Dimmer Wits
[Editor's note: This puzzle was originally written in 2022 and was impractical to update to 2025. Some references may be outdated, but the relevant data should still be accessible. This note is not part of the puzzle.]
| (#1) CrimsonClupea @ 2022-04-01 (system) | Created puzzle |
| (#2) CrimsonClupea @ 2022-04-01 (system) | Edited puzzle content |
| (#3) CrimsonClupea @ 2022-04-01 (system) | Status changed to Awaiting Approval for Testsolving |
| (#4) ScarletSwimmer @ 2022-04-01 | Hey, I just took a look at this. Not really sure what's going on here, do you think you could explain it to me please? |
| (#5) CrimsonClupea @ 2022-04-01 | Yeah, sure. This puzzle consists of a bunch of posts which, thematically, ask "what are the odds..." (specifically, they're posts from the social media website with a thematic logo, so the 280-character limit means the posts have to be short). Naturally, we should calculate these odds, though we should be wary of the gimmick, which is that all numbers should be interpreted in the thematic base (it's used in puzzle hunts fairly often, so this isn't a huge stretch). Other than that, the problems are fairly straightforward and all ask for the probability that a cell is in the thematic state in the valid solutions to a logic puzzle. (For example, the first post, with the square 8x8 Nurikabe, asks "what are the odds that it ends up this way.....", referring to the circled cell under the "40" clue.) Notice that all answers can be represented in the form 1/x, where x is between 1 and 26, so we take the A1Z26 of it to get our extracted letter. Finally, notice that the number of thematic characters trailing after the end of each post form a consecutive ordering (with the post without any trailing characters coming first). |
| (#6) ScarletSwimmer @ 2022-04-01 | Hmm, okay, I think there's probably a bit too much going on here. A math idea is a neat core, and you definitely have some interesting ideas that can be preserved, but you may want to streamline it a bit, because it's not very cohesive at the moment. |
| (#7) CrimsonClupea @ 2022-04-01 (system) | Edited puzzle content |
| (#8) ScarletSwimmer @ 2022-04-01 | Oh, er, you didn't have to throw the whole thing out. If you wanna talk about it we can totally schedule a time on Discord to discuss those ideas! But if you wanna progress with this puzzle I think I'd like to see an explanation of the solve path first. |
| (#9) CrimsonClupea @ 2022-04-01 |
Right, so, as you can see, this is a crossword puzzle, but with the main gimmick that all the clues have to be answered as if you're the thematic animal. (For example, clue 1-Across "NS G K" gives the answer CHIRP.) Oh, also all letters with the thematic form of symmetry are left out of clues. (I guess K might be left out too, depending on the font.) Oh, and the grid doesn't use square cells, it uses thematically-shaped ones. Oh, and some cells need to be skipped while filling. But I'm sure solvers will be able to figure out what's going on after a while! Anyway, for extraction, you'll want to use a thematic implement to cut the grid out, then cut holes in every thematic cell (e.g. the two in the bottom row, in the leftmost and rightmost cell). Then if you fold the grid in half along the middle row, each hole will go over a single letter! Extract by reading those letters in the order the holes appeared in the original grid.
