🤣🤣🤣🤣

Then may I also recommend Sister, Maiden, Monster by Lucy A. Snyder! My Goodreads review: Effective, quick-moving body horror! It felt like it was a fun series of short stories that were woven together into a pretty cohesive eldrich pastiche. The tie-ins to the Lovecraftian themes were fun and flowed well. If Lucy Snyder ever wanted to run a game of Call of Cthulhu, I would be all in!

I'm always fond of the precocious reader game: What Stephen King book did you read waaay to early? For me it was The Bachman Books then The Dead Zone when I was 12 or 13 years old.

Woot! Look at you~ 🎉

I read Lolita when I was 12. Heh

Carrie and Fire Starter and Bag of Bones (I dont believe i finished this one), but I was about 13-14 years old.
I'll definitely check out Sister, Maiden, Monster. I like the review ☆
A super quick read that I loved was SLASHER GIRLS AND MONSTER BOYS. There are about 14 young authors all written in short creepy stories that were selected by author April Genevieve Tucholke. I think it took me 3 days, and I'm a horribly slow reader. Lol
I've read so many awesome books, although of them were series (YA sci-fi fantasy mostly).
M.R. Carey has some great ones
Richard Laymon (he passed away, but there was something not right with his creations because... whoa).

Do you prefer electronic books or paper books??

Hey all...

As a reminder, Happy Daze is doing a Toys for Tots collection on December 6 from 9AM - 2PM. This is being done in conjunction with a sports card show.

In the past, we held previous LB Toys for Tots events. We hope that you will help out with this worthy cause as well..

Like we have always said :
"Together, we can make a difference in a child's life at Christmas!"

Ray and Susan
Happydaze

Thanks! That was fun to have happen. 😃

I had a very fun time at this event! It seems every year they come up with something new! I am, however, totally exhausted!

So is Mackie!

I probably should have advertised this when I started doing it earlier this year, but I’ve been doing a Box of the Month at my local bookstore, The Book Room, in Wilkesboro, NC. Unfortunately it became more of a box of every two months since nobody other than my friend and partner who I BEGGED to get it have found it ;v;

HOWEVER!! There’s an absolutely INCREDIBLE stamp in there this month/December, carved by the talented jolittleRose! So if you’re in the area, please check it out! There’s another box at The Book Room as well (plus Erica, one of the store owners, will happily share a few of her carves with you if you’d like!! She’s itching to have more letterboxer visitors), and several boxes I’ve planted in the surrounding Wilkes County that have no finds yet, as well as a Hitchhiker Hostel! And plenty of boxes in general to find if you’ve never visited the area.

Alright, that’s it for my shameless plug! Wishing you all a very happy holiday season and I hope to see your find reports in my AQ Mail ;)

Ultimately, I'm a paper guy, BUT I'm ultimately format agnostic... I use Kindle, Audible, Spotify, whatever. I'm dyslexic/a slow reader, as well and sometimes a format shift is useful to recalibrate the brain.

Both my wife (NMRK) and I definitely have dragon horde tendencies when it comes to books. We recently moved to Huntsville, AL, and there are a LOT of little libraries around town and that's fostering the otherwise rare impulse to get rid of some of our read books.

I agree, I have been attending the last few years and every year is never the same. Always keeps us guessing. Carves were great and we had plenty of laughs and of course soup. :)

Per my watch, we did 30,864 steps. woo hoo!!!!!!!!!!!

On a side note, who doesn't love the fact we get a fun uber ride?.....lol.

Here's a little tip.

When I started I wasn't finding any boxes and I thought Id give up the hobby as it seemed useless.

Then someone suggested to me, until I get the hang of things, stick to finding boxes that say 'findability: good'. Those boxes usually mean they were recently found and probably still there.

To narrow it down even more, you can check out the 'planted on' dates. The newer the plant, the higher the chance it's still there.

or if you use your own ink pad after someone stamped in metallic, it could ruin your ink pad.

This is excellent advise for beginners.

