[seldom|seen]

Getting tired of having what I felt were legitimate points called into question for November, I am conceding the win to JimandLinda. It is not worth the sly libalous remarks showing up in other caches. So congratulations, guys, I know you worked hard for it.

[seldom|seen]

@RSplash40 wrote:

It’s also not uncommon for someone to pre-build a cache and not put it out for a long time. there is one partially|obscured cacher who has started a cache and not published it for 6-8 months for one reason or another.

Hmmm… Artisans of Appleton was submitted on 1/22/08 and I still haven’t gotten it finished or approved. Yup, I am guilty of the aforementioned, but as long as no one complains, except Dave who watches “recently published” and occasionally misses one of mine, I’m going to keep doing things the way I do.

I would really like a “Pre-publish” state. One that allows me to enter potential cords, concepts, etc for pre-publishing but one that doesn’t show the submission date as the publish date. I very rarely have a cache posted and published in the same week, much less the same day, given the complexity of my caches.

And sometimes, it’s very intentional

[seldom|seen]

@cheezehead wrote:

WOW! 400! Geesh! and I thought my 50 or so was a lot. Way to go Roger.

Agreed! I’m nearing 200 and thinking about what it would take to maintain twice that number is mind-boggling. Of course if all you place are keyholders, 35mm’s, pill bottles and ammo cans, 200 isn’t so bad.

But if you’re placing glass jars, rubber appendages, dear skulls, stuffed animals, fake fruit, footwear, light fixtures, real puzzles, plastic insects (and other various toys), a thermous of goo, rubber balls, playing cards, fishing tackle, a telephone, a turtle shell and the list goes on… it becomes infinitely more difficult to keep up with all of it. Thankfully it has been a really good year and most of mine have stayed intact and I’ve actually experienced a sharp drop in MIA custom containers.

I hope you have been having an equally good year and that you have not had many of your custom containers disappear either. WELL DONE, and thanks for putting out so many for us to enjoy!

[seldom|seen]

Is anyone seeing the clues from this and previous milestones? Just curious as I know some of you haven’t solved all of my puzzles…

[seldom|seen]

@Jeremy wrote:

Now, do I torture myself with the “other” SSSS puzzle? ❓ 😀

Santa’s Little Helper here. Not to get off topic, but I’ll reiterate what I’ve said in a number of places and on a number of occasions. With very few exceptions, S|S puzzles shouldn’t take you more than hour to complete. It is not my intent to drive cachers crazy with puzzles that have no clear strategy outlined from the start on how to solve them.

I do understand that about 10-20% of them can be more challenging and require more time. But, I never want you to get so frustrated with a puzzle of mine that you turn yourselves off from the opportunity to discover what my other puzzles have to offer. If you get to a 2-4 hour mark and still have no idea where you are going with a puzzle, PLEASE send me a note and I will help.

Also, for this Christmas and every one thereafter, I am offering a present to every cacher who responds to this post via e-mail. One “Get Me Out This Puzzle” card. A direct clue or insight or first step in solving one of my tough ones.

The more challenging puzzles are the Camelback Cinema series, ZoeBroCoup series, audible caches including the We Interrupt This Broadcast series and any others that you just can’t wrap your heads around.

Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night!

[seldom|seen]

Dear Satagasu,

St. Nick here, just wanted to let you know that I took care of a certain little Girl with Curly hair leaving a sizable present in her stocking the other night when I was out stuffing them. So you don’t have to bother putting one under her tree this year. And just to be nice, I left a couple “presents” under your “tree” as well. 😈

[seldom|seen]

Congratulation Lisa!, and thanks for thinking of me and choosing one of the most difficult ones around as your 1K find. That “other” one might be sinister to solve, but as Lisa can attest, the S4 she choose as her milestone makes the 2-minute trek to the sinister one look like a walk in the park.

I had a ton of fun today despite both of us going through the ice and donning concrete pants for much of the journey. It was surely an adventure and one neither of us will forget, both for the trek and for the shenanigans 😉 And no, 5/5 are not just for the boys, this Girls’ got heart!!!!

