Round XXVIII Elimination
Russ Wilhelm | November 15, 2006
Predictions? OK
Four goos total
Three players left competing for the third goo.
I'm not one of them (sigh).
The sportscasting idea sounds interesting, I say go for it.
Steve West | November 15, 2006
I sense a surge in the Dark side of the force...
Amy Austin | November 16, 2006
Hmm, yes... a *power* surge. As in, wheels spinning... going nowhere... fast. Heh.
So here's my question... what happens if *nobody* guesses correctly at the first two goos in a row??? ;-)
Scott Hardie | November 16, 2006
Here's my question: If my site is down for hours at a time because of technical difficulties with the hosting company, should I extend the goo deadline? :-(
Amy Austin | November 16, 2006
Yeah, I did notice that, too... but I don't have an answer for that one.
Amy Austin | November 16, 2006
Perhaps you should just call this one a mulligan and proceed as you would have, without counting it for or against anyone should it be guessed (except for, of course, as an Imelda)??? Just a suggestion... as obviously, it could become contentious if somebody guesses this one in the next hour. I guess you'll have your answer then.
Steve Dunn | November 16, 2006
What's the deadline on these things? Is it midnight to midnight?
Scott Hardie | November 16, 2006
Yes, midnight EST tonight, 28 minutes.
I'm waiting until about 12:10 to put up the next one, in case someone guesses at 11:58 and there's a sudden end to the round.
I'm going to count this one, but I'm already looking into a permanent solution to these hosting problems.
Steve Dunn | November 16, 2006
If I guess wrong, but no one guesses right, I'm still in the game. Correct?
Scott Hardie | November 16, 2006
Correct. Normally I would eliminate you just for guessing wrong or not guessing, but then we'd have a day like today where everybody would be eliminated, and that just won't work, so you can only be eliminated if someone else gets it right.
Scott Hardie | November 16, 2006
Yesterday's goo proved impossible, so I've made today's just slightly easier. Let's see what happens.
Amy Austin | November 16, 2006
Well, I'm just pissed that -- once again -- I was grazing the right answer without ever getting close enough to know it. Saw the Sui Generis name and even thought "generic"... just didn't go there! I think I'm getting a little bit lazier about the way I play nowadays.
Amy Austin | November 18, 2006
THIS IS BULLSHIT!!!
I was about to make my last-ditch guess, and the goo expired BEFORE midnight!!! Why does it matter??? Because I had the right answer.
Scott Hardie | November 18, 2006
One thing you are not is lazy, Amy.
Is there any consolation I can offer for the frustration of missing the buzzer? My computer's clock is a minute ahead of the server clock, so to me each goo seems to publish one minute after midnight.
Amy Austin | November 18, 2006
Okay, I am sufficiently confused now.
1) There are two correct guesses, from Steve & Elliot; 2) ...in a minute...
I am thinking that Scott must have seen Steve's correct guess so close to the end of the game that it was prepared to close out (fully a MINUTE early!) with a congratulatory message to the final guesser???
Amy Austin | November 18, 2006
Argh... I hate simultaneous posts -- especially when I'm angry!
Scott Hardie | November 18, 2006
I did manually update the Current Scores page during the finals, but everything else on the site was automated, including the expiration at midnight. Each goo is programmed to publish and expire only on particular days, not on particular minutes, so it can't expire a minute ahead of time. (If it were recorded in the database to go live on 11:59pm on Friday, it would actually publish immediately after midnight a day earlier if that makes sense, because the code only knows "Friday" not "11:59pm.") I think what happened is that the server clock is ahead of your home clock by a minute.
This must be little comfort afterwards. Is there anything i can say to make up for it?
I'm getting up from the computer now (guests are over) but I'll post more tomorrow and reply to whatever you have to say.
