Posts

• Jul 21, 2025

  Brony Musicians Seize The Means of Production: My Eyewitness Account to BABSCon 2025

  Bronies are older fans of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. They are mostly male, typically in 20s-30s age wise, and have been trending older and more female over time. (A lot of girls in the original target demographic grew up, and a lot of men in the fandom realized they were trans.)

  Brony conventions are cons for the MLP fandom. Most started in the peak hype of the early 2010s, but many cons from that era are now defunct. However, a few conventions still exist, thanks to a core diehard fan group that attends reliably enough to keep conventions sustainable. At their peak, thousands of people would go to each convention, but these days hundreds is more accurate.

  BABSCon is one such convention. Short for Bay Area Brony Spectacular, it first ran in 2014, and quickly became one of the mainstays (manestays?) of the brony convention circuit. I went to my first BABSCon in 2016, and have attended most years since. They’ve been fun, but my interest has fallen over time. The panels have started to repeat, the vendors have had less new merch, and it’s all just gotten less novel each year. By BABSCon 2024, I had decided I wasn’t going to any future iterations, and left early to attend a board gaming event. I’d gotten my fill.

  Checking the news afterwards, I learned that con staff announced they were ready to hang things up. Next year, BABSCon 2025, will be the final BABSCon.

  I may have fallen out of the con scene, but of course I had to go.

  Okay But What Do You Do At My Little Pony Conventions

  MLP conventions follow a similar template.

  • Panels, where official MLP voice actors and writers answer questions, or fans present a pony or pony-adjacent topic.
  • Vendor halls and artist alleys, where people sell art prints and fan merch.
  • Gaming rooms, where people play video games, board games, or the defunct MLP CCG.
  • Parties run out of hotel suites, to socialize while drinking cheap booze.
  • A music concert in the evenings, typically set up as a rave with EDM or rock music made by brony musicians.

  I’ve been to many of these conventions as just an attendee. For the final BABSCon, I felt I should give back to the community that had brought so much entertainment over the years. So on a whim, I filled out a panel application titled “Ponies and Puzzles”. I pitched a two-part panel. The first would analyze the design of the puzzles that appear in-universe within My Little Pony. The second would be a solve-along of pony themed puzzles from puzzlehunts. I explained why I wanted to run the panel, cited academic talks as evidence of my public speaking experience, and linked Puzzles are Magic, the MLP-themed puzzlehunt I led the design for in 2020. This was all to convince BABSCon that I was literally the most puzzle-pilled MLP fan in the world. I thought competition to present at the final BABSCon would be high, and wanted to put forward my best shot.

  My panel was accepted! Which left me the task of actually, uh, writing and preparing a 90 minute presentation. Still, wasn’t this what I signed up for? I procrastinate working on it, then start grinding through the slides in the weeks leading up to BABSCon.

  Three weeks before the convention, I get an email from the events coordinator of BABSCon.

  Hello,

  If you are receiving this email then you were accepted to be a panelist at BABSCon 2025.

  tl;dr I’m hosting open calls to talk about the schedule.

  Panelists were expected to attend one of these calls to coordinate a desired panel time. In particular, if there were specific events we wanted to attend, they could make sure our panel wouldn’t conflict with the times of those events. Somehow, I’ve never realized this is how con scheduling works. When you present at academic conferences, they decide the time for you.

  Assuming that time slots were first-come first-served, I joined the first call I could make, the Friday 4-6 PM call. I wasn’t free until the end of that slot, but luckily, the host was willing to stay until they got to everyone. The first thing I heard in the call was someone thanking the con for selecting their panel, because they normally only get to run it unofficially under a stairwell at night. So, we were already off to an interesting start.

  As I wait for my turn, I keep working my slides. Before they get to me, the events coordinator has to take another call. Alright, no problem. We wait, and at 6:05 PM, they come back, saying they’re very sorry, but they’ll need to stop the panel call early. Annoying, but I get that event organizing can be hectic. I pencil in joining the Saturday time slot.

  Saturday morning arrives. I check my email, and:

  Hi all,

  Thank you everyone that came yesterday, I found it very successful and have a much better grasp on panelist needs.

  I regret to inform you that due to the ongoing situation I will need to cancel the schedule forum today.

  I believe everyone involved tried to do what they thought was best and it is more than unfortunate this conflict came to head in the way it did, when it did.

  We are moving forward with what we have, and despite the circumstances, compared to a week ago I am more confident in our ability to pull things off now than I was then. I will wait for an official statement to be decided before speaking on that further.

  This in no way affects the evaluation of any panel and I likewise completely understand anyone who needs to cancel. Obviously there may be changes to the schedule in the next few days. I will plan to resume with forum calls on Sunday (tomorrow) and will send an earlier notification than this if the situation changes.

  ??????

  Sorry, what?

  I don’t read brony social media, so I have no idea what drama is going down. But it’s clear that something is going on, it’s escalated hard, and it’s hit the point where con staff assumes everyone obviously knows what the “ongoing situation” is. Except I don’t. So…what?

  With some trepidation, I open the BABSCon Discord, and there is a fire, burning bright.

  The Situation

  I’ve decided not to name anyone besides Pinkaboo, the central figure of the story. The names are easy to find if you really need to know.

  Pinkaboo was the music concert coordinator for BABSCon. She has been involved in organizing pony music concerts for over a decade, for both BABSCon and other pony conventions. Because of this, she is widely liked by the brony musician community, but not well known outside of them, due to playing more of a background logistics role.

  On Friday 6:18 PM, the musicians get an email saying Pinkaboo was fired from BABSCon. (This is 13 minutes after the panel call was cut short, for those keeping track.) It’s possible some were told earlier, but I believe this email is the first time the musicians were officially told.

  Hello everyone,

  We wanted to inform you directly that the BABSCon Chairs have made the decision to reorganize responsibilities over the Neighhem concert. Moving forward, [name] will assume acting responsibility as Concert Lead, while we finish interviewing an individual to assume the role full time. Pinkaboo is no longer a member of BABSCon staff; her status as a musician remains unchanged.

  To be clear, this decision does not impact the existing plans for Neighhem: The set schedule will remain as planned. Musician benefits will remain as previously agreed upon, including the gratis party suite rooms, which continue to be under Pinkaboo’s purview as private guest rooms.

  Moving forward, for official convention business, we have created a channel for Concert’s exclusive use on the BABSCon server, [link]. We can also be reached via email at [email].

  As we approach the finish line, we acknowledge Pinkaboo’s work building the strong foundation of Neighhem at BABSCon. This is a contribution which we will continue to recognize and acknowledge.

  Thank you,

  BABSCon Chairs

  The brony musicians immediately jump into an emergency Discord call with Pinkaboo, to get her side of the story. They quickly decide the BABSCon Chairs are talking out of their ass, do not deserve their respect, and make a coordinated social media blast announcing they are all dropping out of the concert in protest.

  It is 3 weeks before the last BABSCon, and one of the major evening activities no longer exists.

  This continues blowing up the Discord into Saturday, and continues to boil when the con chairs directly reply to some angry messages while not putting out an official statement. This makes it hard to find exactly why Pinkaboo was fired. A rumor goes around that Pinkaboo was fired for sending a passive-aggressive tweet reply when BABSCon staff shared the wrong draft of a concert marketing video on social media. The only accounts of this are secondhand, and if said tweet ever existed, it was deleted before anyone could archive it.

  On Saturday night, the BABSCon chairs put out their first official message.

  I do want to apologize for the sudden news that broke yesterday, the ripples it sent throughout the community, and how it affected everyone who has planned on attending BABSCon. Our approach to this situation has been to remain respectful of all parties and refrain from divulging sensitive information; however, this approach has led to misunderstandings and understandable concerns from our staff, guests, and attendees. We would like to shed some clarity on a couple specific situations we have seen being discussed publicly, which are excellent examples of multiple perspectives:

  In regards to the concerns with Marketing, we agree Pinkaboo was very engaged with the musicians’ unique marketing needs, and extensively pushed to have them promoted. It is important to recognize that Pinkaboo worked with us to pre-write and pre-approve all the musician announcement posts. Unfortunately when those marketing pushes did not go well, Marketing was blamed and bared the backlash. Then when Marketing didn’t respond fast enough, they were blamed again. This occurred multiple times.

  In regards to Musician compensation, we hear reports of all the work Pinkaboo has done to take care of the musician community. One example was letting them stay in her suite so they do not need to pay for their own hotels. That suite, the connecting rooms, and several other rooms, are all paid by BABSCon as part of Concert’s budget. Those details of the budget Pinkaboo received, and how she chose to allocate it to the musicians she invited, seem to have been obfuscated from the musicians themselves. Do we wish we could pay more for the musicians? Absolutely! The costs to host the concert were already higher than all of the rest of our Panels, Events, Arcade, Tabletop, CCG, Cosplay, and Theatrics budgets all combined, and we worked to stretch it across 50+ musicians as much as we could. We are sorry the details of that were never clearly communicated to the musicians directly.

