I Turn 42 in 3 Weeks

And despite being pretty busy these days (like, continuously), I'm going to do another birthday project—specifically, a blog series that I've been thinking about for a while. Look for a more detailed explanation right here tomorrow.

Meanwhile, in the big city...


https://youtu.be/UE8VpRie1Ik

I Love Twitter You Guys

Because Twitter is where magical things like this happen!

I Have Some Busy Weekends Coming Up

For the record, I'm not doing this as a #humblebrag or anything douchey like that. I'm writing this down as yet another reminder of all the crap I need to do BECAUSE I'M OLD AND I FORGET THINGS OKAY.

This weekend is GameStorm 17 in downtown Vancouver, where DeeAnn and I are re-running a modified version of the "Number Five Is Alive" puzzle hunt from JoCo Cruise 5. We'll hopefully also have time to play some games ourselves, and go to the Doubleclicks concert! Some of Thursday night's events will be in the hotel garage, which should be interesting.

Next weekend, after we do our taxes dammit, I'm going up to Seattle to help staff the Clarion West table at Emerald City Comic Con. I may or may not also have time and energy to wander around the con stalking Gail Simone, but mostly I want to go help out an organization I love (ObDisclaimer: I am a CW alumnus) and hang out with some awesome writers.

The first weekend in April is our friend Maria's birthday, and our other friend Natalie is organizing a chocolate field trip through Portland. You're either super excited and looking forward to this or deeply sad that you can't join us.

The second weekend in April includes my pal Fonda Lee's book launch party for her debut novel Zeroboxer! And probably a few hours prepping the next Puzzled Pint event, which may or may not include scrambling to lock down locations in all cities and/or last-minute revisions to puzzle materials. Did I mention we're an all-volunteer, non-commercial event?

And with any luck, one month from now on April 18th, we'll actually have some free time to relax and watch the third season premiere of Orphan Black.

I Should Be Reading

This is more of a reminder for myself than anything else. I know the usual mantra is "You Should Be Writing," but in my case, I've gotten to the point where the writing itself is not an issue. (I recently told my agent that I could crank out 1,500-2,000 words an hour in first draft mode, and yes that is a check my body can cash. I also don't find it hard to spend 6-8 consecutive hours at a time revising a piece.)

I'll never be able to read all the stuff I want to read, or all the stuff I really ought to read (like this year's Nebula nominees). And let's not even get started on the stuff I'd love to re-read. But I can read more.

It's not just the "read widely" thing that everyone recommends. It's not purely professional (or mercenary) interest. And it's not just for pleasure, either, though a good book will always remind me of how much I love reading. It's about knowing what's out there, learning other stories and voices and people.

Maybe I need a guy to just send me random books, à la Major Bennett Marco's friend in The Manchurian Candidate. You know, Principles of Modern Banking, History of Piracy, Paintings of Orozco, Modern French Theater, The Jurisprudential Factor of Mafia Administration, Diseases of Horses, novels of Joyce Cary, Ethnic Choices of the Arabs. Things like that.

The Portland Food Pyramid

A cautionary tale: this is what happens when you spend too much time on social media.

On Thursday, I tweeted about my lunch at Burgerville. Technically, I guess it was a sub-sub-tweet, since I didn't mention the name of the restaurant or even the specific food items (pepper bacon cheeseburger, waffle cut fries, chocolate milkshake). Anyway. My fellow Portlandians Wink and Brian added their own remarks, and then Larry cascaded it into a very cheesy conversation.

Meanwhile, on Facebook—where my tweets get auto-cross-posted—others continued the ad hoc comedy workshopping. And because I have nothing better to do on a Friday night than answer Puzzled Pint e-mails and watch Downton Abbey, I decided to turn my hasty sketch into something more suitable for Thomas to post in his kitchen.

