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 Forum index » Archive » Archive: General » ARG: Acheron
RANT: VENTING FRUSTRATION!
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MageSteff
Pretty talky there aintcha, Talky?


Joined: 06 Jun 2003
Posts: 2716
Location: State of Denial

 		RANT: VENTING FRUSTRATION!
Frustration warning! Some of the following is just to get it out, so don't take it personally, I do not intend it as a personal attack against anyone. If you got thin skin you probably should not read this.

I understand and accept that real life sometimes gets in the way. I waited while the game was on hiatus. The premise looked interesting, and so were the characters.

I understand that during the major holiday season we went through things slow down to almost a standstill, I have worked at universities, and gone through similar things with groups I meet with regularly at home.

I am now a little bit peeved. Correction ... more than a little peeved... a lot peeved. The lines of communication with the few characters we had contact with were never strong ones, and now at a point in time where at least one of them should be available, we are having a darn difficult time getting hold of them, especially because most of the e-mail routes we had are now awol.

Which leaves us with just Caretaker... who shows up at 5 pm Eastern Time, when many of us are in commute between work and home.

Maybe it is just that the timing is all wrong. We went through two periods of waiting and now we are back to square one with less than a shoestring to go on.

I am approaching the point where the frustration is not coming from cryptic puzzles or odd characters, it is coming from the lack of opportunity to move the discovery of the story forward. Acheron is beginning to leave a bad taste in my mouth gang. I do not know how much longer you will be able to keep my interest in Acheron, because I don't need general pointless frustration. I have had patience, but even patience has a limit. I am reaching the end of mine.
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Magesteff
A small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has. - Margaret Mead


PostPosted: Fri Jan 02, 2004 10:07 am
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talax
Guest


 		Amen. I was hoping for more immersive ARG than what we got so far. I don't like going on IRC (too much of a timewaster for me in the past, so I swear off it) so I don't participate in the chats. there were supposed to be phone calls, emails, faxes, etc...

Now it's even worse... we have... nothing except for a couple of blogs.

PostPosted: Fri Jan 02, 2004 6:08 pm
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scrivener22
Veteran


Joined: 29 Dec 2003
Posts: 71
Location: Kahleefohnia

 		Mmm... rant thread...

Back during the Beast, I knew that I had got in the game too late (and was too dumb in any case) to really be useful in solving puzzles--I remember feeling like really hot shit for figuring out that Evan's password was 'Aphrodite,' and for solving the first Enigma puzzle on Martin's page. But the game was still fun, because I could follow along with what the Cloudmakers and others were doing, and there was enough interesting stuff there to keep me hooked.

But it's frustrating to start playing my second-ever ARG, to come in pretty close to the ground floor, to stay more or less on top of things... and have the biggest obstacle be, not puzzles or hard-to-find sites, but nothing.

If the PMs are having technical problems, of course, it's not their fault. But I can fault them if they've decided to hide behind the curtain without letting anyone know what's going on, or at least having a decent coverstory.

I want to like this game. But right now, there's not a whole lot of it to like.
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I said, kiss me, you're beautiful, these are truly the last days
And we fell into it, like a daydream, or a fever

PostPosted: Fri Jan 02, 2004 6:21 pm
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rose
...and then Magic happens


Joined: 26 Nov 2003
Posts: 4117

 		I understand about the frustration people feel about the game. And it is confusing to have so many sites down and no way to find out why. Still, I think that now the holidays are drawing to an end, we can wait and see what happens next week.

I am still a little baffled by the last contact we had in the Chess game and the chat between Caretaker and Jake. My sense was we were waiting for John Baxter to find a way for Jake to get in.
I'm not sure what we were supposed to take from that. Which adds to my sense of not knowing what is happening.

Still, I hope people decide to hang in and see the game through. This is the first ARG I have played and the group interaction is one aspect that I really enjoy. So I hope that we can wait a little longer.

Happy New Year everybody!
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I love this site for being free, in every sense of the word~Spacebass

Mankind was my business, the common good was my business.~ Dickens

PostPosted: Fri Jan 02, 2004 8:36 pm
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mysteryjones
Veteran


Joined: 21 Apr 2003
Posts: 89
Location: London

 		agreed
Agreed.

As another who's sworn off the devilishly time-consuming IRC, I can honestly admit that there is almost NO access point for a participant like me. Puzzles are embedded in pages of IRC chatter, so ingenuity is not always the first solution - simply a heap of patience.

To be honest, I've lost the sense that we are even helping anyone in our participation - at least when Reggie was so active it seemed we could make a difference. Now that the world's been changed and potentially none of the characters know us - we don't even have anywhere for the fingers to point!

We're losing momentum, and I'd really liked to stay committed to this.

PostPosted: Sat Jan 03, 2004 12:58 pm
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scrivener22
Veteran


Joined: 29 Dec 2003
Posts: 71
Location: Kahleefohnia

 		Acheron: When We Said 'This Is Not A Game,' We Weren't Kidding.
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I said, kiss me, you're beautiful, these are truly the last days
And we fell into it, like a daydream, or a fever

PostPosted: Sun Jan 11, 2004 6:44 pm
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MageSteff
Pretty talky there aintcha, Talky?


Joined: 06 Jun 2003
Posts: 2716
Location: State of Denial
scrivener22 wrote:
Acheron: When We Said 'This Is Not A Game,' We Weren't Kidding.


