Neuro ARG

[safe burrow]

[lusty stag]

https://discord.com/channels/574720535888396288/1193539822640451664 this should be here also i Guess?

[lofty sonnet]

It occurred to me recently why ARG Sama kept feeling oddly familiar to me.

[safe burrow]

[cloud crystal]

[pale elk]

so many messages

[safe monolith]

what percent is schizo

[pale elk]

110%

[safe burrow]

No, I think it’s more by 56%
166%

[uncut cargo]

also this is biggest thread ever, no?

[pulsar glen]

Canvas thread has 78559 messages, so it is now, again, yes

[plucky robin]

I can relate hard to this ARG

[uncut cargo]

I literally study to study

That song is a mood with big Os

[plucky robin]

Do we know if Vedal composes the music

or if it's someone else

[safe monolith]

We highly suspect that pb composed it, but we cannot confirm

[pale elk]

the music is catchy as fuck

[safe monolith]

We had one or two people examine her actual music to gauge her skill, and it seems plausible

[plucky robin]

because I feel like the "I don't wanna be an engineer" part has to do with the author of the music, as it wouldn't make sense with Vedal

unless Vedal actually hates being a software engineer

[pale elk]

wasnt vedal in college for engineering or something? the whole vedal backstory theory

[safe monolith]

It's fiction, anything can happen

We don't have confirmation that the ARG is about Vedal

[pale elk]

true

one of the stronger theories imo

[plucky robin]

we don't have confirmation that the ARG is about Neuro, either

we just assume

[safe monolith]

we never made that assumption

[tulip minnow]

Wow arg is alive

Rare

[safe monolith]

There's a reason why we call the arg girls by study girl, hiyori or fallen down girl

[tulip minnow]

It’s my head canon

[tulip minnow]

It’s clearly her

[safe monolith]

Although, one of the voices is confirmed to be neurosama according to hello world and meaning of life, since she did say her name

[safe monolith]

Proof?

[tulip minnow]

Just listen to her works

[safe monolith]

Words =/= visuals

[tulip minnow]

And who else would take the job

[plucky robin]

It's definitely more surface level IMO and I think the meaning is pretty apparent.

Whoever the ARG is about is/was depressed and does not or did not know what they wanted to do with their life after school. They question what their purpose is in their life, it causes anxiety, etc. A boat that many people have been in.

[safe monolith]

Plausible

[tulip minnow]

I’m pretty sure they are in school

[safe monolith]

But nevertheless still a theory

[tulip minnow]

Or dropped out

[safe monolith]

Point is, we shouldn't conclude things prematurely to keep ourselves open

[plucky robin]

To me, it describes feelings and attitudes one might have in a transition period between school and adult life.

[tulip minnow]

Well I made a time log of events in arg

[pale elk]

vedal at one point did allude to wanting to be an engineer before, combined with him saying that he didnt go to college for programming

[tulip minnow]

It shows she’s in second grade college

I remember

Maybe

[plucky robin]

software engineering...?

or mechanical engineering

there are different kinds of engineering

[pale elk]

i'd assume mechanical, he didnt really specfify, but engineering (afaik) refers more to mechanical than software

[tulip minnow]

I’m pretty sure it’s software

[plucky robin]

Well, he's doing software engineering now.

[tulip minnow]

He was literally making an ai

When he was in college

[plucky robin]

I thought he didn't go to college. I'm confused.

[tulip minnow]

He dropped out

[plucky robin]

Do you have a source?

/gen

[pale elk]

oh it was software engineering

[tulip minnow]

One of the stream he did

You can find it somewhere on the internet

[pale elk]

https://youtu.be/Yy-9Of46w4A this i think

granted still all theory

[tulip minnow]

Isn’t it similar to the arg?

Just saying

[plucky robin]

Maybe Vedal just told pb his life story and was like "Can you make it into music"

[tulip minnow]

That’s probably it

[pale elk]

thats what im leaning towards

which might also be a factor in why vedal is generally more into keeping personal details hidden incase they seem suspiciously similar to the arg, although he could just want privacy

[safe monolith]

, looks probable, but how does any of the ciphertext fit into the theory?

[delicate nebula]

So what you're saying is the final goal of the arg is to dox vedal

[safe monolith]

that'll be funny (don't search up the time we thought 572943 could be an MGRS)

[pale elk]

the final cipher contains his name, address, bank account details and social security number

and his DNA sequence

he got that ATGACGGATCAGCCGCAA DNA

[eager flower]

final goal of the ARG is a vedal clone reveal??? (i miss neuro it’s time to schizo i suppose)

[uncut cargo]

ARG may have some personal metaphors, though I doubt that arg is one big metaphor of vedals life

Ignoring that

Who knows, maybe we will find vedal at the end of the line

[safe monolith]

frankly i dunno if vedal even wants us to find him

also, we also technically don't know who the puppet master is

[uncut cargo]

find him as if, his origins story, vtuber lore, that kind of stuff

[safe monolith]

origin of tutel

[pale elk]

we have to work to earn our vedal lore

[plucky robin]

Maybe the ARG is Vedal being more open about his feelings. Maybe if you factor in the milestone that started the ARG (2.0 debut), it's just about how Neuro changed his life.

[safe monolith]

Maybe the ARG means nothing at all

[hollow garnet]

maybe there never was an arg

[safe monolith]

[uncut cargo]

with all the evidence its not out of the question. Maybe its neuro lore, maybe tutel lore. Maybe both

[plucky robin]

That reminds me of one summer day in the park. I was having a delightful picnic with my good friend, Orville. And I said to him, I said: 'Orville, I have a story.' And he said to me: 'What's the significance of the story?' I said to him: 'Orville, not every story has to have significance, ya know? Sometimes, uh, sometimes a story is just a story. You try to read into every little thing and find meaning in everything anyone says, you'll just...drive yourself crazy.

[uncut cargo]

nice reference

[pale elk]

The arg was the friends we made along the way

[uncut cargo]

it kinda is

[safe monolith]

on the off chance that arg master is reading this, the latest puzzle(s) are too hard, pls gib hint

[pale elk]

kinda funny that the ARG had a gamejacker at one point

[safe monolith]

that was one of the times of all time

[pale elk]

one of the times ever

[uncut cargo]

Eh it turned for a happy ending

sort of

[plucky robin]

what if we just spam "college dropout" in the next stream, and if Vedal gets mad then we know it's not true ||do not actually do this||

[uncut cargo]

[safe monolith]

ok i know you're joking but don't actually do that

[plucky robin]

yes, don't do that

[pale elk]

[plucky robin]

that might actually be hurtful if true

what if the end of the ARG is Vedal saying it back to Neuro

and that's the reason why he hasn't said it, because it would take away from the "reward" factor

[uncut cargo]

we do assume things but lets not go fairy tale levels

but god I hope we get a nice lore drop soon

or a tip for meaning of life

[pale elk]

i think the biggest lesson we can learn out of this ARG is not to study engineering

[plucky robin]

omg

[pale elk]

https://tenor.com/view/yippee-happy-celebration-joy-confetti-gif-25557730

pack it up gang, ARG solved

[safe monolith]

what would i do with my free time without the arg

[pulsar glen]

Wasn't there a neuro namedrop though? Or am I schizo

[safe monolith]

yes (to both ), meaning of life & hello world

there needs to be another mega-theory that covers all lore clues, anyone up to the task?

[plucky robin]

There's a Neuro name drop, but I don't think it's about Neuro. It certainly involves Neuro, but I think the overarching narrative is about Vedal.

I think the music, at the very least, is about Vedal even if the entire ARG isn't.

[uncut cargo]

frick me then I guess. Did one before kinda can do another

[plucky robin]

I will say that people are not utilizing the golden ratio as much as they should.

[pulsar glen]

What would such a narrative about Vedal but not Neuro even tell

[plucky robin]

we discussed this already...

[safe monolith]

it was used to solve numbers 2 though

at least the fib implication of it

[pulsar glen]

you mean this?

[plucky robin]

Metagaming here, but in other ARGs a tool introduced early on is often relevant throughout the entire duration

[uncut cargo]

as far as I see it even if vedal inserted some of his life there, neuro lore is still the main narrative

no doubts

[safe monolith]

indeed, but (so far) not in this ARG. all of the videos can be solved by itself (so far)

we're not entirely clear if meaning of life fits this, though

[pale elk]

vedal lore is basically just prequel neuro lore

[plucky robin]

okay, true.

Whoever you are that wrote the music and the lyrics – if you are reading this, thanks for putting a story that many can relate to into words and song. Keep it up, and I look forward to more.

Definitely would have been reassuring when I was at that point in my life, lol

[uncut cargo]

it is a good question whether vedal wrote the lore personally

or is someone doing that for him

though that would mean vedal is either closely working with that person, or everything vedal said about his past and its similiarity to arg is pure coincidence

[plucky robin]

I think it's more likely he asked a friend to do it or he's working closely with someone. I think pb is definitely likely.

