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Frog Fractions 2 Kickstarter ARG
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phlip
Kilroy


Joined: 18 Mar 2014
Posts: 1

 		FWIW, the "bread machine" thing has been a part of Frog Fractions 1 for some time, as has the shaving simulator game it leads to...

The original version of the game didn't have it, but when it was updated to add the "Game of the Year" logo at the front (about a year ago), it had a number of minor tweaks, including a new room in the text adventure with the bread machine in it. I never figured out how you were supposed to divine the correct recipe, so I decompiled the SWF to find it. There were no Google results for it at the time, so I just guessed it was just some Easter egg.
[edit] This secret keypad you have to type on to get access to the kitchen is new, though, that wasn't there before, you could just go aft from the engine room to the kitchen. And as far as I can tell, that keypad is the only difference between the Frog Fractions SWF of right now compared to the one from March 2013. [/edit]

So yeah, if that is part of the ARG, it's at the very least been in the planning for over a year. Or, alternatively, Twinbeard is just a really weird guy and many of the things people are seeing that look ARG-style weird are just false positives picking up on his general-purpose weirdness. Honestly, I don't know which, either sounds plausible to me.

PostPosted: Tue Mar 18, 2014 4:51 am
Last edited by phlip on Tue Mar 18, 2014 8:54 pm; edited 1 time in total
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KGWP
Kilroy

Joined: 18 Mar 2014
Posts: 2

 		I had been thinking a little bit about the number 0451. As others have mentioned previously, it has connections to other video games as well as to (possibly) Fahrenheit 451. But I think I may have found another connection...

  • The first videogame where it's reportedly used is Deus Ex. That means "A God from" in Latin.

  • In the message given during the video, the mysterious face says something along the lines of:
    Quote:
    The last four digits of the page-view counter are zero, four, five, one.
    Zero, four, five, one.
    The enormity of this request cannot be conveyed over this data-channel.
    Godspeed.

  • Recipe 13 reads as follows:
    Quote:
    "A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
    A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread--and Thou
    Beside me singing in the Wilderness--
    Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!"

  • And at the bottom of the twinbread.com page, there's this image:


Deus Ex? "Godspeed"? "A Book of Verses"? A Jesus gif? What if 0451 is also making a reference to the Bible? So I went ahead and checked out what Book 4 of the bible is and it turns out to be none other than the Book of Numbers! And if you look up Numbers 5:1, you get this:
Quote:
The LORD said to Moses,

Or, perhaps more interestingly (in another translation):
Quote:
The LORD gave these instructions to Moses:


The rest of the translations are here if you want to look at them, but that's as far as I've gotten.

I know it may just be an enormous supposition, but I'm wondering if all of those links are just coincidences or if there's something else hidden here that we weren't initially aware of.

PostPosted: Tue Mar 18, 2014 12:23 pm
Last edited by KGWP on Tue Mar 18, 2014 6:00 pm; edited 1 time in total
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p1start
Greenhorn

Joined: 14 Mar 2014
Posts: 7
Quote:

The last four digits of the page of your account are zero, four, five, one.

To me, it sounds a lot more like "the last four digits of the page-view counter are 0451". That makes a lot more sense.

PostPosted: Tue Mar 18, 2014 2:16 pm
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KGWP
Kilroy

Joined: 18 Mar 2014
Posts: 2

 		Whoops! Yep, sorry. Duly noted and corrected. I copied it from the person that originally posted it a few pages ahead.

The page view counter had those digits in it at one point, but nothing happened according to others here. However, the page-view counter can be one thing, but the Numbers 5:1 thing is still valid. They don't necessarily need to be mutually exclusive.

PostPosted: Tue Mar 18, 2014 6:02 pm
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aklreaxmer
Veteran


Joined: 25 Sep 2013
Posts: 78

 		So the page counter was close to ending in 0451 when I visited a few minutes ago, so I spam-refreshed, and nothing special happened, as previously recorded. I did, however, look at the 'hitwebcounter' link to learn more about the counter. You can specify an initial value when creating a counter, which adds something like "initCount=0" to the end of the URL it seems to use to track page views. The initCount for twinbread.com's counter is 112834. The page count now is 180567. The current count minus the initial count gives us the actual number of page views: 67733. It may be this 'true' value that needs to end in 0451...anyone want to spam f5?

