Descent of the Durtle into eGoooott - NOW AT B8!

Politely, I had sounded the idea that physical descendence might be a play on words for descendants. Word play is of course a common aspect of riddles so I think it’s a valid thread to pull. Moreover, I didn’t realize it until I was composing this reply, but reading the definitions you pulled they can mean the same thing. So in that case the wordplay is supposedly more likely since it’s less of stretch. Who can say.

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Which external site? Where is this from?

http://www.zetetique.ldh.org/herai_en.html

Linked from https://www.tofugu.com/japan/jesus-grave-in-japan/

I appreciate what you’re saying, to some degree. Also, you’re trying to say that a noun (descendence) and an adjective (descendant) mean the same thing. And they do not. They don’t even serve the same function in the language.

The reason why I’m harping on the definition is because I think there’s a good reason why they used ‘descendence’ instead of ‘descendants’ in the clue text. We’re talking about a crew of people who write and teach language for a living here…they wouldn’t carelessly substitute one word for the other (at least I hope not) with the intention of having the meaning be the same.

The fact that the word used is ‘descendence’, matters. The subtle difference in meaning from the word ‘descendants’, must be important to the clue.

In any case, I think that the meaning we’re meant use here is

because that fits best with decoding an encrypted line.

Ooops I cited the wrong part of speech for the term. I should have quoted from the noun portion.

Definition of descendant
1 : one originating or coming from an ancestral stock or source

Though, I’d almost take for granted that descendant can function as a noun, and it’s meaning as a noun was already understood by most readers. It’s the term descendence (the one that the browser insists on marking as misspelled) that held my attention because it’s rarely used especially when we compare the terms to each other.

Regarding the clue text, I consider that is also written in character. I think Durtles, are apt to make mistakes and take liberties with English.

We seek physical descendence, and that is the key difference between you and I.

I question whether or not it’s correct to say “you and I” vs. “you and me” here because I think think it’s functioning as an object in the sentence.

We’re just a different type from you.

This line isn’t the best use of English either. In all three cases, however, I consider a likelihood to take liberties in order to maintain a rhyme scheme, rhythm, or drop clues.

I agree, I think it’s likely that the term descendence matters. I like how you frame descendence as being relevant to encryption – good observation. I think it’s important to keep our thinking fluid. For example, I even consider that the cipher text is a red herring meant to distract us from the solution.

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Nah, I realised in hindsight that it’s ok if “we” is “us durtles”.

Honestly, since the last floor said “you may be able to descend to continue your descent” without any apparent intent, I try not to read too much into typos and miswordings.

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Sooo…
I was away for some time, congratulations for discovering the first step @Masayoshiro

I wanted to know if any other articles were related to the riddle, so I originally started searching manually in the source code for comments for each article. After 5 articles, seeing that there are 20 pages of articles in the archives of Tofugu, I decided to automate it.

I’m divided about this, because I actually found something… It might look like cheating, because we haven’t solved the second step of B3 yet to get to the third step. But in the meantime, anybody with enough spare time could have done that without a script.

Script

Here’s the python script I wrote

import urllib.request
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
from bs4 import Comment


def get_articles_urls(archive_page_number):
    urls = []
    if archive_page_number == 1:
        archive_page_suffix = ''
    else:
        archive_page_suffix = 'page/' + str(archive_page_number)
    archive_page_url = 'https://www.tofugu.com/archive/' + archive_page_suffix
    with urllib.request.urlopen(archive_page_url) as response:
        html = response.read()
        soup = BeautifulSoup(html, 'html.parser')
        article_tags = soup.select('li.article-index-item > a')
        for article_tag in article_tags:
            urls.append(article_tag.get('href'))
    return urls


def get_comments_of_article(article_url):
    with urllib.request.urlopen(article_url) as response:
        html = response.read()
        soup = BeautifulSoup(html, 'html.parser')

        return soup.find_all(string=is_body_comment)


def is_body_comment(text):
    # There must be a better way to get comments of the body tag
    return isinstance(text, Comment) and any(parent.name == 'body' for parent in text.parents)


for page_number in range(1, 21):
    print("Archive page " + str(page_number))
    article_urls = get_articles_urls(page_number)
    for article_url in article_urls:
        absolute_article_url = 'https://www.tofugu.com' + article_url
        print("    Article " + absolute_article_url)
        comments = get_comments_of_article(absolute_article_url)
        print("        " + str(comments))

