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The MIST2000 Treasure Hunt: Puzzle #5, explained!

So, here we are. We’ve breezed through the puzzles in the textmode artforms of lit, ANSI and ASCII, and have even blitzed through tracker music, which brings us to puzzle #5 in the MIST2000 treasure hunt: nightsatFreddies.zoo located at bit.ly/fifthBeatle, containing aeiou.rip

.RIP? That’s right, it’s a piece of RIPscrip artwork, that vector graphics format intended for use on BBSes and never really embraced by them either. This one is a no-puzzle puzzle as well: it writes where to go next directly on the screen. Then, it writes it again. It writes it over and over again, until the sheer texture of all the layers of the instructions renders any one of them unreadable – and (unless you opt to throttle the display speed to that of a slower simulated modem) it displays them so quickly (and the message itself is sufficiently strange) that you will be unlikely to interpret it on-the-fly. Tauntingly, it concludes with a message: palimpsest? Yes, since the heyday of the artscene, we also have taken 100-level art history courses in college. If only you could scrape beneath the layers of extraneous verbiage and restore the simple statement of this puzzle’s clue…

Well, there is another way: because the message was input as plain text (vs. vector instructions for drawing specific outlines that coincidentally spelled out letters quite a bit more slowly), the clue is spelled out … quite a few times … in the .RIP file’s data, laid open for any text editor to enjoy:

!|10000$SBAROFF$|1K|*|W00|=00000001|c0F|Y01000A00|@071Gdegrees|@E31Qo
f|@0543bean|@8Z4Dwith|@3Y67bacon|Y04000A00|@0016degrees|@E31Lof
!|Y04010A00|@1EJM33bean|@6636with|@B61Gbacon|Y07000A00|@031Bdegrees
!|@DK1Gof|@0648bean|@8Z4Kwith|@3W66bacon|Y03000A00|@002Hdegrees|@EA1Bo
f|@0240bean|@924Iwith|@3464bacon|Y08000A00|@0212degrees|@E313of|@003Wb
ean|@8Y48with|@2W5Sbacon|Y0A000900|@020Pdegrees|Y0A010900|@CN2Cof
!|Y0A010700|@1EJG37bean|@6P3Qwith|@EA1Pbacon|Y00000A00|@012Edegrees
!|@274Cof bean|@016Ewith|@6L7Dbacon|@252Cdegrees|@004Bof bean|@8D60wit
h|@037Fbacon|Y0A000A00|@0103degre|Y0A000800|@000Ydegrees|@2H3Cdegrees
!|@041Eof bean|@AN3Cwith|@7U5Abacon|Y0A010600|@1EJQ0Jdegrees|@180Tof b
ean|@3G2Ewith|@5Y2Abacon|Y00000600|@0024degrees of|@0442bean with
!|@005Qbacon|@4624degrees of|@5O42bean with|@AU60bacon|@3W5Qdegrees of
!|@046Ubean with|@0K7Ybacon|@466Adegrees of|@5O74bean with|@AU88bacon
!|c04|Y05000A00|@0Q3Epalimpsest?|#|#|#

“degrees of bean with bacon”? Some bizarre conflation of Six Degrees of Separation (or our favorite variant, Mistigris of Separation) and Commander Keen’s Bean-With-Bacon Megarocket? Well, yes. So, off the puzzler must go, to bit.ly/degreesofbeanwithbacon!