Watch the Footage

Okay, time to get meta about this...

This post talks about fish.

It mentions that he has not experimented with fish before, and that it's about time he did.

Fish --> herring --> red herring

In other words, he is telling us that, previous to this post, he had not deliberately led us astray, thematic-food-wise. This post, however, declares itself to be a red herring. It even asks for suggestions, mirroring our spate of relevant suggestions earlier on.

This makes sense because reasons.

Now the question is: Is the red herring an ACTUAL red herring, and not worth noticing, or is it a "hey this looks like a red herring but you really should pay attention to it"?

The clue is the clue because the clue is the clue.

Boy, nobody's used this thread in quite a while. Have we all given up?

So I was looking through the posts and found this one, which has the title "Totally flipping out, but not killing everyone", which is a reference to this website. At the time we were a bit confused about the title, but when the reference was explained, we dropped it. Perhaps it's worth examining further?

*just keeps grasping at straws*

Don't have much time to respond, as the baby is due in six days, and there's dozens of things to still take care of.

But I can say that the reference to Real Ultimate Power was just me being silly.

I suppose this riddle exists...but

The World May Never Know.

All right, so it's contained in a single post and not alluded to in a later post, which means that a) we can ignore comments, because that would preclude 'single post', and b) cross off bacon cake, because that gets a call back later. THE INVESTIGATION CONTINUES...

Qara-Xuan Zenith wrote:All right, so it's contained in a single post and not alluded to in a later post, which means that a) we can ignore comments, because that would preclude 'single post', and b) cross off bacon cake, because that gets a call back later. THE INVESTIGATION CONTINUES...

Do you think you can get this after this time that has passed?

JRPictures wrote:

Qara-Xuan Zenith wrote:All right, so it's contained in a single post and not alluded to in a later post, which means that a) we can ignore comments, because that would preclude 'single post', and b) cross off bacon cake, because that gets a call back later. THE INVESTIGATION CONTINUES...

Do you think you can get this after this time that has passed?

jr, we can do pretty much anything.

eli_gone_crazy wrote:
jr, we can do anything.

Fix'd

eli_gone_crazy wrote:

JRPictures wrote:

Qara-Xuan Zenith wrote:All right, so it's contained in a single post and not alluded to in a later post, which means that a) we can ignore comments, because that would preclude 'single post', and b) cross off bacon cake, because that gets a call back later. THE INVESTIGATION CONTINUES...

Do you think you can get this after this time that has passed?

jr, we can do pretty much anything.

Can we? Can we really?

Then again, we helped beat Cthulhu so yeah we could do anything.

Eh I'm just saying after all this time do you still think you'll find it?

well, it might help if you look too, but yeah, we'll find it 8|

eli_gone_crazy wrote:well, it might help if you look too, but yeah, we'll find it 8|

What can I do?

I'm pretty sure every one of you looked thoroughly through the blog for something.

JRPictures wrote:

eli_gone_crazy wrote:well, it might help if you look too, but yeah, we'll find it 8|

What can I do?

I'm pretty sure every one of you looked thoroughly through the blog for something.

Yes, but you haven't. You may notice something we've missed. who knows, you might solve it on your own!

A bit of an oversight not posting this on the forums earlier. But... OCD Spreadsheet. For the obsessive puzzle solving metaguards.

We made this earlier today in order to sort out the information we have and try to narrow down just what we know and what we believe we know. I dropped the link in the chat a few times, but in case anyone wants to join, it should be here as well.

Pixelmage wrote:A bit of an oversight not posting this on the forums earlier. But... OCD Spreadsheet. For the obsessive puzzle solving metaguards.

We made this earlier today in order to sort out the information we have and try to narrow down just what we know and what we believe we know. I dropped the link in the chat a few times, but in case anyone wants to join, it should be here as well.

... When Rick sees this, he is going to have the biggest smile on his face, for all the wrong reasons.

