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 Forum index » Archive » Archive: MetaCortechs » MetaCortechs: Puzzles
[LOCKED] [PUZZLE] October 1 picture at paintover
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WedgeGold
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Joined: 07 Oct 2003
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 		a Quickie
Did a quickie with STOL and the possible missing U

Anagram(STOL+U) = LOTUS

It might be too much of a reach.
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PostPosted: Fri Oct 31, 2003 11:01 am
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StreetPreacher
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 		This is probably unrelated but I found it funny. If you go to http://www.redking.net on the dialog box asking for user/pass it says slithytove. I opened up a can of google on that and found a link to http://slashdot.org/~slithytove, if you look at his friends (http://slashdot.org/~slithytove/fans) you find the esteemed Theodore Logan (http://slashdot.org/~Theodore%20Logan/). What are the odds?

PostPosted: Fri Oct 31, 2003 11:04 am
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StreetPreacher
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 		Re: a Quickie
WedgeGold wrote:
Did a quickie with STOL and the possible missing U

Anagram(STOL+U) = LOTUS

It might be too much of a reach.


There are lotus flowers on http://dina.thenekodas.com.

PostPosted: Fri Oct 31, 2003 11:07 am
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Marl64
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StreetPreacher wrote:
What are the odds?


Given some of the obscure (and strangely fitting) connection's I've seen while Googling this game, I'm coming to the conclusion it's 1:1.

And that ain't right Confused

If nothing else this game has shown me that there's of lot of obscure and inter-related connections out there.

The "Six degrees of seperation" theory might need revising down to maybe four or three Shocked

Edit:
StreetPreacher wrote:
WedgeGold wrote:
Did a quickie with STOL and the possible missing U

Anagram(STOL+U) = LOTUS

It might be too much of a reach.


There are lotus flowers on http://dina.thenekodas.com.
I rest my case.
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PostPosted: Fri Oct 31, 2003 11:10 am
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newbme
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Joined: 22 Oct 2003
Posts: 12

 		I have not been posting on this topic, just reading your posts, and allowing my brain cells free course to roam down all the neuropathways that our "out the box" spec has produced.

Question:
Are we sure Ceaser is male?

Now, before you WHOMP on me... remember that Ceaser's hacker team knows NOTHING about him that we know of except Scratch's sharp comments as to his being a "punk orphan" and is always talked down to by Scratch like he's a kid....no actual evidence that they know each other in fleshspace, right?

Dina is way messed up, we see that more and more....her lifestyle on this computer is WAY beyond normal.(and sorry for the Matrix reference, but complain to the creator of subway.avi)...It just sounds a bit too much like Neo in the beginning...falling asleep at his computer... *Wake up, Neo* Dina needs to wake up. Leiphe asks of her family....nothing is mentioned but her beloved Ethan. But does he share her dark dreams and premonitions...how deep does their connection really go? She speaks of NO mom or dad, brother, sister... No one.

Now, I'm not saying that I necessarily think that Dina could be Ceaser. I am just saying that everyone's sex may not be what we would naturally think. AND I believe that soon---all these characters will begin to meld. If they are not connnected in a way that we understand, it may be b/c some characters either do not exist, or already exist in another form.

It has been said recently I see {YOU} is the missing word. It seems that carelessly was our rollcall. This first message may be to someone else. Someone who is/was lost. Someone who did not want to be found (AI?) sorry Yanka Smile Metacortex corruption? James Avery?

Ceasar has a troubled past. We've seen it more recently as has his team. They are getting restless, some have quit. They want this orphan punk to spill it, share time...why are they doing all this work for him? What's his hidden agenda? Is this the topic of the initial picture of paintover? Why we don't get it? The hacker's don't either.

WHAT IS CAESAR'S SECRET????
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PostPosted: Fri Oct 31, 2003 2:28 pm
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xnbomb
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 		You and Caesar
downhere wrote:
I like the peekaboo theory. But uh peekaboo doesn't sound in character for caesar... And I know if I'm the hackers, I'd laugh at Caesar for setting such a wussy password.

I agree with the word peekaboo not being the focus. But the combination of the girl playing peekaboo, and the words above the image being eye see leads very directly and simply to eye see (or I see) you. I'd like to reiterate that for some reason, we've given this very little consideration ... possibly because of its wussiness (?). Maybe it says something about our demographic at unfiction ... not enough parents with young children or girls/former girls with pigtails? I don't know how well it translates crossculturally, but I'm willing to bet that peekaboo was a part of your life before the age of three if English is your first language.

WedgeGold wrote:
When we play the peekaboo game what do we say? "I see YOU!"

So YOU or U is missing?

Exactly! We've been working this for a long time, trying lots of interpretations and angles. Apparently, this is the most obvious thing about the picture (the girl, the central element of the image is playing peekaboo) even though we didn't see it. That strikes as just the kind of thing that's been stymying us ... we've missed a very obvious (well, not to us) thing about the image.

The question is (as always), what to do with that? Who does Caesar see, if that's what the message means in a literal sense. Or is you a missing word in the sense that our other missing words have been used.

newbme wrote:
Are we sure Caeser is male?

That's an awfully good point. I don't know that we can be certain about this. Sometimes, you can get a sense of gender by the way someone writes (I find myself trying to use that sense as I read posts here), but that's not foolproof. Until we have definitive evidence otherwise, we have to accept that Caesar could be a she.

PostPosted: Fri Oct 31, 2003 3:06 pm
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Marl64
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 		Re: You and Caesar
xnbomb wrote:
Maybe it says something about our demographic at unfiction ...

We need to extend the pool Very Happy

I'm hoping it's not a reference that is limited to one group. I can't help thinking about the way American kids sing a strange adaptation of the "Ring a Ring of Roses" rhyme.
xnbomb wrote:
Exactly! We've been working this for a long time,
Yeah and the "You" thing was explored extensively in conjunction with the second pic before it was solved.
Quote:
Who does Caesar see,
or of course "what" since the "you" is unproven.
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PostPosted: Fri Oct 31, 2003 3:27 pm
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joebrent
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 		We also sing "Little Bunny FooFoo" to the same tune as "Ring Around the Rosies". I prefer the former, because it's just no fun to bop a posey on the head.

PostPosted: Fri Oct 31, 2003 3:31 pm
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Xforce
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Joined: 06 Oct 2003
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newbme wrote:
Question:
Are we sure Ceaser is male?

Now, before you WHOMP on me... remember that Ceaser's hacker team knows NOTHING about him that we know of except Scratch's sharp comments as to his being a "punk orphan" and is always talked down to by Scratch like he's a kid....no actual evidence that they know each other in fleshspace, right?

Maybe they do:
Quote:
bigmclargehuge3.jpg (Caesar to Scratch)
Dude, what are you doing? I should pull these files,
we shouldn't be here. What are you up to?
Where'd you get that pic? We gotta talk IRL.


And I don't think a lady would say:
Quote:
bigmclargehuge4.jpg (Caesar)
I guess the tribe has fucking spoken.


On the other hand (pure "random" speculation from here on):
Beth's "my life" on Little Boxes refers to
Quote:
That's how it was with us, the secret meetings, the cryptic phone calls, the emails that said volumes by saying nothing at all.

so I'd lean towards ceasar being Avery, provided he had an affair with Beth.
Their both are used to this form of communication, so maybe the message was for Beth in the first place.
Maybe it points to a longer message for Beth that Avery has hidden somewhere for her.
So maybe we miss one story arc completely which is important to tie things up.
Or maybe we're not meant to solve the picture until the very end, since we yet lack the neccesary info, so at the end of the story arc we're right at the beginning (a nice revolution), so to speak) and get a teaser or a solution.

Maybe I just need more sleep.
cheers,
mac
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PostPosted: Fri Oct 31, 2003 3:39 pm
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Marl64
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joebrent wrote:
We also sing "Little Bunny FooFoo" to the same tune as "Ring Around the Rosies". I prefer the former, because it's just no fun to bop a posey on the head.
See what I mean
Background
Code:
Ring a Ring of Roses
A Pocket full of posies
A'Tishoo, A'Tishoo
We all fall down
Where the Ashes came from I've no idea.

The ring of roses describes the initial symptoms - red rings on the skin
The Pocket full of posies was beleived to prevent infection (some describe it as flowers given to the sick, but since no-one when near the sick, I tend to go for the first idea)
A'Tishoo is the sneeze - one of the final symptoms
We all fall down - It's ultimately fatal.

The whole thing describes the black death ravaging England

Just how [OFF TOPIC] can we get? Very Happy

And to drag it back on topic, fortunately "Peek a Boo" is the same in the UK too Very Happy
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PostPosted: Fri Oct 31, 2003 3:47 pm
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Xforce
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 		no sleep yet, but another take, based on the above:

maybe Beth is ceasar, and uses the hackers to track something or someone.
Scratch has strong doubts about her "methods"!?

So maybe he/she writes her/him an angry email, which is more "IRL" than the cryptic stuff.

Question: Who has gotten an angry email from whom recently? Shocked
Who has expressed the need to talk to whom face to face (In Real Life) recently? Shocked

Gentlemen, have we just crossed storylines? Shocked

Didn't check if the timeframe fits, though..
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PostPosted: Fri Oct 31, 2003 3:56 pm
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xnbomb
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 		Possibility
Xforce wrote:
Or maybe we're not meant to solve the picture until the very end, since we yet lack the neccesary info

I do have a theory that would support this way of looking at it (at least that the meaning of this image will only become clear later), that borrows on concepts we have seen discussed separately on this forum:

There at least is a suggestion that we are meant to think of the girl as Alice (the object we can see her looking at could be a Red Queen, and she is also looking at the following part of the quote "s to l" ... small to large ... eat the mushroom?). There is also something cryptographic in the image, the quote itself.

Alice is also the first character in cryptographic examples (e.g. Alice and Bob want to communicate, but they want their messages to be secret etc.). In another thread, it has been discovered that the filenames of the paintover images have an interesting property. Convert the numbers to letters (1,4,9,25,15,3,26 becomes ADIYOCZ) and then apply a rot-5 transformation and you get FINDTHE. That seems unlikely to be a coincidence.

The poster of the images calls himself/herself Caesar (except the last one ... Scratch, but maybe he figured out what number Caesar would use next). Another name you can use for the rot-5 code mentioned above is a Caesar Cipher, which many hold to be the first kind of letter substitution code.

So, put this together and I get:

Alice is in the first image. The first image contains a cryptogram. Alice is first in cryptography. The Alice image points to the first kind of cryptography. The Alice image is the first part of another cryptogram. The first kind of cryptography is the Caesar Cipher. The Alice image is the first part of another cryptogram encoded with the Caesar Cipher.

So maybe the point of this image was to suggest how we'd find the meta-message, that encoded in the paintover image filenames using a Caesar Cipher. That's easy in retrospect, given the clever work done by the folks in that other thread that found the message in the paintover filenames.

(EDITS: So many typos, so many clarifications)

PostPosted: Fri Oct 31, 2003 4:04 pm
Last edited by xnbomb on Fri Oct 31, 2003 5:35 pm; edited 4 times in total
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Xforce
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 		Re: Possibility
xnbomb wrote:
So maybe the point of this image was to suggest how we'd find the meta-message, that encoded in the paintover image filenames using a Caesar Cipher.

Sounds good, too.
Some kind of friendly "watch this space" sign, and a "how-to" on reading them to "whom it may concern" (i.e. not us). Smile
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PostPosted: Fri Oct 31, 2003 4:15 pm
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Marl64
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 		So the only fly in the ointment then is "who is it for?".

Surely the hackers would have asked caesar already about the answer, if they didn't already know what it was.

Was this intended to keep the interest of the AI (to borrow from the .BK thread) while the hackers watch it?

Or is it intended for someother character, that we have not considered might be looking at this? For all we know the staff of Metacortex get together on a lunchtime to puzzle over it Wink

Perhaps we have to suggest looking here to one of the characters as part of our interaction with them.

I can't believe it's for us, since technically we are passive observers to whatever it is that's happening.

And I'll try not to re-emphasise the question of how the hackers got more than we did with this picture alone Very Happy
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PostPosted: Fri Oct 31, 2003 4:56 pm
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DigitalFuzi0n
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Marl64 wrote:
joebrent wrote:
We also sing "Little Bunny FooFoo" to the same tune as "Ring Around the Rosies". I prefer the former, because it's just no fun to bop a posey on the head.
See what I mean
Background
Code:
Ring a Ring of Roses
A Pocket full of posies
A'Tishoo, A'Tishoo
We all fall down
Where the Ashes came from I've no idea.

The ring of roses describes the initial symptoms - red rings on the skin
The Pocket full of posies was beleived to prevent infection (some describe it as flowers given to the sick, but since no-one when near the sick, I tend to go for the first idea)
A'Tishoo is the sneeze - one of the final symptoms
We all fall down - It's ultimately fatal.

The whole thing describes the black death ravaging England

Just how [OFF TOPIC] can we get? Very Happy

And to drag it back on topic, fortunately "Peek a Boo" is the same in the UK too Very Happy


Just to solve Marl's curiousity on this, the Ashes to Ashes is the burning of the dead victims of the plague. I've never heard the A'tishoo thing, but I'm one of those silly Americans. ;-p

As for the paintover pic, i'd still like to know where the chess piece/cat/red queen theory came from. I've blown the image up and stared at it for hours and it in no way resembles any of those things to me. About the only thing I can see is possibly a face, but even that's a stretch. I do think we have found whatever we were supposed to find in this pic. Notice in the previous theory, basically we've stated that the Alice pic was a "primer" for the future paintover puzzles. And since the PMs tend to drop hints when we have trouble with a pic, we shortly thereafter got a "Congratulations" message talking about a primer...could that have been them telling us "Hey, you got it. You can sleep easy now"?

PostPosted: Fri Oct 31, 2003 5:17 pm
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