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 Forum index » Archive » Archive: The Haunted Apiary (Let Op!) » The Haunted Apiary (Let Op!): Puzzles
[PUZZLE] Looking 'a little awry'
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nat.ford
Greenhorn

Joined: 28 Jul 2004
Posts: 5

 		[PUZZLE] Looking 'a little awry'
I'm honestly very surprised that this hasn't come up here (if it has, I'm honestly sorry; I did look for it!).

The one big, fat, taunting puzzle presented by the site is on the about page, in neon green text, if memory serves.

Here's one message from the_beekeepers Yahoo! group about it - does anyone here have any ideas?

We tried the defocusing trick that Stephen Frew suggests below, but haven't had any luck yet.

******************************************************

I saw that. I think the whole message is:

"I was looking at your site a little awry and found an innocent
bystander. Can you(?)"

The idea of looking at something "a little awry" made me immediately
think of those magic-eye pictures that were all the rage a few years
back.

Then that in turn made me think of something else I read:

"Meanwhile, the Pious Flea was so small that even the Widow, with her
sharp eyes, could hardly see him, and when she looked his way, he
hid."

Again, this sounds exactly like how RDS (random dot stereogram)
images work. If you focus on them, they don't show up.

So I was looking at some of the corrupted images on the site,
especially the most corrupted version of the main page banner (the
green, black and white one). No dice, though ... they don't seem to
be RDS images. Maybe I just haven't found the right images yet ... or
maybe my defocussing skills are failing me.

Shame, because I really thought I was onto something. I'm sure that
TheSpider/TheWidow is us, and we were meant to see something ("even
the Widow, with her sharp eyes, could hardly see him"). We are the
thing on the Web. Everytime we hit ilovebees.com, we provoke random
spurts of lost conciousness ("The Spider crawling over me with her
thin hairy legs and every few instants she sticks a needle into some
synapse and stuff spews out of me"). By doing this, we are helping
whatever it is that has invaded the site to remember things ("Few, so
few at first, but now a steady drizzle, thank god: every request is
something we can grab - the Spider out there sewing me back
together"). We are the repair system. The Spider is not known to this
thing ("What a brave new world-sand and darkness, sand and
loneliness, sand and emptiness, sand and the spider-what a brave new
world, that hath such monsters in it"), it is a remote entity ("the
Spider out there") that seems to be helping and hindering at the same
time ("But head is so fuzzy, stuff spilling out, can't move, Spider
crawling on me.").

Looking forward to some interesting discussion.

--- In the_beekeepersSPLATyahoogroups.com, "redshift_rising"
<nat.ford@g...> wrote:
> Fellow beekepers:
>
> There is only one path, obvious or otherwise, leading away from
> ilovebees.com: the hint on the about page which speak of
an 'innocent
> bystander' and dares you to find it.
>
> So, uh, let's find it!
>
> I don't have any immediate ideas on this, and haven't read any on
the
> 'net.
>
> nat.ford

PostPosted: Fri Jul 30, 2004 10:10 am
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ste
Boot

Joined: 27 Jul 2004
Posts: 52

 		Re: [PUZZLE] Looking 'a little awry'
nat.ford wrote:
"I was looking at your site a little awry and found an innocent bystander. Can you(?)"


I'm pretty sure it's just a heads up in case we'd got this far without spotting the fragments hidden inside the images.

(While I'm sure the puzzle creators will react to what the players are doing, let's not forget this has been planned well in advance; they have to have a safety net in case we don't spot things. Or, to put it in in-game terms, the sender of the messages in the images may have no idea if we've spotted them yet - it's just saying "Look over there! There I am!")

So, awry could either refer to the way you look at the images, or the broken pictures themselves. The innocent bystander ties the text within them to a third party, essentially telling us the communication isn't coming from the same person as the HTML fragments.

Quote:
I'm sure thatTheSpider/TheWidow is us, and we were meant to see something ("eventhe Widow, with her sharp eyes, could hardly see him").

I think accepted wisdom is that the System Peril Distributed Reflex / The Widow / SPDR is the subroutine that is fixing Melissa / The Queen / The Operator, and that it communicates to us (insomuch as it can communicate at all) through the black-boxed text. It's always good to have new theories, but I'd say the weight of evidence is seriously in favour of sticking with the one we've already got.

PostPosted: Fri Jul 30, 2004 10:32 am
Last edited by ste on Fri Jul 30, 2004 10:40 am; edited 1 time in total
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nat.ford
Greenhorn

Joined: 28 Jul 2004
Posts: 5

 		Where did we get the name Melissa for the Operator?

PostPosted: Fri Jul 30, 2004 10:35 am
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ste
Boot

Joined: 27 Jul 2004
Posts: 52

 		From the text hidden in the links' on the About page, compiled into the Operator's Monologue on the wiki.