Here's the original:

@sparCKL/566073118629048320/photo

And now (drum roll, please) the new hotness:

snout.org/pfp

The pictured foodstuffs are (top to bottom, left to right):

• Hot Sauce: Secret Aardvark Habanero Hot Sauce
• Beer: Puzzled Pint (logo by Victor Asteinza; not actually food, but definitely a Portland institution!)
• Whiskey: Eastside Distilling Burnside Bourbon
• Butter: Tillamook Butter
• Caffeine: Stumptown Coffee Cold Brew "Stubby"
• Chocolate: Moonstruck Milk Chocolate Mayan Bar
• Fat: raw bacon (stock photo by Floortje)
• Salt: J&D's Bacon Salt (actually a Seattle company, but I'll allow it because BACON SALT)
• Starch: Kenny and Zuke's Pastrami Cheese Fries (photo by Robyn Lee for Serious Eats)
• Sugar: Voodoo Doughnut Maple Bacon Bar

I'm not sure when in the process the diagram became Portland-specific, but it just felt right. Also note that everything is covered in cheese because come on why wouldn't you do that.

If this infographic amuses you, <zoidberg>HOORAY!</zoidberg> And Happy Valentine's Day? Feel free to share the permalink: http://snout.org/pfp

So that happened.

This concludes tonight's episode of How's Curtis Wasting His Goddamn Time Now? Come back next week for more frivolity. Or just follow me on Twitter if you simply cannot wait that long.

<3 CKL

I am no longer the President

...of "Team Snout." But I am still the Captain of Team Snout. Confused? I'll explain.

My wife and I and our friends started running Stanford-style puzzle hunts, which were then known as "The Game," way back in 2001. At first it was all completely unofficial, and we never took in very much money in registration fees—all we wanted was to cover our material constructions costs. We didn't charge our players for our time and labor, or for any of the scouting, prototyping, or other exploratory work we did before calling a "go" and announcing the event. It was all for fun.

Then, in 2006, we got ambitious: we decided to put on a Harry Potter-themed event, including booking train rides to and from the event and making a freaking magic wand. This was going to cost a lot more than any of our previous Games. In fact, the overall budget was over $25,000, which also covered van rentals for every team and several meals along the way.

Boring tax information follows: If any one person on the team were to report that income on their personal tax returns (and yes, you do have to report all income, even if you spend it later—that's what "gross" means, and that's why you're taxed on the salary you eventually spend on rent and groceries and cats and Netflix), they'd be over the allowed "hobby income" deduction percentage (I think it's about 2% of AGI) and would have to pay several thousand dollars in additional taxes. And that's just not cool. (ETA: OK, so I don't really understand all the tax stuff. Ask DeeAnn if you want to know the details.)

The solution: we formed an unincorporated association in the state of California and registered it as an educational non-profit "to bring together those who are interested in... puzzle hunts, and to increase public awareness of the sport... by producing puzzle hunts." If you're interested, you can read the full Articles of Association for Team Snout (revised 2009).

And that worked really well. We were able to open a separate bank account for Game-related funds and file a separate tax return for the association. We hit a couple of bureaucratic hiccups along the way, but managed to defend our non-profit status and avoid paying the annual business/corporation fees (something like $800 in California). We ran two more Games after Hogwarts—Midnight Madness and WarTron—and co-sponsored several Game Control Summits with Shinteki.

However, now that DeeAnn and I—two out of three of the association's officers—no longer live in California, we've re-focused our Game-running efforts on other events and activities (Puzzled Pint, for one). The puzzling landscape has also changed significantly in the last few years, with escape rooms gaining popularity and weekend-long hunts declining. And there's always been name confusion, since we played Games as Team Snout before forming the association named "Team Snout" to run Games. To be frank, we've never been very diligent about the official-ness of it. It's all just for fun.

Last year, at our annual business meeting, we voted to dissolve the "Team Snout" association and follow the model used by many other groups and businesses who run events: to form up a legal entity when needed for a specific event, then disband afterward. We just weren't doing enough, continuously, to justify the additional overhead of maintaining the association.

Thanks to Bran McMillin for the modified logo :)

So "Team Snout" is no more. (I will continue to use the "Snout" name for personal purposes, as I have in the past, and hopefully remove some of the confusion that's existed around this.) We've donated our remaining funds—just over $1,000—to Elevate Tutoring, Bob Schaffer's California educational non-profit group, which continues to run puzzle hunts. You know, like ETPH3 - Zara's Big Adventure, which happens on January 31st and February 8th and can also be played online. Go check it out!

