u/Legitimate_Stress237

So, I found an ARG on nightmind index called "iris and Plato". The story is about a girl who's website is hijacked by something. It's also inspired by the Plato's cave.

But that's not the point. I need help with a specific puzzle.

And here, you can go and try the ARG yourself, or continue reading. I'll tell you what I found so far, so this is a spoiler. But once you click on the robot cafe article and go to source code, you'll find a Pastebin link in the comment. The Pastebin is password protected. If you look at Nicky's SoundCloud, you'll see the track called "cave". If you put it through spectrogram, you'll see the password is "underthesun".

Once you have access to the Pastebin, it's encrypted with vigenere cipher, with some letters being replaced by numbers and symbols. On the website, once you click on one of the pages and put the soundtrack to it called "new alphabet" through spectrogram, you'll see the key to converting the numbers and symbols to letters.

Here's the part where I need help. Once you put the final result of only letters through vigenere decoder, you get a text that talks about "the iris cafe". But the text has different misspellings. There's a lot of them. So I want to see what plaintext you get to compare it to mine, and see if the misspellings in the final result are due to it being another cipher or me interpreting the symbols from the "new alphabet" incorrectly.

So, I found an ARG on nightmind index called "iris and Plato". The story is about a girl who's website is hijacked by something. It's also inspired by the Plato's cave.

But that's not the point. I need help with a specific puzzle.

And here, you can go and try the ARG yourself, or continue reading. I'll tell you what I found so far, so this is a spoiler. But once you click on the robot cafe article and go to source code, you'll find a Pastebin link in the comment. The Pastebin is password protected. If you look at Nicky's SoundCloud, you'll see the track called "cave". If you put it through spectrogram, you'll see the password is "underthesun".

Once you have access to the Pastebin, it's encrypted with vigenere cipher, with some letters being replaced by numbers and symbols. On the website, once you click on one of the pages and put the soundtrack to it called "new alphabet" through spectrogram, you'll see the key to converting the numbers and symbols to letters.

Here's the part where I need help. Once you put the final result of only letters through vigenere decoder, you get a text that talks about "the iris cafe". But the text has different misspellings. There's a lot of them. So I want to see what plaintext you get to compare it to mine, and see if the misspellings in the final result are due to it being another cipher or me interpreting the symbols from the "new alphabet" incorrectly.

It was made in 1979 in Poland. It's called "Ostry film zaangazowany" (not a correct spelling, since I don't have Polish keyboard), or "A highly involved movie", where "involved" means "sharing a specific ideology" and it's considered a cult classic in Poland.

Don't forget to turn on English subtitles if you don't speak Polish.

I'd like something that has just started ( by just, I mean like a free weeks to a few months ago). It has to be something you know for sure is an ARG, but presented in a way that makes you think "wait a second. What if it's real?" Not necessarily asking for the story itself to be realistic in a sense that stuff like these happen in real life, but something with a realistic presentation. Also, the game component and multi platform storytelling has to be a very prominent thing that is necessary to understand the story, as opposed to just passively watching/reading.

https://youtu.be/jzVWVcXva\_o?si=dSxRkev6UEe2nVDi

(The ARG is in russian, and I don't know if there is or will be an official English version)

This is an animated ARG. It feels similar to the amazing digital circus in vibe, but has a different story. The story right now to me looks like a bunch o very weird f concepts that I can't connect, though. But even though it's nonsense for me (at least right now), it's a very fascinating nonsense. What I know for sure is that the characters are stuck in an afterlife where they are imprisoned by someone who says it's for their own good, and whom they for some reason consider their "landlord". Also, in the city where they live, there are many other Yokai. And one of the characters feels like their lives have become stagnant, and want to go back to the real world (another digital circus parallel I can draw), and somehow in order to do so, they enter their tv screen and get into some another weird, dystopian city, where the citizens are haunted (or at least they believe they are haunted) by some obscure creatures named "shadows", and also citizens of that city have shared dreams of the same creature.

As far as the ciphers go, there's not a lot of what I noticed apart from an a1z26 and a Morse code.

But the two main concepts that drew me in are:

1. In addition to solving ciphers, there's an actual viewer participation involved, where the events of the next episode are dictated only by what decision the audience makes at the end of a previous one.

2). There's also a metanarative where, it's basically an ARG inside an ARG, since your job is to solve both the story of the ARG, but also the in-universe story of the ARGs creators.

Oh, another weird concept is that one of the in-universe authors of the ARG is a sentient program on the other creator's channel.

Also, one of the story's motieves is that there's a conflict behind the creators, where one wants the project to be just an unfiction story where the audience chooses their own adventure, but doesn't need to solve any ciphers,as well as keeping the story more light-hearted, and dthe other wants it to be puzzle, with the story turning into more of a slasher with the characters dying one by one.

If you do decide to go on, be prepared for it's weirdness. Also, there's some yaoi anime monolog from one of the characters, though nothing explicit is shown in the project, so be aware of it if it makes you uncomfortable for any reason.

So, here's the thing. I found this very weird and interesting creepypasta. It was posted to an Russian imageboard.The writing can be better (at least the original one, I'm not that well-read in English literature to judge how good it is in English). But I like the story for it's very promising concept and how much one could do with it.

So, here's the thing.

I'll post the original story, and you'll try to write your own stories in the same shared universe to expand the lore.

It has already been done to this story, but was only in Russian and never got big enough.

" I know this isn't the right time for such a thread, but I need to speak now. I just woke up and I have to say it. I’ve been having strange dreams and strange thoughts lately. I dream of swamps—huge, ancient swamps, endless, shrouded in mist, waiting. And there, within them, I sense some kind of machinery moving. Gears—rusty, gigantic gears with jagged teeth, towering above the swamps like iceberg peaks. They are moving, and I know that beneath these swamps lies something mechanical and alive—an artificial creation that no one has ever built. And there are decayed pistons moving, boiling mud erupting in silence, releasing peat and steam. Above the swamp, blue lights flicker, and what should never be alive, a monstrous mixture of metal and rotting plants, lives there and waits.

All morning I've been browsing swamps on Google. I was surprised to realize how many there are in Russia. And they are huge, and most of them no one has ever seen. I sit here, a little shaken from that nightmare I had and from the thought of what these swamps might be hiding."

You can start the universe and the lore anew, but if you want something to go off from original shared universe, one more detail is that the mechanisms have negative effects on mental health by making those around them suffer depression and deep sadness.

Released around the time of the first local58 episode or even earlier and has a very similar vibe to the series.

It's in Russian, tho.

I can't say it's scary, but it may be of interest to those who want a glimpse of what was before the big series's like local 58 or Gemini home entertainment.

Do I need to go through the original Asma journals/ in search of the tribes ARG before watching the movie, or can I watch the movie and get the complete experience without prior knowledge. Because I just started the movie, and I can see the connections, but I haven't gotten through the original ARG in full

( Not sure if the flair fits)

First of all, sorry if I say something very stupid. I'm new to photography, editing and anything that has to do with it.

So, a little background.

I was playing an online puzzle (which I'm not going to say the name to avoid spoilers), and there is a level where (according to my theory) I need to count the exact amount of pixels on a small part of an image. But the needed pixels are all the exact same color, so it's very hard to distinguish where one pixel ends and another begins, and the original photo doesn't have a clear separation into pixels.

So, do any of you know an app or an online tool that will clearly show all the pixels of the photo and will make it easier to distinguish exactly where each pixel begins and ends?