Awesome job, all! I looked into De Quincy and the Confessions piece this draws from. There’s definitely a lot there - it seems like this is one of those important works that folks don’t know about. De Quincy himself was inspired by all sorts of authors from just before him like Wordsworth, but his work also echoed out, influencing Poe, a character in a Sherlock Holmes story, and more.
I’m not sure about the sunshine connection, though. Luckily, the word only appears once in the whole work. It’s in part 2 which discusses the problems that arose from his opium use:
“No, it must be divided by a thick wall of dark nights from all return of light and sunshine.”
The entire work is on Project Gutenberg, so feel free to dive in more if that seems like a fruitful avenue. Otherwise, I’m all ears for other ideas
EDIT: Neither “snowdrift” nor “rainfall” occur in the text.
I lean more towards option 2 (replying with the decoded message), assuming a little bit of time doesn’t magically let the book know that we’ve figured it out.
(Not that I wouldn’t love to know what would come up for the other two weather choices, I just worry about breaking the magic since “choose” tends to mean you get one, and trying to take more ends up being A Bad Time)
Hi Mounties,
Great work, I barely understand how you solved it, but it definitely looked like great work!
I’ll wait for anything to change in the journal or for you to figure what you think we should do next.
I was wondering, I don’t think picking a ‘wrong choice’ would harm the process don’t you think? That’s why I was leaning towards option 1, because the original message said codexes only reveal their information when the right sequence is fulfilled. Which I take to mean it’s not going to erase any information we’ve already unlocked.
Incredible code breaking, everyone! I wonder if we’ll get different passages from the same work for the other words? Or 3 different minds that will help us triangulate… something?
I rather favor the “write the decrypted text back” option to let the magic in the journal know we’ve solved it. It kind of feels like we’re supposed to chat with it, in a way.
So I’m leaning more towards either figuring out what the decrypted text means or inputting it in the journal, as much as I, too, would love to know the other options, I think because we chose once already it may not be a path available for us to explore.
Nearly random searching interesting terms found at least one odd thing:
The book had 2 versions. Books with different versions is kind of a theme around here. Maybe the passage differs between the two?
Thomas De Quincey produced two versions of his most famous work, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater . He launched himself to fame with the first version, which appeared in two instalments in the London Magazine for September and October 1821, and which created such a sensation that the London ’s editors issued it again the following year in book form. Thirty-five years later, as volume five of his own fourteen-volume selected edition of his writings, De Quincey published a second version, which was much longer than the original, and which contained his final reflections on more than half a century of drug use and abuse.
Edit: The above quote comes from a BBC article about a show called ‘The Secret Life of Books’ I might try to track down the actual episode.
Edit 2: Also, I can’t find the quote we deciphered in the project gutenburg link @Remus posted above. So the quote is only in one of the two versions maybe? I can’t seem to find the other version’s text yet though.
Finding some more time to google. There’s a great article I found talking about “The Burden of the Incommunicable”. I really like their take on it. I might have been the only one who could have used a helping hand understanding the concept though.
From what I’ve been able to gather the quite is from the second version of the confessions. I think. The two version of the confessions are so completely different , I’m having difficulty trying to find any kind of overlap. The quote we have is from a space where he’s talking about his mother. In the other version there’s no mention of the makeup his family remotely like this one.
Oh super interesting article that goes into one of my favourite existential crises: the world we experience can never be fully articulated or understood by anyone else, even when we share language and a common background. It’s like the old ‘I can only ever be sure of my own humanity’ problem. And there’s two versions of the book; two versions of the author’s world and experiences (sounds familiar!)
That being said, I think we should write the quote in the journal. I think it’s a complicated captcha system. Or, worst case, we lose half a page to the quote. Can we get locked out of a magical journal?
I agree with writing the quotation in the journal.
My bet is that each of the different choices would have yielded a different quotation, and this is a sort of validation. That sort of call-and-response isn’t unfamiliar.
That said, I do think we should keep digging into this author and excerpt. The last time we did that we found the connections between Cagliostro and St. Germain.
Lion’s Heart has been a bad, bad castle, Mounties. I’m so sorry.
The solar batteries have been full for almost two weeks, but we couldn’t get any juice out of them until the sun went down tonight. Once I got everyone set up making the best use of the power we had (and the unknown window of time we had to use it) I sat down to catch up on BC33 and what you thought I should do next.
I read your idea, wrote the quote in the journal, on a blank page, and while I was just now nodding off from total exhaustion, I remembered to recheck it. The quote is gone, and these words were left in its place:
