Cracking the Cryptic's latest video (found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBs5N99m1aA) poses a pretty interesting sudoku, and I've found a pretty interesting way to tackle it in Hodoku. The reasonable way to solve it is by finding the hidden quads, as Simon and a computer do. I saw a very ineffecient but interesting way to tear this puzzle apart with Hodoku's digit coloring function. This is going to be a long post in two parts with lots of visualization that's going to take a while to actually get anywhere, but you'll probably enjoy this if you're into theory.
Part 1: 6s
Let's look what happens when you select 6 in Hodoku's coloring function. I'm going to call the bottom middle square our "attack" square, which I'm calling X. There are four possibilities for where the 6 can be in X. We can break it up into two though. The first is in J5, and the second is in the G row, as shown below. Orange cells are legal candidates for 6s. https://i.imgur.com/43dMA3F.png
Now, let's derive the implications on the other boxes for putting the 6s in the G row. Red cells are illegal positions for the 6s if they are found in the G row of our attack square. https://i.imgur.com/HlenKM7.png Notice that I eliminated the cell G5, as it would cause a contradiction with A5.
As we defined X, if both the 6s presence in the G row and a 6 in J5 eliminate a 6 from some other house, then we can eliminate that candidate altogether. Let's perform the same process on 6s, but with our 6 starting in J5. Purple cells are the legal candidates for 6s, and mint are the illegal ones. If we would ever color a red cell mint, we instead eliminate it. Conversely, if we would ever color an orange cell purple, it must be a six. Here's my coloring:
https://i.imgur.com/whnj2kJ.png
We're at a bit of an impasse, while we've managed to eliminate some candidates, we haven't done anything particularly productive, and hodoku still says I've solvedn 0% of the puzzle. Very nice. There's more here though! Now comes the sub-coloring!
While holding the 6 in J5, I'm going to declare a NEW attack square, Y, which is the top-right square. This part is going to look a lot like empty rectangles. The 6 in C8 is colored off, so there are two possibilities for our 6s, they're either in column 7, or in row B. Any 6s that we can eliminate from both of these being true that are already colored red we can eliminate. If the 6s in Y are in column 7, then E8 must be a 6. This eliminates E1,2,3, putting pot
... keep reading on reddit ➡Antimatter Dimensions is an incremental game. Like Cookie Clicker, except the numbers can get to a few hundred million (orders of magnitude). You can play it here, if you want.
Anyways, one of the developers, Omsi, held a short couple of rounds of Hangman to have us guess the names of new currencies in the next update, but in it, some cryptic files were hidden. You can find the logs of the game here. If you want more context, you can join the Antimatter Dimensions discord.
There are four files that are of note:
https://butter.horse/dxckef.wav
https://butter.horse/bxnacr.wav
https://butter.horse/zvdfoj.wav
https://butter.horse/it.webm
The first three are audio files and the last one is a video file. I've tried running them through spectrograms, using audio subtraction, etcetera, but I can't seem to crack anything from here. I figure Omsi isn't just screwing with me, since she did hide something else that was relatively easy to find: this image was hidden in the file name of a gif she uploaded (I still don't understand what the image means, as well.)
I've been gnawing at these questions for a while and I still don't really have any leads on how to decode it.
Collector's Edition content.
More and more, I'm seeing that we can't just buy things in Star Trek Online. Items of interest are either exclusively in gamble-boxes (at undisclosed drop rates), or exclusively in huge bundles.
Can you imagine this in any other circumstance?
I wanted to buy a litre of milk from the supermarket, but I couldn't. Milk only comes in a 'super pack', with three cans of spam, a jar of sauerkraut, a two litre jug of Cheepo-brand shampoo, a DVD of some lousy old 90s movie, a ten pack of denture brushes, and two dozen dodgy lottery tickets.
I wanted to buy a second-hand car, but I couldn't just buy it. Instead, I had to buy 'tickets', each of which gave me a 'chance' to 'win' the car. I had to buy $12,000 worth of tickets to 'win' a $4,000 car.
I wanted to buy a new laptop computer, but I couldn't. I had to buy special 'credits', which I could then use to buy the laptop from someone else who won the laptop from gambling. I had to spend $2,000 to get a $800 laptop.
This ridiculous process of jumping through hoops to buy things at inflated prices is predatory, it's disgusting, and I'm sick of it.
Addendum: Kael once said that bundles sell better than single items. That's fine; so put the item up in a bundle and as a single item.
I told her it was a snap.
She was always one of my favorite writers on Grantland! I would love to hear an oral history of how everything truly ended at Grantland, i.e., not just the Bill Simmons suspension. Always thought it seemed like his Bill took his inner clique to The Ringer.
She even says the ill-fated MTV News venture was less painful.
https://imgur.com/gallery/2rBXs5m
https://imgur.com/gallery/xbVwc1H
Hi r/RBI-
If this is the wrong sub to post this, please let me know/feel free to delete.
I bought an original watercolor in an antique store in Maryland recently. I planned to reframe it, however as I began to look closely at the back, I noticed an odd square piece of tape. I pried it off as gently as I could, only to find a strange message contained there, written on super-thin tissue paper. Underneath where the note was taped, was another message in red ink - " 80' " and then a word that I can't quite make out.
