Background

We broke out of the slump of last week and solved quite a few things! However, we were very wrong with our predictions on what would be easy to solve.
This weekend was punctuated by another blizzard. (Winter has been unusually harsh this year, even for Minnesota.) While that gave us a lot of time inside to solve puzzles, it also threw a wrench in our plans for attempting Taskmaster this week.
Also, for the first time since I've started writing about the Hunt, we've unlocked more puzzles! The story behind it is extremely stupid (but in a lot of ways, that makes it even better.)

About Our Names

Something that's occasionally come up is why we're Cheshire and Syntax despite posting a lot of personal things here.
When I made the first write-up, it was mostly because of A Tearable Puzzle being an issue. I didn't expect anyone to really be interested in reading it. As such, I didn't really tell Syntax that I was doing it until afterwards.
That being said, I didn't want to suddenly use his name on Reddit without his permission. The only username he has on social media references syntax errors, so that's what he is.
"Cheshire" has been both a screen name and a nickname for me for a while. (Mostly because the cat suddenly appears and disappears and has some very strange stories, not because of the grinning.) When I've needed an actual pen name for whatever reason, I've become Cheshire Songchild.
Now that I've already established how I write these, I'm unlikely to stop using the nicknames.

A Note to the Puzzle Creators

Honestly, I'm still shocked that I'm getting so much feedback on these posts. You all are great. When we started, it was assumed that there would just be puzzles which we couldn't ever complete because they involved someone from Setec interacting with the teams, and we very much appreciate your eagerness to help out in all of those cases. (So far, we've found four non-event puzzles that required some interaction on our part to get an answer.)
Even when I don't have a story to tell about how we solved a particular puzzle, they still were enjoyable to solve. Especially all of you that put crosswords and straight-up logic puzzles into the Hunt-- I feel like I'm sort of harsh on those in my write-ups, even though they're often the best entertainment in a whole round. There hasn't yet been a stickler of a puzzle that's only existed to frustrate us.
I'll emphasize this again-- this is certainly my favorite of the large, modern Hunts (2009-now); it might also be my all-time favorite.

Puzzle-Specific Notes (The Solved Ones)

Stuffing

Wait, we didn't have this one yet?
Nope-- I just neglected to mention it for some reason in the second write-up; we'd actually completed it before I started doing write-ups at all.
While this was a very traditional type of puzzle by Mystery Hunt standards, this did sort of strike a chord with us because there are a lot of word games that we've corrupted with non-alphabetic characters and emojis.

Romance Languages

"You know, calling preliminary research for every puzzle 'caressing' is kind of getting old." - Syntax, immediately before I tried to translate the first word of the puzzle
Sometimes, people say things with perfect timing. That was one of those times.
This would have been extremely quick, but I mixed up some entries in two of the columns and Syntax had to fix it. I had multiple Q's in my grid and I couldn't find an easy way to spell something without disassembling the entire grid.
While this was a very simple concept, I'm glad that someone wrote this for the Valentine's round. (Otherwise, I'd be asking where the Romance language puns were hiding by now.)

Activities Midway

At first, we assumed that there was some mathematical property of the number 152 that would magically turn it into the word JUDO. Since there are no MIT students on our team, the fact that the clubs were numbered was not obvious to us, and we only realized it after realizing that we could make "Shakespeare Assassin's Guild" out of actual club names.
There also was a slight problem with us finding the club numbers-- attempting to view most pages that would have that information instead left us at a login page. Google indexed a couple of clubs, but it was nigh-impossible to predict which ones.
Just kidding! Thanks to a helpful pointer from portnoyslp, we found out that the only clubs that Google didn't have indexed for us were among the first ones we tried to check in the leftmost column. This was a fast solve once the ball started rolling. Also, being able to anagram out WIDE-EYED without knowing how to read the grid makes it clear why you all love convoluted indexing schemes.
I think this is another milestone-- it's the first puzzle explicitly related to MIT that we've solved.

