The Vault 2 Treasures & Fairies
You can "Read sample" to get a preview of what it's like. They have a marevelous, cute fairy theme. Nice art. Don't like the puzzles? There are twelve designers, so there should be variety.
The prize amounts are low. I'll let you decide what to make of that. It's not a treasure you travel to pick up, so I get grumbly about calling these treasure hunts. But that's easy for me to say.
It's been dawning on me that treasure hunters .. like treasure.
There is an annual Seeking Treasure Con in Las Vegas. A shindig, with a lot going on. The treasure hunter community is donating several items for gift bags and prizes. That's
what inspired the comment above.
Getting into fantasy territory here
What motivates treasure hunt creators? These things overlap.
Money
Money does not seem to be a serious motivator for most treasure hunt creators.
Mr. Lady Liberty's Treasure Hunt / Riley's Treasure Chase worked the shifts as a police officer to pay for (among other things) the $100,000 prize. He's
not getting that back.
Community
This means the searcher community as well as the broader American society. The Hunt for History has a charity thing. Professor F with his Cracked wants to bring people together rather than divide over politics (I wonder about that in the board game world). Note that when searchers make multiple "boots on the ground" searches around Shackville Montana, they will be supporting the local economy. A secondary reason for me to make Thesaurus Canada is to link this wide, linguistically divided country together.
The people who make treasure hunts were often searchers themselves. At least one, probably multiple originators made treasure hunts to keep the fun going after the
Forrest Fenn hunt ended. The Vault people come from the puzzle community online.
Creative challenge
I think it's fair to say The Vault people make their books for the creative challenge.
Ego
You want your creative efforts to be appreciated. Everyone has an ego.
Push their product
For botg.com you have to buy some of their product ("boots on the ground") to get a treasure hunt.
The Breakfast Tea & Bourbon book was first and foremost a fiction book. The treasure hunt was a secondary thing.
Tell their story
The bigger ones have the author make a book about their life story. Forrest Fenn, John Collins-Black, Justin Posey and Mr. Hope Chest all did this.
Local pride
This dovetails nicely with being forced to make treasure hunts local.
The San Francisco treasure hunt is called A Love Letter to San Francisco Treasure Hunt. People are brought to many local businesses and locations
(which dovetails nicely with getting prizes from local businesses). Some hunts get people to learn local history. I would like to help create a distinct
treasure hunt scene in Canada. It would be nice to have an exciting reason to travel to corners of the country.
Other
Get outside. Appreciate nature. The Cracked guy, an English teacher, wants people to read.
There is a new tablut/hnefa tafl variant emerging. I want to document it before it turns out to be bad. Tablut variants never work; the traditional version always wins in the end.
We'll start with the original tablut. These rules will be used. The pieces are dice, white for Swedes with a red king, and darker for the Muscovites. The number on top of a die indicates the exact amount it moves. During a turn you can either move or flip over a die. For every die two numbers on opposite sides add up to seven. One die can move either five or two spaces; the other numbers are not available. At the beginning of the game the pieces have their standard spots but random orientations.
What would game play be like? Probably an awkward traffic jam with frustrated drivers. And what would we call this?
Jungle Chess online
A good way to get to know this cute game.
Many American men have beards. Long, grey beards. That doesn't happen in Canada. At least from what I see. There might be some subculture aspect to this.
The French word for billion is milliard. Learn something new every day. (million is million)
Okay, I'll bite. Why is Yellowknife so named?
Arctic metallurgy?
Sisu
Nuanced translation.
What does it really mean for society?
The meaning of Sisu | Finnish conscripts of the Jaeger Brigade
Flavour. Visual. Outdoors. You also get to hear the word spoken.
Some day we'll do adaptation/adaption.
Which The Odyssey Adaptation Is the Most Faithful?
Never heard of these.
Lyrics only.
This is a song written and sung by Saskatchewan lady Joni Mitchell. Scottish band Nazareth made a fantastic cover of it.
If we had a time machine we could watch a traditional konane tournament in Hawaii.
But there's one thing that bugs me because something doesn't add up. You get a louder noise in a room when you make noise at the resonant frequency. There is a standing wave.
But you get standing waves regardless of the frequency. My working theory is you always have a standing wave, but the amplitude is larger when it involves the resonant frequency.
It looks like you get standing waves at resonant frequencies. Less so when it's a little off the resonant frequency. It might be useful to see chladini plates, which you might have run into on the Internet.
As mentioned, blue light gets scattered by an atom because the electromagnetic
wave of blue light oscillates at the resonant frequency* of the atom's electron oscillation. But that misses out a couple of things. It's actually violet that has the resonant frequency, not blue, but blue gets a strong effect
because it is close (little of the light coming from the sun is violet). Also the sky is not blue, but bluish white, so you get bits of all the colours.
* Or something along those lines. Light waves are gargantuan compared to the size of an atom.