Willkommen und guten Tag! Ich heiße Adalbert1. This site’s going to be pretty barebones for now; I’d make it garishly red, but I have no concept of CSS.

I do puzzles of all stripes. I’m pretty avid when it comes to puzzlehunts; for most of them, I hunt solo as Inert Oaken Heron2 (despite being none of those three words) or some variation on those initials (typically also bird-themed where plausible). For the MIT Mystery Hunt, I currently describe myself as a “free agent”, though my current team (The Team Formerly Known As The Team Formerly Known As The Team Formerly Known As The Team Formerly Known As The Team Formerly Known As The Team To Be Named Later) won the most recent iteration in 2023 and is thus writing for the next iteration in 2024. Just to be clear, nothing on this website is going to be seeding a puzzle in that Hunt.

In case the (non-existent but I digress) image at the top of this page wasn’t clear enough, I am also a furry (or whatever slightly more specific term they use for people with bird sonas these days). If you’re not cool with that for whatever reason, the door is this way. More on Adalbert here, but that isn’t the main focus3 of this website.

As for interests, despite being a major in computer science at MIT, my actual primary academic interest is linguistics4. Other things you can see me actively engaging with include strategic games (both board and video), classical music, and history. I also dabble in digital art sometimes; all images on this site are made by me.

  1. Pseudonym, obviously. It’s tied to my identity enough for me to be comfortable using it as a real-name-equivalent while also not being my real name. ↩

  2. This is technically a spoiler for Mirrorball (Mystery Hunt 2017), but I digress. ↩

  3. I’ll be truthful, I don’t have anything worth writing paragraphs about when it comes to furry things. ↩

  4. If your first instinct was to ask me how many languages I speak, a) that’s not what linguistics is, and b) the answer is somewhere within the range of 3-4 (English, Mandarin, Japanese, some German), with some basic Spanish and Russian and random phrasal knowledge from many other European languages. Also technically I could hold sufficient conversation in puflantu to get around the galaxy, but in practice I do not because the language is fictional. ↩