Bendy and the Ink Machine story write up Chapter 2
So this is a follow up from my last post and I've explained what I'm doing in that one. To recap, I'm writing the story of BATIM as if it were a novelisation. I'm not too much of a writer but I'm doing this more for myself rather than anything else. If you like it, feel free to let me know. And only constructive criticism please if you have any. My last post covered chapter one, and that did well enough, so here is Chapter two. Bendy and the Ink Machine story Chapter Two: The Old Song We are always told that after a fall, there will always be another rise. This tale has no rise. I had been dreaming. For how long? I don’t know. I dreamt I was at home sitting at the breakfast table. Linda was talking about all sorts of stuff. The state of her friends' dress sense. The price of butter today. Reminiscing about when we were younger. I was either reading the paper or doing the crossword, being sure that I placed a good response at the right time to keep her talking. I hear men say that they hate it when their wives talk too much, but I could never get enough of her voice. But then the mail man placed a letter in the mailbox, and she went out to get it, and I was alone. I was alone. My head was thudding a dull but rhythmic beat. I sat up, rubbing my eyes, adjusting to the light, before seeing where I was. “Oh yeah. Evil cult worship space.” I sat up, looking at the coffins against the wall. I decided it was probably best not to touch them. I had no idea if there was anybody in there, but I could only take so much that day. Looking around, I found the axe I dropped. Strangely enough, it was leaning against one of the coffins. I had fully blacked out and dropped it after having held it in my right hand, and now it was leaning quite neatly on the coffin to my left. Just as I had done before, I brushed it off. I’m slightly worried thinking back. How could I have not understood the implications of how it had got there? This was just the first in a long list of clues I would later see. I was not alone. But I didn’t realise until it was too late. Grabbing the axe, I looked at the way I had come. It was now blocked by a waterfall of ink, seeping into the boards beneath it. I then looked to the door ahead of me. I was not crazy about moving further forward after seeing the coffins. It was barred, but with one swing, the boards came loose. It led to a staircase, with the sign “Utility shaft 9” above the stairway. Going down, I saw more writing. Candles were lit on a small ledge on the wall, and a smaller Bendy cutout was placed next to the writing. It read “HE WILL SET US FREE”. Who’s He? Surely this couldn’t be referring to Bendy… Bendy! My memory had been hazy until then, but I remembered my visions. That, thing, chasing me on the upper level, was Bendy. But how? Bendy’s not real. He’s a cartoon that I made years ago. How could he be real? And who was worshipping him? Looking at the ink writing, I realised that it was still wet. Whoever had written this had done so recently. So there was somebody else down here. Looking to the side, I saw there were offerings. A bowl, with what looked like ink was under the writing and next to that was a tin. I had no idea how long I had been down here, but I suddenly realised I hadn’t eaten in hours. I picked it up and looked. “Briar Label Bacon Soup.” Ugh. That honestly sounded disgusting, and the expiry date didn’t make it seem any better. A rumble in my stomach however, suddenly made it seem more appealing. It was easy to open and I glugged it down. I couldn’t figure out what the taste was, but I can say with certainty that it wasn’t bacon. Looking back into the tin, I was astonished to see that it was black, similar to ink. But it wasn’t ink. At least I think it wasn’t. At least I hope it wasn’t. I looked around the space and found another audio log. I was hoping that this would be from Wally again, and tell me something about this place, but there were a lot more ink stains on this one, some were still wet. Somebody had done this recently as well. I clicked the button and was shocked at the voice coming from it. Image of Sammy's first audio tape “I said, can I get an amen?” I spun around quickly. That last one was most certainly from the tape, but it came from behind me. Absolutely no one was there, but it had sounded so close. That voice was of Sammy Lawrence, the music director of the studio. Sammy was hired by Joey and I rarely saw him. He was uptight and preferred to keep himself to himself. He always seemed so overworked. Poor Sammy. So tragic… So he made the tape and it was most certainly his voice I had heard. So he was in here somewhere. Passing more coffins, posters and offerings I eventually found a small corridor that was flooded with ink. Well, my shoes were already ruined, what harm could this much do that hadn’t already been done? Wading through I noticed movement in the darkness ahead of me. It looked like a human figure, walking across the hall that the door led too. He was holding a cutout, but I couldn’t make out anything about them. “Hello! Excuse me! Can you help me! Hello?” Nothing. I hurriedly moved across the hall and followed the direction he’d gone in and then I stopped. “Where the hell did he go?” There was only a wall. Black footprints led to the wall, but they just stopped as whoever it had been was gone. The cutout was leaning against the wall with a similar looking circle to the one I had passed out in behind it. I decided I must have been losing my mind, heading instead the other way. I flicked a few power switches and opened the door. Turning I looked at a large statue of Bendy. How strange? It was perfectly made, Joey must have had it made, and knowing him and his advertising scheme, there were likely many more around this place. The next room was pitch black. So dark, and with very little light. Looking around I found another staircase heading downwards. I started down, but I saw that the stairwell was completely flooded at the bottom. “For god's sake, how much of this ink is there?” Little did I know, I hadn’t seen the half of it. On the wall was a lever with a power switch. I pulled it and the lights came on. A large sign stated that I was in the Music Department. That made a lot of sense as to why Sammy might be down here. Stepping towards the sign, I heard a slurping groan. Several ink puddles on the floor started moving. Large slimy blobs of ink rose up. They had long arms, no legs and formless faces. They lunged towards me, their arms outstretched. I dodged a couple of them and then swung my axe. It went through them in an instant, causing them to dissipate and seep into the floor. I continued hacking through them until they were all gone. Breathing heavily, I just stood there. “What, in the actual hell, was happening here?” Bendy was alive somehow, Sammy was worshipping him, Joey seemed to have dug a chasm to put all this in and now, the ink itself was alive and trying to kill me. After collecting myself and getting ready to go ahead, I found a new log. It was Sammy again, only this one was a lot older, and he sounded more mentally stable in it. Image of Sammy's second audio tape “Are you kidding me?” A pump in Sammy’s office? Well no wonder he went crazy working under these conditions. Looking to my left, I noticed that restoring power had opened a new passage. Down the corridor was Sammy’s office. This would be simple enough. All I had to do was get in and turn the release pump on to clear the… Oh. Great. A burst pipe was showing the doorway in ink. The high pressurised stream would make it impossible to get in. There was no way I could get to the door through that way. So I instead had to release the pressure on this pipe before I could go in the office and drain the ink from the stairwell. This just got more and more complicated as I went along. Backtracking, I found another stairwell that led to the infirmary. What kind of jobs in an animation studio that required an on site infirmary, I would never know. I decided to move backwards some more. Next to the music department sign was a staircase that led to a projector room. There was another audio log next to it, but I already knew who had made it before I even turned it on. Norman Polk. Image of Norman's audio tape Ah, Norman. He was a nice enough fellow. Like Sammy, he preferred to keep himself to himself. He stayed out of trouble, but had a keen eye for noticing it, without being noticed himself. I had so many days where I was just drawing at my desk and all of a sudden he was right behind me. Almost gave me a heart attack several times. And man could he talk. The guy was much more of a gossip than most of the women at the studio, only the difference was he was often correct in his suspicions. Norman. What became of you? I never truly knew… The tape confirmed my suspicions that something was terribly wrong with Sammy. And it seemed like this had been happening for a while. The room below was too dark, and I couldn’t see what was in there, so I decided to head to the front door of the recording studio. I twisted the handle, and found it was locked. I gave it a shove, but found that this wasn’t moving. I debated trying to cut it down, but looking at the axe, I don’t know what would have broken first. I didn’t want the axe to break. It was my only defence against those, “things.” It took me a while before I found another audio log, and was happy to hear Wally speaking again. Image of Wally's audio tape Now this one made me chuckle. Like I said, Wally was clumsy. It was just like him to have misplaced his keys. He once locked the mens bathroom for the night and somehow lost the keys. The next day was agony as none of us could go. Wally was searching all over the studio and eventually found it in his mop bucket. So, on the advice of the log, I searched the garbage cans, and sure enough, I found it under a pile of screwed up paper balls. I opened the recording studio doors and looked into the large room, the lights coming on as I entered. Several instruments lay on the stage, where the musicians would sit and play along to the cartoons that Norman would project onto the screen. All of the instruments were covered in dust. Whoever had left them there must have been in a hurry. These were expensive, and some had personally belonged to the musicians. Inside was another audio log. This was beginning to get ridiculous. Sure, it was nice to hear their voices, but there were so many of them. This was a different voice though. Image of Susie's audio tape Her name was Susie Capmbell. She had been a young voice actress who had worked at the studio. She had originally started off with come minor rolls, but I saw her potential, and so decided to do her a favour. I created a new character for her. I made Alice Angel. Alice was to be the polar opposite to Bendy. The beautiful and kind angel to Bendys cheeky little devil. I had even based her design off of Susie. Joey seemed sceptical at first, thinking that he’d lose part of his target demographic with her. I think it was mainly Joey's own views on women. Joey had… traditional ideas of women in the workplace. At least, that’s how he would put it. I personally saw him as being medieval in his ideas about women. But, after seeing her in the cartoons, he changed his attitude so much, believing her to be one of the best characters that came out of his studio. Yes. HIS. Anyway. Susie had made it out of excitement of the opportunity that she was getting. Good for her. I had left before Alice had gained so much prominence, so I never saw what had happened. It’s a real shame what happened to you, Susie. So tragic… By that, was a large shutter door next to another solo recording booth. Looking around I found no controls. I started wondering. For how long, I don’t know. I was looking through doors, eating soup and keeping an eye out for the creatures. Once or twice I thought I heard footsteps, but it turned out to be nothing. I eventually found a closet with another audio log from Sammy. Image of Sammy's third audio tape How in the hell did Sammy accomplish this? To have a completely hidden room under people's noses? It was worth a shot I guess. I dashed back to the studio, making sure that I turned on the projector first. I did get a feeling that the cutouts were moving, but I dismissed it. I was so naive, thinking I was alone. I was never alone. I headed to the instruments and played the sequence while the cartoon rolled. Sure enough, the shutter door screeched open, the metal and wood scraping together as it slowly rose off of the ground and open. The room was small. Smaller than Sammy’s office. It was more like storage space rather than a workstation. There was another one of those symbols on the floor, next to a desk. A toilet, of all things, was against the wall. Written on the wall, was a strange sort of poem, written in the large inky letters as before. “SING A HAPPY SONG. WHISTLE A MERRY TUNE. WAIT FOR HIS ARRIVAL. HE’S COMING VERY SOON.” Who was coming and why did I have a feeling it wasn’t a good thing? I made a mental note of the writing and looked at the valve on the wall. Sammy must have been sick of these things. No matter where he went, these valves were around him. I turned the rusty valve. It rattled as the ink went through it. I guessed that this would drain the stairway to the Infirmary. There, I would find the stitch to release the ink pressure. I turned back and stopped. A Bendy cutout popped its head around the doorway and rapidly backed out again. Were these things alive? I held my axe firm and moved towards the doorway. The projector had stopped, making the room darker. I looked towards the booth, and thought that I saw a figure standing by it. I was about to call out, when the floor erupted in ink. More of the creatures appeared. Lots more than before. I was surrounded by them. I swung my axe at one, sinking the blackened blade into its slimy skull, splitting it instantly. The creature sunk into the floor and I turned just in time to dodge the lunge of another, swinging at its elongated neck. After dealing with the second, a third struck me in the back. Dull pain filled my body, spreading from my back. My vision became blackened, and I stumbled, getting out of the way before I could be hit again. There were four more in the room. I dodged and weaved, hacked and slashed and kept going until all were dead. I assessed my injury and felt a slight bruise. These things seemed not to hit too hard, but in large groups they could have dealt with me easily. There was a wet hand print on my back where it had struck, and ink had seemed to have run upwards towards my face. That explains why my vision became blackened when they hit. I later gathered that their preferred method of attack was coating me in ink. Every time I took a hit, my vision would become darker. If I avoided another hit then my vision would steadily get better. God only knows what would happen if I was completely coated in the stuff. They seemed different from the other type of ink that flooded the place, almost being living beings that could move through it. I shook off the ink and pain, looking up again. The figure was gone, but they had been watching me. Testing me perhaps? I don’t know. I decided to head to the Infirmary. As I had guessed, the area was clear. A single creature jumped me, but this time I was ready, striking as soon as it got up. It didn’t stand a chance. The whole room was covered in ink, but many items became clear. More cutouts and a bed mostly. There was no medical equipment. It appeared to have vanished. I wonder what happened to it. I found the pipe but was surprised to see that there was no valve. The wheel was gone. “Where did it go?” I looked back and saw another staircase leading down. It led to a huge tunnel, similar to a sewer. Ink flowed in a steady stream. On the wall was more writing. “DOWN HERE WE’RE ALL SINNERS”. I wasn’t sure I was a fan of all the religious messages. I’ve never really been a religious person, hence why I used devils and angels in my cartoons. But this was far too literal. Further down the tunnel I saw another creature, but this one was different. He seemed slightly bigger, and was wearing a bowler hat. I also noticed that he had the missing valve. I headed towards