unforum

[FractalP]

Is it just me or do the birthdates for the lead disciples seem a bit out of place? I'll look into it when I have enough time

[worthy_m]

I was thinking the same about the names - all of them with a middle initial.
I've written them all down, and the dates of birth for each line too, but I could be miles off course here. Not sure whether the towns and states should be used too. Totally unsure where to go with this.

[Rich Reder]

Savannah

[FractalP]

I'm gonna miss Savannah, it'll be sad to see her go...

Just kidding!

Anyways, running the letters and numbers worthy_m posted through anagram thingies etc as well as my brain and getting nothing as yet...

[Qaqaq]

You're not crazy, Donimo; I noticed that phone number discrepancy in the video at the time.

I do think, though, that the MIR in the current video has got to be significant; it's just too weird and noticeable not to be. Since we haven't used TITLE PAGES yet, perhaps it ties to that somehow.

We are getting nowhere fast this week, it seems, so let me just throw out my thoughts and observations and see what sticks...

The tasks all read very naturally. I would guess that we're not taking any letters out of them.

We have to be using the letters in the names. A name like "Stephanie R. Ere" just screams "yeah, we were forced to use that" from the puzzlemakers.

Everyone has a middle initial, but there aren't enough vowels among them to anagram into a message, and there are enough duplicates that they seem unlikely to be an ordering mechanism.

Everyone has a city and state abbreviation.

Only the leaders have birthdates. Because these can obviously be taken as two numbers (e.g. 4/4) my first thought was to use those as an index into something -- the quote, the task, etc. But I haven't gotten that to work. It could be that ordering by birthdate is significant somehow, though my feeling is that the leaders stay put and we're supposed to reorder the disciple chains to match them.

Only the leaders have quotations. The quotations are mostly famous ones; some are attributable (e.g., the first is Yoda, and Chohan's is Voltaire) and some aren't. If we're taking something from these, then, it's probably a few letters, or one or two words at most.

Only the leaders have smileys. The smileys occur after the quotations, making me think that they're tied together. The names of the smileys strike me as the likeliest thing to be significant about them.

[Xemu]

[FractalP]

Notice that the path crosses the Surgeon and Bandaged smilies...

EDIT: New DI!

[catherwood]

[Projectyl]

If it's MICHAEL (and I suspect it is), and the previous two are CHINESE and RIDDLES, all the answers so far this week have seven letters.

[tinhorn]

I'll offer up the possibility of ART, since it is (in another sense) a name appearing in the line: "Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name." It also feels like a good combination with CHINESE and RIDDLES. Though of course this is pretty stretchy, and we'll need to see how things play out.

[Rich Reder]

Savannah

[Projectyl]

I had a wild theory this morning on what to do with all these names, although it leaves the smilies, quotes, and birthdays unused:

Take "MIR" from the video, add it to the name of the first volunteer, "Amelia L. Gatwick", and anagram to get "calamari" and "gimlet" (food and drink) with "WIK" left over. Pass "WIK" on to the next name, "Annabeth C. Lyons", and anagram to get two more food/drink items with three letters left over, which then get passed on to Veronica, and so on. The types of things we pull out would change from row to row (Famous authors for the "read to seniors" row? Meteorological terms for the "weather-related emergency" row?).

This would be absolutely beautiful and brilliant... if I could get it to work past Amelia, and if it didn't leave out a bunch of information that couldn't possibly be extraneous, and if it gave us anything we could enter in that "Join the Chain" form. Still, maybe this'll inspire someone else.

[FractalP]

...well, we can pull 'Absinthe' out of Annabeth C Lyons WIK... no luck with the food though. I doubt this is a coincidence, but it seems a bit of a stretch. Note that it says:

[Projectyl]

An anagram generator also pulls out "kielbasa" and "baloney", although of course those both conflict with "absinthe".

The more I stare at it, the more inclined I am to write it off as coincidence after all. The right answer's definitely going to involve giving and taking in some form or another, but this method just seems too prone to possible alternate answers.

EDIT re the Seven: With the exception of Xander, we've always learned of the Seven members by solving puzzles. Since it looks as though we've only got the one big puzzle this time around, and we haven't made any progress on it, it probably makes sense that we haven't learned who we're meant to be helping this time.

[Projectyl]

Today's DI: