It’s the day right before the Ides of March, which you might also call Pre-Ides day, or P.I. day for short! In fact, according to Google, it’s the 30th anniversary of Pi Day, so a special one indeed.
This year’s P.I. HUNT is themed around Gravity Falls, though you don’t need to have any Gravity Falls-specific knowledge in order to solve it. In fact, you don’t need any outside knowledge to solve it! That means both that you don’t need a computer to solve it, so it has no trivia, no codes like braille, morse, semaphore, etc., and also that it’s intended to be solved completely without a computer (except maybe looking up words you don’t know, or the like). See more info about printing below.
(Note that you can solve if you haven’t watched Gravity Falls, or have watched it, but if you’ve started watching and intend to finish, there are spoilers past this point. Also, the show finished airing more than two years ago! What are you doing? Go finish it!)
In the show, it was believed that Stanford Pines had written 3 journals about his findings in Gravity Falls. However, it was recently discovered that there was some more pages that had been unaccounted for, meaning the actual number of journals was a number slightly larger than 3…
It is VERY HIGHLY RECOMMENDED that you print the journal out. You should print it double sided, and as you go through it, flip pages from your right to your left, as if you were reading a book. I also recommend using a pencil, through if you write on the pages with pen, (or ruin them for any other reason…) the good thing about it being a pdf is that you can just reprint those pages.
Because lots of printers are weird and different, the printing might be the most daunting puzzle. I’ve provided a test page below. You can print the test page to make sure the printing will work okay before printing the journal. You don’t need color printing, and also there is a margin worked into the document so you don’t need edge-to-edge printing. When you print the test page double sided, the dot should be exactly in the center, and the asterisks should line up when you hold it to the light (if they are off by a little, that’s okay). The arrows shouldn’t be cut off, and should be as close to the edge of the page as they appear in the pdf (a quarter inch). Sometimes the printer tries to add an extra margin, so if there’s an option to set margins to 0, or set the scale to 100%, or an “Exact Size” option, you should select that. I had some troubles when opening the pdf in Chrome and printing it from there, so you should try saving it to your computer, and printing it using that menu. If you’re having trouble with the margins (printers are weeeeird!) you can email me and I can try to help.
You can email me (at jack[dot]l[dot]lance[at]gmail[dot]com) if you have found an error, are stuck and want hints, or have any other comments, but because there’s no unlocking this year, you don’t need to email for anything besides the final answer.
Test Page (not a puzzle)
PIHUNT!
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