[uncut cargo]

seems like most plausible option, at least from stuff we know

[plucky robin]

He's not really an artistic fella from what we know, he's more of a technical guy

[uncut cargo]

yeah writing a whole ass story is no easy task

but sometimes people can suprise

[safe monolith]

let me put up an unconventional candidate and say tomyomy

[uncut cargo]

Anyway at beginning of the ARG I thought this was going to be Neuro lore only

but all these months seeing how much brand of neuro connects to vedal

Its not out of the question that Vedal will be a character in the ARG

and since neuro lore is technically also vedal lore, those two align

[pale elk]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0aXFj2mHJQ&ab_channel=roboti

surprised how big the music from the arg got

[uncut cargo]

Though the prime candidate for Vedal in the ARG would probably be the roommate

We don't know anything about them, but they are only character that seem relatively close to main action

[pale elk]

i feel like the "vedal's dead sister" theory would be really weird to consider

like i dont think vedal would make an arg out of a dead sibling

[uncut cargo]

definitely not.

[plucky robin]

I agree.

[uncut cargo]

that would be crazy

messed up even

[pale elk]

crazy perhaps

oh im blind

joke ruined

[plucky robin]

An ARG is supposed to be a game after all, I think that it'd be a sensitive topic.

[pale elk]

yeah

like theres nothing that explicitly disproves it, but i highly doubt they'd make the arg about such a topic

[plucky robin]

Also would not count on it being about anything in violation of Rule 9 of the server, otherwise we wouldn't be allowed to discuss it LMAO

[uncut cargo]

So yeah that's my theory
Roommate is the only character that is somewhat "witness" of the action, so roommate becoming more significant character is very possible

[plucky robin]

Was pb maybe Vedal's roommate at some point

they're both British, maybe know each other irl lol

[pale elk]

makes you wonder if we even have enough evidence to make a theory close to the actual result yet

[uncut cargo]

we can make something, but definitely not the result

its too blurry really

logical conclusion would be actual creation of neuro, but what before that?

and how

[plucky robin]

I will say that as far as ARGs go, there's not a lot of direction given in this one. Often times the hidden messages reveal instructions to get to the next part, but the messages in this ARG don't seem to lead anywhere and it just seems to be a matter of "wait-until-next-clue-drops"

[uncut cargo]

well to be fair those breadcrumbs do build tension and hype

and even single new piece of text gives birth to dozens of new theories

it is a little frustrating but fun at the same time

[plucky robin]

we haven't been able to crack the first cipher, no?

[uncut cargo]

depends which cypher you mean as first?

if you mean overall, you're totally wrong

we've broken all and now we're stuck on meaning of life

[narrow turtle]

Maybe the real ARG were the friends we made along the way

[uncut cargo]

definitely not the real ARG, but we certainly did

[plucky robin]

is there a spreadsheet

or a pinned? or anything?

[uncut cargo]

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1eVzlovY47YYmmxtO2q7jKQ4_fFU-wq7YOoLLwrvI2E0/edit

[hollow garnet]

bottom of pins for the google drive

[uncut cargo]

quite nice to see how far we've gotten

[safe monolith]

imagine if this was still the case

[safe burrow]

[uncut cargo]

Now choice is in front of me, one game of R6 or writing theory

[brittle musk]

play one game for every time you go schizo mode

gonna become professional player in no time

[uncut cargo]

If only I had that much free time

[uncut cargo]

Man I swear

Arg made me hate doors

The door knock scenes are such an enigma

[safe monolith]

just get used to it, it's everyday now

[uncut cargo]

I mean Im collecting some notes for meta theory, but interpretation of those scenes makes me wanna scream, depending on it it pretty much changes half of the theory

[safe monolith]

can't wait to see what you cook

[uncut cargo]

Don't expect miracles, I might use my OG theory for some cheap base and go around that, or not.

[unique mason]

ikrrrrr every single time i get to writing my own i have like 10 different interpretations of everything and it gets jumbled up and i get nowhere

[safe monolith]

Write all of them

[tulip minnow]

I simply forces them altogether

[safe burrow]

[uncut cargo]

anyway what are y'all personal opinions on study samas? Different characters or AI art error?

[daring acorn]

oh yeah the image in the videos are AI-generated aren't they

just making sure

[zinc hinge]

clue until proven schizo

[uncut cargo]

Yep

You can tell by study because of goofy fingers

[daring acorn]

I've always thought those were man-made but I never took a closer look

[uncut cargo]

Really, use of AI art is an interesting one

Cuz its on purpose, no doubt about that

[daring acorn]

maybe so we don't find out the artist(?)

[uncut cargo]

Doubtful. could be but very doubtful

It feels too on purpose

Espiecally when we're talking about ARG of an AI vtuber

[safe burrow]

[lament rover]

how goes the ARG, people?

[cloud crystal]

yeah, ARG....

[lament rover]

[cloud crystal]

[vapid token]

WH ?

[hardy burrow]

maybe this arg was only a tease for the mommy ai vtuber all along

[safe burrow]

And I drink tea for your success

[safe burrow]

def numbers(secret_number):
    key = secret_number
    key += 2
    key *= 5
    key //= 6
    key = int(str(key)[::-1])
    key = int(str(key).replace('2', '3')) * 9
    key //= 24
    key += 17
    key = int(str(key).replace('572943', 'abcdef'))
    return key

Do you want to enter like this?

[cloud crystal]

wait, this is the first video

why are we back?

[safe monolith]

meaning of life has enough references to earlier videos, so we hypothesized that ciphers from the earlier videos may play a part

[cloud crystal]

[safe burrow]

Well, you can chew some cookies.

[cloud crystal]

🍪

[pulsar glen]

Isn't this code wrong since it replaces the secret number with secret letters only when the secretnumber appears in the same sequence as it is written

[wispy thistle]

def numbers(x):
    x = int(f'2{x}91')
    x *= 5
    x = int(f'{x}6'[::-1].replace('2', '3'))
    x *= 9
    y = f'17{x}24'
    for (a, b) in zip('572943', 'abcdef'):
        y = y.replace(a, b)
    return y

[distant rune]

The hive is buzzing lately.

Has there been a new clue?

[safe monolith]

Nopers, estonte's cooking though

[safe burrow]

[safe monolith]

but hmm, correct me if i'm wrong, but last i heard from estonte, he's looking at transposition ciphers. in other words, it might not be as simple as mapping a -> 5, b -> 7, etc. every instance of a might be mapped to a different number

[wispy thistle]

on the original [Filtered] description's solution, the description doesn't match the base64 that's on the cyberchef link

(correct / wrong)

• 293: e / е ('\u0065' / '\u0435')
• 349: l / 1
• 424: l / I

the cyberchef is the correct one, but why is it wrong in the google doc?

[safe burrow]

[pulsar glen]

I am going to make a baseless guess and say that probably one is from yotube API and another one was copied from youtube directly

In which case it would be Google docs silently changing characters behind the scenes when pasing API response into the docs

[wispy thistle]

something to note for the future then (why the fuck did l get changed to 1 and I though, this isn't OCR)

it really does look like someone just OCRd the API response and nobody noticed

anyway everything else in the google doc matches (I've checked everything up to [Filtered] so far)

[pulsar glen]

It is indeed weird. Why would anybody OCR the text and then repaste it everywhere in the doc

Can't even check because the description is different now

And it's only 2 ls out of 8 that were changed.
It's probably worth looking at the doc history to see when that happened

someone did a troll on Nov 1 00:02 UTC+0 and changed it

And then proceeded to manually replace all the es at 00:39 UTC+0
Manual tampering is evidenced by the fact that the process took them from 00:39 to 00:49 as opposed to if they just pasted the entire text with the wrong es

https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/1067638175478071307/1141815918587035679/ezgif-2-468ff245b2.gif

[safe monolith]

Thanks for catching

[hollow garnet]

😔 sometimes i wish the google drive held onto emails for that sort of thing

[safe monolith]

@timid swift can you maintain a locked ciphertext repository?

[delicate nebula]

[safe monolith]

or should i gamble on the chance that I'm here forever and do it instead

[hollow garnet]

i have no clue what'd be a good solution ngl

[safe monolith]

Tbh having people check the keys regularly like what chayleaf & OnlyInstinct did is probably the best, for integrity sake

It's like having an auditor

[hollow garnet]

yeah makes sense

[safe monolith]

But we do need a more permanent and reliable repository

[hollow garnet]

i guess there's github pages as an option?

