I grew up in Massachusetts and figured after living in the Boston area for a few years, I’ve already seen all there is to see here. Well, I was totally wrong. That much I know after this scavenger hunt.  The route our team–the Tuff Muffins–took to complete the hunt ran us from Boston Common, all the way through the Back Bay, to Copley, and further south to Symphony Hall, all the way over through the South End to the Boston Center for the Arts, up through Bay Village to Chinatown, north again to Government Center and then back to the Commons.  So many of the things I saw along the route were totally new to me, and this isn’t even a sizeable chunk of the city, since we didn’t even get into neighborhoods like Roxbury, Dorchester and Jamaica Plain. Had we not run out of time, we would have made a quick stop in the North End as well. 

I’m not sure how many miles of walking that was, but I can tell you after four hours of alternately walking and jogging all that, I was wiped.

So what kind of scavenger hunt was it exactly? Well, we weren’t looking for objects, we were looking out for places. Each team of 10 people had a “passport” with a number of clues in it, and each clue referenced a location in Boston. I have to tell you, had it not been for my extremely savvy teammates I’m not sure what would have happened. Some of those clues were for some really obscure places (Pi Alley? Really?) At best I probably could have figured out a quarter of the clues, but putting our heads together my team actually figured out every single location clue.

I snagged our passport after the Hunt was over and scanned it in for posterity. You can check out all the clues on my Flickr account here: side one and side two. At each location there was a Bandito or two, ready with a task that each team had to complete. These tasks were all pretty zany, kind of a summer-camp-zany, including:

Passing a potato down a line using only your elbows (in front of the Irish Famine memorial statues):

Playing in an silent symphony (on the steps of Symphony Hall):

Writing a page of a children’s story (next to the Make Way for Ducklings statues):

Other favorite tasks of mine were the ribbon dancing in front of the Chinatown gates and handing a stranger a love letter in Post Office Square. (We all were grinning like idiots on that last one.)

We seem to have perplexed a lot of people wherever we appeared–lots of tiny flash mobs suddenly running the city made it seem like we were all in a mini-Amazing Race in Boston–but I was really heartened at how good natured Bostonians were to us during our strange tasks. The notoriously “cold” city didn’t seem that way while we were walking around. (Note that I’ve never thought of Boston as “cold” anyway, but I just figured that I’m used to its quirks by this point and haven’t noticed.) After this scavenger hunt though, I’m starting to wonder if the reputation is ill-deserved and if Boston really just needs better PR.

We passed this lovely bride and her party walking across the bridge in the Public Garden right by the swan boats.

Bay Village is picturesque but so tiny that it’s very easy to miss!

This group of men playing mahjong right by the Chinatown gates were not distracted one bit by our dancing antics.

My right knee still hasn’t forgiven me for those hours of jogging around the city, but next year I’ll be better prepared with much better shoes! Despite my wonky knee, I’m already looking forward to the Second Annual Boston Scavenger Hunt.

Seriously, what a great way to spend a Saturday in Boston. Can’t wait to see what the Banditos have in store for us next. Keep it up guys!

Towards the end of our visit, some of the guys found the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle sidescroller arcade game from when we all were kids. They all pooled their coins together and four of them started button mashing through a pretty decent number of levels.



Got a video of them playing too. These arcade games were always so horribly unbalanced to make you lose your money as quickly as possible, it’s pretty funny hearing everyone trying to their best to not get killed.

Very happily I got to jump in and take over as Donatello when one of the other players backed out. (Michaelangelo was my favorite as a kid — he was the party dude, of course!) So yes, I was a big Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle fan when I was a kid, and it was really funny seeing that vestige of my childhood again. What a shock to see how dated April has become!

Speaking of childhood vestiges, look what was just a few feet away from the TMNT game:



It’s been ages since I’d seen a real Pac-Man too.

Supposedly the IKEA will help vitalize Assembly Square and bring more jobs to the area. Supposedly the Good Time Emporium will be able to relocate somewhere else in the Boston area. Can’t really say. But as we all wait to find out what happens, I thank you, Good Time Emporium, for that lovely nostalgia trip this evening. It was wonderful to play these games I remember from when I was a kid. They still have a lot of charm.

In a few years, if I find myself in Assembly Square buying some umlauted goods, it’ll be weird to think that I once played skee-ball where there’s now a Björkudden table.

This past Saturday was the first hint that our lucky weather streak was coming to an end. We had a few spats of thunder and pelting rain, but nothing serious at all. I even got to see a lovely rainbow over the Back Bay as the late-afternoon sun poked through the clouds:

Today, Monday, we had thunder and lightning intermittently throughout the day. Made for kind of a dreary start of the week, but the rain itself wasn’t anything serious. Or so I thought.

As I started my evening commute home up Lexington Street in Waltham, I noticed there was a lot more traffic than usual. It seemed many cars were pulling U-turns in the middle of the street. As I continued on, I saw a massive puddle ahead that inundated cars well above their headlights at their deepest points. Not wanting to flood my dinky Corolla’s engine, I also pulled a U-turn and tried an alternate route.