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| (#10) ScarletSwimmer @ 2022-04-01 | Yeah, uh, again, same issue. The base idea of a crossword and that extraction is probably okay, but there are a ton of gimmicks there that don't really go well together. Do you want to discuss writing on Discord? Also where did the whole bird thing come from |
| (#11) CrimsonClupea @ 2022-04-01 (system) | Edited puzzle content |
| (#12) ScarletSwimmer @ 2022-04-01 | Uhh, I guess I'll take that as a no. Once again I will need some help deciphering this. |
| (#13) CrimsonClupea @ 2022-04-01 | Okay, so each of the clues is a weird 3D shape, right? Naturally you can imagine a light shining onto the shape, which would let you read a phrase off the ground beneath it in the thematic way. For example, the first clue gives "KINDHEARTED OR RED OR BENEVOLENT OR HAPPILY SYMPATHETICALLY HELPFULLY INTERESTING". Next we take the thematic letter from each word to spell out a word. We can combine this with the hint in the title of the puzzle ("Japanese") to thematically turn it into another word. Finally, we notice that these final things are all thematic types, and index their evolution levels into the original cluephrase to get our extracted letter. Now all we need is an ordering; notice that one word in each clue is a member of a thematic ordered set, which provides our ordering. (Uh, I guess we can add two more items to the end of the ordered set so we can have enough items for our extraction?) |
| (#14) ScarletSwimmer @ 2022-04-01 | How did you end up with more disjoint incoherent ideas in the same puzzle? Are you actually reading my feedback? I sent you a few Discord PMs. |
| (#15) CrimsonClupea @ 2022-04-01 (system) | Edited puzzle content |
| (#16) ScarletSwimmer @ 2022-04-01 | Here we are again. We stand together, once again, before this new puzzle. We both know that I will ask you for a solution path, you will provide it, I will give feedback, and you will ignore it. We will dance the same dance for eternity. We both know the steps, and how they repeat, a temporal tessellation into infinity. |
| (#17) CrimsonClupea @ 2022-04-01 | We have a bunch of logic puzzles. First off, notice that each logic puzzle is shaped like a US state; placing them on the thematic diagram, we notice that they neatly go west to east from California to Ohio, which gives us our order. Now we can get to solving the logic puzzles, which involve positioning trains on the thematic surfaces. Notice that each of the trains has a thematic kind of number on it (for example, for the Colorado-shaped puzzle, it's the square root of 22). As hinted, we can round each of these down to the nearest integer, which gives us the number of a song in Dua Lipa's somewhat thematically-titled studio album. Next, consider the four letters used to represent the four thematic shapes. Notice that this song title contains a few of these letters, so we can treat the presence or absence of the letters as four-bit binary (specifically, mostly in alphabetical order, with the earlier letters being the lower bits, but with the second letter swapped with the last letter, as hinted by replacing every S with D ans vice verda in thid sifficult puzzle), which gives us our final extracted letter. |
| (#18) ScarletSwimmer @ 2022-04-01 | Behold! It is my cue. The dance must progress. I say: "The puzzle contains promising ideas that could be nurtured yet. However, they must be separated from each other, just as saplings crowded will turn on each other and choke each other out with their roots. Dear writer, will you not sit with me a while? We will talk of many things, but mostly of basic tenets of puzzle construction." |
| (#19) CrimsonClupea @ 2022-04-01 (system) | Edited puzzle content |
| (#20) ScarletSwimmer @ 2022-04-01 | This is like the puzzle-editing version of shouting at someone wearing AirPods about an approaching truck |
| (#21) CrimsonClupea @ 2022-04-01 | Okay, I have it. No way this one can go wrong. It's just a scavenger hunt with a twist. There's five categories: something thematic, something thematic, something thematic, something thematic, and something thematic. Items can count towards multiple categories: for example, a die would count for the first category and the fourth category. If it was gift-wrapped it could also count toward the third category, but if it had numbers instead of pips it wouldn't count towards the fourth category, I guess. The categories are pretty broad so they can be satisfied easily, like for the second category we could accept a typical combination one used for a bike or even one of the relevant keyboard keys. Teams can submit sets of items multiple times, and each time they satisfy at least one category they get a different letter of the answer phrase depending on which categories they fulfilled, so a team would submit a gift-wrapped die with pips and that keyboard key and maybe just write "KEVIN" or "JOHN" on a piece of paper to get the H. (We'll be padding the answer phrase out by prepending 22 characters so we have enough letters to deal with any non-empty subset of satisfied categories.) This is a really foolproof straightforward idea and surely it won't cause a lot of work for us. |
| (#22) ScarletSwimmer @ 2022-04-01 | The "no way this one can go wrong" into multi-submission scavenger hunt with random categories is like a one-two gut punch |
| (#23) CrimsonClupea @ 2022-04-01 (system) | Edited puzzle content |
| (#24) ScarletSwimmer @ 2022-04-01 | I think at this point it makes sense to request that you post your puzzles along with an explanation by default |