  Internally to staff, there were multiple other situations where statements and allegations Pinkaboo made were, upon review, found to be false.

  This leads to the core of the matter – the Chairs have repeatedly seen Pinkaboo twist the truth and serve as an unreliable narrator within our staff team. This issue only grew worse with time, and with three weeks until the convention, it had become an issue we could no longer work around. Part of operating as a team is being able to trust your teammates to accurately and truthfully present information. Pinkaboo lost that trust, and she was removed from staff.

  This says a lot of things, while not clearing up anything. Saying Pinkaboo was an unreliable narrator without providing examples is like the OpenAI board saying Sam Altman was not consistently candid without specifying how. Sure, there’s some element of truth, but you have to give more than that. Similar to that situation, this statement doesn’t bring anyone to BABSCon’s side. It just makes people angrier.

  My View

  In general, I assume social media hate mobs aren’t fair to the people they’re hating on, especially with the rise of astroturfing. So here’s my most charitable interpretation of what happened.

  In a bid to incentivize brony musicians to show up for the last BABSCon, Pinkaboo spent a lot of the budget allocated to her, and pushed BABSCon to give her more. These incentives were massively successful, because the concert lineup is stacked. Many musicians haven’t performed their music live in years, and half the lineup could be the headliner at an average brony concert. Making this happen was likely expensive, and I get the impression Pinkaboo had more of a begrudging relationship with BABSCon rather than one with constructive criticism.

  On Friday, Pinkaboo messed up something. (In the BABSCon Discord, one staff member says Pinkaboo’s actions caused multiple weeks of delays, again without providing specifics.) In normal circumstances, this would be resolved internally, but leadership was sick of working with her. So they took the opportunity to snowball that mistake into an excuse to fire Pinkaboo, thinking they could massage the damage and remove a headache from their lives. This backfired horribly.

  Now, as con chairs, they have the authority to fire anybody. No one says they can’t fire their concert head. Everyone’s saying it’s dumb they did. It’s the final BABSCon! If the con chairs are sick of working with Pinkaboo, is working 3 more weeks before never having to work with her again really so impossible? Just let her finish her job. If the concert goes wrong, you even get to blame her in the end, since it’s her responsibility. And if it goes well, you don’t have to air any dirty laundry. How is this so hard?

  The musicians in particular are pissed off because they know who Pinkaboo is, have a working relationship with her, and are directly aware of the work she’s done to support them. Firing someone from the concert they’ve been planning for months, and then saying they can still perform in it if they want, is just a crazy level of tone-deafness over what these concerts mean to the bronies performing in them.

  This is not lost on the general BABSCon public. In the end, it’s all people, but this feels a lot like a big company (BABSCon) firing a productive worker (Pinkaboo) the moment something goes wrong, ignoring their years of service to the company. And, like most terminally online fandoms, MLP fans are very leftist. They quickly support the strike.

  

  I come out of everything agreeing with them. In a game of he said she said, what matters is reputation. Pinkaboo has it. The con does not.

  Fallout

  The standard practice for music artists is to sign written contracts with the cons they’re performing at. For example, Odyssey said she’s contractually obligated to play Discord at her sets, which - understandable. Before deciding to strike, the musicians reread their contracts. They argue that all the contracts are signed with Pinkaboo rather than BABSCon, so those contracts no longer apply after Pinkaboo’s firing.

  BABSCon staff disagrees. They say any common sense interpretation is that the contracts are from Pinkaboo on behalf of BABSCon, rather than Pinkaboo individually. I take BABSCon’s side of this dispute, but they never pursue collecting on those contracts because it won’t fix their fundamental problem of losing all their music talent, and the legal system would be too slow.

  Other conventions start tweeting in support of the brony musicians, with no one taking BABSCon’s side. (Even if you agreed with BABSCon, would you forever burn all musician goodwill to stand up for a con that’s about to end?)

  Some start airing out dirty laundry from previous BABSCons, alleging the con has a history of mistreating talent. This barely changes my opinion. I assume all conventions have internal drama by default, because logistics is hell and hell is a pressure cooker. To make a convention happen, you must make fast decisions with imperfect info. Any longrunning convention will, eventually, ban an innocent person for sexual harassment. Or fail to screen a stalker for a visiting celebrity. Or some other disaster. There are always stories. I’m not surprised people have bad things to say about BABSCon, now that it’s publicly acceptable to dunk on them.

  Con staff and the former BABSCon musicians enter negotiations, to see if there’s any way they can resolve the strike. The musicians’ give their conditions for performing again:

  • Pinkaboo must be reinstated as concert head.
  • BABSCon head of staff must step down.

  BABSCon staff refuses. Now, in my opinion, firing your music lead 3 weeks before con is dumb. Firing your head of staff 3 weeks before con is just suicidal. As angry as the musicians are about the concert, they consistently tell fans to still attend BABSCon. Many are friends with artists in the community, who rely on con attendees for personal income. Everyone (everypony) still wants the rest of the convention to be great.

  Unfortunately for me, the concert was close to the only thing I wanted to see at BABSCon. I was mildly into brony music pre-2020, and then fell deep, deep into the rabbit hole as a side effect of writing the puzzle Recommendations for Puzzles are Magic. It’s hard for me to explain why I like MLP fan music, because brony music really isn’t accessible. The scene has evolved from “haha mild remix of song from MLP episodes” to “metal song about Sweetiebot from the Friendship is Witchcraft AU that last updated 10 years ago”. That was one of the bigger songs of 2023. These days, an MLP song is likely to have minimal pony references, only implying a side story that happens to have ponies in it. Often it won’t have pony references at all, and the only connection is that the music artist has a pony OC.

  The best explanation I have for how this all “works” is that if you’re a fan of My Little Pony, you automatically give some slack to music made by other fans of My Little Pony, because they clearly have good taste. Then the music recommendation algorithms hijack the existing fandom social fabric to introduce you to new artists. Pony musicians build off each other’s work in a small reference pool, which lets you feel like you’re part of the in-group. Pretty soon you’re radicalized into getting emotional over a song about a unicorn that rediscovers her love of music by whispering to fish. Now that’s a story about life.

  Of the artists in the cancelled BABSCon 2025 lineup, the one I was most looking forward to was Vylet Pony. I was introduced to Vylet through 4everfreebrony’s cover of Little Dreams, then went down her discography from there. Out of her older work, I really like Overrun and The Magic Show, but by far her most famous song is ANTONYMPH. Its music video, a love letter to the Internet of the early 2010s, is a tour de force of nostalgia that kicked off its own subfandom. You’ll usually see at least one Fluttgirshy cosplay at any MLP convention.

  I am partial to the lyra.horse version, an in-browser audiovisual experience made by a trans horse infosec researcher. Nothing about that sentence is surprising if you’ve spent enough time online, which I unfortunately have.

  In the years since, Vylet Pony has amassed an eclectic diehard fanbase. Common themes in her work are “don’t be afraid to like what you like”, loving yourself, and examining trauma through an increasingly complex lore that I honestly don’t bother following. Her work is so unabashed of its inspirations that it circles to being endearing. There is no subtlety: everything is here and extra, for better or worse. In practice, this means I often really like half of a Vylet Pony song and then don’t like the other half, but it also means that when I find a song that hits on all cylinders, it hits very hard.

  Vylet Pony also never performs at conventions, having last performed at the final BronyCon in 2019. She was one of the musicians most outspoken about how she only agreed to perform at BABSCon because she trusted Pinkaboo to keep everything together. I also suspected she only agreed to BABSCon because she grew up in the Bay Area, and wanted to revisit her hometown to reflect on how she’s changed. So I was assuming this was the one and only live Vylet Pony performance I’d get to see, and now it’s gone.

  Well, maybe it’s gone.

  Asgard Is Not A Place

  All the brony musicians who were going to perform are still flying into the Bay Area for the BABSCon weekend. If everypony’s going to be in the same place at the same time, there’s no rule saying they can’t perform somewhere else.

  On its face, moving a concert to a new venue in 3 weeks is insane. But ask yourselves: is this any more insane than BABSCon trying to replace all their music talent in 3 weeks against a hostile crowd? Not really, and the musicians are the ones with the means of production.

  Real traction begins when 15 comes out of hibernation to offer a bunch of money to make a new concert happen.

  I'll pay at least like $5,000 to help secure a new location for the concert if it's still happening (seriously), I was looking really forward to it 😔 https://t.co/1gisC5VE0E

  — 15 🔜 TrotCon (@fifteenai) March 29, 2025

  A bit of lore: 15.ai is a free MLP voice generation site run by an anonymous AI researcher who goes by the name 15. They worked on voice generation before it was cool, and in my opinion, when the site launched in 2020, their model was arguably the highest quality voice generation model in the world. Like, better quality than the models trained by Google. 15 credited this to the very high quality annotations of MLP speech data by the Pony Preservation Project from 4chan. Running 15.ai was expensive, often costing thousands a month in GPU credits, but they never compromised on keeping the site free. This made them a celebrity in the fandom - “horse famous”, as it were. These days, AI voice generation is more serious and controversial, but multiple startups credit 15.ai for creating the market they now compete in. (See the 15.ai Wikipedia page if you want to learn more.)

