Wednesday, 29 April 2009

• Net Riddles

  Last year John and Hank Green of vlogbrothers put together a scavenger hunt on youtube. Exactly what it consisted of I'm not sure because I didn't follow it, but I knew there were clues in the videos, and people had to find things online. The idea interested me, and I decided to do something of the sort here. I still haven't done it because it would take a lot of work to put together, but I may yet.

  My inspiration is Shamrock Around the Clock, which is an annual, city-wide scavenger hunt in my home town. It's organized by the youth pastor of NCBC, one of the bigger churches in town, and I first participated upon the invitation of a good friend of mine who was in their youth group. I had a great time.
  Here's how Shamrock works:
  1. Everyone meets up. This involves hundreds of teens and their adult sponsors from various church groups around the city.
  2. You split into teams.
  3. Each team gets a stack of envelopes, each containing a clue.
  4. You run to the vehicles and try to figure out a clue as quickly as possible, so you know where to go next. The clues come in all kinds of riddles that are challenging enough to be fun but not to the point of making you want to shoot people.
  5. You run around finding the judges who are stationed throughout the city.
  6. The judges have tasks for you to complete, and they grade your group on various things.
  7. Each of the judges has a piece of a bigger clue, and when you've found them all, you figure out that riddle to find the final destination.
  8. There's a big, all-night party waiting for everyone at the finish, and there are prizes for the groups for lots of things like fastest completion, best dressed (it's a St. Patrick's Day event; mostly they're looking for the greenest group), most enthusiastic, etc. There's also enough green pizza to feed a small town, and they have activities going on like bowling and movies and such.

  Anyway, I think I could do something similar online. It would be fun if I could get enough people interested in doing it and maybe some help organizing it.

  The reason the idea popped back into my head is that I just found something kind of similar last night. John Green has created and is still expanding a huge online riddle thread, thisisnottom (or TiNT for short). Hank talks a bit about it at the end of this video. It's incredibly difficult, and I've only seen as far as I have by getting spoilers from the forums. I want to go back and figure out all the clues (and I have figured out some), but there are several that have me stumped. I'll be following this as it goes from now on, though.

  Lastly, Hank mentioned notpr0n as the inspiration for TiNT, so I took a look at that, and I'm equally stumped there. I've gotten to the sixth level (out of 140). Apparently, notpr0n started in 2004 and ended in 2005, and though millions and millions of people have tried, only 9 people have solved the whole thing in all this time. If anyone wants to embark on an adventure trying to solve this with me, let me know.

  *edit* I've gone back and recorded step-by-step how I've gotten to where I am in notpr0n, so if you want to join me, I can get you up to speed quickly. I intend to do the same thing for TiNT.

  Okay, but back to what I was saying, would you be interested in an online scavenger hunt challenge thing?

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