him, preparing for a fight, but this thing decided to run. It sunk into the ink and a small stream indicated it was heading further into the sewer. More writing on the walls. Who was doing that? I eventually found a small work station with sheet music all over the floor and another audio log on the table. Image of Jack's audio tape Jack Fain. I had most definitely heard the name before, even seen it on the time stamps, but I didn’t know the guy. He had obviously worked with Sammy on many of the songs. The way he spoke… It gave me the impression of what he had been like. I’ve always had a talent for picturing someone from a voice, and vise versa. I would always be able to visualise a voice actor from how they spoke in a cartoon, even if I had never seen their face before. This helped me pick who I wanted to play the character after hearing the voice demos. That was one of my last jobs before leaving. Joey left that to me, but he supposedly left it for Sammy after I left. I imagined a small well dressed man when I heard Jack’s voice, who liked to avoid others. That behaviour seemed incredibly similar to that thing. But it couldn’t be. That would mean that Jack… Oh my God. I reached the end of the tunnel and found a small chamber with a crate suspended on a chain. The creature had held itself up in there. I moved towards it, but it sunk into the ink again. I chased it around the room before getting frustrated. This thing just wouldn’t stay still. I then had an idea, seeing a handle attached to the mechanism that held the crate. The thing avoided me, moving under the crate, so I slammed on the handle and with a thud, the crate collapsed on the creature. The hat and valve fell aside. I grabbed the valve and looked at the hat. “Sorry I had to do that. Nice hat though.” Why I said that, I have no idea. I guess that I just felt sorry for the thing. It didn’t try to hurt me and didn’t know I needed the valve. Oh… Jack… How could I have done that to you… I placed the valve in the pipe in the Infirmary and gave it a turn. The sound of ink spilling onto the office door had stopped. Brilliant. I headed up there and opened the door. There was a desk and a chair in the corner. Music sheets littered the floor, some having been named. “The Devil’s Swing,” “Gospel of Dismay,” “Art of darkness,” and many others. The desk itself was bare, except for a single sheet. There was a blueprint for Joey’s machine. I stared at it. I had no experience in engineering, but even I knew that something seemed impossible with this thing. On the wall was even more writing. “IT’S TIME TO BELIEVE” and next to that, was the control pump. I gave it a tug and the clanking and drainage sound told me that the staircase was clear. I headed down the corridor and turned the corner before reaching the staircase and, WHAM, something hit me. I stood for a second, before collapsing on my back. Looking up, I saw the dark figure again, holding a blunt object. That bastard had hit me. As I blacked out, I heard him say “Rest your head. It’s time for bed.” and then nothing. “There we go now. Nice and tight. We wouldn’t want our sheep roaming away now, would we?” I hadn’t dreamed that time, but I really wished I had. I was restrained, tied to a support beam in a large room. Candles lit the place up, and I got a proper look at my advisory. “No. we wouldn’t.” He was a tall man. Taller than me and spindly as well. His skin was black with ink. He was fully coated in the stuff. It dripped off of him. It was hard to know if this was actually his skin or just a coating of the stuff. He wore stained white dungarees, and a mask covered his face. A wooden Bendy mask, with ink splotches all over it. It had a hole in the teeth where his mouth was seen, only it couldn’t be seen. It was like his head was just blank, but I couldn’t tell. “I must admit I am honoured you came all the way down here to visit me. It almost makes what I’m about to do seem cruel.” At that he raised my axe, polishing the blade slightly, pausing while looking at it. I was about to speak, but nothing came out. I was frozen with fear. For I knew who this man was, or once had been. It was the same voice I’d heard in the tapes, and the same figure I’d seen in the hallway and in the projectors booth. It was Sammy. “But the believers must honour the savoir. I must have him notice me.” At this, he walked to another beam and propped the axe up against it. Savior? Did he mean Bendy? “Wait,” He said, getting closer to me, his face inches from mine. “You look familiar to me… That face…” I intended to talk then. To see if I could reason with him. There was obviously a part of his old self left. I just had to reach it. But before I could get anything else out, he cut me off. “Not now. For our lord is calling to us, my little sheep. The time of sacrifice is at hand.” He took a step back and began moving across the space in front of me, almost preaching. “And then, I will finally be freed from this… prison. This inky… dark… abyss I call a body.” A thud was heard in the distance. “Shhhhh… Quiet! Listen!” More thuds, coming closer. “I can hear him. Crawling above. Crawling!” Even more thuds. I began to feel afraid, and Sammy noticed this. “Let us begin. The ritual must be completed! Soon he will hear me…” He got in close again. I smelled his breath, reeking of that bacon soup stuff. There must have been nothing else to eat. How long had he been here? “He will set us free.” With that he left me, going off to a side door to my left. His footsteps echoed loudly in the chamber. A speaker screeched into life, and he began to chant. “Sheep, sheep, sheep. It’s time for sleep Rest your head. It’s time for bed In the morning, you will wake Or in the morning, you’ll be dead.” A shutter door opposite me began to slowly rise. I began struggling. There was no way I was just gonna sit here while that demon entered this room. If I was to die, I was gonna go fighting. “Hear me Bendy! Arise from the darkness! Arise and claim my offering! Free me! I beg you!” The door was now open, but nothing was there. “I summon you, Ink Demon! Show your face and take this tender sheep!” With that there was a loud crash and a roar, but it was heard on the microphone, and not in the chamber “No! My lord! Stay back! I am your prophet! I am your-” But he never finished his sentence. A scream came over the speakers, as Bendy must have attacked Sammy, choosing to take him instead of me. With a final few strained movements, I was able to break the binds holding me. I dashed to the axe, the ground shaking, as Bendy must have been finishing Sammy off. Ink began to drip heavily, creatures forming from the puddles that they left. I cut through them and ran through the open door. Thinking hard, I remembered seeing a glimpse of a large object being lowered through a gap in the wall next to me. I didn’t think about it till later, but I realised it was the machine, and it was sinking through the studio. I moved through the hall, cutting through beams to clear the path. There was one more ahead. I raised it and brought it down hard. The wood snapped into splinters, but the axe broke in half, the head denting and detaching from the shaft. There were still more creatures behind me, so I dropped the broken axe and headed forward, seeing a flooded room. I was prepared to start wading until he appeared. The ink writhed and whirled into a tall mass. A shape coalesced from the ink, forming into the hauntingly familiar shape of the creature that had chased me into this damn pit. Bendy stood before me. He roared, rearing his head back and creating a cacophony of screams. He turned his sightless eyes on me and started a running limp towards me and I ran. I didn’t think about where I was going, but I just kept going. Every fibre of my being screamed at me to get the hell away from him. I made many twists and turns, sneaking a peak back every now and then. Despite his limp Bendy was a god runner, and he was rapidly gaining on me. Ink seemed to spread from him, the walls and floor being covered in tendrils of ink, all flowing towards me. I saw a door ahead of me and sprinted towards it. I bolted through and slammed it shut behind me, leaning against it with all my weight. The door banged loudly as Bendy beat against it with his hands, his right hand shrivelled, making a quieter beat compared to his giant left hand, which thundered against the door. I looked around for anything that could help before noticing a bar and brackets that could be used to barricade the door. I slotted it into place and stepped backwards. There were a few more knocks until, with a growl, Bendy left the door. He had lost interest. OK. So he couldn’t just pass through solid objects all the time. That was comforting. That or he could get in at any time he liked but just chose not to. That was less comforting. I instead decided to focus on the fact that he wasn’t there and was no longer after me for the moment. I looked around and found that I was in some sort of storeroom. There were cans lining a few shelves and a couple of pipes along the walls. At this point however it would have been more surprising to see a room without pipes. A door lay open and I headed towards it. There were a couple of barrels and one or two ink stains on the floor, but apart from that, it appeared to be the cleanest parts of the studio, almost like someone had been living there. A can rolled out from around a corner and across the floor. Someone was there. I had nowhere to run and nothing to defend myself, so I took the next logical step. I finally spoke up. “Hello? Someone there?” No answer. I tried again. More firmly this time. “I know you’re in here. Come out and show yourself.” Steady footsteps were heard and I prepared for the worst. The figure emerged and my jaw dropped. How was this possible? He was dead. I saw his body on the top floor. Even then, he was just a cartoon character. Everything else was a corrupted employee or a mindless beast, but something was different about him. He stepped into the light, and smiled at me, his big toothy grin making me feel better. It gave me hope, but at the same time, made me slightly uneasy as the sheer absurdity of him being here was almost too much. “Boris?” End of Chapter Two So there you have it. This one took me a hell of a lot longer than the first one, because the chapter is longer. I will probably get around to chapter three soon and don't worry, I won't go through all of the pedantic tasks. I'll probably mention them but keep them brief. I'll leave a link to chapter one at the bottom of the post and add a link to chapter three once I've written it. Chapter one: https://www.reddit.com/BendyAndTheInkMachine/comments/gjkyzd/bendy_and_the_ink_machine_story_write_up/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x Chapter three: Part 1 https://www.reddit.com/BendyAndTheInkMachine/comments/gneho7/bendy_and_the_ink_machine_story_write_up_chapte?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x Part 2 https://www.reddit.com/BendyAndTheInkMachine/comments/gnejmbendy_and_the_ink_machine_story_write_up_chapte?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x
My mother passed away on May 19th of this year. She had never been very lucky as it pertains to personal health. Despite brushing twice a day her whole life, she had frequent infections in her teeth, causing several removals and eventually, she was stuck with dentures in her mid-thirties. She had persistent back pain starting at age 10, caused by a pinched nerve in her lower back. The doctors often told her that the inflammation would go down eventually and the pain would more or less subside. It never really did, flaring up pretty badly every few months. Little things like that added up to making my mom seem very fragile to me, despite the fact that she was one of the strongest people I've ever known. Early onset Alzheimer's is what took my mother. She was only 55. Her mother only passed away late last year. My grandma was as strong as an ox, and despite her petite frame (which only shrank every time I saw her), she would not give up her fight for anything. She went with dignity, in hospice care, fairly lucid and ready for whatever was next. Being a farm girl from birth, she asked to be cremated and placed in a small bean pot that she had thrown picked beans into with her mom throughout her whole childhood. My mom took that bean pot home and left it on her mantle. I would visit her sometimes, and when we had the TV on, I would notice her eyes would drift to the pot and not come off it for several minutes. She would maybe tear up a little, but she wasn't one to cry in front of her boys. I'm not certain how much you know about Alzheimer's, but I have learned a lot in the last few months. I learned the typical progression (from onset to death) takes between 3 and 11 years. Those who develop Alzheimer's earlier tend to end up on the lower end of that spectrum. I also learned that, as any degenerative condition does, Alzheimer's worsens over time, and is often mistaken for forgetfulness and clumsiness until it worsens significantly. And of course, I learned that you're under greater risk of developing Alzheimer's if there is some history of it in your family. Which makes it all the stranger that my mom died of her condition only about 6 months after diagnosis. None of her immediate family had suffered from the disease. She went downhill fast, going from my sharp, witty, vivacious guardian angel to a rambling, moaning mess in almost no time flat. Because of her bad health luck, she became a worrywart. She felt a little "foggy" in the wake of her mother's death, so she decided to see a doctor for a little check-up. Just to know everything is okay. She walked out of that clinic nervous that the tests she took would come back positive for the horror that would take her life in only half a year. She had no clue what was about to hit her. I know it is the way of life for children to grieve their parents. That doesn't make it any easier to see your support system muttering on a hospital bed, kept going only by machines and her body's waning resolve against death. It was a horror beyond words; I know it is an all-too-real situation for many people, but when you live it, it's a surreal nightmare. I could hover on just that image of her slowly fading for a million more words, and it would never do the terrible, awful, stupidity of it any justice. It is just for me now; a personal horror I revisit whenever I close my eyes. In the wake of everything, my brother took a lot of my mom's stuff. I don't begrudge him that. He was her first, and he shared in a lot of the best and worst parts of her life. He had a connection with her just a level beyond my own, and I am happy to know that he has reminders of those times with him now. He took the bean pot, now with two souls in it, plucked from the vine and happy to share a cozy space in the best of company. I wasn't after much. Since my brother is so allergic, my wife and I took my mom's enormous Maine Coon, Bear. It wasn't a question of where Bear would end up. After my mom and dad split, she moved into an apartment on her own. My wife and I insisted she get some kind of company. She was adamant that she was "done with love" after two failed marriages, which is another casual horror with which too many people are familiar. After a couple months, she caved, and was lucky enough to find a gorgeous, sweet, heavenly creature like Bear at the Humane Society. It was his first day there, discarded by some monster because he had a track record of pretty poor health. My mom saw in his special needs a kindred spirit, and took him home immediately. Bear have gotten on swimmingly in our home. My wife is an animal lover, and our other cat has grown fond of his new furry pals after some initial uneasiness. I have maybe caused the largest road block in his new adaptation. I can't give him all the love he deserves because I just see my mom every time I look at him. Well, I suppose there's another reason, too. The other thing I wanted was my mom's cell phone. In the days leading up to her death, my brother, myself, and our wives took shifts by her side. It was agonizing. Most of the time she was sleeping, and it was easy to zone out into your phone. I spent countless hours on Facebook, Reddit, doing NYT crosswords, you name it. It was easier to do that than remove the distraction and look at the reality of my mom's tortured existence. It was easier to do that than look forward at the near future and confront the thought that I sort of wished my mom would just go. It would be less painful for her to be gone. During one of my shifts, I was watching some useless video on YouTube, just playing the distraction game like always. Suddenly, my mom sat up (as much as she could), and looked right at me. Sudden bouts of liveliness were common, but there was a directness to it that caught my attention. Her eyes were completely clear. I could have fooled myself into believing my mom was never sick in the first place, that she had just woken up from the nightmare we were living in. She said my name: "Matthew." This made my hair stand up. I had been a lot of people throughout the last few months, but rarely was I actually myself to her. I was torn between being elated that she knew me for now, and frightened that something so unusual was happening. "Matthew," she said. "There's proof on my phone, Matthew. There's proof just for you. There's only proof for you, Matthew." I know you may imagine a horror movie scene, with her voice rasping out, or an even, robotic monotone. But that's not how she sounded. She sounded like mom. She didn't sound like she wanted to menace me. If anything, it sounded like she was speaking with great care, almost concern. And just like that, she settled back into her antiseptic, starch white sheets, and fell asleep. I asked everyone else about this. No one had experienced anything like it. She could hardly form sentences anymore, let alone something that complex. I was left reeling for a while, but eventually, I just put it down to her condition. I wouldn't think about it again until after the funeral. After the grieving. I got curious. It was as simple as that. I got curious like the idiot in a slasher movie who asks 'Who's there?' rather than just run away from the danger they were approaching. I had to know if my mom was just raving, or if she really knew what she was saying. I wasn't sure which reality I preferred. My mom was a typical person in her fifties. Her phone had no lock on it. I opened it up and poked around a little. I wasn't honestly sure what to look for. I looked through the messages, briefly. It still felt wrong to be in there, but she hadn't sent a text message in many months. One of the last ones she sent was to me. It said "Love you!!!" Seeing that crushed me beyond measure. Fighting through the years, I navigated around in her documents and stuff. Nothing too special. Her settings let me know that her dumb slot machine games were where most of her battery usage came from. No surprises there. The next most usage came from her camera. I felt like an idiot for not thinking of that sooner. I chalked it up to the bizarre circumstances. Opening her gallery, I was astonished to find dozens of short video clips. Most of them were from right before she had to leave her apartment. I could tell from the thumbnails that many of them featured a finger or thumb pressed firmly over the camera aperture. This little detail hit my heart with another pang; she was just a scared, lost woman trying desperately to communicate with the world somehow. I opened one of the videos with her finger as the star. I couldn't see anything in it, but I could hear my mom, speaking as directly as she did that day in the hospital. "This is for you, Matthew. Do you see it? Do you see how it changes? This is for you. Matthew, do you see it? Do you see how it changes?" And then it ended. I was stunned. It was the same kind of thing she was saying on that horrible day. She had done the exact same thing before, by herself, with no one there to hear her. I scrolled away from that ugly block of videos, in an effort to shield myself from their existence. I discovered weeks and weeks of pictures that always seemed to come in pairs. They were taken moments or hours apart, but always from the exact same angle; a book sitting on her coffee table, a lit lamp, the blinds pulled halfway down her bedroom window. Invariably, they came in pairs, and invariably, they looked the exact same. Scrolling through weeks of these picture pairs calmed my heart rate down. It put everything back into perspective for me. I was scrolling through the steady deterioration of a human mind. Setting aside that it was my mom, this was an academic exercise, not some ominous omnibus. She could've pulled anybody's name out of her head, and I wouldn't have batted an eyelash. In a way, I felt selfish. I felt like I was trying to get some meaning out of my mother's decline that only I was entitled to. Like she left the last cogent parts of herself to invest into a message all for me. I felt childish and puny. I scrolled back up to the block of videos. Steeling myself, I picked out the longest one. It began with my mom shakily steadying the camera. She walks around a corner of her apartment and into her bathroom. Bear lay on the bath mat in front of her shower, looking cool and disinterested and beautiful, like any cat would. "Look at him, Matthew. Matthew, do you see him?" My mom's voice comes out clear as a bell once again. She turns and walks out of the bathroom. The phone gets fumbled around a little as she closes the door behind herself. She walks with purpose back down the hallway, and turns into her bedroom. She approaches the bed and gently pushes down a ridge of blankets. As she pushes the blankets aside, Bear comes into view, sleeping in a curl on her bed. He looks at her, just as disinterested as ever, despite the fact that his presence in that exact location is an impossibility. "See him, Matthew. Matthew this is Bear. Matthew, do you see it?" She walks out of her bedroom, closing the door behind herself. This time, she trains the camera through the closing crack of the door, to focus on Bear, coolly coiled on her bed. She walks faster now back to her bathroom. She cracks the door just enough to poke her phone in. As the aperture blearily opens and closes, the shape of Bear comes into focus. Bear who is closed inside her bedroom. "Look at him, Matthew. Matthew, this is Bear. Bear is yours, Matthew. Matthew, do you see that Bear is yours? Do you understand, Matthew?" The video ended as I chucked the phone across the room. I was weeping, my heart was racing, I was seeing stars. What had I just witnessed? How could any of that possibly have been real? I think I just curled up on my couch and cried for a while, trying but failing to look anywhere but at the phone that lay on the other end of the room. After what felt like ages, I rolled myself off the couch and retrieved the phone. I opened it again and again, I scrolled quickly past the videos at the top. When I got to the pairs of pictures, I swear my heart stopped beating in my chest. The pairs were different. The book on her coffee table was Of Mice and Men, but the second photo was of Cannery Row. The lamp is lit then not lit. The blinds are half-closed then fully open. None of this would have been all that surprising if I hadn't seen these photos earlier, and everything had matched. The pairs could have been identical (I could have sworn so!), and suddenly, they just weren't. They were an impossibility, just like Bear being in two places at once. I more or less blacked out in that moment, but I remember stuffing the phone in the trash. Deep down in the trash. It's been a few days now since all of that happened. I'm still not really sure what to make of all of it. I haven't shared a bit of it with my wife, mostly due to embarrassment, I think. Honestly, it all just feels like a half-remembered bad dream. It has pretty rapidly faded from my memory, leaving only this vague, dark bruise on my past. I can't believe how quickly most of it has gone from my mind. If you'll allow me a little joke, I guess I got my mom's memory.
Two-Man Mystery Hunt: Less Caressing, More Guessing (Week 4 Update)
Background
We broke out of the slump of last week and solved quite a few things! However, we were very wrong with our predictions on what would be easy to solve. This weekend was punctuated by another blizzard. (Winter has been unusually harsh this year, even for Minnesota.) While that gave us a lot of time inside to solve puzzles, it also threw a wrench in our plans for attempting Taskmaster this week. Also, for the first time since I've started writing about the Hunt, we've unlocked more puzzles! The story behind it is extremely stupid (but in a lot of ways, that makes it even better.)
About Our Names
Something that's occasionally come up is why we're Cheshire and Syntax despite posting a lot of personal things here. When I made the first write-up, it was mostly because of A Tearable Puzzle being an issue. I didn't expect anyone to really be interested in reading it. As such, I didn't really tell Syntax that I was doing it until afterwards. That being said, I didn't want to suddenly use his name on Reddit without his permission. The only username he has on social media references syntax errors, so that's what he is. "Cheshire" has been both a screen name and a nickname for me for a while. (Mostly because the cat suddenly appears and disappears and has some very strange stories, not because of the grinning.) When I've needed an actual pen name for whatever reason, I've become Cheshire Songchild. Now that I've already established how I write these, I'm unlikely to stop using the nicknames.
A Note to the Puzzle Creators
Honestly, I'm still shocked that I'm getting so much feedback on these posts. You all are great. When we started, it was assumed that there would just be puzzles which we couldn't ever complete because they involved someone from Setec interacting with the teams, and we very much appreciate your eagerness to help out in all of those cases. (So far, we've found four non-event puzzles that required some interaction on our part to get an answer.) Even when I don't have a story to tell about how we solved a particular puzzle, they still were enjoyable to solve. Especially all of you that put crosswords and straight-up logic puzzles into the Hunt-- I feel like I'm sort of harsh on those in my write-ups, even though they're often the best entertainment in a whole round. There hasn't yet been a stickler of a puzzle that's only existed to frustrate us. I'll emphasize this again-- this is certainly my favorite of the large, modern Hunts (2009-now); it might also be my all-time favorite.
Puzzle-Specific Notes (The Solved Ones)
Stuffing
Wait, we didn't have this one yet? Nope-- I just neglected to mention it for some reason in the second write-up; we'd actually completed it before I started doing write-ups at all. While this was a very traditional type of puzzle by Mystery Hunt standards, this did sort of strike a chord with us because there are a lot of word games that we've corrupted with non-alphabetic characters and emojis.
Romance Languages
"You know, calling preliminary research for every puzzle 'caressing' is kind of getting old." - Syntax, immediately before I tried to translate the first word of the puzzle Sometimes, people say things with perfect timing. That was one of those times. This would have been extremely quick, but I mixed up some entries in two of the columns and Syntax had to fix it. I had multiple Q's in my grid and I couldn't find an easy way to spell something without disassembling the entire grid. While this was a very simple concept, I'm glad that someone wrote this for the Valentine's round. (Otherwise, I'd be asking where the Romance language puns were hiding by now.)
Activities Midway
At first, we assumed that there was some mathematical property of the number 152 that would magically turn it into the word JUDO. Since there are no MIT students on our team, the fact that the clubs were numbered was not obvious to us, and we only realized it after realizing that we could make "Shakespeare Assassin's Guild" out of actual club names. There also was a slight problem with us finding the club numbers-- attempting to view most pages that would have that information instead left us at a login page. Google indexed a couple of clubs, but it was nigh-impossible to predict which ones. Just kidding! Thanks to a helpful pointer from portnoyslp, we found out that the only clubs that Google didn't have indexed for us were among the first ones we tried to check in the leftmost column. This was a fast solve once the ball started rolling. Also, being able to anagram out WIDE-EYED without knowing how to read the grid makes it clear why you all love convoluted indexing schemes. I think this is another milestone-- it's the first puzzle explicitly related to MIT that we've solved.
A Mysterious Event
What to do here was obvious to us from the beginning, but finding out what words to put in the grid took a lot of testing. First, we tried slotting in words related to the numbers (such as SPECIAL and SCORE.) Next, we tried picking apart the dialogue for crossword clues (leaving us with entries like "BARRICADE" for the "retaining wall" mentioned.) At some point, we assumed that the answers were in the books themselves, and promptly tried to search a plot summary of Thursday Next to figure out the words. After all, she only has seven books. As we also learned, the plot to the Thursday Next books is extremely convoluted. I personally stopped being optimistic somewhere between the usage of the word "jurisfiction" and the sudden appearance of the Cheshire Cat. Eventually, Syntax was the one to figure out that we needed the "Letter is for Word" series of mysteries. Once we got the trick, assembling the grid was still non-trivial. Actually, we assembled the grid on a physical Scrabble board when we finally solved the puzzle. It worked surprisingly well-- it was obvious when we ran out of certain tiles and it was easy to correct mistakes.
Halloween-Valentine's Day Meta
"Since we still apparently can't solve the right things, I've tried to place the four answers we have in the grid any way I can. The answer has to be eight letters, and I think I've proven that it's H???SUT?." - Syntax Even though we solved more than half of the Valentine's Day puzzles by this point, we only had Activities Midway for eight-letter answers in the round. Then again, we'd sort of assumed that this would need an eight-letter answer-- the construction of a logic puzzle on an 8x8 grid became apparent to us weeks ago. Because HATAMOTO had two O's, that forced us to have a dummy row with no O's and no letters in common with the final answer. We couldn't prove it was Activities Midway unless we solved absolutely everything in the round, but we were pretty sure we had the dummy row. While we immediately thought HIRSUTE was a candidate, it didn't quite fit, and it wasn't eight letters. We ended up ignoring it for several hours. I came back to it, came to the same conclusion, and realized that HIRSUTER was a reasonable pun. It still wasn't the answer and it still didn't fit. "Did you try putting an 'I'm' in front of it?" - Syntax, half-joking "That's not eight letters, so it won't work, but I'll check it anyway." -Cheshire (ten seconds later) "Oh my [caressing] god." -Cheshire We managed to clear this with only one answer from Valentine's Day. "Wait a minute, having an "I'm" in front disproves the existence of a dummy row..." -Cheshire We only had 3/8 answers, plus a wrong answer, and we also made incorrect assumptions about the length of the answer line. Assuming all of those things was also the thing that caused us to solve the puzzle, though. This takes the award for "luckiest solve" by a longshot (as I reference quite often, solving Starbucks Lover with an incorrect anagram and getting Caressing with 5/10 right letters and two wrong ones were the most ridiculous parts of the Hunt before this.) I feel bad for the creators of Poor Richard and especially the Treehouse of Crossed Destinies. We got decently far in both of them, but we aren't really grinding our gears to solve puzzles that are likely to go to a completed meta. We were down to seven missing answers in Valentine's Day when we solved this, and four of them went back. Those have always looked like eight-letter answers to us, but we couldn't crack them in time.
