{"id":4000,"date":"2017-04-16T11:44:45","date_gmt":"2017-04-16T15:44:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/?p=4000"},"modified":"2017-04-16T11:44:45","modified_gmt":"2017-04-16T15:44:45","slug":"the-great-eostre-mystery-hunt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/2017\/04\/16\/the-great-eostre-mystery-hunt\/","title":{"rendered":"The Great Eostre Mystery Hunt"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>As is an occasional tradition at our house, this year we did a &#8220;mystery hunt&#8221;, where I prepare a series of clues, each pointing to the location of the next. The final clue identifies the location of the prize. The ladies work together to decipher these clues and outsmart &#8220;Mr. E&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>In order to complete this year&#8217;s hunt, some of the stuff they needed to know (or be able to find):<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Smokey Robinson lyrics and\/or the plotline of Pagliacci<\/li>\n<li>Greek mythology and traditional iconography of statuary based on it<\/li>\n<li>the value of Pi to 32 decimal places<\/li>\n<li>how to use a known ciphertext to crack a substitution cipher in characters in another alphabet, and then use that cipher to decode unknown text<\/li>\n<li>how to recognize GPS co\u00f6rdinates, and use them to identify a location at a 1m resolution<\/li>\n<li>how to extract embedded text strings from a printed QR code<\/li>\n<li>how to translate from Latin to English<\/li>\n<li>how to translate a simple rebus embedded in a frame of a digital video file<\/li>\n<li>how to solve a bunch of more traditional, goofy riddle clues<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>It took them just under an hour.<\/p>\n<p>(I guess I&#8217;ve got to up my game next time, and make some of these things actually <em>hard<\/em>.)<\/p>\n<p>My favourite of the clues was actually the one that identified a particular episode of Once Upon A Time (the show Sarah is currently working her way through), and a timecode in it. I had edited the file on our media server to overlay that second with a couple of images so, if you were watching at the specific time code you would have seen this:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-content\/images\/2017\/04\/vlcsnap-2017-04-16-11h24m21s445.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-4002\" src=\"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-content\/images\/2017\/04\/vlcsnap-2017-04-16-11h24m21s445-300x173.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"173\" srcset=\"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-content\/images\/2017\/04\/vlcsnap-2017-04-16-11h24m21s445-300x173.png 300w, http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-content\/images\/2017\/04\/vlcsnap-2017-04-16-11h24m21s445-768x443.png 768w, http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-content\/images\/2017\/04\/vlcsnap-2017-04-16-11h24m21s445-1024x590.png 1024w, http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-content\/images\/2017\/04\/vlcsnap-2017-04-16-11h24m21s445.png 1280w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a>I thought that would be one of the easier ones to decode, but the ladies spent longer on that, and actually had to resort to a thesaurus, than they did on many of the ones I thought were much harder.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p class=\"excerpt\">As is an occasional tradition at our house, this year we did a &#8220;mystery hunt&#8221;, where I prepare a series of clues, each pointing to the location of the next. The final clue identifies the location of the prize. The ladies work together to decipher these clues and outsmart &#8220;Mr. E&#8221;. In order to complete this year&#8217;s hunt, some of&hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/2017\/04\/16\/the-great-eostre-mystery-hunt\/\">Read more &rarr;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5],"tags":[463,461,251,464,462,171],"class_list":["post-4000","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-storytime","tag-easter","tag-family","tag-games","tag-mystery","tag-puzzle","tag-sarah","xfolkentry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5UQvw-12w","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4000","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4000"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4000\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4004,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4000\/revisions\/4004"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4000"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4000"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4000"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}