Last weekend was the first Lextalionis. Lextalionis is a LARP event based on Vampire: The Masquerade. This is the first actual event organised by [Evolution Events], the LARP club of which I am in the board. A lot of people have been working very hard for this weekend, which it turned out to be.

I'm not gonna write too much about this. Partly because I have not seen as much of the actual roleplaying and plot because I did a lot of reffing, making physreps, fixing things and being generally useful. Also, I have been continuously distracted for the past seven hours, but finally managed to get my study work (deadline: past friday) done. So, I should really go to bed Real Soon (tm).

Anyway, about a week before the event, it turned out the location we wanted to use was not available since the required permits would not be arranged in time. Since we had a backup location arranged for, there was no problem. That is, until the contact from the backup location told us there had been a fire there about a month ago, making the location unusable. They hadn't been able to tell us, since all of their contact information was lost in the fire.

So, past week was spent by Sander and Rene looking for a location. We already had a location for saturday night, but we needed one for friday night (and for sleeping saturday morning). Late thursday afternoon, they finally managed to fix up a new location: The cellar of a wine store. Unsure what to expect, it turned out to be an ideal location for playing (with a bar, very nice decor and nicely situated in a window-less cellar). In short, a perfect Toreador Elysium.

The location was a little less suited for sleeping, though. It was somewhat cold and the location was only a single room (which is bad for early sleepers while people are still playing). Still everybody managed to get some sleep and it worked out okay-ish.

The transportation to the second playing location saturday afternoon went a little less smooth. There were a lot of things to arrange, so it took a while before a few people were arranged to drive back and forth. The first car (with me in it) was fixed rather quickly, but getting the bulk of the players to the other location took quite some time. Fortunately, I was already there quite early, together with a few people helping out, so we managed to build up the second location in time.

The second location was rather briljant. It was a big car workshop, complete with a sports car on the car lift. There were a bunch of construction yard style fences available, which we were able to use for separating the OC area for luggage and early sleepers. The night evolved rather nicely (and since we started at 8 instead of 11 as we did friday, it was pretty long too).

My favorite scene was the elimination of a certain Lasombra trespassing the Elsysium. It took the sherrif of the city one night and a half to find out he was an actual Lasombra, but after that, it took only just over two seconds to completly blast him to pieces. Just before this happened, the tension in the room rose slowly, but visibly and immediately after this, it was gone. Very pretty :-)

Anyway, I'm gonna leave it at this for now. Yesterday evening and this afternoon have been well spent evaluation and talking about the weekend, so we already have tons and tons of new ideas for the next one. Yesterday, Sander tried to officially asked me if I wanted to join the Lextalionis crew, but since I've been running around the event taking care of things and making calls all weekend, I found it rather implicit that I would do that. Still, I gladly accepted. So, also because I have a clear view of what Lextalionis is now, I will probably be able to help out with the preparations of Lextalionis 2. But for now, I we need to focus on our next event: Exodus.

I have a few good ideas on a nice online system for event subscription and character building/administration, which I will post here sometime soon. I have been thinking about this a while longer (together with Simon, from Symbols, with whom I will be cooperating on this), but slowly this is getting more solid. But, that's for later.

w00t! I lost my left glove about two weeks back, around the computer rooms at our faculty. I think I had them when I was there, but I didn't have them when I got at my bike. Yet, they were not at lost and found, so who knows where they went...

Just now, I walked out of the computer room through the same route as two weeks before and I saw it lying in a bush. It's a little dirty and rough, but I got 2 gloves again! Yay! :-)

(Disclaimer: This post is about a game. It is all fiction.)

Okay, it's been a while, but I'll try to remember what happened a few days back. I already described today's meeting, so I will skip to the puzzles. Bas, the creator of these puzzles has also written a nice piece on how they were created.

Easy start

To find the device to disable our localization implants, we were given a clue with 10 hexagons on it. These hexagons were marked in some way, possibly representing numbers. Also, there was "MA 5/6 214040" on the clue. MA 5/6 represents college hours, the number is a course number.

Half our team was on their way to pick up their bikes, only Brenda and I managed to take them with us after the chaos just before. So, immediately after the meeting, the two of us went for some WLAN coverage at the Hogekamp building, to look up where the given course was held in the given time slot, since that was undoubtedly the next location.

This gave us "Langezijds 2520". The rest of our team had arrived home by now, so we called in somebody with a photo camera and the exact location of the 2520 room within the (huge) Langezijds building. I sent Brenda home, since we still had all the licenses of our team, so they couldn't really go out. I myself went to the Langezijds building, where I would meet Jasper (a non-contestant) to bring me the camera.