Amy Austin | November 18, 2006
Hm. Well, see... historically (and yes, I am very in tune with it), my clock appears to be just a few seconds AHEAD of the server -- or, at least, the moment at which I see the goo publish when I refresh my page. And I am talking about my computer's clock here -- not any home clock -- which I have also noticed appears to be exactly in sync with the Cox cable time that appears on my DVR & converter box (as it was with Time Warner's boxes when I was in NC), so I had assumed that all of these things (including your clock as well) were in sync, with any experienced delay (always the same mere handful of seconds) being only a matter of communication time between my computer and the server. (Because yes, I have refreshed my page at exactly midnight MANY a time!) Any other differences, such as tonight's, I have perceived to be manual differences (like not having the goo already pre-programmed to publish... such as I thought may be the case in the heated end of this round -- after all, the first night's was held over for an extra 10 minutes due to your very own words above in 11/15 11:32PM... and so I guess I wasn't as worried as I should have been about guessing at the *literal* last minute!
Ordinarily, too, I would feel like a total lying shmuck for trying to make such a claim -- even though it is true! -- for the same reason as we discussed in the "OJ debate"... because there would be no one who could verify it. However, in this instance, I happen to have a friend at work to whom I showed the game earlier in the week and told my "best" (but unverified) guess to earlier today... complete with my rationale about Xs/Os and tic tac toe. I know that she will be quite sorry for me (but probably also, "I told you so!") because she kept asking me why I had not yet entered my guess (at that time, however, I was leaning toward William Chan -- not Mak -- and had not submitted it because of his cinematic involvements). That was just after lunchtime.
Ugh... I will stop here and go to sleep for once this week, because this is just making me sick. No, I don't think there is anything you could say to make me feel any better about it... the only thing that remotely has that effect is that Steve West got it, too, thereby saving me the additional pain of (what I would consider to be) an "illegitimate" Imelda -- though I am also sorry that he did not get it as an Imelda... I know he has had many close ones of late, and I know how it feels to lose out to a second guesser, too!
No... I will just have to SUCK it up and say "good game" to Megan, Mike, Russ, & Steve... and "congratulations (goddammit)" to Elliot -- in the immortal words of the Governator: I *will* be back.
Scott Hardie | November 18, 2006
I was incorrect when I said that the Current Scores page was the only thing I updated manually during the finals. Normally, every night at midnight, a goo automatically expires and another goo automatically publishes. The expiration part still happened automatically during the finals, but because the round could end at any time, I usually had to wait until a few minutes after midnight to publish another goo manually. The exception was when multiple qualified players guessed Fuentes and there was no need to wait; I knew the round would last another day. (The preceding paragraph was not remotely interesting, but I figured I should say it as long as I'm going on the record about everything else after this hotly contested finish.)
I was about to go into cron scripts and the actual nature of how goos are published in the php code, but even *I* don't find that interesting.
Can I take a moment to be wowed at how many of you managed to narrow it down to Sun Boyz? Good lord. For the last few nights, I've had guests over at midnight and had to excuse myself for 20 minutes to put up another goo, and when I described the new goo to them they were often skeptical that anybody on the planet could possibly come anywhere close to figuring out such an insanely difficult goo, and my answer was always "You would be surprised." I am humbled to have players who would go to such crazy lengths of research just for my silly little game; you have all transformed it with your exceptional talent. You're amazing.
Elliot Farney | November 18, 2006
Ah, yes, the Dennis Mak goo. “Frustrating” is the only word that comes to mind when I think of what I had to go through to find the answer. When the goo was published yesterday at midnight, my inclination was to search for something along the lines of “boy bands in Hong Kong,” and sure enough I found that boy bands were all the craze in Hong Kong. After filtering through a number of bands, Sun Boy’z came up, and I immediately consulted the diverse source of knowledge that is Wikipedia. Russ mentioned in another thread that he went through the founders and discovered nothing, and so he passed the others by and continued on his search. I did exactly the same thing, but I bookmarked the Wikipedia entry just in case and stopped searching for the night. In the afternoon, I spent what little time I had blazing through the remainder of the Hong Kong boy bands, and then broadened my search to boy bands in general, thinking that Scott was attempting to deceive players by placing “Hong Kong” in the clue. In about half an hour, I must have gone through 50 boy bands and their members before coming to the harsh realization that I was going absolutely nowhere. I stopped searching, but vowed to come back to this insidious goo.
