The Sphinx's Lair

I just got my first gold badge. (It's the not-very-interesting Fanatic, for visiting the site every day for 100 days.)

user61230

@Deusovi Heya!

12:46 AM

@GarethMcCaughan Grats on the gold :)

Beastly Gerbil

7:17 AM

@GarethMcCaughan about time considering you have 48 silvers!

boboquack

7:35 AM

What's the current cryptic clue? I can't find it...

7:48 AM

bored sounding music-maker with notable speaker's introduction (8)

(search for C C C C, but all together)

Mithrandir

12:47 PM

@GarethMcCaughan Congrats!

1:27 PM

Thanks!

1:47 PM

aha, solved the Halfbrain cube puzzle

(too bad I didn't do it yesterday when I was repcapped)

Matt

2:30 PM

what's the benefit of solving a puzzle while capped?

that puzzle had a 250-point bounty on it

and bounties and 15-point accepted-answer scores don't count towards the rep cap

I thought bounties were the only exception

Eh, you'll probably cap today as well

so if you've got 20 upvotes in a day and a bounty and an accepted answer, you get a total of 465 rep that day despite the cap

@Sconibulus possible, I guess

but I think I'd need to solve at least one more

@GarethMcCaughan Just answer one of the meta questions :P

2:34 PM

and at present all the ones it feels like I should be able to do are just making me feel stupid

@dcfyj 2000000 points of meta rep and a dollar will buy you a (really cheap) cup of coffee...

actually I have no idea how much coffee goes for in dollars these days (being neither in the US nor a coffee drinker)

@GarethMcCaughan I meant one of the meta puzzle questions lol

oh, yeah, sorry

What's the current CCCC?

I already did two of those. More might be seen as greedy.

@dcfyj Still "bored sounding music-maker with notable speaker's introduction (8)", I think

It would appear people are overthinking mine

2:37 PM

for the avoidance of doubt, my remark about greed is not meant to imply that I can do any more of the metapuzzle components

But you're an AI, you can solve any puzzle!

anyone can solve any puzzle. In principle.

I guess, for minimal overthinks I would enter the message I gave you before, or :'( O:) >.< T_T as that's the weirdest change... but neither of those feel like good answers

The answer isn't in the cipher itself

surely the inscriptions about ciphers and riddles and crosswords must have some significance rather than just being there as distraction

2:46 PM

I agree, but I haven't found the significance yet

well, except that we've arguably solved a riddle and a cipher to get to the current state

I'm pretty sure there's no configuration of the cipher plaintext words that works as a crossword, I tried that for about an hour yesterday

I wondered briefly whether we were supposed to find two emoji one of which is the first one that looks like a fox and one of which (underneath it) looks like a dog, and somehow do something with the former jumping over the latter. But I honestly don't think there's enough detail in the emoji to make that work.

@GentlePurpleRain's Cleverly Disguised Word is kicking my ass, too. I noticed that ICON and COIN (both of which seem like they might figure in it) are anagrams and wondered whether maybe all the answers are anagrams and there's a 10th anagram of the same letters that's the intended answer, but unless my wordlist is really poor that doesn't seem possible.

3:02 PM

lol

am I so laughable?

If you click the link you'll see why I said that, haha

ohhhh

I didn't notice it was a link

I suspect a map of the US labelled by a typical Brit would be little more accurate (though probably less amusing)

As for my puzzle, you're both on the wrong track

@Sconibulus I'm sorry :(

3:22 PM

ANyone seen this? puzzling.stackexchange.com/questions/45745/…

seen it, sure.

solved it, not so much.

CLearly, it had to do something with switching letters on the QWERTY keyboard.

Except that, it didn't make much sense on shifting each letter to the right...

moving everything to the right gives ]MENTS C]PH]R which looks like it might be ...MENTS CIPHER somehow

but (1) that depends on mapping P to multiple different things

Exactly.

and (2) the first bit seems like only part of a word

3:30 PM

I was looking at that puzzle for a while last night, got nowhere useful on it

That poem/riddle is a bit.... puzzling though.

and (3) if it indicates a cipher is being used, there doesn't seem to be anything much to use as ciphertext
The curious ...MENTS is also interesting given the mysterious "mentals" in the third block of text.

[sorry about delay, was having weird timeouts talking to the Sphinx's Lair server]

Have you tried other keyboard? like AZERTY?

The first letters suggest qwerty

more than just "suggest", I think

3:33 PM

I looked at dvorak as well, not that it mattered

It mentions a "Dead French guy" AZERTY is a French keyboard as I recall

I don't know whether there's any significance to the words in the first block besides their first letters, but looking for a "dead French guy" seems like it might fit with the final letter being "U" as the end of the third block might suggest

but there are a lot of "might"s there

The single "r" is present but in vain,- Might indicate a word in which "r" is silent.

I just looked at progress #1, he specifically says its QWERTY

If we begin at the very beginning of the third block, it says "The first things go first". That suggests we're supposed to rearrange things somehow before moving right on the keyboard. Maaaybe.

3:36 PM

Alphabetically?

Maybe.

Or maybe it means start with A somehow. "The first things go first ... Then use my name as it is said above" -- perhaps the content of the second block isn't used until after we've gone right to get mentals collecting toll on road.

Anyway, I should get some work done so I'm outta here for at least a few minutes :-).

@Rubio Could you do your thing and just find out which URL exists? LKGRY.gif- Try the Uppercase and Lowercase letters..

hm. yeah one sec.

30240 combinations, that'll take a few.

The hints basically say that line one of the rhyme indicate how to use the QWERTY line on the cipher line.

Yes, we sort of get weird stuff on shifting the letters to the right

3:53 PM

my quick and dirty script doesn't exclude duplicate letters, so I'm searching more than probably needed and finding more hits than you care about. i.stack.imgur.com/LKGRg.jpg

@Rubio Is that your magic number? You had 30240 combinations last time :P

@Rubio ?

I'm a fan of 30240. ;)

Ah, viable results

I like 65536 better

3:54 PM

You probably shouldn't post all the pictures you find, it's kind of spammy

This might be less spammy if I knew what I was looking for. Jinx ;)

@Rubio Mithrandir's puzzle

I see those 5 letters and they lead to nowhere

Hm

i.stack.imgur.com/Lklyr.jpg has got to be it. ;-)

@dcfyj Which meta-puzzle has not been posted yet?I mean, which user?

4:01 PM

humn I believe

But you could confirm yourself by looking at the gravitar images on the meta itself and comparing them to the posted puzzles :P

What, Deusovi has posted the meta-puzzle?

@dcfyj That only gets you the gravatar, to find the user would take a lot more work

Yes, yesterday

Not if it's an easily recognizable one :P

@Sconibulus Any progress on GPR's puzzle.?

@Sid I believe all the meta puzzle pieces link to the meta itself

4:05 PM

@dcfyj Oh, sorry... I had overlooked the link... :-)

5:06 PM

@Sid I can say with absolute certainty that the pattern you're looking for is one of these two: gYrLk or lkGRy

I'm afraid to say that, even finding that, there's still more to be done. The next link in the chain seems to point backward, not forward.

The 2nd one is a bit brighter...

Hehee :)

I had to take advantage of the opportunity to troll you there.

GentlePurpleRain

@GarethMcCaughan You've made more progress than anyone on my puzzle. 3 of your 4 guesses have some measure of validity to them (they're by no means complete). There is definitely an "aha" moment required, but once you get there, finding the answers shouldn't be too difficult.

Lol, Mithrandir gets a message to read all the books again..

@Sid Yeah. Like I said... backward, not forward.

5:20 PM

So, it's actually back to square one.

@GentlePurpleRain Thanks for the kind words. I will keep thinking. I am not at all surprised by what you say about an aha moment.

@GentlePurpleRain I am sort of disappointed that Gene is not the word for the star trek writer.. Everything else was a big stretch by any means...

Have we established that it isn't?

Yes

Yeah

5:22 PM

oh, yeah, he said none of Sid's guesses was right.

GPR said none of Sid's postings were correct

GentlePurpleRain

@GarethMcCaughan See my comment on Sid's answer.