jmac says, "An archive of the contents (and some metadata from me) should now be available at http://dl.dropbox.com/u/15528558/pax_east_2011_puzzlestick.zip" jmac says, "I believe that zarf is now updating the wiki appropriately." Ellison asks, "69 megs? you put one of your gameshelf movies into here, didn't you?" jmac says, "That's the size of the RAR payload, man" jmac says, "It might be a single HD rickroll" Johnny says, "That would be in character." zarf says, "i've added links to the wiki, but I haven't looked at the contents yet" zarf says, "same symbols on the drive" Ellison says, "the Wingdings translates to INFOCOM8F0BC8, it looks like" Ellison asks, "is that the same from last year?" zarf says, "yes, the symbols on the drive are the same" jmac asks, "Policy question: Would it be fun to make a public blog post about this, or would people be happier to keep this in the family?" inky says, "I'd be happy to see a public post" Ellison says, "public is fine by me" jmac says, "(Yes, I'm volunteering.)" Ellison says, "so, 8F0BC8 seems to open the first rar" * Emily has joined the channel. Emily asks, "is this a piece that was missing from last year or something?" inky says, "well, he delivered a new one" inky asks, "I sort of lost touch with last year's stuff -- was there not enough info to decode it all or did people just give up?" Ellison says, "here's the page on last year's thing: http://www.ifwiki.org/index.php/PAX_USB_Drive" Ellison says, "I think we basically got it all" inky says, "oh ok" Johnny says, "Last one was Mini-Zork ZIL code." Johnny says, "Which had previously been floating around with the ZIL manual." Ellison says, "and The Abyss done as z6-y, menu-y type game" zarf says, "did we get the level-4 or not? wiki says no" Ellison says (to zarf), "I guess not" zarf says, "no, never mind -- it says we did" zarf says, "bad editing" Ellison says (to inky), "that wiki entry is great because it begins with you laughing at people losing things" Ellison says, "anyone recognize the other game in the first level picture? I assume the left side is Todd's Adventures In Slime World again" zarf says, "I'm going to refactor this wiki page some" Ellison says, "guess the game on the right is Chip's Challenge" * baf has joined the channel. zarf says, "okay, I've consolidated the explanations on the wiki page. Tell me if I made anythign be false." Johnny says, "Looks good to me." Ellison says, "yeah, I dunno. I'm having no luck with this. I figure it's some kind of two-part password, the second half being one of the cheat codes mentioned on the Chip's Challenge wikipedia page, MAND or TONY, but I have no clue about the first half." Johnny says, "YES" Johnny says, "No wait, that didn't work." zarf says, "grr" Ellison says, "babyjarson tweeted an hour ago, 'courier delivered it unto the bathroom. if its lost i can send by mail. ask for follow then DM the address'" Ellison says, "yeah, it gets to the point where it seems like it worked and it's rewriting over empty files, and then your hopes are crushed" zarf asks, "does the snap00.bmp image tell us anything new?" inky says, "snap00.bmp? I hope this is based on Snap!" Ellison says, "I don't see how the Todd's half references any particular mode or level like last time, but the Chip's Challenge half of it is new, I think" Johnny says, "With snap00.bmp, getting frustrated is a snap!" Ellison says, "yay" Ellison says, "since these are both Atari Lynx games, I also tried variations of LYNX, ATARI, and ATARILYNX" Ellison says, "oh wait, you guys were talking about snap00.bmp. I would guess that's just another clue to '8F0BC8' which is a Todd's Adventures cheat code and the password for the first rar" zarf says, "yeah, it's the same snap00.bmp as last year" zarf says, "I checked that" zarf says, "(eventually)" zarf says, "http://www.gamewinners.com/LYNX/ChipsChallenge.htm" zarf says, "have another 149 cheat codes" zarf asks, "anyone see a list of Chip's Challenge level shots that we could maybe identify this one from?" Johnny says, "I saw a walkthrough with shots, but not of the Lynx version." Ellison says, "the Todd side does seem to be from the 'Computer Map' level, in case that's relevant" zarf asks, "where was that walkthrough?" zarf says, "ah, http://strategywiki.org/wiki/Chip%27s_Challenge/Levels_1-20" Ellison says, "I'm thinking the puzzler edited out the level/time/chips so as to not distract us but who knows" Johnny | http://strategywiki.org/wiki/Chip's_Challenge/Walkthrough Johnny says, "Heh, right" Johnny says, "Passwords here, I guess | http://www.gamewinners.com/LYNX/ChipsChallenge.htm" zarf