Return to Unfiction unforum
 a.r.g.b.b 
FAQ FAQ   Search Search 
 
Welcome!
New users, PLEASE read these forum guidelines. New posters, SEARCH before posting and read these rules before posting your killer new campaign. New players may also wish to peruse the ARG Player Tutorial.

All users must abide by the Terms of Service.
Website Restoration Project
This archiving project is a collaboration between Unfiction and Sean Stacey (SpaceBass), Brian Enigma (BrianEnigma), and Laura E. Hall (lehall) with
the Center for Immersive Arts.
Announcements
This is a static snapshot of the
Unfiction forums, as of
July 23, 2017.
This site is intended as an archive to chronicle the history of Alternate Reality Games.
  

The time now is Tue Nov 12, 2024 7:42 pm
All times are UTC - 4 (DST in action)		 View posts in this forum since last visit
View unanswered posts in this forum
Calendar
 Forum index » Diversions » Perplex City Puzzle Cards » PXC: Black Puzzle Cards
[SOLVED] #219 Black - The Master of Secrets
Moderators: AnthraX101, bagsbee, BrianEnigma, cassandra, Giskard, lhall, Mikeyj, myf, poozle, RobMagus, xnbomb
View previous topicView next topic
Page 5 of 5 [66 Posts]   Goto page: Previous 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Author Message
Riiick
Veteran

Joined: 29 Apr 2005
Posts: 82
Location: Canterbury, Kent, UK

 		The solve I have had accepted on the ppc website is:
Spoiler (Rollover to View):
Alan Gardiner


Well done beano³ and Sarah!

PostPosted: Tue Oct 11, 2005 6:36 pm
 View user's profile
 Back to top 
Magma
Veteran


Joined: 10 Jan 2006
Posts: 119

 		Way beyond my ability to solve, this one - but I have had a go at it myself and managed to get a very crude partial translation that seems to match on a lot of key words. I know it's already been solved, but I felt that for a black card it would be such a waste to just fill in the answer without trying to see how the translation was arrived at in the first place. My previous experience in heiroglyphics consists mostly of writing my name back in school when I was 5, so I feel this approach is something that anyone who is unable to actually read hieroglyphics can attempt.

In my searching, I found an application called "JSesh" in which you can select heiroglyphs from categories and recreate the message on the card exactly.

http://www.iut.univ-paris8.fr/~rosmord/JSesh/

It's a Java based program, so it runs on most platforms, including Windows! Something of a novelty in this game, I have noticed... Smile

From there I found that the save files that the program made used the same notation of a searchable English-Ancient Egyptian dictionary, which had a lot of the individual words in its database. Using a combination of looking up the English words that I was trying to match in the translation, and searching for words containing individual hieroglyphs from the puzzle, I managed to fill in a lot of the blanks:

http://hieroglyphs.net/0301/cgi/pager.pl?p=01

Like I said, I still only have a partial translation at the moment, and it reads like a conversation between Tarzan and the Incredible Hulk, but it's nice have a vague idea how the structure of the language works.

PostPosted: Wed Feb 08, 2006 3:49 pm
 View user's profile
 Back to top 
dmatos
Boot

Joined: 15 Jun 2006
Posts: 26

 		I am absolutely amazed and impressed by anyone who manager to transliterate and/or translate it. I ended up just checking here for some help and it turned out the answer was right in front of me the whole time

Spoiler (Rollover to View):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gardiner%27s_Sign_List was what I was using to attempt to translate


PostPosted: Mon Aug 07, 2006 6:31 pm
 View user's profile
 Back to top 
Platinumflux
Boot


Joined: 03 Aug 2006
Posts: 43
Location: Ireland

 		Read through this entire thing as I didn't want to repeat someone else's post. I managed to transpose each glyph (Is that right?) using:

http://www.omniglot.com/writing/index.htm

Managed to do the ENTIRE card before realising

1. I dont speak ancient Egyptian.

2. I dont speak Eyptian.

3. I can barely speak English.

4. I dont know ANYONE who speaks it.

So thank you all Laughing

PostPosted: Wed Aug 23, 2006 8:10 pm
 View user's profile MSN Messenger
 Back to top 
gabeshep
Guest


 		It's amazing how the mind works (or, as is more often the case, doesn't!)

Spoiler (Rollover to View):
So, I'm going along, trying to translate the signs, learning about all sorts of new things - like uniliteral, biliteral and triliteral hieroglyphs, the 'Manuel de Codage' and the 'Gardiner Sign List' - and eventually, I discover, among all the hieroglyphs with multiple, seemingly unrelated meanings (who knew a striped ball over a mouth could mean either 'with' or 'fall' - or, if followed by a spoon, a duck and a thinking guy, 'voice'?), a string of signs that has only one, non-abstract meaning: 'gardener'. Now HERE'S something I can work with! So, I start by googling 'ancient egypt gardener', and after a bit of scrolling, I find a promising reference to a book called "The Ancient Egyptians", by an author named J. Gardener Wilkinson. Aha, maybe it's not about a gardener, methinks, but a guy NAMED Gardener! (this thought brings back fond memories of 'Being There' and its hero, Chance the Gardener, a.k.a. Chauncey Gardner.) Anyway, so I do a bit more digging, and I realize that it's not, in fact, J. Gardener Wilkinson, but J. GARDNER Wilkinson! "What a stroke of luck", I think. "If they hadn't misspelled his name, I never would have found the poor sod!" Now I'm starting to feel the excitement; I'm getting close to the answer. Next, I surf over to that old standby - Wikipedia - and start reading up on 'JGar', as I like to call him. However, after reading his bio, something in my gut tells me this isn't the guy. There's far too much in there about topography and manners, and not enough about hieroglyphics. So, now I'm all discouraged again. Back to the drawing board. But I notice a link on the page called 'English Egyptologists', and on a whim, I decide to check it out. Turns out, there's a whole whack of 'em, and for some reason, I start looking for my buddy JGar on the list. Can't find him. What the heck? Oh yeah, he's not in the Gs, you dolt - his last name is 'Wilkinson'. But wait a sec, who's THIS? Some other guy named 'Gardiner'! Hmm. This is followed by at least another hour's worth of surfing and scrolling and linking and reading before I decide that I am, indeed, on the right track with this other guy. I start closing all the tens of thousands of windows I had opened during the course of my research, when suddenly, on one of the very first pages I had read, a title catches my eye: 'Gardiner's Sign List'. OMG! (Oh My Gard!) The answer had been staring me in the face for hours. I'd even used Gardiner's list to decypher the hieroglyph for 'gardener', but I had never made the connection until a series of unlikely errors (misspellings, mistaken identities and misalphabeticized last names) led me full circle, right back to where I'd started. That's my story. Goodnight.


PostPosted: Fri Jan 19, 2007 4:46 am
 Back to top 
aliendial
Unfictologist


Joined: 29 Sep 2002
Posts: 3438
Location: Far Far Away. Nowhere Near You. Really.

 		!! Razz !!

Good on you!
_________________
aliendial

PostPosted: Fri Jan 19, 2007 3:26 pm
 View user's profile
 Back to top 
Display posts from previous:   Sort by:   
Page 5 of 5 [66 Posts]   Goto page: Previous 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
View previous topicView next topic
 Forum index » Diversions » Perplex City Puzzle Cards » PXC: Black Puzzle Cards
Jump to:  


You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot vote in polls in this forum
You cannot attach files in this forum
You can download files in this forum
You cannot post calendar events in this forum



Powered by phpBB © 2001, 2005 phpBB Group