  15 is known for being reclusive, so breaking their silence for the BABSCon situation was a big, big deal. Over the weekend, the idea gained momentum, turning from idea to official project. Brony musicians began advertising the alternative concert in the BABSCon Discord, calling it “Pinkaboo’s Neighhem”. The name is not an accident. It is a proverbial middle finger to BABSCon, and a reclaiming of a name that the con no longer deserves.

  This announcement sparks some infighting among BABSCon staff. The staff is not a unified front, with plenty of volunteers who disagree with how Pinkaboo was handled. Those volunteers respect the authority of the con chairs, but they aren’t happy about it. At the same time, Pinkaboo haters understand that Pinkaboo’s story is now woven into the story of BABSCon, and it cannot be silenced. They end up creating a #neighhem-planning containment channel, and ignore it the best they can.

  Through a mix of outreach, GoFundMe, and a desire to make everything not be for nothing, Pinkaboo’s Neighhem reaches its funding goal and is officially opened for registration a few days later.

  • It will be held on Sunday evening, at the Fox Theatre in downtown Redwood City. This is to avoid competing with the con, which is scheduled to end on Sunday afternoon.
  • Neighhem will be free, even for people who didn’t register for BABSCon. Donations are welcome to help cover costs. A limited amount of concert merch will be on sale, along with a small artist alley.
  • The music schedule will be heavily compressed, but most of the original lineup will still perform, including Vylet Pony.
  • Thanks to sponsors, there will be free shuttle buses taking people from the BABSCon hotel to the Fox Theatre and back. (Important because public transit will stop running by the time the concert finishes.)
  • Most importantly,

  GO TO THE BUCKING CONCERT!

  

  Meanwhile: What’s BABSCon Doing?

  BABSCon chairs manage to pull together a new set of evening activities, headlined by a music set from Mystery Skulls. This is an impressive pickup, since Mystery Skulls is a “real” (professional) music artist. Their connection to brony fandom is due to owing a lot of their popularity to the Mystery Skulls Animated series by MysteryBen27, an animator from the early 2010s brony scene.

  (If you haven’t seen it, Mystery Skulls Animated is good. It’s the kind of series that raises more questions than it answers, with smooth animation filled with details you only notice on your 3rd viewing, and it only takes 20 minutes to watch everything released so far. Go watch it!

  As for how they got Mystery Skulls to agree on such short notice: Mystery Skulls was scheduled to perform at BABSCon 2020, before it was shut down due to COVID. So they already had a working relationship. In some ways, this is a make-up for the set they should have played 5 years ago.

  Excited to announce I will be performing at @BABSCon
  this year!!
  go to https://t.co/k5NeRt6wFc to get your badge! Use the code “SKULLS” and receive 15% off either a one day or three day badge! See you there ! !! ! #Mysteryskulls

  — Mystery Skulls (@MysterySkulls) February 19, 2020

  (Statements made before disaster)

  Also, money. You can get higher talent if you only have to pay 1 person rather than 15-20. As someone connected to but outside of the fandom, Mystery Skulls isn’t seen as a strikebreaker in the way that a brony musician would be viewed. I mean, they are breaking the strike, but strikebreaking implies the strikers have any intention to come back. They don’t. So, whatever.

  With this, people point out that against all odds, everyone’s gotten what they wanted. BABSCon doesn’t have to deal with Pinkaboo. The brony musicians don’t have to deal with BABSCon. If you wanted to see a concert, now you have two concerts. The official BABSCon concert (now called Burning Mare) is much shorter, and the slack in the schedule is used to shuffle many panels to larger rooms. My panel benefits from this - I get upgraded from a side room further away from the main hub to one of the three main panel rooms. There are still hard feelings, but the average con goer experience really did get better. The breakup is bad, but the divorce is clean.

  With the drama resolved, I can stop doomscrolling the BABSCon Discord, and focus on what’s important: making my panel the best it can be, to play my part in making the con what it is.

  BABSCon, One Last Time

  When I arrive on con weekend, I ask if panelists get a special badge. They don’t, so I just pick up a regular badge and the official conbook. It may just be my imagination, but the page advertising Mystery Skulls feels like it is made of noticeably cheaper last-minute paper stock.

  I immediately head to the con store, because I’m pretty confident they will run out if I wait. I leave with a BABSCon 2025 T-shirt and a coin from leftover BABSCon 2024 merch. My call is correct: the T-shirts sell out by the end of the first day.

  There isn’t too much to comment on for the rest of the con. As I said, I’ve been to enough of these to know what to expect. When I walk into the vendor hall, I do a quick once over, confirm I’ve seen most of the vendors before, and spend my time admiring things rather than spending cash. I do end up buying prints from one of the MLP comics artists that’s attending BABSCon for the first and final time, and two tiny laser-burned wooden pony pieces that were 25 cents each from a gachapon. (I rolled Vinyl Scratch twice, unfortunate.)

  There is a brief protest for Pinkaboo, but it is very brief. A bunch of people in fursuits carry a “We Support Pinkaboo!” flag, pose for a photo op, then disperse.

  

  The food is overpriced, but the gaming area is fun. One of my favorite BABSCon memories from past years is playing 3 hours of Smash 64 against someone continuously salting about how bullshit Kirby is while wearing Trixie cosplay. Just, 10/10 no notes. Unfortunately, the gaming has shifted heavily to Smash Ultimate and Them’s Fightin’ Herds, neither of which I got very into.

  The panels are fun. One is a livecast of a modded WWE game, changing all the wrestlers to look like MLP characters. Another goes through a leaked Hasbro document from early brony fandom, written to help internal employees get up to speed on the fandom. Now it unintentionally acts as a 2011 time capsule. They have a whole section for Steven Magnet. When’s the last time anyone’s thought about Steven Magnet? Or used this meme template?

  

  When it’s time for my panel, I head over early for setup, unsure if con staff will be there to assist me. When I see no one there, I set it up myself. I’m a bit nervous, but as the panel starts I shift into “presenter mode” and the nerves go away. From my standpoint, the panel goes well. I have to live-debug fixing computer audio in the middle, but people are engaged the whole time, have terrifyingly good knowledge of MLP trivia, and ask good questions at the end. After my analysis of the two in-universe My Little Pony escape rooms (yes, there are two of them), I run a solve along of Bottom Lines from DP Puzzle Hunt, Power from Deusovi’s Zelda Minihunt, and Art of the Dress from Puzzles are Magic. We go a bit over time, but it’s 30 minutes until the next panel, so I end up livestreaming a group solve of the Cross Eyed crossword from Puzzles are Magic until we are kicked out. Hopefully I’ve converted at least one person to puzzlehunts.

  With that, there is pretty much nothing left for me to do, besides going to room parties and waiting for Mystery Skulls. I stop by the British themed room party, where I meet a life-size cardboard cutout of King Charles, eat a bunch of snacks they’ve brought from the UK just for the bit, and chat with one of the organizers of PonyCon Holland. He is on a mission to convince people to travel to the EU pony circuit. I mention that I was just in London a few months ago, and he complains that visiting London only means I’ve been to London. It doesn’t mean I’ve been to Britain. I ask what would count as visiting Britain - he says “anywhere but London”.

  We talk a bit about pony cons outside the US, and the recent explosion of the Chinese bronycon scene. I don’t follow the Chinese brony fandom, but I know My Little Pony is massive over there. It feels like China is 10 years behind the US’s hype cycle, and they are living through our 2015-2016 peak of MLP popularity. There are a ton of Chinese MLP conventions and most new merch these days is made for China first. I’m surprised there aren’t many resellers at the vendor hall. I figured at least one person would be trying to profit off them, but I guess the demand for non-English merch is just too low.

  In the US, the massive growth of MLP was followed by a contraction where cons died off. Hopefully that doesn’t happen to the Chinese scene, but it’ll depend how much staying power MLP has over there. If Hello Kitty can be timeless, My Little Pony can too. I hope to see debates over 虹林檎 vs 稀有苹果 for years to come.

  The final BABSCon wraps up with its charity auction, which I am quickly priced out of (the suspiciously wealthy furries continue to sweep the table). As closing ceremonies begin, a few people start boarding the Pinkaboo’s Neighhem shuttles. I am not enough of a pony music person to skip the literal final BABSCon closing ceremony, but it does have an odd sense of penultimateness to it. The real finale’s in Redwood City.