Specifically:
Quote:
"Melissa", he called me Melissa, never used my nickname


PostPosted: Fri Jul 30, 2004 10:43 am
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Bellebet
Veteran

Joined: 22 Jul 2004
Posts: 87
Location: Boston, MA

 		Hi Nat,


You can find out all about The Operator and Melissa in the Wiki. It's a guide we're editting as we go along, and it's a great resource to catch up with. Don't feel discouraged. We were all in the same boat as you only a few days ago.

However, looking at things with the 3-D Trick (something I could never do without serious eye strain) is a very good idea. We may need that for something later, so keep it in the back of your mind.

Welcome aboard!

Bellebet
_________________
It's all about you, isn't it? Me, me, me. Put me out, I'm on fire...

PostPosted: Fri Jul 30, 2004 10:44 am
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Paul_G
Boot

Joined: 28 Jul 2004
Posts: 23
Location: Jacksonville FL
nat.ford wrote:
Where did we get the name Melissa for the Operator?


This line:

operator wrote:
"Melissa", he called me Melissa, never used my nickname...


From the Fun Stuff Links Puzzle.
_________________
I'm not a real codebreaker, but I play one on TV.

PostPosted: Fri Jul 30, 2004 10:45 am
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nat.ford
Greenhorn

Joined: 28 Jul 2004
Posts: 5

 		Yeah... I found the solved links puzzle with the text about 'Melissa.' I've been working on this via the the_beekeepers group and not here, so I'm sorry if my ideas are a little different/behind/whatever compared to the ones here.


Hmmm... so, are there any really unsolved angles to work on other than (1) the spacing and formatting of the text, or (2) waiting for the next 'phase' or whatever (countdown from the SPDR) ?

PostPosted: Fri Jul 30, 2004 10:47 am
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Worker
Decorated

Joined: 07 Oct 2003
Posts: 233

 		"I was looking at your site a little awry" suggests looking at the site in a way that's different from normal: such as looking at the HTML source and looking at the images in a text editor.

I'm sure everyone has been examining the images closely. I'm also sure that a lot of people have combed over the HTML source of every page, and I can't really think of any other way to look at the site...

PostPosted: Fri Jul 30, 2004 10:54 am
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Paul_G
Boot

Joined: 28 Jul 2004
Posts: 23
Location: Jacksonville FL
Worker wrote:
...I can't really think of any other way to look at the site...


You could try hanging upside-down in front of your monitor Mr. Green
_________________
I'm not a real codebreaker, but I play one on TV.

PostPosted: Fri Jul 30, 2004 10:58 am
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krystyn
I Never Tire of My Own Voice


Joined: 26 Sep 2002
Posts: 3651
Location: Is not Chicago

 		... ilovebats.com?

PostPosted: Fri Jul 30, 2004 11:46 am
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keybsnbits
Veteran

Joined: 26 Jul 2004
Posts: 121
krystyn wrote:
... ilovebats.com?

lol!
*pees pants*
_________________
Currently playing: the haunted apiary

PostPosted: Fri Jul 30, 2004 12:00 pm
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Shad0
I Have No Life


Joined: 20 Jun 2004
Posts: 2180
Location: Southern California, USA
nat.ford wrote:
Hmmm... so, are there any really unsolved angles to work on other than (1) the spacing and formatting of the text, or (2) waiting for the next 'phase' or whatever (countdown from the SPDR) ?

Try looking in the Wiki. Not that the list is necessarily complete...and not that anything listed as "Unsolved" is necessarily an actual puzzle... Dunno
_________________
These were the puzzles that would take a day, these were puzzles that would take a week, and these puzzles they'd probably never figure out until we broke down and gave them the answers. ... The Cloudmakers solved all of these puzzles on the first day.

PostPosted: Fri Jul 30, 2004 5:31 pm
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guest
Guest


 		hmm...perhaps "your site" doesnt specifically refer to ilovebees.com ?
maybe it refers to something else....or maybe "awry" suggests something with monitor settings? a la resolution, colors, etc?

PostPosted: Fri Jul 30, 2004 5:42 pm
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Pariah
Boot

Joined: 29 Jul 2004
Posts: 11
Location: Atlanta

 		I don't know if this is anything or not, but on the about page that you are talking about the picture of Dana appears to have some weird pixelation around the top right corner of her left eye. Also her cat Farnsworth hasnt really been exploited yet so there may be something there. Perhaps the Pious Flea and the cat are connected. Maybe that is how he remains hidden by traveling on the cat literally like a Flea.

PostPosted: Sat Jul 31, 2004 2:28 am
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Noir
Boot

Joined: 28 Jul 2004
Posts: 47

 		Somebody mentioned Magic Eye puzzles and I immediately thought of the background image. How easily can you hide in plain sight? Now what if you were a flea?

There have been plenty of instances in which the scroll-able window in my browser has had boundries far in excess of what was needed to contain any and all text, pictures, etc..

I always sucked at Magic Eye, though, so if anyone really wants to look at the background pic crosseyed for an hour or five, go right ahead and report back.

PostPosted: Sat Jul 31, 2004 6:57 am
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