A Mysterious Event

What to do here was obvious to us from the beginning, but finding out what words to put in the grid took a lot of testing.
First, we tried slotting in words related to the numbers (such as SPECIAL and SCORE.)
Next, we tried picking apart the dialogue for crossword clues (leaving us with entries like "BARRICADE" for the "retaining wall" mentioned.)
At some point, we assumed that the answers were in the books themselves, and promptly tried to search a plot summary of Thursday Next to figure out the words. After all, she only has seven books. As we also learned, the plot to the Thursday Next books is extremely convoluted. I personally stopped being optimistic somewhere between the usage of the word "jurisfiction" and the sudden appearance of the Cheshire Cat.
Eventually, Syntax was the one to figure out that we needed the "Letter is for Word" series of mysteries. Once we got the trick, assembling the grid was still non-trivial. Actually, we assembled the grid on a physical Scrabble board when we finally solved the puzzle. It worked surprisingly well-- it was obvious when we ran out of certain tiles and it was easy to correct mistakes.

Halloween-Valentine's Day Meta

"Since we still apparently can't solve the right things, I've tried to place the four answers we have in the grid any way I can. The answer has to be eight letters, and I think I've proven that it's H???SUT?." - Syntax
Even though we solved more than half of the Valentine's Day puzzles by this point, we only had Activities Midway for eight-letter answers in the round. Then again, we'd sort of assumed that this would need an eight-letter answer-- the construction of a logic puzzle on an 8x8 grid became apparent to us weeks ago. Because HATAMOTO had two O's, that forced us to have a dummy row with no O's and no letters in common with the final answer. We couldn't prove it was Activities Midway unless we solved absolutely everything in the round, but we were pretty sure we had the dummy row.
While we immediately thought HIRSUTE was a candidate, it didn't quite fit, and it wasn't eight letters. We ended up ignoring it for several hours. I came back to it, came to the same conclusion, and realized that HIRSUTER was a reasonable pun. It still wasn't the answer and it still didn't fit.
"Did you try putting an 'I'm' in front of it?" - Syntax, half-joking
"That's not eight letters, so it won't work, but I'll check it anyway." -Cheshire
(ten seconds later)
"Oh my [caressing] god." -Cheshire
We managed to clear this with only one answer from Valentine's Day.
"Wait a minute, having an "I'm" in front disproves the existence of a dummy row..." -Cheshire
We only had 3/8 answers, plus a wrong answer, and we also made incorrect assumptions about the length of the answer line. Assuming all of those things was also the thing that caused us to solve the puzzle, though. This takes the award for "luckiest solve" by a longshot (as I reference quite often, solving Starbucks Lover with an incorrect anagram and getting Caressing with 5/10 right letters and two wrong ones were the most ridiculous parts of the Hunt before this.)
I feel bad for the creators of Poor Richard and especially the Treehouse of Crossed Destinies. We got decently far in both of them, but we aren't really grinding our gears to solve puzzles that are likely to go to a completed meta. We were down to seven missing answers in Valentine's Day when we solved this, and four of them went back. Those have always looked like eight-letter answers to us, but we couldn't crack them in time.

The Obligatory G&S Puzzle

So, I’ve got my receipt for that MIT Mystery
Hunt puzzle that is so musical-themed.
Discovering all the right people in history
Was such an easy task (or so it seemed…)
I’ve contacted members of Setec Astronomy
Just to solve tearable missing uploads.
I’ve struggled through grids made of garbled gastronomy,
Half-cooked spaghetti, and telegraph codes;
Caressed every cat trained at Kitten Academy;
Learned that Helvetica’s only okay;
Repaired faulty programs for turtle anatomy
And promises formed from console displays;
Deciphered Assembly for Game Genie glitches;
Recorded the pH of acids and bitches;
Reviewed films for cable with substitute moral lines;
Faced cartoon horrors (but somehow missed Coraline);
Wired a trip from Burkina Fa-SOOOOOOO!
Baked thirteen concerts of virtual DOOOOOOOUGH!
I’ve solved text adventures and college activities;
Zyzzl konundrums and killer festivities;
I’m still Songchild; I’ll do anything…
...but I never expected you’d need me to sing...
We got an answer line to this just as I began writing today. We joked about submitting a video just to get an answer we needed for Halloween, and because Murphy's Law is a thing, we got one.
As for why this took so long, both of us had singing shyness, we didn't have a lot of experience with editing audio or video, and we were extremely indecisive about who to pick for the "biopic" part.
Last weekend, Syntax said that he'd generate the name of a random famous person online and I'd have to be the one to sing about them. We'd pick a song strictly based on how the name scanned.
We got Stephenie Meyer. It took all of zero seconds for me to realize that her name slotted perfectly into the chorus of "Sex on Fire" by Kings of Leon.
However, not only is that song decently high up there in terms of vocal range, the singer's voice sounds nothing like mine. It was a recipe for disaster.
When I recorded myself this morning, I thought my problem was going to be that I sounded off-key. Instead, I had nearly every problem OTHER than sounding off-key. I was constantly singing just a little slower than the backing track for the song, I was too soft-spoken to have the microphone consistently receive my voice well, and my tone was horribly awkward and inappropriate for the song (in a way that's difficult to describe-- imagine a slurred, disinterested Bob Dylan voice.) But at least I was on pitch! (I think. Hopefully.)
After a couple hours, I'd recorded myself doing it several times, spliced together the best parts of each recording, fixed a lot of the timing and volume problems, and generally had something that was a little less embarrassing. (Sadly, I couldn't fix the drunk Bob Dylan aspects of it all. Whoops!) This might count as a pretty bad caress, since I never really paid attention to what went into recording a piece of music until I tried to do it on my own. To all the teams out there that did this, I already have sympathy for you.
Note: while the flavor text here implies otherwise for rhyming purposes, we haven't yet solved Your Wish Is My Command or First You Visit Burkina Faso. Also, I just realized that the topic is a lot more similar to the Major General's Song than it was to the song in the video. Can't win 'em all.

