Wake Up - Something's Been Bugging Me · 7:12pm Nov 17th, 2018
We’re continuing the strange and cryptic tradition of a new glitch chapter this week. And with that, again, we have the end of one contest and the beginning of another. No longer will finding the hidden message in SWEET_DREAMS["are_made_of"](this); qualify for the extra chapter challenge. But don’t fear! A brand new chapter has just been posted for you to cut your teeth on. Except this one’s going to require the solution from last week.
So let’s recap a few things:
The Extra Chapter Challenge:
That’s right - solve the puzzle in any week’s glitch chapter and I’ll tack one whole extra chapter onto the end of the story. Imagine these chapters like “Deleted Scenes”, with the challenge winner offered the option to suggest any part of the story they’d like to revisit in their chapter. If you’re up for the challenge, load up the latest chapter - Wake Up - and get cracking!
Winners - Week 1:
You’re all winners because everyone gets to see the extra chapters once they’re completed. But you owe your thanks to the following individuals for a whopping 6 extra chapters!
Winner - Week 2:
Yep, only one person managed to solve the chapter during the course of the week (or at least only one person reached out to me). I knew it was hard, but I didn’t expect that. So in order to compensate, I’ll be awarding an extra extra chapter to our lone victor:
This means that we’re up to a whole 8 extra chapters at the end of week 2, with 37.5% of them coming from the dedicated efforts of a single user! Nearly Epic One? How about Totally Epic One.
Writing the Glitch - Week 2:
This one was something else. I decided that I wanted to take the reader outside of the story for a bit. I spent a lot of time on the technical aspects of making that happen, and had to sacrifice a bit in the content of the chapter itself. Seeing WAKE UP repeated nearly 1000 times was probably nowhere near what everyone expected. I decided that in the end I needed to embrace that. Having a chapter that was completely absurd and put you on edge is, after all, what I’m aiming for here. But this chapter… It holds a secret.
Read on for instructions to solve SWEET_DREAMS["are_made_of"](this);
Tools needed:
- Scripting language of your choice. Python preferred.
- Web Browser
- (Optional) Text or stream editor for light preformatting.
Process:
- Find the words that aren’t capitalized. If you read them left to right, regardless of height, they end up saying “tell me what happens if i don’t wake up”
- Except I said in the A/N that there were two secrets. That one was way too easy. The other one must be hidden a bit better.
- Figure out (either through my hints in the A/N, my comment, or Unicode knowledge) that those weird markings in the first WAKE of the last twenty or so rows… might be something.
- What are those marks, though? They look like they’re just part of the letter, like that zalgo font or something. But what if they’re actually separate characters that stack on top of the adjacent letter?
- They are. Unicode calls these COMBINING DIACRITICAL MARKS, which is the coolest possible way to say “there’s literally never a good reason to use these”. But they do make a great way to encode data in plain sight. Steganography!
- Go ahead and get out your scripting tools or text editor and start stripping out those CDM characters. They’re the only characters in the chapter with a Unicode codepoint at or above 0x300. Now you’ll also want to figure out how to denote which character they came from, cause that’s going to be important. That is not a triviality by any stretch of the imagination, and in fact I forewent this altogether when I solved it manually
- Remember that SUB 0x2E0 thing? Well that’s what you need to do to decode the enciphered characters. Simply subtract 0x2E0 from the ordinal of each character and you get the cleartext back. The first line decodes to [’h’,’l’,’h’,’0’] which doesn’t seem like any kind of meaningful answer.
- What if, though… What if you were to look at them in columns and not rows? That first column starts looking interesting. You get h then t then t then p then a colon then two slashes… Shit it’s a web address. And it’s not even secured! (Go away Google Chrome, SSL is for NERRRRRRDS. …or at least people who are less lazy than just clicking “Yeah gimme static web hosting” on an S3 bucket and tossing a CNAME towards it. Shut up!)
- Go forth, enter that which you should now know, find the secret that’s hidden within, and prosper.
Announcing the Glitch - Week 3:
What glitch? It’s just another chapter… Isn’t it?
Oh also, and you’ll figure it out when you figure it out, you’re going to need the solution for the last challenge, so you might want to re-read that section above if you skimmed past it.
It gives me such great delight to expose you all to concentrated levels of bewilderment, and with only one person solving last week’s chapter… well, I’ve found the perfect weapon.
As a last note, I’d once again like to give an enormous thanks to all of my readers. You put up with me during a particularly difficult week, and we even managed to get Wake Up briefly featured three times already! I can’t believe the level of continued readership I’m still getting, and I hope you know that I’m grateful for each and every one of you. Thank you so much for letting me tell my story. And above all else, massive thanks to everyone who has commented on or messaged me about Wake Up. I love to hear your thoughts, feelings, and ideas.
.... yeah good luck to all who particapate in that because I am not even gonna try
Yeah. I know what I need to do, even looked at Python and all that crap, but I have absolutely no knowledge in coding, or text languages in general.
I salute any who can get the answer to this, 'cause ain't no way I can.
Any chance the answers can be given to us once the story is complete? I'd hate for the vast majority of your readers (myself included) to miss out on this.
4969654
I'll likely do something after the story is complete. But right now... right now the confusion, the fear of missing out, that's all part of the experience. Embrace it, become one with it, learn from it.
We know what to do, but sadly, not enough time to engage in meta games when a story is afoot!