Descent of the Durtle into eGoooott - NOW AT B8!

Not sure what you mean by “answered,” but that referred to getting a durtle badge (Alan Durtschowitz) for making a comment that proved you at least skimmed the ToS. ^-^

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I guess that’s what I meant… I only came back at the end of december and didn’t answer, so I wouldn’t really know :S Too bad! I thought the durtle might answer our prayers! Well…

Same, I’ve been randomly going through some Death level kanji in the hope that anything clicks, but nope…

I know… I’m just trying to make sense from physical descendence and difference between You and I

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https://community.wanikani.com/badges/128/alan-durtshowitz

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I wonder how much relevance that still has for us, or if that was just to lead us to the article aka #clue2 so type in the sense of typing and key, as a keystroke while typing etc and what we should concentrate on now is what’s in the picture? So starting from death… whatever that means :frowning: That’s awfully short

edit: but then again the whole thing IS in an article about typing, so typing might still be of relevance… I don’t know

Nice find!

I suspect that the comment isn’t intended as you described. I think it’s more relevant than that. It seems to suggest that some information from the article sources (because that’s where the comment appears in the document flow) will help us solve the puzzle. I’ve skimmed through all the sources. I thought the Google Godan keyboard (for smartphone) might be interesting because it’s a different way of mapping alphanumeric keys to kana: a different type, if you will. But… because it’s not included in the Win version of the Google IME I couldn’t properly tinker with it.

I think this comment in the page source warrants more speculation. I also looked at the source of the “How to type in Japanese article” because this durtle comment is close to that text as you can see in @Omun’s screenshot.


<p>Keep an eye out for Part II, where we teach you <strong>how</strong> to type in Japanese, using the keyboards you just installed. See ya then.</p>
<!-- Durt Durt! Hmm, not bad, you're on the right track! -->
<aside class="blog-post-highlight article-sources">
<div class="container">
<h4>Sources</h4>
<ul>
<li><a title="View source" href="https://coscom.co.jp/learnjapanese801/index.html">CosCom - How to Type in Japanese</a></li>
<li><a title="View source" href="http://nihonshock.com/2010/04/12-japanese-ime-tips/">12 Japanese IME Tips</a></li>
<li><a title="View source" href="https://www.google.co.jp/intl/ja/ime/">Google - <span lang="ja">日本語入力</span></a></li>
<li><a title="View source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_typographic_symbols">Wikipedia - Japanese Typographic Symbols</a></li>
<li><a title="View source" href="http://www.hadamitzky.de/english/lp_special_chars.htm">Wolfgang Hadamitzky - Special Characters and Symbols</a></li>
</ul></div></aside>
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So I decided to google these, and

B51BIQPGS206HD

(getting passed the WK forum images) shows a lot of Arabic keyboard related images. Dunno how relevant that is. The other ones didn’t reveal anything outside of WK.

Worth a shot, for sure. If you put the term in quotes, you’ll see the results are limited to this topic.
https://www.google.com/search?q=“B51BIQPGS206HD”

I am 100% certain that knowledge of Arabic will not be required to solve these puzzles.

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The Tofugu Article “How to Type in Japanese (And Fun Characters Too!)” also has an image of a computer screen, but it looks all Japanese. No cryptic text by eyeball, although I don’t have time to read the text right now (I’m very slow and bad at translating still).

I tried searching Tofugu for “durt durt”,. but I didn’t even get that one hit, so that’s useless.

I think the repetition itself is the important thing here:

Both the clue text and a-regular-durtle use ‘ha ha’.
Both Koichi and a-regular-durtle use ‘chop chop’.
And now the encouragement in the source code says ‘Durt Durt’.

We’re either looking for a word with the repeater character, need to do something twice (or use the word ‘twice’), or else the 4 keywords repeat one (as in ‘Tiger, tiger, burning bright.’) and no that’s not the password. I also tried ‘Durtle, durtle, burning shell’, method #403 (at least) of not getting in to Durtle heaven. seriously, Crabigator, cut me a break here. One of my poetic forays has got to be right sometime.

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Also phrases 1 and 3 start with repetition AA and 00.

Maybe one is はは and the other そそ(chop chop per Jisho)

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And the first thing on one of those reference links in the Tofugu article is the repeater symbol.

Now that I’m home, I can read the last link that was blocked at work by NETWARCOM for some reason. (I have high hopes for the last link actually, since ‘start from death’ and descending business in the clues)

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On the theory that Caesar Cipher was dated and that a different decryption technique might help I thought I’d read up on various Japanese ciphers: Japanese cryptology from the 1500s to Meiji - Wikipedia

Tried applying things in a couple ways, but so far no luck.

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PURPLE actually looks interesting. In particular, the key settings require five numbers corresponding to switch settings, and a starting alphabet. We have five numbers in the range, from the kanji stroke counts.

Problem is, PURPLE couldn’t do symbols or numbers and our ciphertext has both.

I like the idea.

I’ve check the article, and the first símbolo is 々 with Unicode 3005. It really looks like the beginning of the 3rd phrase… 3.00L

I read down that list, and there’s a Japanese punctuation mark called kikkō (亀甲, “tortoise shell”). Very tempting to think that this may be a clue!

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In the “It’s probably nothing” category, comparing the “how-to-install-japanese-keyboard” source today vs last year I see the following diffs:

< <p>Ready? <span lang=“ja”>レツゴーー!</span></p>
> <p>Ready? レツゴーー!</p>

Likewise in a couple other spots where there was utf sequences in the text, the <span lang=“ja”> is removed.

And the thumbnails at the very bottom of the page are new, but I suspect that’s a site-wide addition and has nothing to do with this particular page. E.g. bottom of the page used to look like this:

Reference, Wayback machine archive

You seek spiritual ascendence
through your Lessons and Reviews.
We seek physical descendence,
and that is the key

I tried running a cypher decoder on “AABQD010L76223CEGD72FI5DPBOJJMO+” using “physical descendence” as the key but nothing came up. I also used variations such as just physical, descendence, spirtual ascendence, spiritual, ascendence.

No luck.

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