  Pinkaboo’s Neighhem

  

  To borrow a saying from the youth, the vibes are immaculate. The entire concert feels like one huge after party, complete with a custom drinks menu at the bar. According to the organizers, Pinkaboo’s Neighhem got over 1000 signups on their Eventbrite, compared to 2000 registrations for BABSCon. It’s unclear how many people actually showed up, but half the convention looks accurate to me. Pretty good turnout for a last minute unofficial event. Turns out you can just move a concert if everypony wants to make it happen.

  The Mystery Skulls set at BABSCon was fun, but Neighhem is beating it in all dimensions. The venue is nicer. The concert setup is more elaborate, with a larger stage and more audiovisuals. The performer callouts are more specific to MLP fandom. It feels more like a pony rave rather than just a rave.

  I stick around until the schedule gets to an act I’m less excited about, and leave to get dinner at Marufuku Ramen. (Another upside: being close to good food.) As I walk back to the venue, boba in hand, security stops me and tells me no outside drinks are allowed. So I drink my boba outside, suddenly feeling self-conscious about the MLP hoodie and jersey I’m still wearing. But this fades quickly when I remember that cringe is defeated by safety in numbers and not giving a shit.

  When I wore my fursuit on my college campus for Halloween I had many peers who thought they were a spectator to the cringe show that I was, and they’d record me or look and talk about me from far away in their groups- unaware of how good my head’s visibility is. When I noticed someone recording or jeering, I waved and I posed, and they’d either immediately look away or act like it was not me they were recording. They didn’t realize the show was interactive! We have this kind of drive to cringe at and feel better than others, assuming they are static and detached from us, but in reality (especially as we see it now) the “other” might be starkly aware of you.

  (Comment by @riff__rafferty, on The Brony Song That Makes Me Cry)

  In the crowd outside, I spot someone who I remember giving a talk about MLP generative AI at a previous BABSCon. I walk up and say hi. In retrospect, I realize I did not introduce myself at all, and, oops, that must have come off as so awkward. We briefly talk about the state of rationalist AI discourse. It turns out you cannot escape rationalist discussion if you are in the Bay Area, even at a My Little Pony concert.

  I go back into the concert area, picking up a poster since T-shirts in my size are sold out. By the end of the night, Neighhem will have sold literally all merch they made. I alternate between the dance floor area and the cool-down balcony on the top floor.

  

  Midway through one of the sets, there’s a medical emergency, where someone dislocates their knee and can’t get back up. EMTs are on-site, and organizers stop the set to allow the medical professionals to attend to them. As far as I know, the person who fell was just clumsy and got too excited, but out of an abundance of caution the bar cuts off alcohol for the night. Which unfortunately means I never get to try the custom “Pinkaboo” or “Eurobeat Brony” cocktails.

  Concert staff release balloons into the crowd, and for the next few hours, there is a minigame of “keep the balloon in the air”. People start leaving as the night continues, but I am committed to seeing the Vylet Pony and Odyssey sets, even if it wrecks my sleep schedule.

  

  (Source)

  At midnight, Vylet Pony takes the stage to much cheering. Her set doesn’t include anything from her newest album Monarch of Monsters, but I wasn’t expecting it to - it’s not a particularly good “dancing” album. Based on crowd reactions, it is very obvious that most people are here for ANTONYMPH, but I’m happy to recognize songs from Super Pony World, I Was The Loner of Paradise Valley, and Creature City, one of my favorite songs from 2024. Shelly the Android Lobster forever.

  That leaves the final set of Odyssey. Like always, her stage presence is great, and the venue is still packed at 1 AM. When it gets to Luna and Discord, the crowd shouts out the lyrics, because yes, here everyone knows the lyrics. Part of me wonders how much Odyssey likes playing songs from over a decade ago, compared to her new work with way fewer views. But the old brony songs are the ones that pay the bills, cultural touchstones in a fandom that’s been buffeted and weathered but somehow never quite died. BABSCon is over for good, but pony fandom continues.

  Coda

  The BABSCon Discord is now mostly dormant, having turned into yet another MLP chatting Discord, but with a Bay Area lean.

  The Pinkaboo Neighhem Discord also goes dormant, now functioning as another MLP music discussion space. Several months later, Pinkaboo announces that after paying musicians and staff their fees, Neighhem had $1500 left over, which was donated to the music program at New Horizon School, a school for students with learning disabilities.

  The musicians go back from whence they came. Some are still active, while others have either stopped or work professionally under other aliases. A few months after BABSCon, Vylet Pony releases her new album, Love & Ponystep. To quote a review, it is “fearlessly cringe”, and I love it. Fan of “Peace, Love, Glalie”, “Wonka X Howl”, and “Falling in Love With a Corporate Illustration” so far.

  Recently, as my blogging profile has grown, I’ve wondered how much time to spend on stories like these, rather than more “professional” ones. But when I started this blog, I did it to write for me, not for anyone else. Have I learned nothing from pony fandom? Screw it, this post is going up. The point of pointless stories is to tell them. It’s okay to do things for you, even and especially if they aren’t legible to others.

  As for My Little Pony, the world continues to spin. There’s speculation that Hasbro will leverage their Chinese popularity to do a big marketing push for the Year of the Horse in 2026. And as of last week, Variety reports that a live-action MLP movie is in the works. No one is excited by this news. The track record of live-action reboots is really not good. But I remember when Friendship is Magic was written off as a trash cash-in cartoon before it started airing. Then people watched it, and now Twilight Sparkle is a cultural icon. I hope the movie’s good. For now, all there is to do is celebrate what we have and wait for what’s new.

  Comments
• Apr 1, 2025

  Who is AI For?

  Who is AI for right now? There are obvious use cases. Image generation for people who want filler art for work presentations, or just to mess around. Coding assistance for people who code, vibe coding for people who don’t. Speech-to-text for automatic captioning, and text-to-speech for grinding out TikTok videos that read Reddit comments to farm engagement. But also…math contest solving? Science Olympiad questions? Who is that for?

  I think the easy answer to this question is that right now, AI is for the AI developers. People working in AI respect math and science contests, doing well on them is high status, so they test LLMs on those contests, even if most people do not care. It’s why so many LLM developers are focusing on code. It’s why we get announcement posts advertising that a new model is good at answering Typescript questions. Code is useful, it makes money, it is a testbed for AI speeding up the development of AI, and it is easy. Not in it being easy to improve coding, but in it being easy to evaluate. In this era, if it isn’t easy to evaluate, you have no hope. Should we be surprised that people who write code can tell what models are good at coding? Did we focus on code because it was the best thing to do, or because it was the closest thing that seemed approachable?

  People have argued that teaching models to reason in math, code, and science domains generalizes to reasoning elsewhere. To be clear, those arguments are bearing fruit. Yet it doesn’t feel like the only path we could have taken. We say we want our AI to be truth-seeking, and then define truth-seeking as passing unit tests.

  Recently, I sharpened a #2 pencil and took the history section of “Humanity’s Last Exam.” Consisting of 3,000 extremely difficult questions, the test is intended for AI, not me. According to its creators and contributors, Humanity’s Last Exam will tell us when artificial general intelligence has arrived to supersede human beings, once a brilliant bot scores an A. […] Of the thousands of questions on the test, a mere 16 are on history. By comparison, over 1,200 are on mathematics. This is a rather rude ratio for a purported Test of All Human Knowledge.

  Asking Good Questions is Harder Than Giving Great Answers, by Dan Cohen

  If CGP Grey videos have taught me anything, we should have been asking the historians what it means for something to be true. Or philosophers, if the point was to build rigorous arguments in natural language. The story of philosophy is people writing increasingly nitpicky arguments attacking imperfect, imprecise definitions of how to view the world. Not that that’s my cup of tea, but if people in another universe got reasoning to work with a DeepConfucius or OpenAristotle model instead, I wouldn’t have been surprised.

  People talk about \(p(doom)\), but not \(p(good)\) or \(p(thrive)\). It’s as if people assume \(p(good)\) is exactly \({1 - p(doom)}\), that any case outside the worst case will be amazing for the world. I don’t think people make this assumption explicitly, it’s just in the way people talk. No one would seriously think this on reflection, right?

  I’m working in AI because it pays well and is potentially really good for the world. The x-risk questions are worth consideration. But I would claim that even assuming the existential risk questions are overblown, AI’s not going to be good for the world unless we (the field) proactively work for it. I think that requires more engagement with outsiders and more intentional choices of domains to focus on than we’ve done so far.

  When OpenAI first announced their video generation model, Sora, they gave closed beta access to a few filmmakers to see what they made of it. The result was that it didn’t help much, because the model didn’t understand the filmmakers, because it wasn’t in the data and OpenAI devs never spotted it as an issue.

