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Matt Mayfield, RiddleMaster |
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March 10 Trividoku!Trividoku #1 is finally available!
Trividoku is a book I've put together which combines trivia and Sudoku. What I do is take nine of the starting numbers out of a Sudoku and replace them with trivia matches. For example, the trivia matches could be:
In nine spaces in the Sudoku grid, there are letters, (A) - (I). If you can match the letter with the digit, you place that digit into the Sudoku grid. For example, George Washington was the first president so you know that where the (C) appears in the Sudoku grid, you can place a "1" since Washington's term was (1) 1789 - 1797. Don't know the trivia? You can still solve the puzzle, it's just harder. Some of the puzzles are triple trivias where we've taken 27 of the digits out of the puzzle and we give you three sets of nine trivia matches. For more information, you can visit the web site at http://www.sudoku-usa.net
January 09 Back to RiddlesSo it's been less than three months since I last blogged, that's good, right? Anyway I just wrote about a dozen new riddles since we were getting low at Cloud Kingdom for our riddles.
Here's my current riddle that's up on the site:
Most people think it's very easy (0.52 on a scale of 0 - 5), but they seem to like it. If you don't get the answer, mouse over the white space : pie : to see it. A big reason for doing this riddle has to do with my daughter finding a song on the internet, which you can find here. Listen to it and it will all become clear. October 12 Fixing a blank Frame in FlashWhile putting together an online banner ad under Flash (Flash Professional version 8), I came across a really annoying problem. The banner I was making contained three actual ads for our board and card games. Which ad appears was based on the current time. Our newest product is most likely to be displayed, then the next newest and then our oldest. Each of them was a movie clip that appeared in its own frame. Originally I tried using separate scenes, but I backed out of that and instead chose to just use embedded movie clips.
The first two ads came up just fine, but the third ad failed and appeared as a blank frame. It happened only once or twice during my initial desktop testing, but then when we put it onto our beta site for testing, it appeared more often. Additionally, it failed more often in Firefox than in Internet Explorer. When I went back to testing again on my machine, if I had only text in the fourth frame then it displayed fine. If I added a single small graphic, it worked. Add two graphics or a larger graphic and the entire frame would be blank. No text, no images and the action script on the frame wouldn't execute. The explanation is fairly simple and is based on the way Flash works. When the Flash object in a browser triggers, it reads in "frame 1" and starts it going and then keeps loading up the rest of the file. In a normal Flash file, there is actual content in frame #1 there that gets displayed. Since my first frame had nothing in it but simply action script to chose which frame (advertisement) to display, loading up frame #1 was incredibly quick. When I simply had it going to frame #4, I was getting there before the frame was loaded and so nothing was displayed. My work-around isn't perfect; there is probably a much more elegant solution, but the standard settings (such as exporting the images to be available in the first frame) didn't work. My original frame #1 action script looked like:
My revised start-up code uses an interval to check for whether or not the frame is loaded first. I initially did this in a tight loop and locked up Flash. I believe this failed because by having the Actionscript in a tight loop, the engine that loads the frames was unable to run.
When running, this means you might see an initial flicker or a blank box (depending on download speed), but then the correct frame will run.
A third possible solution would be to simply have one frame and load the appropriate movie clip into that frame depending on the choice. In some ways this would be a better solution, although it means that the most common ad, which appears in frame #2, wouldnt' appear as quickly since all the movie clips would need to load first. It's back on our beta site now, hopefully it will be up on www.boardgamegeek.com sometime next month. The ad campaign is kind of fun; for Minions and Ogre Bash, our two card games, people will be able to vote on things. For Minions: Darkness & Myth, we ask what to do with the Princess: Marry her, Devour her, Rescue her or Sacrifice her. The Minions game is an amusing card game where you're trying to get "Glory". The Princess happens to be one of the Glory cards. For Ogre Bash, the game has five different Ogres in the deck: Crash, Gnash, Smash, Trash and Percy. People will get to vote on which is their favorite. I'm betting on Percy... The Minions card box
The Ogres; from left to right, Crash, Gnash, Smash, Trash and Percy. July 10 Two New Riddles - Hurrah!I finally got around to putting in some more riddles for Cloud Kingdom. Checking our "inventory", we only have new riddles going up through late August and we always like to have at least three months of riddles out there. Often it takes a while for a riddle to settle in before we can improve hints, notice typos and so on. At our last Cloud Kingdom meeting, for example, we went through hints for some riddles and found some typos, but more importantly improved the hints a lot.
My biggest problem coming up with riddles recently is that I have lots of ideas, maybe some keywords and so forth, but I can't come up with something I absolutely like. Some of my riddles are just synonyms or puns waiting to somehow gel together. I even have a bunch of riddle answers with nothing at all to go with them, just an answer that looks like it would make a cool riddle.
Here's the first one of the two riddles I just wrote. I like the imagery but I really wanted to use some more "keywords"; words that have an obvious meaning which has nothing to do with the answer, but which also have a more obscure meaning that does.
To see the answer, mark between these asterisks: * mine *
There were some other words I wanted to throw in, but I couldn't make them fit. Maybe inspiration will hit me before August when this one goes out on the riddle of the week site.
The second one is more of a dictionary riddle, using multiple meanings of the same word.
To see the answer, mark between these asterisks * tag *
There are a few riddles that I still really need to finish. One of them I've been dragging around incomplete for more than a year now, waiting for just the right inspiration to strike. I have some airplane flights coming up, those are always good for riddling. Wish me luck!
June 28 When is a Riddle like a Writing Desk?
The above excerpt is from Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland.
So what is a riddle? For over 15 years I've been writing various riddles for publications. We came out with our Riddle Rooms #1 book back in 1992 and we've been sending out the riddle of the week since 2000-ish. So I guess I'm sort of a riddle snob. To me a riddle is a poem (usually) which either implicitly or explictly asks the question: what am I talking about?
There are also other word riddles (let alone image and mathematical riddles) which are similar in that they pose a misleading or puzzling question of some sort. Unfortunately, many of these turn out to be just puns. I recently purchased a Sudoku book, "Riddle Sudoku" by Gary Disch and was pretty disappointed. Every "riddle" in there was just a pun. Nothing deep, nothing requiring any real knowledge, just an ability to guess what the pun was.
Another common type of riddle is of the "I met a man with seven wives..." or the "Two Texans are walking down the street, the short one is the son of the tall one, but the tall one is not his father." This is a puzzle where you're led to an assumption that isn't correct. For example with the man going to Saint Ives, you're given extra information about what he's carrying and who he's related to, but the question has nothing to do with those. Likewise, with the "two Texans" type of puzzle, the question is phrased as if both of them are male, although the answer of course is that the tall one is the short one's mother.
The riddles I tend to write are of the Tolkein sort, the type you'll find in The Hobbit, although usually phrased as a poem. Usually the wording is intended to obscure the answer and to misdirect you. My favorite kind of riddle is the obscure metaphore, where I refer to something which an obscure description, comparing it to something completely different than what it is. With these riddles I try as hard as possible to refer to only a single thing. If I'm writing a riddle about a "castle" for example, the kind with a moat and drawbridge and so forth, I don't like doing things like bringing in the chess move of castling.
Here's an easy example of a metaphore riddle:
To see the answer, mark the following with your mouse: * camel *
The other kind of riddle I write, but which I prefer not to, is the multiple definition riddle. In this case, each line or couplet often refers to a separate definition of a single word. That's in contrast to the metaphore riddles where the entire poem refers to just one thing or concept. These riddles can be fun but after a while, I find they get kind of tiring. What I really hate doing is making the riddle so that it does funny things with word forms like odd things involving plurals.
Here's a dictionary definition riddle. This one was originally written as a line riddle for Origins 2003. We put various riddles up on posters so that people there waiting in line would have something fun to do:
To see the answer, mark the following with your mouse: * event *
Each line of the riddle has a different definition or usage of the word. These riddles are definitely easier to write. Sometimes I'll come up with a pun or strange way of thinking about a word and use that for a basis for the riddle. Then I take a look at a dictionary or thesaurus and see if anything else fun pops up. Once I have a few definitions, then it's working on the rhyme scheme - often this is the hardest part since getting the meter and rhyme right can be tough. Often I end up with some polysyllabic words I want to use that just won't fit or else I have to really make use of poetic license to sneak in a rhyme.
Metaphore riddles are harder to get started - I always want to start with a really good vision - but are often easier to complete. Instead of coming up with different phrasings for various definitions, I just need to come up with a poetic, misleading description of the riddle answer. it's getting that initial concept; the oblique way of looking at something that's tough.
If you like word riddles, the kind I like to write, then you definitely need to keep up with our riddles at www.cloudkingdom.com. There are plenty of riddle sites on the net, but many of them are the obscured information sort. Sadly many of them are fairly insolvable riddles which end up being too much like "what's in my pocket?". The riddle writer knows what they're trying to say, but don't provide enough information for you to really guess what it is.
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