Trivia useful for puzzles

Authoring Story Research and Design
61

ooh I didn’t know that about tarot decks!

Now, what do you call a book made from binding a stack of unfolded sheets along one edge?

That’s perfect binding. I believe they’re still printed on a big sheet and folded, except the folded sections get their spines chopped off and glued instead of sewn. They can technically also be described as folio/quarto etc in the traditional sense, based on how many pages were printed on each side of the sheet, but it’s not common.

One probably can make an A8 sized A0 256mo, by cutting the A0 paper before folding, eg cut to A7 size that you then fold in half to get A8. if you don’t have a paper guillotine and also don’t want to cut pages open as you read that’s the way to do it. If it’s a printed book the imposition (arranging PDF pages so they print in the right order) would be so complicated though…

62

Another bit of card-related trivia.

There is a method where, given a deck of up to 27 cards, you can deal the deck out in 3 groups, ask another person which group a card of their selection, and repeat for a total of 3 rounds and identify the other person’s chosen card based purely on the mathematics of the order cards are dealt and picked up. I forget the exact details, but basically, the method assigns a 3-digit ternary number to each card and the dealing process is such that which of the three groups a card ends up in each deal encodes a digit of its number. And while this works with a deck up to 27, it can be done with smaller decks, so its a good trick to perform with the major Arcana excluding the fool from a Tarot deck, dividing the cards up into sets of 7… Pretty sure it can be extended to larger decks but requiring more rounds of dealing and more groups(e.g. dealing a deck of 64 cards into 4 groups of 16 4 times or a deck of 81 into 3 sets of 27 4 times, or a deck of 49 into 7 sets of seven just twice.

2 Likes
63

You know how Game of Thrones has the king sitting on the Iron Throne, made from the swords of everyone he’s conquered? There actually is a historical attestation of an Iron Throne belonging to the Hittite king Anitta, though for a very different reason!

Around the start of the Hittite Empire, iron was the most expensive metal in existence. It was plenty common, but most of it was bound up into ores, and it was impossible for humans to separate the metal from the stone. Only the gods could do that, and humans had to seek out the thunderbolts the storm god hurled down in his battles with monsters and try to extract the iron from the melted remains. (That is, meteorites.)

For comparison, looking at the prices specified in the Hittite Laws:

  • Tin wasn’t directly mentioned, but in the surrounding area it was a bit cheaper than copper
  • 160 pounds of pure copper would buy 1 pound of silver
  • 32 pounds of silver (on average) would buy 1 pound of gold

And in Anitta’s era, around the start of the Old Kingdom, eight pounds of gold would buy one pound of iron—and that price was considered an absolute steal. Merchants at the time were instructed never to accept copper for iron, because the amount of copper you’d need to make a fair trade was simply too high to work with. Going by these ratios (which are, note, averaged across a pretty big timespan), you would need 90 pounds of copper to buy a single gram of iron.

So when Anitta boasts about having a throne and scepter made entirely of iron (or more likely plated in iron, but he calls it “the Iron Throne” all the same), that’s a hell of an achievement! For most of their history, the Hittites were the undisputed masters of ironworking, and they steadily developed techniques to extract more and more of it from alloys and ores (though the empire didn’t survive to see actual mass production). And they liked to show this off by having ceremonial implements and jewelry (both royal and religious) made of iron. Every meteorite they recovered was a manifestation of their storm god’s power, after all! The proper Game of Thrones equivalent to Anitta’s boast would actually be something like “The Valyrian Steel Throne”: the rare fantasy metal that can be reworked by humans but can’t be created by them.

(We don’t have a ton of information about Anitta’s reign, but near the end of his famous Proclamation (CTH 1) he describes how he razed the city-states of Harkiuna, Zalpuwa, Hattusa, and Salatiwara. Then his main surviving rival, Purus’handa, decided to submit to his authority rather than fight, and provided him with “a throne of iron and a scepter of iron” (1 ĜIŠŠÚ.A AN.BAR 1 PA.GAM AN.BAR) as tribute.)

