[0338] A Challenging Comic – Solution
└ posted on Tuesday, 3 January 2012, by Novil
The following codes were used for the text in the word bubbles:
- 1st word bubble: See the crossword puzzle.
- 2nd word bubble: The text was translated to Bahasa Indonesia, a Malay language.
- 3rd word bubble: The gray values of the little squares corresponded with the ASCII number of the letter. Example: RGB value [95, 95, 95] –> ASCII value 95 –> ‘I’
- 4th word bubble: The text was written backwards, with arbitrary spaces and an additional ‘A’ before each letter.
- 5th word bubble: The following line was in the source code of the linked HTML page: <meta name=”richard” content=”Who are you calling?” />. If you use Mozilla Firefox, you can see the source code of a page by pressing [CTRL] + [U] on your keyboard.
- 6th word bubble: The following calculation was carried out for each letter: Alphabet index of the letter + Alphabet index of the next letter = Alphabet index of the code letter. If the alphabet index of the code letter was > 26, the index value was reduced by 26 to start at ‘A’ again. The last letter ‘M’ of the original text remained unchanged.
Wow. That’s bad. The crossword EVIL! And a fitting topic.
Ah, great. But my mind has been broken.
@ Tfeth282:
*The crossword? Evil!
Also, First. 😀
you got WAY too much free time
Dang, looks like somebody got the 3rd one before me.
lol, nice puzzles :D. I wonder how much criticism you received to decide to retaliate this way o_O
Legal torture worse than waterboarding? There is also the Christmas speech by the German president.
What? Answers? But I don’t want any!
Guess I’ve got to wait another few days for Woo and Sandra.
And people solved these in a few hours?
…
DANG the moon people are all around Sandra and Woo, they’re aboot to invade Earth!!! D:
my mind is happy to know what there talking about ^^
But the answer tho the number 3 is aqua
“The text was translated to Bahasa Indonesia, a Malay language.”
Indonesia =/= Malaysia. They are 2 different countries, though their language are indeed similar in many parts.
Putting that aside, I wonder how to actually solve the last riddle. The formula to create the riddle is told, but I still fail to figure out how to do it in reverse.
Ooh. So it was an axe, not a gun. So was Columbus really the first one to leave written records about raccoons? (Seems a bit Eurocentric to me, no offense to your otherwise errorless comic intended.) I don’t even know about the third word bubble. Too techy. The penultimate one I might have gotten if I tried. Source codes giving answers? You might want to try some URL puzzles like Tricky’s Riddles (google it). I got stuck on the cube number one, though.
so, we need to know a LOT about the strip, know the language Bahasa Indonesia, use a digital color meter, know ASCII values, look at a random bible section’s html code, and do some really complicated number to letter stuff with some gibberish, all to read this comic.
Bravo. Also, I think the difficulty should’ve gone up; the way this happened, some crazy person who thought of looking at RGB values earned only a sketch, whereas someone who just looked at a webpage’s html source code won a colored drawing.
“2nd word bubble: The text was translated to Bahasa Indonesia, a Malay language.”
Ummm, no, Bahasa Indoneisa =l= Malay language. Malay language used by Malaysian and Singaporean while Bahasa Indonesia is used by Indonesian.
Bahasa Indonesia used tons of mixed sources for it, based from the large diversity in Indonesian thousands tribes and languages.
Really, Powree is an Indonesian, you should ask her.
00m wrote:
AckAckAck wrote:
Indonesia is part of what is called the Malay Archipelago, thus, “Malay language” is not the same as “Malaysian”, which is the proper English term for Bahasa Malaysia.
Really, I’m a Malaysian, you should ask me.
Dante wrote:
Actually in the old time it Indonesia is called East Indies, and Indonesia stretching not just around Malay archipelago, but reaching the West of Papua Island.
And there are thousands of laguages, but most of them use Indonesian, even though some Indonesian were well versed in 2 languages at once. Mostly Indonesian and others language from large tribes of Indonesia.
