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Post by jhafnermd on Jan 30, 2017 23:51:34 GMT -5
They also are linked to a very specific IP address and location - which has an interesting restaurant nearby
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Post by neutronstar on Jan 31, 2017 20:36:32 GMT -5
They also are linked to a very specific IP address and location - which has an interesting restaurant nearby Can you tell us more??
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Post by Todd on Jan 31, 2017 20:55:08 GMT -5
I can tell you that, if viewed as an IP address, it traces to HP Executive Center in Palo Alto, CA. The closest restaurant I see is a McDonald's. . I can't imagine that's what was being referenced.
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Post by jhafnermd on Jan 31, 2017 23:13:11 GMT -5
You are righty - for some reason when I first did this I got the Georgia State Capital and a nearby Sundial Restaurant. I must have had a mistake - my bad
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Post by centaurofattn on Feb 1, 2017 11:33:13 GMT -5
You are righty - for some reason when I first did this I got the Georgia State Capital and a nearby Sundial Restaurant. I must have had a mistake - my bad Oh wow, that's a rather convenient mistake to run into. How unfortunate to get your hopes up haha
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Post by jtobcat on Feb 10, 2017 18:54:51 GMT -5
So I've been playing catch up and just got to this point. I got the answer to the sundial using a hint in another thread to be able to just guess the answer after spending some time getting nowhere with this list. But I'll share my thoughts of what I think of when I see the list. Once seeing that all the locations are libraries I instinctively thought of the numbers being a book cipher above each section. So my thoughts are each set of locations somehow resolves to a book title and the number above it is the word in the book you need. I'd assume we'd use the city names or the library names to resolve to titles as those are something you could easily pick to fit your needs while keeping with the library requirement. If this is the correct thinking then I'd expect to see a 4 word phrase along the line of "Harvest at (9) (4)" (the 9 and 4 letter words should hopefully be apparent if you solved the sundial, as it hand leads you to the answer if you google that with the word sundial) or it could be none of this and be something completely different
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Post by phraca on Feb 13, 2017 20:51:14 GMT -5
ok. I think I'm caught up here, and I always want to know HOW the answer was found. So, if you're at the "Harvest Time" site, and are using the words as amanda mentioned and seeing the things neutronstar mentioned... I've made a list of the names of the places that are near or on the destinations given by the words. My first question is, why aren't they ALL exactly on the destinations? Why do some destinations exactly match, while others are off by several squares? Does that mean something? Examples: compiled.lentil.squad touches the exact square corresponding to the little book that designates the associated Library.
lease.budding.victor is four squares above the Hat of the associated school. Is the school library supposed to be where the actual pointer is? Even if so, that doesn't explain the next one.
views.money.tricks is 16 squares north and one square west of the nearby library's book icon. Why? According to satellite view, there is a path there. Why? Why not make it movies.yarn.chill?
Are the differences meaningful? I've made a thing, But I don't know if it will help. I think I have figured out why some of the locations don't match exactly and some do. I've been able to reproduce the given locations exactly for some of the odd ones like: views.money.tricks and scenes.defender.airing ...by using a particular method. At this point, I don't believe it helps solve the puzzle directly, but it indicates to me we should be focusing on the google maps page for each library.
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Post by jtobcat on Feb 14, 2017 16:51:52 GMT -5
So based off the new information above, it's looking like the specific location identified in relation to the icon is not important. Which is unforunate because I thought I was on to something. I had been using the location of the marker and the number of direct squares between it and the library icon (by only walking through adjacent squares) as an index key into how many letters to index into the library name. I started with the set of locations for 15 and 1 since they had the least incorrect markers. Doing that gets me the letters AMLU for 15 which can anagram to MAUL and the letters CRACITS for 1 which can anagram to ARCTICS. (This is why I hate anagrams as a puzzle mechanic, you never have any idea if you are onto something or its just coincidence. Sidenote, Darth Maul and Darth Arctis are both Star Wars Characters, but have one too many letters for that). Unfortunately this fell apart when looking at scenes.defender.airing since that distance exceeded the library name. Now seeing the details above I'm convinvinced the marker location doesn't matter, just the nearby library it's referencing, and I'm guessing it was just poor encoding process when making the puzzle.
So my latest thought is only the name of the libraries is important (or maybe possibly the city name, but then why pick all library buildings). I tried a ton of differnt letter extraction techniques which yielded nothing. (All these were attempted based on their grouping) -First letter as Ordered, Longitude Order, Latitude Order -Indexed List as Ordered, Longitude Order, Latitude Order -8th Letter as Ordered, Longitude Order, Latitude Order (Because of the incorrect 8th letter between web address and title) -8th letter caesar shifted 7 as Ordered, Longitude Order, Latitude Order (Becasue M>T is shift 7, though I also looked at all 26 shifts and nothing stood out)
The compass icon for this puzzle makes me wonder if we should be using NSEW somehow in conjunction with the locations. Though I still have no idea how the numbers fit in. (Still holding out hope that those are book cipher numbers and the locations give us the book to use them on)
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Post by kite on Feb 14, 2017 18:20:54 GMT -5
ok. I think I'm caught up here, and I always want to know HOW the answer was found. So, if you're at the "Harvest Time" site, and are using the words as amanda mentioned and seeing the things neutronstar mentioned... I've made a list of the names of the places that are near or on the destinations given by the words. My first question is, why aren't they ALL exactly on the destinations? Why do some destinations exactly match, while others are off by several squares? Does that mean something? Examples: compiled.lentil.squad touches the exact square corresponding to the little book that designates the associated Library.
lease.budding.victor is four squares above the Hat of the associated school. Is the school library supposed to be where the actual pointer is? Even if so, that doesn't explain the next one.
views.money.tricks is 16 squares north and one square west of the nearby library's book icon. Why? According to satellite view, there is a path there. Why? Why not make it movies.yarn.chill?
Are the differences meaningful? I've made a thing, But I don't know if it will help. I think I have figured out why some of the locations don't match exactly and some do. I've been able to reproduce the given locations exactly for some of the odd ones like: views.money.tricks and scenes.defender.airing ...by using a particular method. At this point, I don't believe it helps solve the puzzle directly, but it indicates to me we should be focusing on the google maps page for each library. I'm not sure I understand. What "particular method"? Hawkeye and I have written down the "offsets" for the ones that aren't right on the library marker, and also noted the location names for the actual library markers in those cases, but none of it pops out as relevant. We've been close to just assuming that a small percentage of markers on Google had shifted in the year or so since this must have been created. Are you seeing something that looks useful? (EDIT: Or are you saying you figured out why some are offset and it's meaningless? Regardless, I'm very interested in your method.)
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Post by phraca on Feb 14, 2017 19:48:34 GMT -5
scenes.defender.airing on PEI is probably the best illustration of what I'm talking about. The point on the map is actually down the street from the actual library. Click on the library icon and select "view on google maps." On the left hand side of the google maps page at the bottom, you will see the "exterior view" of the library. For some reason, for this library, there are no close-up exterior photos like most of the others, so it uses a Google Street view image down the street. If you click on that image (with the circular arrow icon), it will bring up the Google street view image. There is now a new inset map in the lower left corner that shows a person icon where the photo was taken from. That location matches up almost exactly with the three word address. I can see no other reason why the three word location would be down the street from this library unless they were somehow using this google maps "cover photo" origin. Another example is views.money.tricks In this case there are several different photos, but several of them (including shots that are clearly inside the building) are shown to be from the center of the park, which lines up with the 3 word location. In other cases, such as Library of Congress, the 3 word address matches up with the library icon, but I think that may only be coincidental. There are several photos that have the library icon as the photo origin. If this theory is true, but it probably means we can rule out a code that uses the difference between the library icon and 3 word location, since that is just an artifact of where the photos origins happen to be marked. In my first example above, that location was somehow picked by Google's algorithm combining it's street view and map data.
