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[argodaemon]

I was looking into that myself. I probably won't be able to look into this anymore today (school sucks) but I will keep it on my mind.

EDIT: I looked at Dictionary.com and got this for definitions of Archaic:

[blackhawk127]

for those who haven't seen it the text is as follows

[Jaxon-Xz]

Actually, yesterday Argo and I found out that the small town of Ismay, Montana changed it's name for a short period of time in 1993 to Joe, Montana as a publicity stunt. The town is less than a half square mile and has something like 26 people living there.

Not sure if this is really helpful, but meh.

[argodaemon]

Here are some random thoughts I have been spewing out of my brain over the last few days. This is pretty much all random.
---------------

Considering that the cipher thing has two Qs and only one U, that would mean that there has to be some letter swapping. We probably have the key, just don't know what it is or how to use it.

There are three occurances of duplicate letters. BB, PP, & LL. If the cipher does not have to be rearranged, then these letters are limited as to what they can be. Being that the LL is only one letter from the end, the choices there are limited even more. Being that we can't see spaces, this does also mean that the end of one word may be confused with the beginning of another. Hard to tell at this point.

There are 3 occurances of OLB in order, two of which also have a T at the end as well (OLBT). Could be a common word with common letters.

There are 3 occurances of O and I being next to each other. There are 2 occurances of RT. There are 2 occurances of TI.

Three letters are not shown: J, N, W
Two letters are by far the most common: L, O (meaning one is most likely E)

The distance between each letter in the pairs are as follows, in order:
1, 22, 13, 15, 0, 2, 3, 11, 14, 5, 8, 18, 3, 16, 1, 11, 1, 6, 2, 7, 11, 7, 1, 5, 13, 2, 6, 10, 7, 5, 8, 13, 4, 9, 5

I tried matching all the of the sets up vertically and there was nothing, unless there is a pattern as to which way to position them.

[krystyn]

So could the key be "Ismay"?

[argodaemon]

I tried various different ciphers with Ismay and IsmayMontana as the keyword and got nothing.

Also, if the title of the Feb 12th blog IS an anagram, it does have a Z in there, so that does limit the word choice by quite a bit.
Words that contain Z and work with the other letters: Ritz, Anzac, Haze, Nazi

I ran through EVERY page of every website pertaining to the ARG and searched for any words containing the letter Z. No matches.

I got bored yesterday and wrote up a program that will generate just about all possibilities if this was a substitution cipher, but considering that there are 26! (4.033 x 10^26) possibilities, it would take a miracle to run into the correct answer.

[GalvanicSpiral]

[Jaxon-Xz]

Hypothetically it wouldn't have to be a Fairplay cipher, it could also be a two-square cipher... then it would give you the possibility to use two words for the key... Joe, Montana... Archaic Size... eh?

[krystyn]

I keep thinking that "archaic size" may be referring to the method to solve, cos I keep thinking of "cubits," so maybe cubing the letters similar to a playfair will be the direction to go in?

I'm not especially good with ciphers, so I am probably totally off. Feel free to chuckle at my dimness.

[blackhawk127]

wheres strifey when we need him, actually i think thats the consensus right now. Another thing i noticed, i tried googeling size hint and realized its an actual word and it somehow relates to programming

[blackhawk127]

new alfred alan posting

[krystyn]

"aneurisms" appears to be the only single word formed as an anagram of SUN ARMIES.

[blackhawk127]

today i sat down and went through the very long history of cryptography. I no longer think this can be playfair mostly because of that pesky bb occurrence. Im now thinking this is a four-square cipher, the cipher sure does look alot like it http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-square_cipher.

also the key to solving it may be AA since he says the key is in plesantville.
i have no idea where to find the resources to attempt a decode though

[Apocrypha]

Just a note, Alfred was back on yahoo last night, around 2am est. I didn't have a chance to talk to him tho.

[argodaemon]

I had seen that "AA, Pleasantville USA" before and thought it might be Alfred, but I just ignored it for a while. Erg....

Of note, Joe Montana and the mother on the show Pleasantville were born on the same year.