(SPOILER EDITION) Descent of the Durtle into Madness

Right, I (admittely slower than usual) caught on to the edit history (finally).

So what’s the current state since then?

Summary

These are the codes which were added to the page, and the books to which they refer:

Genki Workbook

9784789014410 89 41 3 12 31

Genki

9784789014403 209 1 24 29 41 50 84

Minna no Nihongo

4883196038 36 2 10 45 130 4 55

Japanese for Busy People

1568363850 23 33 2 5 10 34 19

Japanese for Everyone

4889962344 50 4 33 8 13 434 4

Japanese: The Spoken Language

9780300038347 168 19 1 6 5 5 5 10 9

Adventures in Japanese

0887275494 33 98 2 55 34 9 10

Japanese from Zero!

9780976998129 39 4 3 45 134 2 66

Japanese the Manga Way

1880656906 43 99 3 24 55 16 9

A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar

4789004546 181 8 49 3 20 2 33

The first number in each set is an ISBN referring to a specific edition of each book. The remaining numbers are most likely a book cipher - according to my understanding, the second number is a page number, the third a line number, and each number after that is a specific word, from which we’re supposed to take the first letter.

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Here’s the content of the spoiler:

Spoiler

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
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 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 its getting late here so I need tosleep.

Here are my notes so far:

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

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

Summary

Of those books, I only own the Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar. (I’ve also got Japanese for Busy People, but it appears to be a different edition - 2006 instead of 2011).

Trouble is, page 181 doesn’t lend itself towards a book cipher terribly well - it’s a gap between two entries, so there aren’t many lines on the page.

I have a Genki 1 and a Genki 2

The first three keywords (not necessarily in order)

As @Belthazar mentioned, there are a bunch of ISBN numbers and other numbers.

The other numbers are a page number and a list of character numbers.

I’ve decoded words in the following three books:

Genki 1
Genki 1 Workbook
A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar.

The three keywords are:

  • Turtle
  • eating
  • unko (<–Japanese for poop)

Here’s the example for unko (assuming I did it right. The other 2 keywords were easier)

Clue:
<!-- 9784789014410 89 41 3 12 31 -->

9784789014410 is the ISBN number for the Genki 1 Workbook (2nd edition)
Page 89 has the following text.  I've removed all spaces and punctuation:

         1         2         3         4         5         6         7         8
1234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345
KenandMichikoaretalkingListentothedialogueandanswerthequestionsinJapanese

Choosing the 41st, 3rd, 12th, and 31st letters gives you:

unko

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Also, for the record, I don’t think that brute force search was cheating at all. In fact I suggested the search for Durt Durt after Safarigirl found the comment in the first page. (But I didn’t have the skill to do it. :smile: )

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Aww, page and character numbers, didn’t think of that…

Unfortunately, I’m fairly sure my Japanese for Busy People is too different - page 23 is numbers and times written in Japanese - the page starts with “II. Numbers:” and then it’s just numerals and kana.

But yeah, I get “eating” from DBJG as well.

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Yeah, the solution for Japanese for Busy People isn’t readily apparent. I’m not 100% sure there’s something in all of the books.

Oh, I spy a Durtle. Think we’re about to face the Durtlish Inquisition.

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Oooh hoo, hello friends! Anything that brings the Durthlic Church deeper into Durtle Heaven brings pleasure to the Durtle Pope––no matter how durtverted the methods! Your progress pleases us to no end. :durtle_durverted_lvl2:

34 Likes

Or, that works too…

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Hmm. I vaguely wondered if these specific pages were chosen because they’re included in the Amazon sample pages, except the Amazon sample pages for Japanese for Busy People are for the 2006 edition, not the 2011 edition…

Are there any books we don’t have? Unfortunately the only one I have, you’ve already solved, so I have to wait and see what the words are and help figure out what they mean.

Also, I bet Leebo has every book, every edition. :smile:

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For anyone that wants to try to work on Japanese for Everyone:

Edit: the page below is from the wrong edition :thinking:

The needed content

Are you outsourcing because one of the numbers is 434? :stuck_out_tongue:

I think 434 is likely to still be on that page. Depending how you count. And that’s the trick. I haven’t found any hits in this page yet. Just for the sake of honing in quickly, I put a ? in place of character 434.

Edit: I’m sleepy… I just realized what you were saying. Anyway, nope… I’m outsourcing because I’m not sure many (or any) people are likely to have this particular book. It’s from 1993.

So, if there are 10 books, each with a word, how does that lead us to 4 words?

I think most of them may be false trails. So far, I’ve only found 3 that had readily decodable words. I don’t have all of the books, so it’s going to take some teamwork to locate copies of the rest.