The Obligatory G&S Puzzle
So, I’ve got my receipt for that MIT Mystery Hunt puzzle that is so musical-themed. Discovering all the right people in history Was such an easy task (or so it seemed…) I’ve contacted members of Setec Astronomy Just to solve tearable missing uploads. I’ve struggled through grids made of garbled gastronomy, Half-cooked spaghetti, and telegraph codes; Caressed every cat trained at Kitten Academy; Learned that Helvetica’s only okay; Repaired faulty programs for turtle anatomy And promises formed from console displays; Deciphered Assembly for Game Genie glitches; Recorded the pH of acids and bitches; Reviewed films for cable with substitute moral lines; Faced cartoon horrors (but somehow missed Coraline); Wired a trip from Burkina Fa-SOOOOOOO! Baked thirteen concerts of virtual DOOOOOOOUGH! I’ve solved text adventures and college activities; Zyzzl konundrums and killer festivities; I’m still Songchild; I’ll do anything… ...but I never expected you’d need me to sing... We got an answer line to this just as I began writing today. We joked about submitting a video just to get an answer we needed for Halloween, and because Murphy's Law is a thing, we got one. As for why this took so long, both of us had singing shyness, we didn't have a lot of experience with editing audio or video, and we were extremely indecisive about who to pick for the "biopic" part. Last weekend, Syntax said that he'd generate the name of a random famous person online and I'd have to be the one to sing about them. We'd pick a song strictly based on how the name scanned. We got Stephenie Meyer. It took all of zero seconds for me to realize that her name slotted perfectly into the chorus of "Sex on Fire" by Kings of Leon. However, not only is that song decently high up there in terms of vocal range, the singer's voice sounds nothing like mine. It was a recipe for disaster. When I recorded myself this morning, I thought my problem was going to be that I sounded off-key. Instead, I had nearly every problem OTHER than sounding off-key. I was constantly singing just a little slower than the backing track for the song, I was too soft-spoken to have the microphone consistently receive my voice well, and my tone was horribly awkward and inappropriate for the song (in a way that's difficult to describe-- imagine a slurred, disinterested Bob Dylan voice.) But at least I was on pitch! (I think. Hopefully.) After a couple hours, I'd recorded myself doing it several times, spliced together the best parts of each recording, fixed a lot of the timing and volume problems, and generally had something that was a little less embarrassing. (Sadly, I couldn't fix the drunk Bob Dylan aspects of it all. Whoops!) This might count as a pretty bad caress, since I never really paid attention to what went into recording a piece of music until I tried to do it on my own. To all the teams out there that did this, I already have sympathy for you. Note: while the flavor text here implies otherwise for rhyming purposes, we haven't yet solved Your Wish Is My Command or First You Visit Burkina Faso. Also, I just realized that the topic is a lot more similar to the Major General's Song than it was to the song in the video. Can't win 'em all.
Bitter Kittens Cross the Pond
We finally realized that the woman was announcing for Miss Universe... in a way that directly references "Bitter Kittens". We could even just search for her lines verbatim! With quotes! I can't believe that we got the Eurovision half while completely missing that. This was a great puzzle. How did you realize that despite every performance being on YouTube, apparently nobody has given a written description of the events on stage? Those things were really hard to Google (we mostly found them by looking up every single performance for the country referenced by the woman's puns.) Since I had the Icelandic name for the second clip, there was also a bit of time wasted because we extracted "U R FORGIVEN" as our answer line. Thank you for forgiving us over getting stuck here, Mystery Hunt ghost.
Hexed Adventure II: Hexed Again!
There are two types of people. Syntax had spent hours mapping every bit of this puzzle right before we established the rules of our Hunt. He really liked the first Hexed Adventure, and he was wondering what board game it could be. I played through part of it, and it seemed very well-designed. The only place I'd heard of the first one was in the video for Haunted. That being said, both of us were expecting a board game. Syntax managed to miss all of the references, but I immediately recognized the game as Betrayal at House on the Hill. In fact, he almost solved the puzzle without falling for the red herring, but I found it for him anyway. The only other thing I personally did with this puzzle before Syntax figured it all out was identifying how to index at the end. He wanted to put as much the dialogue as possible from the game into a spreadsheet, but (thankfully) only did the final battle before falling asleep. Oddly, I think my favorite part of this puzzle was the deliberate red herring. Everyone who worked on Haunted would have been spoiled about the first one just in time to be confused about the meaning of "hexed" here. Also: points for reusing the pun in a different context.
Loaded
This one gets the award for fastest solve this Hunt. We got it in less than 15 minutes. It was a great concept for a puzzle, but it was surprisingly easy to us for this late in the Hunt. It doesn't get the record for fastest solve of all time here. Syntax and myself both independently solved No Pluto from the School of Fish in less than a minute.
... FISH Puzzles?
Speaking of School of Fish... We loved that Hunt. 2015 was our second-favorite hunt (behind this year) and we were excited that there was a tribute to it. That being said, you managed to choose every puzzle in the whole School that doesn't take less time after knowing how to get the answer. And because I solved Chowing Down, I saw "no such thing as a" and immediately got irritated when "free lunch" didn't work as the answer. Google filling the phrase with "fish" made me feel awfully dumb.
Middle School of Mines
Minesweeper was a great inspiration for a puzzle. This was pretty simple and also fun to solve-- so much that I went back and played a couple of the games after Syntax already had solved the puzzle. I'm honestly really happy that you occasionally implement non-Hunt-related games into the Hunt in a very straightforward way. If Minesweeper is fun outside the Hunt, then it's fun inside the Hunt, even if it doesn't make a super difficult puzzle.
Deeply Confused
This was a weird situation where I took charge of a puzzle despite knowing less about the topic than Syntax. I figured that knowing more about training neural networks would be a good thing when I'm applying for basically every coding-related job where I have a chance at being qualified. As I kind of expected, the process was very automatic if you could get through a maze of dependencies and installations. After about an hour into my research on how to get the images from ImageNet and install everything, I realized that someone already had the exact network and training I needed for free use online. Sometimes, I want to learn. This time, I'd gotten fed up with the depth of the rabbit hole of what software needs other software to run. That made this a very quick solve (even if everything I needed to do for the puzzle was very repetitive.) This is another fun one to tell outsiders about.
A Lemon Tree
We never attempted to actually solve this puzzle as if it were a lot of math problems. Syntax caught the elementary theme quickly, and I knew the Periodic Table well enough by heart to realize that subtraction with strings of symbols would always produce a valid result. There was a slight holdup with identifying the Sherlock Holmes stories, though. It doesn't help at all that a large number of them randomly contain the names of chemical elements. Syntax tried to piece every four-letter code into a different list (NORW being a country, HOUN being a Pokémon, et cetera.) Overall, I think this was a really clever concept, especially the answer extraction step at the end.
Complementary Copies
Ooh, clues in pairs! The whole concept of a children's literature-themed puzzle in a later round felt kind of heartwarming. I don't really have much more of a story here other than that I enjoyed doing it. Oh, yeah. I got "MELANIE RICH DOT" instead of "melanin" at the end, which prevented me from finding the counterpart to Superfudge. I spent half an hour trying to find out what it meant. Syntax, as his alter-ego of Captain Obvious, came to save the day.
Puzzle-Specific Notes (The Unsolved Ones)
Crosscut
Hey, clues in trios! The haiku splitting was cool, but now we don't know what to do with the nine-letter movies. We've proven they don't normally fit into the grid, which probably means I misidentified something. It's getting a little irritating.
Dampfwalze
At least these clues aren't in groups of four. *rereads flavor text* Oh. This is an early candidate for "trickiest puzzle in Arbor Day". After answering and coupling all of the clues, we realized we need something about Mannheim Steamroller. (Mostly because we were surprised after translating the title.) We've listened to quite a bit of music and got a list of nearly all of their songs, but we still don't know what's going on.
Engelsche
My first experience with this: "Wow, they singled out Terpsichore in here. That hasn't happened since that one guy tried to write the world's longest tongue-twister." Then, not knowing what to do, I closed the puzzle. My second experience with this: Syntax asking me "what's the 'dearest creature' poem? I read the first letter of every line." I Googled it, and then promptly was floored that my gut was right. We know that the lines of this puzzle map roughly one-to-one to the poem (well, occasionally missing a few things here or there.) We also have had a tedious time trying to piece this puzzle apart, even knowing that. I'm hoping that it gets easier once we figure out some sort of hidden trick.
Flocks
We have a complete tree, and all our birds have perched. The answer still isn't obvious to us, though.
I AM GROOT
This is now the puzzle I show people when I have to explain that Mystery Hunt puzzles often don't have an easy way to interact with them. We have no idea what to do here at all. I feel like this is either supposed to be super easy or super hard. We did find the hidden picture, though.
iN SYNdiCation
This has been, by far, the worst example of "caressing" so far during the Hunt. So much that we've considered changing the word to "syndication". So much that we neglected to use the actual puzzle name in favor of calling our spreadsheet for this one the "in syndiCAtion RESearch Sheet". I'd recognized one of the twelve video clips off the bat (the Doctor Who one), but the others were very hard to research without knowing what to look for. Meanwhile, we've had family and friends randomly stumble upon one of us looking at this and instantly recognizing things that we'd spent a long time trying to find. It feels so weird being seemingly the only people who DON'T know the information required to solve something. Meanwhile, even though other people walking by always seem to love the clip we're looking at or the background music, they never seem to know what a show is if we directly ask. The Lost clip without the actor's face was especially mean. Google reverse image search didn't even recognize any part of it until we tried the logo on the door at the end. And now that we're done with caressing for now-- we have every clip, every song, and the original song for every clip-- we still have no idea how to extract an answer.
Mountains and Valleys
I loved the concept behind this- I fold a lot of origami outside the Hunt and I was impressed that you could make a puzzle out of diagrams without the answers being obvious. I've folded everything and I recognize nothing. Now I have no idea how or when progress here can advance.
Quaternary Structure
The phrase "I hope I never have to caress out a doctorate" has been said multiple times this Hunt. This is the first time that sentence has been entirely serious.
Touring the Nation
We've more-or-less solved the grid and proven the order of the states, but we don't have an answer yet.
The Treehouse of Crossed Destinies
Both of us loved the concept here, and we're probably decently close to an answer. However, we probably also solved the meta that this feeds. We have proven the position of every card at the end and identified all the Simpsons guest stars, though.
Comma and a Freaking Dot
We finally solved the puzzle portion of this-- it wasn't about wine after all! I'm planning on rapping-- it's just that making audio recordings is apparently something that takes several attempts in a quiet room. I was going to do it today, but my G&S video took way more time than I thought it would.
Taskmaster
Similarly, we're still working on this. However, this is also the creative challenge that requires the most time on our part, and we also have to be together to complete a lot of the tasks. It's something we're excited about, but the logistics of it all are slowing progress.
Everything Else
I feel like we have enough open puzzles that it's impractical to write about all of them. I don't think you want to read "we failed to understand why Your Wish is My Command didn't work" or "how does one state machine" every week until the end of time, either. While we did make valiant efforts at a lot of puzzles that aren't listed here, I only mentioned the unsolved puzzles that were in a different state from last week.
Gold Stars
I'm excited to say that we have an additional progress marker exclusive to our mock Hunt. Last week, I got congratulated on solving Display Case, and I also learned about the solving statistics for the Halloween round. I decided to mark with gold stars on our checklist to indicate that they were solved by fewer teams than any other puzzles for that round. While it isn't strictly a measure of difficulty-- things like the unlock order have a lot of influence over how many teams solved them, too-- it's the best bearing on what "the hardest puzzle" for any given holiday was. Currently, we have three stars-- those two and Caressing. Oddly enough, when we started calling unnecessary research "caressing", it was because we assumed that Caressing was supposed to be an easy puzzle and that it took unusually long for us. Apparently not. While I don't want to hear a lot of unnecessary guidance or statistics on things we haven't yet solved-- hearing that certain puzzles are easy or hard will influence the order in which I attempt things-- I do like hearing when we've done something unusually difficult. As for my guesses of the remaining star locations: I can't decide which of our two incomplete Christmas puzzles was the harder one. If Your Wish is My Command isn't the Thanksgiving star, then that jukebox has to be exceptionally nasty. I can't actually gauge Running for Office fairly, we still have no insight on Insider Trading, and State Machine still feels like it should have been straightforward to us (but is probably the most likely star.) I honestly have no idea about which of the Arbor Day puzzles is hardest- the existence of things like I AM GROOT doesn't help.