We are certainly not aged veterans but we have looked for a box or two in our time, and in that time I've come to appreciate the harder searches. One of my fondest memories was finding a box that hadn't been found in about 10 years. When I sat out to find it, I knew my chances were about zero, but, these days, it's the hunt I enjoy most. Sort of a 'Zen and the Art of Letterbox Hunting' deal, ha ha.

I also found boxes that I couldn't find when I first started. I guess it like with everything else, the more practice you have, the more the clues start to make sense.

I love finding old boxes. I actually feel proud of myself if I do. lol.

... there are by state?

I just looked at someone's stats and I think they have more finds than there are boxes in my state!

Not a biggie of course, but it got me curious about how many boxes there are by state.

Under the HOME tab is statistics by state... if that's what you're looking for

I recently found a box I looked for twice over three years ago and couldn’t find.

It’s a good thing no one could see me yelping to myself all alone in the woods.

I’m not sure if I’ve ever looked at those statistics before. Why am I not surprised that Massachusetts has the most boxes?

I understand that feeling. I went back for a box I couldn't find the first time, and found it. The owner had mis-identified a tree and gotten their left and right confused. That was a toughie. I might have yelped a bit myself at that one.

That's exactly what I was looking for, thank you!

I have never once clicked on the Home tab, now I'm going to explore the rest of the site, ha ha.

Ryan,
Question...
On the 'Plant Types' and 'Hide Types' pie charts, why did you switch colors on the types for each chart. It's seems a little confusing. Just my nit-picky two cents worth!

🙃

I'm not really sure, to tell you the truth. I have some sort of vague memory that I had basically used "rainbow colors" on both charts originally, but when red was the first color and used for "traditionals" (the "first" type of letterbox), people complained that the charts used too much red--which tends to look like an error or mistake or something. So I think I reversed one of them.

But honestly, I'm not even sure if that's true or if I'm just imagining it.

I've gone ahead and tweaked the code so both charts will show up in reserve-rainbow colors, though. The charts are generated each night (I think) with a cron job so you won't see the change immediately, but the next time it runs, they'll both use the reverse rainbow order color so red doesn't take up the biggest chunk of both pie charts.

-- Ryan

Watership Down. It's a slow, cozy read. Perfect for late Autumn.

These people are wrong, of course. ☺️ Red is a great color! My favorite in fact.

That aside, I don't understand what "reserve-rainbow colors, cron job" means but I would think that if I'm looking for, say, event boxes, it makes sense that I would be looking for the same color on each pie chart, no? Or is that what you meant?

I just finished a themed stamp for the event box. Hope we see several boxers at this casual meet-up in the heart of the SMU area.

I’m excited to chat about this hobby and do some exchanges. My sig and personal are ready!

Visit Dallas for some holiday shopping and stop by the event for coffee or tea and definitely a pastry! 😉

I meant to post "reverse-rainbow color", not "reserve"-rainbow color. Instead of red to purple, I used purple to red.

But I do agree that it is more logical to use the same color for each element on each pie chart.

A cron-job is just something that I have the system run automatically over a set period of time. AQ runs all sorts of stuff in the background. It'll check if remotely-hosted clues have changed since the last time the clue was checked (it'll do this throughout the day and night). It'll run backups of the database. (It does this once each night.) Once per week a cron job runs that selects the Box of the Week.

And in this case, there's a cron job that (I think) runs every night that will update the graphs with the latest data. AQ uses external software to generate the graphs and they often have limits about how much I can call them or how often I can call them, so I use cron jobs to generate the data once per day so I don't run into those sorts of limits, and it's not so time critical that it needs to be updated every minute or anything.

-- Ryan

Ryan,

Thank you for addressing this and I hope it didn't cause you extra trouble. I was more curious than anything.

But I do appreciate your taking the time to explain it - ignorance fought.

Hoping you and your family have a wonderful Thanksgiving!

I really wish I could attend this. I have family in Dallas (I'm from there originally) and it would great to see them and make this too. My schedule won't allow it, I'm afraid... but a boy can dream. 😊

I hope you have a successful meet up !

This year, I'm thankful for people who have spoken up for democracy, so I just sent snail-mail thank-you notes to some lawmakers who have been especially courageous. I hope other folks will consider doing the same as we celebrate Thanksgiving here in the U.S.