  With cinematic shots, the ideas of ‘tracking’, ‘panning’, ’tilting’ or ‘pushing in’ are all not terms or concepts captured by metadata. As much as object permanency is critical for shot production, so is being able to describe a shot, which Patrick noted was not initially in SORA. “Nine different people will have nine different ideas of how to describe a shot on a film set. And the (OpenAI) researchers, before they approached artists to play with the tool, hadn’t really been thinking like filmmakers.” Shy Kids knew that their access was very early, but “the initial version about camera angles was kind of random.” Whether or not SORA was actually going to register the prompt request or understand it was unknown as the researchers had just been focused on image generation. Shy Kids were almost shocked by how much the OpenAI was surprised by this request. “But I guess when you’re in the silo of just being researchers, and not thinking about how storytellers are going to use it… SORA is improving, but I would still say the control is not quite there. You can put in a ‘Camera Pan’ and I think you’d get it six out of 10 times.”

  Actually Using Sora, by Mike Seymour

  To be fair, I assume Sora is better at this now, given that this article was from last year. OpenAI deserves props for asking for feedback in the first place, because many do not.

  I’ve lurked in a few fan art communities in my time. The artists did not know what AI was, but when they learned, they quickly decided they did not want it. But we automate art because we can, and it’s easier than learning to do the plumbing. Do the plumbers want AI? Genuinely, I don’t know. Maybe someone should ask them.

  Things move fast in AI, and we’ve speedrun the journey from cute toy to symbol of capitalism and big tech in record time. If people expect their benevolent AGI to cure cancer, stop aging, and open up new vistas of knowledge, it’d be real cool if we make sure that’s actually something we focus on. Since right now, I’m not convinced we are. It feels like the most likely outcome is that people go all-in on pushing raw intelligence, in the way that AI developers can measure it, leaving behind those that are not like AI developers. We’ll follow the path of easy-to-generate text rather than text that encourages a better life, take the road of whatever gives the best PR, and eventually marvel when we create the final victory of capital over labor. It doesn’t feel like a great path to me. I don’t know how much power I have to change that path. I just feel some notion to make it a little better.

  Comments
• Jan 28, 2025

  MIT Mystery Hunt 2025

  This has spoilers for MIT Mystery Hunt 2025. Spoilers are not labeled or hidden.

  I feel I have been slower about this year’s post than last year’s. There are no deadlines here, but last year I got my post done before TTBNL’s AMA, and I only started on this post by the time Death & Mayhem did theirs.

  To spoil the answer to this puzzle, Death & Mayhem have been impressively on top of things, hosting their AMA the Wednesday after Hunt, and being on top of things was just a running theme. This year’s Hunt was really solid. I enjoyed it more than their 2018 Hunt, which is commonly cited as an all-time good Mystery Hunt. In part that’s because I was remote in 2018, so I missed all the in-person energy from that year, but I do think the rounds from 2025 rivaled some of the concepts from 2018. One of the hypest things you can do in a puzzlehunt is backsolve a meta, so of course I would like the hunt where we backsolved five of them. (And they weren’t even all Shell metas!)

  It did make me a little wistful about writing 2023’s Mystery Hunt. A lot of 2023’s writing goals were to write something analogous to 2018 (fewer puzzles, weird and difficult metas, go all-in on what teammate values, scale down Hunt). I know it’s stupid and doesn’t make sense, but throughout the weekend I was thinking “dang, this is what could have been if we’d executed better”.

  During wrap-up, Death & Mayhem said they were “a little bit capital E Extra in everything we do”, and, yes, that came through. It was great, 10/10, very strong theater kid energy, like Death & Mayhem had charged up 7 years of power level and went nuts once they got to write Hunt again.

  

  From Paranatural

  High-Level Thoughts

  Hunt was won at a reasonable time. Sunday 11:47 AM, hooray! That being said, it still felt long because Cardinality won so far ahead of everyone else. Would definitely have preferred Hunt go shorter by another few hours, but can’t complain too much.

  The decision to give every team a radio was insane, very cool, and probably should not be repeated. I did not do any radio puzzles besides listening to the weather (more on that later), but we did break our radio when we plugged it into charging while the radio was still on. We got it fixed, but it was indicative of how much of a headache it looked like to support.

  The Gala made a lot of sense in-story, and I would echo that it was great to run into hunters from other teams during the few times I visited. I’m not sure how many people it took to staff, but I would like something similar to come back.

  Story-wise, I think it’s just hard to tell a story within a puzzlehunt. You have much more success if you instead focus on conveying a certain vibe or aesthetic, and then let that aesthetic carry the plot for people interested in the story. In that respect, I feel this hunt delivered the crime noir aesthetic really well, even if I didn’t fully remember everyone’s name or secret.

  As for the unlocks…

  Choose-Your-Own-Adventure

  I think if you want to do a choose-your-own adventure unlock system, this Hunt was a good implementation of it, and showcased its strengths. The choices were informed, so teams could solve the puzzles that sounded exciting to them. It enabled a lot of strategizing on whether to go all-in on one round or spread out. It is much more likely that every puzzle is worked on by many teams, rather than the final feeders in unlock order getting shafted.

  The open-world nature of Breath of the Wild was brought up as inspiration, but that invites the main criticism of Breath of the Wild. Since there is little guarantee on shrine order, most shrines in Breath of the Wild are flat in difficulty, complexity, and reward. It is much more interesting to find a shrine than to complete it. In this Mystery Hunt it was reversed, where the act of unlocking is easy but the value and difficulty of a feeder varied. Sometimes you open a puzzle that’s harder than expected and just go down 1 width. (Looking at you, Do the Manual Calculations.)

  I had a lot of fun with the choose-your-own-unlocks. I am not sure if our hunt ops team felt the same way? To borrow a metaphor from Defunctland’s FastPass video, some people enjoy planning their trip to Disney World, and some people just want to go to Disney World. My experience was much closer to the “go to Disney World” side. I saw puzzles get unlocked, with no idea what round they were in, and I worked on them because I assumed hunt ops was only unlocking puzzles that helped Hunt progression. Meanwhile, the first reaction of our hunt ops to the key system was “this is going to be a disaster”, since it added lots of tiny decisions on top of their existing large scale decisions. I do hope it was a fun disaster, rather than a real disaster.

  The eventual teammate key system was this:

  • Hunt ops owns all the keys and clues. No one else gets to use them unless hunt ops says it’s okay.
  • The owner of our Hunt management system modified their bot to send a Discord alert whenever we revealed a new puzzle.
  • Team members asynchronously vote on puzzles they want to work on, where a vote means you will actually work on it, rather than watch other people work on it.
  • Keys will be spent based on votes made, taking round prioritization into account. Ping hunt ops if keys haven’t been used in a while.
  • Hunt ops planned to convert the 1st clue to keys, then reassess.

  This was all pretty uncontroversial. Where it got controversial was when we got our 2nd clue, hunt ops did a discussion, and declared that we would be saving all future clues to push feeders in endgame metas. After failing to finish last year, we were pretty determined to finish this year, and optimized for that outcome. As we progressed through the Hunt, exciting sounding puzzles would sit there, being unlockable if we cashed in clues. This was exacerbated when hunt ops decided to stockpile 3 keys after we’d made some progress on the Illegal Search meta. The reason they did so was because they strongly suspected more puzzles were gated behind Papa’s Bookcase (“clearly the bookcase of an escape room will hide another room”), and stockpiling would let us immediately push further progression in the round and avoid stalling out. This was a correct prediction, and getting an instant 3 unlocks post-Bookcase definitely contributed to us finishing that round early. The problem was that they didn’t tell everybody this was the plan. So multiple people saw that we had keys, and weren’t using them even on reminder ping, when hype puzzles like The 10000-Sheet Excel File weren’t getting unlocked…

  Personally, I never felt like I ran out of puzzles to work on. There was always something in motion that I could contribute to, and puzzles were big enough that 4+ people could work on them productively. However, I did notice that we never really had a puzzle that sat untouched for a long time, like I’d seen in past Mystery Hunts. Based on asking other teams, teammate was on the low end for clue to key conversion. We converted 1, Cardinality converted 2, Galactic converted 3 and regretted converting the 3rd, Unicode Equivalence converted 3 and also regretted it, Providence converted 3 and didn’t regret it, TSBI converted 3, Setec converted 4. It worked out for us, but I can totally see how it would have been more fun to just unlock all the things.

  Choose-your-own-unlocks have had two good showings this year and in 2018, but I’d be hesitant to say that’s evidence for it as the default. The data is not that it works, it’s that it works if you’re Death & Mayhem and have 100+ people helping out on the week of Hunt. I have enjoyed all the Huntinalities, so I trust Cardinality whatever they choose.

  Pre-Hunt

  Our story begins with the Gala invitation.

  

  In previous years, teammate has tried to solve puzzles from pre-Hunt material. Every time, they were not a puzzle. After doing this for 5 years, we’ve stopped trying. The general thinking was that the Gala invitation was a puzzle, but it wouldn’t be solvable without shell from the main Hunt.

  When we eventually did unlock the invitation puzzle, and found it had no shell, we were surprised. Supposedly Cardinality pre-solved the puzzle because “teammate is definitely going to pre-solve it and if we don’t we’ll be behind”. Sorry to let you down? We also failed to pre-solve the Dan Katz Puzzle Corner.