Final Notes
I can't think of much more I have to say this week! If I should add anything to these, just let me know! Also, here's our scoreboard so far: Christmas: 4/6 (missing GIF of the Magi and Nobel Laureate) Halloween: 16/17 (missing Joke-O-Lantern), star (appropriately found in Starbucks Lover), anomalous answer line (from A Killer Party) Thanksgiving: 13/16 (missing Cross Campus, Jukebox Hero, and Your Wish is My Command) Valentine's Day: 11/17 (missing Be Mine, Just Desserts, Poor Richard Goes To Sea, Shah Raids, and the Treehouse of Crossed Destinies; puzzle for Comma and a Freaking Dot solved but creative submission incomplete), star (found in Caressing) President's Day: 8/12 (missing Insider Trading, Safety Training, and State Machine; likely to be indefinitely missing Running for Office) New Year's: 6/13 (missing Art Tours, Bubbly, Far Out, First You Visit Burkina Faso, iPod Submarine, and The Sound of Music; Taskmaster is also yet to be completed but that's sort of in the same boat as Comma), star (found in Display Case) Arbor Day: 7/18 (missing Crosscut, Dampfwalze, Delightful, Engelsche, Flocks, Furious Fellows, I AM GROOT, IN SYNdiCation, Mountains and Valleys, Quaternary Structure, and Touring the Nation)
Quick Unit Analysis - Goddess Hatsune Miku and Duetto Megurine Luka (Give-away inside)
Hi guys! Gumi have been releasing units at a rapid pace these past couple of weeks and as such, I'm woefully behind on my analyses. This means I don't have much time as I would like to dedicate full analyses to Miku and Luka. Instead, since I would still like to give you guys information about these units, I'm going to do a quick and dirty summary of these units and how they function. It'll be akin to the synopses you'll find in my Batch Overviews, so no direct comparisons except for brief mentions but hopefully it'll still be information rich enough for you guys. :> Hope that's okay! BONUS: I have a Luka code to give away to the first person to answer a cryptic crossword-like riddle I'll post at the end of the analysis. Isn't that nice? :> Goddess Hatsune Miku
LS: Fill BB gauge every turn and boost to BB gauge fill rate (BC fill 3BC/turn, BB gauge fill rate +25%)
Hit Count: 9 (Drop check count 2/hit)
BB: 27 hit multiple target Earth damage and fills BB gauge every turn for 3 turns for all allies (25BC to fill, BC fill 3BC/turn, damage modifier +190%)
Being stuck at 5* really makes it difficult for Miku to compete with the 6* metagame. Mainly, it's her HP that holds her back, being sub-5k as a Lord makes it difficult for Miku to not be a liability in higher end content because her survivability drops drastically.
Her other stats aren't impressive compared to 6* units either, but they're not going to be the hindrance that her HP is.
As far as 5* units go, she's about in the average range for her stats.
Her Leader skill is actually really excellent. It's a fantastic BB-spam leader skill and she'd be a top tier BB-spam leader if she was a bit stronger. However she's absolutely amazing for new players who can't really afford to run a 6* BB-spam leader.
Her LS is also great for the Arena. In terms of pure BB filling ability, it's the strongest Arena leader skill in the game bar none. However by not having a damage augmenting component to her leader skill, she loses a lot of viability in her arena prowess since that first turn damage is almost if not more important than filling the BB-gauge by turn 2.
Still a solid option if you're looking for a nice BB-spam leader for the Arena.
Since she's a viable Arena unit, here's her Arena AI:
Check 1: Use BB on random unit (60%)
Check 2: Use BB on unit with highest ATK (20%)
Check 3: Use normal attack on enemy with lowest HP (30%)
Check 4: Use normal attack on random enemy (100%)
So a pretty good set, the same as Lira's and Ophelia's. She can sit in any position on your Arena squad.
Her drop check count is fine at 18 total for her normal attack, but it's not particularly noteworthy either.
Her BB is pretty amazing for a 5* unit. I think Miku probably needs some credit since Serin got a mountain of praise for having a 16 hit MT BB and Miku absolutely destroys her at 27.
Unfortunately, it's probably the climate of the metagame that has changed that Miku suffers from. Units are just much more powerful now than they were when Serin came out so Miku pales in comparison.
However 27 drop checks is 27 drop checks, that's almost Luther level, in fact, negligibly close to Luther level BC generation (and if you factor in her buff, it's more than Luther generates by quite a bit). You lose a spark buff which hurts and you lose a LOT of damage since Luther's just way better in general, but as a poor man's Luther, Miku is solid.
Her buff is pretty nice too, 3BC/turn isn't huge but given her hit count, it makes her a very potent unit for BC generation.
And that's probably the best way to utilise Miku, a BC generation machine. Her stats are too low and she doesn't have an SBB damage modifier that would let her contribute anything significant damage wise, so she's a unit you can slot in to patch up BC generation issues or to boost your squad just enough that they can maintain infinite SBB.
If you have Luthers, or Douglasses or even Michele batch units in surplus, you probably won't need Miku. Let's be honest. She's not a top tier unit by any means which is to be expected since she's free. But if you really need some BC generation on your team and you lack other options, Miku is fantastic filler.
In summary, a poor man's BB spam leader and a poor man's LutheDouglas, but certainly a VERY GOOD poor man's unit.
She's farmable, and her stats are problematic so on this rare occasion, I think it's worth farming for her ideal type if you can spare the time (and with energy at 1/3min you don't really have an excuse).
Anima > Guardian > Lord > Breaker > Oracle.
Anima gives her the greatest survivability at the least cost so I think if you're going to use her, definitely try for this type. Her drop rate is good and energy is not a rare resource at the moment. Guardian's good on her as well since no matter what, her damage output is going to be balls. However, if you're using her for the Arena, obviously go for Breaker. The other types should be fairly self-explanatory.
LS: Boost to HC drop rate and HC effectiveness (HC drop rate +20%, HC effectiveness +50%)
Hit Count: 8 (drop check count 2/hit)
BB: 12 hit multiple target Dark damage and gradually restores HP to all allies for 3 turns (20BC to fill, damage modifier +150%)
Being limited to 4* means that Luka is obviously not going to be a feature on any summoner's end game team unless they just really want to use her so I'm not going to be pretending she's viable later on in a summoner's career. She's clearly meant for someone who's just started the game.
For a 4* unit, her stats are very solid. For a new player, Luka is most definitely going to be a very good unit to have around and will serve you well through the starting content.
She's actually just really ideal for beginning players which I believe is intentional, she comes as a 4* unit, so she has really high stats compared to a lot of beginner units, she has a multiple target BB with a low fill cost that both does damage and gives a heal. Super ideal for beginners.
Her heal values are: 780-880 + 0.1*REC per turn which is more than adequate for people who have just started the game.
If you were lucky enough to grab her and you're new to the game please use her! She'll definitely serve you well for a long time and if you haven't managed to pull a rare summoned healer, she's very much a better alternative to the other farmable healers out there so she's going to be very valuable to you early on.
Notably she's also dark's only non-pseudo healer, haha.
Luka won't be on your squad forever though, I can almost guarantee that. Once you get a few rare summons under your belt and start evolving them past the 4* stage, you'll probably find that she starts to become a bit lacking and her heals are no longer adequate in justifying her position on your team. At that time, feel free to replace her as her usefulness has probably come to an end.
She's certainly not suitable for high level content.
Other than that, she's a nice little collector's unit. She seems like she might be quite rare unless a vortex is released so that's pretty cool too.
Typing discussion for Luka is so stupid I won't even bother.
That's it guys, hope that was okay. I didn't want to delay my other analyses for too long but this should be plenty informative anyway. Let me know if there's other information you want and I'll try to accommodate. BONUS LUKA CODE I know you've all skipped everything until this point, you pieces of scum. Anyway, I have a Luka code to give out and I thought we might as well make a quick game out of it. Only one winner, sorry! :< Rules are simple, the first person to correctly answer the Brave Frontier related riddle (in the form of a cryptic crossword clue) I post below will win a Luka code. You only get one guess, if you get it wrong you're disqualified so make it a good one!
Here's the riddle:
'Seems like, the jumbled mail joined the start of the delivery man' (5) Good luck everybody! EDIT: And we have a winner! Congratulations to ivannnt. The answer was 'Dilma'. Explanation: 'jumbled' mail = ilma 'joined the start of' 'delivery' = d. Together that makes Dilma who is a 'man'. Link to past analyses
Joe had been a nocturnal creature all his life. Not a vampire, or a morlock, or whatever you call it. He was human. He just liked the night. Is anything wrong with that? No. of course not. To him, the night was a special time. The day was hectic, hot. The night was cool, both literally and figuratively. It made him happy. It was a time when people were in their beds, sleeping or possibly on the verge of sleep. Or maybe they were just like him, staying up, trying to win a bet, or something like that. Maybe they had insomnia. It was a mysterious time. In the age of technology, the world was connected, always talking, never stopping. But the night was the one sacred time left when things were calm and peaceful. The moon was there, the stars were out, and so on. And it was dark. When Joe saw a car passing on the street, he always wondered who those people were and where they were going. The mystery was even more intense at night. Could they be gangsters? Aliens? Corpses? Or just normal people like him? He would never know, and it drove him mad. Night life was fun to have. It gave you a sense of uniqueness, it made you feel like you were the only person in the world. They say the city never sleeps. Joe knew this as a fact. People may have been sleeping, but the buses kept running, the lights stayed on, the sounds kept going, and the voices kept talking. His favorite time of night was three in the morning. He had read once that they said three in the afternoon was the “light hour,” or the time when there was the least spiritual activity. And three in the morning was the “dark hour,” or the time when there was the least spiritual activity. Joe knew it was all hocus pocus, and there weren’t any spirits up at three in the morning, or any other time, really. But he still got chills up his spine whenever he was awake at three hours after midnight. Three was, for people who slept at night, the time when their bodies were in a coma like state. When Joe was younger, he used to get into the same coma like state. But now, he was wide awake every night at that time. Just knowing that somewhere out there, there were people who were dead unconscious, scared Joe. But only a little. Of course, it was not all fun and games at night. Joe had to earn a living somehow. So he got a job at a gas station just one mile from his house. There were two good things about night shifts: one, the pay was good, and two, there were fewer hours. It had been the same at every night shift he had ever worked at. And he loved it. The pay was good because the owner of the gas station was an idiot. Like most bosses, he assumed that night shifts were harder to pull off for each employee. So Joe got about fifty dollars more than the two people who worked there during the day, every day. And he loved it. There were fewer hours because, again, the boss assumed that night shifts were hard, and he wanted to let his employees off early. And Joe loved it. Of course, night shifts weren’t hard for Joe. He had changed his internal clock from day to night years ago. Now, he woke up at eight at night and went to sleep at nine in the morning. For him, the day was the night. And vice versa. He never told his boss that he liked night shifts, or the boss would, naturally, give him less pay and more hours. Every night, he stumbled in and looked very worried. “Shoo boy, here goes another night,” he would say. He would yawn, groan a little, and then get behind the register. He never kicked anything over or anything, though. Just mild contempt. Nothing too severe. “Here’s your cash,” the boss would say, and then shuffle out. Joe had him right where he wanted him. The boss was not really the boss. Joe was the boss. The boss would be a laughing stock if he owned a gas station and it closed at midnight. Gas stations are supposed to be open eternally. The boss was very scared that Joe might leave at some point, to go get some other job. And then the boss would have to find another guy, who, like Joe, was willing to stay up until the wee hours. There were very few people like Joe. So the boss tried desperately to keep Joe in there. Joe’s salary was raised by a few cents every week, just so the boss could keep the place open at night. Joe, of course, played like he was miserable, and didn’t like being there. And the boss ate it up. Joe was living the good life. Joe’s boss was an old fat guy, pretty much bald, and he always wore turtleneck sweaters. He looked like what you’d figure an old, fat guy in a turtleneck would probably look like, but maybe different. Joe always told his boss that he had a wife, who was waiting for him to get home. He didn’t have a wife. And he didn’t want to have a wife, because if he did, she really would wait for him to get home. Joe worked from ten at night to two in the morning, less hours than most people worked. After he left the gas station, he would walk around in the night air, or go to a restaurant, or watch movies, or whatnot, until the sun rose. Then, he would fall asleep. There was one problem with Joe’s job. When Joe got off work, somebody naturally had to take over from three in the morning until dawn. The gas station was open twenty four hours a day. So who filled those hours? Joe didn’t have a clue. The guy who worked after him was an enigma, a shadow person who he didn’t know. Only the boss knew, and he wasn’t telling. And the boss left the gas station when Joe started, so he never really got around to asking him. Joe knew who worked at the gas station for the whole day. There were two cashiers then, and Joe sometimes saw them, but only very rarely. One was named Kelly, and she was twenty something, blonde hair, pretty fat. The other one was named Aiko, and he said he was from Japan. Black hair, also twenty something, relatively skinny. Both of them were college kids. Joe was 40. It seemed a little strange for a forty year old guy to be working a small fry job like this, but the boss didn’t object. If he objected, he was short one night shift, and he didn’t want that. Joe wished he knew the guy who worked after him, but he always left before the guy got there, and if he hung around too long, he might look suspicious. Joe had only heard the mystery guy’s name once, and even then he wasn’t sure. One night, Joe had come into work, and the boss was talking to someone else. Joe didn’t know who he was. Maybe someone from higher up or something. Joe didn’t really know how the corporate world worked. “How many employees ya got?” said the guy. He was wearing a grey business suit and dress shoes, so he must have been pretty important. His hair had oil in it, his teeth were blinding, they