[Mason]

Quote:

No, all of the interactions we have should be shared here

*You* don't have any interactions because you're too afraid to send an email to a character in a game. I don't see why we should help you when you don't help us, other than being a google replacement and finding obscure links to other ARGs.
Since I'm the person who's had the most contact and shared the most information, I don't see why you believe you have the right to have a jab at me when you trout every single post and add no new game information.

I'll keep my contacts with Eric confidential as per his request. If you want information, email him yourself.

I seem to remember SpaceBass splitting the thread because he had obtained information which convinced him to do so. Eric only told me what he knew at the time, there was no interpreting going on. It's how the game progresses, characters learn more information themselves. But of course you wouldn't have a handle on that because you just recycle other peoples findings.

[tipsila]

DelVillan. wrote:

There's a Tool concert at 7:30 tonight at DTE Energy Music Theatre in Clarkston, MI.

And it will forever be known as Pine Knob, as far as I'm concerned. DTE Energy Music Theater. Bah.

DelVillan. wrote:

As for the mail thing, we'll probably have to stop the posting and such, I would assume. Perhaps we could make a "mailing list" of sorts (forwarding, maybe) instead? I don't receive emails from Eric, so I'll be at a huge loss of information, seeing as the sites aren't updating anymore, if I don't get a chance to read them.

No, all of the interactions we have should be shared here. Remember that *someone* was misinterpreting what Eric was saying -- and it caused the games to be separated into two threads. That caused much confusion for those of us who understood that Eric was only playing the part of being unaware of the AAs -- not a PM speaking of his game being hijacked.

[James Stone]

I emailed Eric and asked about all the questions he has been receiving and about any connection he may have with Boston. Here is his reply:

Eric Hachlinski wrote:

Hello James - I have no aversion to a comfy chair... as long as that is the Spanish Inquisition you are referring to - and not that actual one! I would be interested to know who has been withholding information from your group. Although I'm sure they are following quite closely. Good work on the anagram from the team. I do have heavy connections to Boston that I could see them sourcing in some way and it's a large medical community in parts - that may be the east coast connection that would then span the US from west to east. I am as eager as you are to get my hands on that file. Obviously AA3 got their hands on it - and they seem to have gotten away. Maybe they are holding the file in hopes of catching them again. Pretty quite out here lately - which is a good thing as far as I'm concerned. I wish the best of luck to both of us.

[Scribe]

Mason wrote:

Maybe we should take this elsewhere...

Unfiction rules are that these boards are completely OOG, AFAIUnderstand - they are a "safe haven" for players.

However, I guess that doesn't stop in-game characters from picking up on things like the wikis, or even snooped e-mails/IM logs, etc. (as part of the plot). I'm wondering about password-protecting the exmosis wiki. Maybe also suggest to Eric that he checks his computer for monitoring software?

DelVillan. wrote:

There's a Tool concert at 7:30 tonight at DTE Energy Music Theatre in Clarkston, MI. I'll see if anything special is going on with it.

Cheers DelVillan, worth checking out I guess, although last time Eric mentioned he was off somewhere, it was a direct reference to what we were supposed to find (an Incident at Gate Three). But then, maybe "they" made him go there, as a signal to us. The Tool gig sounds more like his personal life.

Maybe we're looking for a particular tool though, like the way we needed a "feather" back in the NomenNescio part...

[DelVillan.]

There's a Tool concert at 7:30 tonight at DTE Energy Music Theatre in
Clarkston, MI. I'll see if anything special is going on with it.

I'm assuming that Eric doesn't know who "they" are, either. And if that alien-bit came as a surprise to him, I'm not sure what's up.

As for the mail thing, we'll probably have to stop the posting and such, I would assume. Perhaps we could make a "mailing list" of sorts (forwarding, maybe) instead? I don't receive emails from Eric, so I'll be at a huge loss of information, seeing as the sites aren't updating anymore, if I don't get a chance to read them.

Edit: Similarly, Eric made the Gate3 page. Did he only just look into that now? Seems to me if you were making a page titled "Mahasamparka" you would be a little curious.

Doubly Edit: Tool has a song called Ænima, with the lyrics
"Some say a comet will fall from the sky
Followed by meteor showers and tidal waves
Followed by fault lines that cannot sit still
Followed by millions of dumb-founded [idiots] and

Some say the end is near
Some say we'll see armageddon soon
I certainly hope we will
I sure could use a vacation from this."

Sure sounds like Eric, no?