[safe monolith]

open source arg

[hollow garnet]

where else would i flex my useless tools

[safe monolith]

let's see what everyone else thinks

[pulsar glen]

Markdown-ise the docs and sync with git

[safe monolith]

I'd say minimally the keys & ciphertext need this sort of immutability, yep

[wispy thistle]

https://gist.github.com/chayleaf/e3977f5b290af6ff4a91e15dfeb9cc0a all "solutions" up to filtered in python

[timid swift]

it could indeed be an accidental replace, but I like the idea of this all being big enough to attract subtle trolls. I'm not sure I like the idea of a locked document, but we definitely will have to mitigate this in some way. One way would be to read the version history, but there are quite a few documents to review

[safe monolith]

i peeked for 5 seconds, is that a malbolge interpreter

[wispy thistle]

yes

[safe monolith]

[safe monolith]

hmm. will the git idea work? not for all docs, just for the info that we absolutely don't want to mutate

[timid swift]

What value do you propose it adds over downloading the folder with all the docs?

[safe monolith]

e.g. if the latest ciphertext from meaning of life were changed at all, it may have thwarted correct methods

[timid swift]

we have version history right now, and git will only make the documens less accessible to non-techies

[safe monolith]

Probably for new users. If someone comes along with an idea, they'd probably want to test it as fast as possible

Planning to store it on Github Pages actually

[timid swift]

Right, that would solve the viewing part, correct?

[wispy thistle]

true, github pages is plenty accessible

[safe monolith]

nodders

[timid swift]

I still feel that it would bar contributing to the experience

[safe monolith]

Yeah, so I still think we can keep the docs. The GitHub pages will only be for ciphertext and keys

things that should never change

[wispy thistle]

yeah there's a balance between accessibility and keeping trolls away

and keeping ciphertext locked on github only should be perfectly fine

not even locked, just requiring a github account

[timid swift]

Ok, so the idea is to have a two tiered system where some parts cannot be tinkered with, right? We can do that on gdocs

[wispy thistle]

github is more open than locked gdrive doc tbh

[timid swift]

I don't disagree, but editing with git is less accessible to non-technical people

[safe monolith]

more worried about the maintainers suddenly falling out of existence in this case, but if we have enough maintainers i'm up for it

[timid swift]

That at least i'm not worried about. If the maintainer disappears we could just fork

[wispy thistle]

github has an edit button on files, though yeah it isn't as user-friendly

[timid swift]

How's that for inline image editing and other stuff? Markdown isn't hard but I assume the editor doesn't have buttons for selecting text size and bold etc

[wispy thistle]

meh everyone is used to markdown from discord

except images i guess, they arent in discord markdown

[timid swift]

sure, but images?

ye

[safe monolith]

small side-point to collect all the scripts we've ever used in a neat way

[wispy thistle]

do you want to use jekyll or whatever?

[timid swift]

no. Someone would have to host it

[wispy thistle]

nope, github pages+github actions

jekyll is a static site generator

[safe monolith]

can even use hugo

[wispy thistle]

sure

[safe monolith]

but the point is, it's the accessibility breadth's concerned about

[timid swift]

it sounds like a lot of techie stuff. I don't want to exclude people

[wispy thistle]

it's that or raw html

[timid swift]

absolutely not raw html

[safe monolith]

can a gdoc document be publically comment-only?

[wispy thistle]

exactly, so we have to use a static generator (which processes markdown into html)

[timid swift]

yep

that's what most ARGs docs do, and we may have to resort to it

[safe monolith]

ok, then I think we need to invest effort into maintaining Key Phrase Repository. can we make that the immutable doc?

[timid swift]

I just don't want people to jump through hoops to contribute.. but we may have to make them jump through logging in and at least mention that they're fooling around

Hmm, I wouldn't mind some of the more directed documents to be owned by a specfic person and read only for everyone else

like the key phrase document. That's a good idea

plus, if people are logged in we can ask them what's up and get clarified if it for instance was a find replace gone wrong

[safe monolith]

actually i think that'll go against accessibility. some of us don't have alt google accounts and want to stay anonymous

[timid swift]

yeah, you're right. I do have an alt but that's a hassle

[hollow garnet]

idk i made one just for this, but i can see how that isn't ideal

[safe monolith]

we can do this. then only commit a change once we're absolutely sure of each key phrase

if it's on comment only, anonymous people can still suggest changes (i think)

[timid swift]

I agree. Who does it belong to now?

[safe monolith]

genuinely no clue

i can see their email address but it at least doesn't correspond with their discord username

[timid swift]

by the way, wasn't this the doc that was lost??

[safe monolith]

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1eVzlovY47YYmmxtO2q7jKQ4_fFU-wq7YOoLLwrvI2E0/edit
this?

[timid swift]

ye

[safe monolith]

but yeah that's what i'm afraid of actually

minimally there should be 3 active editors

[timid swift]

Makes sense, yes

[safe monolith]

for now, do we fork this?

[pulsar glen]

No, the lost doc is still unrecovered

The lost doc had only the solutions

[safe monolith]

ripbozo

[timid swift]

Ah, yes

[safe monolith]

btw this is on the overview

[timid swift]

great :D

[cloud crystal]

I was thinking before

Can another language be used in this ARG?

[timid swift]

it was added in one go. It's probably an accidental paste

dec 25

[safe monolith]

Personally, I don't think so, since there is a fairly strict "English only" policy on Twitch chat and Discord. Why would the ARG be different?

Objectively, it is entirely possible, although everything recovered so far was English. The trend suggests it is unlikely, but not impossible

[hollow garnet]

looks like with this set to commenter on a link anyone can use there are anonymous comments

wait google just kicked me out

nvm it still saved the comment

[cloud crystal]

mhm

[safe monolith]

breadth you should be the owner of the forked doc. you can add me as an editor if you want

[timid swift]

alright, sure

https://docs.google.com/document/d/12h4LgBqTC1VmXvzHzEytXNh69OBpce3LMbkBtjoek3I/

There we go. I replaced the links in the overview as well. We'll keep this and a very select other few docs on lockdown if need be, but of course anyone regular can request editor access for those.

[uncut cargo]

What does it read?

[safe monolith]

will add a small note

[timid swift]

yeah, that's probably a good idea

[timid swift]

this is the probably-accidentally-pasted text

Сводка
Структура документа
Neuro-sama ARG Overview
Discord threads
Loose ends
Lyrics + timestamped observations
Solved
Putting it all together
Wild goose chases
Stubs
Dead ends
Gamejackers
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Study - Glitch patterns analysis

oh lmao

poor guy

[safe monolith]

one of these days i'll also start documenting all the gists pasted in this channel in a doc somewhere. if you would like to opt out please let me know

[uncut cargo]

[safe monolith]

rip bozo, the key phrase repo was wrong all along

[wispy thistle]

yeah i wrote about that above

it's a troll

[safe monolith]

yep, it propagated to the key phrase repo

[timid swift]

nah, it's a screen reader malfunction

oh

[wispy thistle]

ah bruh

[timid swift]

the other thing

We should probably copy them in from the OG source where we still have it, and take the earliest version from the version history where we don't, and put that in key phrase repo

[safe monolith]

yeah, i'm checking from the back

[timid swift]

alrite

[safe monolith]

😔 the title for filtered was not copied right

[timid swift]

we may still have it here in discord

[safe monolith]

̷͔Ͱ̴΁̱ͭ;͌ͪ͊Ά͑΅ͳ΂΁̿Ϳ͉̻̽ͻ̸͕͸ͦͶ̳Ί͐͏͎΋΂·ΆͿ΄ͽ΁ͺͿ͸̾͟͞ͺ͹͸ͱ̷̶ʹ͖ͲͫͰͩͨΌ͎͍ͬ΃͛͢͝ͺ͚͙͘ʹ̷͓ 

[timid swift]

oh, we have the escape codes

[safe monolith]

yep, recovered from escape codes

[timid swift]

nice

it may be that gdocs cannot contain the raw text, not sure

I wouldn't blame it honestly

[safe monolith]

copying the new distorted text from gdocs works for me

[hollow garnet]

fwiw here's a link to a message with the old title in an embed #neurotic-neurons message

[safe monolith]

1 track?

[timid swift]

WHAT

[hollow garnet]

wh

[safe monolith]

https://soundcloud.com/572943/tracks
can't see it though

[hollow garnet]

[timid swift]

but it's private?

[safe monolith]

is there such a thing as unlisted tracks in soundcloud?

[hollow garnet]

i can try uploading a private track to see if that happens

[safe monolith]

something is being cooked

[hollow garnet]

there's also scheduled it would appear (though i can't use it)

[safe monolith]

oh damn.

i think we are meant to find this eventually

[hollow garnet]

ok so i can confirm that it did not exist in November

[safe monolith]

holy

ok i wanted to write a script that will fetch all rss atoms from all arg-related channels, combine it into one, and beam it straight into my phone

now i'm regretting not doing that

[hollow garnet]

it should be possible to find their rss feed i think

[safe monolith]

i think i did before

[hollow garnet]

https://feeds.soundcloud.com/users/soundcloud:users:1258077262/sounds.rss

[safe monolith]

ah, not enough metadata

wouldn't have found out

[timid swift]

query that URL every 5 second until it changes

[hollow garnet]

ok so i uploaded a private song but i don't seem to have a track

[timid swift]

the heck does that say?

