Check out the crazy new footage and website!
Check out the whole category for more info. (Especially a spoiler about the ending.)
There’s a new blogspot post with lots more Sanskrit. Here’s the translation (imagine if you were the Hollywood intern whose job it was to translate J.J. Abrams’ ramblings into Sanskrit).
Clover Field used to be the name of Barker Hangar at Santa Monica Airport. (A Santa Monica connection was found through whois.ws)
Devin, you may be closer than you think with your Rampage guess. What do you think of Legendary:The Box? I thought that it was weird that they said it looked like a lion.
Pandora’s Box getting opened in downtown New York? I’d pay to see a movie about that.
Spoilers begin here, so if you are planning to solve the puzzles, look away and think about how awesome it was to line up all of those light projectors in Myst III:Exile (I personally wanted to take the hammer and hit the guy at the end of one of the games…I forget which one (I think Riven, because I played that with Tom…they all run together))
Those letters on the EthanHaasIsWrong site look more like sanskrit. Here’s what you get:
Are they attempting to scare us into belief?
Ethan Haas would try to strike fear in the heart of me. Do not be taken by the ramblings of a mad man my brothers and sisters. We are all safe.
These are going to be solutions to the puzzles that I mentioned previously. The site keeps track of the puzzle that you were on (at least it started me on puzzle 2), so that’s pretty cool. I totally kept clicking on the same wrong square because I learned the sequence wrong the first time. My wife thought that was pretty funny.
There is a secret e-mail field. Here is the e-mail that you get:
If you’re receiving this auto-response message it means that I’ve gone into hiding. You should be careful now, too. They’re likely to start coming after all of us in an attempt to keep the balance of power in their favor. But remember, as our numbers increase as a group, the weaker they’ll become.
As you recruit new people to our cause, you might need to share this message as guidance for how to navigate the 5 locks to the key code…
The first lock will test your memory. Follow the trail of light and sound, but be careful — one wrong move will send you back to the beginning.
For the second lock, you may need to look to the stars. They will help you find HAAS who will lead your way.
The third lock will require you to extinguish all lights but one. Only with one light remaining will you be able to proceed.
The fourth lock will let you move all 4 pieces through the control of one. However, unless the three key pieces are simultaneously placed into position, you will not be granted access.
The fifth lock will be the toughest. Seek help again from the stars to reveal your key and the message that you must decode. The two working together will open the way.
Good luck.
Van
Here are the puzzles:
- Like I mentioned, the first one is a Simon-type game. Follow the flashing squares and then click in the right sequence. I like the random electricity over the guy’s shoulder in the following video. I don’t like his scary hat.
- It’s an alphabet decoder ring. Get one side to spell out HA and then the other side to spell out AS as you rotate the rings. The Flash movie lets you zoom in to see the characters better.
- I had a game like the third puzzle as a child. My grandpa who lived in Iowa gave me a triangle with pegs/golf tees on it. You had to capture all of the pegs except the last one. Checkers jump to your heart’s content. (Or frustration, as it usually was with me.)
- You’ve got to program a course using the arrow keys on your keyboard to get the three green circles to the three green gears. Blues go where you want them to. Greens have issues. During the following video, the number ’54312′ flashes on the screen (thankfully slightly less disturbing than Brad Pitt’s subliminal message in ‘Fight Club’).
- On this last puzzle, you have to use 54312 as a sequence. You’ve got to count up how many times letters appear. Messages have four-letter code words on their second lines. Once you re-arrange the grid (do a 4×5 grid instead of a 20 letter word board) you should get:
BNSN
EITD
ENIE
HIGE
TGNH
Put that in the 54312 order and you should get:
Huge spoiler
“The beginning is the end” (Try reading the grid top to bottom.)
I’m like flippin’ Sphinx from Mystery Men.
Sphinx: You must master your anger before your anger…
Mr. Furious: What? Masters me? Is that what you were going to say?
Sphinx: Not…necessarily.
Wow. I feel like that was kindof a let-down and not a good use of time.
I feel like I just gave away the ending to ‘Anthem’. (Another spoiler…)
“I”
Yep, kids, that’s the secret word. That’s what we worked towards this whole time. Woohoo! That’s why they punished the janitor. (My sophomores liked Ayn Rand’s books pretty much like I did (not much) by the time we got to the end. They kept asking why I was so excited while I taught it; they thought I liked the book. I got the same reaction when I taught the intro to freshman comp session up at NAU. I went crazy on the chalkboard diagramming ideas, calling on students, raising pertinent questions about ‘Ishmael’ in the English building (This, by the way, was my confirmation that I should get into teaching). My residents said as they walked back to the dorm that they enjoyed the class and had not stayed awake in an English lecture for a while until then. They had one question: why did I like the book so much? Why did I get so excited about it? My response? “Oh! No, I hated the book. It’s dreadful. You can still read it, understand the ideas, and disagree totally. I got excited because Residence Life and the Orientation Department needed me to get you ready for ENG105. I got you ready. Mission accomplished.”)
Man, I love teaching.
Here’s the thing with J.J. Abrams, though. He gets you all hyped up, promises meaningful ideas, but then leaves you with more questions and the only solutions are let downs.
Give me a samurai who can stop time anytime. Give me a psychopath who can telekinetisurgically [my new word] steal your brain powers. (On second thought, don’t give me him.)
I have no beef with J.J. Abrams. He seems cool enough. I’m just upset that I don’t know what the monster (‘Smokey’, I guess…but that’s one [bleep]ed up bear) is and that Mr. Ecko died. And now Charlie of the Shire…
View the source of the Ethan Haas Was Right site and there’s a message:
…war came, no longer from the elemental nor from the star’s rain of fire. The world was again remade, and the glow was as the coming of the sun upon the Earth. The children of the gods were again too few, scattered and divided and among them walked the ancients and those whose thoughts were not as to the towers and the marvels, but to the End and the destruction of the Earth and to the fires from which nothing could escape.
I’m thinking Shiva and Kali and karma cycles, but I think Devin may be right with Rampage. Lots of building bashing.
