I'm not sure why I keep wanting to do this to myself. Silicone is gross, my floor is even grosser, and it's painstaking and time consuming and nothing ever goes right. But I got funded by the excellent Techx, which can reimburse selected projects up to $500 in funding for a project to display at the annual Techfair at the end of January. It really let me splurge and do this project all-out, as far as materials goes. But while all of this cash is great, it does mean that I had very specific check-in deadlines I had to have results for. It's the golden rule of cosplay, folks. Cheap, good, fast: pick two. And apparently I picked good and fast, so it was really the funding that allowed this all to come together.
As it happens, the major deadline for a halfway point happened during the same weekend as the annual MIT Mystery Hunt. For those of you joining us new to the world of the Institvte, Mystery Hunt is a huge world-reknowned puzzle hunt, where dozens of rounds of steganographic codes, ciphers, and real-time activities are released for solving, in the hopes of one team eventually finding the location of a coin hidden somewhere on campus. The hunt typically starts on Friday and goes until at least Sunday, sometimes spilling over into Monday. I've participated in Hunt with a very large team for three years now, and hunting is a 24-hour activity. While I'm not as hardcore as some of the hunters, I like to be on site at HQ to help people solve and bounce ideas off of others, so I was rushing back and forth in the ten minute walk and four flights of stairs between hunt HQ in the Stata center and my helmet in my room on Fifth East.