Blocked there, too, by the same problem. Massive flash flooding from what was, to me, not a large amount of rain at all. By the third time I ran into a puddle-roadblock, the cops had gotten involved, directing cars through any available parking lots or backways to try another route. This was the Car-Engulfing Puddle O’ Doom they were directing us to avoid:

Here’s a better view of the huge puddle and the cars trapped behind it, dumbfounded as to how else they can get home:

A little closer in on the fire hydrant, you can see that the water has come up over the street, over the sidewalk and halfway up the hydrant on the curb. And that’s not the deepest part of water by any means:

For anyone curious, this stretch of Lexington Street was right in front of the strip mall with the Shaws and GameStop in it (the only reasons I’m ever at this strip mall, really). Was this water really all just from backed-up drainage? As far as I could tell these roads were no where near any overflowing body of water like a creek or river. I remember in spring 2006 the Merrimack Valley had some serious issues with the river spilling over its banks, but that was after several days (if not weeks) of constant rain combined with a sudden thaw, wasn’t it?

All this talking of street flooding puts into perspective how much this really is the most minor inconvenience on the grand scale of things. My thoughts are with the strong people in the Midwest whose lives have been so disrupted by the massive floods. I can’t even begin to imagine the difficulties they are facing right now.

Just like the Seine in Paris, the Charles is such a psychological boundary for Boston-area residents. Crossing the river, simple as it is on foot/bike/car/train, seems to require much more effort than it really does. It’s so much easier to just stay on your side of the river and not cross over. Cantabridgians stick to their own, Bostonians likewise. And now that the Red Line is crawling snail’s pace over the Longfellow due to repairs, the gap between the two sides seems bigger than ever. If there’s a social event across the river, I know many people who’d rather just stay home than go over the Charles, even if it’s not very far. Such a bizarre phenomenon.

Meantime, I thought I’d provide the latest lame excuse for my delay in updating–one that’s just a tiny bit ironic considering my last posts were liveblogs from the Bastion of Geekery a.k.a. ROFLcon. I b0rked my server, meaning I kind of had a mishap with mySQL database. I wish the reason was something cool, like I was running some fabulous back-end scripts for some nefarious purpose. Sadly, no, nothing even remotely that excusable. All it came down to was that I lost my password. Kind of pathetic, really. Sorry about that.

[edit] Does anyone have a low- to mid-level DSLR recommendation? My very trusty Canon Powershot is on its very last legs, bless its sturdy PCB heart.

As with yesterday, newest posts are at the top.

Check out these two feeds:
My flickr account (photos)
My twitter (tiny tweets)

[@4:11pm] I’m home from ROFLcon — have to head out with the family for Orthodox Easter celebrations now. Had to miss out on some of the final panels (tweets on the ROFLcon feed are telling me perhaps I didn’t miss much) but I’m already looking forward to next year. I’ll post more about my overall thoughts on the conference in a later post. Have a lot to digest from the past two days before I can get some cogent thoughts together.

[@2:26pm] Whoa, Timbaland ripping off OCremix isn’t getting any coverage? If true, how is no one picking up on this story?

MSM and radio and talk shows read Fark for material. Apparently show networks can’t attribute Fark for material because of union and network contracting rules — legal ramifications. Hat-tips just don’t happen in MSM, says Curtis. He’s explaining how many TV news networks quote each other when stories breaks. This isn’t news to me, but a lot of audience members seem shocked. Old media ethos is exact opposite of how sites like Fark and Reddit work, kind of incomprehensible about how the two will mesh more and more.

“The Internet” = Fark.com

[@2:11pm] We have now successfully RickRolled the panel.

Alexis of Reddit: “So many buzzy PR things happen organically and it frustrates the hell out of them. ”

Another question — are trolls necessary?
DJPretzel: “They are necessary to deal with the marketers that come to the site. If you’re real it will come through, if you’re fake you’ll get trolled–there’s no way to pull one over the audience.”
Matt of Metafilter: “Marketing comes off as fake.”
Fark summary of comments: “People submitting content, great. Marketers, fuck ‘em.” Oooo.

Corollary: Old media being fooled by stupid stories/marketing, Drew Curtis not sure why old media is always getting drawn in by these fake stories all the time. I’m not either! (Mooninites anyone?)

[@1:56] Fark’s Drew Curtis on what Fark is: “Everybody else is stupid but I’m smart.”

Anil Dash deserves a lot of props and shoutouts, he’s doing a fantastic job of moderating this panel.

Comments on how Reddit and the Reddit community is changing, has changed. From geeky LISP-related news to political memes (Ron Paul) etc. Fark and Reddit commenting on their community–even the gripers–they’re really happy with the communities. OCRemix wants to see more diversity of games remixed, I can’t argue with them there (I go for the FF and Chrono Trigger remixes mainly but other games I like are barely touched by remixers). “Don’t always go for the lowest common denominator in terms of what you want to see featured.”

Current top comments on the backchan interactive are the first few lyrics from Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up.”
That’s right, ROFLcon’s RickRolling Fark, Metafilter, Reddit and OCRemix. It has all come full circle.

