Thursday 19 December 2013

Mckay's Magazine Review Ship Of Theseus


A short while ago Doug Dorst tweeted these pages from McKay's Magazine.

They contain pages from a review of Ship of Theseus and are from February 1950.

A brief scan of the review shows that the reviewer is not exactly a fan of the book - "a vulgar ouroboros of a novel, filled to bursting with apathy, anomie, and omphaloskepsis." (Yes I did look that last one up !)

The second page has some adverts and other articles and I am going to work my way through them to see if there are any further clues in them. This post will be updated if any new information comes to light, please let us know in the comments, via twitter or email if you think there is anything new in the article or other material.

This is great news for fans of S. as it means to me that there are other things to come, whether this is a gentle push to get us to look further or just part of a planned activity I don't know, but interesting never the less.

Update 1 - I just realized Edsel B Grimshaw, and this review, is referenced on the Eotvos Wheel Website, on the candidates page

@ObFuSc8 also reminded me that this is mentioned in the book - "Chap7 IIRC along with the obituary). Magazine owned by Bouchard/ARP."

Lady Lobster also points out that it is mentioned on page 106 in Eric's margin note.

Update 2 - The WhoIsStraka Wordpress blog has a transcription of the review.

Update 3 - There was a lot of discussion yesterday about the contents of the review and the adverts, I have collated most of it in a Storify list

I think the main points are -

From one of the adverts an address could be the New York Public Library and a search reveals it has books by Václav Straka - (Link from @CFish6) Does anyone live near the library that could call in and take a look at the books to see if anything is hidden within ?

@ObFuSc8 has posted a list of references used for the adverts in the comments below.

@MyTheseus mentioned the "magic burgoo" mentioned in the review and wondered if this points to anything within the book, a search for links and references was started.

@MyTheseus also said "Review mentions 450 pages in SOT, but there are 456. Six pages missing…" - So does than mean the original version of SoT has been extended for our benefit ?

Tuesday 3 December 2013

LONOE

I must admit to being slow to recognise the significance of this map, I saw it a few days ago from a comment by Tonzi in the Cipher Explanations page and didn't realise what it was.

If you haven't finished the book yet you may not want to read on.

Then last night @MyTheseus on Twitter pointed out a new blog post on WhoIsStraka.WordPress.com which had the same conclusion, although arrived at via a different thought process.

Firstly the map is quite important as it explains the relationship of the coordinate system to the codes used, they are linear as you can see and these aren't locations from the book, these are all coordinates that can be found when LONOE is in the wheels window.

When you look at the map you can see that Maraú in Brazil (blue pin) is close to this line, on the postcard dated the 20th of April (insert on page 201) Eric writes that he is near this place.



So the conclusion is that the missing letters L O N O E are actually a pointer to the location of FXC should Straka have ever picked up the message hidden in the footnote cipher.

Tonzi very kindly created this as a Google map for us all to use and see this linear relationship.

Saturday 30 November 2013

Nine or Ten Clues ?

So where are we ? Short answer is not very far forward I'm afraid, assuming there are mysteries left to uncover we haven't got a handle on what they are.

I thought I'd post about a couple of things that haven't been mentioned in a main post, but have been discussed in comments or emails.

First of all are these two pictures from @RadioStraka the first to be sent was the poem written on a wooden door. What is odd / interesting about this is that, as ObFuSc8 told us via Twitter, the first verse and a little of the second appear to be taken from a poem published by Illy Kotz in 2010

Perhaps Radio Straka just likes the poem, or part of it at least, but who added to it and put it on a door ?

The second picture was the birds as you can see, this coupled with the twitter feed for @EricHusch changing to the image you can see here, two of the S. symbols which when arranged like this have a picture of a bird between them may be significant.

These led to a few people speculating about the chapter 9 cipher that we don't currently know how to solve.

The Chapter title is "Birds of Negative Space" and the space where the bird appears in the EH profile picture is most definitely negative space.