[hollow garnet]

i uploaded some random wav file to soundcloud as a private track

this number is still zero

[timid swift]

maybe it needs time to cache/propagate?

alternatively, what if you have 1 public track and then delete it or make it private?

[hollow garnet]

yeah possibly, you can check https://soundcloud.com/owobred to see if its just region cache or something idk

(apologies for the awful music tastes)

[safe monolith]

says 0 to me

[timid swift]

bred play's the long con. Subtle soundcloud plug

[hollow garnet]

oh actually

you can share links to private soundcloud songs it would seem

[safe monolith]

have verified all the things in key phrase repo. here is a question: do i also add the tentative "correct interpretation" of the ciphertext in meaning of life?

[safe monolith]

it might be possible that the latest ciphers will lead to a soundcloud song then

[timid swift]

why is it not https://feeds.soundcloud.com/users/soundcloud:users:owobred/sounds.rss ?

[hollow garnet]

its a user id

https://feeds.soundcloud.com/users/soundcloud:users:295595542/sounds.rss

[timid swift]

wait

what

oh right, we were given that number plainly. For a moment I thought the lyrics of Numbers were fitted to give the soundcloud user id

[hollow garnet]

oh yeah for some reason it says i have a follower but no visible followers

i wonder if soundcloud just sucks at counting

[safe monolith]

leave the song there for a day

let's see if it updates eventually

[timid swift]

you have 5 followers tho, don't you? https://soundcloud.com/owobred/following

[hollow garnet]

im following 5 people

[timid swift]

oh, i'm slow

maybe it's Tom Anderson

[safe monolith]

btw need an opinion on this. since we're currently solving it, maybe it's better to have anti-grief measures against trolls who may change the "correct interpretation"?

[wispy thistle]

well thats a clue i guess, but the url is needed

[hollow garnet]

you'd need to know the permalink + share secret i think

[wispy thistle]

yeah

[safe monolith]

Maybe that's why the ciphertext is so huge

[wispy thistle]

i'm making a site anyway because it would look nicer imo, but it doesn't have to be "official" (to the extent official is applicable here lol)

[hollow garnet]

oh i didn't see it but there's a seperate rss feeds checkbox

[wispy thistle]

nah the share secret is like 6 or 8 chars

[timid swift]

right, so if it goes public we're not guaranteed that it'll appear in the RSS

[hollow garnet]

no clue

[wispy thistle]

soundcloud.com/<artist>/<song>/s-<5 chars>

[hollow garnet]

mine was longer than 5

[wispy thistle]

guess they improved security

[pulsar glen]

Bruteforcing soundcloud links?

[hollow garnet]

s-xxxxxxxxxxx

[timid swift]

random length secret key. Keep the enemy guessing

[hollow garnet]

case sensitive letters + numbers it looks like

[wispy thistle]

well anyway it's relatively short and consists of i think ascii letters and numbers

so if we see s-... that's the key i guess

[hollow garnet]

though soundcloud do offer a link shortner that works with these https://on.soundcloud.com/xxxxx

[uncut cargo]

New drop?

[hollow garnet]

not yet

[abstract horizon]

YET!

[timid swift]

being funny is a lot harder now, yes.

||Oh that's Danish. It says "Added:"||

[wispy thistle]

:schizo: the troll is vedal, everyone look for what random bits are messed up, that is what we need to look into

[uncut cargo]

imagine

[safe burrow]

I really enjoyed reading everything from above.

[digital radish]

just pin the real one

[hollow garnet]

wdym

[digital radish]

can confirm the track is privated

[timid swift]

how so?

Ok, I wrote a short thing about the "new" soundcloud "track" and put it in the timeline as well https://docs.google.com/document/d/1oBEX9j0Z32UQtVnnojsNFDCIz21R7LnyuoSp_2Uila0/edit#heading=h.uk6skn59q2qq

[digital radish]

idk

trust my word (their api is just shit)

[timid swift]

compelling

[digital radish]

always blame it on the api

[timid swift]

and if that doesn't work, blame the compiler

[safe burrow]

[tulip minnow]

New clue?

Lets hack SoundCloud’s database and pull that song out

[safe burrow]

Sounds interesting

[wispy thistle]

there's a typo in the meaning of life google doc section about shifting down bb ce

it doesnt seem to lead anywhere if i fix it but still

i think it's very suspicious that there's 33 letters in bb ce

[wispy thistle]

so, about 692048501258949201

if i overlay it with the original image, there's still 2 (?) digits to the left

and god knows what to the right

which makes me think theres more to be done here

at least it doesnt seem to start with 17 and end with 24

[abstract horizon]

[wispy thistle]

oh apparently nuero can be seen here too

[wispy thistle]

also yall missed another message

what does it say? i have no idea

okay honestly probably nothing

yeah ok probably just the audio

it just looked oddly like a box to me

but thats because it's a harmonic rhythmic sound that starts and ends together

[abstract horizon]

I think that's in the doc, i think

[abstract horizon]

This Is in the doc

[abstract horizon]

And this

The last Time i check i see that

[wispy thistle]

https://neuro-arg.github.io/

collected known source data and solutions here

(should've reduced some images' dimensions but meh)

[wispy thistle]

anyway if anyone wants neuro-arg github org membership just dm me (by that i absolutely don't mean that you have to, the google doc serves a wider purpose anyway, i just mean that i don't mind it at all)

[wispy thistle]

yeah the 6920 text seems fine

(what looks like digits around it is actually rotated parts of the actual text)

[wispy thistle]

so, i guess what i currently find weird is that the hex string has 10 different digits (could even be decimal in disguise, but it's missing the digits 13469a, not 572943, so i don't know what to make of this), and the bb ce string has 15 different digits

furthermore, the bb ce string's charset is bcdefghij qrstvy, it's almost all in order. I've tried replacing one character at a time to make the filtered program produce a string where only one char is wrong (out of 33, so there's 32 hex characters which can be translated to binary), but all of my attempts failed. Either way, it's way too ordered to be random, so imo this is the best clue at the moment

i think the fact we have 3 values (the number and the hex string and the bb ce string) means we have to make them work together somehow, but i don't have any particular ideas at the moment. It's of course possible one of the hints could be for something else, but in particular the hex string and bb ce are most likely related, they're literally in the same frame

inb4 it's rsa this time rsa requires way too much bits

[cobalt axle]

could the "1 track" be becuase it's a scheduled release?

[wispy thistle]

the only 2 ways of different values "working together" i can think of right away (besides encryption) are xor and ordering/indexing

i've explored xor a little but it's a vast topic

and ordering/indexing is a big problem because of the irregular lengths (bb ce = length 33, number = 18 decimal/15 hex digits), the only thing with a normal length (64 hex digits) is the hex string

actually there's 15 different chars in bb ce and 15 hex digits in the number, i guess that could work... somehow

and it's unclear whether there's any purpose to spaces between bb ce components

it could be that the components of the string have to be reordered somehow

[wispy thistle]

schizo time: the digits 692048501258949201 occur in the fibonacci sequence at the 3465th number, position 1254663 (in the same sense as numbers 2)

[safe monolith]

Strictly speaking, you only need coprime numbers to do textbook RSA, so it is still possible. Just unlikely

[wispy thistle]

yeah i'm just trying to find a way to connect multiple values into a single key

[safe monolith]

This one is interesting though, you might be on to something here

[wispy thistle]

ugh I hope not

[safe monolith]

It is a huge number, that's for sure

[zinc hinge]

have we ever used Fibonacci sequence yet?

since if we haven't that might be a lead

[safe burrow]

I love the movie where they use Fibonacci

[safe monolith]

We have, for Nums 2

[pulsar glen]

scheduled releases are apparently only for paid Pro users

[timid swift]

Can you see if someone is a paid pro user?

[pulsar glen]

Yeah, there's this badge in the description, on a random artist from soundcloud homepage.
And according to a reddit comment, the badge cannot be hidden.
So this is likely not due to a scheduled release

[timid swift]

right. Good to know

[sage pivot]

oh great, another schizo video dropped

[wispy thistle]

(a month ago)

[sage pivot]

then why are you guys going crazy all of a sudden ^
did you find a clue or what

[wispy thistle]

wdym?

[safe monolith]

#1112082183235047506 message

[sage pivot]

arg chat seems to be way more active than usual from what I can see above

[wispy thistle]

I guess it's mostly just from me joining in

(plus the soundcloud thing yeah)

[dapper wraith]

guys

[wintry notch]

did we get any more leads?

[wispy thistle]

don't think there's been anything since meaning of life

[wintry notch]

i missed so much ;-;

[timid swift]

check the timeline if you're in doubt. But no, not much

[wintry notch]

i just remembered a thing i tryed to do a while back, i tryed to put the numbers tru a decoder (or one of the videos description) and got some wierd text, din't post it since it was realy bluntforced and probably whould have been a red herring. (also i think it was solved in the doc :P)

stile got the text too

[wispy thistle]

I collected the summary of all we know for sure at https://neuro-arg.github.io

of course there's also many uncertainties which aren't documented there, but it could be useful for quickly catching up

[wintry notch]

intresting, indeed

[pulsar glen]

Bruteforcing soundcloud links!