were so white, and he had a thick New York accent. Joe could tell at his first glance that he didn’t really like him. At all. Not one bit. “I have four,” said the boss. “There’s Joe, over there. He works from the time when I leave until about two in the morning. He’s really loyal and a great guy. I wish he could come over and meet you, but he’s busy right now.” This was not true. Joe was just pretending to shuffle some things around. He didn’t want to meet the New York guy. But he continued to overhear. “Then I have two day employees,” the boss continued. “Kelly and Aiko. Sometimes they work individually, and other times they work together. They’re real helpful, too.” At this time, Joe was concentrated on his fake work even more. “There’s one other guy,” said the boss. “He works here from two in the morning to dawn. His name is ouaheauyhayeo...” Joe grit his teeth! He was doing his fake work so hard that he had tuned out to the conversation, and the boss’s words became gibberish just at the moment when he was going to say the mystery guy’s name. After the New York guy and the boss said a few more things, they both shuffled out, and Joe punched himself in the jaw for being such a bad snoop. So Joe never really knew the mystery guy’s name. It was one of his worst memories. It tormented him, day after day. Sometimes, the memory was very intense. It was almost like he was there, listening to the conversation, And he would hear the guy’s name, but it was only gibberish like before. He tried to recall the gibberish, have it make sense in his head. It wouldn’t, no matter how many times he replayed it in his mind. Sometimes, instead of just having a memory about it, he had nightmares about it. He would wake up, screaming, in broad daylight. He had two types of these nightmares, and they were both equally horrible. In the first kind, he would be listening to the conversation, but right before the boss said the guy’s name, he was interrupted somehow. Sometimes, a rock fell on his head and split it in two. Other times, the dream would just cut out. In the second type of nightmare, Joe was listening to the conversation, like before, and this time he heard the guy’s name, but it was a really weird and bizarre name. Coochirango. Galarkey. Bobo. He hoped the guy wasn’t named any of those. Still, they were kinda cool. After he had the nightmares, Joe decided to stop thinking about the mystery guy. It was tormenting him, and it didn’t really affect his life in any way. Besides, he might find out some other day. After he had stopped thinking about the mystery guy, life went on pretty much like it always had. Joe would wake up at eight or nine, come down to the gas station, say hi to the boss, and work until two in the morning. One night, a man with a beard and a lot of tattoos stopped by. When he entered the gas station, The little bell rung. When Joe had gotten this job, at first it seemed cute, but now it was just as annoying as shit. The tattoo guy proceeded to go up and down the aisles, like an insane person who came there for no reason. Joe was bored. He entertained himself by tapping on the counter. The tattooed man kept walking. He was whistling some kind of tune, and Joe did not like this, because he had never learned how to whistle. The tattoo guy kept walking. Finally, the tattoo man got a bag of potato chips, and walked up to the counter. He was wearing a tank top. Joe did not like him. “What flavor are these potato chips?” said the tattoo man. “Ranch, sir,” said Joe. “It says that right there on the bag.” Joe didn’t know if the guy was trying to be funny or if he was just an idiot. Either way, he still didn’t like him. The tattoo guy held the bag up to his ear. Then he squished it, hard. A hideous crunching sound emanated from the bag. “I can hear from these potato chips that they’re all broken,” said the tattoo guy. “I guess I’ll have to get a new bag. I don’t like mine broken.” “Sir, if you don’t like yours broken, why did you break all those?” By this point, Joe was pretty sure he was on LSD, or maybe drunk. “I broke them?” said the tattoo guy. “YOU BROKE THEM!” At this point the tattoo guy shoved the bag in Joe’s face. By this point Joe was positive that the guy was not on drugs. He was just a jerk. “Sir, I’m afraid we can’t sell broken potato chips,” said Joe. “You’ll have to buy them.” The tattoo guy payed him no mind, and went back to the potato chip aisle, contemplating which flavor he wanted. “Sir,” said Joe, “Please just take the chips and leave.” The tattoo man went back up to Joe, pulled out some money, and payed Joe. Then he went out of the gas station. Joe decided not to call the cops, because he didn’t know if the tattoo guy had committed a crime. Maybe he hadn’t. If he hadn’t, he would be wasting the police’s time. Joe kept working the gas station. The customers at night were weird. At night they were not normal. There were hundreds of mohawks, tattoos, body modification. Really weird stuff. And some of them were drunk. A lot of them. Joe went out of the gas station at two in the morning, like he did every night. As he looked back, he saw a shadow enter the building. He figured it was the mystery guy. But he stopped thinking about him. He didn’t want to think about him. He went down to a hamburger joint on 33rd. It was a good place to eat. He went there a lot. He ordered a hamburger, no cheese, and some french fries. The prices here were reasonable. The whole shebang only cost four dollars. The fries were a little salty, but okay in terms of how fries could be. He remembered once, when he was a kid, his grandpa told him that when he was a kid, they called french fries “shoestring potatoes,” and they were much thinner, almost like spaghetti. He thought it sounded cool, and he had always wanted to try some, but no restaurants ever had them on the menu anymore, so he couldn’t get any. As for making some himself, he wasn’t much of a chef. He could make normal french fries fine, but he didn’t think he could cut potatoes as thin as spaghetti. He had never been too handy with a knife. The burger was good, a little well done, but it had pickles and lettuce, both of which evened out the flavor okay. All in all, good to eat. He paid the waiter a fifty cent tip. Sure, it wasn’t much, but then again, he didn’t have much money, so he couldn’t give too many tips. He looked out the window. It was raining, and it looked pretty bad, so he decided to take a bus home. He didn’t like cabs. The drivers of those things were always smelly and talked like New Yorkers, either because they really were or because they wanted to seem like what you’d think a cab driver would be like. He hated cabs. And he wasn’t up to date yet with those cabs that were really just cars or whatever. Those were fricking weird. And he didn’t have a cellphone, so that didn’t work for him. Why have normal people drive normal cars? Aren’t taxis enough? Anyway, he walked half a block down to the bus stop. It wasn’t too long before the bus pulled up. There was a long line of people behind Joe, and he didn’t want to hold them up, so he grabbed out his wallet and opened it like a madman. Twenty quarters spilled all over the floor. He didn’t want to pick them up, though. But then he picked up some and dropped them in the slot. May as well not waste money. “You’re a dime short, bub,” said the bus driver. Joe was not named Bub. Joe started looking through his wallet. “Shoot,” said Joe. “I only have five dollar bills. I might have a dime in my pocket, though.” “Forget about it,” Said the bus driver. He let Joe go through. He found a seat between a hobo that smelled sort of like pee and a fat lady who was knitting. He didn’t know why she was knitting. It’s not like a bus ride is that long or anything. Definitely not long enough to knit a sweater. Then a tire blew out in the back. The sound was like a bullet. Joe thought he was dead for a second. The bus bumped up and own a little, then there was a hideous squeaking sound and the bus halted to a complete stop. “Sorry, everyone,” said the bus driver, whose breath stank like onions. “This bus is out of commission as of right now, so you’re all gonna have to get on the next one. It’ll come in about 30 minutes. I know it’s hard to handle, but this happens very rarely. Have a good night, ok? Sorry.” Joe got off, as did everyone else. It was then that Joe realized that the bus he was on had been going in the wrong direction. He was farther from his house now than he had been at the hamburger place. The rain was really pouring down now, in sheets, and most of the people who had gotten off the bus just decided to walk. But Joe decided to stay. One of the few people who was also staying was a lady and her screaming toddler. The screaming was very annoying. “Hush, hush, baby,” said the mother, even though her kid was clearly four years old. “Cute baby ya got there,” Joe said sarcastically. He hoped he wouldn’t get smacked by the mother, but luckily she didn’t catch on and took it as a sincere compliment. “Thanks. I’m trying to get him to calm down, but he just won’t listen.” She shoved a peppermint in his mouth, and he stopped wailing. Joe felt like he was in a swimming pool, and had a hard time breathing. The wait was very long, even though it was really only 30 minutes. The rain kept pouring down, and he was sick of it. So he held his arm up over his head, as if that would fix it. It didn’t. Finally, the bus came. He paid his fare in some more quarters. He didn’t know where they came from. Then he sat at the back. This bus was much less crowded. It was four in the morning. He sat down between a guy who looked like a serial killer and another fat lady who was reading a book. The guy had a hoodie on. It said, “Do you want to die?” and then a skull with blood dripping out of its eyes. Joe hoped that it wasn’t sincere. The creep had eye shadow on. Joe guessed that he was one of those weirdos who call themselves gothic or whatnot. He didn’t like those kind of people. The fat lady was reading a book that looked vaguely erotic. Joe realized that she was a weirdo too. He didn’t know why she’d be reading something like that, since she was too old and fat to have a love life. Or maybe she did have a husband, but then why would she be reading an erotic book? Joe didn’t know what to think anymore. The bus ride home was very bumpy. Joe had bad experiences with the night like that on a regular basis, but he didn’t mind. The night was his oyster. Or lobster. Or whatever. He loved it, and he would never go back to living during the day. On one occasion, Joe was minding the cash register, as per usual. Business had been slow this one night. Only two customers had popped in. Still, Joe had a job to do, so he waited behind the counter. To keep himself busy, he pulled out a crossword puzzle he had gotten from the newspaper. Off in the distance, the clock struck twelve. He had two more hours to go. The crossword puzzle was very hard. So hard, you would think Einstein had written it, just to mess with the general public who didn’t know sticks about science. But then again, Einstein couldn’t have been too bright either, what with how he sticks his tongue out for the camera. One of the clues was “A long piece of furniture, usually soft, which one sits on or lies down on to relax.” Joe could only think of “couch,” but the damn thing had nine letters and started with q. He was getting sick of the whole thing, so he threw it on the floor and squashed it under his shoe. There was mop water on the floor, so it got soggy. The newspaper he had gotten the puzzle from was not from his house. He didn’t subscribe to newspapers. They wasted paper and most of the stuff in them was dull. Instead, he found the newspaper in the gutter on his way to work. It was dry, and it was the entertainment section, which was the only good part, so he had brought it with him. The entertainment section talked some about celebrities and movies and tv shows a lot. That was the dumb part. The fun stuff was the puzzles and comics. Actually, just the comics, since the puzzles were too hard. One of them was about a dog who did a lot of funny shit, and another of them was about a kid who did a lot of funny shit, and another one was about a family who did a lot of funny shit. Joe remembered that when he was a kid, he read the newspaper comics a lot. He liked how the cartoon characters from as far back as the forties were still in there. But now, as he looked through them, he felt sheer contempt. They were the same characters and all, down to the letter, but now they made references to computers and shit. How was this possible? If they were characters from the forties, when computers didn’t exist, how could their universes alter so that they had computers once their comics were brought into the modern era? You could tell these cartoon characters looked like they were in the fifties, but if they were, they couldn’t have technology. He could get it if they actually aged in real time, so that they were in the modern age with computers. But no. This was some kind of bizarre amalgam of old and new, something which weirded him out a lot. There was also a sports page. In the first place, joe didn’t like it because he hated sports. Just his sheer contempt of sports was enough to make him hate it. But there were other things about it, too. The sport section was ten pages long. It was an atrocity. It was a waste of paper. Nobody needed ten pages about guy bumping into each other and doing a bunch of silly stuff with a ball. Really, how deep could you go on that kind of thing? It didn’t seem like the kind of thing somebody could write ten pages about. It didn’t demand that much speculation. The other thing he hated about it was that it was written as if you knew who all the players were. It would talk about Harvey Mulroni and how he scored 2-10 over Westdale, and how Coach Karby decided to throw him out. For people who stayed up to date on this kind of thing, it would make sense, but for people who were only mildly interested, like Joe, he didn’t know who Coach karby or Harvey Mulroni were. He didn’t know any of the players on his hometown team. He got the baseball team and the football team confused. He didn’t know what a touchdown was, or if the super bowl was a real football stadium. He was in the dark about everything related to sports. There was also a lot of celebrities and stuff. So he put the newspaper aside. He was very bored now. Not tired, no, but bored. He looked at his watch. Only five minutes had passed since he had picked up the newspaper. It would be a long while until two in the morning. He was sick of it. He walked over to the place where the hot dogs were made. They were buttery and greasy. The hot dog oven was a complex machine. There were about 20 black, rotating tubes on the bottom of it. They were arranged side by side. The hot dogs themselves were nestled in the crevices in between. Above the hot dogs were bright heating lamps which prevented the hot dogs from spoiling, and kept them from getting cold. And as Joe stood there, watching them sizzle, he realized that he really wanted one. Badly. “NO!” he thought. “What the fricking flip am I thinking? Everyone knows that gas station hot dogs taste like a bag of garbage soaked in gasoline and then eaten by 20 pounds of maggots!” Or was that just popular opinion? He leaned closer, and looked deeper. After all, if nobody ever tried them, how would they know what they tasted like? Was their being bad just an urban myth? He wanted to try something new. Something exciting. Something different and mind opening. Something super cool. The hot dogs were roughly six inches long, with a little whatchamacallit on the ends, and coated with yummy grease. His nostrils inhaled the scent. His eyes closed a little more. The hot dogs were hypnotizing him. But would it be shoplifting to take one and eat it, if he was an employee? He guessed so. There were security cameras all over. But he just wanted to bite down into it, and feel the processed meat, cascading over his