:smack: I didn’t even look at the first letters of the clues. :smack: I was looking at the first letter of the clue answers, most of which I can’t begin to get. :smack:
Frankenstein must be destroyed. Not sure that gets me any further to an answer though.
Maybe it’s showing that many of the answers (all?) are missing a letter. We were too focused with the double letters but failed to notice that answers with no double letters might be missing letters too.
That’s the name of a movie:
Nice find, Barkis. Sorry I missed that.
I took some time and did the manual copying of letters from our best ‘known’ clues into the grid. Unfortunately,
a) There aren’t enough known clues to fill in much of anything. I didn’t do the hypothesis of dropping the double letters, so that doesn’t leave too many sure things. The ones I feel most sure of are SAUROCTONOS, THEMUNSTERS, ABNORMAL, FRIGHTHOUND, BRAM STOKER, SASQUATCH and CERBERUS. Of course opinions will vary.
b) Filling in just those gives a load of gobbledegook. No good letter patterns, no distinct words. For example, 107-108 is the two letter word “CT”, which might be an abbreviation, I guess. (No double+ letters map to 107 or 108.)
c) We don’t have a solution for the case where two different letters go to the same space. I figure it’s either (1) a mistake in the answers, (2) some function of the incoming letters, like averaging, or (3) put in all of the letters, figure out the order. To my mind #3 is the most likely, because that’ll give us longer words. The fact that the word lengths are largely on the short side points in this direction, I think.
d) I don’t have a good way to share the manual labor I’ve done, which makes collaborating on this difficult. I’ll paste what I have in here, but I bet it ends up all but unreadable. Numbers are underneath the letters that fill the slot. No indication of word or sentence breaks in this dump.
O E A R T EF
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20
E I M U
21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40
A S A L S N H H A R
41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60
N O H
61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80
A S S B B U R O
81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100
U R S R O
101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120
M B T M C T R NTC NE S AGT
121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140
R D E C U R O H
141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160
S U T SK Q
161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180
O
181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188
Sentence #4 (107-127) 2, 4, 4, 1, 3, 7
So the last word in the message is 7 letters, 121 - 127.
121 appears in the clues once, in V. I feel most confident about the BRAMSTOKER answer, which puts the letter ‘M’ at 121. I OK about THEMUNSTERS as the answer for N., which makes 125 = ‘T.’ And SASQUATCH seems like the answer to Y., which means 127 is ‘C.’
So the last word in the 4th sentence is M _ _ _ T _ C.
Any answers I’ve come up with to fill in those gaps don’t work very well.
Actually, the ‘CT’ you’re referring to are in spaces 127, 128. And you can see that the word from 121 - 127 is nonsense based on the answers we feel good about. You have M B _ _ T M C.
Or am I completely misunderstanding the sentence structure?
No, you’re right and I’m wrong. Tired and misreading my own format.
107-108 is a two letter word, _U. Which I guess could be “Mu” or “Nu”, but seems unlikely.
I’m beginning to have sympathy for the view that the entire acrostic part of the puzzle is just a big red herring. I suppose it could be the case that you’re supposed to fill in the full acrostic and then apply some decoding scheme to the resulting gibberish, but that seems kind of out of the spirit of these things, since you then wouldn’t be able to do the back-and-forth solving that an acrostic usually entails. Not that the evil Boris Barlow or his confederate should be constrained to produce puzzles that are fun for us to solve.
In the “very weak conclusion” department I’d add that the Frankenstein monster is sometimes referred to as a double or doppleganger, so the “Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed” phrase could be a subtle clue to drop the double letters, as we’d been supposing for some answers.
Can the clues be shifted up or down or anything? It is just not going to work out with it as it is. For instance, E. Killer in the Louvre, it seems is SAUROCTONOS but that makes 135 a letter ‘N’. But in AA. Dog in Hell, 135 is the letter ‘E’
If, for those clues only (E. and AA.) you put the solution in backwards, the letter ‘U’ matches up for 135.
well, neither forward nor backward does number 133, in **U. **and AA. match up
Yeah, I’m beginning to question the FRIGHTHOUND answer for U. It really messes up the 3 letter word 51 - 53. As it is, that word is “SNH.”
Not sure what else it could be, though. There is a Scooby Doo episode called “The Howl of the Fright Hound.”
You have about had enough of this. How is anyone supposed to solve an acrostic puzzle when the rules are obviously being messed with? And whoever heard of an acrostic where the first letters of the clues spelled out something? Forward? Backward? Up? Down? Sideways? You hate this puzzle.
Sigh. Maybe, You think, You should download a copy of Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed and watch it for clues. No, You are not that desperate. Not yet.
Damn Boris Barlow and his impossible red herring-filled puzzle! There must be something else You are missing. But what?
RIIIIINNNGGG!
You answer your phone. It is Jones.
You listen to the Agent. The information is thus:
There is a security video of Barlow and Stone outside of a convenience store along Interstate 81. They are shown to be buying soft drinks, lots of beer, cigarettes, snacks, a large styrofoam cooler and twenty pounds of ice. The video also shows they are driving a silver Honda Fit. License tags match those of a car reported stolen in Tennessee earlier in the week.
Jones talked today with the military. It seems they were very interested in Boris Barlow’s revolutionary Qwave technology. You remember Boris once used Qwaves to bring the recently dead back to life. The military, however, was much more interested in how Qwaves could be used as a weapon. It seems a massive dense Qwave directed at the enemy might actually destroy all their electronics. Boris was supposedly helping them figure out how to do this, but the work had stalled. Some at the military thought Boris might have figured out more than he was letting on. That now looks probable.
Jones pauses to tell You he has another call. After a few minutes he returns to You. His voice sounds much more grave. The case has taken an even uglier turn.
Well, sadly for all of Barlow’s future body part donors (of which I’m sure there will be many), it’s not really a lack of motivation that’s got us stymied here. Clearly this is some sort of other puzzle only masquerading as an acrostic, so short of some lateral insight I don’t see any way forward here.
175-176 is a 2 letter word starting with Q _. Any scrabble player can tell you that qi is a word. Apparently a Chinese word for “life force” but tough to see how it fits in this puzzle.
Well, 175 is also in clue K (which ought to be “The Brain” except it’s nowhere near the right number of letters). So depending on what the many-to-one rule is in this puzzle, that could mean that Q isn’t the letter. Or it could mean that both Q and another letter fit in that space, making this a 3 letter word. Not that QAT, QIS or QUA are any more likely that QI, I think.
It just seems to me that huge chunks of this data are there only to hide the true message. As opposed to a traditional acrostic, where every bit is meaningful. The question is what to ignore.
I don’t know if this is significant or not but clue H is the only one where every letter is shared with another clue.
Well, it’s significant in the sense that if this were a normal acrostic that clue wouldn’t be included at all; it’s entirely superfluous. Except to provide the “S” in Frankenstein.
I think that might be…
Probably significant, but H isn’t nearly the only clue that shares letters. I’ve been trying to sniff out words in the sentences and been completely stonewalled to this point.
Any thoughts on answers to other clues?
X = CARAMEL?
Z = SORCERY?
Hm, if we just put in “correct” answers, ignoring the difficulties actually putting them in the grid, does that acrostic reveal any information?