[timid swift]

Is it a good idea to have our documents several different places? We could easily become very scattered. There's an issue of maintaining this. We don't have access to it, only you. Dark tried something like it earlier, but it's not been updated for a while now. the link is dead now
I appriciate that you want to sum it up, but why not do it in gdoc?

[wispy thistle]

first, as I mentioned above, I don't mind giving access to any of you
second, sites look nicer and are nicer to navigate than google docs imo
third, this doesn't scatter anything because it doesn't offer any new information, it only rehashes already known info that's already in the google doc

[wintry notch]

my theory scences are tingling

[timid swift]

I'm not sure I find it more readable to be perfectly honest.. I find the blog layout confusing

[wispy thistle]

the page list is bad and a table of contents could be added, but I basically don't care enough right now

[wintry notch]

the doc's are a nightmare to treverse 💀

can't find stuff in there, but hey that's my personal view, maby you guy's find it more convinient.

[timid swift]

I don't disagree that it's a mess. But I don't think a blog template will aliviate that

[wintry notch]

👍

[timid swift]

It's very much a symptom of being a compromise of many different ways of thinking and organizing. It's obvious that it's not created by just one person but influenced by many. And many people will have contradicting ideas. Personally I would've made many tiny documents that each link around, where others would've preferred one big document with everything. The issue is that we have to work together and find compromises that work for us all. It's hardly even about where we write the stuff at all

[wispy thistle]

the current format is fine and serves its purpose well

[uncut cargo]

I had no idea how to download alex's subnautica mod from github because of course actual release is a little box on the right instead of being in front of me

[timid swift]

uh? (:

[wintry notch]

hi

[uncut cargo]

That's my experience, as such I have an opinion that github is not new user friendly

[wispy thistle]

I mean I agree

[timid swift]

oh, that's on github pages too, i get it now

[wispy thistle]

no, it's not

github != github pages

[safe monolith]

he means this thingy is hard to find on his first try

[wispy thistle]

github is a site for programming and stuff, github pages is just a way to host sites on github's servers

[timid swift]

ok, and where does github.io fit into that?

[uncut cargo]

that might be just a me issue
But yeah pretty much

[safe monolith]

i don't blame you, i wrote the CI for that and took a while to figure out that it ends up there

[wispy thistle]

plus iirc github shows some other 2 useless panels in there by default

packages or whatever

[safe monolith]

i think the point is, having another layout when docs have a mostly universally understood layout will be challenging for newcomers

[timid swift]

WYSIWYG is stupidly powerful

[wispy thistle]

I guess that's our core disagreement, WYSIWYG kills me inside

[safe monolith]

i can see some situations where a github org is useful though (slightly unrelated), for code related stuff. we had a bunch of them in this thread, so i think collecting it in a repo makes sense

[uncut cargo]

also they have headers which is comfi

[safe monolith]

by the way chayleaf respond to my DMs

[timid swift]

So in other words, you would rather exclude non technical people because the technical purity is more important

[wispy thistle]

no, i'm not excluding anyone because I am not deleting your google doc ffs

[wispy thistle]

thanks, didn't know discord has message requests now

[timid swift]

alright, i'll give you space

[safe monolith]

imo docs will always be the main collaborative space, and this thread will always be the main comms channel, until something goes horribly wrong

anything else is like a fan work. it can be higher quality / lower quality, but maintenance will be up to that individual / team

[wispy thistle]

yep

[timid swift]

That's fair, but perhaps then it should be cited as a secondary source, not as the primary when people ask

[safe monolith]

btw ripbozo. it's still pinned though.

if a mod is reading this , please do us a favour

[wintry notch]

one thing we know for shure about the arg, the songs slap.

[timid swift]

yee, been thinking of asking a mod to clean the pins safe for a select few

[safe monolith]

real test to see if a mod actually reads this thread

[timid swift]

why would they read our insanity?

[wintry notch]

this is what vtuber ARG's do to people.

[timid swift]

I vaguely remember a translated wiki with the key notes in an asian language (sorry, i'm too stupid to tell the difference)
Can anyone remember what it was?

[wispy thistle]

Korean, Naver wiki or something

it simply translates the google doc solutions more or less

[timid swift]

https://namu.wiki/w/Neuro-sama/ARG this one, right?

[wispy thistle]

yeah

[timid swift]

Are there any other sources a reader might want to get up to speed with?

[wispy thistle]

don't think so

[timid swift]

I hope ya'll are ok that i rewrote the overview doc intro section (: As with anything else changes are of course welcome

[wispy thistle]

could the bb ce text be a completely new cipher? (something like the enigma machine, though it's not that)

[safe monolith]

Maybe, although usually we'd also get hints as to what such a new cipher could be (e.g. Numbers 1 & 2 had the algorithm as part of the song)

[wispy thistle]

it could be part of the visuals and yeah the lack of hints is tough

[timid swift]

I don't believe we've had any garbled text in the past that wasn't something in the end, have we? Surely it's something

[wispy thistle]

ANXIETY is like the only connection we have to anything else

[timid swift]

how so?

[wispy thistle]

anxiety-sama?

[timid swift]

Right, it's the same picture

[safe monolith]

hmm? why only anxiety? i think the start & ending of meaning of life makes it quite clear the video references all of the previous videos

[timid swift]

and the picture with the bb ce text has the image from the previous video right? The horizontal rotated one where it looks like blood coming from her eyes

[safe monolith]

yeah you're right, it comes from filtered

so yes, i guess that means it's a much stronger connection to anxiety-sama temporally

[timid swift]

but it's also the same image with the barcodes we encoded as c75e0fb05eec877fc8522e550df55ded5b50508fbbe88bb7d82e28d8f2df0e2b, which suggests that all three are related?

[safe monolith]

i hope that's what we're supposed to take away. so far, from the efforts that i know are ongoing, we're relying on all three clues being related to one another

interpreting them as different clues can literally go anywhere, although it isn't impossible

[wispy thistle]

yeah they are very close in time so hopefully they're closely connected

[safe monolith]

also the fact that it went from the original [Filtered] to the now [Filtered] surely means something

[wispy thistle]

it'd be best if we somehow found a cipher that can transform a number, a hex string and bb ce into a 128-bit key

[safe monolith]

🪄

[wispy thistle]

yep

[timid swift]

What surprises me the most is that there are so many bits of random looking info when we collect it all. 5 pieces of info, if we include the spectrogram hint

This suggests to me that we're not just looking to solve one cipher

I mean it would make most sense if it was just two completely unrelated ciphers in parallel, but if if it's not?

[safe monolith]

i mean, you do have Numbers II description backing up your hypothesis

oh, read that wrong

[timid swift]

well, even so you're not wrong. It could also be layered

[wispy thistle]

the problem is we've already tried single layer stuff

so far we've always got ascii after successful decryption

so if single layer works we'll know it

[timid swift]

I mean, surely we've not exhausted every possible thing that could be tried. Just the ones we've thought of

[safe monolith]

another thing to just point out (it's not subtle, good to mention) is that most of what we've got is suspicious. like, chayleaf found out the numbers matches some part of a fibonacci number, the "hash-like" probably isn't actually a hash, the bb ce string doesn't conform to what we already know

the only constant was the base64 string towards the end, we know with some level of confidence that it is some base64 encoded ciphertext

[wispy thistle]

no anything matches Fibonacci at some point, that part is not suspicious

[dapper wraith]

with the captions in MOL being manually uploaded, why are they different from the text in the description? surely that means something

[safe monolith]

i mean, you can say the same thing for Pi as well, but not within the first 1 million digits (source: i tried)

[wispy thistle]

it's more suspicious how ordered bb ce is, almost can be shifted down to hex but not quite

[safe monolith]

for fib numbers it is within computable range

[wispy thistle]

still not hard because the digits can be reordered in any way

[safe monolith]

• 15 unique characters, + weird spacing

[wispy thistle]

spacing is weird yeah

[safe monolith]

oh, were the digits reordered?

[wispy thistle]

yes, like in numbers 2

[wispy thistle]

and the bottom string's start is aligned with a character of the top string, although that could be a coincidence

[safe monolith]

yeah. point is, if they were indeed different parts of different puzzles, then this is one very hard set of puzzles. too many possible interpretations

on the other hand, if we think they're part of the same puzzle, we actually just don't know what to do with it

(yet)

(yet?)

even AES isn't faultless, from estonte's attempt at doing multi-layered AES decryption

[timid swift]

Suppose we had one cipher and multiple layers. How would we transform each of the other bits of info into suitible keys?