Bitter Kittens Cross the Pond

We finally realized that the woman was announcing for Miss Universe... in a way that directly references "Bitter Kittens". We could even just search for her lines verbatim! With quotes! I can't believe that we got the Eurovision half while completely missing that.
This was a great puzzle. How did you realize that despite every performance being on YouTube, apparently nobody has given a written description of the events on stage? Those things were really hard to Google (we mostly found them by looking up every single performance for the country referenced by the woman's puns.)
Since I had the Icelandic name for the second clip, there was also a bit of time wasted because we extracted "U R FORGIVEN" as our answer line. Thank you for forgiving us over getting stuck here, Mystery Hunt ghost.

Hexed Adventure II: Hexed Again!

There are two types of people.
Syntax had spent hours mapping every bit of this puzzle right before we established the rules of our Hunt. He really liked the first Hexed Adventure, and he was wondering what board game it could be.
I played through part of it, and it seemed very well-designed. The only place I'd heard of the first one was in the video for Haunted.
That being said, both of us were expecting a board game. Syntax managed to miss all of the references, but I immediately recognized the game as Betrayal at House on the Hill. In fact, he almost solved the puzzle without falling for the red herring, but I found it for him anyway.
The only other thing I personally did with this puzzle before Syntax figured it all out was identifying how to index at the end. He wanted to put as much the dialogue as possible from the game into a spreadsheet, but (thankfully) only did the final battle before falling asleep.
Oddly, I think my favorite part of this puzzle was the deliberate red herring. Everyone who worked on Haunted would have been spoiled about the first one just in time to be confused about the meaning of "hexed" here. Also: points for reusing the pun in a different context.

Loaded

This one gets the award for fastest solve this Hunt. We got it in less than 15 minutes. It was a great concept for a puzzle, but it was surprisingly easy to us for this late in the Hunt.
It doesn't get the record for fastest solve of all time here. Syntax and myself both independently solved No Pluto from the School of Fish in less than a minute.

... FISH Puzzles?

Speaking of School of Fish...
We loved that Hunt. 2015 was our second-favorite hunt (behind this year) and we were excited that there was a tribute to it.
That being said, you managed to choose every puzzle in the whole School that doesn't take less time after knowing how to get the answer.
And because I solved Chowing Down, I saw "no such thing as a" and immediately got irritated when "free lunch" didn't work as the answer.
Google filling the phrase with "fish" made me feel awfully dumb.

Middle School of Mines

Minesweeper was a great inspiration for a puzzle. This was pretty simple and also fun to solve-- so much that I went back and played a couple of the games after Syntax already had solved the puzzle.
I'm honestly really happy that you occasionally implement non-Hunt-related games into the Hunt in a very straightforward way. If Minesweeper is fun outside the Hunt, then it's fun inside the Hunt, even if it doesn't make a super difficult puzzle.