Like a lot of my recent facts, this is probably more useful for worldbuilding than puzzle design, but I find it fascinating just how valuable iron was before the invention of smelting. “This is a rare and precious material that humans can’t make, only the gods can make” is a staple of fantasy, but for a while it was actually true!

7 Likes
64

Interesting, because gives an insight on the end of the bronze age in Italy:

an item (allegedly) from above, and quickly cloned, by a mortal, into 11 replicas, for hiding the original in plain sight. so, the legend seems to stem from a transitional era, when was conceivable that mortals can replicate items from heaven. If we justapoxe with the hittite story, we can posit that in the days of Numa (700-650 BCE) the metallurgy in central Italy was transiting from bronze to iron. Interesting hypothesis…

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

2 Likes
65

This was the first card trick I learned as a kid! You deal the three piles face up as you would deal hands in a card game, one card to the first, next to the second, etc. I would lay them out in columns so that they were all visible. You ask the spectator to think of one of the cards they see and ask them which column their card is in. You collect the cards and repeat the whole process two more times. The trick is to always put the column they identified between the other two as you collect them. The last time you collect them, their card will be in the 11th spot from the top of the deck. Reveal it as you like.

2 Likes
66

Huh, I did recently learn of King Tut having an incredibly valueable dagger of meteoric iron among the treasures found in his tomb, but for some reason, it didn’t click that that might make Iron the platinum of antiquity… and makes me wonder what the Hittites would think about Japanese smiths turning rusty river sand into top quality steel.

Also, I’m reminded of how the Pyramidian of the Washington Monument was made from Aluminium because at the time, Aluminium was more valuable than gold because we didn’t have the modern tech that allows it to be one of the cheapest metals in common usage.

Also, I feel like it’s worth noting that Amethyst used to be much more expensive than it is today, having once been a true precious stone.

And speaking of meteoric metals, one of the smoking guns for the Asteroid that killed the dinosaurs is the high abundance of iridium in the rock layer at the K-Pg boundary… which has made me wonder at the feasibility of forging a pair of daggers from a pair of T-rex teeth and coating them in Iridium from the K-Pg impactor or even forging solid iridium daggers shaped like T-rex teeth.

67

Here’s a trick for surviving an attack from an alligator: A Florida Girl Survived an Alligator's Attack by Shoving Her Fingers Up Its Nostrils

1 Like
68

The question now is, how do you phrase that as a parser command?

69

put/insert/stick finger/fingers in/into/up alligator/gator/alligator's/gator's/-- nostril/nostrils/nose

(but add more synonyms and phrasings :slight_smile: ).

2 Likes
70

Pick gator’s nose…

Still sounds like a good way to lose a hand… though I’ve heard a average human is strong enough to hold a gator or croc’s jaws shut as apparently they invested all their evolution points in making their jaws close strongly, but almost nothing in strength to open them.

Also, I feel like there’s a puzzle to be had in having an Alligator and a Crocodile as obstacles and the player has to figure out which is which… admittedly, I’ve got no clue how to tell them apart and no idea if there even is a well-defined difference by modern definitions with the way evolutionary genetics have overturned so much of what biology thought was true based on morphology.

71

The hostile parser won’t let you refer to it until you’ve proven which of the two it is!

72

In hard mode, it turns out it’s actually a caiman?

1 Like
73

As far as I am aware, Crocodiles and Alligators are still classified separately, even by modern standards. Alligators have a U shaped jaws, and when their mouth is closed, you should only see their top teeth outside, whereas Crocodiles have V shaped jaws, and you can see both their top teeth and a few of their bottom teeth on the outside when their mouth is closed. Caimans are pretty similar to Alligators, there are some differences to their bone structure, I’m not sure these are identifiable by regular people, they are supposed to be smaller than both Alligators and Crocodiles, though.

Florida is the only place in the world where both Crocodiles and Alligators live in the wild. There are two living species of Alligators, one from the Southern US and north-eastern Mexico, the other is from China. Caimans typically live in Central and South America. There are a lot of different Crocodile species, and they can be found in way more areas of the globe, including Central America and parts of Mexico where Caimans live, and Southern Florida where Alligators live, and India where Gharials survive (they have a pretty weird and easily recognisable jaw).