  Ignoring the puzzles for a bit, the invite suggested cocktail attire. This was very convenient for me, since I was attending a wedding before Hunt. (The couple specifically picked the week before Hunt because many of their friends are puzzle people.) That made it incredibly low effort to show up to kick-off dressed up. teammate did a group order of bowties as well. Did you know you can buy boxes of 40 bowties for $25 on Amazon? It was surprisingly cheap to play along.

  

  

  I did have to figure out how to get my blazer to Boston without wrinkling it in my carry-on. The solution was to be stylish and wear it on my person, which meant I also dressed up at wrap-up and in the airport.

  In my free time pre-Hunt, I went to Puzzled Pint, where I tried to all-brain a logic puzzle (solve it without writing anything). This was a terrible idea. I also went to some museums in the area, and got involved in a heated argument about vegetables in the teammate Discord. It is not worth re-litigating, but my takeaways are that some vegetarians dislike salads, people like vegetables more if they’re cooked (shocker), and “screw zodiac signs, what vegetable are you?”

  

  Friday

  After kickoff finished, we went to our on-campus classrooms, and puzzle release went off without a hitch. Honestly, I’m not sure why no team has thought of “don’t refresh the page, let it live update” before. It’s such a good idea.

  Missing Diamond

  XOXO - This was our first solve of the Hunt (hooray for the Activity Log to make checking this easy). I will always be proud that we outraced the logic puzzlers working on Unreal Islands. Identified two pairs then focused on transcribing pairs into the grid for extraction.

  Downright Backwards - By the time I got to this puzzle, the entire grid had been filled out, and my one contribution was asking if we should try the opposite interpretation of the z-direction (which was correct).

  Battle Factory - I have been watching some Gen III Battle Factory speedruns recently. Luckily this puzzle got solved faster than those speedruns, with much less RNG. This is a cute idea, I’m surprised I haven’t seen it before.

  📑🍝 - I did not work on this puzzle, but got many confusing DMs until I understood what was going on. This turned into an interesting litmus test for how other teams were doing, based on when they asked for 🍝.

  🔎🧊 - A little annoyed with the final extraction step of this puzzle (really wanted it to be only adjacent letters, rather than any pair), but I liked everything before it. This was the first puzzle I did coding for this Hunt, to brute force finding the words. There was a clean way to implement it, and the way I did it (8 nested for loops).

  Zing it Again - The first set we found was Weird Al (as expected). We found the Bob’s Burgers set pretty soon afterwards, but could not find the HM set for a long time. I was pretty happy about breaking into that one, definitely enjoyed the B-B-B-BAD TO THE CHROME rebus.

  The Boardwalk - I worked on all the metas in Missing Diamond, because, well, I like working on metas. I didn’t come up with any of the extraction ideas for this meta, instead I did advocating for the ideas I did like. Took us longer than it should have to find THE BEATLES, because we didn’t realize The Beatles Collectors Edition could have a space for THE BEATLES. We also expected letters to get extracted from the entire board, and assumed we were missing feeders since all our letters were only in one half. Luckily, one person decided to submit exactly what was in the sheet from the 5/5 feeders we had.

  Also, I don’t think anyone else has mentioned this: it’s kinda insane Death & Mayhem implemented 3 minigames just for the Boardwalk story interaction? Like, what? I tapped into my God Gamer genes and won all of them. They don’t seem to be replayable, hope they make it to the archive!

  The Jewelry Store - The meta crew next looked at The Jewelry Store, breaking in pretty quickly. Interestingly, when we broke in, all of our 5/7 feeders were adjacent in the chain. That hurt the wheel of fortune attempts, and we needed a 6th feeder to solve it. I thought the backsolve would be easy, but there was a surprisingly large set of valid answers and we ended up forward solving the last feeder.

  The Art Gallery - When I started looking at this meta, we’d already IDed the Crayola and RGB steps. Another teammate did a sort by length, and I noticed the UNICODES partial. From there it still took us a while. I refuse to believe there’s a good canonical source for this, we tried both Wikipedia and the Crayola fandom page and they gave conflicting data. At one point, I decided the most canonical source would be to use an eyedropper tool on colors from the crayola.com website, but then that was inconsistent too and not the one used for the puzzle! (At least for Flamingo Pink.) Our solve relied on putting all the options into different spreadsheet tabs and squinting until an answer came out.

  (Aside: for the Art Gallery interaction, we were asked to investigate Papa’s secret, which was in either his wallet, his office, his car, or his study. It was set up as a forced choice, where only one option would progress the story. I know this because we voted for every other option first. I want it on the record that I voted for the correct option every time, who keeps their deepest secrets in their car, why did so many people vote for that.)

  On the Corner - We knew this puzzle went to Art Gallery, which we’d solved. The backsolve had failed, and eventually we said “how hard can it be to forward solve a puzzle?” My contribution was 1) working on the Tech Corner puzzles while 2) not noticing that all 4 Tech Corner puzzles had already been solved in another tab. I assumed Dan Katz was in on it and it’s so funny he wasn’t.

  The Casino - We were down to our final Missing Diamond meta. I noticed all our feeders contained a card value, started with a suit letter (C/D/H/S), and ended with a suit letter (C/D/H/S). From this, we concluded that each answer defined two hole cards. One was the number + suit from the last letter. The second was an undetermined number + suit of first letter, and we would find that number based on what worked for the given hands.

  Now, that’s not exactly how the meta works…we had 5/7 feeders and it just so happened that we were missing the two feeders that would have broken the pattern. After failing to solve, we decided to go get another feeder.

  Be Kind, Rewind - This puzzle definitely reminded me of the similar one from Puzzle University, but that puzzle was fun and so was this one. I was drawn to this puzzle for the movie ID, but then it turned into more than that. I am very thankful that although teammate is young, they are still old enough to know what Blockbuster was. I don’t need to feel any older from Mystery Hunt.

  The Casino, Revisited - Now that we had an answer breaking the pattern, we thought more about how to use the cards. Looking at the most constrained hand (10♠/A♠ or 9♠/10♠), I noticed we had both of 10♠ and A♠ in our answers, and had no diamonds (which was good for uniqueness of the first hand). I proposed the correct idea and we solved pretty quickly, backsolving No Notes to clean up the round. At wrap-up, we wondered why our team wasn’t in the team photo montage, and that would be because we backsolved the submission puzzle for it. Oops.

  The Thief - Paraphrased version of our solve: two people go out with the radio, returning an hour later.

  “Yeah, we’ve followed the entire path but don’t really know what to do with it.”

  “You know about the grid on the round page and all the witness statements we’ve been collecting in the spreadsheet, right?”

  “…What?”

  Stakeout

  I spent most of my Hunt working on the tougher, meatier puzzles, so I did not spend much time in the Stakeout round. Stakeout width was deliberately kept low (around 1-2 until meta unlock, then 0 after Chinatown unlocked). I joked that we were practicing sustainable fishing.

  The Ultimate Insult - Man, I opened this puzzle a few minutes after it had unlocked and it was already done. I’d like to think our 6 minute solve was the fastest, but I bet some other video gaming team did it in 5.

  Fight Night at Mo’s - This puzzle felt a little weird. Once we broke in, we started unrolling the bracket, but then realized all the extraction notes were either in round 1 or the finals, meaning you could ignore almost all the matches. I initially thought this would be about Moe’s Tavern, but nope, that was a different puzzle.

  Control Room - I stopped by this puzzle to spectate the madness. We assumed “rotate the camera” was going to be meaner than it was. Our expectation was that our remote camera view would rotate by 180 degrees, and we’d have to do all future directions from an upside-down camera feed.

  Some Assembly Required - I see we’ve continued the meme of having a puzzle named “Some Assembly Required”, from 2023 to 2024 and now 2025. I’m looking forward to solving “No Assembly Required” in Mystery Hunt 2026, a puzzle that gives you the answer for no work.

  Background Check (Friday)

  He Shouldn’t Have Eaten The Apple - When solving this puzzle, the first location we IDed was Adam’s Peak, which inspired many Adam conspiracies, like trying to make Tomb of Adham Khan work. We eventually got out of this rabbit hole by finding the UNESCO connection. We skipped the step of putting the locations on the map, by guessing the correct sort order. I will say, it took us a long time to get the joke of “they are all ruins”, it felt pretty unmotivated before that and only tenuously motivated after that. Still, if you have an in with Adam Conover, you gotta use it.

  Paper Trail (Friday)

  World’s Largest Crossword Puzzle - Author of World’s Largest Logic Puzzle: “I feel like if I don’t work on this puzzle, I will have committed a crime.”

  My contributions were 1) pointing out the clues for “Zero” and “One” were bolded, clearly indicating how input worked, 2) solving both clues incorrectly with NULLED and UNIQUE, and 3) leaving for another puzzle, making my contribution worse than useless.