[safe monolith]

hmm. i feel like no matter what we do, the result key size would have to be truncated to fit a proper key. this is a feeling from having tried a bunch of things, so it is entirely a skill issue

[timid swift]

Right. I intuit that truncation wouldn't be the solution. Could we lessen the number of bytes some other way? Different encodings like the binary => ascii => hex thing. Or with the letter shift algorithm?

[wispy thistle]

a cluster of 109 quantum cores with a clock rate of 2 THz would need a million years to break AES-128

Get on it

[safe monolith]

bred

[timid swift]

stalker detected

[hollow garnet]

smh

[safe monolith]

ye know the last step we had to take to solve filtered? the one where someone figured out "oh hey let's write hello world in malbolge and use that as the key!!"

what if it's something like that

last time round the key was hinted to end in G4

this time round maybe all of the clues we're seeing is part of the key

[wispy thistle]

the key is the friends we made along the way

[uncut cargo]

That was after discovering the title read hello world tho

[timid swift]

There's definitely a precedent for leap of faith solutions

[safe monolith]

the title read "hello wo", we used our imaginations for the rest

it could have been hello wonderful smh

[timid swift]

right, you're saying that we may need to be looking at more divergent interpretations

[wispy thistle]

there was System.Print hello world!, and there was the previous video title

so it isn't a huge assumption to make

[safe monolith]

yeah, it feels like we're being built towards "hey, everything's related"

[wispy thistle]

anyway I had the idea of shifting down "Meaning of life" but the char count doesn't match anything decent

ANXIETY is 7 letters too

[safe monolith]

speaking of anxiety, what's up with [filtered] becoming anxiety-sama anyway?

Like, why does staticy blood cry hiyori become anxiety-sama

Staring at us with those judgemental eyes

[uncut cargo]

Hold up

Static from filtered is the same one from study?

[safe monolith]

Yes, but this is coming from someone who uses eyes to look at text their whole life

Wait

It seems I should change careers since i clearly can't read

No, the static itself isn't the same

i'm talking about the thumbnail

[uncut cargo]

Ah

[safe monolith]

erm, more context is that i'm assuming the thumbnail change in [Filtered] is canonical, which preceeds the release of Meaning of Life that has anxiety-sama on the thumbnail

[mint sonnet]

do yallknow if this is official or not https://www.youtube.com/@PublicStaticVoid644

[uncut cargo]

Almost definitely not

[safe monolith]

i think the owner of that channel is someone in this thread

ayato? inb4 misinformation

[mint sonnet]

ight

[wispy thistle]

key to filtered = extended version of malbolge program

key to meaning of life = extended version of I saw a ghost

[safe monolith]

arg schizos finishes i saw a ghost just to solve the arg

ok but what if the key was genuinely the lyrics to i saw a ghost

[pulsar glen]

Could be youtube AI but I am not familiar with its exact workings. Allegedly youtube can automatically timestamp and edit a script to fit the audio

[wispy thistle]

I think the captions are manual because one caption starts with a space

plus backslashes are stylized

(different video but still)

[safe burrow]

(Noted)

[wintry notch]

ups

din't mean to send that

[wispy thistle]

maybe the ciphers from previous videos have to be applied in the order the video references appear???

also what does "syllables syllables" in numbers 2 refer to? (btw "follow me" clearly means on soundcloud /s)

or idk concatenating youtube video ids???

the references in order:

• hello world (the start+bg music)
• the door opening to the empty room is reference to psv
• after the knock it's the noise and blood eyes hiyori ([filtered] reference)
• then it's a numbers reference (crossed eyes hiyori headbopping) and a study reference. This is also on the thumbnail.

[wispy thistle]

oh, i know how to figure out whether what we decrypted is encrypted with another aes or is a false positive

since it uses pkcs padding

if last 16 (or more) bytes arent the same, dont even bother trying to aes decrypt it again

on the other hand, if there's 16 bytes with value "16" at the end, it's most definitely aes128

[timid swift]

That's only for multiple "layers" with the same key, is that correct?

[wispy thistle]

yes

(or different keys)

basically, if decryption succeeded, there will always be N bytes with value N at the end

and for aes within aes there will always be at least half a block wasted, which means at least 16 bytes of padding will be used

[safe burrow]

I'm making different pictures again, yes I love doing something

[wispy thistle]

[filtered] noise appears to actually contain the image

vs

you can clearly make out some of the image details on the noise screenshot i sent

so, clearly the right thing to do is denoising each frame and seeing what happens, surely there's so clue there

[hollow garnet]

we sorta managed to

[safe monolith]

Yeah it was the topic of discussion & work for a week or two

bred even wrote dark magic towards the end

[hollow garnet]

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dL6lH_qnlXMgpIXyc02Q3qpB78_vWyUgKV_pEo7H_Cw/edit#heading=h.2ni7alj8uag3

[wispy thistle]

i'm kinda impressed that a shitty algorithm i hacked up in 5 minutes in attempt to reproduce your work (simply calculate the best rotation by diffing it with the mean) detected the black lines on the left successfully despite completely failing to show a clear image

[wispy thistle]

anyway very impressive work with guessing the rotation algorithm

[fast path]

oh wow, is this still ongoing?

[safe monolith]

omg hi silver its been a while

[fast path]

hi

just realized only 3 other people have access to the summary doc

ill try to catch up and update it later

[dapper wraith]

yeah, some people kept messing with some of the stuff so we decided to have at least one doc where everything is collected without everyone having access

[pulsar glen]

Well, that's the missing doc issue solved just like that

[safe monolith]

Ah, i should have remembered the missing doc was owned by silver

[safe burrow]

[wispy thistle]

passing the meaning of life number through the algorithm in numbers gets me to either i7gbd3idgfc7eeceefdf7g7f7bce or r7koq3rqklp7nnpnnlql7k7l7opn or anything in between depending on which letters you associate for duplicate digits, doesnt look useful

[abstract horizon]

Looks very real

[safe burrow]

[wispy thistle]

kinda suspicious that theres nothing in the first 14 minutes of MoL

[abstract horizon]

I mean looks like that Is part of the arg

Looks very good

[timber whale]

Emotional support Fumo inbound

[wispy thistle]

oh shit just got an idea about what to do with the hex

oh also previously someone mentioned that all puzzles have been self contained so far but at least the phone number reused a key from numbers

[safe monolith]

Study and Numbers were made aware to us as a set though. Not so much as released on the same date, but the ARG started with those two videos

[safe monolith]

continue cooking 👍

[wispy thistle]

okay no it's another close call that almost looks like it's going to be right but everything turns out not to work,

i've tried decoding the hex string using the reverse numbers algorithm, it looked promising as it starts with c7 and ends with 2b, which could mean c means 1 and b means 4.

but it's actually impossible for it to be a result of the numbers cipher

let's look at the charset: 02578bcdef, 5 dec and 5 hex digits, 6 digits are missing, specifically 13469a
that means the source number could be comprised of 13469 at the start, right? wrong!

since there's 5 hex digits and 5 missing decimal digits, each hex digit has to correspond to some decimal digit. But hex digit replacement always starts with A (e.g. 5 -> A, 7 -> B, 2 -> C, 9 -> D, 4 -> E, 3 -> F). If there's no A, this would mean the digit for A isn't used in the number at all, but that's only possible if the amount of missing decimal digits is at least 1 less than the amount of present hex digits.

it's possible to make some assumptions (like that B is the first letter to be used here rather than A), but this turns into another game of schizo rather than a solid clue

[wispy thistle]

yeah i tried going further and couldnt even get a number that divides by 9

anyway theres 1bad0fcabc1ebdce 10100101101001011101001010101001 3455861094181771 uAMQEAAADCIPunNs and U543s+O)o-&+*#G4, if MoL is connected to previous puzzles perhaps somehow part of those keys or solutions could be reused

[cobalt axle]

got curious about the phone number and reading the document saw that the name on telegram was "Harmit Kaur" but nobody tried to do anything with that (or at least it isn't documented). did anyone check if it was an anagram or maybe a key or something?

[wispy thistle]

nah since it's a number from a random sms provider someone simply has used it before

[pulsar glen]

#1112082183235047506 message

[wispy thistle]

just checked all relevant malbolge program ends i could think of (Meaning of life, meaning of life, save me..., hello world!, the programs that we had as part of ARG) and obviously nothing worked

maybe bb ce text can be arranged in triples? since the char count is 33 that's about the only arrangement that could work (other than the default one which we don't know anything about)

in conclusion, guess it's time to wait for vedal to drop another hint

[cobalt axle]

ok so, the yt channel descritption states "ALT ACCOUNT" and I believe nobody questioned it. I always thought it was obvious that the main account should be the neuro channel but going by ARG rules that would be immersion breaking wouldn't it? So I ask, if the neuro channel isn't the main account, then what is?

[uncut cargo]

the channel is _neurosama

so idk if that is the case

however not a bad theory

Additionally the arg is connected to neuro herself

so It could be argued that neuro herself is the puppet master

[safe burrow]

I'll drink tea and everything will be fine

[wispy thistle]

I guess undoing the view bopping in the video and then finding unique frames is the only other idea I have

it may or may not be hard depending on the method of rendering the image for the 3d video

[hollow garnet]

you talking about the 360 video?

