We won the lottery in our room placement for Anthrohio 2024. We got room 201, which I dreaded would be next to a noisy elevator bank. Not so; it was on the other side of the hotel, near the elevator that only goes up three floors, and next to the stairwell that only goes that far. While it felt precarious taking the cart with our luggage on it down all that distance --- the wheel was falling off --- the room was everything you might want. It wasn't loud, probably from the elevator being barely useful. And it was like right next to the con. Just down the elevator or the stairwell and we were at the center of the con space, able to drop into any event space we wanted except Hospitality, which was a hike. Several times over the weekend we went back to our room to use the bathroom, rather than take the longer hike to the (surprisingly) lone public hotel bathroom.
The convention's theme this year was cryptids. Well, properly, it was the Purr-anormal, but most of that gave way to crytpozoology, as if they were trying to compromise. This did affect some of the programming, which included panels on cryptozoology as a scientific phenomenon. And maybe into a couple panels that could be described as being aware of nature --- a remarkably well-organized and presented one about native wildflowers, for example, and another about backyard gardening. These were aimed at the mid-Ohio clime, of course, but that shares a lot with mid-Michigan.
As part of the cryptid theme, though, the con book had a challenge. There were stamps representing various legendary monsters hidden through the hotel grounds. They had a set of clues in the con book to where you might find them. Collect them all and show Con Ops and you could win a prize. Ed Hyena, con chair, explained at Opening Ceremonies that this was like geocaching. It is, of course, much more like letterboxing, to the point that first I and then ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger decided to stamp the creatures in our letterboxing logbooks. (We had brought them with the correct thought that we might find a box on Monday, taking the edge off the sad drive home.) We thought they fell short of being a proper letterbox, even one planted for a short-duration event like this, mostly in there not being a log book, but when we were done we learned we were invited to sign the journal that Con Ops was keeping of successful finders. So we did stamp our signature stamps in the event logbook after all.
Finding the stamps was an interesting blend. Some were easy: one was hidden in the video game room, and none too hard. It was just on the table next to the Atari 2600 emulator. Later in the weekend it would at least be behind the 2600 emulator's TV. One was tucked under some plants by the south exit of the hotel, the one nearest our room. One was tucked under some plants near the front of the hotel; that one bunnyhugger found not by thinking about clues but by thinking of where would be likely spots for a letterbox to hide.
But the other two. One was annoying in that its clue talked about finding the big umbrellas and we just couldn't find any umbrellas at the hotel. bunnyhugger met up with two other people working as diligently and they couldn't find umbrellas either, even after thinking outside the box and looking at, like, the photos hung in the hotel bar and stuff. I had a good-but-wrong idea that they might be near the tents set up by the car show, out in the parking lot outside the south entrance, but they were not. Eventually they broke down and asked Con Ops for a clue. The umbrellas used to be there but were not, in fact, present anymore. So that confirmed what we had concluded needed to be: the 'umbrellas' were patio furniture around the hotel pool. This one had the stamp for Loch Ness Monster's Lake Erie cousin.
The most baffling one? And the most elusive cryptid? The clue there was merely N40.ABCDB W82.ABEFCD (or something like that). What can you do with that? Well, obviously, it's a substitution cipher of some kind and, as bunnyhugger reasoned, it's got to be the latitude and longitude of some space near the hotel. 40.12342 North, 82.125634 West was nowhere near town. 40.01231 North, 82,014523 was closer but not on the hotel grounds. But --- ah, if A is 0 and B is 9 and C is 8 and such? You get a spot just outside the south doors of the hotel, and I spent a good bit of Friday evening poking around, looking for a box hidden under a shrub. bunnyhugger thought this too close to the second box we'd found, and I wondered if it had been moved and lost already. It turns out we were both correct. The cipher was not what we naively supposed. It was, however, given as a clue in the other four boxes, in text we'd been too proud of ourselves for finding the boxes to actually read. But it was a simple cipher, with the twist being that ... oh, I think both B and F were 9, something we wouldn't have guessed. The box was, or was meant to be, in either the bay window of the hotel outside Main Events or else on the grounds just outside the building by the bay window. (Depending on how big a margin of error you allow for the coordinates).
The catch was that the box had gone missing, suggesting to me that it was inside and someone walked off with the curio. This would not be the only box to go missing over the course of the convention; according to the feedback panel Sunday night only two of the five survived the whole weekend. But they had backup stamps at Con Ops, which they would stamp for you if you correctly described where the box was supposed to be. Although when we described the Con Ops person merely allowed that this was where most people had said they thought the box was, phrasing needlessly elusive enough to raise suspicion.
Still, this gave us the not-perfectly-satisfactory credit for finding all five boxes, and we were entitled to pick a goofy little rubber toy out of the prize bin, the most geocaching-like element of this (besides the ciphered latitude-longitude clue). And we shared intelligence with the two guys that bunnyhugger had met up with; they loved this taste of letterboxing and asked to get her trail stamp in their booklets. She was happy to oblige them, once they managed to all get together at the same time.
When we got to the end of the convention I made a point of mentioning at feedback how much we enjoyed the letterboxing element. Several other people praised it too, pointing out how well it hit the niche of being a side game that wasn't too involved and wasn't competitive at all and was a fun little addition to the events. There may not ever be another one like this --- the side quest games have been different every year --- but it was a part of a well-programmed weekend.
And now? You know? That Labor Day visit to Michigan's Adventure? It wasn't very long. Here's the last of the pictures I feel worth sharing.
More Halloween setup, a boiling cauldron that I expected kids would be able to get their pictures in. Would they? Only one month to find out if they would ...
Three roller coasters in view here, with the front being Wolverine Wildcat's station fence, the cyan track being Corkscrew, and the wooden coaster in the distance Zach's Zoomer. The balloon is part of Camp Snoopy, a balloon flat ride.
Someone hurrying to not miss their chance to use the Fast Lane on Wolverine Wildcat, despite there being no line to speak of. Fast Lanes are generally anti-democratic nonsense but at least at Michigan's Adventure they're also self-evidently wastes of money.
Evening sun filtering through the trees outside Loggers Run. Also you can see the post-Cedar-Fair-ownership ride sign.
Mad Mouse, in a rare state of operating, near the end of the day. It's close to where I saw that actual mouse with the photographs shared recently.
And this isn't anything special, just a couple trees in their autumn livery, outside the Giant Wheel.
Trivia: In 1644 the Basque mathematician Pierre Hérigone published a book using a rectangle to denote the product of two factors separated by a comma. So, ``[]5 + 4 + 3, 7 ~ 3 : ~ 10, est 38'' would mean ``(5 + 4 + 3) * (7 - 3) - 10 = 38''. Source: A History of Mathematical Notation, Florian Cajori. Hérigone is also noted as being possibly the person to invent the angle symbol, that < mark.
Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine Volume 37: The Lost Bomb Islands, Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.