I can only speak for myself, but I was very happy with all we did as "Team Snout" and were able to do because we were an association. DeeAnn and I certainly learned a lot about forming legal entities, and if we ever decide we want to do it again for something else, we'll have the benefit of experience to help us get started. (Along those lines, if anyone has legal or tax questions about their own hobby groups, feel free to ask!)

What's next? Well, we and our many cohorts will continue to run Puzzled Pint, which may be adding two more cities in the next few months. Crazy! And I may have other big news to share soon, but let's not count our dinosaurs before they've hatched.

SnoutCast #213: Team Snout is Dead. Long Live Team Snout!

This is the end: after more than four years of lackadaisical podcasting, DeeAnn and I are hanging up our... microphones? headsets? I dunno. Anyway, we're stopping now. It's been fun, but it's time to move on. (This also coincides with the dissolution of our California non-profit association, which we talk about in the show.)

Thank you to everyone who listened, commented, or supported us in other ways for the duration of this endeavor. We got to talk to some really cool people, and managed to spark some great conversations. We learned a lot, and we hope we gave you something to think about along the way.

Don't worry, we are going to continue running puzzle events—honestly, it's pathological at this point—and you'll definitely hear about them (figuratively) on the Internet. But we'll do it under other names which are more suited to the specific event. Those names may or may not include the word "Snout." Always in motion is the future and shit.

Here's one last overshare: our podcast planning spreadsheet! Note that the proposed "topic notes" don't always match what we actually ended up talking about...


https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key= 0Aj84p6-RxYgWdHRYVVlyT3pmM3EwYkxEOFhkRkV5Y1E& usp=sharing

Finally: we forgot to mention in the podcast that as part of closing down "Team Snout," we donated our remaining funds to Elevate Tutoring, another California non-profit which regularly runs puzzle hunts. Go check out their latest event, ETPH3 - Zara's Big Adventure, happening on January 31st and February 8th!

Thanks again, everyone. Run More Games.

[ Download mp3 ]

Show length: 35:21
File size: 33MB

Stuff and things:

• Andrea Phillips' weekly podcast The Cultures
• Cully Long's book How to Puzzle Cache
• Puzzled Pint, of course

Follow @TeamSnout on Twitter for more!

What Else?

• Chris Dickson's Exit Games UK
• Dan Egnor's Puzzle Hunt Calendar (and Escape Room Directory)
• Rich Bragg's ClueKeeper

Tell us we're wrong on the Internet! E-mail podcast@snout.org or post a comment at www.snout.org/podcast.

Music: instrumentals from "Code Monkey" and "Tom Cruise Crazy" by Jonathan Coulton

[ RSS feed / iTunes link / Stitcher link ]

 

I Now Own Part of a Private Island

One square foot, to be precise, in the place known as "Hawaii 2," which the horrible people at Cards Against Humanity actually purchased—and then gave away—as part of this year's Holiday Bullshit shenanigans.

Here's where my real estate is located:

Maybe I'll visit it someday. Maybe not. Seems like a lot of trouble.

There was also a large-scale, online puzzle hunt associated with this year's CAH promotion, which ended at a safe hidden on the island. Read all about it on Boing Boing, Max Temkin's blog, or ARGNet, and see the Reddit community writeup of how the puzzles worked.

I May Have Gotten a Bit Drunk along the Way

DeeAnn and I went on an epic quest last weekend to collect McMenamins Passport stamps. She was our designated driver, and I did my best to chronicle our journey on Twitter and Instagram:

StampsQuest 2014
https://twitter.com/sparCKL/timelines/504524715923230720

In all, we visited 25 different McMenamins locations, and I collected 39 stamps, including bonuses and experiences. (I've had my passport since early this year, but DeeAnn only got hers this weekend, so I'm ahead of her by approximately 16 stamps.) I am now 54.3% of the way to Cosmic Tripster status!