[wispy thistle]

yeah

also looks like nobody tried vigenere yet, here i come

it fits the theme at least

[safe monolith]

i have tried vignere (some combination here and there), had no results. lemme know if you find anything different

[hollow garnet]

then in this case the bobbing is much easier to understand if you don't watch the video in 360.
I downloaded it and played the file I got, and it's basically just a big image moving around seemingly randomly

[wispy thistle]

why 41693?

nvm

this all seems to good to be coincidence yeah

i'm trying to recreate what you did right now to make sure you didnt miss anything (i already tried before but turns out my code was buggy so i'm trying again)

i've found 512 different potential solutions, what makes you think it's 41693?

(and the lack of a still worries me but i'll choose to ignore it)

https://pastebin.com/a6XTEPuf

all of them produce a75e0fb05eea877fa8522e550df55ded5b50508fbbe88bb7d82e28d8f2df0e2b using my version of the algorithm

which is same as that hex string but a instead of c

this is close enough to be a troll on vedal's side rather than a wrong direction

anyway now following on, key from numbers 2

yeah okay still no idea

but this is very very good progress

assuming W = 5 | 7 and X = 4 | 6, it's 1416938177140W6W13234W0996W8W54119196W770W7949581998XW

[wispy thistle]

documented here https://docs.google.com/document/d/1HrzZYlFmxAzI76Ov0aSkjCe6v1hbzHCTaXK7j34Hdi0/edit#heading=h.z8nhxvkrsno3

[safe monolith]

Hi friends, in light of recent soundcloud discoveries, I now understand the importance of stalking.

So here's an Atom feed that does the stalking for us: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/neuro-arg/arg-monitoring/publish/atom.xml

Code can be found here: https://github.com/neuro-arg/arg-monitoring

The feed updates every day at 12 midnight. At the moment, it monitors some soundcloud metadata (e.g. tracks and name), youtube feed (for uploads), and also ensures that the video / audio stream of all uploaded videos thus far retains the same hash.

On an Atom reader, you should only get an update if there is a change. I recommend Aggregator for Android, not too sure about iOS

[wispy thistle]

nvm just fixed my algo

it produces c75e0fb05eec877fc8522e550df55ded5b50508fbbe88bb7d82e28d8f2df0e2b now

[safe monolith]

^ this is for all 512 possible combinations right?

[wispy thistle]

yes

i mean there may be fewer combinations depending on how to understand "replace 2 with 3"

i understand it as "any 3 might have originally been a 2 or a 3, you never know"

which is why there's 512 combinations

for the record, here's my code for recovering all possible original numbers https://github.com/neuro-arg/solutions/blob/b56138afe33304a360d9d252d7092e576208d107/rust/src/schizo.rs#L49

(has some cruft that i dont need anymore but im too lazy to clean, tho i probably should)

anyway most of it is validation which can technically be discarded but is nice to have anyway

this way we know the number is 100% valid

[safe monolith]

incidentally, i had an idea and a half to automagically extract ciphertext from all the videos and run it through your code as CI, but i figured it would be overkill if we just wanted to know something changed

[wispy thistle]

yeah it's definitely overkill

the videos havent changed once yet

[safe monolith]

except for [filtered]

[wispy thistle]

(plus youtube makes it hard to change the video itself, idk if its even possible in this case)

[wispy thistle]

that was the desc and title but yeah

[safe monolith]

oh you mean the actual video. it actually is possible iirc. adding music or smth

[wispy thistle]

i guess adding youtube video json scraping could be nice too if you can add that

except the view/like count, that's useless for us and generates useless changes

[safe monolith]

sorry can i try and understand the work done on numbers 2. how does the rearrangement work?

[wispy thistle]

yeah so remember fibonacci sequence?

[safe monolith]

this is done as part of the feed nodders (youtube atom feed + metadata)

[wispy thistle]

where 201 1321 5831 matched 0 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21

[safe monolith]

yep

[wispy thistle]

the numbers 2 key ends up being 3455861094181771 (after removing all the matching digits from the fibonacci seuquence and taking the first 6 digits)

but check this out

3455861094181771 -> reordered
1416938177140585
141693817714056513234509965855411919657705794958199845

[safe monolith]

the part I don't get is how it went from 3455861094181771 to 1416938177140585

[wispy thistle]

reorder the digits manually

same as it was for fibonacci

[safe monolith]

what were the rules involved to reorder 34... to 14...?

[wispy thistle]

3455861094181771
1345586109418177
1435586109418177
1413558610948177
1416355810948177
1416935581048177
1416938551048177
1416938155048177
1416938175504817
1416938177550481
1416938177155048
1416938177145508
1416938177140558
1416938177140585

just like in numbers II, the point isn't the specific ordering, the point is that the digits match

[safe monolith]

ah

i see

[wispy thistle]

sure, i can do it for you

[safe monolith]

between 3455861094181771 and 1416938177140585, is there a transposition?

[wispy thistle]

yes

(in python, sorted('3455861094181771') == sorted('1416938177140585'))

[safe monolith]

borrowing an earlier idea, we can recover some transposition key that might work for the entire string

[wispy thistle]

i think we have to find multiple smaller ones

like in numbers ii

in the "official" ciphers (the ones listed in psv), there's been at most a single 2 at a given time at the "make the 2 a 3" step

so i can't verify whether you're supposed to replace them all or only 1 of them

or whether they're allowed to have more than one 2

[safe monolith]

(i wrote this down for estonte and i have no memory of it )
here's a thought, the way we solved this:

     01123581321 34558 9144233377 6109 8715972584 418 1676510946 17711
     20113215831 XXXXX 7237434913 XXXX 8798752145 XXX 7169064156 XXXXX

with the gaps and everything seems fairly reminscient of the gaps we have for the bb ce string

[wispy thistle]

idk convert bb ce to ascii decimal?

anyway, the length is 54, and at least 13 of that we've chomped off already

wait bruh let me check

no not a good match

(above: the number from rotated image, below: the number from hex but with removed dynamic parts)

this does make me think tho

hmmmm

let me check fibonacci fornow

the problem is even the first num doesnt match perfectly

though it's a super close match

[fast path]

the lyrics do say "make the 2 a three, yeah"

[wispy thistle]

they dont mention what to do if theres multiple 2s

(because 0 of them is officially allowed)

41693 isnt random, it's only applied if the first 6 digits are 141693 (or probably 441693/641693/941693/341693)

so it's useless to apply it to other stuff

so far the numbers substitution has only been used on the actual numbers cipher, i dont think it's a good idea to use it outside of the numbers cipher until proven otherwise

(as a reminder, it's where the first 6 digits of the original number are replaced with ABCDEF in the final number, but if there's the same digit at multiple different positions, the latest one takes precedence, at first i thought the first one takes precedence but i was wrong)

yeah i miscount characters all the time too lol

anyway if we got remaining digits down to like 28 it'd be possible to bruteforce the rest (assuming the key is part of this number)

but currently there's potentially 41 digits (over 512 numbers...)

[safe monolith]

hey btw i don't think this is completely useless

If you combine it with the 14... string, maybe the gaps mean something

So eliminate all matches, everything left might mean something

[wispy thistle]

so going back, there's

1bad0fcabc1ebdce (572943)
10100101101001011101001010101001 (neuros)
3455861094181771 (we attempted this)
uAMQEAAADCIPunNs (soundcloud)
U543s+O)o-&+*#G4 (filtered)

543 :schizo:

[safe monolith]

You think all the keys will apply here?

[wispy thistle]

probably no, but there's been a whole lot of references

[safe monolith]

Yeah undeniable

Inb4 all of them are actually the same key but just rearranged

[wispy thistle]

clearly the key is "fortytwofortytwo"

[fast path]

sorry, what is this A0Z25 that converts the letters to numbers

[safe monolith]

Literally A is 1 and Z is 25

[wispy thistle]

no, A is 0

but otherwise yeah

[safe monolith]

Ah yes that

[fast path]

oh

i see

[wispy thistle]

so now we have 2 numbers and 1 weird string

i guess that's an upgrade over a number, a hex blob and a weird string

[safe monolith]

It now makes some sense that we have numbers now

Given we weren't given cipher hints this video, of course ( ) we needed to convert stuff down to things we have ciphers for

[wispy thistle]

if we're reordering things, the obvious first step is to reorder the start of 692048501258949201 to 69420

[safe monolith]

petition to drop the arg if it isn't 69420

[wispy thistle]

so anyway chronologically (as per the video timestamps), i think looking into the weird text makes sense next

[safe monolith]

I can only imagine

[wispy thistle]

I can only guess

[safe monolith]

Yeah holy, we're talking about Numbers 2? that felt like ages ago

silver coming back is a sign maybe

regarding bb ce, what ciphers did we have that worked with just pure ascii?