Deeply Confused

This was a weird situation where I took charge of a puzzle despite knowing less about the topic than Syntax. I figured that knowing more about training neural networks would be a good thing when I'm applying for basically every coding-related job where I have a chance at being qualified.
As I kind of expected, the process was very automatic if you could get through a maze of dependencies and installations. After about an hour into my research on how to get the images from ImageNet and install everything, I realized that someone already had the exact network and training I needed for free use online.
Sometimes, I want to learn. This time, I'd gotten fed up with the depth of the rabbit hole of what software needs other software to run. That made this a very quick solve (even if everything I needed to do for the puzzle was very repetitive.)
This is another fun one to tell outsiders about.

A Lemon Tree

We never attempted to actually solve this puzzle as if it were a lot of math problems. Syntax caught the elementary theme quickly, and I knew the Periodic Table well enough by heart to realize that subtraction with strings of symbols would always produce a valid result.
There was a slight holdup with identifying the Sherlock Holmes stories, though. It doesn't help at all that a large number of them randomly contain the names of chemical elements. Syntax tried to piece every four-letter code into a different list (NORW being a country, HOUN being a Pokémon, et cetera.)
Overall, I think this was a really clever concept, especially the answer extraction step at the end.

Complementary Copies

Ooh, clues in pairs!
The whole concept of a children's literature-themed puzzle in a later round felt kind of heartwarming. I don't really have much more of a story here other than that I enjoyed doing it.
Oh, yeah. I got "MELANIE RICH DOT" instead of "melanin" at the end, which prevented me from finding the counterpart to Superfudge. I spent half an hour trying to find out what it meant. Syntax, as his alter-ego of Captain Obvious, came to save the day.

Puzzle-Specific Notes (The Unsolved Ones)

Crosscut

Hey, clues in trios!
The haiku splitting was cool, but now we don't know what to do with the nine-letter movies. We've proven they don't normally fit into the grid, which probably means I misidentified something. It's getting a little irritating.

Dampfwalze

At least these clues aren't in groups of four.
*rereads flavor text*
Oh.
This is an early candidate for "trickiest puzzle in Arbor Day". After answering and coupling all of the clues, we realized we need something about Mannheim Steamroller. (Mostly because we were surprised after translating the title.) We've listened to quite a bit of music and got a list of nearly all of their songs, but we still don't know what's going on.

Engelsche

My first experience with this: "Wow, they singled out Terpsichore in here. That hasn't happened since that one guy tried to write the world's longest tongue-twister." Then, not knowing what to do, I closed the puzzle.
My second experience with this: Syntax asking me "what's the 'dearest creature' poem? I read the first letter of every line." I Googled it, and then promptly was floored that my gut was right.
We know that the lines of this puzzle map roughly one-to-one to the poem (well, occasionally missing a few things here or there.) We also have had a tedious time trying to piece this puzzle apart, even knowing that. I'm hoping that it gets easier once we figure out some sort of hidden trick.

Flocks

We have a complete tree, and all our birds have perched. The answer still isn't obvious to us, though.

I AM GROOT

This is now the puzzle I show people when I have to explain that Mystery Hunt puzzles often don't have an easy way to interact with them.
We have no idea what to do here at all. I feel like this is either supposed to be super easy or super hard.
We did find the hidden picture, though.

iN SYNdiCation

This has been, by far, the worst example of "caressing" so far during the Hunt. So much that we've considered changing the word to "syndication". So much that we neglected to use the actual puzzle name in favor of calling our spreadsheet for this one the "in syndiCAtion RESearch Sheet".
I'd recognized one of the twelve video clips off the bat (the Doctor Who one), but the others were very hard to research without knowing what to look for. Meanwhile, we've had family and friends randomly stumble upon one of us looking at this and instantly recognizing things that we'd spent a long time trying to find. It feels so weird being seemingly the only people who DON'T know the information required to solve something. Meanwhile, even though other people walking by always seem to love the clip we're looking at or the background music, they never seem to know what a show is if we directly ask.
The Lost clip without the actor's face was especially mean. Google reverse image search didn't even recognize any part of it until we tried the logo on the door at the end.
And now that we're done with caressing for now-- we have every clip, every song, and the original song for every clip-- we still have no idea how to extract an answer.

