It’s a freezing weekend, so great to be inside drinking tea and doing puzzles. These two issues were fun, but not as fun as the last, through no fault of their own, rather my rusty puzzling skills and that I am apparently not a literal enough thinker. Also, possibly the ridiculous Christmas music my cafe of choice is blasting. In January. I’m so tired of Christmas music there aren’t words.
Anyhow….
Issue 4
This issue has us trying to find the reset password for some misbehaving robots at the all robot hotel. AI malfunction, apparently. Don’t ask what happened to your luggage, or why there is plaid flannel in your omelette.
As with the others, Issue 4 gives you a clear place to start - the Crafty Corner says “start quilting immediately!” This puzzle I had a LOT of issues with, and eventually just read through the clues. It’s two grids, with letter pairs and words in italics interspaced. It’s fairly obvious that they’re meant to be interwoven somehow, but this was not a puzzle for me - it relies on some strenuous stretching of rhyming to make numbers from one to eighteen. Barely. I get glue is two, but how is heaven eleven and not seven? And how is per bean thirteen? I gave up on that one and just read the numbers from the hints section.
Then you go forward, pairing the nun/one with letters PU, etc., until you get Push Speech Up for a Home Score Down for Away.
That takes us to the little league game, a series of 1s and 0s I’d initially thought would need to be some sort of binary code. The Speech in question is from the Arts section, a gobbledygook of letters with the hint “The Literal Thinker will be Rewarded”. I am not a literal thinker. I ran versions of RotN ciphers, trying to modify the letters themselves. Eventually, with a hint, they really mean LITERALLY. So, rather than one line of text, you get three. Take the + first, then 0, then -, and you get Fold Right Edge to Star, Fold Left to Diamond.
Thankfully I’d noticed the drawing of the robot on the front had neat decorations, and that part of the text from the advertisement was the wrong font. Literally folding the page, you get the message: From Opinion, take 1st from 1st, to 7th from 7th. Going to the opinion section, you get Take upside-down pins from beginnings otherwise ends.
I had a bit of trouble on this as I was taking single characters, but eventually tried taking ALL of them up to the number from the quotes in the ad, EXTERMINATE. Hincks’ makers are nerds. I love it.
Issue 5
The 5th issue has us trying to find the name of a dinosaur at the Museum of Extinct Terrestrials Engaged in Otherworldly Reconnaissance (METEOR), so we can sign the petition to keep the Lobby for Actual Museum Entities (LAME) from shutting them down. Lol.
There is no obviously labeled ‘start’ on this, but the Nonogram is simple enough, and says ‘greeting’, so maybe that’s a start hint? Anyhow, filling out the nonogram is quick, and yields SH, which in turn takes us to the Book Club, where I go down today’s first rabbit hole. Trying to take the first two letters of each, as SHhhh is capitalized goes nowhere. I then spend an inordinate amount of time trying to find the ‘real’ names of the books, as with the movie puzzle. I get convinced that “A Halo Fate” is a reference to Aegis, from the video game, and Ryben was a character in Game of Thrones somewhere… I go down many internet rabbit holes to come up with nothing. I give up and look for a clue, at which point the system points out that that’s 9 titles with 9 letters, like the nonogram… *sigh*. Overlaying the titles with the nonogram yields Half the Savories, Triple the Sweets, sending us to the Recipe Roundup.
I can math with the best of them, but I still hit a snag. I SHOULD have thought of the trick for the last answer - taking ALL of the letters. I do not. I bang my head *a lot*. I try to unscramble and rescramble and the answer is neither ‘my Socrates note’ or ‘too many secrets.’ I ask for a hint. Take the word with the length specified, then UP TO that letter. Argh. Pair Bulletins, Spot Common.
The bulletins in question were obviously paired already, and I appreciated the nerdy Time Bandits reference - Mom, Dad, don’t touch it! It’s evil! Anyhow, finding the words in common is straightforward and yields: Middle Character from Critics. That, in turn yields us [space] rex. SPACE REX
Thank you for another fun puzzle, Hincks. I’ll try to puzzle better next time.
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