unforum

[FeloniousDrunk]

[Relia]

Re: Post card

[BostonBeats4]

I felt terrible for stepping OOG to the PM's to get anything but I'm glad to see my old friend back in the mix. Anyone know if we've fully used the Simple and Direct graph yet? Sorry to ask twice, I'm just still wondering

[Scuzzy]

Been following this for a bit with you guys, and been trying to figure this out too. I was thinking maybe the forte, loud, could mean capitalization, but the two together at the start of the entry seem to discredit that idea.

But been talking it over with my girlfriend, she is the one to show me the video in the first place, and she came across this, which seems like it could help with decoding: http://datadragon.com/education/reading/shaping.shtml

[Anenome Antipodleons]

Re: HUGE UPDATE

[jebreject]

I really do wish the PMs would have found a clever, in-game way to communicate this information to us. Radio silence seems like a strange move to be making.

[Relia]

[eOgas]

Hey, all this talk about the PMs is very off-topic and is getting in the way of the original purpose of this thread, so I made another thread for you guys.

[dposse]

Re: HUGE UPDATE

[drothe]

Hi everyone. I've spent the past few days getting caught up on all I've missed in this ARG. Like you all, I'm doing my best to figure out this diary cypher, but I'm finding that I can't even follow how the first one was figured out, and I don't see a post where it's explained.

I recognize that the records in the The way into the doleful city. table in Milwaukee: A Reasonable Haven match the letters and symbols used in the diary entry, but I don't understand where you went from there. I'm hoping that if I can get a clear understanding of how the first cypher was solved, I might be more help here on the second.

Would anyone be able to take a minute to indulge me on what I missed?

[BostonBeats4]

[drothe]

Oh, wow. That is much easier than I had thought. I was vastly over-thinking it, trying to use the column/row header values to arrive at the appropriate letter.

Thank you for helping me out there.

[drothe]

I'm noticing in looking at puzzle #2, that there are characters used that are not mentioned in any of the tables and graphs. Specifically, I'm referring to the f (or forte symbol), lowercase p, and most notably, the ' (apostrophe).

Working from here, assume for a moment that these characters can't be translated and must remain as they are, as we decode around them.

Centering around the apostrophe, I think we could start to decode something. Notice that there are only two ways it occurs:
1) ' _ (apostrophe, followed by underscore)
2) ' F F p ' (around a group of letters)

If we assume that "_" refers to an "s" (an unproven supposition, so just bear with me), these cases look like
1) 's
2) ' F F p '

Now it's behaving just like a normal apostrophe. Definitive proof that "_" = "s"? Not by a long shot. Worth a try? I think so. I'm going to see what kind of rules I can work out that allow for "_" to mean "s" and work from there. Meanwhile, for those of you more familiar with the context of the game than a latecomer like myself, it might be worth trying to think of any three-letter word or abbreviation that has the first two letters the same and warrants quotation marks.

Again, I've made only baseless assumptions, but judging by the standstill I'm seeing, it's probably necessary to approach this from a new angle.

[eOgas]

That's an interesting method. While we do have the '_ things in there, possibly indicating that _ = s, I think the 'FFp' thing indicates a contraction such as we'll or i'll. Notice that there are two occasions where we have 'FF. Unfortunately, these two possibilities contradict each other, because we have _'FFp'FFB_ As far as I know, there is no (legitimate) contraction that has an 's' before the apostrophe. Now that I look at it though, we do have some apparent repetition. There are two occurences of FFp. I think I remember someone else making note of all the repeated sequences. Since you've said you missed a lot, you may have missed this page from A Reasonable Haven. Some people, including myself, think that the underscores from the puzzle are related to the underscores in the second grid.[/url]

[huh]