And Malaysia is under British Empire rule, so Malaysian’s Malay language is a mix of Malay, Arabic and British. While Indonesia’s Bahasa Indonesia were a mix of various local and imported languages (Malay, Arabic, Javanese, Batakese, Ambonese, Padangese, and many more other languages) and Dutch.
And Novil already employed Powree (An Indonesian) as his/her artist, rather than asking you, he/she can always ask Powree.
Till now, you were cute, coming up with such nice comics.
You just got sexy! Let’s meet up.
SS wrote:
According to your user picture, you have the wrong gender. 😉
Man this was cryptic.
Also, Novil. I have noticed at the donation page that the strip archive from 2011 stops at nr 306, witch means that none of the “new” colored strips is included. Any reason for this?
@ Novil:
😮 That’s fairly insensitive of you! What if he swings that way?
@ Fenixwong:
I was wondering that. Tatu, while they are a good group, don’t really have an affiliation with barbie, Unless it was a in a comic I’ve missed?
I think Novil meant this comic.
I’m glad I didn’t do all that work. The joke would not have been worth it. =\
I’m going to agree with Person. Terrible joke, not worth some of these more punishing puzzles. Also it seems like an excuse to not draw several strips because you’re just using one and then reposting it with the actual dialogue.
*Grins as per the comments strewn about here and previously, definetely a thought provoking direction. Well Done!
nice……i agree i MUCH rather be water boarded! and i love the crossword idea!
AckAckAck wrote:
“Malaysian’s Malay language is a mix of Malay, Arabic and British. While Indonesia’s Bahasa Indonesia were a mix of various local and imported languages (Malay, Arabic, Javanese, Batakese, Ambonese, Padangese, and many more other languages) and Dutch.”
Both languages are not “mixes” of anything (which would classify them as Creole languages), but rather employed a couple of loanwords from other languages. The loanwords make up to 20% in both languages.
You are right that loanwords in Malaysian are preferably Arabic or English (there is no such thing as a “British language”), while in Indonesian they are Arabic, Javanese, and Dutch. (Loanwords from other languages spoken in Indonesia are relatively rare and mostly confined to the area where the respective language is spoken.)
You are right that Indonesian is to some extend an artificial language and that it is not based on Malaysian. However, it is based on Riau (spoken in parts of Sumatra) plus some loans. Riau has already served as a lingua franca in Indonesia before its independence and was then made official. By this time, most loanwords had already got into the now-to-become Indonesian language, thus noone put other languages of the Indonesian archipelago into the Indonesian language to build a “mix” of everything.
You are right that from a political point of view, Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia) and Malaysian (Bahasa Malaysia) are different languages. However, they are over 80% cognate with each other, classifying them, from the linguistical point of view, as dialects of the same language. Linguistic publications have come to call this super-language “Malay”, thus Novil is perfectly right to call Indonesian a “Malay language”.
I could lead you to the Wikipedia page about the Malay language for reference, but firstly you’ll find it without any help, and secondly I’m not sure whether you’ll trust Wikipedia. Thus, I show you a more reliable source: The Ethnologue report for Indonesian. http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=ind – look at the “Classification” entry: It starts from broadest classification (Austronesian family) and goes into more detailed sub-family listing, just to end with the “Malay” branch.
Ethnologue has not yet accepted the Malay languages as *one* language, it’s rather regarded as a branch of the Austronesian family; but that does not make Indonesian less of “a Malay language”.
Do not get confused by Ethnologue’s insistence to call Malaysian “Malay”, making “Malay” a language of the “Malay” branch.
“Drops 17 dollars when killed”… Technically, that’s “Mr. Batty”, not just “Bat”. Still, it’s nice to see that other people have played the Mother series.
:O
Oh my, who in their right minds would be able to find those out? Maybe it’s good, maybe it means I’m not _that_ nerdy ^^”
I’m proud to say I didn’t get any of them, hehehe
Yaaaay! \(^o^)/ Gaïa Reference!!! Just began to read it and just love it!!
[…] I’d also like to throw a shout out to this comic with too much visual information and Sandra and Woo’s crossword puzzles. […]