teeth, and have it slide down his throat. Then he realized that he was weird for him to be thinking about a hot dog like that. But if he wanted to buy something from the gas station, how could he do it? He was the only employee there. It would be weird to pay himself. Was that wrong to do? He didn’t know. He was very bad at his job. He picked up the hot dog. It was luke warm. His first day at work, he had been told where the hot dog buns were, just in case anyone would like to see what a bag of garbage soaked in gasoline and then eaten by 20 pounds of maggots would taste like. Nobody ever wanted to. Except now. Joe lowered the buns down from the shelf, and slipped the hot dog into the bun. He knew that the security cameras were watching him. He could put the hot dog down, back into the oven right now, and be done with it. But what would the point of that be? It would mean he had admitted defeat. He went over to the condiment table. There, set out before him, were a cornucopia of ketchup packets, mustard packets, and relish, with colorful designs on them. There was usually a little pit full of onions, which had some tongs, but it was empty right now. He didn’t care. He didn’t like onions. They were too spicy. And they made him cry. He ripped open the condiment packets, carefully, making sure not to spill them. First the ketchup. It was blood red. It smelled like tomatoes. For a moment, Joe wondered why it smelled like tomatoes, and then thought he was stupid for not remembering that ketchup was made out of tomatoes. He squeezed the packet gently, between his fingers, holding the small opening over the processed meat. It oozed out, ever so slowly. He made sure to cover every inch of the hot dog. He didn’t want to leave any bare spots. Next, the mustard. He figured it might be made out of lemons, but really, he didn’t know what the hell it was made out of. Dijon something or another? What was mustard, anyway? He didn’t know, at all. He squeezed it, just like the ketchup, on every square inch of processed meat, taking care not to leave any mustard free spots. There was less mustard in one packet than there was ketchup in one packet. He used two. Finally, the relish. It was chunky, and it was a viscous liquid with many, many little chunks of pickle in it. They had an acidic odor. It didn’t come out too easy, but his diligence paid off. The deed was done. There was no turning back now. The condiments had been placed, strategically, like a game of chess. Joe hated chess. Hesitantly, Joe put his hand in his pocket. Ironically, the very salary he got for selling products was going to be used to buy one of those products. Capitalism could be very silly sometimes. He didn’t know if he liked it. He gasped when he realized that his wallet was not there, but then breathed a sigh of relief when he saw that it was in his other pocket. He pulled it out, took out two dollars, and inserted it back into his pocket. Then, he slipped over to the cash register, said that a hot dog was being purchased just like for a customer, and slipped the two dollars into the drawer. The boss would never know the difference, and the security cameras were rarely ever checked anyway. He stuffed the hot dog into his mouth. Aiko stepped in. Joe screamed. “Hi, Joe. I forgot my jacket here earlier today. I thought I might as well pick it up. I heard it was going to be cold tomorrow.” Joe tried to hide his face. He looked like a glutton. Or a pig. Or whatever it is you call someone who eats too much. The bun was sticking out of his mouth. “You’re trying one of those hot dogs?” Aiko said. He was smiling. “I had heard they tasted like a bag of garbage soaked in gasoline and then eaten by 20 pounds of maggots. You must be pretty crazy to pull off a stunt like that.” Joe was mortified. Nobody but him would ever think to pull off a stunt like this. Not in their right minds. “Acshuwee, iss pweyy goo,” said Joe. His mouth was still full. “No thu bess haw daw ah ewer tashte, buh pweyy goo.” He didn’t know if Aiko could understand him. “Ok, sure, man, whatever you say,” said Aiko. Joe tried to swallow a little more of the hot dog. It was very hard to do. He almost choked. “Are you kidding me, just so you don’t look stupid? I know those things taste bad. They’ve got to. You’re faking, right?” said Aiko. “Yesh,” said Joe. He had been faking the whole time. It tasted worse than a bag of garbage soaked in gasoline and then eaten by 20 pounds of maggots. It tasted like a bag of garbage soaked in gasoline and then eaten by 21 pounds of maggots. But the condiments were okay. “Why do you do this, Joe?” said Aiko. “How can you stay up all night? How is it possible? You must have really bad insomnia, or something.” Joe could not tell Aiko about his love for the night, or Aiko would tell the boss, and that would mean a lower salary and more hours. “Yesh,” said Joe. “Or summfing.” He had narrowly avoided a predicament. “Maybe you should tell your doctor about it,” said Aiko. “This job must be hell for you.” Aiko sounded funny, because of how wrong he was. “Yesh,” said Joe. The last of the hot dog slid down his throat. Now the embarrassment was gone from his body. He felt a wave of relief. “Well, see you around, man,” said Aiko, slipping on his jacket. “Enjoy the maggots!” “You’re a real kidder, Aiko!” said Joe. He gave out a small, nervous laugh. The little bell rang. Aiko had disappeared into the night, never to be seen again, at least until the next time Joe saw him. Joe clutched his stomach. He ran to the bathroom. He stayed there until his shift was over. No customers came. Bad things like this happened all the time to Joe. But he did not care. He was impervious to whatever mishaps befell him. At least, somewhat. One night, after work, he was looking for some action. Not sex or booze or anything, but maybe just a fun place to hang out. For a while, anyway. Do some dancing, watch some sports or something, something like that. There was a new club that had opened on the other side of town. It was called the party house. Joe thought it was a stupid name. It sounded like a kid’s tv show. When he got to the door, he immediately noticed the bouncer. He hated bars that had bouncers. It was insane. He thought that if a business couldn’t accept certain people, it shouldn’t be a business. The bouncer was an enormous black man with veins in his muscles and steel toed boots. Joe was not happy, and he considered just going away, but he kind of still wanted to have fun. Maybe. The bouncer grabbed him by the shoulder before Joe even indicated that he wanted to go in. “How old is you, little man?” said the bouncer. Joe whimpered a little, like a sick puppy that had been left out in the rain. “F-forty,” said Joe. “Can’t you tell that I’m old enough? I’m n-not a teenager!” “Ha, ha,” said the bouncer. “I was just kiddin’ with you, little man. I know you’re old enough. Have a good time.” The bouncer released Joe’s shoulder. It ached. Joe hated “funny” employees. The doctor who tells you you have cancer when you really don’t. The pharmacist who tells you they’re all out of your medicine, when they’re really not. The waitress who tells you that they’re out of ice cream. Joe hated these people because when he went somewhere for a service, he expected a quality treatment, not some stupid prank. Those people oughta get fired, he thought. He especially hated that bouncer. There was no false advertising at the party house. It was a party house. It was the wrong kind of party for Joe. He liked laid back parties where you could talk to people, maybe some cookies, like that. This was not that kind of party. This was a wild party. “Wild” maybe being an understatement. The lights were so intense that when he first got into the door, Joe thought that he was blind. There were all the colors of the rainbow, amplified so much that they weren’t pretty anymore. They moved all over, very erratically, insanely, never stopping, just going on and on and on. The sound was so loud that Joe thought he was deaf. There was a huge rock group onstage, doing guitar shit and stuff like that. The lead singer looked like an insane person. The music had no tune, just a bunch of guitar strumming and science fiction noises, turned up to maybe one billion octillion decibels. How could anyone stand it? There were 100 teenagers in the middle of the floor. They moved around like people who have been possessed by the devil. Never stopping, just going on. And on. And on. There was a giant mosh pit in the middle of the floor. “YAHHHAHAHHAAHA!” said a fat guy who was behind Joe, bumping into him. Joe fell into the pit, spraining his ankle. He didn’t have much time to think about the intense white hot needles of pain surging through his body, though. “COWABUNGA!” said the fat man, as if it was still the nineties, and landed on top of Joe. Joe gasped for air. The fat man was on top of his head. Below him was the cold hard floor. His head was being crushed. He felt like he was suffocating. He was absolutely correct. The music kept playing. The fat man got off. Joe stood up. Then the fat man slapped him on the back, and Joe fell down onto the floor again. He hated this place. Then the fat guy went away. Joe had a hard time getting out, because he was injured, and because the masses of idiots clawed and grabbed at his shirt and pants as if they were the hordes of the undead. As he went out, he passed the bouncer. The bouncer was smoking a joint of marijuana. “Aaaww, goin’ out, little man?” said the bouncer. “Party too intense for ya?” “Yes, sir,” said Joe. “Much too intense. I don’t think I’ll ever come here again.” The bouncer laughed, and Joe went off once more into the night. Yes, bad things like this happened all the time to Joe, but he didn’t care. It was his life, and it was enjoyable, despite what ever happened in it. He was a fine man. A real character, with a strong will to live. On his way home, he thought about his life. It was something special, his life. Something that nobody else had. He liked it a lot. Well, some other people had it, but they were few and far between. Nobody else stayed up at night like him. He passed the houses in his neighborhood. He knew this neighborhood very well. He had lived here for about a decade, maybe more. He knew it like a book. Except for his neighbors, who he didn’t like. They were nosy and weird and shit. The streetlights were on above his head. He thought about how much electricity they put out. He thought about what was producing that electricity. Some power plant, miles away. Hundreds of workers burning fossil fuels and the like. He would never know those workers. The city at night was creepy, in a way, because you didn’t know who people were. He got home, and inserted the key into the lock, just like he did every night. Well, actually, like he did every morning, since by now it was six o’ clock. He made himself a dinner of noodles and tomato sauce. It was good, but he wished he had some shoestring potatoes. Those would be very good with this. The noodles were not spaghetti. They were the little ones that looked like bowties. He pondered on these a moment. He knew that they were authentically Italian, probably Italian since ancient times. But he wondered. Why were they invented? Why would anybody need a food that looked like a fashion accessory? Were they invented as a novelty? Did some pasta maker, one day, just think it would be fun to make a pasta that looked like a bowtie, and that a lot of people would buy because it would be fun? Or was it invented out of necessity, like some inventions? And, if so, why would they need to look like bowties? Why not just make normal noodles? Joe didn’t know, and by this point, he didn’t really care. He just ate the noodles. They were pretty good for something he had made. After downing the whole plate of noodles, he went to bed. He didn’t have any dreams. He rarely did. On one occasion, Joe was minding the gas station, as per usual, when an old lady walked in and picked a soft drink from the coolers in the back. She had curlers in her hair, and she was wearing a pink bathrobe. She hobbled around on a metal walker. The legs of it were stuck into tennis balls. Joe didn’t know why old people stuck the legs of their walkers into tennis balls. Why not just get one with wheels? It didn’t look that good. Were tennis balls good to put on walkers? The old lady got a soda pop. Joe didn’t like soda pop. Not because it was full of sugar, but because it was only made by two companies. There were no independent soft drinks anymore, and if there were, he had never seen any. Corporate America at its most evil. He still drank it, though. All the time. The soda pop was sugar water with other stuff thrown in. “I only have pennies,” said the old lady. Joe wasn’t in the mood to count pennies, but he liked pennies, and didn’t want to make them obsolete, and they were legal currency, after all, so he had to accept the damn things. The old lady’s purse was deep red, kind of made out of velvet. Joe didn’t know what velvet was, but he figured it was some kind of polyester thingy, maybe something different. The old lady reached her hand in there, and pulled out a huge handful of pennies. Joe didn’t even know how her hand had such a huge capacity. It was amazing. She dropped the pennies down on the table like a construction crane releasing twenty tons of dynamite. There was a loud sound, almost ear grating. The pennies, of course, rolled all over, and roughly sixty four percent of them fell onto the floor. The old lady started to crouch down and pick the pennies up. “No, no, wait, let me help you,” said Joe. He didn’t want to, but he really liked the elderly, and she looked like she had a back injury. Joe spent about five minutes on the floor, picking up those little coins, reaching under the cracks and stuff, looking around some corners. After what seemed like a tremendous feat, he had collected the whole two dollars’ worth. Now he had a back injury. “Sorry about all the trouble,” said the old lady. One of her hair curlers had popped out. “Oh, that’s fine, ma'am,” said Joe. “I really enjoyed it very much.” Joe was a master of sarcasm. Luckily, the old lady didn’t notice he was being sarcastic. “Have you seen Hot Nards?” said the old lady. Joe didn’t know what the hell she was talking about. “I’m afraid I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, ma’am,” said Joe. He realized that he had spoken his thoughts. Luckily, the lady only shrugged at his lewd profanity. Joe realized that what he had said sounded like a butler. “It’s this show on TV,” said the old lady. “It’s really very funny. I guess it’s what you of the younger generation call the ‘in crowd’ and all that!” Joe didn’t call anything the ‘in crowd’. And he wasn’t that young, now that he thought about it. Forty was halfway to the end. “Anyway,” continued the old lady, “There’s this guy who meets this other guy. And they both like gummy worms, right? So they start eating them. But then, his girlfriend, Clarissa, steals their apartment, so he has to get it back, and oh boy does he do it in the craziest ways possible!” This was only a rough interpretation of what the old lady was saying. Joe wasn’t really paying attention. “So Pret, and his old army buddy, Hank, find the key, and they try to go in, right? But it turns out it’s a frame up, and so the police catch them off guard!” Here the old lady whirled around, waved her hands around, rolled her eyes, and made a sound like a police siren. Whatever the hell this show was, Joe was never going to watch it. Or even look it up. “So then they’re in prison, right?” said the old lady. “They’ve cut the cards, their futures are on the line, and they could suck the bucket if they don’t get it right. But then, just in the nick of time, at the end of season one, they get the governor’s pardon, and they go scot free! Except for the security guard. He ends up okay.” Joe didn’t know why the old lady thought he would be interested in this. Maybe she was just really senile and didn’t know what was a good tv show.
