unforum

[Mountain Girl]

[snowfox090]

Any room for a newbie? This is my first ARG, and... man. Gonna have a hard time sleeping tonight, even though I -know- it's a game.

[Mountain Girl]

[Wabonan]

LOL @ snowfox..If you watched all the vids and read the cubing forum you probably will...I read and watched most everything last night after listening to the ARG netcast I got about 3 hours sleep..lol
Edit
Welcome Snowfox BTW

[snowfox090]

[Wabonan]

The observer sent me a PM

[paterson]

just a guess... it could be greek characters and your OS isn't enabled to show them correctly. he posted greek words before and my computer blorts out characters like that when russian colleagues sent me emails with cyrillic text in them.

[warneverchanges]

No, those are legal ISO-8859-1 characters. If they weren't displayable characters you'd see a square in place. Maybe working it like a cryptogram is what to do here.

[warneverchanges]

Okay, that didn't work...I should have listened when he said there would be no more word games.

[aninterloper]

it doesn't appear to be a cryptogram; the best I got after running it through several good solvers was:

[Wabonan]

Its not greek or russian..I can see them planly on google...Im pretty sure its a code of somekind.... But I gotta go to bed now I gotta get up at 7am see yall...lol

[aninterloper]

It is Greek. Here's what it says, but I can't translate.

[cyberus]

For what it's worth, the observer has a birthdate of 01/01/1900 listed on the forums.

Something about this strikes me as strange. With one of the children having a birthday of 3/3/1903, it makes me think that the observer represents some sort of neutral party. I could be wrong though, just a hunch.

[snowfox090]

Okay, after a couple hours of failing to nap, I have the beginnings of a possible avenue of inquiry: names.

In many cultures, names have very real power. Certain Native American and First Nation tribes take two names, one of which is never made public for fear of it falling into the wrong hands. To lose a name is to lose much of your personal power. It's a theme that runs through several different sets of mythology, including the Greeks. In fact, Mnemosyne--a Titaness and the deity of memory--was the first to name every item in creation, effectively making them real.

The part that really made me sit up and go '!!!' is that Mnemosyne is also the mother of the Muses. So if she's their mother, and they're the sisters of these Dark Muses, we can assume she's -their- mother too. And, having given each and every thing in the world a name, she'd certainly have the power to take them away.

Also, there's a Talmudic tradition holding that changing one's name is one of the four ways to avoid divine punishment. A bit outside the realm of Greek mythology, but maybe something worth considering.

And now, links!
http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node=names%20have%20power
http://www.satansheaven.com/names_of_power.htm
http://www.threepennyreview.com/samples/mamet_w04.html
http://koti.mbnet.fi/neptunia/essays/namep1.htm
http://thewordnerds.libsyn.com/index.php?post_id=4722
http://www.factmonster.com/ipka/A0768229.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_God
http://www.lowchensaustralia.com/names/gnostic.htm
http://homepage.mac.com/cparada/GML/Mnemosyne.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names#Names_in_religious_thought

EDIT: What if the observer's supposed to be Mnemosyne? Maybe she's refereeing the game between her sons and daughters.

[aninterloper]

Here's possible rough translation: