Blog
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2025 MIT Mystery Hunt recap
The 2025 MIT Mystery Hunt can be found here. This post will have spoilers.
This was my sixth Mystery Hunt and my usual hunting friends tagged along with TSBI again. This year, TSBI re-merged so we had about 70 people, 17 on-site, and we finally finished hunt (technically). It doesn’t really feel that way to me since we didn’t do the runaround and finish the story, though.
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About my site theme
Feel free to “inspect element” in your browser or view the repo to see how the styling is done. A word of warning, it’s pretty disorganized and definitely unoptimized.
Besides my personal website, the only project where I was heavily involved in the web design was UMD Puzzlehunt. I enjoyed playing around with CSS there and thought it was a useful skill, so I had been meaning to learn more. I wanted to share a bit of the process in creating the theme, which is modified from Jekyll’s default theme, Minima (v2.5 specifically).
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2024 MIT Mystery Hunt recap
The 2024 MIT Mystery Hunt can be found here. This post will have spoilers.
Last month, during MLK day long weekend, I participated in MIT Mystery Hunt for the fifth year in a row. My usual hunting team assimilated into the TSBI Swarm again and we made up half of the on-site presence. We all flew in Thursday and met up for dinner. Even though half my hunting group also live in the Bay, I still only regularly see them in person all the way up in Cambridge. Hopefully with DASH coming back, that will change.
This year, our team ended up doing similarly well. Across Saturday, we had the second-most puzzles solved. I think during Sunday when the width of the hunt was extremely large, we slowed down as the collective focus of our team was weaker. We were farther away from finishing as well, but I still felt pretty accomplished by the end.
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It’s harder to write K-pop trivia than I expected
A couple of months back, I wrote a K-pop-themed Pointless-style quiz for a few friends. I’ll reproduce each question here just before each corresponding section. The questions draw heavy inspiration from a Pokémon-themed quiz I took part in, authored by lovemathboy. They deserve all the credit for their creativity in writing the questions. I had fun with the Pokémon quiz and wanted to create something fun and new for my friends. Plus, I hadn’t written puzzles in a while and I was itching to create something puzzle-adjacent I could release. I re-hashed the questions with a K-pop theme, but it wasn’t as simple as I had assumed—I ended up with a lot of observations of K-pop culture and media along the way. This blog post is essentially my constructor’s notes and unstructured observations, but I’m using it to explore K-pop as a cultural phenomenon by examining its potential for generating decent trivia questions.
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