[seldom|seen]

Santa just slapped my hand… ouch! Back to the workshop to fill a bag of coal…

[seldom|seen]

Thanks guys. If it wasn’t for aspects of the sport that some might consider a little “sneaky”, it just wouldn’t be as fun for me. I set a personal challenge to push this last month with the 3, count them 3, overnight and 1 following day caching opportunities that opened up. Besides the already challenging set of circumstances to find these lonliess, I get the added challenge of going after the majority of them in the dark. Anybody who’s night cached knows the difference it can make trying to spot a simple tree-hanger at 2am.

Anyway, it sure was a fun month for me as my mid-month thought of posting a couple hundred point to give the leader a little scare turned into a real opportunity to win when another opportunity presented. And that’s when I went into overdrive. My goal was to reach 500, but I hit a number of snags that resulted in a goodly number of points not making the cut. If if had worked out, my tally would have been around 490 points. So close…

I know how much work the 2nd place contender put in this past month and completely understand the sting of having me come sneaking up behind without warning. I’ve been there before myself.

That’s probably going to be about it for me for the year. Of couse I’ve said that before, but now I have some real constraints that are going to be tough to overcome. Just putting that out there to let the rest of you know the last month is anybody’s game as the 2 all time leaders are going to be very quiet until the event in Jan.

I hope most of you will be able to make it to the Only the Lonely Can Play event and I am personally going to go through my stack of finds to recount some of my more incredible stories to share with the rest of you…

Like the time I was looking for a huge white bucket hanging in a tree at head height – certainly as visible as a Maple-tappers bucket in daylight yet hit my head on it as I stood up – tired of the fruitless hunt on the ground below it with my weak flashlight…

[seldom|seen]

@gotta run wrote:

@seldom|seen wrote:

If I can’t get a solve in an hour, I toss the sheet in the recycle bin.

😯

Glad we didn’t follow that practice on your puzzles! “Meine kopf” still hurts from trying to figure out “links oder rechts” and trying to find microscopic 3-d numbers…

Yup, I’d have given up on those 2 for sure, although I just don’t understand why so many have such a hard time with 3-d glasses. I might have to re-do that image as part of my annual review…

[seldom|seen]

@Sagasu wrote:

Certainly|classified this accidental|accomplishment by someone|seeking lonely|locations with distinct|disdain for memorable|milestones. Cautious|congrats and somewhat|sorry about the bright|banner accidentally|annoucing the audacious|achievement on your wife’s|windshieild.

Brings back malicious memories of conjugating convoluted Latin literary works like the Illiad.

Clamat piscis et pavescit.
Circumspectat et tremescit.
“Ludum stultum iam remitte!
Nunc in mensam me demitte!
Ne mox cadam PERTIMESCO!
Tales ludos perhorresco!”

In keeping with a recent tradition of posting clues in my milestone recognition logs, here are a few on some of my most lonely puzzle caches:

Clavell’s King Rat is a novel about a Prison camp in Japan (not China) and its prisoners surviving by resorting to their ANIMAL nature. The King is an advantageous rat-b)*^*$^, who prays on the necessity of others;

My neighbor Totoro likes tress, Porco is a pilot though not a pirate, and if you fall from a castle you may be caught;

A river is “rich and full and wide”, roses grow in gardens, stories are found in libraries, and hearts occasionally need to be looked after;

Thanks for the um… recognition. Wonder how long it will be till I hit the big 1K?

[seldom|seen]

No stack here. I solve them if I can when they appear on the LCG list. If I can’t get a solve in an hour, I toss the sheet in the recycle bin. So, I guess having 80 found isn’t bad, but balanced with the 101 I have published, I gotta put some more time in I guess…

[seldom|seen]

@labrat_wr wrote:

these ideas are well taken though I have seen some ribbing about “padding” by adding baggies to caches that didn’t necessarily require them. Same idea on the trackables.
10 baggies = 20 points => the potential difference between 1st and 2nd.

I agree with Sagasu on his former point about trackables. We should continue to incorporate their discoveries and grabs from lonely caches or report them missing. We’ve all seen GC’s and TB’s logged into caches that are no longer there and reporting them with a Verified “TB wasn’t there” alerts the cache owner that they need to report it missing which in turn informs the owner that their trackable is gone.

Also agree about the baggie and the pencils points. Most of us seem to agree that we should be removing these puff points from the game and doing maintenance simply as a matter of habit.