S_o_S wrote:

Pixelmage wrote:A bit of an oversight not posting this on the forums earlier. But... OCD Spreadsheet. For the obsessive puzzle solving metaguards.

We made this earlier today in order to sort out the information we have and try to narrow down just what we know and what we believe we know. I dropped the link in the chat a few times, but in case anyone wants to join, it should be here as well.

... When Rick sees this, he is going to have the biggest smile on his face, for all the wrong reasons.

I dunno, I think all of my reasons for smiling are right.

Giving it a complete look-over, I will confirm that all of the info in that document is up to date for you guys and correct... sort of.

In some cases, yes, I did specifically say that given posts do not have the puzzle (for example, I did confirm that the "chicken and waffles" post does not). However, in several of the cases, I didn't deny that the entire post is free of puzzle. For example, for the post about the Hobbit theme meal, all I said that the post was not about trying to squelch paranoia. I did not confirm a lack of puzzle in said post.

You will probably want to cross-reference to delineate between which posts have been completely eliminated, and which ones only have had one or two theories eliminated.

As for being able to "get it" at this point... flipping back to a player perspective, I remember how it took two years for the Perplex City playerbase to solve one particular puzzle, "Shuffled." Two years! Just like with this ARG's last one, it happened well after the ARG itself completed. And for humor value, the method used to solve it? You guys used that same method to solve the "Shadow Under The Ice" puzzle at the end (namely, pinpointing a word in a ciphered script and reverse-engineering the cipher key from that)... a technique that you guys decided to use in less than an hour. My point? What could take others years to figure out might be as glaring as the noonday sun to someone else.

Just to clarify (and get some sort of summary, because everytime I start to work on this I forgot everything we had already done before). The message is not in some sort of clever encryption or... maybe not that clever encryption, right?

Bacon cake.
Not bacon cake itself, but this line:

There was one tragically funny incident with mint cake (I'll go into that another time), but for the most part, it felt like we were hitting against walls.

Mint cake never gets a call back. We obsessively analysed the bacon cake post, and may even have noted that. [EDIT: Qara did.] What dies mint cake have to do with anything? I have no idea. (EDIT 2: It's the Greek herb of hospitality and it 'exhilarates minds'. And several anime characters' names who I really can't be bothered to look up. No, that's not really helpful.)

The word walls shows up there, too.

Rick has confirmed that the puzzle is in this post.

Okay, then. Thoughts:

It doesn't seem to be a "first word/letter of each paragraph/sentence/word" thing.

Could it be something about the flavors not muddling? Like, different characters/players/puppetmasters are the ingredients, all being put in a dish?

Or the comment about having company over... could that be a hint that something in the game happened prematurely, when there weren't enough people to handle/appreciate it?

And what about the cheesy oatcakes? I notice he talks about frying them, but then uses the word "bake." I could imagine describing the process of something being fried as "baking," though, so I'm not sure if that's worth commenting on. (Wish I knew more about cooking terminology so I could feel on firmer ground about this.)

Clearly, what we need to do is MAKE BOTH OF THESE RECIPES, and see if the results are the same as Rick's descriptions. DOES oatmeal not firm up when you fry it? WE MUST EXPERIMENT.

Wait so after so long we're actually close to getting this damn thing done?

Wow....

Okay so following up on my rushed message of Friday, Rick has further suggested that what we need to find in the post is a riddle/puzzle/thingy which we would then have to solve in order to get the message. But it's not hidden in any sort of typographical/ orthographical / grammatical error.

Also, he claimed to me that a) we need make no recipes in order to solve it and b) the cheesy oatcakes part is only relevant if you're interested in making cheesy oatcakes.

Further information I've aggregated by running through Rick's tweets and posts and re-reading our other threads on the topic, in the name of solving the thing, can be found here.

I find this sentece weird:

Anyhow, as I said at the beginning, not everything is going to work.

But that's just me, I don't think I am good at solving these kind of riddles.