Category Archives: art

2021 Year in Review

I love making things. I feel I am my best self when I am creating something. Do you feel the same way? How interesting.

But if you used this blog to keep up with all the things I make, you would get the impression that I never make anything (and may in fact be dead). Let’s correct that. Let us, in the middle of 2024, do my 2021 Year in Review.

My 2020 Year in Review is here.

And my 2021 Year in Review is HERE.

2018 MIT Mystery Hunt

In 2017, my MIT Mystery Hunt team, Death and Mayhem, found the Coin first. I wasn’t actually at MIT at the time. I was helping out as best I could from the great state of Iowa.

The horrible fate of each winning team is that they have to design the following year’s Hunt. For me this was a dream come true: I admired the Mystery Hunt from afar for years, and it was really exciting just to be on a competing team when I joined D&M in 2015. Over the course of 2017 I got to help make the MIT Mystery Hunt which feels like a fictional sentence even now.

Then MLK Day Weekend of 2018 appeared, and I went to Boston to help with Hunt operations in whatever way I could. That was the plan, anyway.

I must have caught something on the plane ride, which probably interacted with the incredible stress of the epic undertaking I had involved myself in, and I fell ill. I was out of commission for like 70% of the weekend. WHOOPS

So let’s get back to 2017: I got to contribute a whole bunch of different things to this Mystery Hunt, and I’m very proud of them, and now, four months later for some reason, I’m devoting a blog post to bragging about them.

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Halloween Zeen 2017

BEWARE: The new Halloween Zeen is out!

A lot of really cool people contributed a lot of really cool stuff to this year’s Zeen. Plus there is a board game that I didn’t do a very good job of designing. BUT THE OTHER STUFF IS RAD. CHECK IT OUT.

What have you been up to, Ryan?

Plenty!

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If you are eager to know what I’m up to at any given moment then your best shot is to follow me on Twitter. Thank you for your interest!

My Wii Fit Trainer amiibo mod

Addendum, 3 September 2015: I did this project with a Wii Fit Trainer from the first amiibo run. I am led to understand that the reprints are better-constructed, and in particular the foot and the cast are glued much more securely to the stand. People who have executed this mod with the reprints have had to “club it straight off and mighty glue it,” albeit with gorgeous results. It’s still very much possible to execute this mod with your newer WFT amiibo, but you probably won’t have as easy a time as I did.
conceptThis is what the Wii Fit Trainer amiibo was supposed to look like.

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