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Post by phraca on Feb 14, 2017 20:18:10 GMT -5
So here's my theory on how to really solve the puzzle: I believe there are physical notes or bookmarks hidden in books in each of the libraries. At first, I thought the logistics of creating a puzzle like that would be difficult. But the more I thought of it, you could do it fairly easily. There are only 20 or so unique cities, and you could just ask friends, family, and business associates to help, so you wouldn't even have to travel. In fact, the location distribution looks like a scatter plot of where a younger person from Toronto might know people. Nearly all are in Canada/USA, several clustered in the same city, and many on college campuses. There is an ARG I played a few years back (PerplexCity) that used this technique to help launch it, although I only heard about it after the fact. I found this old thread where it talks about this part of it: forums.unfiction.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=9217&search_id=943191670My guess is that whatever is found in the books is another layer to puzzle. It seems more involved than some of the other vault keys, but maybe since it was supposed to be the last puzzle, it is sort of the "bridge letter" of Volume 3 and is supposed to be difficult. I have some ideas about which books to check, but I am in the Detroit area and not close to any of the libraries. Any thoughts? Edit: Also, to support this theory, maybe we are to take "harvest time" literally, as in "time to harvest" the info that was sown in the the libraries.
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Post by phraca on Feb 14, 2017 23:10:10 GMT -5
I'm close enough to the Folger Shakespeare Library/Congress (DC) to make a visit. What do we make of the fact that all the libraries are in North America but one? Maybe there is something special about that one? There's also one that's a school, with no mention made of a library. Maybe there's something special about that one? K8, Which one are you referring to as only a school? I found public libraries associated with all of them. At first, I thought lease.budding.victor was just a school, but google maps shows that "Bibliothèque Le Cormoran" is also at that same address and is a public library. Some more googling/facebooking reveals the library is on the 2nd floor of the school and is open to the public.
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Post by jtobcat on Feb 15, 2017 15:03:05 GMT -5
Some other observations about how to get the exact location offsets. Start typing "321 Wisconsin Ave, Waukesha" into the search bar (instead of views.money.tricks) then select the first autofill selection and look at the words it kicks out at the bottom. Same deal if you search "5-7-13 Minamiazabu, Tokyo". But if you do this for "4400 Forbes Ave, Pittsburgh" you get a location that isn't directly on the library icon like it should be for woke.mason.shapes. So for some reason it looks like they used the actual name of the library for some to find the coordinates (which gives a location directly on the library icon) and for others they used the address of the library (which gives an approximation of where that is, which isn't necessarily on the library icon). This doesn't get us any closer to an answer, just one more additional thing that can help explain away the location discrepancies.
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Post by phraca on Feb 17, 2017 19:10:32 GMT -5
Well....... anyone still working on this? I posted my thoughts over the last few posts. Interested to hear alternate theories. It would seem we have a little more time with the delay of Volume 4.
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Post by Geodus on Feb 17, 2017 20:08:36 GMT -5
I still haven't made any progress although I try to brainstorm some ideas every few days. I've been fixating on the number headings for a while now, and trying to determine whether they have a direct relation to the locations beneath them or they are simply extra information aesthetically interspersed. Some thoughts in no particular order: - The vault key has 5 letters, but there are only 4 headings, That suggests that the Harvest Time puzzle isn't a letter-based puzzle (e.g., each section drawing a letter shape or something like that).
- The four heading numbers are probably not an IP address, although they are all within valid range to be (the IP address 15.72.1.44 resolves to HP in Palo Alto, CA).
- The four heading numbers aren't in the right range to suitably represent LAT/LONG positions.
- The four heading numbers lack a prefix that would make them UTM grid coordinates.
- The largest number, 72, is greater than the number of coordinates (8) or words (24) in the 72 section.
- The largest number, 72, is greater than the number of seconds in a minute, and minutes in an hour (or degree).
- None of the numbers are prime.
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