The song makes some other alien-references, notably the Sci-fi Scientologist, L Ron Hubbard.

[Mason]

I got an email from Eric.

Quote:

Are my messages being posted somewhere they can read this? That may be an issue.

Maybe we should take this elsewhere...

[Scribe]

Some info on the file we're still waiting for, Eric's musical tastes, and the extent of his knowledge. Any chance "Tool" is a hint of some kind? Some of us have also been wondering if this ties in with any other ARG - does anyone know if there has been movement of a file elsewhere (e.g. Eldritch Errors?)

Quote:

Here's what I need help with - what does "6op 1 Libra" mean? It seems to be the start of things but I have no info on it. Obvioulsy we are here to help each other solve this - but I have waited a long time (it feels) for a "file" that probably holds the key! I have been contacted by someone that has the file - but it's not one of them. I may get it from that person first - but I may hide that fact until I get it from them. Off to a Tool concert for now as my personal life goes on in all of this. I kind of enjoy the quiet. Side note: They haven't asked me to open new sites - but I looked up gate three incident and noticed the "alien" thing. What does that mean? I'm at a loss - too many things going on in the code and such - it would all seem like a big joke if these people weren't so serious about me doing my job. All seems like a bad episode of X-files.

[DelVillan.]

I gathered a little more information on YES.

YES1, or yamaguchi sarcoma viral oncogene homolog 1, is a plasmid DNA gene. YES is a non receptor, cytoplasmic PTK, or "protein tyrosine kinase," which is a type of enzyme that attach phosphate residues to protein substrates. While that sounds like intense genetic jargon, it can be explained.
YES1 is a type of gene found in humans that is a homolog to the Yamaguchi sarcoma virus. Yamaguchi is the last time of the man who discovered it, and a sarcoma is tumorous connective tissue. The gene maps to chromosome 18 (18p11.32), and is called YES1, while a pseudogene, (a defective segment of DNA that resembles a gene but cannot be transcribed), called YES2, maps to 22q11.2. Apparently, there are other similar sequences to YES in the human genome, but have yet to be mapped.
Being a proto-oncogene, it can be altered/mutate when introduced to the Yamaguchi sarcoma virus. (The oncogene would be the virus itself, and the proto-oncogenes are the homologous counterparts that mutate)
The actual function of the YES1 gene is unknown, but it is believed to play a part in growth control.

[Scribe]

Following on from tipsila's post, there seem to be 2 main meteorite (or possible meteorite) hits on January 18th. The first was in Spain, 1994, but may not have been a meteorite, and is referred to as the Cando Event. Links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cando_event
http://www.rense.com/ufo/galician.htm

Not much else on it, apart from a report dismissing the meteor theory.

The second, though, was in Canada in 2000, and contained organic matter from far away. Lots more info on the web for this one:

http://nai.nasa.gov/news_stories/news_detail.cfm?ID=44
http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/11015.html
http://www.astrobiology.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=21384
http://aquarid.physics.uwo.ca/~pbrown/tagish/
http://oro.open.ac.uk/8172/

(Most of those are news articles.)

[Scribe]

That is extremely cool, DelVillan - gets my vote, although the others are still great. Thanks for the link, Tipsila - very interesting stuff.

A couple of things:

1. Stuart has questioned whether the rabbit is white. Nick has suggested that he, me.. everybody! could be the rabbit. Perhaps the rabbit is just the entire human race - i.e. our genetic structure. Then anybody could be a rabbit, be they white or otherwise.

2. Reply from Eric quoted below. Not much apart from some background info, and making me feel guilty for asking him what's going on

Quote:

On 6/30/07, Scribe wrote: > I have to admit I'm at a bit of a loss now. Is all of this still part of > their 'test'? I have speculation - plenty of - but only scant idea of a > real direction. Are we missing something other than a file? You are at a loss! HA! How do you think I feel! I'm always up for an adventure as long as it doesn't cost me personally - but this is starting to get creepy as I tie my own clues together. I did my stint in forensic image analysis and some military type training here and there for various reasons - but I assure you - my current qualifications have nothing to do with anything going on. I get paid to come up with ideas - but not ones like this - this is all way over my head - I am just your average guy. I can't wait to see this "file" we seem to be waiting for... for all I know it could be a nail file I have to deliver across the country at this point. Nothing they seem to do or say makes much sense. Next thing you know I'll be forced to relocate for the 6th time in two years. Cheers!

Still, I like the idea that we're helping him as we work things out...

[DelVillan.]