I agree with Deejay about the lonliess being open to everyone for the same score during the 2mo period. Although there is already one exception to this rule and that is the double points for “over a year un-found” that DOES ONLY go to the first player to find it. If we build in more incentive for the really lonely ones. 6mo, 9 mo, 12mo or more un-found with 1.5, 2 and 2.5 times the regular score then they too could fall under this special point incentive.

[seldom|seen]

Agreed, for the most part. I have 2 trackables that I intend to be lonely. “The Road Less Traveled” whose mission it is to visit only Lonely caches and “It Takes a Pair” whose mission it is to visit only 5/5’s. I don’t expect either of them to move around that much, but for those that do discover them the reward for being among the very few to do so is much greater that any reward I get from seeing them move. Dave and Pete both discovered “It Takes A Pair” at Seldom Seen’s Sloppy Seconds and know from whence I speak!

It is good to move trackables along but again, so what if a player gets 2 more points for picking up a traded trackable at a lonely cache. A few points here and there do not make the difference between a first and second place finish. There’s usually at least a 20 point or better difference in scores for the top finishers and I think making a big deal out of this is not worth trying to modify the rules or complicate the scoring procedure. I personally don’t see anything wrong with the current scoring system for lonely trackables – 2 points to move them along is enough incentive for me to do so and to look in every cache for them. Isn’t it for the rest of you guys? Has anyone passed up a trackable in a lonely cache?[/i]

[seldom|seen]

@Sagasu wrote:

The game has drawn me to more new interesting locations and caches than any other aspect of the game thus far. Some have been the most remote and scenic of any caches I have found. For this broadening of my experience I am grateful, and hope others can benefit as much by chasing these finds. In addition, I have always been curious how or why a cache has become “lonely” and most often seeking and finding them (or not) has answered that question.

I concur. The only unfortunate thing for me was that my frequent night caching constraints didn’t allow for the full appreciation of some of the remote places I was taken. On the other hand, there is something special about a deep woods at night when you hear a Great-Horned calling a few yards away. I like the night and I like caching in it.

@Sagasu wrote:

1. In response to Dave’s disappointment that some of the “very lonely” caches still haven’t gotten a look, without complicating the game too much, perhaps those should get triple points as a big incentive for those who are driven by the “bragging rights” or competition. Double points might apply well to caches that have been lonely for three seasons, or nine months.

This might get more of us out there after the Uber-lonliess.

@Sagasu wrote:

4. The logistics of regional competitions seems prohibitive to add that much complexity. There have been groups of lonely caches in all the quadrants of the state at some point during the year. Mark your calendars for March or May after the northern half of the state has been idle for the winter.

I also agree. The distribution varies so much from period to period that there should be no need to break it out regionally. Sept-Oct for example had a slew of Lonliees in the LaCrosse area and anyone in that area willing to tackle them could have cleaned house since none of the contenders from the Valley ever made if over to that part of the state. This will likely continue. The same held true for EauClare and Rhinelander areas at some point in the year.

@Sagasu wrote:

6. Require owner permission on replacement like a couple have suggested. As the year wore on I came to recognize situations where some caches should die and open up an area for a hide that will be maintained.

This, again, is probably the biggest sticky point of the game. A notice should go out to lonely owners requesting permission to allow replacement. This brings it to their immediate attention that they have a Lonely cache and gives them the option to prevent replacement up front, without fielding e-mails or phone calls. If they don’t respond in a week, their cache is brought to the attention of the reviewers as a potentially inactive cache and a “Do Not Replace” note is added to that cache in the list. If they do respond, a note or icon is added for “Replaceable” or “Do Not Replace”.

@Sagasu wrote:

9. Trackable points. No one seems to have commented on this one. I think those should be folded into the find like maintenance points, another way to simplify the game. What trackable owner wouldn’t expect you to move his or her travel bug or geocoin along if it had been sitting in any cache, especially a remote one, for four months or more?

Not sure what Dave is referring to here since I have logged many TB’s moved or TB’s missing points this year. Can you be more specific?

It’s about the final objective. Keeping all Wisconsin caches in the best shape possible for the enjoyment of all cachers. The “crazed” players have done a great deal over the course of the year to not only doctor caches in bad shape, but improve them and even replace them with better versions of their original selves. For this they should be commended, not dissed because they logged a DNF they couldn’t get to or made a mistake by replacing one the was still there. I think most of us have done this on at least one occasion and that includes you too J&L (Flashlight).

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