We had seen some delay at Hogekamp, due to 2d4d trying to kill us (first time within the 10 minute safe time, second time they had come back for the kill. ah well, the puzzle is more important than killing anyhow and I managed to return the favor of a kill). But, due to this delay, we arrived second, after team CIA (nicely done, CIA). There, I could not find the clue at once, but did find it shortly after. Hoping that CIA would go away so I could write down the clue, I delayed a little. In the end, another team arrived, so I had to be more careful. Also, Jasper arrived with my camera. As soon as the third team arrived I decided to screw it and give the clue away to team CIA. I climbed into the fire ladder to make a proper photo of the clue. In the end, it turned out to be a good decision, since on our way back, we met at least 4 teams coming our way behind the Langezijds building...

The clue had a few aspects to it. First, there was "MISSING LINKS". Second, there were three lines, each sharing a single starting point, pointing upwards, bottom left and bottom right. There were markings "T", "L", "R" in the top, left and right parts of the figure respectively. Lastly, there was

GOTO(SUM(L,R)
REMEMBER(T)

by now, we had pretty much established that the markings on the original clue were numbers, encoded with the bars meaning 5 and the dots meaning one (This turned out tot be Mayan counting in the end, but we didn't know that). If we overlaid the TLR figure over each hexagon on this clue, we could label each number with T, L or R.

See more ...

(Disclaimer: This post is about a game. It is all fiction.)

It is done. This afternoon we fully finished Pandora. Though I have not blogged about the third and second day and puzzle, I will do that next weekend. First, I'll be concentrating on sleeping :-) Delivering the solution within thirty minutes of the solution, closely followed by two other teams, we managed to obtain a smashing victory. Not only were we the only team to solve all four puzzles, we also solved them first every time. Even on the kills area we didn't do bad: we managed to get 11 kills on the last day while our kill joker (triple points) was in effect. This got us a pretty decent score:

1. L.I.E.V -- 2570
2. Happy Hooves -- 1810
3. 2d4d --1280

I've just been to the "Battle of the Cultures", a game of theatresports between Contramime, Pro Deo and Nest. I Barely noticed the effects of my tiredness (in the past 60 hours, I've only took a small 2 hour nap) while watching the show.

During the break I went out for fresh air, but as soon as I saw the outside campus, my mind and body sprang back into Pandora-mode: rushed, driven & paranoid. Back inside, it faded away. Apparently just seeing places that have strong Pandora memories triggers this. As I rode home I noticed that nearly every spot of the campus now has a distinct Pandora memory attached to it, since we actually searched just about every building on campus. Let's see how fast this will help...

Another interesting effect of sleep deprivation: Last night's puzzles used a number, 2.513274. Also, the night before we used the ISBN number 90-365-2349-4. I just wrote these two numbers down from the top of my head... Apparently the lack of sleep makes me remember stuff better? This might explain why I have such strong memory associations with certain locations. Also, it completely kills my power to formulate sentences, so blogging is probably a bad idea. Wanting to write the last sentence, I just wrote a sentence about killing and stopping processes that made completely no sense... Anyway, don't mind the spelling errors...

Anyway, from the moment I sat down in the Theater Cafe, I felt an imminent breakdown coming up. Since I arrived home, I've typed this blog and read my IRC backlog and now I'm so totally wasted that I'll sleep as soon as I touch my pillow... These last words are produced solely powered by willpower...

So, I bid you goodnight and crash into my bed....

(Disclaimer: This post is about a game. It is all fiction.)

Last night and today was hell. Fun hell, but still :-) We've finished the puzzle after 15 straight hours around 1500 this afternoon. Today was obviously the die-hard puzzling day...

We started out nice at the meeting last night. Our attempts from the day before were succesful and we were able to penetrate the PCC systems to disable surveillance. So, with surveillance disabled, we would be able to make our escape freely. Since we were the best scoring team so far (738 points vs 690 for the runner up), we had the questionable honour to be the first to make our escape.

With surveillance disabled, we made for the getaway car that was parked just off campus. When we were about half way, two patrol cars full of guards drove in, spreading guards all over. Frantically trying to flee, I ran into the second patrol car, so I had to turn around and was caught by another guard. Me and two of my team members were apprehended for violating the curfew (not for making an escape attempt, fortunately). We were taken a while away and dropped at some random location (I was dropped pretty close, since the car that was supposed to drop me, went missing).

After being released, everybody hurried to the agreed backup location. Once I got there, I let Frank know what I thought about his attempt to betray us and set us up. He obviously saw this coming, so he was a traitor! My teammembers convinced me not to shoot Frank where he stood, which turned out to be rather ok. So far, it seems he might not have know anyway, but I'll be cautious on the meeting tonight.

At the backup location, Frank put forward a captured guard, to be tortured by the especially overflown expert from Russia, Boris (Who has actually worked for Magistor a while, until a rather unfortunate incident with Magistor's wife...). Boris managed to draw information from the guard, who turned out to be a system administrator. He told that they had implanted small tracking devices in everybody at the first meeting. They could track everyone's location, so they knew something was going on.