So do we use this bird to solve the cipher, or is this a pointer that we need to find out own negative space in this chapter ? Mark Voorneveld commented that perhaps we need to use the cut out parts of the S. symbol to find a hidden message, but as yet I've been unable to find anything.

Finally for now is the suggestion that came from Karen via email, since the clue from J J Abrams last week was Ten, perhaps there are alternative versions or at least small differences in the pages of chapter 10.

I don't want to post the whole chapter here, but I have posted three pages which I think are significant and if you can check your own version of S. maybe we can find some differences.


Saturday 23 November 2013

Mulholland Books Cipher Contest Answer

If you entered the Mulholland Books S. Cipher Contest you should have heard if you were a winner.

I was not, mainly because I am from the UK and was ineligible to enter ! However I did submit an entry and received an email to say that I was not a winner but had solved the cipher correctly. As the answer is now published on the Mulholland website I think we are safe to post the answer here as well.

The clue in the original question was of course "Follow these lines, from first to last, and play fair" so like in the book you take the first and last letters of the passages in the tweets - MC FR NM SH XM CS - and feed the result into a play fair cipher.

For the grid code word you need to use the next part of the clue "the bearded sailor sees all", the bearded sailor in S. is of course Maelstrom, which gives us this grid

MAELS
TROBC
DFGHI
KNPQU
VWXYZ

Using the Playfair cipher rules the result is - ST RA KA LI VE SZ, which gives us the answer "Straka Lives" (The z is a filler letter)

If you don't know the rules of Playfair, then there is this online version you can use to decode the message.

So apart from a bit of fun is this another clue ?

If you won the competition we would love to hear from you especially once you have claimed your prize and had your lunch with J J Abrams and Doug Dorst.

***UPDATE

We have heard from the winner, Kris from the BOLO Books website, he won and has had his lunch with Doug Dorst and J J Abrams.

Read all about his experience of this and the talk at Symphony Space on his BOLO Books write-up

Who Is Straka Update

I'm still not sure if the Who Is Straka Website is legitimate, but there are definitely more things to find there.

We had an email from Terrance to say that he and a friend had found some hidden images on the site, Kristin Rix also mentioned this in the comments yesterday, I went back to the site and I couldn't see anything different to what was there previously.

However I persevered and looked at things from a different perspective, that perspective was the Chrome browser. When you look via Internet Explorer you see a PNG file of the S symbol, when you look with Chrome you see a GIF file.

That Gif file is actually an animated one and contains all the images you can see here. 4 Rorschach style ink blots, and the phrases "SEEK SHELTER FROM THE STORM", "SAFETY IN NUMBERS WONT KEEP YOU DRY" AND "6483kHZ".

If you notice the S's in the phrases have what looks like a . under them similar to the Chapter 3 code.



The .GIF file isn't the only difference when viewed in Chrome.

As you can see the source code is different, there is an extra couple of comment lines and the unusual dot pattern after the encrypted lines.

As always if you can make any sense of this please get in touch in the comments, via Twitter or on email.

*** Update 25/11/2013 ***

The source code has changed again, more information has been added -

!-- Please direct all correspondence to whoisstraka@gmail.com --
!-- using secure communications protocols and encryption --
!-- to avoid detection and unwanted surveillance. Unsigned --
!-- messages with no PGP key will have to be ignored. They --
!-- are watching and it is raining. --

Doug Dorst and J J Abrams in New York

If you were following the conversation on Twitter yesterday you will have read all the fun that Mr Dorst and Mr Abrams were having in New York.

I will try and sum up some of that information and point you to where you can see more of the events.

First of all J J Abrams was at the NYC Soho Apple store, he was doing a live chat and this was also being relayed via twitter by @iBooks and @Bad_Robot

I have created a Storify version of the chat for you to read if you want to. Not related to the chat but interesting for us, while I was over at Storify I noticed there was a page for Radio Straka created by Anna Frame.