The link above contains all photos for context (I am also trying to get any insight about the artist) - however the "notes" are toward the end of the list of pictures.
Any assistance is appreciated!
Edited to add another imgur link with (hopefully) better pics of the stamps.
SOLVED
UPDATE/solved
The artist’s name is Mitsue Elston. She was born in Seoul S. Korea to Japanese parents in 1920. She married an American serviceman, Norman Elston in 1950-51. It was at this time in her life she really began to pursue art, as her parents discouraged her artist interests growing up. She lived in Aberdeen MD and taught the Sumi-e style of watercolor at the local community college & showed her works at galleries & exhibits often. She was a very diverse, gracious and talented woman. She passed away in 2000. If you have a newspaper dot com account, I highly recommend looking her up. I feel like I know her now & feel even more fortunate to have found this beautiful piece.
https://twitter.com/bluepointgames/status/1209919383734087680
'Twas the night before, excitement mounts
In stealthily wrapped boxes creatures stirred for announce
Hope for adventure and victory spread
Visions of heroes enhanced in their heads
We sprang forth to play, exclaimed at the sight
Happy gaming to all, there'll be no sleep tonight!
Title says it all, really. I paid 50m EC for two of these damn outfit boxes, but if I'd known I couldn't wear my STARFLEET rank tabs, I wouldn't have! I just wanted some kind of "open" 2410 Odyssey outfit, since you didn't make them for the Open Jackets outfit pack that's actually in the C-Store.
FMR.
I'm new to this sub and came upon it because of my own spiritual awakening but geez it seems like most posts on here get put through a fucking blender and then reassembled by an AI. Why the hell are they so cryptic and unnecessarily pseudointellectual/unnecessarily complicated. The wording is so convoluted in most that I simply dont have the energy to dive in and dissect it.
If you want to say something and have it heard dont make it a damn puzzle.
I do understand the memes about mcr being cryptic af and no one knowing what the hell is going on, but I've seen a lot of people on Twitter and fair amount on this sub honestly complaining and just wanting them to use words. Bitch wtf, do you really prefer to wait until who the hell knows when for them to just say "okay guys new album dropping on x month, ok bye"? Where the fuck is the fun in that? They're hyping up these release more than anything in the world, as they fucking should, due it being so damn special (we waited since 2013 and mourned their death until october 2019), but you just want them to not do anything? Seriously?? Pluk it's MCR, if there's a band that has to do this is them.
rant over, bye
So, I've seen this being discussed in multiple places in the last few weeks/months and despite numerous call outs to the Dev team and Community Manager from multiple people there has still been zero communication from Cryptic on this situation.
Last year we had the podcast with the whole "the account is the player" shtick in it and people felt positive because it seemed to be the right direction that Cryptic were heading in.
We also had the Elite Starter Pack launched which had a good selection of goodies for the whole account and was pretty much a must have for all new players and even older ones too. Plus it effectively replaced the cost of a month's subscription when the sub method was done away with too. So all in all things were looking up.
The roll on last November/December an the Elite Start Pack suddenly vanished without a word from Cryptic. At the time other items were missing from the C-store too so it probably didn't get noticed right away and could have been considered on of the bugs affecting the store.
But things got more suspect when another pack with an almost identical name, the Elite Services Starter Pack, appeared in the store again without any word from Cryptic.
People noticed it was not the amazing account unlocking wonder the original pack was and also picked up on the EXTREMELY similar names. I personally feel (and i know i'm not alone in this) that the similar names is an intentional deception to make people buy the pack thinking its the old ESP which is recommended in many buying guides.
It's a pretty shady and clear "bait and switch" trick that they used and as yet they have not said a word on the changed.
So i'm writing this post here because every other form of communication with Cryptic gets shut down or ignored when this is brought up.
A thread on the official forums just got locked with a post quoting some BS from the terms of service about changing the value of zen items at without warning, and event people calling of Kael himself for feedback are being ignored.
I don't want to cause a scene here bu this is the only independent place where we can openly talk about this without being silenced by Cryptic or ignored all the time.
The way the devs seem to be ignoring this leads a lot of us to believe it is intentional deception and I think it is important that the players see this and have a way to discuss it openly. The game needs to be trusted by the players and this situation seems to be the opposite to man
> Completing either of these participating activities once per day, per account, will earn you a First Contact Day Badge Box. Opening this box will grant players the opportunity to choose between 17 never-before-released Comm Badges as account-wide unlocks.
Quoted from the announcement. Icons in game can be hard to tell what things actually look like so it would be nice to have an actual preview image with names since it's going to take 17 days to get them all so we can decide which ones we may want to get first.
EDIT we have a preview of the first 10 badges. Some may be very familiar to us from a long time ago. https://mobile.twitter.com/trekonlinegame/status/1244771467167817728
Randomly going through reddit, I found rather weird r/nullthworldproblems
All of the posts are cryptic and I’m very curious, so if anyone can decrypt the posts...
Edit: It’s not a bot because I checked the user’s comments, some of them are pretty human.
