Wake Up - Buggy Code

It’s that time of the week again, and that means another glitch chapter! Last week’s Extra Chapter Challenge has come to a close, and the reward for solving the latest chapter will be… something different. No longer will finding the hidden message in any of the earlier chapters qualify for the extra chapter challenge. But there is a new chapter with a new reward just waiting for you to get cracking!

So as usual let’s go over a few things:

The Extra Chapter Challenge:
With four successful challenges and 16 chapters earned, the Extra Chapter Challenge has finally reached its end. The winners, listed below, have brought you more than two weeks of additional updates that will be packed full of fun and tantalizing adult themes. This means that there will be new chapters almost until the end of the year!

Winners - Previous Weeks:
These are all of the brave souls that have completed a prior week’s challenge and earned a bonus chapter for all. Heading into this week we were up to 11 extra chapters:

• 1 Max 8BIT
• 1 omnislash772
• 2 EnticingCanine
• 1 PVCmech
• 4 nearlyepic1
• 1 Fishsticks
• 1 Arravadel

Winners - Week 4:
We have five winners this week, which brings the final extra chapter count to 16. Man do I have my work cut out for me. Anyway, round of applause for:

• Fishsticks
• EnticingCanine
• 4 nearlyepic1 (what a surprise)
• 1 Arravadel
• 1 Marker

If you’re in this list, or the one above, you can expect to be hearing from me soon. I’ll be reaching out to collect your thoughts and show off my ideas for your extra chapter(s). The order I’ll be using to decide who chooses first is sorted primarily by chapters earned, and then who earned them first.

Writing the Glitch - Week 4:
This week was interesting, and actually caused me a bit of trouble! Mostly because the secret isn’t in the chapter, the secret is the chapter. So when something decided to take a shit on my word count IMMEDIATELY as I posted it… Well, I had to redo the entire secret in response.

Read on for instructions to solve Home
Tools needed:

• Probably a scripting language (what a surprise)
• A web browser
• Google Maps or similar
• A modicum of patience.

Process:

1. Load up Home and scrollify all the way to the bottom. See the secret:
2. HYPERTEXT PROTOCOL PONE DOT ZONE SLASH | APPEND CHAPTER DOWNLOAD > TEXTFILE > SHA1 HEXDIGEST > DECIMAL > STRING > SPLIT MIDDLE > INSERT POINT AFTER TWO > MAP > CITY > FETCH OBLAST > LOWERCASE | APPEND DOT HTML ENTER
3. It looks like three main instructions separated by pipe characters, so start with the obvious: http://pone.zone/

4. Then that middle section is complex, so let’s worry about the end “.html⏎”

   1. Going back to the middle section, we have a series of steps to follow:
   2. Download the chapter, as a textfile
   3. Get the SHA1 sum (the hexdigest) and convert to decimal (most libraries won’t give you a decimal digest function)
   4. Convert that to a string and cut it in half, giving you two 24-digit strings
   5. Insert (a decimal) point after two (characters). You now have something like XX.XXX…, YY.YYY…
   6. Map? Map what to what? Oh, but the next instruction says city so… Plug that in to your pin dropper of choice, and find the nearest city.
   7. Fetch the Oblast (like a province in some Slavic countries) of that city.
   8. Pop that in between the first and last parts. It should be fairly obvious what you’ll want to do with the finished string.
5. Sit back, relax, and watch the pretty colors.

Announcing the Glitch - Week 5:
This week there’s actually not an Extra Chapter Challenge. This week’s chapter actually gets you two things (neither of which being an extra chapter.) Of course, this chapter is a bit more esoteric like the first two, which is a break from the more or less consistent programming you have been getting for the past two weeks. That said, the chapter itself is interesting because it pulls exclusively from language used in the previous chapters. Because of the way FimFiction tries to be smart about layout and highlighting, this chapter doesn’t appear to hide any secrets when viewed in your browser, but download to textfile and something should become apparent. But even yet, FimFiction trimmed a few characters from the story that cause some problems, so if you really want the solution, you’ll need to use the pastebin pointer in the A/N. I’m really excited to see who solves this one.

As usual, I want to take these last couple hundred words to ramble a bit. I think a lot of you might be noticing something that you haven’t quite put to words, and that’s that I’m edging ever closer to burning out on this project. The last two chapters of Act IV, for example, were written immediately before posting. I tend to get into one of these phases IRL where I just let things pile up and only deal with them at the very last second, and that’s been increasingly true both in my writing and in my personal life. I feel bad that I’m not pumping out things I’m passionate about - not to conflate that with quality, which I still try to maintain. But nonetheless, I look back at the early chapters and I can see a marked difference. I was excited, upbeat, and there was a kind of happy linearity. Lately I’ve been a bit darker (even ignoring the overtones of each chapter), more procedural, and definitely a bit disjointed. So I’d like to say two things: First, I will likely not go back and rewrite anything. Second, I do intend to still finish this, and I think I’m on the upswing from this funk. I need to get a few chapters banked this weekend so that I will be back to sunshine and rainbows. Either way, thanks for being there when I’m not at my best. I hope to bring this winding tale to a full and satisfying conclusion here very soon.