Anyway back to the book chat, most of the questions were the usual things people ask about the book and it's creation, but at the end there was something quite interesting for us.

@AmandaKennedyuk, who is a follower of this blog, asked a question about whether there is something major we have yet to uncover. The response was first that there are quite a lot of things hidden online, but then this clue was given - "TEN". In typical J J Abrams style nothing is easy ! Does this mean there are 10 websites, we have to solve something big in chapter 10 (have we already solved that ?), is this a reference to the roman numeral X ? Answers on a postcard from Brazil please, or in the comments if yow want.

So now on to the next part of the event, where the picture at the top of this post comes from courtesy of Paul (@TK10815) who was at the event.

I haven't got much detail yet from this part of the event, but Paul did take a short snippet of video which is on Instagram. He also mentioned that the full chat will be online at some point on the iTunes Meet The Author pages.

As soon as that is available we will update this post and send the information on twitter.

*** Update *** This is now live.

As you can see from the picture Paul got to meet Doug Dorst and have a photo taken with him. Paul said this after the event - "Thanks for being a gentleman and a scholar, @dougdorst, for answering (&avoiding) my questions after the NYC Apple chat tonight"

Paul also said on his Instagram page for this picture that "Doug then thanked everyone at SFiles22 for their passion and commitment. He's well aware of the blog and what is being posted there :)"

So I think it is appropriate to say Hello Mr Dorst, we really appreciate your work on the enigma that is S. and are still puzzling away at the mysteries.

Friday 22 November 2013

J J Abrams Talk in the SoHo Apple Store NYC

@Bad_robot just sent a tweet about J J Abrams speaking at the Apple Store today in New York.

There was no timeframe given in the tweet, so if we hear anything we will update this post.

The link given is for the Apple store website -

Apple Store
SoHo
103 Prince Street
New York, NY 10012


Tuesday 19 November 2013

Who Is Straka .com

A new website has appeared !

Amanda has let us know via email that she found a website called WhoIsStraka.com

When you visit the site all you see is what you can see in the image a styalised S. symbol.

However that is not all there is, there is a hidden link to a PGP public key (Click here) and if you look at the website source code there is an email address and at set of Eotvos wheel coordinates.

The email address says - "Please direct all inquiries to whoisstraka@gmail.com" but it also says please use secure communications protocols and encryption.

There is some encrypted text following this, but I have thus far been unable to decrypt it.

At the end of the website source code there is this set of coordinates - 35° 46.865', -5° 48.797 - this appears to point to Tangier in Morocco and on the wheel it gives us C G E U Z.

Amanda also mentions there is a related Tumblr account which was set up today and the first post was today.

The web address was also only registered today (the 19th !) so it is unclear whether this is something official or not, but any suggestions are more than welcome in the comments.

If you send a PGP encrypted message to our new friend please let us know.

Saturday 16 November 2013

Cipher Explanations

I thought it would be a good idea to try and explain the ciphers used in the book for those that are not too familiar with how the ciphers work. I want this page to act as a reference specifically for the ciphers.

If you have read the book you will know that in each chapter there is a code in the footnotes, some Jen and Eric solved, some we have solved and I am sure there are a couple we have yet to solve.

Most are solved by Jen and Eric and the answers appear in the margin notes, but apart from mentioning the cipher used and some key words there is not much extra explanation so to the uninitiated it may be confusing.

Just a quick warning, that the full post here contains information that you may not want to see until after you have read the whole book.

Doug Dorst Book Signing Event in Austin

Details of another S. book signing have been released.

Doug Dorst will be signing copies in Austin Texas on the 9th of December.

See the Book People website for more details

Making Connections

A couple of things were tweeted to us in the last week and I thought they might be of interest.

First of all is something sent by @MyTheseus, who have their own connections to S. with the name and profile picture !

The information sent was about the poster image you can see here and the Etsy store where it came from.

On page 225 in footnote 10 "Fukuzawa Yukichi" is mentioned and it is underlined, probably by Eric. On the Etsy store listing it says "...Boilerplate has recently been optioned by Paramount Studios for a major motion picture to be produced by J.J. Abrams." Doing a search for Boilerplate and J J Abrams shows the news was mostly from 2011, so not exactly a new connection.

I would put this in the Easter Egg category rather than the clue category, but it is a nice thing to find.

Next we have the movie "The Ship of Theseus", I had been aware of this, but @tikirama mentioned a connection to the book which was interesting.

While the name and main theme of the movie is obviously a connection, on page 101 of the book Eric writes about Hollywood versions of the film and then says - "Heard once that an Indian director was trying to do it but haven't heard anything since." Well the Indian director is Anand Gandhi and he did make it happen.

Again I am not linking this to the book in terms of clues, but it is a nice Easter egg to tie us into the real world.

You can read more about the film on IMDB and see the official Facebook page

If you have seen the film why not let us know your thoughts on it and parallels to the book.

Barrel Code

Since the solution for the Chapter 10 code has been found it seems logical to me that there is another code in Chapter 10 that needs resolving.

As with other posts like this, don't read this full content if you don't want to know what the code might be or see the discussion on how to solve it that might get posted in comments.

Friday 15 November 2013

Friday Catchup

First of all we have a possible / probable solution to the footnote code in chapter 10 of the book.

In the comments "The Fourth" gave a solution, followed up by some extra info from ObFuSc8.

As this is something in the book that isn't explicit in the book I will put it in spoiler tags just below in case you don't want to read about it just yet.

Click here to see the possible answer

In the first footnote for Chapter 10 the words "Spinning Wheel" and "locate" are in italics, so this points us straight at the Eotvos wheel contained in the book.

If you work out the locations referenced from the footnotes and write down the 5 letter codes in a grid you get a message -

Which if you read left to right top to bottom is

I HAVE LOVED YOU FROM THE BEGINNING. I WILL LOVE YOU TO THE END.

There is still the question of the location of the 6th column, as the footnote mentions Calais but the coordinates for Calais France do not match the code necessary to make the whole string work fully - L O N L E



The list of locations is -

1 - Bergan, Norway - 60N, 5E - I Y B W U
2 - Biabou, St. Vincent - 13 N, 61 W - HOEIT
3 - Portland, Or - 45 N, 123 W - AUGLO
4 - Thunkar, Bhutan - 27 N, 91 E - VFILT
5 - Santiago, Spain - 33 S, 70 W - ERNLH
6 - Calais, France - 51 N, 0 E - XBTUP (??)
7 - Morondava, Madagascar - 20 S, 44 E - OMIVE
8 - Havana, Cuba - 23 N, 82 W - VTNEN
9 - Sofia, Bulgaria - 42.70 N, 23.33 E (approx) - E H G Y D
10 - New York City - 44 N, 73 W - DEIO*

You can see the discussion on the Eotvos wheel code page, Click here to see the first comment and then scroll down slightly to see the post by ObFuSc8




Next, not really book related, Mr Toasty has kindly set up an IRC room for us to chat in about S if we want to - Straka IRC

Then we had an interesting tweet from @sFileSerin, who said if you look at this website for UViRCO Technologies, the name Vaclav Straka and CORIOLIS General Trading is mentioned.

I'm sure it is a complete coincidence, but fun never the less.
Finally for now is this article from the San Marcos Mercury

It interviews Doug Dorst and talks about the secrecy behind the books creation.

S. Book Signing

There is quite a lot to catch up on from yesterday, but lets start with the big event, the book signing in Waterstones Piccadilly, London.

It was a really well managed event, and although not huge amounts of people were queuing initially there was certainly lots of interest. I arrived around 3pm and some friends had been there since around midday so they were right at the start of the queue, one of those friends was the Bad Robot you can see in the video below.

I have edited a few photographs and a little video together, so please take a look, it shows a flavour of what happened without you having to wait for 5 hours on the streets of London !



Overall the signing was excellent and J J Abrams was fantastic to all who wanted to talk to him. I mentioned the blog and he thanked us for creating it and the fact that S-Files is in the book :-)

There were quite a few books signed for the three of us in the queue but as you can see in the video there was one special book signed and you could own it, if you can wait until next year.

As the inscription says it is for Cancer Gets LOST, which is a charity set up by two of the biggest LOST fans I know. Read all about the charity and the plans for the next event, which will be in September 2014, at CancerGetsLost.org

Wednesday 13 November 2013

The Isla Files

Our old friend @JuriMoller mentioned this Tumblr Blog - The ISLA Files.

As we know Isla is a key figure in the story of Jen and Eric and almost Jen's nemesis in her story, she is also searching for Straka with Moody.

The blog is mostly just information we have seen before, but it does have this video from You Tube which is supposedly a confession from Summersby purporting to be V M Straka.

According to the Eotvos Wheel website list of candidates Victor Martin Summersby has odds of 15-1 of actually being Straka.

There is a comment on the video - "I cannot disclose where this recording was found, please do not contact me. The book that is coming out is missing some key details that some of us have known for many years. I needed this recording to be heard."

I do not know if this website is from the "Real" Isla Dirks, but it was seemingly set up in April this year and the post about the video was on the 20th of October, well before S. was released, however the video was only uploaded on the 28th of October so there is a discrepancy there.

This got me thinking about other Social Media accounts that may be out there for us to find.

There are a few twitter accounts that may be of interest, and even one for Straka himself !

@VMStraka

@FXCaldeira

@JenTheUndergrad

@EricHusch

Most of these accounts were set up very recently (5th Nov) so I am not convinced they are something we should be focusing on at the moment, but possibly worth keeping an eye on.

While looking for those I came across another blog looking at the Mysteries of S. which coincidentally I have just noticed Brandt Warsley had posted a comment mentioning the same blog.

Glad to know there are others searching for answers.

Tuesday 12 November 2013

Bad Robot Clues Us In

A short while ago the @Bad_Robot twitter account sent these messages out.

They if we can solve the clues there might be a super charged version of S. for us to win.

We have been sent a possible answer on our twitter feed @Sfiles22, but see if you can solve the riddle and send Bad Robot your best answer.

Click here to see the possible answer


The first picture is of part of the Lincoln Memorial inscription, the word "enshrined".

The second picture is of EWA beach in Hawaii.

Courtesy of ObfuSc8 the third picture is a painting "Lincoln the Rail-splitter" by F. A Schreider (1909) - which is in the Library of Congress.

All this adds up to the Lincoln the Frontiersman statue which is located in Hawaii near EWA beach, @MrToasty on twitter was the first person we saw with this answer and a link to a web page about the statue

The answer that has won the Prize is that Lincoln is depicted holding an axe. "The Grandfather's Axe" is another title for the "Ship Of Theseus" paradox.


*** Update ***

We have a winner !

In the comments someone identifying themselves as Tyler has mentioned that their answer (in the spoiler tag above) has earned them the prize from Bad Robot.

Really looking forward to knowing what the Super Charged version of S. will contain.

Monday 11 November 2013

Footnotes 9-10

Thinking about the Eotvos Wheel and potential clues to the code to decode it these two footnotes jumped out at me.

They are the only two chapters with footnotes 9 and 10 on the same page, and they do seem to allude to a code of some sort. That combined with the Eotvos Wheel website saying lots of Santorini man pages were 9-10 is looking more like a deliberate pointer rather than a coincidence.

Page 225 Footnote 9 again has an instance of 19 - "He argued that while these were separate conceptions of individual identity, they were equally true, as were seventeen other “Lesser Variant-Selves” between those two endpoints."

Jen also underlines the name and two dates "Mariusz Mytych (b. 1853 or 1854)" she says Mytych doesn't exist and that the 60 + 24 are what is important, which don't correspond to the dates that are part of the Nihilist Cipher used in that chapter.

Page 225 footnote 10, the only thing that seems significant is - "I do not know whether Straka would have agreed, but one could argue that this conflict is at the very heart of the book you are now reading." Possibly alluding to an underlying mystery.

I can't read anything relevant into Footnote 9 on page 270, so if anyone has any theories please let us know.

Looking at footnote 10 on page 270 I think the relevant part of the footnote is - "but modifying its suite of disorientations to include the additional dimension of Time"

A possible reference to the date being significant to the code being deciphered as well as the longitude and latitude of the locations we have seen, both in the Santorini Man murder locations and the locations in Ship of Theseus.

Where does this leave us ? not very far forward I'm afraid I have tried combinations of the date year to get a digit between 1 and 5 to read a single letter from the wheel code, but have not managed to find any combination or calculation that is plausible. Of course we may need to take the whole line of the code at the selected location and use them in something like a Railfence or Play fair cipher as people have suggested, however this would drastically limit the amount of coded messages that the wheel could produce for us.

Any suggestions and theories on this are more than welcome.

Friday 8 November 2013

Parallels in S.

When we started the blog we didn't really see ourselves as a literary review team, as I don't think we had enough experience or training to do that.

However we have received this nice comparison of characters from Nimy Leshinski and I thought you might appreciate reading them too. Needless to say that this covers insights from the entire book so you may possibly class the information as spoilers if you haven't already read the entire book.

If you have any insights or reviews you would like to share we are more than happy to receive them and publish a selection of them if we can.

The information below covers the parallels in S.

Theseus > Straka > Eric

- All three navigate a maze to take on a monster, though they're hopelessly outmanned. With Theseus, it's the labyrinth and the Minotaur. With Straka, it's the deceptions and Bouchard. With Eric, it's the codes and Moody.

Ariadne > Filomela > Jen

- All three help their man through the maze by giving clues, yet they cannot participate themselves. With Ariadne, it's the ball of thread, which is where the term 'clue' originates. With Filomela, it's the footnotes in the book. With Jen, it's the margin notes.

Ship of Theseus > The S.

- As with the 'Ship of Theseus' paradox, the S. always exists, despite its members constantly getting replaced. This stretches back all the way to the writing of The Archer's Tales, or maybe even to Greek mythology, as the Theseus title would suggest. Admittedly, this one's pretty obvious.

Vaclav Straka > Eric

- Both men 'die' while young, only to be reborn in secret and with a new name/identity. With Straka, it's a literal death, and later, the emergence of the V.M. Straka identity. With Eric, it's the death of his academic career, and later, its rebirth.

S-Files

Little did we know that when we started this blog we would be in the book !

Ok,. the arrow and writing may have been added by us on this occasion, but it is really cool to see our name in there.

Page 323 if you want to look for yourselves.

J J Abrams Book Signing

Cannongate books has made an official announcement about the UK book signing for S.

It will take place on Thursday 14th of November at Waterstones in Piccadilly, London, between 6 and 8pm.

We will try an post updates to the blog, and certainly we will via twitter

Eotvos Wheel Website Update

A few short hours of sleep between investigating the mysteries of S. and look what happens.

It seems that all our efforts have been noticed by J.W.Dominguez and he / she has decided to post some more updates on the Eotvos Wheel Website.

Apparently it has been a rough few years since the last post there, but the current level of interest has prompted a new post.

The information is split into two parts, first some information created a few years ago, but never published, but then the second half has some more recent information.

The information is all about the Santorini Man which we first learned about via Radio Straka, there were two waves of killings that fitted the same pattern, a man is washed up on shore with a page from one of V M Straka's books.

There is an evidence photograph of the first Santorini man and @0bFuSc8 on twitter has said the Greek words are - Ιούλιος = July Σαντορίνη = Santorini and we have another 19 reference - 19th of July 1936.

In fact the post mentions the appearance of 19 as some of the pages in the pockets of these men are 9-10.

@0bFuSc8 also mentions that "There's discrepancy b/n book & website. p74 SoT Eric says page found is from Miracle at Braxenholm" - Is this a deliberate mistake or a clue ?

@WorkroomB19 also reminds us that Radio Straka mentions the Braxenholm page in connection with the Santorini Man.

However the most recent update is that there may be a third wave of killings happening right now (that is underlined on the site !).

There is another evidence picture on the site and quite a large list of places and dates for us to look at.

If you have any theories as to the significance of this new information then please let us know in the comments.

Thursday 7 November 2013

Eotvos Wheel Code

So we have an Eotvos Wheel, but what do we do with it ?

Good question, Jen and Eric discuss this early on in the book on page 3 -


It is then mentioned again on page 270



This isn't a discussion of the Eotvos Wheel website, but I wouldn't be surprised if the site is linked in some way as it seems too much of a coincidence not to be.

Wednesday 6 November 2013

Circles and Squares

While reading the book I noticed quite a few places where words have been circled and where they are enclosed by squares.

These can be simple words or small passages, so just in case they are significant I have tried to catalogue all of them. I have kept them separate so there is a circle list and a square list below, the circle list has either single words or smaller phrases, and the square list has a wide range of sizes.

I have tried to keep case and punctuation as it appears in the book, and hopefully any spelling mistakes are from the book not mine ! If I have missed any please let me know in the comments on this post.

Tuesday 5 November 2013

The Cabin Wall

The cabin wall seems to want to tell a different story than the one S. writes. Below you will find one from page 207. Jen thinks it's contains another message or something that will help in another cipher. What do you think? Or is Eric's new green-ink perspective correct? Let us know what you find.


I SWAM AWAY FROM THE SHIP,

the wall says.

I HAD ASPIRED TO DESTROY IT.
I FOUND MYSELF UNDER AN ARCH, 
CURSING AT SENATORS, COULD I HARM
THE NOISY DEMONS ABOVE?

Fn2: "This may be an allusion to the anonymous 1866 novel Les Démons en Haut, a scathing rebuke of the contemporary Parisian bourgeoisie. While the book is not well-known–indeed, it was banned almost immediately–one can easily imagine that Straka felt a kinship with its author."

conversation in the margin

Eric: in pencil: Doesn't exist (no surprise there)

Jen: Probably a code in the wall writing – don't you think? Whether it's part of Ch. 6 code or something else entirely?

Eric: Agree - VMS didn't do stuff like this by accident. He did like to mess w/ people who read everything as a clue re: his identity. Kind of like John Lennon writing nonsense to taunt the "Paul is dead" crowd.

Jen: ? Paul was dead?  <<baffled>>

Eric: Just look it up when you have time to kill. Pointless but fun.

Eric: (later in time, green ink) What if it's not a code or a joke but something serious about trying to tell a story or express a feeling, but never having it come out the way you want it to?


Jen's Favorite Words and other oddities

Jen likes words! 

Thanks ObFuSc8 for gathering this words below, they could be key words in ciphers. If you come across any other "favs" or unusual words or phrases, let us know in the comments. 

Words

Double letters. Is this a cipher? 

vi - skullduggery - underhanded or unscrupulous behavior; trickery, Radio Straka show talked about trickery of characters in stories

 ix - Amanuensis - murderous Servian nationalist, also "Apis's Amanuenis" both words begin with a and end with s.

Dictionary definition of Amanuensis - "One employed to write from dictation or to copy manuscript"

p. 10 and margin notes (2x)  provisionally - subject to further confirmation, for the time being

p. 42, p. 57 marked/circled (2x) holystone - a piece of soft sandstone used for scouring the decks of ships

p. 69 (margin notes) - MacGuffin  - an object or device in a movie or a book that serves merely as a trigger for the plot

p. 88 - leptorrhine - having a thin nose

p. 164 gaffed - a stick with a hook, or a barbed spear, for landing large fish

p. 198 (bubbles glyph) - blackscabbards, common as two words black scabbard fish, The fish is known commonly as Black Scabbard in English or “Espada” in Portuguese. The correct common name in Portuguese is “Espada Preta” so as not to confuse with the “Espada Branca” (White Scabbard), which is also fished off Madeiran shores, albeit uncommon for this epipelagic species (fish that habitate closer to sea level) to be fished on a regular basis.

p. 367 - integrious  - Eric asks if it's a new fave and Jen replies that it makes her top ten.  misspelled on purpose to have double 'i"  - In Open Dictionary summated by Beau Hodson 11/2010 - an integrious man's values are congruent with and evident in his actions. Wiktionary: marked by integrity.  Some references to Oxford dictionary but Oxford says not so fast.. looks like it was removed and there are efforts to have it put back in...

p. 379 - Palimpsests x2 - a manuscript of piece of writing material on which the original writing has been effaced to make room for later writing but of which traces remain. Something reused or altered but still bearing visible traces of its earlier form. palin "again" + psestos "rubbed smooth"

Phrases


p. 81 - "scratches his bald head self consciously.."  part of a line that Jen says she loves

Monday 4 November 2013

Website - La Balise


LaBalise.fr

Just for completeness it is worth mentioning this website that is noted by Eric on page 108 of S.

At the moment if you go to the site all you see is some analogue static and a message "No Server Signal Found"

Whether we will find a server signal at some point is unclear, but it is definitely worth keeping an eye on.

An English translation of La Balise is "The Beacon"

Thanks to stageboy for mentioning the site in the comments of the websites reference page.

Saturday 2 November 2013

Getting Organised

Now we have seen more of the book and possible related content it is time to get organised.

Hopefully you can see the new link bar just below the header at the top of this blog, we will add links to this new naviagation bar for any reference lists we can think of adding.

If you have any suggestions let us know.

The other thing is we now have an official email - sfiles22blog (a t) gmail (d o t) com - If you have anything you want to share that can't be left in comments, or you don't know where to add it, then let us know.

Friday 1 November 2013

Pinterested in S. ?

This note on page 14 was pointed out by Jojo in the comments of the S. Discussion

Jojo also points out that there is someone on Pinterest, called Juri Moller with a board that lists places where the S symbol has been seen throughout history.

I actually saw the board a few days ago when @MollerJuri replied to a tweet that @Tess315 sent about the book. I looked up Juri's Pinterest page and it looked interesting, but at the time I had no spare moment to look further and I filled it under interesting but not linked.

So when I read Jojo's comment about page 14 I decided to look further.

Juri's bio on Twitter says he is from "Frederiksberg, Danmark" so that fits with the book. The pictures on Pinterest look quite convincing, although some possibly a little too good to be true, the fact that the site mentions a pin from Nazca is the one thing that sells this as a potential to be a direct connection to the book. This pin was pinned on the 22nd of October so well before the book or the Radio Straka transmissions took place.

The accounts have all been set up recently and don't have much unrelated to S, apart from one retweet from the Rolling Stone magazine "50 musicians on Instagram". One tweet simply says "05 JUNE '46" which as we know is when V M Straka disappeared. This tweet was sent on the 28th of October, S. was released on the 29th and I don't believe the Radio Straka broadcasts mentioned this date before the book was released.

Please feel free to discuss this site in the comments, and let me know what you think, can you find any other occurrences of S out in the real world, and do the pictures on the board lead to other potential clues to Straka ?

Eotvos Wheel Website

If you were looking through S. and wondered what an Eotvos Wheel is then you are not alone.

In the general discussion comments Just Thinking mentioned that after performing a search for this term, which appears on page 3, a rather interesting website is listed - http://eotvoswheel.com/

This website is titled - "Dossier of V.M. Straka" so I'm fairly sure it is safe to say it is firmly within the world of S. and is something extra for us to look at.