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[krystyn]

[PUZZLE] Oh look a mysterious image

[GWing_02]

*groan* Betamaze. I can't believe they got a hold of it again.

It must have been toyed with somehow; I don't recognize that bottom right tile as any letter. I'm thinking perhaps for each row they split the tile in thirds down the row horizontally and reversed the whole row of a slice or something fancy like that?

The pixels on the slant don't 100% match up. Aren't they supposed to? I smell flippage...


edit: OH! I found the mysterious last tile... it's an endstop, apparently.

[spriggan]

looking at the first five tiles, i've gotten these decodes

[GWing_02]

Looks like what I've got so far. I've got the first row down now.

[spriggan]

[GWing_02]

I'm not paying much attention to the patterns. Most are unflipped though.

I'm having difficulty with one particular pattern; I can't quite figure out what the first row, second to last tile is supposed to be.

edit: I went back and marked the ones that are flipped. My head hurts, and I swear I'll be able to just read betamaze by the time this is done.

edit2: With an anomaly here or there the pattern of flipped/not flipped is reversed each row.

edit3: Ignore that.

edit4: Found out what the trouble tile was. Apparently there's two versions of Betamaze, or one of the sites I'm using has an error with the "b." A corner got added where it should've been shaved off.

edit5: My fastest row yet. I'm getting good at this, which is not a good thing for my mental health. YAAARGH.

edit6: 1/3 of the way done. There's an AWFUL lot of f's, both of the flipped and unflipped variety. A little more flipped than unflipped, I think.

edit7: Almost there...

[GWing_02]

WOW.

I finished it. No one say betamaze, please.

Here it is.

KEY!!!!
RED = Not flipped
GREEN = Flipped


IMPORTANT: The & is not really an &, it's my own substitution to what the site calls a "full stop." The hyphen - is really a hyphen, as is the semicolon ;.

My guess is that the flipped ones need to be ROT'd or otherwise manipulated one way while the unflipped ones need to go another (perhaps the opposite) way.

PS I might've messed up here or there. Darn chipped corners.

[spriggan]

[GWing_02]

Bleh, I guess I'll leave the rest to the experts.

An interesting note:

There's several strings of "horey" in the last three rows above the last one. I thought I'd messed up when I saw that as a was doing it, but there might be something there to analyze. There's another one 9 rows up from the bottom on the very right, and another that starts 7 rows from the bottom on the very right and finishes on the beginning of the next row, so we know that it should probably be read row by row, not any funny pattern.

There's a coupla "forey"s too.

[spriggan]

[Muffin]

Don't know if this is really necessary but...

GWing_02 says...

[Ehsan]

Well since no key length would make sense because of the repetition of fwchorey, I gathered it's a simple substitution cipher. After 2 hours of staring at letter frequencies and comparing digrams & trigrams.. (I'll spare you the details)

[Caterpillar]

Sort of taken from Aldous Huxley's A Brave New World Ch. 3 (but machine has been replaced with symbol)

The machine turns, turns and must keep on turning–for ever. It is death if it stands still. A thousand millions scrabbled the crust of the earth. The wheels began to turn. In a hundred and fifty years there were two thousand millions. Stop all the wheels. In a hundred and fifty weeks there are once more only a thousand millions; a thousand thousand thousand men and women have starved to death.

[Ehsan]

This was from the metacortechs wallpaper..

Also note that 150 weeks has been changed to 1050 days.. (which are equal)

[GWing_02]

Which one was on the wallpaper, I can't remember? Was it the modified or original passage?

Here's comparing the differences between the two passage: