The Purloined Pony East Egg Giveaway Winner and Solution · 8:52pm Sep 1st, 2019
So! This was fun. Right? Right!
I loved getting messages from people thinking they'd found a hidden secret, and there are a couple I wanted to call out here because I thought they were great (albeit completely unintentional).
Silent Whisper noticed that the order form expired in 1982, which is the year the My Little Pony toys were launched. This is a fantastic coincidence! But it is just a coincidence; the order form's expiration date was copied straight from Inside UFO 54-40's order form.
Unified Dreams and Azarak both completely blew my mind by noticing that the pile of books on page 8 contains fourteen books, which is the exact number of volumes Ponyfeather Publishing produced for the bookstore at BronyCon (twelve titles, but Cynewulf's was three volumes, so fourteen total). I absolutely love that this worked out -- it's very satisfying! -- but it really was a complete fluke. I didn't actually know there were fourteen books in the picture until Unified Dreams messaged me, and even worse this art was completed late last year, long before I knew how many books I'd have ready in time for the bookstore.
A few folks got very, very close to finding the actual Easter egg, but only one person actually took it all the way. But before we get there, here are a couple progressive hints -- I figured others might want to try to figure it out without having the whole thing spoiled off the bat.
Hint #1: The art is not involved.
Hint #2: The interior is not involved.
Hint #3: It's on the back cover.
Hint #4: The numbers on the back cover are important.
Hint #5: ISBNs are like credit card numbers; they contain a checksum digit calculated from the other digits in the number. This means that ISBNs can be valid or invalid. Here's a validation tool.
Hint #6A: A lot of smartphone camera apps include barcode scanners.
Hint #6B: If you don't have access to a barcode scanner, scanning the barcode results in
076783001756.
Hint #7: Just to make sure we're all on the same page: neither the numbers printed below the barcode nor the ISBN make sense.
Hint #8: If you string the printed barcode numbers and the ISBN together, you get 07151204051408011822051920.
Hint #9: You can break that into two-digit numbers, like so: 07 15 12 04 05 14 08 01 18 22 05 19 20.
Hint #10: None of those two-digit numbers are greater than 26.
Hint #11: A very basic type of substitution cipher replaces "A" with "1", "B" with "2", etc.
So, if you decrypt the combined barcode and ISBN string, you get GOLDEN HARVEST -- which seemed appropriate for a book starring everyone's favorite carrot farmer -- and that's exactly what ThePoneDrome did! Congratulations to him, and I hope he enjoys his requested copy of Monochromatic's The Mono-Logues as well as his bonus The Purloined Pony.
If you didn't figure it out yourself, or you found out about it too late, don't worry! I'll be looking for other reasons to do PFP giveaways in the future.
Thanks to everyone who participated!
You colossal fuckin' nerd
...Wait, that's not how you spell Carrot Top!
Congrats to ThePoneDrome, though, who turns out to be far better at noticing easter eggs than the guy who actually wrote the story in question
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I was on the right track! And then work exploded.
Congratulations to TPD!
Heck! I knew I should have kept messing around with the ISBN number. I even looked into decoding numbers but didn't go the simple extra step of separating the numbers like that! Dang. Good job to the winner and I'll definitely keep an eye out for future giveaways.
Welp, I found the right location for the solution at least, but got caught up in way more complicated analysis than a substitution cipher. Typical.
Oh, marvelous! :D I knew I didn't have a chance at finding something like that.
That was pretty cool! I'd have not ever thought of that or figured it out. It's interesting that it just worked out that way...
...or did it?!
5114841
YOU HEAR THAT, CHRIS? GOLDEN HARVEST!
Jesus Christ that’s fucking up obtuse. Congratulations 5114848, you mad lad!
Well, at some point at least I was looking at the right place--I was thinking zip codes, though, and came up with nothing evidently relevant.
This is crazy. I remember thinking when I picked this book up “wow did he actually get an isbn for this? Funny, I remember him talking horizon out of using one on his.” But I never bothered to actually try and check it.