New developments in CassieIsWatching

From the "Cassie Is Watching" discord server (yeah... a handful of us never quit playing the game... We've got less than three years to solve the final anagram before the 20th anniversary of our first failure to do so cost us Cassie). Ahcapella made an interesting observation.
The WHERE poem from Oct 2, 2006 (and solved on Oct 4):
--
Inside the gate you will defend
the doe-eyed moppet’s only friend
The picture has not yet commenced
so depicts a rose in soil fenced (soil fenced anagrams to second life!)
The garden where the killer wined
Still holds the cup for you to find
--
The interesting bit was the double anagram, as Cassie's presence in Second Life wasn't known until the Revelation 3 video.

Another interesting tidbit is that Cassie's Second Life avatar was quite obviously created to look similar to Jessica Rose, the actress who played Bree aka Lonelygirl15, which CiW played off of. "Depicts a Rose in Second Life," indeed.

A final interesting tidbit it that the picture I posted the other day was from the Revelation 1 video from October 1, 2006. (Due to a technical issue with YouTube back in 2006, the last second(s) of videos were frequently cut off. We're not sure of the puppet master of CiW would have been aware of that. Until YouTube fixed that issue years later, it would not have been possible to discover that clue). We missed that clue. Since discovering the picture, I have speculated that we may have missed a drop, but it was still likely to have been recoverable. If he was the picture of the cathedral back then, there were a group of players in CA ready to go looking.

So frustrating to be 17 years removed from the clues to be able to verify any of this, as the puppet master of CiW remains a mystery. I have my suspicions, along with other players, but those suspicions continuously sing towards then away from one particular party. These recent developments point those suspicions squarely at them. If it were them, I don't think they'll ever break their silence, which would be the only way to confirm any of these thoughts at this point. A physical drop in a public area is likely long gone. And a virtual drop in Second Life is most definitely long gone... Unless anyone who reads this has an in at Linden Labs, and Linden Labs happens to have backups from that long ago which could be scoured. lol

edit: A final, final interesting tidbit. I had partially solved the first Maddison Atkins 1.0 clue as TWO BAGS. I was not aware at the time (and Jeromy eventually had to find another way to get us the final solution) but this was a reference to OpAphid clues frequently being double-encoded. I wonder how many other double anagrams Cassie slipped in which went unnoticed. But this leads me to believe maybe, just maybe, OpAphid's PM was already double-encoding clues before they launched OpAphid ;)

Missed CiW clue!

Last frame of Revelation 1

Perfect

This kid has some serious talent:

Beth

I do not remember much from my childhood from before I was a teen, and even what I do remember is generally not very specific. But every now and then, something will open some floodgate and memories will come rushing in. Usually, that something is completely random, such as a random video about rock power ballads which didn't include the Kiss song "Beth," which I suspect should top everyone's list of hard rock ballads if they're over a certain age. And since the person posting the videos invited comments, I posted that this would be number one on my list, and the floodgates opened. Suddenly, I was transported to Lehigh Acres, Florida, and I was eight years old. I only lived there for just under two years, but I had a small group of friends. James, Jay, Sean and I were pretty inseperable for the short time I knew them. We were in one of their homes, I can't remember which, and they had just gotten Kiss - Alive II. My dad, who I lived with at the time, and his various wives had always had country music on the radio, so hard rock was entirely new to me. And I fell in love with it right away. I was too young to really understand most of they lyrics, but I knew I liked the sound of it, and "Beth" just oozed melancholy to eight-year-old me. And I loved it, too. But the memories didn't stop there. I remember we moved to Florida with my dad's third wife, but she wasn't in the picture very long after the move. But I also don't remember my dad being around much, either. Just me and my two sisters most of the time, and us hanging out with our various friends. I remember in the winter of fourth grade, my class were all required to take either band or orchestra. If you took band, you had to buy or rent your instrument from a music store, and my family was way too poor for that, so that left orchestra. The school had a couple of violins, cellos, and upright basses which could be loaned to students, and a couple of girls got the violins. I was way too short to handle an upright bass, so that left cello. So I learned to read sheet music, and the first stringed instrument that I learned was cello. I don't remember being particularly good at it, but I do remember practicing it, and I remember having to lug that thing back and forth between the school bus stop and my house, which was not an easy task for such a little guy. Poor eight-year-old me would have been able to carry a violin much more easily ;) I don't remember much about my time in Florida other than that, and an aligator walking into our kitchen while my older sister was preparing dinner once. Sometime during the fifth grade, my sisters decided they wanted to move back to Ohio to live with my mom, who had remarried by then, and my dad gave me the choice of going with them or staying with him. I don't know if he would have honored my choice if I had chosen to stay with him, but they were my sisters. What kind of choice did a 9-year old really have? I think I saw my father one time after we moved back in with my mom and step-dad, when I was maybe 15 or 16. He wanted to give me advise about some personal stuff one of my cousins had told him I was going through, and I wanted absolutely nothing to do with him at that point. I no longer even resent the man. I just don't know him, so don't really have any feelings at all at this point. I do know he remarried yet again, and had another family. So I have two half-sisters and a half-brother whom I've never met.