Mountains and Valleys

I loved the concept behind this- I fold a lot of origami outside the Hunt and I was impressed that you could make a puzzle out of diagrams without the answers being obvious.
I've folded everything and I recognize nothing.
Now I have no idea how or when progress here can advance.

Quaternary Structure

The phrase "I hope I never have to caress out a doctorate" has been said multiple times this Hunt.
This is the first time that sentence has been entirely serious.

Touring the Nation

We've more-or-less solved the grid and proven the order of the states, but we don't have an answer yet.

The Treehouse of Crossed Destinies

Both of us loved the concept here, and we're probably decently close to an answer. However, we probably also solved the meta that this feeds.
We have proven the position of every card at the end and identified all the Simpsons guest stars, though.

Comma and a Freaking Dot

We finally solved the puzzle portion of this-- it wasn't about wine after all! I'm planning on rapping-- it's just that making audio recordings is apparently something that takes several attempts in a quiet room. I was going to do it today, but my G&S video took way more time than I thought it would.

Taskmaster

Similarly, we're still working on this. However, this is also the creative challenge that requires the most time on our part, and we also have to be together to complete a lot of the tasks. It's something we're excited about, but the logistics of it all are slowing progress.

Everything Else

I feel like we have enough open puzzles that it's impractical to write about all of them. I don't think you want to read "we failed to understand why Your Wish is My Command didn't work" or "how does one state machine" every week until the end of time, either.
While we did make valiant efforts at a lot of puzzles that aren't listed here, I only mentioned the unsolved puzzles that were in a different state from last week.

Gold Stars

I'm excited to say that we have an additional progress marker exclusive to our mock Hunt.
Last week, I got congratulated on solving Display Case, and I also learned about the solving statistics for the Halloween round. I decided to mark with gold stars on our checklist to indicate that they were solved by fewer teams than any other puzzles for that round. While it isn't strictly a measure of difficulty-- things like the unlock order have a lot of influence over how many teams solved them, too-- it's the best bearing on what "the hardest puzzle" for any given holiday was.
Currently, we have three stars-- those two and Caressing. Oddly enough, when we started calling unnecessary research "caressing", it was because we assumed that Caressing was supposed to be an easy puzzle and that it took unusually long for us. Apparently not.
While I don't want to hear a lot of unnecessary guidance or statistics on things we haven't yet solved-- hearing that certain puzzles are easy or hard will influence the order in which I attempt things-- I do like hearing when we've done something unusually difficult.
As for my guesses of the remaining star locations: I can't decide which of our two incomplete Christmas puzzles was the harder one. If Your Wish is My Command isn't the Thanksgiving star, then that jukebox has to be exceptionally nasty. I can't actually gauge Running for Office fairly, we still have no insight on Insider Trading, and State Machine still feels like it should have been straightforward to us (but is probably the most likely star.) I honestly have no idea about which of the Arbor Day puzzles is hardest- the existence of things like I AM GROOT doesn't help.

Final Notes

I can't think of much more I have to say this week! If I should add anything to these, just let me know!
Also, here's our scoreboard so far:
Christmas: 4/6 (missing GIF of the Magi and Nobel Laureate)
Halloween: 16/17 (missing Joke-O-Lantern), star (appropriately found in Starbucks Lover), anomalous answer line (from A Killer Party)
Thanksgiving: 13/16 (missing Cross Campus, Jukebox Hero, and Your Wish is My Command)
Valentine's Day: 11/17 (missing Be Mine, Just Desserts, Poor Richard Goes To Sea, Shah Raids, and the Treehouse of Crossed Destinies; puzzle for Comma and a Freaking Dot solved but creative submission incomplete), star (found in Caressing)
President's Day: 8/12 (missing Insider Trading, Safety Training, and State Machine; likely to be indefinitely missing Running for Office)
New Year's: 6/13 (missing Art Tours, Bubbly, Far Out, First You Visit Burkina Faso, iPod Submarine, and The Sound of Music; Taskmaster is also yet to be completed but that's sort of in the same boat as Comma), star (found in Display Case)
Arbor Day: 7/18 (missing Crosscut, Dampfwalze, Delightful, Engelsche, Flocks, Furious Fellows, I AM GROOT, IN SYNdiCation, Mountains and Valleys, Quaternary Structure, and Touring the Nation)

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Two-Man Mystery Hunt: Less Caressing, More Guessing (Week 4 Update)