About an hour before its expiration, I resumed my search, only to discover that Steve West had guessed correctly. Given Steve’s dedication to the game and his undeniable talent, I was not the least bit surprised that he had attempted to find this mystery singer even though he had been eliminated the previous day. I searched a few more boy bands, and at this point, I was so sick of seeing the photos of these boy bands that I was ready to give up and call it a night. However, my bookmarked Sun Boy’z Wikipedia entry kept glaring at me, challenging me to further pursue it contents, so I finally gave in and went for it. Like Megan and Amy commented, there were cinema entries for all the previous and present members of the band except William Chan, for which there were no photos that remotely matched the goo. That’s when I actually read the entire article, and suddenly made the connection between hugs and kisses and their song “Tic Tac Toe.”
Dennis Mak was my next search, and as I browsed the images on Google, I came to a photo that I believed was a pretty good match to the goo. The reason that I had thought that this was the photo was the distinct red line segment and the lights that appear in the top right portion of the gooed image, and in the bottom left portion of the actual image, which is when I knew that Scott had probably rotated the entire image and then applied an absurd amount of distortion. In the bottom left-hand portion of the photo, there was a logo for “Dennis Station,” but I wasn’t totally convinced that this was Dennis Mak, and not some other Dennis. I went back to the main page of Google, and went through some defunct Dennis Mak sites before finding “dennismak.net,” the “Dennis Station” site that I needed to confirm that the photo was indeed of Dennis Mak of Sun Boy’z. Sure enough, there in the image section, was the photo that I had seen on the Google image search. The rest, as they say, is history.
Amy,
Thanks for the congrats! I know that you’re incensed about not getting Dennis Mak in time, but let’s consider the round as a whole. You answered 97% of the goos in the accumulation phase correctly and earned TWO consecutive Golden Imeldas for Jeremy "Passion" Manongdo and Alison Scott-Baumann. That’s quite an accomplishment that was somehow overlooked but certainly deserves congratulation. I’m still waiting for the day that I will see, “This celebrity goo was requested by player Amy Austin, who wrote the clue, provided the source image and created the gooed image.” Just a thought :)
Thanks to everyone for playing both a good round and a grueling tiebreaker. Have a wonderful Thanksgiving, and I will see you all when the next round begins.
Regards,
Elliot Farney
Amy Austin | November 20, 2006
Heeyyy... you're right, Elliot! I was just checking out the new Awards Page and thinking to myself, "Only 7? I'm sure that it feels like more than that!" There's 2 more right there... I guess Scott needs to re-check his code!
Thanks for the props -- I'm still feeling a bit pouty, but I will try to be over it by next round. ;-) Congrats again... because that's the last time I plan to say it (to anyone!) ;-D And don't worry... I have had a whole list of goos that I've been compiling for submission for quite some time now -- many of which I've even written clues for -- and I had planned to start doing so once I hit 70% in the accumulation phase this round. But between my big relocation and my (even bigger) addiction to the goo search, I just never found it in me to do any up. I could just submit the name, clue and/or source image... but I'm just a bit too much of a control freak and want to do it all myself! ;-) I will try to have some ready for the accumulation of the next round, though... just for you. ;-p
Scott Hardie | November 24, 2006
My code has been rechecked.
Amy Austin | November 25, 2006
Heheh... thanks, Scott. ;-)
Adrianne Rodgers | December 2, 2006
I love how I have to go out of town when the elimination round starts...but I mostly play for fun.
Scott Hardie | December 2, 2006
Well, lucky for you, "fun" and the Elimination Round goos have nothing to do with each other.
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Scott Hardie | November 14, 2006
Here's your place to talk about the end of the goo round until it's over. Any predictions so far?
I'm not supposed to root for certain players any more – I can't believe I kept up that insensitive policy for so long – but privately I have my preferences just as the rest of you do. No matter what happens I'll be happy, and this ought to be an interesting competition.
When I rushed to get this new site done by August 1, one of the corners I cut was programming the Current Scores page to behave different during the Elimination Phase, and I've been telling myself in vain to do that ever since. I might do so tonight, but I'm toying with the idea of not programming anything into it at all: If I manually update the Current Scores page every night, I can write whatever I want on it, and make it more of a summary of what happened each day in the competition, almost like a sportscaster. Hmmm - is this a good idea or am I just rationalizing?