unforum

[catherwood]

another reminder that we were discussing "hole2" and q9als2002.gif here.

The thread for "hole3" and t9agen75.gif is there (and any more persephone updates will go into yet another new thread when it occurs).

cheers.

[pihwlook]

Here's my long winded analysis of the hole2 picture.

Not steganography
This is just a gif file with a two-color palette. The way steganography works is by slightly altering the least significant bit of every pixel's color. On a JPEG file with many many shades of every color, you can't even tell that it's been altered. On a gif like this one there just aren't enough colors to go around. It wouldn't work.

Nothing crazy
Brainstorming is good. The polar coordinates thing was a great brainstorming idea. But we tested it out, and nothing special happened. We need to move on. It's good to TRY crazy ideas like that, but you have to be able to realize that the makers of the game WANT us to figure stuff out. Therefore we will KNOW when we find the answer. Try crazy stuff but let it go when it doesn't work out.

Analysis
Let me start from the start. It looks like this is an image that had certain filters or operations performed on it. Certainly the picture has been at least converted to black and white. If we could find the original image, that would be awesome, but that is a pretty daunting task and we don't have much to go on to search for it. It appears that a certain filter was applied to the image - something similar to a graphic pen filter, which has been mentioned in this thread previously. The output of that filter leaves vertical strips/lines just like can be seen in this picture. The actual filter would create a random assortment of these lines. If, however, they applied it in some sort of special way, then they could put certain patterns in the number, length, and frequency of those lines.

I've tried doing a number of different things with the number of pixels / length of lines in the image. I attached a sample of one thing I've done that didn't mean anything.

In this image, I colored vertical white segments based on their length. So, for example, every 1 pixel tall white line in the original image has been replaced with a light blue line. Any 2-pixel tall white line is now a dark blue line, and so on.
I've also tried all sorts of things based on the total number of black pixels in each column, the sequence of alternating white and black lengths in each column, and others. I'm open to suggestion for what else to do in similar vein.

Thanks for reading!

[DarkStorm]

... did anyone mention that the white part of the man's face (where the eyes, nose, and mouth should be, but are whited out) sort of looks like a horse's head?

Probably nothing, but thought it was worth mentioning. Because who knows?

-DS-
Been a long time since I posted here.

[Gus Raja]

[Negative Kelvin]

With the white parts in his hair it kinda looks like a trojan horse. Maybe a hint that something is hidden in something that seems ordinary. Just a thought.