The results are in the next section, so don’t bother to run it.
If you really want to, fair warning, it’s pretty slow, and you will need to install beautiful soup using pip.

``


The raw results are pretty long, so I stripped them to only contain articles which have comments in their body tag. And surprisingly, it’s only four articles:

Choosing the Best Beginner Japanese Textbook For You

Comments
[’ 9784789014410 89 41 3 12 31 ', ’ 9784789014403 209 1 24 29 41 50 84 ', ’ 4883196038 36 2 10 45 130 4 55 ', ’ 1568363850 23 33 2 5 10 34 19 ', ’ 4889962344 50 4 33 8 13 434 4 ', ’ 9780300038347 168 19 1 6 5 5 5 10 9 ', ’ 0887275494 33 98 2 55 34 9 10 ', ’ 9780976998129 39 4 3 45 134 2 66 ', ’ 1880656906 43 99 3 24 55 16 9 ', ’ 4789004546 181 8 49 3 20 2 33 ']

How to Install Japanese Keyboard on Everything

Comments
[" Durt Durt! Hmm, not bad, you’re on the right track! "]

Genki Textbook Review by Tofugu

Comments
['Durt Durt! Almost! ']

Article A Dictionary of Japanese Grammar - The Tofugu Review

Comments
[’ Durt Durt! Nice try! ']


I skimmed through the articles but it’s getting late here so I need to sleep.

Here are my notes so far:

  • The comments of the beginner-japanese-textbook article are just ISBN 10 codes for the books. That must be legitimate comments with no link to the riddle.
  • The comment of the dictionary-of-basic-japanese-grammar article might be the result of following a red herring, hence the “Nice try!”
  • The comment of the genki-textbook article make it seem like a real step, but I did not see anything looking like a clue in the article.

I don’t know what to do with the articles yet and we might not know before solving the step 2 of B3, but they can maybe give us some hindsight on what we’re looking for.

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Yeah, no, that was absolutely cheating. Mebbe cover those up so we can at least pretend to actually solve it. :stuck_out_tongue:

Think solving the clue on this page is going to give us a hint that we’re looking for some textbook, at which point we’d go “ah! Genki!”, so the page would go “Durt Durt! Almost!”, and we’d have to try something else.

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removed, as it was comment to removed post :slight_smile:

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Alright, everything’s a spoiler now

Edit: I hesitated before posting this, because it might ruin some surprise

I think that’s a just a confirmation of a step change, not a mean to skip steps

Okies, first thing’s first: only the long number at the start of each group of numbers is the ISBN of the book that’s being referred to in that section.

Guess the other numbers are… what, page numbers?

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Removed because of the ruining-the-jiddle-thingy

Yeah, I just checked the Wayback Machine - they weren’t on the version of the page archived in July.

Alright, this might be ruining the riddle. Should I remove the evidence and we just pretend that we saw nothing?

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I’m kinda thinking that. You don’t want the Regular Durtle to be disappointed in you. :slightly_smiling_face:

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Done.

But I’m calling it out now, genki is one of the four ki-words

Edit: Thanks for the edit, @sumsum :heart:

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Time to turn your smarts towards solving the puzzle proper-like. :slightly_smiling_face:

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Time to sleep :smile:

Well I might have found one or two of the four ki-words by cheating, so… it’s something?

I still want the durtle to appear more regularly, because I feel so lost :fearful::disappointed_relieved:

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