  At some point during the solve, the author of WLLP shot down an idea saying “It can’t be that, because when I tried constructing that idea, it was impossible.” Just a truly deranged solve. teammate solved this in 2 hours, and I am pretty confident that will be fastest solve once more detailed stats are out.

  Illegal Escape (Friday)

  By the time I understood the round gimmick, we’d already applied all the operations. It’s a cool concept for a round, that I mostly missed, but you can’t see every cool thing during Mystery Hunt weekend.

  (A Puzzle of the Dead) - This puzzle was annoying to transcribe data for, but quite solid all the way through. Each section takes 40 seconds to display, and there are 8 sections to see, which added up. Once we got the message for the first destruction’s encoding, I failed to find the online decoder for it, using a jank Python script I found instead. “What could go wrong with executing arbitrary code from the Internet?”

  Once we got to the rhyme scheme step, I suggested that it could work like Reflections on a Milky Steed Who’s Quite Amphibious, Indeed. With the comment that “15 years is long enough to reuse an idea”, two of us put in the letters, getting excited that we’d hit exactly 26 rhymes. Unfortunately, we had some data errors. We flailed until the Saturday 1 AM cutoff, and I took a look in my hotel room for a bit before going to bed. It got solved the next morning when someone checked our work. It’s not until I read the author’s notes that I realized the poems were constrained to not use the letters U or O. Props on the construction, that sounds so painful.

  Murder in MITropolis (Friday)

  esTIMation dot jpg - It was interesting to break into this overnight. But first, let me backup a bit.

  At time of unlock, we had time to send 2 groups, one at 11 PM and one at midnight. Our first group got wrecked due to lack of MIT knowledge, so we remade our second group to have more former MIT students and they did better. They also said the Friday midnight esTIMation was incredibly lit - I heard someone got engaged 15 minutes before the interaction? Wild.

  Overnight, some images from esTIMation were posted to our #crowdsource channel. I was working on (A Puzzle of the Dead) at the time, but took a look and successfully IDed two of them. This baited me into doing another hour of image searches, but I didn’t find any more matches.

  Saturday

  Murder in MITropolis (Saturday)

  esTIMation dot jpg - We sent two more groups of people, at 8 AM and 9 AM. These were considerably less lit than the midnight run. With 2 more visits of data, and more fresh eyes, we successfully nutrimaticed the answer from 6/17 letters, right before our 10 AM group went for round 5.

  Give This Grid a Shake - As we solved the crossword clues, I looked in my folder of past puzzlehunting scripts, and found a file called boggle_bash.py. While other teammates worked on building the Boggle board by hand, I did code archaeology to investigate what this script did. After reading, I determined my script constructed 4x4 Boggle grids from a list of contained words, which was exactly what we needed. I put in the constraints, it output the correct 4x4 grid in 25 seconds, and I put it in the sheet. I was told I absolutely had to tell this story in my blog post, so there you go. (The epilogue no one else knows is that I then tried to modify it to solve the full 6x6 board, but it got handsolved before I could make all the required changes.)

  At the time, I didn’t know why I had this script, but now I do. Four years ago, we suspected a metapuzzle worked via Boggle, so I wrote this script to try to generate all possible boards given some missing feeders. The script didn’t work, because the meta wasn’t Boggle based. I’m glad my work was useful 4 years later!

  We Can Do This All Day - It was not until wrap-up that I learned this was not intended to be the obligatory scavenger hunt. Before then, I’d discussed it with a teammate as an interesting innovation on how to make the scavenger hunt less grindy, while maintaining the seat-of-your-pants bullshitting that makes the scavenger hunt fun.

  I am overall ambivalent on the scavenger hunt, I think it’s fun but it’s always fighting the tightrope of taking too much time to prepare entries for. We solved this by prerecording each task at multiple locations before calling Death & Mayhem for our 2nd attempt.

  Engagements and Other Crimes - As mentioned earlier, we did not presolve this puzzle, but we did bring the original invitation keepsake, so we didn’t have to print it. Which was good, because our access to printing was pretty low this year, given many MIT students had aged out and were now just alumni. We did end up printing another copy anyways.

  

  What Do They Call You?

  

  A Map and a Shade (or Four) - On initial unlock, the person who spent the key said “oh no, this was a scam”. I took a look and said it wasn’t obviously a scam, since it was definitely something with US states and four coloring. We sat down and started making some derivations. Then, Jargon got unlocked.

  Illegal Escape (Saturday)

  Jargon - Literally everyone at my table said “LINGO PUZZLE” and left me to the geography wolves. I decided I could not defeat the geography wolves on my own, and bravely retreated to Jargon as well. This got started by like 10 people simultaneously - most of my contribution was repeatedly pinging people to come to our table instead, since we’d had the most progress and relaying info in the sheet was way less efficient than crowding around 1 computer.

  During this, A Map and a Shade (or Four) had gotten picked up by another group. Once we’d finished Jargon, I decided that actually I didn’t need to work on a US geography logic puzzle, and moved to something else.

  Murder in MITropolis (Saturday, Part 2)

  Beyond a Shadow of a Doubt - This one was nice. The main idea comes together pretty elegantly, but the actual grinding is really non-trivial even if you know what you’re doing. Potentially we could have jumped to the final dropquote and solved around the missing info, but we ended up solving it sequentially and I proposed the final correct idea for how to use the colors.

  The Killer - I helped on IDing a few pages (the ones for Wonderland and Berkeley), but then moved to other puzzles. Only now do I understand the calls for a Morse code nutrimatic. I’m guessing someone did implement one by Hunt end.

  Background Check (Saturday)

  The Tunnels Beneath the Institute - This was, just, like, the weirdest dataset. Finding the AC Installation Tutorial genuinely broke me. We did not go far enough to get to the central a-ha, as I was instead baiting into searching a different cursed dataset from…

  Story Vision Contest - This puzzle was pretty fun, it’s surprising how much overlap there is between the two datasets. My introduction to this puzzle was “here’s a clue that talks about churning butter, which you’d think would be from a fairy tale, but is actually from Poland’s 2014 Eurovision song where a sexy model churns butter in the choreography.” We sped up a lot of the song ID by guessing the puzzle would use the most famous or popular performances from each country. The motif IDing afterward was a bit less fun, but we got through it before it got stale.

  Alias - I didn’t do anything for this metameta. I just wanted to mention that teammate backsolved The Mark, then guessed the correct metameta pun from 2/3 pieces on the first try. Background Check meta team was cracked.

  Paper Trail (Saturday)

  Of the later rounds, I spent the most time on this one, both on feeders and the metas.

  Do The Manual Calculations (Don’t Try Monte Carlo) - I ran far, far away from this puzzle. We filled up two blackboards with calculations, getting to the CORRECT partial on Friday, but did not solve until Saturday. Long story short, there was a mistake in an earlier board that still extracted the right letter for the CORRECT checksum, so much of Friday was spent with an incorrect grid that didn’t work for the puzzle. This took a long time to notice and fix.

  

  Follow the Rules - I jumped onto this puzzle because I had just come off doing a bunch of research puzzles and wanted to poke a black box. We got 7 of the rules, but couldn’t find a consistent explanation for the last 2. To handle this, we turned to brute force with code, since \(3^9\) is plenty small enough.

  Ignoring the two missing rules, there were 38 solutions. Four of us split up the work manually checking which one solved the puzzle, by which I mean, one of us said “oh, I got it” on the first solution they tried, and the rest of us checked another 15 solutions to convince ourselves the solution was unique. It was unique, that person was just insanely lucky.

  We still didn’t know the last two rules, but one person pushed for generating all trigram constraints for each section, assuming it used ternary. The first section extracted CAL and they were adamant it would continue LIN for CALL IN and so forth. I thought this would be too messy to do (you’d get 40 trigrams per set for some ugly regex), but then they pointed out you could verify each section on the website even if you don’t understand all the rules, as long as you mentally apply the permutation on the website’s output. That was enough to finish the puzzle.

  Star Crossed - We got through the first step of the puzzle without too much issue, although we were stuck on “SHTBYELEVEN” for a bit, trying to turn it into a final cluephrase (SHOT BY?). As one of us left to go talk with hunt ops, they said “this can’t just be a word search, that would be lame”. I realized it could be “SHIFT BY” instead. That was confirmed by the answer checker, so we kept going.

  The policy on confirming partials has become more lenient over years of Mystery Hunt. This is partly because of the shift to automated answer checking, but it’s also likely driven by broad trends in the adjacent field of escape room design. Rooms have moved from advertising their low finish % to advertising how fun they are. People prefer confirmation on their partial progress more than the abstract idea of only submitting answers when you are confident you are done. I think this is fine? Partials getting confirmed haven’t stopped people from writing good puzzles.

  We did the shift, did the next step, got the “find names of Venus” message, and then got stuck. The only names we’d be able to find were ISHTAR and VESPER. Although we suspected the puzzle would continue to use 6-long names of Venus, we just could not find more. In a bid to try to make more famous options like APHRODITE work, I created a conditional formatting version of the grid with APHRODITE letters colored, which was…not so helpful.

