unforum

[OmegaX]

[Caterpillar]

Okay - first off - no laughing

I know squat about programming, so can someone tell me if the following is standard language or a type of identifier unique to this website:

html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"

If it's some sort of "business as usual" then just forget I was here, but if it's unique then the "1999" could further support the possibility for a basis in the Countdown novels.

[Rogi Ocnorb]

Just visit that string as a link, and I think your question will be answered.

[Caterpillar]

I did actually visit it prior to posting the question.

It was entirely Greek to me, which is why I asked the question in the first place, along with the tongue-in-cheek "no laughing" directive. I was a bit embarrassed to post the question in the first place, but figured that anyone who knew me would know that if I was asking a stupid question it was precisely because I didn't know the answer.



/but I'm really good at needlepoint

[Shutaro]

[Tien_Le]

TL waves to Dan. Welcome back, buddy.

[OmegaX]

Any news on this? Inquiring minds want to know!

Or can I just assume that no post = no news?

[simokon]

Greetings folks. Long time no post.

I did some digging around late last week. Didn't find anything earth-shattering, but here goes:

Daniel Parker, the author of the "Countdown" series, is actually a pseudonym for Daniel Ehrenhaft, who writes young adult fiction. He has a website ( http://www.danielehrenhaft.com/), but there doesn't seem to be any indication that he has anything new coming out soon.

Based on the content of the links on filicide, it all seems (to me, at least) a little too gruesome to be connected with a book for teenagers.

While on the subject, all of the links reference parents killing their offspring. Except pomc.org, which is is an organization for parents whose children have been murdered - not necessarily by their parents. Hmm.

The "scribbled" frame of each flare appears to be all twelve of the flare questions superimposed.

Also found (via my resident webmonkey) that http://www.nomoreparents.com actually redirects to http://www.nomoreparents.com/index.php (found by trial and error) which presumably is a server-side script that autogenerates the page on loading. It appears that the only variation is which "flare" it chooses.

The icons on the flare directory page ( http://www.nomoreparents.com/flares) can be directly accessed (i.e. http://www.nomoreparents.com/icons/image2.gif) - this seems to indicate it's a unix server, as windows servers (according to webmonkey) store standard icons outside of the web directory.

Spot-googles of some of the phrases in the comments and some of the flare questions didn't produce anything useful.

nomoreparents.blogspot.com (and nomoreparents.net, a redirect to the former) appear to be unrelated. (The author even complains that nomoreparents.com was already taken).

Unless there is more to be determined from the links, I don't think there's anything else to go on until so-called "Spring 2007" arrives.

simokon

[degravedi]

[simokon]

Are we a go?

[konamouse]

Re: Are we a go?

[danman_d]

new e-mail

[Schrijvertje]

The word in the subject line - orbitas - is made from the missing letters in the message on nomoreparents.com. It fits the celestial theme. Solar flares reaching the earth when it's at a certain location in its orbit around the sun, perhaps on June 17th or would that be reading too much into it? Preparation for the June solstice?

Orbitas is a Spanish word, though. Perhaps a link to some solar initiation trips to South America. There are several sites of companies that organise such things and they all seem to be connected. Probably way off target, though. I put in June 17th at Solar System Live and there's nothing special about the position of the planets, at least not that I can see.

June 17th is Father's Day, so that might connect to the filicide theme.

Since orbitas was an anagram of the missing letters, what about the name of the site itself?

By the way, the link to that ask.metafilter page danman_d posted in his first message is also included in the source code. Wasn't mentioned yet. Strange that the "POMC" link has been removed ... Wouldn't have known about it if I hadn't read older messages about this.

Any clues regarding "Victor"?

[danman_d]

good call on the missing letters... I, too, googled orbitas and came up with no solid conclusion for what we should be finding. shrug.

The only other possible puzzle, which I've been staring at to no avail, might be in the meta tag:

[danman_d]

One other thought... Back when I used to PM, we used to worry that people would stumble upon in-game sites and be interested, but never realize that there was an entire community of people working on it. That explains why the PM's might want to link visitors to the original metafilter post.

It also might explain why they included the "HUGS danny" quote: people could google the phrase and find this unfiction thread. However, I just googled it, with quotes, and didn't get this thread returned as a result. Shrug.