| (#25) CrimsonClupea @ 2022-04-01 | This is a "list of clues"-style puzzle. For example, we can look at the clue "Shining Hope ___", which obviously thematically leads to ROAD. Then we can use the thematic slang to get FROG from this (like how STAIRS would give APPLES). There's also an enumeration for indexing (37), but obviously this is too big for the word, and the flavortext is cluing a "slice" of it, so you want to index this into the thematic number—we're ignoring the digit before the decimal point, so for example (1) gives 1, not 3—and index that digit into the word. Then we look at the thematic major scale and note the number of black keys in one octave, which is again too large to index into the word (and besides we've already used that data) which clearly means we need to index that into the clue. Finally, we need to order the clues, so we should look at the last piece of data we haven't used, which is also thematic: the number of underscores in each clue ranges from 1 to 9. |
| (#26) ScarletSwimmer @ 2022-04-01 | Is this a nightmare? Is this whirling maelstrom of bad ideas merely a hallucination induced by a fever? |
| (#27) CrimsonClupea @ 2022-04-01 (system) | Edited puzzle content |
| (#28) CrimsonClupea @ 2022-04-01 | This puzzle is a transcript of 9 players' conversations in a thematic room, while they try to solve it. The first puzzle features 9 of the 88 thematic things, and solvers need to identify them from context clues while the fictional solvers blunder about the room. There's a short diversion where the players draft thematic legal action against the owner of the room, which is actually puzzle-relevant because it mentions ordering the players by the number of letters in their nicknames (starting with "Mr. Y"). The second puzzle features 9 of the 80 thematic things you can catch in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and once again solvers need to identify them. The last part of the puzzle is a thematic kind of puzzle, where solvers need to combine the answers they've gotten so far to get a final answer: as it turns out, each player's dialogue hints at one of each kind of identified object (e.g. "DJ Mylky" mentions "named by Lacaille" and "130 bells" as their two hints), and there's exactly one letter shared among all three of the player's name and their two identified objects, which gives an extraction. |
| (#29) ScarletSwimmer @ 2022-04-01 | i like how the escape room setting lets you get away with completely incoherent theming because it's not your fault, it's whoever made this fictional escape room. clever |
| (#30) CrimsonClupea @ 2022-04-01 (system) | Edited puzzle content |
| (#31) CrimsonClupea @ 2022-04-01 | This puzzle is presented as a Monopoly set, but the thematic set of cards is actually puzzly. Underneath the game instruction on each one, there's a word translated into Morse code, but the thematic characters have all been removed, leaving only the dashes: for example, on the first card in the deck, the first, second-last, and last letters are all represented the same way, though they are actually different letters. Once solvers have found all the words, they might notice that each word was, in fact, the official winning word at the thematic national competition (specifically, during the period from 1930 to 1938), which gives an ordering for later. Separately, the Community Chest cards each contain one instruction as well as a cryptic clue (that uses the thematic cryptic clue type) which solve to this same set of words. Using the same example, the aforementioned card corresponds to the Community Chest card whose instruction states "Bank teller facing existential crisis. Take $7 while they're not looking." We use the amount of money as an index into the thematic identifier (first and last) of that year's winner, giving us our extracted letter. |
| (#32) ScarletSwimmer @ 2022-04-01 | this is an online hunt. WHERE are the monopoly sets coming from |
| (#33) CrimsonClupea @ 2022-04-01 (system) | Edited puzzle content |
| (#34) CrimsonClupea @ 2022-04-01 | We have a few images of short Java code snippets with notes about what they are meant to do (for example, the one at the bottom of the first page is meant to accumulate the Fibonacci sequence on the "night" variable), so the natural first step is to find the thematic mistakes. After this, notice that each picture has the text in one of the 7 thematic colors, which each have a canonical color code via HTML color names. We just need to look at the thematic representation of the color codes in the images, and notice that they are slightly off from the canonical color codes. Taking the differences and applying A1Z26 (in the order I'll explain later) gives the message ADD BSLASH, of course referring to the thematic character which is used in that particular way (e.g. in newlines, tab characters, etc., but not including it when used as a literal character). For each program, count the total number of times it is used in that way (in this example, that's 17) and add it to the original difference value for that program (the ones we used to get ADD BSLASH), mod 26, to get the extracted letter. Finally, the ordering: notice that each program uses a variable whose name which is a word from the title of a song from the thematic musical (specifically, they're the first nine from Prologue to Magical Lasso, including the Overture but not the Hannibal Rehearsal, and merging "Little Lotte/The Mirror and I Remember/Stranger Than You Dreamt It), giving the order. |
| (#35) ScarletSwimmer @ 2022-04-01 | please. i have to know. where do the ideas come from |
| (#36) CrimsonClupea @ 2022-04-01 | Oh, just day-to-day things. Making connections, that sort of thing. |
| (#37) ScarletSwimmer @ 2022-04-01 | your days are unlike anything i can fathom |
| (#38) ScarletSwimmer @ 2022-04-01 | i'm getting another editor |
| (#39) ScarletSwimmer @ 2022-04-01 | who let him cook |
| (#40) ScarletSwimmer @ 2022-04-01 (system) | Deassigned self as editor |