  

  We abandoned the puzzle, with notes to try finding more names of Venus, and some fresh eyes did the grunt work for the solve a few hours later.

  A Weathered Note - Throughout Hunt, we had written down the weather reports coming in, but we had done a really half-assed job of it since there was always something more pressing. (We includes me here, my scrawl for Stockholm was unreadable.) I was hyped to finally use the weather data, but our data was low enough quality that it was better to begin from scratch. This turned the start of the puzzle into the world’s goofiest Pomodoro - 25 minutes of research about weather telegram codes from the late 1880s, then short breaks to transcribe the weather. Every time the weather came in, we would shout “WEATHER!” to get the room to be quiet. Unfortunately, the puzzle solve jingle was louder than the weather broadcast…

  

  Fortunately (unfortunately?), the time it took us to find and understand the 1887 War Department Weather Code was long enough that we were never bottlenecked on weather reports. Our bottleneck was what you’d call a “skill issue”. We got up to the last step, but failed to figure out the correct interpretation of “retiring after this last transmission” and got stuck. When the Shell Corporations got unlocked, I abandoned the weather in favor of those shells. We solved the puzzle on Sunday after getting a hint.

  Despite getting stuck, I think the cluing was fair and this was one of my favorite puzzles from Hunt. In an absurdist way, it was so fun to tell people “SHUT UP I REALLY NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE WEATHER”, and the relevant documents were just the right level of obscure.

  (I think there’s actually a small mistake in the solution too? For Los Angeles, the river is rising at -1’, 6 tenths. I translated this as JAY rather than JAMES. My interpretation of the pg 65 river report table is that for negative values, you should read each section backwards, lines after the bolded -N foot header are for -(N-1) K tenths. This is consistent with the height of the river ascending as you go down the page, and makes JAY be -1’ 6 tenths with JAMES as -0’ 6 tenths. The reason I believe this interpretation is because the alternate one makes it impossible to encode -0’ 6 tenths. This mistake didn’t really affect solvability, we solved that clue correctly with JAY.)

  Shell Corporations - In conjunction with the metameta, these were definitely the highlight of my Mystery Hunt. Soon after we unlocked the shells, Death & Mayhem came by for a team check-up, asking about our meta progress in particular. We delightfully told them our progress on The Killer was “54 PDFs”. The narrator for the weather was part of the check-up team, and we jokingly asked if we could hear the weather in Los Angeles.

  “Sorry, there are union rules. I can only give you the weather at very particular times.”

  “We’ll pay you triple your rate!”

  “I get paid $0, so that’s not a lot.”

  “…Your union needs to negotiate better.”

  The people working on The Killer debated what they could ask about their work, but we were quickly told that we were absolutely not getting hints on anything, which let us know we were doing well. We continued work on the shells, solving Shell 1 forward and solving Shell 3 with 0 feeders via a Vigenere brute-force, but failed to progress further. Late in the night, we broke into the mechanic for Shell 6, and I spent my hotel room evening trying to construct cryptics without much success.

  Sunday

  I would end up spending my entire Sunday on Paper Trail, because once we broke into the shells, it was too exciting to do anything else.

  Paper Trail (Sunday)

  Shell Corporations - When I arrived, we were very confident something weird was up, but weren’t sure exactly what. The metas just felt too much like spaghetti, reminiscent of Pokemon and Sci-Fi metas written around tight constraints. I even looked at AllSpark in hopes it would help us solve Shell 5.

  Our leading guess was something like, “there is a backsolved feeder we can’t submit like Safari Adventure, and also feeders go to multiple shells”, based on the feeder count and us really liking PENROSE for Shell 1 but not succeeding on any backsolve. Meanwhile, all our Shell 6 work was on the wrong track thanks to an early guess on RANGE that was entirely incorrect.

  At this time, HQ called us and said we could now ask for hints. We knew Cardinality was about to finish thanks to seeing literally their entire team in the Gala, so I took the opportunity to get the hint we desperately needed for A Weathered Note and came back in hopes the extra answer would let us break in on a new Shell.

  By now, we had divided our HQ into two rooms. One room was “The Shells room”, and the other was “The Everything Else room”. We gave a runthrough to some people who’d joined the Shells rooms, and one person asked a pivotal question: shouldn’t shell corporations contain other shell corporations?

  With this prompting, we realized Shell 3’s answer could be excellent for Shell 4, and asked across the room if anyone else’s shell wanted Shell 1’s answer. The Shell 2 group said it worked for them, and the entire room perked up. Realizing we should now attempt backsolving metas, we backsolved Shell 7, re-forward solved it to get the answer for Shell 4, and then things got loud as everyone shouted desired constraints and backsolves across the room. While re-forward solving Shell 4, Papa’s Stash got solved, unlocking the blacklight puzzles.

  Illegal Search (Sunday)

  Jargon (Under Blacklight) - Can’t believe the Lingo people left me to the wolves again!!! Rude. They barged into the Shell room (as the person who had all progress was working on Shells), went straight to our Lingo re-solve, re-solved the puzzle, and then immediately went back to the Everything Else room.

  Paper Trail (Sunday, Part 2)

  Looking back at Shell 4, we understood the feeder constraints, but not how to forward-solve the puzzle, and moved on to other metas. The rest of our solve path was a backsolve of Shell 6, a side-solve of Shell 2, a forward solve of Shell 8, a partial forward solve of Shell 5 (enough to understand the feeders it used), then a backsolve of Shell 5 before we finished the forward solve to unlock Shell Game.

  The Shell Game - The majority of the Shells room was asked to finish forward solving Shell 6 to resolve the graph, while a smaller group of around 8 of us double-checked the shell graph and debated metameta mechanics. I verified that yes, that shell does go to itself, we’d put it in as a “fuck it we ball” placeholder and now that we had 100% info I confirmed it as “yep we do ball”.

  The rough idea from the mechanics team was to draw paths using our feeders, but the edge counts didn’t line up the way we wanted (number of unique letters was off in an unhelpful way). To fix this, our team tried writing feeder answer letters out of order, which felt unsatisfying. As Shell 6 got cleaned up (including the “what the fuck” update to our graph), I volunteered to go to the Gala to verify we weren’t totally off track. At this time, it was 5 PM, hints were free-for-all, and we really wanted to make sure we got to do the runaround.

  On my way to the Gala, I ran into a huge contingent of Providence solvers in the hallway, and reported that Providence was likely about to finish. I got confirmation that our graph was correct, and that our idea was mostly correct, with a nudge to “consider the entire corporate structure”. This was just big enough for me to get the correct idea, which I messaged ahead as I walked back. When I entered the Shells room, there was only chaos. The Killer had been solved on my walk back, so everyone had migrated to the Shells room. There were 4 working copies of the puzzle (2 on blackboards, 1 in Excalidraw, and another in someone’s solo program), and we decided not to consolidate them, instead treating each as a redundant backup in case others hit a contradiction. I decided I literally would not be able to get close enough to the blackboard to contribute to the graph, and spent my time discussing meta puns instead. Our solve went through a bit after 6 PM, and to celebrate, we mass-unlocked our remaining Stakeout puzzles to chew on while waiting for our endgame interactions. I contributed a bit to Men’s at My Nose, but mostly helped on cleaning up our HQ.

  Endgame

  As explained in the wrap-up, in the runaround, teams ended up at the Finster vault. The door was locked with an audio lock installed by Sidecar. To open the lock, we needed to do Foley sounds for a 3 minute silent movie. Only one person could see the movie through a hole in the vault door. The room would record audio as the movie played, then it would play back the movie (with recorded audio) on a big projector.

  The audio in wrap-up explaining this was a bit muted, so, for your viewing pleasure, here is our first attempt.

  Yeah, in retrospect, using audio cues to signal people during sound recording was a bad idea. Others and I recorded this with the plan of referring to the recording for the 2nd attempt, but Death & Mayhem quickly came over and gave an in-universe speech about how it was impossible for us to have such compact video cameras in this day and age, and that we should only look at recordings later. We did it properly the second time. Or more accurately, we spent so long writing down and planning our coordination that Death & Mayhem told us “the lock’s not that sensitive”, so that they could clear the vault for the next runaround. We opened the lock, and finished Hunt.

  I helped clean up HQ, then walked through the snow with a few others to the MIT rhythm game room to fumble on DDR, get confused about the knobs on Super Voltex, and play exactly 1 song of CHUNITHM.

  

  

  This post ended up being a lot longer than I expected it to…but that is how all my Mystery Hunt posts go. This is my 10th post about Mystery Hunt, a milestone I find slightly disquieting. I never went to MIT, but after over 10 weekends of attending, there are campus corridors I recognize by heart. I feel privileged that I get to experience this narrow and biased slice of MIT culture every year, and I’m looking forward to seeing people next year.

  

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