PostPosted: Tue Mar 18, 2014 11:31 pm
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Zukero
Kilroy

Joined: 19 Mar 2014
Posts: 1
aklreaxmer wrote:
So the page counter was close to ending in 0451 when I visited a few minutes ago, so I spam-refreshed, and nothing special happened, as previously recorded. I did, however, look at the 'hitwebcounter' link to learn more about the counter. You can specify an initial value when creating a counter, which adds something like "initCount=0" to the end of the URL it seems to use to track page views. The initCount for twinbread.com's counter is 112834. The page count now is 180567. The current count minus the initial count gives us the actual number of page views: 67733. It may be this 'true' value that needs to end in 0451...anyone want to spam f5?


Stating the obvious here, but that makes it ending in 3285.
However, I see nothing in the page source that "reads" the current value from hitwebcounter.com. Moreover, nothing on hitwebcounter.com looks like they have a way to get the current value from them. Worse, the whole site looks completely bogus:
- It is hosted by domainsbyyproxy.com, a shadowy GoDaddy subdivision that tries to hide the real registrant ID by supplying their own in whois requests.
- Its "HTML Tutorial" section is a collection of links to their self-hosted "blog", that all look like random spam for very different things, except there's no link.
It made me think it was part of the ARG, except there are many hints that date this site back to 2009. Too old to be part of this ARG, yet too young to be credible (Who was still using ugly page-view counters in 2009 ?).

Weird.... so I think this is not the place where 0451 may be useful. Maybe the "google-analytics" part of the source could help (it does states "trackPageView"), but I don't know enough in javascript to try to use that info.

I noticed something else by digging through the page sources of twinbread.com : they are all malformed in the HTML sense. Double closure of tags (<a></a></a>), nesting errors (<a><b></a></b>)...
Could that be on purpose ?

Sorry if I'm just wasting your time, this is my first contact with the ARG world....

Edit: I also tried to find Netscape Navigator 3.1 to view the page "as recommended", as maybe exploiting the issues of old browsers was the point of these malformations in HTML. Guess what: it never existed. The 3.x line stopped at 3.04, followed by "Netscape 4.0" (dropping navigator).

PostPosted: Wed Mar 19, 2014 6:59 am
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plastercramp
Greenhorn

Joined: 14 Mar 2014
Posts: 4
phlip wrote:
So yeah, if that is part of the ARG, it's at the very least been in the planning for over a year. Or, alternatively, Twinbeard is just a really weird guy and many of the things people are seeing that look ARG-style weird are just false positives picking up on his general-purpose weirdness. Honestly, I don't know which, either sounds plausible to me.


Yeah, going by this tweet https://twitter.com/vogon/status/444186833816023040 and the upload date of the Kernal of Truth video (about a year ago), it looks like Twinbeard has been sitting on some of this stuff for a while.

aklreaxmer wrote:

So the page counter was close to ending in 0451 when I visited a few minutes ago, so I spam-refreshed, and nothing special happened, as previously recorded. I did, however, look at the 'hitwebcounter' link to learn more about the counter. You can specify an initial value when creating a counter, which adds something like "initCount=0" to the end of the URL it seems to use to track page views. The initCount for twinbread.com's counter is 112834. The page count now is 180567. The current count minus the initial count gives us the actual number of page views: 67733. It may be this 'true' value that needs to end in 0451...anyone want to spam f5?


I actually did try this as well. My method for getting a desired view count has just been a script to perform the desired number of requests until refreshing a few times gets me the correct view count. I can post another archive of the page at 3285 if people are interested, but it seemed like a dead end to me.

Zukero wrote:

Stating the obvious here, but that makes it ending in 3285.
However, I see nothing in the page source that "reads" the current value from hitwebcounter.com. Moreover, nothing on hitwebcounter.com looks like they have a way to get the current value from them. Worse, the whole site looks completely bogus:
- It is hosted by domainsbyyproxy.com, a shadowy GoDaddy subdivision that tries to hide the real registrant ID by supplying their own in whois requests.
- Its "HTML Tutorial" section is a collection of links to their self-hosted "blog", that all look like random spam for very different things, except there's no link.
It made me think it was part of the ARG, except there are many hints that date this site back to 2009. Too old to be part of this ARG, yet too young to be credible (Who was still using ugly page-view counters in 2009 ?).

Weird.... so I think this is not the place where 0451 may be useful. Maybe the "google-analytics" part of the source could help (it does states "trackPageView"), but I don't know enough in javascript to try to use that info.

I noticed something else by digging through the page sources of twinbread.com : they are all malformed in the HTML sense. Double closure of tags (<a></a></a>), nesting errors (<a></a>)...
Could that be on purpose ?

Sorry if I'm just wasting your time, this is my first contact with the ARG world....