A word on our methodology: We always stopped and had at least two drinks (one for each of us) at each location. It wasn't humanly possible to eat at every single place, especially when we were doing seven or eight stops in less than twelve hours, but we wanted to actually spend some time in each new place.

As the late Joe Cotter's epigram on the back of the passport says: "If you ever get to it, and don't do it, you may never get to it to do it again!"

We did observe other people doing drop-ins, where they just asked for a passport stamp and left immediately. Several of the servers we spoke to said that behavior is not uncommon, and the staff don't really care one way or the other. But many years of running The Game and Puzzled Pint have made us sensitive to the quid pro quo of asking locations to host players.

Anyway. Most of the remaining McMenaminses are around Portland, but we'll have to do another road trip out west to catch the two bars which weren't open when we visited last weekend, plus a separate jaunt down to Bend. We also plan to hit some Washington state locations when we drive up to Seattle for our friends' housewarming party next month. THERE WILL BE TWEETING.

Meanwhile, for other questing perspectives with much more detailed travelogues, check out Portlander Gretchin Lair's "McMenamin's[sic] Passport Project" blog, which she began this month; and Seattleite Todd Springer's "My McMenamins Passport Odyssey," which he started in January (the latest update was in mid-April).

I had a great Memorial Day weekend

As shown in these spoiler-free photos, and one video:


http://goo.gl/FtyEY7

DeeAnn and I traveled to the Bay Area to visit friends and participate in a few different puzzle-hunt-ish events, including Team Snout's annual business meeting, volunteering for Shinteki Decathlon 9, playing the Cluekeeper "Stanford Puzzle Tour" with Larry Hosken, and attempting to "Escape from the Moon Base" (our first Real Escape Game experience) with Larry, Corby, Yuan, and Mike.

It was a great trip, albeit a little exhausting: was California always so brutally sunny? Or have we just grown accustomed to the Pacific Northwest?

SnoutCast #203: Stacy Costa

This month, we talked to the world's only female enigmatologist, Stacy Costa at the University of Toronto, who helped create the recent "Research Matters" Virtual Scavenger Hunt!

[ Download mp3 ]

Show length: 49:49
File size: 47.8MB

Our conversation topics included (but were not limited to):

• The Puzzle Instinct, a book by her mentor, Marcel Danesi
• The variety of Clues in the "Research Matters" Virtual Scavenger Hunt
• How this may or may not be the company which hired Stacy to write puzzles for their cereal boxes
• That guy who cheated at a sudoku competition (and was eventually disqualified)
• "Memory & Imagination: The Role of Enigma," a University of Toronto Continuing Studies class Stacy will teach this fall
• The Toronto Star's That's Puzzling! magazine, compiled weekly by Danesi & Costa

Follow @Stacy_A_Costa on Twitter for more!

What Else?

• Sign up to play DASH 6 on April 26th in a city near you
• Check out Puzzled Pint on April 8th in Portland, Seattle, London, Missoula, or Chicago
• Find more events on Puzzle Hunt Calendar

Tell us we're wrong on the Internet! E-mail podcast@snout.org or post a comment at www.snout.org/podcast.

Music: instrumentals from "Code Monkey" and "The Future Soon" by Jonathan Coulton

[ Subscribe to SnoutCast / iTunes link ]

  

More Information Than I Required

If it weren't for robo-calls to the wrong phone number, I would have absolutely no idea what was going on in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Thanks, imperfect automation!


Download MP3

I Enjoy Hunting for Puzzles

The statement above should come as a surprise to exactly no one, but I thought I'd use this space to clarify the spectrum of my liking for various puzzle and presentation types.

But first, just in case you've wandered into this blog totally at random:

Hi. I'm Curtis Chen, and I'm a puzzle gamer. I first played The Game at Stanford University in 1996, and I ran my first Game in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2001. Since then, I've run or helped run more than fifty different puzzling events, including:

• the Hogwarts Game (2006);
• annual Game Control Summits (2007-present);
• Puzzled Pint (2010-present);
• the JoCo Cruise Crazy puzzle hunts (2011-present); and
• WarTron (PDX 2012, Boston 2013).

