125 is a cube, so naturally I wrote three articles today and published one on each of the three platforms where I regularly appear. Feel free to hunt for the Easter egg! Bilibili Ah, yes. Today is my birthday. I am celebrating in American time, so this post may appear a little late. But wait: China Standard Time and Central Standard Time are fourteen hours apart. If I count both time zones, I get a glorious thirty-eight-hour birthday! Brilliant as always. ...
It is that time of year again, and naturally the annual retrospective cannot be omitted. Let us see how much I can finish before 11:59 p.m. ( One thing worth mentioning: I gave my experiences in the Puzzle Hunt community this year their own article. On one hand, I feared I would hit WeChat’s character limit and leave no room for anything else. On the other, judging from the feedback I have received all year, not many people around me are particularly obsessed with this subject. The video made its earth-shattering debut during the puzzle team’s TPAPWRAPA livestream on the 29th, then appeared on Bilibili together with the companion article. If you are interested, please follow Zhuge Tianyao on Bilibili. Thank you! ...
Congratulations to the WeChat account Mysterious Mr. Owl Q on reaching one thousand followers! Confetti 🎉 I saw the news first thing in the morning and became so excited that, amid the deadline panic of finishing a paper, I found time to doodle some limited-edition merchandise. Only one exists, so you tell me whether that counts as limited. If the opportunity arises, I will put it into ruthless mass production. ( Come to think of it, I have been in the puzzle community for roughly as long as that account has existed. I have recently been organizing the various puzzle-related things I wrote over the past year, so here is a tiny preview—and a lazy way to pad today’s word count. ...
Thank goodness for Thanksgiving break! American geocaches are beginning to seem suspiciously homogeneous. So far, I have found at least six hidden in similar places, including the only two physical caches on campus. Damn it, I have not seen a single one resembling the ingenious camouflaged caches Teacher Nano once showed me. Must Chinese Taobao teach these Americans a small lesson in the manufacturing might of Yiwu? Then again, this pattern gives me more time to read the story behind each location, because that is honestly the only interesting part left. Perhaps this is simply geocaching adapting to America’s great road-trip culture. At least I can confidently write “found” in my log instead of behaving like certain newcomers who search for my cache in Hangzhou, fail without ceremony, immediately post “Needs Maintenance” to pressure me into sending a friend out, and then demand a revised hint and lower difficulty in one seamless chain until the answer is practically placed in their mouths. You only realize how demanding players can be after becoming a cache owner. I wonder whether any of my own “did not find” logs at the beginning of the year caused someone else the same trouble. ...
Near the end of yesterday’s Cornerstones class, our professor gave us a little Puzzle Hunt. Can you imagine how I felt? Cornerstones, as the name implies, is the class you must take if you hope to survive at LETU. It is the foundation of everything. Fine, it is not actually that grave. Apart from doctrinal material such as the cheating and plagiarism policies, the class is basically one extended tea party. Our professor also chairs the writing section of the student center, so she gleefully assigns us a journal every week. Presumably she hopes we will take our drafts to the tutors there for help, although I have never once done that. My first thought was: perfect, I can lazily count these as entries in Sojourner’s Diary! My second thought was: perhaps exercises written with elementary-school vocabulary and grammar are better left unpublished. ( ...
Step outside the frame: the America Arc does not necessarily have to be about America, does it? I have wanted to summarize this stage of my geocaching journey for ages, but life stayed busy. Now I have a workspace of my own—or procrastination space, depending on your definition. I cataloged the hunts I had joined, looking proudly at title after title in my bookmarks. Somehow I have played this many hunts in less than a year. I also prepared for CCBC 16, creating a dedicated workspace both to keep personal information out of recordings and to help myself focus. A little setup somehow produced forty-four pages. Absurd. At last, I can begin writing. ...
My steps on the way home were light. I hummed as I splashed through puddles, as if even Shanghai’s endless rain could do nothing to extinguish my excitement. So I have to write something more for today. Yes, in the end I gave up the advance screening and gathered instead with the brothers and sisters my father had visited before. As I headed out that morning, talking with my parents on the phone, I noticed someone emerge from the room next door with a backpack and look around. At that exact moment, a message from Q appeared on my phone: “I’m out.” I moved in with complete confidence: Good morning, Q! ...
How did things end up like this…? I found myself wishing I had never seen the GMHS announcement. Then, like CP31, it would have remained a simple regret instead of becoming something painful. I knew what the right priorities were. I had already considered the possible conflict of coming to Shanghai on Sunday. So why did I immediately say yes to Q? Wishful thinking, perhaps… If nobody had reminded me, I might genuinely have stopped gathering with them. ...
Nothing much to say about today, so let me fill in yesterday’s trip to the botanical garden. We followed a friend to the Beijing Botanical Garden for a spring outing. Spring in Beijing is brief and brilliant. Besides the beautiful flowers, of course, there is willow fluff filling the sky. Once you let yourself mistake that all-enveloping white for snow, you cannot help marveling at how perfectly Xie Daoyun described it. ...
0:00-1:00 Puzzle hunt, lights out 1:00-7:00 Sleeping 7:00-8:00 Getting up, washing up, making coffee, puzzle hunt 8:00-9:00 Calling a classmate to wake him up, catching the metro to Niujie, listening to an audiobook, solving Fish Puzzle Poker 9:00-10:00 Riding the metro to Niujie, solving Fish Puzzle Poker, buying bread 10:00-11:00 “Dreaming of Xuannan” puzzle walk 11:00-12:00 “Dreaming of Xuannan” puzzle walk 12:00-13:00 “Dreaming of Xuannan” puzzle walk 13:00-14:00 Collecting prizes, resting, buying a drink 14:00-15:00 Catching the metro home, organizing Xiaohongshu material 15:00-16:00 Picking up a package, bathroom break, showering, doing laundry, making lunch (?) 16:00-17:00 Thawing lamb chops, eating homemade pork-floss bread and xiaolongbao 17:00-18:00 Hanging laundry, solving the puzzle calendar 18:00-19:00 Solving the puzzle calendar, writing diary entries (actually catching up on all the previous days right now), playing a little MC 19:00-20:00 Playing a little MC 20:00-21:00 Playing a little MC, cutting up the thawed lamb chops, roasting lamb chops 21:00-22:00 Eating dinner, watching videos 22:00-23:00 Watching videos 23:00-24:00 Writing a write-up