[wispy thistle]

uuh malbolge? :^)

dont remember anything else

[safe monolith]

all lowercase, only 15 unique chars. if we follow the pattern so far, are we to transform this to numbers too?

[wispy thistle]

yes probably

[safe monolith]

malbolge iirc has only a small set of starting chars, so surely it'll be easy to spot

[wispy thistle]

yeah it is

vedal has only given D' starts iirc

other starts are possible but that requires selecting non-standard setting in the online malbolge code generator :^)

13 groups
15 unique chars
33 characters (almost all ordered: bcdefghijqrstvy)

y - q = 8, j - b = 8, hmm

(means there's 9 chars in either range)

so if we're to believe the charset is contiguous in b..j and q..y, this doesnt seem to be a hex or decimal number at least

brb gonna look at the filtered program output for the millionth time

surely i'll see something on the 1000001th time

[safe monolith]

most ran program in the past month

[wispy thistle]

thinking of remaining digits in the decoded hex sequence, it wouldn't be weird if bb ce decoded to 1 character per chunk

[safe monolith]

Reverse numpad?

nah surely not

[wispy thistle]

right i remember trying typing that but i didnt see anything at the time

i mean maybe i could see something new now but yeah

[safe monolith]

just saying, we used binary to obtain the hex like, then we used numbers 2 to obtain a num. both are numbers 2. it was even used the exact same way (binary on visuals, algorithm on resultant binary)

[wispy thistle]

maybe theres some other esoteric programming language lol, though i dont know any and theres a much higher chance vedal doesnt (plus a program would be much longer)

but anyway it's some sort of substitution cipher

[safe monolith]

rotation was used to visually obtain the 69...201 number, filtered reference. bb ce is basically on a numbers 2 + filtered frame

what's the essence we're meant to get from filtered in the description? that we should try shifting stuff to get to an esolang?

[wispy thistle]

well in theory that was for getting the malbolge code in the title

but

the malbolge code didnt use the branch where it doesnt shift anything down if it's a space

[safe monolith]

reversal, this time we got clear messages in the description and audio, but ciphertext only in the video

was there another cipher we can reverse?

[wispy thistle]

phone lol

ah never mind

wait malbolge was already reversing

instead of running malbolge to get hello world!

you had to generate a malbolge program that writes hello world!

[safe monolith]

yeah, so that was more reconstruction than reversal, hmm

even shifting the lines back in the [filtered] video was technically reconstruction

[safe monolith]

(feed update: latest difference was due to a dependency bug in descriptions, no panic 👍 )
seems like github actions will delay scheduled jobs, so typically everyone will get updated feeds around 01:00 instead

[gentle locust]

Wow its active here? New clue?

[safe monolith]

some progress made by the amazing guys above

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1HrzZYlFmxAzI76Ov0aSkjCe6v1hbzHCTaXK7j34Hdi0/edit#heading=h.z8nhxvkrsno3

[gentle locust]

Oooh let me read that

^-^

[wispy thistle]

i can already try bruteforcing it but i probably wont get any results

if 1416938177140585 is getting removed like in the numbers 2 puzzle, then something has to be done about 585. A single 5 can stay with the ...77140, but at least 85 have to go. I think it makes sense to use this for it

[gentle locust]

That was a lot to read but wow so much work

[wispy thistle]

this leaves 26 characters, which i think in our case requires around 60 million checks per number (so multiply that by 512), which sounds doable

of course it could also not lead anywhere

okay i should probably go to sleep after working on the arg for 32 hours lmao

[gentle locust]

w< dedication

[wispy thistle]

it's just obsession, easily comes and easily goes

[wispy thistle]

so right now we have this clue:

long string has (5|7), 6, (5|7)
short string has 5, 5, 8 in no particular order

this could work by:

• shifting 767 by 2 (down-up-down) would produce 585. Same applies for just 67/76, so it could be 567 or 765. Alternatively, shift 2 down = shift 8 up.
• shifting 85/58 by 1 (down-up/up-down), so it would produce 76/67, this achieves 567 or 765 as well
  • ^ note that "bb" is precisely "11" in a0z25. However shifting by more than 9 doesn't really make sense...
• maybe the string has a break (space) almost at the very end, and continues in a different place? sounds weird but maybe, we still have to learn how the breaks are defined though

[wispy thistle]

yeah fuck it i'll set up bruteforce

actually no cba

maybe if there wont be any progress for another month

[mint sonnet]

so i turned the notes from hello world! into binary not sure if its usable

101011011010001011011010101

[safe monolith]

cheers, i will ping you 14 feb

[tulip minnow]

Next clue in 18days

But we haven’t finished the last clue yet tho

So maybe it’ll be another music video

[cobalt axle]

nah, probably it's the soundcloud (for what other reason could it had been updated?)

[safe burrow]

[safe burrow]

And so now I can do it

[wispy thistle]

sorry i should've done it earlier but i'll post a numbers algorithm calculator online

(as in a webpage that does it)

[safe monolith]

why you apologizing , you're doing us a service. thanks a lot

[gritty thorn]

when was [Filtered] solved? I don't see it in the timeline

[pulsar glen]

Fugg, it's not on the timeline

How did that happen

Wait no you're trolling

[wispy thistle]

https://neuro-arg.github.io/toolbox.html

[pulsar glen]

the pink line that is just cut off on your screenshot is the time it was solved, it just wasn't called [filtered] at th time

[wispy thistle]

numbers = applies numbers algo to any number
reverse numbers = gets all numbers that result in a given string
aes = takes base64 and key as input, and returns the decrypted result only if it's an actual valid result (unlike cyberchef which can return whatever)
shift = [filtered] algorithm

@daring acorn please use this link for the numbers algorithm

also this is shareable

for example, here's the link to "reverse numbers" for the hex string https://neuro-arg.github.io/toolbox.html#DcxBCsJADAXQu2StEAKfCd7GTH60YKuMrRvp3dvdW72_TMtnW-UmvYFaoSC7t1bdYUZAs4BkIqBQrwi6R7R0o3l6WZbSQi5yfz3eY1qf89kN_ji-vC7bHCdkPwA

or here's a link to the 784-byte shifted malbolge (warning, it takes a while to load) https://neuro-arg.github.io/toolbox.html#HY9JTgJhEIXv8q-NB_AsbNwonThF25UxEXEIiAMqhBlCwgwJQwcaCPQF6qszUbB7i_d9Ve_BeVc39747cTHHvywYS6AJRjJhS4Y-aVK0afGkb2T1lZk-a0IiItmQkjUD1hKSI7TWXGaa5odvvqjrhyypWPvdyEhf2JA084qIULbUqVleGjeRhcwJyDM125geXc0wNMfnPtOhYbYkVZqUKVE0smrt1SEXyNrFwD7_4zfmjt2RO704v771_PilrbqLe2e-e9wB

you can ask me to add any other ciphers if you want

[safe monolith]

cheers chayleaf

[gritty thorn]

holy shit, that far back???? I was checking every 2 days to see if any progress was made and I missed that completely

[uncut cargo]

Actual skill issue

[gritty thorn]

welp, at least I have something to do, time to get back and read what lead to that

[wispy thistle]

it could be that the discrepancy between the numbers2 key and the reverse numbers number is explained by having to add any of:

[-7, 20, 290, -9, 18, 288, -207, -180, 90]

To the numbers2 key

or xor any of [25, 27, 124, 126, 180, 211, 352, 354, 426]

the problem of course is that I have no idea where any of those numbers would come from

[gritty thorn]

I read all of it, and that was some mindblowing 5head stuff, specially the shifting towards the lowest values and the Hello World in Malbolge.

Looks like the description was changed to give more hints (maybe in case it wasn't solved yet), because it gives basically a step-by-step of the solution:

• The shifting to the lowest possible value the title converted into Unicode: "(ord(char) - 1)" until "char is "<blank>", giving the 784 shift;
• Then, the UTF-8 conversion afterwards ["chr(ord)"] to give the malbolge code that spelt "Hello wo-";
• And the "Message = Hello World!" which when converting to malbolge would give the complete code with the Key mentioned in the old description. (**********G4)

[digital radish]

description is the same

[wispy thistle]

nope it changed

[digital radish]

wuh

what was it before

[gritty thorn]

I meant changed from Oct 31st to Nov 29th

[wispy thistle]

it used to have a base64 with [KEY = "**************G4"]

[digital radish]

oh we solved it so it was removed

anything with the code changed?

[wispy thistle]

it wasn't solved at the time it got removed

(I think)

[digital radish]

it was

[wispy thistle]

oh wait, Nov 29, yeah

[gritty thorn]

yeah, I went back to check the [Filtered] solving way back on Nov 2nd because I missed that entirely

[digital radish]

it was changed when meaning of life came out

i think

[wispy thistle]

yeah so it's probably a hint for MoL

[digital radish]

did anything from the python script change

[wispy thistle]

the specific hint is spaces being ignored