You could say I have a bit of a Gaming habit. Possibly even an obsession. (Sadly, not a career; I have been paid less than half a dozen times for doing puzzle-hunt-related things.) But I don't love all puzzles or puzzle events equally.

To the layperson, all puzzlers may appear very similar, but--as with any special interest group--there are many fine distinctions and gradations within our ranks. Certainly, there are those who love any kind of puzzle (broadly defined), whether it's a logical brain teaser or something math-related or pure wordplay. Some people just want to SOLVE ALL THE THINGS. But I suspect most are like myself, with definite preferences and dislikes.

I've been credited with coining (or at least popularizing) the term "underwear puzzles." I'm not a big fan of puzzle events that are just a bunch of puzzles you could have solved by yourself, at home, in your underwear; i.e., which don't take advantage of real-world interactivity. I prefer Games that actually get me out of the house and put me into unusual situations to have new experiences. I'm not really into the great outdoors per se, but if you tell me there's a puzzle hidden somewhere in the forest, I may spend a ridiculous amount of time searching for it. Because that's something I would probably never do otherwise, and I might never visit that location ever again.

It's all about the reward. I've tried a couple of "conference room" puzzle hunts--of which genre the granddaddy is, of course, the MIT Mystery Hunt--and they're just not my bag, baby. I do enjoy the intellectual challenge of any given puzzle, but I get bored very quickly. And for me, getting more puzzles to solve is not really a compelling reward; I want something else, like a new location to visit or a new bit of story or even an amusing video clip. Just give me a break before dumping another bucket of puzzles on my head.

Related to that, I enjoy team-play events more than solving by myself, but I prefer "linear" hunts to the "batch" model. (BTW, I'm just making up words here; feel free to suggest better terminology in the comments.) In a conference room hunt, you may have a huge team--say twelve people--and a large number of puzzles "unlocked" at any given time, which means that very often you'll end up with sub-teams of two or three people working on different puzzles. It then becomes impossible for any single person to solve, or even see all the puzzles, since you're racing against all the other teams to finish first. (Or possibly second, to subvert the tradition of the winning team running the next event.)

I approach puzzling events from more of an audience perspective, as opposed to a competitor perspective. When I'm reading a book, or watching a show, I want to enjoy the experience as it's happening--and if I'm really in love with it, I may not want it to end. I rarely watch a show or read a book just to be done with it, and I certainly don't compete with others to read faster or more than anyone else. Similarly, when I'm playing a Game, I don't care too much about my team's ranking relative to other teams (as long as we're not last!)--I care about whether we're all having fun. And it's more fun to solve puzzles at our own pace, without the added pressure of an artificial competition.

"But wait!" you may say. "Isn't Puzzled Pint exactly the kind of sit-around-and-solve event that you hate?" Well, first of all, I never said I hated conference room hunts; they're just not my favorite. And Puzzled Pint does get people out of the house, albeit to just one location. I don't know if I would play Puzzled Pint if I weren't on GC, but I support any attempt to draw puzzlers out of their shells to meet and interact with each other, and PP has certainly done that in Portland, Oregon.

Let's face it: we puzzlers are mostly just the kids who were good at homework, all grown up and looking for more problem sets to do. We may not all be introverted xenophobes, but we're all socially awkward to some degree--and even if that describes most of the human race, we may be more painfully aware that our particular hobby is way, way outside of the mainstream. It usually takes me five to ten minutes to explain puzzle hunts to any given stranger, and the two most typical responses are either "I could never do that" or "what do you win?"

And that's why I support all puzzling events, even if they're ones I wouldn't personally play in. Do you want to run Puzzled Pint in your city? Talk to us, we'll help you get started. Are you opening a new puzzle-related business? I will pimp it as hard as I can.

Because we're all in this together, and encouraging more people to have fun by exercising their minds will make the world a better place.

We few, we happy few, we band of puzzlers;
For he to-day that solves this Clue with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This Game shall gentle his condition!