says, "http://strategywiki.org/wiki/File:Chips_Challenge_Nuts_and_Bolts.png" zarf says, "that's level 9" Ellison says, "interesting" zarf says, "so: "KCRE"" zarf says, "password is D9E275KCRE" Johnny says, "nice" Ellison asks, "wow, how'd you figure how the first half?" Johnny says, "Ha ha" zarf says, "brute force" Ellison says, "well done" Ellison pulls out the headphones zarf says, "rickroll!" zarf asks, "uh, with more audio data piled in?" zarf says, "this is weird" Ellison says, "I've opened this up in a WAV editor and the weird mixed parts aren't visually that much different" Ellison says, "our best bet, I'd think, is working with the sound thing at the end of the clip" Ellison slows it down to 1/10th speed to see if anything recognizable comes forth. "no." Johnny asks, "Does it sound like it could be morse code?" Ellison says, "not really" Johnny says, "Huh, it kinda sounds like *something*" Ellison says, "interestingly, 'never gonna give you up' is track 1 on 'whenever you need somebody', not track 2 (which is the title track). whether that means anything beyond the rickroll, I dunno" Ellison says, "slowed down, there's one part that kind of reminded me of a videogame, but variations of 'pac-man' don't work" Ellison says, "(one part in particular reminded me of the chasing-ghosts sound)" zarf says, "I hate audio puzzles" zarf says, "audio puzzles kicked my ass at this year's Mystery Hunt" Ellison says, "thought for a moment that maybe it was the sound of hitting an oil patch in Spy Hunter, but that doesn't seem to work, either. I'm probably on a completely wrong track, but I'm just trying to think of videogames it could be" zarf says, "it doesn't feel like a game sound effect, I think." Ellison says, "it sort of does at 1/10th speed but that might be barking up the wrong tree" zarf says, "it's too varied" zarf says, "I want to do some kind of frequency plot, but I don't know enough to know what that means" Ellison says, "yeah, all I'm good for is speeding or slowing things down or separating channels" * genericgeekgirl has joined the channel. Ellison asks, "woo, did you figure anything out for us?" Ellison says, "(if you came here after seeing the entry on the ifwiki)" genericgeekgirl says, "Sorry, no :(" genericgeekgirl says, "Was curious to see what the status was." zarf says, "we have an mp3 file" Ellison says, "I wonder if Jaybird is skilled in any audio cracking. he'll be happy to find out the mystery is back on in any case." genericgeekgirl says, "I'm terrible at anything audio-related (also my latest Debian upgrades seems to have killed my playback ability)." Ellison says, "ouch" genericgeekgirl says, "I'm curious to see if the spectrogram for the mp3 file shows anything, but I can't really figure out either Audacity or glfer." Ellison says, "I have it open in Goldwave but none of its tools (that I know how to use) are really telling me anything" Ellison says, "I e-mailed Jaybird to let him know there's a new USB puzzle-thing in town" genericgeekgirl says, "Any progress? I'm still convinced it may be either a spectrogram or an sstv image, but I'm still figuring out how to view such things." Ellison says, "no progress on my end. I've only looked at the wave forms, and it doesn't seem to edited in a way that the mixed parts look crazy different from the rest." zarf says, "I think you should be able to extract both kinds of audio stuff with a band-pass filter. One of them is narrow, and the other is high-pitched noise on top of a low-pass filter" Ellison says (to Jaybird), "zarf has been updating the wiki at http://www.ifwiki.org/index.php/PAX_USB_Drive with info about the new one and where we're at" Ellison says, "right now, we're trying to decode something hidden within an mp3 file" Jaybird says, "Just a thought. I haven't listened to the file or anything, but my initial thought with weird noise was some form of compute3r data, E.G. a cassette dump" Johnny says, "Tree Wave had a song that was also a Commodore executable." Johnny says, "Which? Why, 64!" Ellison says, "I had a thought like that but I wouldn't be sure how to read it if that were the case" Johnny asks, "So, is there some kind of analysis that helps find out something like that?" Jaybird asks, "Is athere a link anywhere to the audio?" zarf says, "No" Johnny says, "There's a link to the file that contains the file that contains the file that contains it." zarf says, "I want to set up a more detailed page with links to all the intermediate files, but I haven't done it yet." Johnny says, "I was optimistic that there would be IDv3 data or an embedded