I do not now that much about animals, though, I vaguely remembered they had different jaws/teeth visible when their mouth are closed, and that their natural habitats didn’t overlap that much, but I had to check back most of the information in that message.

74

Googles Caiman. Hard mode indeed… though now I’m imagining all the puzzles that could be built around distinguishing similar species… a survival game where you have to forage for mushrooms and identify which are safe to eat and which are poisonous and which are psychedelic*, having to find a frog for some potion while avoiding the poisonous frog, disntinguishing Monarch butterflies from Viceroys, identifying if a snake is a constrictor or venomous or even identifying which of two venomous snakes you need to milk to make anti-venom…

*Also, now I’m wondering if there are any IF out there where the player can ingest a hallucinogen and all the room and item descriptions change to reflect the player’s altered state of mind.

75

I feel sure I’ve seen something like this, but I can’t place where.

76

Oooooh. How about an IF version of They Live?

1 Like
77

I’ve tried doing something like this, and boy it’s a pain to get all the corresponding descriptions right. Never released it, but some pieces of it have made it into this year’s IFComp entry.

1 Like
78

I post a lot about Mesopotamia in the 1000s-2000s BCE; how about Mesopotamia in the 0s CE? One of the most popular types of magic in that era was the incantation bowl: a clay bowl with its inside covered in Aramaic prayers and incantations, buried upside down under the floorboards of your house. The bowl lures demons in, and then keeps them from escaping once they’re underneath: the spiritual version of a box propped up with a stick.

an incantation bowl with spiralling Aramaic text and a sketch of a demon in the middle

(Via)

They’re typically considered a quintessentially Jewish form of magic, and the vast majority of them are written in Aramaic, with the asterisk that “Jewish” is a very broad category in this era (after the destruction of the Temple, before the creation of the Talmud, before Christianity got adopted by the Roman Empire)—there were a lot of different sects with different beliefs, with no central authority to establish an orthodoxy.

Regardless, people outside that milieu usually got people within that milieu to create the bowls for them, because the Jewish ones just worked better than the other ones—the name of G-d has a lot of power to it! Which meant that often, the people buying these bowls didn’t speak Aramaic themselves, and non-Jewish scammers were known to create bowls covered in random “Aramaic” squiggles that couldn’t actually bind anything.

This one says, among other things, “THIS CAT IS BOUND”:

an incantation bowl with horizontal Aramaic text and a sketch of a demon cat bound with squiggly lines, plus a lot of other unidentifiable figures

(Same source as above)

And the idea of trapping demons (or spirits, or curses, or magic in general) with the supernatural equivalent of a box propped on a stick feels like it has a lot of IF potential.

5 Likes
79

Not quite IF, but Nethack does this to pretty hilarious effect.

In practice, you just get garbled (random) information about what you see, possibly making lethal mistakes or missing information.

2 Likes
80

I figured having to basically rewrite a huge portion of a game to handle the hallucinations, and possibly several times over to introduce enough randomness the player can’t just memorize their way around the trippy version of the map would make things hard… Even in video games where you can have a psychedelic color filter or randomized screen distortion do most of the heavy lifting instead of manually redoing all the assets, but the only example of something in this vein I can think of is level 1-7: Touch Fuzzy, Get Dizzy from Yoshi’s Island for the SNES… not that 10/11-year-old me playing on my SNES, nor late teen/early 20s me playing the GBA port realized the level could be seen as a metaphor for drugs… And if you haven’t played that game, the level is loaded with floating, cotton-ball creatures called fuzzies, and while they won’t hurt you, touching them or trying to slurp them up with Yoshi’s tongue Causes the screen to warp, the controls to become less responsive, and the music to go slow and kind of weird…

Maybe not the best video to show off the effect as it sounds like whoever is playing manages to avoid the fuzzies throughout the first half of the level and its from the SNES Classic instead of original hardware, but here’s a youtube video of someone playing the level in question:

1 Like