So, as we get closer to 5000, should we like, organize some questions or something?
Aside from “HELP, we have no idea what we’re doing” there must be some more directed things we can ask.
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@rfindley and @Belthazar I appreciate your logic here. Not to contradict per se 
, but I will add that Koichi did say if we want to get past B3 we’re going to need to solve the image cipher and I believe he knew that we had already uncovered the book cipher. I’m open to the possibility that this can be true without invalidating your reasoning, but I also consider that at face value his comment implies that it’s not a unko before the Turtle scenario 
Edit: If we stall on both though, it doesn’t really matter what the case is 
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Of course it will be. That’s how this works.
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The fact that there’s ten books listed but we only get sense out of the cipher for four ( three?) of them has always bothered me. That’s a hell of a lot of work to do just to cast some red herrings.
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I’m not following why this is debated. The book cipher discussion happened around 1/8-1/9.
Reg Durtle and Koichi comments were before then unless I’m missing something. We had the five kanji, we got a stroke hint and we got the Tofugu article…is there another possible order from this that the book cipher could have slipped in from?
Well, the timeline is:
RT: Regular Thread
ST: Spoiler Thread
- RT Post 4394: Brute forcing post
- RT Post 4437 / ST Post 1: Start of the schism
- ST Post 8: Approval of the brute forcing by a-regular-durtle
- RT Post 4527~4565: Visit of koichi for the 4500 posts
So we do have comments from koichi after the brute forcing.
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On a side note, my memory might be faulty, but has koichi’s title (that thing to the right of the username) changed?
It’s “Durt Durt!” now and I think it was “Overlord” at some point? or was it?
Yes, it has changed…I think
I thought the same thing, though I can’t pinpoint the date that I first noticed the change.
Is it a clue? Did we discuss this?
Sorry if somebody already noticed while I was away, I tried to keep myself up-to-date but I might have missed it.
It was Overmind not Overlord
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Both the brute-force revelation of HTML comments and the (partial) solving of the book cipher were before Koichi’s comment saying that the 4-line code is “important” if we want to reach B4.
But that doesn’t mean the 4-line was intended to come after the book cipher. I suspect it just means that the 4-line helps us find or narrow down or understand the rest of the book cipher.
In that sense, I think trying to apply the book cipher in solving the 4-line is cart-before-horse.
Though, I acknowledge that as long as you’re going downhill, even cart-before-horse can work, if not very smoothly 
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How did you embed this so that it auto-plays everytime I load this page? It was making me think I had actually gone mad until I figured out where the sound was coming from…
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It’s just a link, but it’s so annoying
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It’s not autoplaying for me but I can understand the frustration 
It wasn’t auto-playing for me but I’ve changed it to a regular ol’ link
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I think the book cipher falls into a few different theories, and we don’t know which is correct.
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We were supposed to find it, and we need it in conjunction with the image cipher to solve B3.
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We weren’t supposed to find it (yet), but it’s the next part of B3 after the image cipher, so reverse-engineering it might help solve the image cipher in addition to moving us forward after that.
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We weren’t supposed to find it and it’s farther down the road and unconnected to the image cipher (maybe even part of B4), so reverse-engineering isn’t going to help right now. But solving it would still presumably help us later.
I think Koichi’s comments could support any of the 3, in that regardless, we have to solve the image cipher.
For the record, I’m leaning toward Explanation 1, but still getting nowhere. I also note that while Explanation 2 or 3 means we don’t need the book cipher to solve the image cipher, it doesn’t mean we already have everything we need to solve the image cipher. We might still be overlooking a clue in the B3 text.
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Actually, I’m changing my mind. I think Koichi’s comment about people going down to B4 without us could indicate the book cipher is part of B4, but that we can’t solve B4 either until we know what the question is and get some additional hints from the B4 text. And couldn’t type in the answer to B4 anyway until we get to the password box for it, which would require us to solve B3. So we still have to solve B3 first.
But that would also mean we should be able to solve the image cipher without any reference to the book cipher.
It’s been over a month since the Ghost of Crabsmas Durtle came to spread this plague jiddle.
I give you all a gold star for perseverance, and for being far better at this than I ever was or will be. 
All of our salvation depends on your abilities to free us of the question:
WHAT THE HECC IS DURTLE HEAVEN?!
So no pressure. 
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So you’re saying that we’re still stuck with the same 4 lines of text? D::: it’s sad at this point
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