All right, folks; clearly everyone who was going to solve the MIST2000 treasure hunt on their own has already done so. Foolishly I’d thought that it would spur interest in the then-upcoming MIST1015 but it looks like we might have done better by going the other way around. Oh well, we may as well unpack the rest of these puzzles in short order so that archive can also enjoy public wide release as well.
When last we visited this treasure hunt, we had been directed by Bubble Bobble letters in ASCII to go to bit.ly/omnetriumperfectum , yielding trois.lzh, which when opened contains luddyvan.ans. And what do you see when you load up that piece of ANSI art?
Having already gone the uncoloured route in the previous ASCII art puzzle, you’d think I could have thrown in a splash of pigment here, but apparently not. Apologies for the misleading opening quote; it had a way of misleading people who investigated the hint, which, when itself viewed, looks similar:
“Now you see it, now you don’t.” Why couldn’t I have chosen a phrase that elegant and unambiguous? Both images clearly present frames in which something should be visible, but what and where? What we have here are the artscene’s first and second artworks substantially relying upon the quirk of ANSI colouration known as “black on black”, 20 years apart, where individual character cells on the screen are assigned both a foreground colour of 0 (black) and a background colour of 0 (black). This trick was not infrequently used to conceal greets, artist credits, and other hidden messages in an ANSI picture – I have a vivid memory of stipulating text for illustrator Eerie to hide in my poem “I am Elite” released in MIST1294. There are a few techniques for revealing black-on-black characters. The puzzle’s first winner brute-forced it in a powerful text editor, removing all ANSI colour codes. The intended solution involved cycling in some classic ANSI viewer software like ACiDview or GoldView from colour mode to grey mode to ASCII mode, when it is revealed. Another approach could involve using a block or brush recolouring tool in an ANSI editor such as Pablo and assigning new, visible, foreground colours to whatever was contained there.
Happyfish> This is hilarious, I can see in text file that there are line segments presumably spelling something out; AcidView just renders it as a featureless grey block in monochrome mode. FAIL
This is my punishment for not downloading pablo. OFF I GO
Applied to Mage’s earlier piece, that resulted in the following appearance:
… and here’s where my alleged cleverness came to bite me in the bippy: everyone who got to this puzzle thought that the hint was the name of the character in the hidden ANSI (character is what you are in the dark, and there’s the character in the dark, right?) – but no one knew what his name was. (No, I don’t, either.) I intended only to indicate that the same technique was called for on my minimalistic greyscale ANSI, which when properly massaged would reveal the following message in ugly TheDraw ANSI fonts, one of the few allowing mixed letter-case use for the message to appear in correctly-capitalized German:
“So pocht das Schicksal an die Pforte”: Destiny knocks on the door. (You know what it describes, even if you’ve never heard the phrase before: the four notes opening Beethoven’s 5th Symphony – da da da DUMMMNH!) And that, there, is the next stop in the treasure hunt: bit.ly/SopochtdasSchicksalandiePforte
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