My personal favorite. I've taken the zodiac Libra symbol and made us a little ET.

[tipsila]

Just thought I would pass along a very informative site. Do check out the meteors and meteorites section, as well as the craters section. Additionally, I found a meteor-impact-crater map.



http://www.daviddarling.info/

About this site

The Worlds of David Darling is a large on-line collection of information on astronomy, astrobiology, spaceflight, physics, and other areas of science and mathematics, both conventional and speculative (teleportation, time travel, etc). It has been developed and is updated daily by author and astronomer David Darling. Regular users include aerospace companies, NASA and other space agencies, the military, and academic institutions, as well as a broad swathe of the general public.



http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/D/dirpans.html

Directed Panspermia

The idea that life might have been intentionally spread throughout space and seeded on the surface of other worlds by a guiding intelligence. A detailed version of this hypothesis was put forward in 1973 by the molecular biologists Francis Crick (co-discoverer of the structure of DNA) and Leslie Orgel.1 The chances of microorganisms being passively transported from world to world across interstellar distances, they felt, were small. The probability of successful seeding would be greatly increased, they pointed out, if the fertilization were carried out deliberately by an existing technological civilization. Their argument depended first upon demonstrating that it was possible for an advanced extraterrestrial civilization to have developed in the Galaxy before life first appeared on Earth. This they were able to do (see extraterrestrial civilizations, ancient). As for the means of dispensation:

The spaceship would carry large samples of a number of microorganisms, each having different but simple nutritional requirements, for example, blue-green algae, which could grow on CO2 and water in "sunlight". A payload of 1,000 kg might be made up of 10 samples each containing 1016 microorganisms, or 100 samples of 1015 microorganisms.

Crick and Orgel further suggested that directed panspermia might help resolve one or two anomalies in the biochemistry of life-forms on Earth. One of these was the puzzling dependence of biological systems on molybdenum. Many enzymes, for example, require this metal to act as a cofactor. Such a situation would be easier to understand if molybdenum were relatively abundant on Earth (see elements, terrestrial abundance). However, its abundance is only 0.02% compared with 0.2% and 3.16%, respectively, for the metals chromium and nickel, which are chemically similar to molybdenum. Crick and Orgel commented:

If it could be shown that the elements represented in terrestrial living organisms correlate with those abundant in some types of star-molybdenum stars, for example-we might look more sympathetically on "infective" theories.

A second example they give concerns the genetic code:

Several orthodox explanations of the universality of the code can be suggested, but none is generally accepted to be completely convincing. It is a little surprising that organisms with somewhat different codes do not coexist. The universality of the code follows naturally from an "infective" theory of the origin of life. Life on Earth would represent a clone derived from a single set of organisms.

There might be a variety of reasons why an advanced civilization would wish to intentionally initiate life elsewhere: as an experiment in astrobiology using an entire world as a laboratory; to prepare a planet for subsequent colonization (see terraforming); or, to disseminate the genetic material of the donor world to ensure its survival in the event a global catastrophe (see extraterrestrial civilizations, hazards to).

[Scribe]

I bumped into Nick from Heavenly Media yesterday, and had a quick chat. He suggested I was the rabbit - but then again, also suggested anyone nearby could also be the rabbit, so bah. One thing that stood out was he mentioned a meteorite hitting the earth at some point - can't remember *why*, but maybe that's why it stood out. It would fit in with the "panspermia"/life from extraterrestrial sources theme perhaps.

Currently looking at: Panspermia and the RNA World Hypothesis at Wikipedia.

Also, Wow - agreed: great logos, DelVillan! No criticism from here...

[tipsila]

DelVillan. wrote:

While we're on the subject of wikis, here's what I've got so far for some wikilogos. I'll probably do a handful more tonight/tomorrow, but I want to have these up for suggestions while I'm doing others to keep them in mind. I'm aware that they're larger, but it's easier to work that way. They look fine at the appropriate size. Keep in mind this is "untouchedup," but I'm not going to spend time on that if people totally don't like a logo or something. Edit: please view at full size. Looks terrible compressed like that.

Wow, those are great, DelVillan!

Not that I don't like these two, but I can't wait to see more of your work!

[James Stone]

Mason wrote:

James Stone wrote: Just to let you know I have been trying to sort things out in my head and created a wiki to assist. http://wikihost.org/wikis/6op1libra/wiki/start A few pages back, Scribe posted this link: http://www.exmosis.net/6op1wiki

Yes, I know, I can read.