Fairly certain the missing websites were due to a computer meltdow. But it would be nice if we were getting more pieces of information from Jake, Frank Harker, and John Baxter. Or a puzzle of some kind to keep us busy.
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Magesteff
A small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has. - Margaret Mead


PostPosted: Sun Jan 11, 2004 6:59 pm
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PastaBagel
Boot

Joined: 07 Jan 2004
Posts: 51

 		THEY CALL ME PASTABAGEL

I have a puzzle!!!

A priest, a rabbi, and a Baptist minister walk into a bar... oh, wait, that's a joke, not a puzzle. Hmmm.

Ok, here's a good one:

How can you fit the Empire State Building intact into a cube 1 inch on each side?


THEY CALL ME PASTAPUZZLER...
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PostPosted: Mon Jan 12, 2004 10:10 am
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lurker
Boot


Joined: 06 Nov 2003
Posts: 52
Location: uk

 		Empire State Building puzzle

Believe it or not, this was actually a jackpot question in our local pub quiz last year... (nobody got it right but everybody wanted to know the answer - not sure where it originates from though)

Spoiler (Rollover to View):
Build your 1-inch cube in a space that has 225 million dimensions


PastaBagel - you might like to look at the Timewasters thread http://forums.unfiction.com/forums/viewforum.php?f=13 - generally stocked with a healthy supply of diversions and puzzles

PostPosted: Wed Jan 14, 2004 8:43 am
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PastaBagel
Boot

Joined: 07 Jan 2004
Posts: 51

 		THEY CALL ME PASTABAGEL

Yay! You win a free miniature gigantic pie. Just turn in $10 to you local supermarket to collect your prize!

The solution is actually straightforward. For any number of dimensions n, a cube in n-space with a side length=x has a diagonal d whose length is equal to x*sqr(n). The cube in the puzzle has x=1.

In 2 dimensions, the "cube" (the square) has a diagonal with length sqr(2). In three dimensions, the diagonal is sqr(3).

The empire state building is roughly 15000 inches. To fit that in a cube 1 inch on a side, the cube would have to have (15000)^2 dimensions, which equals 225 million.

Now for extra credit, how many dimensions does a pastabagel have?

THEY CALL ME PASTABAGEL
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pastabagelSPLATpastabagel.com

PostPosted: Wed Jan 14, 2004 12:33 pm
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MageSteff
Pretty talky there aintcha, Talky?


Joined: 06 Jun 2003
Posts: 2716
Location: State of Denial
PastaBagel wrote:

Now for extra credit, how many dimensions does a pastabagel have?

THEY CALL ME PASTABAGEL


I know, I know! PIE!

PIE dimentions. The bigger the pie the better Wink
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Magesteff
A small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has. - Margaret Mead


PostPosted: Wed Jan 14, 2004 4:56 pm
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SquareKnight
Boot

Joined: 30 Oct 2003
Posts: 28

 		Regret to inform...
Unfortunately, that answer is wrong because the question is wrong.

As a Square Knight, I know a great deal about shapes related to the square, and a cube is specifically a 3-dimensional shape. All definitions I can find reinforce this. A cube is defined as being a special case of hexahedrons (a polyhedron with six sides): a regular polyhedron (a polyhedron with six equal squares as its faces).

The term for a n-dimensional cube, where n>3 is "hypercube." (hypercubeknight is, not coincidentally, my Yahoo handle)

Thus, it is impossible to fit the Empire State Building, intact, in a cube with each side having a length of 1 inch. You can do it in a hypercube, though.

I realize this is nitpicky, but for future riddling, one could replace "cube" with "box," which, though misleading, does not have a rigid mathematical definition.

-Square Knight

P.S. It's still a clever riddle, though
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PostPosted: Wed Jan 14, 2004 7:30 pm
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AnthraX101
Entrenched

Joined: 18 Mar 2003
Posts: 797

 		Incidently, you could fit an Empire State Building into a 1in^3 cube, provided your building is using non-standard dimensions. Wink

AnthraX101
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PostPosted: Wed Jan 14, 2004 8:41 pm
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PastaBagel
Boot

Joined: 07 Jan 2004
Posts: 51

 		THEY CALL ME PASTABAGEL

BlackKnight: of course they are called cubes in higher dimensions, specifically they are called n-cubes, where n is the dimension. for example a 5-cube is a cube of 5 dimensions.

Quote:
We begin by looking back at the lower-dimensional analogs. To make things easier, we will call all the objects ``cubes'', but also give the dimension; in this way, the 3-cube is the standard cube, the 2-cube is the square, the 1-cube the segment, and the 0-cube the point. The hypercube is then the 4-cube. This gives us the ability to talk about an n-cube without having to specify which one we mean; the goal is to be able to say things about the n-cube that are true no matter what the n is. These will be the statements that help us understand the hypercube.


See here, for example: http://alem3d.obidos.org/en/intro4d/


THEY CALL PASTABAGEL AND I CAN BE ANNOYING IN ANY DIMENSION.
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PostPosted: Wed Jan 14, 2004 9:53 pm
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catherwood
I Have 100 Cats and Smell of Wee

Joined: 25 Sep 2002
Posts: 4109
Location: Silicon Valley, CA

 		I played this more like a bar bet:
PastaBagel wrote:
How can you fit the Empire State Building intact into a cube 1 inch on each side?

I would write "the Empire State Building" on a cocktail napkin, fold it up and shove the napkin into the cube.

PostPosted: Thu Jan 15, 2004 3:49 am
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