I'm going to conclude it's April Fools.

This is one of the best small-scale April Fools I've ever seen, actually. It was confusing and silly without being annoying, and also had a bit of challenge to it that kept people from getting immediately bored.

Great work, guys!

Thank you.

Regarding the mod hat avatars, I have a theory.

Back when I still used Internet Explorer, I could see them just fine. Due to technical issues, I've switched to Chrome for these past few months and the mod hat avvies are not visible. Now, however, that I'm using a different lappie that has some ancient Explorer programme (windows 98 or something), I can see them again.

So, maybe it's a matter of browsers?

edited 1st Apr '12 1:50:28 AM by lu127

I remember being on Explorer for all the time of that discussion 2011/2012, and only recently switched to Firefox. So, I don't think it's browsers.

Rather, I think that when Eddie was playing around with the background during that discussion, he inadvertently made the mod hat avvies invisible to non-mod posters, and nobody noticed.

It's a bit weird that this bug went unnoticed for almost three months.

I guess people thought that, as an extra and non-critical feature, it must have been discontinued. Since that happened for everyone, nobody thought to discuss if other people saw it, or why it was gone. But it's back now, so that's good.

On a side note, our inbound links today are peppered with odd versions of the home page. Norwegian is the highest of them, followed by Al Bhed. What is that second one a reference to? I can decypher it — it's only monoalphabetic substitution with no nulls, etc. — but haven't a clue where it's from.

On a side side note, I bet that blackcat will change to a third person, specifically Willbyr, for two reasons: A) Tangent is using Willbyr's mod hat avatar rather than the normal one, and B) 'cat changed to Morven less than halfway through the iDay.

Al Bhed is a cipher code language used in Final Fantasy X.

You can find different translators for Al bhed around the net but here is the base code

I know some people who can speak it rather fluently provided they had the time to code the words .

*Headdesk* I should have known that...

edited 1st Apr '12 11:47:57 AM by Belian

Tel: As of the timestamp on this post, all the information you need to set up the progression completely correctly is available to you.

Hmph. Oh well, see you at some point with a solution — I hope!

I'm just so damn helpful it hurts, aren't I?

Hint: It really is one closed loop. Not two interconnected ones.

edited 1st Apr '12 1:31:46 PM by Madrugada

The reveal on this will totally be up to Maddy, for reasons she best understands.

That reason would be "because I am enjoying the hell out of watching Tel figure it out. And because I was the one who tracked it as we built it in the first place."

edited 1st Apr '12 1:33:19 PM by Madrugada

I noticed a few minutes ago (edit: before 211) that 'cat is now you, Maddy. I'm just trying to diagram that with only some outdated version of MS Word, and I don't know how to take a screenshot on this machine (running, again, Windows of some description). I've hit "print screen" on the keyboard, but I don't know where that's gone to so I can crop and upload it. Can I have some help in screenshotting?

edited 1st Apr '12 1:41:38 PM by Telcontar

Hit Print Screen, then open up Paint and click "Paste". The screenshot is on your clipboard as an image.

edited 1st Apr '12 1:43:19 PM by Madrugada

That took long enough to work! Anyway, is this horribly formatted diagram right?

That is a misspelling: "Madrugada" not "Marduugada"

edited 1st Apr '12 1:58:36 PM by SeptimusHeap

This keyboard is going crazy — pressing "." can lead to "...........". And backspace is messed up. (Not on here, though; only in MS Word and the other programs I used.) I'll do a better and correctly-spelled version when I'm back home.

Don't worry, I doubt anybody's going to complain there

I certainly am! Look at those squiggly underlines! You need to update your spellchecker, as it contains some glaring omissions! And those arrows! They're all different lengths, and not evenly spaced, either! And look at those jpeg artifacts! And I'll have you know that my username is only to be entered into a word processor in 22 point Sabon; anything else is simply incorrect.

:p

Yes, tel. That's exactly right. Nobody else connects back to blackcat in a loop. She just sprouts three one-way connections: one that's part of the loop (Morven), and two spur lines to Bobby and me. That's why we said it would complicate things — since she started with Bobby's, there was nowhere to hook Morven into the progression until she switched to his. And the assumption that was wrong that you didn't mention in your list was that she was in the loop multiple times.

edited 1st Apr '12 2:39:54 PM by Madrugada

Random thought: Is it suposed to look something like this:

EDIT:NVM the image I made... not used to that type of image and my backslashes disapeared

With blackcat at the bottom? AKA: Make a "V" shape? If so, I would have thought:

EDIT:NVM the image I made... not used to that type of image and my backslashes disapeared

would have been better (a T and a V).

Note: I realize that thefirst one does not match up perfetly (it is 4 one way and 3 the other), but, like I said, this was jst a random thought.

edited 1st Apr '12 2:45:56 PM by Belian

Ah.. so it is suposed to look like this:

EDIT: F*** it. Getting weird formatting and it does not look that good anyway.

And look like a T inside a circle.

edited 1st Apr '12 3:00:10 PM by Belian

So what else happened on the internet today? I saw that Google Maps has a Zelda version, and that's it.

deviantART was taken over by cats who kidnapped the mascot, Fella. The ransom was art of cats. I think 5,000 deviations.