[@1:47pm] Starting the “Incubating the Mindvirus” panel on memes– OCRemix, Fark, metafilter, reddit. This might be my last activity of the day — it’s Eastern Orthodox Easter tomorrow and I need to be with my family this evening.

Randall Munroe, creator of XKCD, is here. He says thanks to the referrals from Reddit he’s on there all the time. Figures, ’cause XKCD is on Reddit all the time. Cozy.

More twitter-reddit hybrid comment posting on a projection. Top posts right now: “Trolls: are they an essential part of the community?” and “Do you think the Internet is less interesting now that you’re all in here?”

Reddit gave a shoutout to Yahztee (Zero Punctuation game reviewer), says Yahztee should be here next year. I couldn’t agree more! Yahztee’s fast-paced potty-mouthed game reviews are painfully funny, and his homegrown reviews have basically dwarfed all the professional game reviewers out there from word-of-mouth alone.

[@1:15pm] We got locked out of an event room but there are a few ROFLconners inside. I’m twittering one of them, asking them to open the door (since they can’t hear us knocking) when they see the tweet. This is really bizarre, even for a geek like me!

[@1:01pm] TripAdvisor provided 225 boxes of free pizza (I asked an employee, that’s how I got this number). I think we ate about half of the food, I wonder what they’ll do with the ~100 boxes of untouched pizza? [I'm overhearing talk of Salvation Army and Pine Street Inn.]

Earlier, Anonymous (4chan) showed up toting pizza. Cries of “Anonymous delivers!” rang out.

Had a group photo outside of all the attendees. It’s a beautiful sunny day for it, can’t wait to see the pics.

Another one of those “Only at ROFLcon” moments — Tron guy, the Firefox and Cheez (CEO of Icanhascheezburger.com) all chatting together:

BTW, looks like there’s a Tron guy documentary in the works. He’s trailed by a sound and video guy at all times. Fascinating.

Earlier, the FireFox and Ollie the Owl (TripAdvisor’s mascot) duked it out:

… but they reconciled, all in the name of OMGfreepizza:

Going to get a seat now for the Stuff White People Like blog panel. I talked to the blog creater earlier, he’s a really nice guy and I’m interested to hear more of what he has to say on his blog’s very, very sudden and huge popularity.

[@11:59am] Fans are kind of asking for dirty Homestarrunner — Homestarrunner porn? Have Homestar say things he oughtn’t? Bros Chaps reply: “Corner me in the john.” Um, no thanks.

Lunchtime. Free pizza (oh, it really is like college again). The Firefox and the Owl will have a smackdown. Hmmm.

[@11:51] Brothers Chaps affirms they did indeed visit Disney and met with a producer there, he wanted to collaborate with HSR. Apparently nothing came of it (conclusively) but they found it very flattering that Disney folks liked their work.

Panel voted unanimously: The internet is awesome.
Great.
Glad we cleared that up.

The Firefox asked the panel about adding features for accessibility and open standards on their websites?
…Panel replies they don’t really get what open source is.
Moderator: “This is like a panel of people who only visit the internet.”

[@11:46] Someone asked the inevitable “How does Strongbad type with boxing gloves on?”
Strong Bad: “I’m gonna murder whoever put that question up.”

[@11:41pm] Neely: “I’m waiting for the day when someone tells me this thing is all over…but I have secrets” — OK, it must be obvious I am a huge Brad Neely fan. If he’s got other things up his sleeves, I can’t wait to see it!

Brothers Chaps: Someone actually thought the whole HSR joke was that Homestar has Down Syndrome?!?! What the heck?

[@11:34pm] Brad Neely–”Flash to me is a guy in a red suit that runs around”–talking about processes and tools used in production. HSR still uses Flash 5. Wow!

[@11:15am] Here I am again at the MIT campus in a sea of geeks and laptops. I didn’t get back from the ROFLconcert at the Middle East Upstairs (in Central) last night until 2:30am, so as you can imagine I’m pretty tired. In my exhaustion this morning, I forgot my camera at home! So it’s all cell phone photos today. Sorry!

Still the main focus fo the day are the excellent panels going on today.

Right now I’m (a half-hour late) to the Making It Big panel. Big names here–Brothers Chaps of Homestar Runner, Brad Neely of SuperDeluxe.com (Babycakes, Professor Brothers), Burnie Burns of Red vs Blue and some of the staff of Cyanide and Happiness.

The discussion has moved from what “selling out” is, to freedom of expression on the internet versus self- or imposed-censorship on other media, to the processes they go through to create their popular content.

Applause for Homestarrunner.com never running ads on their site for the eight years they’ve been going.

Q: “Can you talk about not having ads on your site?”–moderator
A: “There’s nothing to talk about, ads are the worst thing about the internet”–Bros Chaps

Brothers Chaps apparently work out of a “inspriringly depressing shopping center.”

There’s a room-wide twitter-like channel going on. Comments are up-down voted ala Reddit and the entire screen is projected behind the panelists so they can see what the most popular comments and questions are. This is a fantastic idea.