Tidal

Answer: THICCEST

By Ben Coukos-Wiley and Jonah Nan

This puzzle is based on "Meme Man Wurds" memes, the most famous of which include "Stonks", "Helth", and "Kemist." Each of the nineteen memes has a caption cluing a word in an ironic manner and an image representing the word being clued, with Meme Man's head edited in. For example, "When you win the nursing home's bingo night twice in a row" clues GAMBLER and includes a picture of a person playing at a casino, comparing the small feat of bingo night to the high stakes of casinos.

Similar to memes like "Helth", the words that actually fill out the blanks are funny misspellings that sound the same. In the case of this puzzle they are all real words, each being clued by one of the nineteen clues at the top of the puzzle. So the aforementioned GAMBLER becomes GAMBOLER, matching with the clue "One who frolics."

The memes are in alphabetical order by caption.

When they use doilies at your middle school dance

When you make it up two whole flights of stairs before getting winded

When you hit all the piano keys at once

When you win the nursing home's bingo night twice in a row

When you break the glass ceiling by becoming the CEO of an expoitative company

When you tell your TV audience they can gain God's favor for the low low price of $19.95

When five compartments of the ship are breached by an iceberg

When you take off your shoes before putting your feet on the table

When you dribble through the warmup cones without knocking any over

When your grandpa worked his whole life to get coal but you already have diamonds

When you carry two folding chairs at once

When you silence all opposition to your brutal regime

When you make propellor noises while you run

When you can't afford a new helipad for your yacht

When you trade one dollar for two quarters

When you shrink the margins of your essay to hit the page count

When you write a puzzle using stock images but don't pay for the licenses

When the smart kid does the entire group project

When you teach your little brother to swear

Clue	Answer	Homophone	Index	Letter
Type of scale	MINOR	MINER	1	M
One who frolics	GAMBOLER	GAMBLER	2	A
Certain vegetable	LEEK	LEAK	4	K
Perforated	HOLEY	HOLY	4	E
Sob	BAWL	BALL	2	A
Illegal drug	HEROIN	HEROINE	6	N
Missing the middle	CORED	CHORD	5	D
He who smelt it	TOOTER	TUTOR	5	E
Environment	CLIME	CLIMB	4	M
Boring	PLAIN	PLANE	3	A
Ceremony	RITE	WRITE	2	I
Aquatic mollusks	MUSSELS	MUSCLES	6	L
Dump	POUR	POOR	3	U
Strong alloy	STEEL	STEAL	1	S
Estates	MANORS	MANNERS	2	A
Untidy	MESSY	MESSI	1	M
Predictor	PROPHET	PROFIT	6	E
Abound	TEEM	TEAM	4	M
Fragment	PIECE	PEACE	3	E

Extracting the letters in the red blanks and ordering by clues reveals the message "MAKE AND EMAIL US A MEME." From here, solvers must send a custom meme to the hunt email. This will earn them the answer to the puzzle, "THICCEST."

Authors' Notes

As soon as we saw that an answer of THICC worked with the meta, we knew we wanted to write a meme puzzle. The meme puzzle idea went through many, many versions before we finally settled on this one. We came up with the idea of using Meme Man Wurds, but we were stuck on the issue of “how do you ensure that solvers spell made-up words correctly?” The key insight was having the “made up” words be real homophones. They still look silly and fit the mood of the meme man template, but now the spellings are unambiguous.

We got the idea of asking solvers to submit their own meme from Puzzle Potluck 3 and UMD Puzzlehunt 2021, both of which had a puzzle with a similar step. Without the option of adding a keep going message, we hoped that the short instruction message would be clear enough. We think we succeeded, as not many teams had issues. But even so, it's one more reason why we're looking at using a different site architecture for our next hunt.

We like that this puzzle is accessible to people who are less familiar with hunts. We can show this to our friends and they can solve it without too much difficulty. On the other hand, this puzzle proved to be unenjoyable for people not already familiar with memes. Upon reflection we think we should have linked to examples of this meme format, similarly to how we linked to a cryptic guide in Teepees.