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 Forum index » Chaotic Fiction » QU13E
[Trailhead] Splinternails.com 2014
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no_moon
Boot

Joined: 31 Aug 2014
Posts: 64

 		Z65ed, what?

Mars is the God of War....

qeken, I've got nothing, most unfortunately. Was occupied by work all this time. I've thought about it briefly the past couple of weeks, but have only room in my brain for one mystery at a time and I'm working on a work-related one....

The more I ponder this puzzle, the more strongly I feel this must be solved in numbers. But I'll be the first to admit I am really only good with narrative. I had thought that previous incarnations being what they were, and splinternails being who he is, there would have been some deconstructed narrative for us to piece together, but... dead ends and more dead ends.

splinternails holds all the aces, it seems.

PostPosted: Mon Jan 05, 2015 10:35 pm
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no_moon
Boot

Joined: 31 Aug 2014
Posts: 64

 		In the months since last we posted, has anyone discovered anything?

The sites are still up, unchanged, unvaried.

Perhaps splinternails doesn't really care to play anymore, but for nostalgia's sake, or as a sign to someone (not one of us), he's put the sites back up?

Any other theories?

PostPosted: Fri Mar 06, 2015 8:53 am
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supersekretsrsly
Boot

Joined: 18 Jan 2013
Posts: 54

 		 
no_moon wrote:
In the months since last we posted, has anyone discovered anything?

The sites are still up, unchanged, unvaried.

Perhaps splinternails doesn't really care to play anymore, but for nostalgia's sake, or as a sign to someone (not one of us), he's put the sites back up?

Any other theories?


Hello again,

I think I just can't hack it, I recall from the googling I did into QU13E that Splinternails was an avid fan of puzzles, and comes from a background of a love of very deep wordplay and lateral and logical problems. That is beyond me - far too beyond me. I never did complete an ARG, just had a go here and there out of curiosity.

QU13E is beyond me, utterly impregnable. Everything I uncovered, as I discovered later, was already known, and I found nothing further.

I do thank Splinternails for the game, it was good fun having a crack at it. Impossible, but fun Wink.

PostPosted: Tue Mar 10, 2015 9:13 am
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no_moon
Boot

Joined: 31 Aug 2014
Posts: 64

 		I stand corrected. Since the time I posted that and now, the Splinternails.com site has actually changed-- there is an added graphic, under a link entitled "Deadman's dance"...

Do have a look.

It's a .gif of Shibuya, the Scramble, black and white and at night... from the perspective of standing at Hachiko facing Center-gai shopping area. If one clicks the "deadman's dance" again (another link) it downloads directly to the dance of the vampires .wma file.... Circular argument perhaps, but it's the first new something we've seen in months.

The .gif of Shibuya, when downloaded, is entitled "ghosts."

Perhaps the fun is in the unsolvable nature of the puzzle? Who knows. I'm terrible with numbers, but if there is a story, even fragmented, to be told, I'm still interested to hear it sung.

PostPosted: Wed Mar 11, 2015 6:11 am
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supersekretsrsly
Boot

Joined: 18 Jan 2013
Posts: 54

 		That is certainly new, and it almost seems like it's referencing our former struggle. But to quote a certain someone:

"I didn't understand what he meant by it then, and I'm afraid don't understand it any better now."

Maybe I'm just dense, but nothing about this points me in any direction. It might be pointing us to the song again, but we already know that qu13e existed without that song before, so I'm not confident it has any relation to qu13e.

PostPosted: Wed Mar 11, 2015 5:19 pm
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sirgreentoad
Boot


Joined: 12 Sep 2014
Posts: 11

 		The lure of a link has tempted me.

I have found that the pictures on splinternails.com are not unique to it.

Google image search finds hits
flowers -
http://bit.ly/1wEBsju

flowers.gif seem to hit results for 1920's vintage movie.

ghosts -
http://bit.ly/1AkrHDo

ghosts.gif seems to hit results for Tokyo Ghoul anime.

I haven't been able to find the name of the movie for the flowers or if the ghosts.gif is truly part of Tokyo Ghoul anime.

I will continue to look for where the images originate from.

PostPosted: Fri Mar 13, 2015 2:12 pm
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sirgreentoad
Boot


Joined: 12 Sep 2014
Posts: 11

 		I've been focusing on finding the flowers.gif

I still haven't been able to find where it comes from I keep running across similar results.



Nosferatu happens to be a vampire. I will continue to look into this.

PostPosted: Fri Mar 13, 2015 2:30 pm
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punkbass
Boot


Joined: 23 Apr 2008
Posts: 56

 		URL Parameters
I thought I was on to something this afternoon. I'm not so sure anymore, but I will share it in case it turns out to be a part something.

The text on deadmansdance seemed intriguing to me so I spent a lot of time staring blankly at it. The fourth and fifth lines stand out to be as being out of place. I eventually came to think that this was intentional, like he's trying to express to use that there was an error, or a "f l a w" in parsing a character and when the computer recovered from it (reconnect reconnect) it continued the text.