OH!

If you know where I'm from, you probably know the outcome otherwise why bother posting it? ;)

Bait and switch

The retail place I was going to lease was listed at $2.50/sf/yr. I should have known something was up when the person at the property management company drug his feet and, even though he knew I was ready to sign the lease before I met with him on Tuesday, sprung "there's an application proceess" on my at our meeting, and said he'd email me a link. The whole process started via email, and I had already met his maintenance person, so why would he wait to spring this on me? Disappointed, but still OK. I had been talking about how a big driver for me was the low cost of the lease, and he never corrected me, so we never discussed price other than what the "modified gross" term of the lease included and didn't include. So, we're walking out of our meeting, I'm a little bummed about not having signed the lease and taken possession at our meeting, and he springs the cost on me which comes out to over $14.50/sf/yr. It's not like he had it listed at the lower price on one site. No. It was listed that way on several sites. Because it is still listed that way, despite having over 48 hrs to have had it corrected, I'm going to assume it's an attempt at bait-and-switch, and this is why it's sat empty for so long. Debating reporting it to the state AG to force corrective action with the listing, as it is deceptive and wastes a ton of time for any interested party. My guess the manager drags his feet and wastes so much time that it's not worth it to walk away from, but I was going to lease it more because I'm a hobbyist who needs space, not because I actually need it for commercial reasons, so I had no choice but to walk away from it when it significantly more than I expected. Bummed, but oh well. With the additional utilities and such, it may have spread me a little thin, so he probably saved me from a bad decision ;)

Link rot, and how the Internet is dying

This is the post I teased. ;)

Methos is a bit younger than myself, having stated that his first computer as a kid was running Windows 95, but I believe he has a history degree, or was at least a history major, and is a civil war re-enactor. At ahcapella's suggestion, I started sharing some of my interest in computer history, and my collection, and how my goal is to open a computer museam and such, and Methos is apparently also into the retro-futuristic aesthetic, personified by r/cassettefuturism, which is not a Reddit I was aware of, so thanks for the link ;) There are also sites like the Vault of VHS tumblr, which are interesting in certain circles, I suppose, but not something you're likely to stumble upon unless you know exactly what you're looking for or, in my case, provided a link by someone whose interests overlap my own. (Also, there's a guy who does videos like this one where they watch and review mystery VHS tapes. The YouTube algorithm likely never would have put it in front of me, and I never would have known to look. But it's fascinating.)

He started bemoaning the fact that the Internet is dying, partially due to link rot, but also partially due to the commecialized nature of it, instead of the "wild west" that it used to be. Used to be that everyone end their mother, brother, uncle, etc, had a personal website somewhere, either on Geocities or some other free space, or with their ISP under their ~username folder. You could get lost for hours down one rabbit hole or another, just following links from someone's personal website. Some of those pages still live on the Wayback Machine at archive.org. The problem is, while sites like TheOldNet make it easy to access those old pages, if they exist, the search engines don't exactly show results for personal pages these days so there's no longer an easy way to just stumble across them.

I mentioned tilde club to him, which he found very interesting, and we discussed webcomics (thanks for the index, Methos!) as well, and conventions and fandoms and such. If it's packaged up as a nice, shiny commercial project, it'll rank on searh engines. If it's on a personal website, unless there are few other hits on the specific search terms, the algorithm which once saved us from blackhat SEO has made things worse for the rest of us who are not commecial entities.

Maybe this is why I'm so interested in resurecting the old ISP I used to work for, at least to some extent. There was such a wealth of information of the ~user sites on it which have been lost to time. I would love to recover what I can and restore the long-dead links. The current world wide web feels sterile and corporate. I miss the days where you could spend hours exploring links off of some randome page you stumbled upon. I want to restore at least a small slice of that.