(with apologies to William Shakespeare)

TONIGHT: I Sing the Ignite Portland Electric

Portland! 7:00PM! Hollywood Theatre!

I'm one of the speakers at tonight's Ignite Portland 12, "a fun, fast-paced, evening of presentations where speakers gather to share their knowledge and passion."

Here's a sneak preview of my first slide:

And yes, it will be something completely different from my previous talks on puzzle hunts and cat feeding robots. Tune in to the livestream at igniteportland.org to watch me blather about words and music!

Now Hear This

Eventually, somebody's going to figure out that these recorded messages are going to the wrong place.

Meanwhile, here's more (in Spanish) from the Los Angeles Unified School District!





Feel free to post your English translations in the comments. :)

SnoutCast #189: Chasing the Raven (Part 2 of 2)

Here's the second half of our conversation with Rich Bragg, Dan Egnor, Wei-Hwa Huang, and Jonathan McCue about their experience playing in the Ravenchase 2013 Great America Race. (You can read their daily blog posts, including photos and puzzle details, at "Bloody, Smoking, and Burning.")

ALSO: Would you like to solve Curtis' 40th birthday puzzle? Or rate this podcast? C'mon, it'll be fun! Thanks in advance. :)

[ Download mp3 - 21 MB ]

04:18 - ...and now, the conclusion!
22:18 - The End

Tell us we're wrong on the Internet! E-mail podcast@snout.org or post a comment at www.snout.org/podcast.

Music: instrumentals from "Code Monkey" and "Tom Cruise Crazy" by Jonathan Coulton

[ Subscribe to SnoutCast / iTunes link ]

     

SnoutCast #188: Chasing the Raven (Part 1 of 2)

What was it like playing in the Ravenchase 2013 Great America Race? Rich Bragg, Dan Egnor, Wei-Hwa Huang, and Jonathan McCue tell us all about it! (You can read their daily blog posts, including photos and puzzle details, at "Bloody, Smoking, and Burning.")

You'll hear the second half of this conversation next week. Meanwhile, tell Curtis how you first met him!

[ Download mp3 - 22 MB ]

00:59 - "American"
23:39 - The End

Tell us we're wrong on the Internet! E-mail podcast@snout.org or post a comment at www.snout.org/podcast.

Music: instrumentals from "Code Monkey" and "Tom Cruise Crazy" by Jonathan Coulton

[ Subscribe to SnoutCast / iTunes link ]

     

The Famine Teams: District 12, Mining

Jasper here! This is part twelve in a twelve-part series, looking at the teams who will be playing in The Famine Game this fall!

District Twelve is home to a whole lot of miners! No, not minors, miners! People who do mining! You know, digging stuff out of the ground! Like coal, or diamonds, or ancient alien artif--oh, never mind!


Trivia question: Two of the players shown below are working together on a puzzle hunt event scheduled for 2014! Do you know who they are? Scroll to the bottom of this blog post for the answer!

---

12 Hangry Nerds
South Bay CA and Seattle WA


http://youtu.be/gJttrcQ-C6o

That person is wearing Google Glass! They may even have recorded part of this video #throughglass! I guess that is pretty cool, but cats don't like wearing things on our heads. I don't even like wearing things around my neck! Anyway, that training montage sure is something--all it's missing is some 1980s rock 'n' roll music! I have every confidence that Dan, Ederlyn, Francis, Richard, and Yuan will be prepared for whatever challenges await them in the Capitol!

---

Coeds on Fire
SF Bay Area


http://youtu.be/VZfJhRuR57A

Hey, wait a minute! These six people are actually three couples--two of them married, and the last engaged. Now I'm just a cat, but going into a possibly life-or-death contest with your significant other seems like a terrible idea! What are Dale & Linnsey and Wei-Hwa & Trisha and Melinda & Corey thinking? Well, maybe they just love each other so much they can't bear to be separated for even a single weekend. I suppose I can respect that! Humans are weird.



And that's all the Famine Game teams!

If you have more free time, you can watch all the public Famine Game application videos, including some teams who were not selected as tributes. I feel bad for them, but on the bright side, they've got that whole weekend free to do other fun things!


