unforum

[veebee]

[Crucifixation]

[doublecross]

Thanks Crucifixation. Following your advice I have reversed the first three images and superimposed them again. I have also removed two lines that must have been part of the background. Here is the result.

[veebee]

This is looking good guys! Well done!

A Google search for Swamp/Heaven gives this:

http://www.rickross.com/reference/unif/unif180.html


Obviously OOG, but the references to wealth/religion kinda work.

[Crucifixation]

Sifting through google results for "天沼矛", simply because it hasn't occured to me just now that I should google it. Google unfortunately cannot tell the difference between chinese characters and kanji, so I have a sh*t ton of results.

天沼矛=あめのぬぼこ= ame no nuboko. I believe this allude to a Shinto legend, but unfortunately I am not familiar with Shintoism.

Will be back soon with possible leads.

[Prizefighter-Inferno]

Agent 47 here...the cygnus account was used during Con08 for contacting Yori, so they obviously stuck with that one and not the google account I was using as well. Wasn't involved so much with VITD as I didn't have the time, but I am bringing myself back up to speed with this one and am looking forward to some puzzle solving goodness

[Prizefighter-Inferno]

Use babelfish (http://uk.babelfish.yahoo.com/?fr=bf-home) for translations, used it on a number of occasions for kanji and the like.
The symbols 天沼矛 translate as "Amanuma halberd" when taken from Japanese to English, it's the name of a weapon from a japanese video game iirc, will need to look into it more...

あめのぬぼこ translates as "The [nu] [bo] of the [a] [me] it is dense" which suggests to me that a basic operator is missing somewhere in the original text, but it is close to what was found by Crucifixation...

[Crucifixation]

Bingo! Japanese folklore. Wikipedia misspelled the romanji, so it took me longer to find. (It's amenonuBOko, not amenonuHOko.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amenonuhoko

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Izanagi
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Izanami


In a nutshell, it has to do with the creation of the world in Shintoism. Ame no nuboko (天沼矛, literally translates to "Heaven Swamp Spear) is a spear that the god and goddess Izanagi and Izanami used to raise the earth which we live on from the sea.

ETA:
And oh...according to this web site, ame no nuboko is also a symbol for the male sexual organ. (Spear...salty water drops falling from the tip...)

[Prizefighter-Inferno]

The video game is Shin Megami Tensei I and is basically a Japanese RPG developed by Atlus for Super Famicom in 1992. Essentially it concerns the second war between Heaven and Hell breaking out in Tokyo in 1999.

For a full writeup and walkthru see here;

http://www.gamefaqs.com/console/wii/file/938084/5391

[veebee]

[kosmopol]

Wow people, you rock! I so wanted to help out with Japanese - but you were quicklier

Anyway, Gendo Takahashi is IG, its cool, but... when he is died... is it somebody else on the facebook?

And Polina is shortname for Appolinariya, so I think, we can call her so, if she won`t be against it.

BTW that Clarke quote

[Bartock]

[veebee]

[Bartock]

I have not. Seems the PM may have an aversion to my email addy.

Could someone message it to me on here or forward it to my gmail account (to avoid cluttering up the thread with info everyone already has)?

[PhanomKelvin]

I got the email sometime last night and it was late. I saw that I'm agent 117 I believe.