So I read it like
"what is the purpose of existing"
error
"to see the deadmans d a n c e again ?"

if this were the case, then I felt like the character causing the error might be a question mark. That make me think of URL parameters. URL parameters are key/value pairs that you append to the end of a url with a question mark. It made sense to me since we have plenty of "keys" and values from pieces we've put together. On further study, however, the only places I can find where the server would be able to parse any parameters that are passed to it would be the .php files on the qu13e homepage that are responsible for serving a random image.

I supposed it's possible that if we pass the right key value pair into one of these php files that the server will serve us something other than a random image, but I feel like I'm trying to force a solution at this point, and I've tried a few things that I think would have been the expected key value pairs with no luck.

PostPosted: Fri Mar 13, 2015 9:30 pm
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no_moon
Boot

Joined: 31 Aug 2014
Posts: 64

 		punkbass, sirgreentoad,

Those are two great possibilities! Please update us if you find anything concrete.

I started thinking about anagrams again... might be a misdirect but the elongated spacing of the words ends up making them very emphasized. Why would those words, in particular, need emphasis?

I mean, even comparing the two pages, the spacing for "Deadman" and "Dance" can differ.

"silent" is perhaps "listen"?

I haven't quite started playing around with this, but will definitely start thinking about it.

Another possibility is that it was a direct answer to my question of whether the site is meant to catch the attention of someone else (reconnect) and not really meant for us....

PostPosted: Mon Mar 16, 2015 1:50 am
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no_moon
Boot

Joined: 31 Aug 2014
Posts: 64

 		Sorry for the double-post.

I think word repetition is the name of the game....

Previous similar clues:

"You must be silent while I unremember answers to your qu13estions."
"Names once spoken don't listen anymore... to speak to those you seek,"

"One memory at the price of another; for to dance with shadows, one must betray the light."

What is it we aren't seeing? Or maybe we should be hearing?

"CONJUREFLAWDANCESILENTI" = "Can we all end injustice for"
(??)

One more thought. It says "see the deadman's dance"
-->could this mean that we are supposed to view something in the sound file? I don't have a program on my computer that would open it as a video, but it's possible?

PostPosted: Tue Mar 17, 2015 7:59 am
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Delusional
Entrenched


Joined: 16 May 2005
Posts: 839

 		I should turn on email notifications... It's been so long since I've been to Unfiction and I was shocked to see the Qu13e forum resurrected. I have been going back to the qu13e site every once and a while for the past 7 years...

Looking forward to checking out the resurrected splinternails site but I'm not so naive as I was to expect any closure or clearly defined purpose to any of this as I did before. I'm pretty convinced the whole thing is a sorta of Lynchian artistic output with no real intent to follow even loosely a clearly delineated narrative, which is awesome in my opinion!

PostPosted: Sun Jul 26, 2015 10:24 pm
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Kaliel
Decorated

Joined: 06 May 2011
Posts: 230

 		Hi there. Wanted to introduce myself and say hi to anyone who happens to stumble by. I just found this forum and game and having spent more hours than I care to mention on similar puzzles such as Torment found myself itching to be frustrated again.

I've read about 90% of the qu13e and splinternails threads, as well as the german wiki so hopefully I don't contribute too much people have already long known and waste anyone's time.

For the time being and my own sanity I've decided to start focusing on splinternails.com as qu13e.com seems a bit intimidating to me in the pure number of person-hours of learning I'd have to catch up on.

Looking at the words on the deadmansdance page I found one other source matching those. A deviantart post from almost 13 years ago quoting those words and more:

Quote:

lucid visions run through my head
laid out on a bed of something red
through my mind i see the make-believe
of things i conjure into something real to touch
and feel the passion of all things i know
what is the purpose of existing flaw
reconnect reconnect

lyrics taken from an IMBUE song..
you can find their site at this [link]


The [link] pointed to imbuenet.com, the band's website. Their site went down a few years back after the band broke up. It exists in the internet archive but it's a pretty generic indy band site for the time. At the time of the post Imbue had put out 3 cds.

It took me a bit of digging around but I found all of Imbue's songs. Youtube actually started hosting them 8-9 months ago. To my amusement in all that time I was the first person to view some of them, so it's not exactly a well known band. None of the lyrics databases I can find have their lyrics in them.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwIteFwUT8pTsDD7sIGpKWg

I've found 4 interesting things in all this that are scratching the part of my brain that tells me something is here.

1) I've listened to all of Imbue's songs I can find from their 3 albums. I can't find these lyrics in any of them. Granted, my focus could have wavered since I'm doing this at work and I could have spaced out somewhere and missed them, but I'm on my 3rd listening to some of these songs. Maybe someone else can find them. I was hoping perhaps some difference between the posted lyrics and the real lyrics, or the name of the song, would give a hint.

