Room Escape Artist

Near the end of every month we publish a deep dive or reflective piece about escape rooms. At the conclusion of that piece, we thank all of our Patreon supporters.

We started this in September of 2020, so we’re going on 6 years of these posts. Read them all here. David and I like the challenge of having a post that we can use to honor our financial supporters. (David especially loves this challenge, and he usually writes them.) I stole this month from him. So, you are the first list of names.

Making an Archive

The second list of names comes from a project that Brendan, David, Theresa W, and I have been working on for months, and finally launched.

Back in the pre-escape room days, David and I used to speak at conferences pretty often. We both were keenly aware that conferences don’t do a very good job of preserving the history of the people who grace their stages. It takes work, thought, care, and data management. When we started the Reality Escape Convention, we didn’t want to forget the people who shared themselves and their knowledge with our community… so we preserved the data.

We have long made sure that there was a record of past speakers on the RECON website, but it was never quite what we wanted it to be. Now it is. The RECON Archive is comprehensive documentation of the people who have presented at RECON and what topics they covered. Plus for RECON Remote, it includes all of the videos of every past session that we have recordings of.

And the best part is that it’s now built to (almost) automatically archive future RECON event data at the conclusion of the event.

This isn’t something that we did to drive ticket sales. We did this because we’re proud of every RECON event and the people who presented. Their work deserves acknowledgement.

And on that subject, we’re coming up on RECON 26 Laval in about 7 weeks. Ticket supplies and hotel rooms are starting to dwindle. And while we do share video from the online version of RECON… if you want the knowledge from an in-person RECON, you have to show up.

The RECON Archive is your second list of names.

The Killer Isn’t Alice

More than a few people in our community know that I love names (and lists of names.) While names don’t play a significant role in my career at the moment, they did for more than a decade. Believe it or not, my educational background is in a branch of linguistics known as onomastics (the study of names.) And yes, that degree treated me just fine, thank you for asking.

Anyway, someone who knew this mentioned a puzzle book called The Killer Isn’t Alice to David. (He regrets that he cannot remember who, but it was someone at the Prague Escaping Summit.)

The Killer Isn’t Alice is literally a book filled with 46,600 names spread out over 211 pages, and a fairly short set of criteria to identify who the murderer is. David bought it for me, because it was a list of names that was a puzzle.

It was the sweetest terrible gift that I can recall receiving… which… to be fair, was clearly his intent.

I categorically do not recommend it The Killer Isn’t Alice, unless it’s a joke gift. It’s a miserable puzzle to solve. And no, I have not solved it. But it is funny.

That’s your third list of names. (I did tell you in the title that you could buy one of these lists, but wouldn’t want to.)

Back to the First List

While David usually writes our end of month “Patreon Names” pieces, I am the one who loads everyone’s names into place, carefully swapping in pseudonyms, nicknames, and all of the other adjustments that our community members have requested.

Loading everyone’s names gives me a moment to reflect on the fact that we couldn’t do most of what we do without the people who believe in us enough to back us with their money. It’s an honor and a responsibility that we don’t take for granted.

This list of names is my favorite list of names.

Thank you to our Patreon backers.

Special shout out to those who joined this month: Radka SVAČINOVÁ, Mathieu Dufort, ohi2u, Ray, Sean Weitner, Emily Yong Ling Zhang, Ryan Harris, Alex Rohrer, and SM

To those of you reading who have the means, we hope you’ll consider joining this wonderful group of supporters.

Support Room Escape Artist’s Mission

There are lots of ways to support Room Escape Artist, like buying from Amazon or Etsy after clicking into the links included in this post or backing us on Patreon.

The money that we make from these helps us to grow the site and continue to add more value to the community that we love so much.