Well the Baseball was annoying because I watch a lot of baseball and I didn't remember the Marlins incident but for a Brit, I watch quite a bit of American sports.
But that is going to be a trap, the questions you have to live in the states to have a reasonable chance of answering. The more time I spend in the states, the better I am at answering them. When I travel around, I ask questions, like finding out that IHOP stood for International House of Pancakes, and Wendy's has square pancakes in their burgers, the little stuff you only pick up living in a place.
But when it comes to the rest of the world, I'm far better at international trivia than most Americans.
No, I did not write a book, but I did write some play-by-mail articles, I did do a few 10-15 years ago. I was always very keen on all of these things. Things like Facebook games are so much better these days.
The answer is pretty much all of them. Board games are nice when you can get your family together to go see them. Sports - I'm 48 now, so my competitive playing days are over, but I still like to get the occasional game of cricket going, basketball would be a bit of a tremble. I must confess I just bought the latest Grand Theft Auto and have enjoyed tearing up the streets. And crosswords and puzzles, I get bored with them easily.
None of them, I can beat them all. And I'm sure they'd say the same answer about me. When he's at his best, Paul Sinner is apart from me the fastest and he probably has the widest range of knowledge, but he has gaps in his knowledge. As a second generation immigrant, he gets called out on questions that he missed in his education. Old English phrases will catch him out, whereas the kind of phrase my granny would have told me, I would know it, but when he is on his top game his top to beat. For consistency, it's Ann - she's nothing spectacular, she is almost like a machine, and she rarely makes errors. She has the best win / loss ratio but she doesn't have the gear to get out of trouble. She grinds up good wins but she grinds them out, versus Paul and I can do the "how the HELL did you do that? 8 correct answers in 26 seconds"
The good news is I was scouted. When they were looking for people to be Chasers, they started with a show called Mastermind which was our most prestigious show traditionally in Britain for trivia. A lot of them are quite bright, but they are not the most interesting people in the world. So they asked "Who's the most interesting person you know who could be slightly intimidating?" and here's the thing, that sense of theatricality - most of these guys went along to the interview in smart outfits, and I went in my MASSIVE soviety greatcoat with my coat sweeping behind me like Darth Vader, and most importantly, I could answer the questions.
No! Let me go further. I have never thrown so much as a question, let alone a show, and I'm totally confident my colleagues would say the same. We get flustered, we make mistakes, every once in a while we do something so unbelievably stupid. I had one the other day, I don't know if it's a form of Tourettes or something - "How many S's in Assassination"?
I work out there's 4. I then say 6.
And I know people might not believe this, but I thought 4, I said 6. It is not my job to decide who wins on that show, it's the contestant selectors and the producers, who am I to have the arrogance to decide who wins and loses on that show? The only fair way is to play as hard as I can on every show. If my beloved nieces were on that show, I'd play hard against them too. A few years ago, there was a British contestant who came on with an unbelievable sob story. I caught the team with 5 seconds to go, and afterwards, as I"m walking out, he's having a cigarette, and we have a brief chat, he turns around and says "I thought with my story you'd let me win." Nobody checks people for their backstories. And I can understand if people tell great tales to try to get through the contestant process. I'm a moral vacuum when we are playing. If you could piggy back on the signal in my brain. all you would hear me is thinking "What is the question Brooke just asked me, and what is the answer." And then afterwards, normal human being comes back. If we start playing favorites, etcetera, the show wouldn't last very long. What Joe Public picks up on is that we love playing. If you win by playing well, well-played, have the money, but I never want them to win because I've screwed up.
I much prefer the US version. And my reasons why are: firstly, I like the audience. They bring a real buzz to the show, and the way they are arranged around the set gives it a gladiatorial feel. A bit of a bear pit, but it's fun. And the contestants are a higher standard - and before I get crucified by my compatriots, I'm playing free players, they are ALL good and good players make for great shows. While it's nice to win an easy game, you want a competitive match. This second series that we are showing (obviously I can't reveal the results) but SO many of them could have beaten me, and could be beaten. A guy named Chad was in charge of contestant selection, and it was great fun, win or lose. And I really can recommend it. We got the level of the contestant team perfectly. Whether they or I won, it was a good match.
No, I have not come across a contestant. And let me explain why. In the British version, no, there are people who are quite good, but none that have made me go "wow." In America, the guy who beat me on season 1, Raj, was one of the top players in the world, but he wouldn't be a Chaser because his personality was not strong enough. He's find playing for himself, but obviously there's a mental side to this as well. Plus you have to be interesting. Some could be in a few year's time.
And just a bit. With the famous "Fanny Chmelar" question, I was there in the studios and I think we couldn't stop laughing for about 10 minutes. Every once in a while, a good one gets through. There's a bird in New Zealand called a "rough-faced shag" and I think that's going to come up at some point, and people might snigger.
I don't know! Those are what I call the "list-learner" type question. To some extent, who cares, unless you're a fan of the team.
I will go for Aston Villa.
(and these are the kind of questions that if you're hosting a trivia night, I would avoid for the following reasons: unless it's the local team, it's a charter for cheats because they will get their smart phone out and look up the answer, for the rest of the population it's a blind guess. If you're going to ask a specific question for a year there's got to be a bit of something relevant about it - so for example, the 100 meter winner in Seoul in 1988, "who won after Ben Johnson was disqualified" - that was a big event. Who won something in such and such a year is such a bland, boring question)
The toughest question I've ever been asked was how far can a mole dig in 24 hours? There was quite a bit of.
We went for 50 yards and the correct answer was 100. We said the only way that could be true would be if the mole were called Usain.
Anyone can ask a question that is virtually unanswerable. It's whether you can prove the question right... And getting my question wrong on "Who wants to be a Millionaire" for 64,000 pounds hurt.
No I don't. I know that epistaxis is nose bleeding... traditionally, rhinoplasty is nose surgery, and rhinitis is sinus congestion... what would be picking? Rhinifidilitis? You get half the way, but I think I've lost this one.
It's nearly always a Greek term. A knowledge of Greek and Latin goes a long way in competitive quizzing.
By living life, by wandring round making notes, so if I'm the London Tube, making note of the new plays, books, having the TV on in the background to clock the adverts, reading things online, the Huffington Post is a great source of primary news. Just paying attention to things I guess.
I'm going to go for God. Although would you count him as a character? I'd like to find the answer to that. It's worth knowing, and passes the interest test, which passes the test for a good quiz.
I've been lucky, I've been interested in quizzes or gameshows since I can remember, and as you get older.
I started playing quizzing seriously about 25 years ago, when I found I could make a pretty good living from Quiz Machines in Britain. It's paid for every car I've ever had. And it's always just been a bit of fun, but 4 years ago the Chase came along, and I've been a pro in the last 2 years. So who knew? And now you can make a living at it. I know there are many countries in the world which are considering running their version of the Chase, and they are looking for Chasers. So my advice to those people are: be INTERESTING. Have something visually interesting about you, or have a good persona, or if you can't have a good persona, fake it. You need to be interesting and put on a show.
I love being the only Chaser! Both from the point of view of ego, and point of finances, because you're doing more shows. The British version you have a sense of camaraderie, when one of us has a bad game, we're all good we just have bad games. We have to have more than one Chaser on the British version because of the number of shows that we do. I really like that the American version you know you're doing it, it's kind of nice to have all the press and promotional work, on the British version we don't do anything like this, however with ITV we have limited resources. We're averaging 3 million viewers on what used to be the Graveyard slot for ITV, day in, day out. And gameshows are very cheap and easy to make, and we have the strongest endgame on a quiz show.
They were thinking about it, not sure if it's going to happen now because last year we did it as part of a run of other shows so it was tacking it onto an existing set. Not sure, but they are looking at it, maybe. Link to plus.sandbox.google.com
1) No, we haven't got time. It's a shame really. On the British version, it really is a conveyer belt, we are doing 3 shows a day, you are lucky if you even see them afterwards, and in fairness if you've ever been on a contestant research team, those boys and girls work 18 hours days, the last thing they want to do is you shooting the breeze with their contestants. The American one is not quite as rushed. I always meet the American contestants.
Monster Heel, yeah - I always say the secret is that I'm actually borrowing from a biography I saw on Stone Cold Steve Austin. I forget who said this but "The best wrestlers are themselves with the volume turned up." I'm myself, with the volume tuned up. So in real life, you might think something about somebody, but you wouldn't say it. Well on the show, I think it, and providing it's clean language, I say it. You're still you, but with a bit more exuberance. I might think that someone is a beeping beep, but I'll say "that's a bit weak, wasn't it" or if I'm feeling really cheeky, I'll say "meow."
My strongest subject is sport, science, history, geography, literature, everything basically.
I have no weaknesses and I wouldn't give it away even if I did. People often ask me "how did you get on the show" and i always reply that if you want to get on the show, the last person you should speak to is the Chaser - because if I know you too well it' makes it difficult to get on. We've got to be Caesar's Wife in this regard - above suspicion and above reproach. So if someone tells me they are on the show, I report all the conversations to the S&P guys so they know.
Oooh, that's a tough one, so much as I love the Simpsons that is pretty big. I would probably go for Flags of the World or something like the Superbowls, because there have only been like, 46 of them now? You try to make the subject as relatively small as possible.
My favorite traditionally is "15 to 1" because it was what we would call a pure quiz show, very few gimmicks you just got on and played the game. The luck element (as all quiz shows have to have) was there but it was very fair. 15 players started, you drew randomly for position which was a nice tough, and if the right question came when it was your turn, good, if the wrong question came you were in trouble, but at least it was fair in its randomness.
"Duel" is another show that I really liked which I thought had a wonderful format, in that to set the thing up you had 10 counters each which you got to use up, and each question was a multiple choice question with up to 4 answers, and you could put a counter to cover as many answers as you want, and if you got it right you got that one back, and any counters on a wrong answer got lost, but if you failed to cover the right answer you were instantly out, so it was a lovely test of your confidence as well as your strategy. It did okay but only got one series, which was a shame as it was a lovely show.
And there was a show called "Pokerface" that had a million-pound prize. And the winner of season 1, a girl called Sarah Lang from Wales, she did it by absolutely bluffing the contestants. She told people she had come in second in the European Quiz Championships, in Estonia, and I knew she was absolutely lying, but she scared everyone else and they all panicked and folded and let her win, and she won a million pounds as a result of it, which is tax-free winnings in the UK.
So sometimes it's not about being the smartest, it's about being the bravest or the luckiest. And some days it's your lucky day.
I'd guess 7 but it's a blind guess. Admittedly, if you asked it the other way around, asking if how many people have hosted University Challenge (it's two) or Mastermind in the UK (three) over the years, I'd know those sort of things, but it's one of those things where you've had to be watching it for 30-40 years.
I'd go for a holt of otters. I'm not right though. I know there's a crash of rhinos, and a leap of leopards, and a pride of lions, and an ambush of tigers.
For the Chase, it's a collaborative effort, and I can't go into more detail than that. Obviously like all shows there are obviously budgetary constraints, but that's all the detail I can go into here.
3 straight super league grand finals in a row. St. Helen's is my answer. Possible but I don't know.
Well "Floreat Eton" means "Farewell to Eton" which were the last words of Captain Hook. So I know that "exon" is the shortened / Latinized word for Exeter, as in the City in Devon, so I am going to go for "Farewell to Exeter."
Sometimes it's difficult to pin down one answer to a question, when you're writing them! Especially with science, especially with questions short enough to ask in a quiz round.
Whatever works for you. There are now 4 Chasers in Russia. There is one Chaser in Germany. There are 4 in Britain. There are quite a few others in Europe. We all have different ways of picking up knowledge. Paul Sinha has a very different way of picking up knowledge than I do. Shawn Wallace reads old quiz books. I play quizzes, as many as I can find. And as I said, my main way of learning is reading a good paper, or when I am walking the streets of NY, LA, London, I will make a note of it, so I'm the great sponge. But it's different for different people. But you do have to put the effort in. Nobody's born a great quizzer. The rewards are great if you get good enough.
The contents of my contract are between me and GSN. So as diplomatically as possible, not your business. I don't ask people what contracts they are under.
That's a really good question. What's changed the world in small but significant ways? You can argue is it things like dwarf wheat staving off potential starvation? The improvement in agribusiness is staggering. I think I'd have to go with the smartphone. For Star Trek, the communicator looked AMAZING, and I remember the first mobile phones, they were huge, the size of a brick. And you look now, but the vast majority of the population carries a smartphone, it's changed your behavior a little bit because everyone has a camera phone. I didn't get a contract phone until a few years ago, but I literally just got a smartphone for America. I was trying to text on an old phone, and it was so difficult. You look at old TV shows, and the plots "I have to get to a phone line." It's changed everything.
I can understand why people ask, because there have been problems on both side of the pond with quiz shows and TV fakery, but it's not faked in any way, shape or form. We are that damn good, we have independent adjudicators, but I can understand people's skepticism. But if you WAS faked, you wouldn't have someone like me doing the job, you'd have a much better, smarter looking actor doing the job. If you choose to believe that any tv game show or trivia show is faked, you've made your mind up, so please don't watch. Save yourself the aggravation. If you think it's fake, why are you even bothering watching it. We couldn't have it any other way.
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