2) The deviantArt profile I found these lyrics on? It belongs to Decima, a person known for being a friend of Random Martin/spinternails/whoever. Decima has been on these foruns years ago and claimed all of her pages are out of game. I'm not going to link to her page, or contact her. I have no doubt she's a real person and I'm not going to ask her what song she talked about in a post over a decade ago.

Now sure, if they were/are friends maybe they had similar tastes in music and both liked this song, if it exists. Still, you're telling me in all of the searchable internet I can only find these lyrics on 2 pages, her's and spinternails.com? 13 years apart. That's odd.

3) It's not just the same lyrics. Aside from splinternails.com adding spaces to a few of the words, it's the exact same text. Same lack of capitializing 'I', same lack of puncuation, correctly hyphenating make-believe which most people never do. It almost looks like a copy and paste from deviantart. Why copy and paste something from a source out of game who's already been harassed for being in game? It's almost cruel, honestly.

It is possible they were both staring at the liner notes and are transcribing the lyrics, I guess. Most people aren't that exact though and will do things like capitialize I by default.

4) This band Imbue is from the same time frame we suspsect the Vampires song was recorded. None of their songs match Vampires, and honestly it's a little to upbeat of a song to come from Imbue to my mind, but perhaps their is a connection somewhere. Perhaps they share some band member, but so far I haven't found any crossover.

Or else this entire puzzle is based on some guy's music collection from the late 90's and early 2000's and it's a coincidence, I suppose.

I also checked all of Harry Roberts last.fm tracks that he's favorited and can't find anything from Imbue or the Vampire's songs in there.

I did sent a message to the email address on the site asking about the band and their connection to this. I doubt I'll get a response.

Sorry for the wall of text. I apparently had a lot of info to dump from the last few days.

PostPosted: Fri Aug 07, 2015 11:54 am
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no_moon
Boot

Joined: 31 Aug 2014
Posts: 64

 		Kaliel,

Thanks for joining, and sorry for the very delayed reply....

Quote:

Looking at the words on the deadmansdance page I found one other source matching those. A deviantart post from almost 13 years ago quoting those words and more


GOOD SLEUTHING!

Quote:

lyrics taken from an IMBUE song..
you can find their site at this [link]


I did my own listening/searching and found several things about IMBUE as well.

1) This soundclick:
http://www.soundclick.com/bands/default.cfm?bandID=22937
I listened to the one song available and the artist's voice sounds very similar to the Deadman's Dance song.

2) This YahooGroup and this MySpace
https://uk.groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/imbueukfansite/info
https://myspace.com/imbuenet/music/songs

There's a new weird entry on a certain livejournal, but suffice to say I think we can ignore it. It's not what we are looking for, and it refers to things we can't hope to understand. OOG, I suppose.

It's getting closer to Halloween again. We might as well try to give solving it another go!

PostPosted: Thu Sep 17, 2015 10:41 am
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Kaliel
Decorated

Joined: 06 May 2011
Posts: 230

 		Thanks! And no worries, I knew I was posting in a sleepy time of the thread.

I didn't really end up with anything from this direction. I listened to all Imbue's songs on youtube. Couldn't find the splinternails lyrics. Nor did I hear the Vampires song among them. I'm still pretty sure there were periods I just stopped listening because it all ran together in my head after a while, I may have missed them.

The lead singer of Imbue is Ric Nigel who is credited as being in one other band before Imbue called "Under the Noise". The collection can be heard at "https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB97RES-yOUgtvEkwx8-_Ng" I didn't find the lyrics or Vampires song there either.

I do find it odd all of Ric Nigel's work was posted to youtube a year ago, right around the time Splinternails.com posted his (alleged) lyrics. I'll give that up to coincidence though, but it'd be amusing if Splinternails ended up being a member of the band and this is all just a PR stunt to call attention to it.

I'm afraid I'm out of leads at this point. I did email a summation of my findings to the silent address, but never got any response.

PostPosted: Thu Sep 17, 2015 11:51 am
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no_moon
Boot

Joined: 31 Aug 2014
Posts: 64

 		Yeah, the thread has been quiet for quite some time-- all of us are out of leads, and opinions vary about the true nature of this game. Is it still a game? Is it performance art? Are we just not seeing something obvious?

Quote:
I'm afraid I'm out of leads at this point. I did email a summation of my findings to the silent address, but never got any response.


You might try emailing one of the qu13e addresses, as others have said they have received replies sometimes.

Something you said about that "Under the Noise" band name seems to me... like we are supposed to listen to the blips in the noise? or it is pointing us again towards the "iS tHis rEmemberinG? oR the mIddlE of Forget?" riddle....

PostPosted: Thu Sep 17, 2015 1:01 pm
Last edited by no_moon on Mon Oct 05, 2015 9:48 am; edited 1 time in total
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