The guard also mentioned a device which could disable thes trackers, but he didn't know anything about it. Fortunately, the organisation had managed to get some intel on the device, which was given to us for examination. The intel contained a reference to a college time slot and course number as well as ten hexagons containing 3 symbols each.

Solving (part of this) was easy, but I'm not going to discuss this here right now, since a) the deadline has been moved to 2100, so people are still puzzling, and b) I haven't slept since yesterday morning, so I am ready to fall over now... (meeting at 22:30!). I'll add a report of the puzzled solved sometime soon, probably tomorrow, though.

(Disclaimer: This post is about a game. It is all fiction.)

The monday night meeting was an hour later than Sunday's. Fortunate, since it gave me an extra hour of time to sleep between dinner and the meeting. So arriving there fresh and (a little more) rested, we would receive the next puzzle... and the consequences for the lemon juice afair.

So, after an explanation of Sunday's puzzles, we were called forward. Frank explained the mistake we made and declared our punishment: From now on, we would no longer be team E.V.I.L., but team L.I.E.V. ("cute"). So much for our image. Fun :-).

For another report on the past two days, see Brenda's weblog.

Puzzles

Our assignment today was simple: The mainframe we found yesterday has an admin interface. We could use our own logins here, but not without a valid pincode. To help us find a pincode, we received an envelope with a clue: A paper with 6 Kakuro puzzles. After making a number of photocopies we went home to solve them. After first starting out with one puzzle each, we quickly realized that this would take too long. As soon as we found out that these damn puzzles were called "Kakuro" puzzles (thanks Diederik!), two people started search for kakuro solvers on the internet. In the end Brenda found a number of solvers, from which the first worked (Which proves you need a woman to actually find stuff...).

See more ...

(Disclaimer: This post is about a game. It is all fiction.)

Pandora 2006 has begun. Yet instead of the promised "Pandora Paradise", we were "volunteered" into the Pandora Correctional Center. Us being team E.V.I.L, we found the new environment rather familiar :-)

Hidden in a pie we got by mail, we found a letter from three survivors of last year's edition of PCC, as well as a number of metal parts, bolts and rubber bands. The letter told us about the horrors of last year's Pandora Correctional Center and about the survivor's plan for escape. They offered us a chance to join their escape, but for that they want us to help them with some preparations. So, every night from last night to wednesday, they will give us puzzles to show our dedication.

Puzzles

So, the first puzzle. A letter from upper management to Pandora security that got into our hands, notifying them about a new mainframe. The information was apparently encoded:

":pp[ rrmd rrm tpmykr"

The encoding was cracked within a few minutes: Find every character on your keyboard and replace it with the character on the key to the left of it. You'll get:

"loop eens een rontje" (Take a walk arount)

The first thing you notice here is the wrong spelling of "rondje" (around). So, this "t" is probably a hint. Since there is a building on campus called the "T-house", we went there and arrived first. No hint there, so we widened our search aroun(d/t) the building and a few other nearby buildings.

See more ...

W00t, I've been having a nice night. Instead of my usual routine of not wanting to do things and delaying them, filling my time with "useless" coding or fiddling with my laptop or pc or stuff like that, I have spent all night doing "useful" stuff.

I had already spent an hour or two last week sorting out my cluttered email inbox (260+ messages) that contained emails that I was planning to reply to or that needed some action before they were fully handled. I had reduced the number of messages to 30 or so, that needed some action of some kind (and ten or so email discussions with Brenda that slowly died and still need sorting out).

Today, I've looked at a bunch more mails, and instead of postponing them more, I actually did stuff and reduced my inbox to 12 messages. Besides that, I've done some work for my Bachelor Referaat, helped fixing our pandora registration, read the Inter-Actief financial semi-annual report and even found some time to do a little nerding in between.

In short, this was a very nice night, with no delaying, postponing and wasting time as usual. I'm even going to bed before 0200, which is not as bad as it could be (though still improvable, I'm pretty tired). But hey, you can't do everything at the same time :-)

Yesterday, I've fixed up the menu and breadcrumbs plugins I installed recently to display Inter-Actief with proper italicization.

Just now, I've added some syntax to the markdown plugin to support left and right floating images. Also fixed a small issue with nesting images in links in markdown.

This morning I got up to get to college, felt terribly tired, so decided to skip college and sleep for two more hours (which helped a lot ;-) ). Thinking that I had left my bike at the train station yesterday, I've been walking around the campus today (being late everywhere because I kept forgetting I had to walk).

When I was walking back home just now, I found that I did not leave my bike at the station, but it was next to our flat, exactly where it should be. Not really sure how I got the wrong idea, I haven't even been drinking yesterday... Ah well, all this walking was probably good for my aching leg muscles from yesterday...