Edit: I also tried to find Netscape Navigator 3.1 to view the page "as recommended", as maybe exploiting the issues of old browsers was the point of these malformations in HTML. Guess what: it never existed. The 3.x line stopped at 3.04, followed by "Netscape 4.0" (dropping navigator).


Hey, welcome. I agree that trying to compare the correct view count using hitwebcounter is probably a nightmare. Twinbread appears to be serving up static html pages, however it is possible to configure Apache to execute php in .html files. So something could be happening server-side, but yeah, I don't see any reason to make it appear otherwise. So I agree that this is probably not the place where 0451 is useful.

PostPosted: Wed Mar 19, 2014 9:27 am
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aklreaxmer
Veteran


Joined: 25 Sep 2013
Posts: 78

 		Just wanted to point out this neat video that was posted in /r/isthisfrogfractions2.

PostPosted: Wed Mar 19, 2014 9:26 pm
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nymo
Greenhorn


Joined: 29 Oct 2008
Posts: 4
Location: San Francisco, CA

 		Just wondering: Anyone in town for GDC this week here in San Francisco?

It would be interesting if any of us comes across Jim there.

And last year: He was actually at this free outdoor event called "Lost Levels" where he gave a brief talk about Frog Fractions 1. http://twitter.yfrog.com/es8w8gqj?sa=0
Totally missed my opportunity to get his business card, though.

The event is held again this year (today, actually, from 1-5pm at Yerba Buena Gardens), and who knows if he'll be coming back to it again http://lostlevels.net/

PostPosted: Thu Mar 20, 2014 4:12 am
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gee_rad
Kilroy

Joined: 21 Mar 2014
Posts: 1

 		I went to his GDC talk "Preserving a Sense of Discovery in the Age of Spoilers". I tried to keep an eye out for secrets/hints in the talk, but I didn't see any, and I got the feeling if I asked about this he'd play coy.

He talked a lot about creating secrets it would take an Internet community to solve like some things in Fez, Dark Souls, Demon's Souls, and The Secret World. He talked about using weird symbols so that you couldn't Google them if you didn't know their names. He also talked about how Nethack is open source so people can just look at the code to find all of the secrets, whereas ADOM was closed source and often players weren't sure if they hadn't figured out how to accomplish certain things or if those things just hadn't been implemented yet. ARGs were not mentioned at all.

PostPosted: Fri Mar 21, 2014 8:27 pm
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Zephonith
Veteran


Joined: 20 May 2007
Posts: 136
Location: Not your time zone

 		I was reading this thread a few days ago and tweeted about it, and Jim Crawford favourited the tweet (he doesn't follow me or anything).
So, uh, keep up the good work guys Smile

PostPosted: Sat Mar 22, 2014 7:29 am
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brh131
Kilroy

Joined: 22 Mar 2014
Posts: 1

 		On the about page on twinbread, it says his email is nospamSPLATnospam.com. I have no idea what should be emailed to it, but I am convinced it might lead somewhere. Maybe we'll learn from the Berkeley trip?

edit: replace splat with an @ symbol, idk why this forum does that.

PostPosted: Sat Mar 22, 2014 6:31 pm
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aklreaxmer
Veteran


Joined: 25 Sep 2013
Posts: 78

 		It's just a fake/placeholder email address: www.verify-email.org

P.S. The SPLAT is to prevent spam-bot email harvesting

PostPosted: Sat Mar 22, 2014 7:51 pm
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MD1500
Boot


Joined: 04 Nov 2006
Posts: 52
Location: England

 		There's going to be a Reddit iAMA with the Frog Fractions creators today at 4pm EST.

Might be interesting.

EDIT: Live now. http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/21987f/we_are_twinbeard_we_made_frog_fractions_and_we/

PostPosted: Sun Mar 23, 2014 12:23 pm
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EdShaw
Kilroy

Joined: 24 Mar 2014
Posts: 1

 		twinbread seems to be down. Sad

It was behaving funny when I set my user agent string to Netscape Navigator 3.1 (look at the footer), but I don't think it's related...

Edit: Tried again. Pretending to be NN3.1 seems to reproducibly give lots of 500 status codes before blocking me from accessing that host (even when not using the same user agent string). I think this is just an issue with whoever is hosting.

Edit 2: Yeahh, something is just broken. Seems to be related to user agent strings without anything after the OS. "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en; rv:1.9.1.7)" reproduced this issue. *sigh*

PostPosted: Mon Mar 24, 2014 5:33 pm
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