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[fubarz]

This Is Not A Game- Novel

[El Neil]

i picked up a copy of the book today, and there are some strange markings on the edge of the pages. i think if i line them up i'll find something, but its going to take me a couple of hours.

bear with me

neil


EDIT: ffs theres not enough light for my iphone, and not enough battery for my camera! suggestions?

EDIT 2: aaarghghg it definitely says something, i just havent got enough hands!

EDIT 3: ripping pages out - this had better be worth it.

[faeryqueen21]

Admittedly I haven't read this book yet so I don't know if what I'm about to say is accurate, but should this thread be in Timewasters? Or is there an actual ongoing ARG with the book?

[El Neil]

okay, second attempt at typing this - it crashed the first time.

[El Neil]

picture attached

[Lunsford]

Does anyone else have the book??? I am interested to see if the dots are also the same in another copy..

[danteIL]

[Lunsford]

That sux.

[faeryqueen21]

Aw. That's a big bummer. At least no one can ever question your dedication to solving a puzzle!

[El Neil]

any other book and i would have ignored the marks, but an arg book?what are the odds?!

neil

[thebruce]

I dunno... still looks suspicious. I'll have to find the book locally and check it myself. too curious... =P

eta: hah! there's ONE copy in a local Chapters. It's like it's there just for me
(my luck, I'll go and it'll be gone by then)

[Lunsford]

TheBruce: I will be waiting to see what your copy looks like..


What if they only did it on a certain number of books..??

[sapagoo]

if this is a barcode puzzle, then the left side is the same as the right side.
Each line starts with 19 bars (with 18 spaces in between) a large gap, then the same 19 bars (with 18 spaces) again.

I'm using the bottom half of El Neil's picture, since most of the lines are oriented correctly.

Every line except the first one starts:
211232 and ends 331112.
(the first line is upside down, starting with 211133 and ending with 232112)

My notation:
211232 means black bar with double width, single width white space, single bar, double space, triple bar, double space.
Obviously you'll always have one bar more than spaces.

one line in the middle I've got transcribed as
2112321231 2221321222 1213421112 2331112 (spacing is mine)
There aren't that many barcodes that use widths of 4 in their encoding scheme.

Edit to add: It's 128-C
Every line (except the first one, which is upside down) starts with the code for "Start Code C".

You have 13 lines.
The 8th line is

[thebruce]

for me, running each line through bctester does indeed show Code-128 (which only supports 0-9), but these are the results it gives per line (double checked, and bctester does orient the lines correctly):

[sapagoo]

Okay, so the 4th character in my list is a check-digit.
And my lines 5-8 are reversed from thebruce's - so they are his 9-6.
The middle character is always 21 or 22.
The third character is always 7 less than the first character.

Using thebruce's list:
We are left with
I R J Q K P M N M O L S H
(or is it BKCJDIFGFHELA )?

Edit to add:
looking less and less like a real answer:
Going right to left, take
B C D F G H L
and you are left with
KJIFEA
reverse that to get AEFIJK
ABCDEFFGHIJKL so every letter from A-L is in the list, F twice. half going alphabetically, the other half reverse alphabetically.

I see no point of printing that on a book. Due to the "order-ness" I can't imaging it meaning anything.