Obliterator Pyro is in danger.

 From the 1993 Transformers catalogue. Yes, they were still making Transformers toys in 1993. The comic, cartoons and other media had all long since stopped, but there was still a new assortment of transforming robot toys in the shops. The biggest ones were the Obliterators - the heroic Autobot Pyro and the evil Decepticon Clench.

The puzzle in the bottom right raises some questions. Obliterator Pyro is in danger, apparently. What the danger consists of goes entirely unexplained. Is it related in some way to the question of which Obliterator will reach the crystal megatron first? Would reaching the crystal megatron help matters, or make things worse? Perhaps the danger is the damage that would be caused by driving into a really big crystal?

And what, exactly, is "the crystal megatron" in the first place? Is it somehow related to the Decepticon leader called Megatron (whose toy was no longer on the shelves by this point)? Has he somehow turned into a big gemstone? We'll never know.

I mean, Obliterator Pyro does get there first, and Obliterator Clench drives off the bottom of the page, but is this a happy ending? Or is Obliterator Pyro still in danger? We need some answers, but I don't think we're ever going to get them.

World of Excel Esport

 The last two Saturdays gave us five battles in the Microsoft Excel World Championship! I refer you to my previous post for details of how the whole thing works, because it's too complicated to go into the whole double-elimination thing again, but the important point is that I got all the way to the fifth and final round before being eliminated. So, very close to qualifying for the Las Vegas finals, and since I can't afford to go there anyway this is the optimum result - allowing me to boast about having done very well, without exposing my poverty to the world! It's win-win! Well, technically, it's loss-win-win-win-loss if you want to go into detail.

Round 1, "All Shapes and Sizes", was a puzzle involving a big grid of numbers, and having to work out the sum of the numbers covered if you overlay different shapes and patterns on different parts of it. And I had great difficulty in getting my head around how to do that in the time limit. Of the 32 people in the group, you had to finish in the top 16 to get a win, and I was 26th. Three of the competitors were no-shows, too. Bit of a slow start, there.

So that puts me in the "one loss" group for the remainder of the competition. Finish in the bottom half of that group again, and you're out. The second part of October 10th's double-header was called "Roll Dice Roll", and required you to track details of how a six-sided die would move if you rotate it from one cell of your spreadsheet to another. And this one went better, probably for one very important reason - remember that He-Man Adventure Game Book I did the other week? I left the die I used then sitting on my desk, and having an actual one there in front of me when I opened the spreadsheet was really, really helpful in visualising what the task was talking about! I got the third-best score of the sixteen who'd picked up a loss in round 1, improving my record to L-W and meaning I survived to the following Saturday!

Having turned fifty years old on the Wednesday, it was a more mature me who sat down on October 17th for round 3. Here I'm competing in a group made of eight W-L and eight L-W competitors, with the eight W-W people in their own section, and the eight L-L people having been already eliminated. It's perfectly simple if you get used to it.

Round 3 was "The Ultimate Spreadsheet", asking you to do all kinds of strange calculations about what would happen on a gigantic spreadsheet with many more rows and columns than Excel can deal with! It was fun, and I finished eighth of the sixteen in the one-loss group - the lowest you can finish without being eliminated, but it's good enough! L-W-W, and on to the next round!

Round 4, in a group consisting of the 12 remaining competitors with two wins and one loss (while there were four in the top group still on W-W-W) was "Portals III - Borderless". A map-based case, which is something I always have trouble with. We've got 25 different maps and we're told the way they join together, and you have to work out how quickly you can get from one point to another. Luckily, I've done this kind of thing before, and I already had a macro ready from the previous time I was left wondering 'how the heck do you do formulas in Excel based on what colour these stupid map cells are?', which certainly helped. I was relieved to see I ended up sixth in the group - once again, bottom rank of the qualifiers, but still clinging on with a L-W-W-W to my name!

But then Round 5, "Ashfell", either due to tiredness on the third round in swift succession, or maybe general ineptitude at Excel, I did really terribly in. It was a Dungeons and Dragons kind of thing where you're on an adventure with a pack full of goods and have to calculate their value to trade in for drinks at a tavern, and things like that. We were down to eight one-loss competitors now (while the two remaining unbeaten ones contested their own duel for top spot), and the top four would go through to Vegas. I was seventh, and quite a long way back from the others.

But still! Like I said at the start, it was a great competition all round! Roll on next year!