picture." Jaybird says, "downloading now" Johnny says, "Passwords on the ifwiki page." Ellison says (to Johnny), "I looked to make sure nothing funny was in the IDv1/2 data, but I don't have anything that does 3, I think" Jaybird says, "I have a hypothesis. It's not computer data from the sound of it. My thought is that it's actual data hidden in the MP3 file itself, within the audio data, thus corrupting the audio data, which is why you hear those weird noises." Jaybird says, "It might. I have no idea how MP3 audio works, but there's probably some way to hide data in an MP3 in such a way that only part of the original audio is corrupted. I dunnow, those noises kind of remind me of MP3 artifacts E.G. something encoded at a low bit rate, only more pronounced. And those things in the middle where most of the frequency response goes away, then you get this whoosh..." lpsmith says, "Oh, right, there's a term for this." lpsmith says, "And software that can extract it for you." Bishop says, "Steganography." lpsmith says, "That's it." Johnny says, "That reminds me, I need to play Aotearoa" genericgeekgirl says, "I downloaded qsstv, thinking maybe it's like the Portal thing, but I can't figure out how to get it to even *take* the audio file. And I have at least two different applications to view spectrograms, but even with files that I *know* contain images, I don't know how to get it to show me anything." Ellison says, "huh" Jaybird says, "I dunnow, it just doesn't sound like a videogame sound to me." genericgeekgirl says, "Oh my gosh. I think I did it." Ellison says, "wow" genericgeekgirl says, "it IS a spectrogram." zarf says, "rock on" zarf says, "the twittering or the whoosh!" zarf asks, "?" genericgeekgirl says, "I'll figure out how to share this in a bit. But the first distorted bit says Welcome to the IF Suite at PAX East 2011! I hope you have a great time. -- babyjarson" zarf says, "as I said, I want to collect the intermediate data, so I'd be grateful for screen shots or whatever you've got" genericgeekgirl says, "the second bit looks like someone's head. Trying to figure out how to zoom in." genericgeekgirl says, "Of course." genericgeekgirl says, "Third bit looks like another head. The fourth one is another message. "Last year there were 4 parts placed in the IF Suite, 4 placed at PAX itself, and 1 leaked online. Only 1 part from PAX was recovered (that we know of). Only 6 parts were needed to unlock the final puzzle."" zarf says, "huh. Interesting" genericgeekgirl says, "next message: Did you know: "Todd's Adventures in Slime World" is an anagram for "means Don Wods did it, letr luvers"" genericgeekgirl says, ""Murder is in the air under the temple of ra death awaits on the final curtain" is the bit at the very end" genericgeekgirl asks, "anyone know what this means?" genericgeekgirl says, "Let me try to screenshot what I can." Johnny says, "Well, Don Wods wrote Adventur with Will Crowter" inky says, "apparently the bit at the end is from macgyver" inky | In Cleo Rocks a letter is left behind, stabbed into a manican. What does the letter say and what is it's hidden message? inky | Murder is in the air/Under the temple of/Ra/Death awaits/On the final/Curtain The first letters of each line combine to spell Murdoc Ellison says, "awesome" Ellison says, "password is MURDOC" jmac says, "I wrote a blog post about the thumbdrive fun: http://gameshelf.jmac.org/2011/03/thumbdrive-riddler-is-never-gonna-give-you-up/" Ellison asks, "can somebody watch my 5 month old nephew while I watch you guys solve this?" inky says, "hee hee" Ellison says, "whole lot of ZIL stuff in this next level" Ellison | hi good job you win pax east 2011!! Ellison | level4 is a special curse that wont open until doomsday and only if you are good and only if i am bad and that wont happen so stash it away for someday just in case Ellison | enjoy your time at pax!! Ellison | cul8r Ellison | @babyjarson Ellison | qidle Johnny asks, "Heh. qidle?" zarf says, "that wasn't in the file. :)" zarf says, "okay, wiki updated" Ellison says, "heh" Johnny says, "This is excellent." jmac asks, "So was that everything?" zarf says, "that's everything" zarf says, "babyjarson is using material from the semimythical Infocom Drive as rewards" jmac exclaims, "Y'all obsoleted my post literally seconds after I put it up!" jmac says, "Next time, write faster, jmac" Ellison says, "it's hard to know how much of this is from the original ZIL manual, but there's stuff about multi-player ZIL stuff (don't know if that means multi-character like Suspended or what)" zarf says, "or post faster!"