Trivia answer: YUAN NIU and COREY ANDERSON are the "lead coordinators" for next year's DASH 6!

tell the humans what you think of SNOUTCAST

hello... i'm TYE and i know some of you listen to the humans on their podcast every week... if you enjoy their talking... please consider rating or reviewing SNOUTCAST on the ITUNES STORE... i know they would really appreciate it...

i'll tell you how... it's so easy even a DOG could do it... OH SNAP

first try this... click on this link here...

https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/snoutcast/id348528472

that web page should have a blue button that says VIEW IN ITUNES... click that blue button to launch your ITUNES app... then SKIP DOWN to the DETAIL PAGE instructions below...

otherwise... if that doesn't work for you...

START HERE

first... open ITUNES and click the button that takes you to the STORE... as shown below...

easy huh... next... go to PODCASTS and then type SNOUTCAST in the search box at the upper right corner of the window... look at the screenshot here if you have trouble finding it...

you should see some search results... at the bottom should be the spiffy new SNOUTCAST logo... click on that...

SKIP HERE IF THE WEB PAGE THING WORKED

now you are at the DETAIL PAGE for the humans' podcast... just select RATINGS AND REVIEWS and you will be able to RATE their show... anywhere from one to five stars... or write a detailed REVIEW so other humans can know more about this show...

for example... you could tell them that they do not have enough CATS on the podcast... i know they talk about us quite a bit but we have never been featured guests... WHY IS THAT I ASK

anyway... i'm sure the humans will appreciate any feedback you would like to give on SNOUTCAST... you can also e-mail PODCAST@SNOUT.ORG if you have stuff to say to them directly... bye now

Haven't We Met?

I've ordered some rain for tomorrow
PDX will be sunny but wet
And out of nowhere you're suddenly there
And I say, "Yeah, pardon me, have you filled out my 40th birthday survey yet?"

(with apologies to the late Kenny Rankin)

Don't worry, I'm only going to be nagging you to complete this survey for a couple more weeks. And if you're not convinced you want to participate, for whatever reason, please scroll past the form and read on.

(scroll down to see all questions)

Embed not working? Go to http://snout.org/40survey

Back in 2010, I ran a birthday art project called "37 Postcards", in which I asked people to send me postcards from their home area and tell me why they lived there. DeeAnn and I had cross-referenced a lot of city data before deciding to move to Portland; we weren't constrained by jobs or family, so we could choose to live anywhere we wanted.* I was curious why others lived where they did, and what they liked about their home areas.

I scanned in each postcard as it arrived, and you can see all of those images under the 37postcards label on this blog. I've received 59 so far--and counting! So, to coin a phrase, HUGE SUCCESS.

I've been wanting to do another "birthday ask" for a while, maybe even make it an annual tradition, but I didn't hit upon something that seemed interesting and worthwhile until now.

I have never really been sure how I appear to other people, and though I know I've changed over the years, personality-wise, I don't know if my outward appearance has altered significantly. And it's not really something people will tell you directly; very rarely do people look me in the eye and say, "I think you are _____." It's something I have to suss out indirectly, by noticing their reactions to my behavior. And I'm not very good at reading people.

So, I figured, why not just ask people about where they met me, and what their first impression of me was? Which would also capture how long we've known each other, which is interesting information, and totally quantifiable. (Even though this is a completely unscientific survey, I still like to have some hard facts.) It would be a weird question to ask out of the blue, but hey, it's my party, I'll poll if I want to.

Just to be clear: I am not fishing for compliments here. I'm very glad to see that at least a couple of people have given not-necessarily-complimentary answers, because they were honest, and that's what I want. I want to know if I seemed less than friendly when we first met. I want to know if I did something especially good or especially bad. It's all signal, and I want the feedback.

So. If you haven't completed the survey yet, it should only take a few minutes. At least take a look?

http://snout.org/40survey

If you can, please respond by the end of this month (Monday, September 30th, 2013). Thanks in advance!



* We did limit ourselves to the continental United States, because we didn't want to risk any international quarantine issues which might prevent our cats from coming with us.