unforum

[degravedi]

[ReRez]

Re: something found on the front

[Broklynite]

Re: something found on the front

[Broklynite]

Hunh. Nobody's considered court stenography. I'm rather surprised.

[FilmEdge]

Re: something found on the front

[Christien]

Just got mine here in Montreal. Astro-Gunner. The dots are the same as the others.
Unfortunately it sat in my mailbox all day in this heat wave we're having and now it's pretty warped. But at least I got one, I was getting worried that it might have gotten lost in the mail.

[Rogi Ocnorb]

Many of the issues we're experiencing have a simple solution that works on most any decent-sized forum...
I present:
The Search Function

[Nighthawk]

Geez, we haven't figured this out yet?!? I refuse to believe it's this complicated; it would go against everything so far.

[AKComic]

I realize that several people have said that the bars on the front of the card are postal markings and should be ignored - but just to clarify, is it normal for articles mailed through the post office to have TWO sets of barcodes? Because there's two sets on these postcards - the nearly-invisible one on the front, and the obvious black-and-white one on the back, beneath the black bar with the dots.

Are those BOTH being used by the post office, or did we overlook something here?

[mach1monorail]

once again:

[AKComic]

Yes, I saw that - that isn't what I was asking. I know the nearly-invisible code on the FRONT is a postal code; my question was, is it normal for postcards to have TWO barcodes? Because there's also the regular printed code on the back - and I don't know if these are both used together, or if that's a dummy code.

That all being said... I have a completely different theory on this that just hit me - I don't have time to explore it myself, but maybe someone else can take it and run with it, as I don't believe it's been suggested yet (didn't see it in search). Somebody suggested a while back that maybe it was a map to the Exhibit Hall, rather than a code - then I noticed over at FlynnLives.com that the SQUARE dots on the black bar look suspiciously similar to the square dots on a map on the website - the one in the screenshot from Space Paranoids.

What if it IS a map - and we just had the location wrong? What if it's a map to Space Paranoids? Perhaps the dots line up somehow with the sectors in the game. More, I remember a poster stating that when you put the different postcards together, there's one dot that overlaps - what if that's the digital "X marks the spot" on our map of the game?

[davidnorell]

[Rogi Ocnorb]

I'm 100% sure the black barcode is the postnet routing code for my Zip+4 delivery area. I checked it.

The fluorescent barcode is something internal to the USPS' sorting and routing functions and is very much like the Canadian Post "CPC Binary" postal code. In this case it's a binary representation of a unique sequential "control" number assigned to the document. I know this by comparing the three cards we got in my household and noting that two of them differ only in the last few bars where one has no 2s bit but does have a 1s bit and the other is the opposite. Since there isn't a lot of information about this schema available, I'd bet it's at least partially a post-911 security measure.

[davidnorell]

[Rogi Ocnorb]

As am I.
Only the first sentence of my last reply dealt with the black barcode.