Alright. Black Hills Radio Control, or BHRC as it has come to be known, was the next step along the way. It's showing almost a shoulder patch of sorts in a keystone shape with a radio tower and a flashing lightning bolt, and flashing bolts around the top of the tower. You can also hear an odd sound file looping, almost like skewed Morse code. A lot like Morse code. Exactly like Morse code. HetMasteen translated the code to find it was taken from a book called "Civil War" by Lucien. The quote is the inset from the book link, starting with "Just so flashes..." Discussion between drizjr and HetMasteen further revealed that the smaller bolts at the top of the radio tower were also Morse code- but numbers only. After a hitch or two, drizjr posted these numbers. Using these numbers, and a modified Beale/book cipher(Beale- the painter of the magic lantern slides, remember?), the words were counted out in the quote to reveal- "dearther." At the time, the topic of discussion was- what's a dearther? Wild speculation and definitions helped in no way. HetMasteen, however, did discover that dearther.html was the next step in the Tooman way. Dearther lead us to a group of radio flash programs, and we've heard everything from static, to Morse code, to a presidential campaign- all of which we'll cover when we get there. Oh, and dearther? Merely an anagram for "red earth," the password to the AYAB site. :)
The first lead from BHRC came well after its finding, over a month after it's discovery. Morse code... that lead to www.sakanasherald.com.
Coming to you live from the Black Hills, right here on KTOM...
We moved on from Ajkin.com to drizjr's first discovery- areyouaborder.com, another cryptic site. AYAB showed a slide show of pictures from Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven." At the bottom, a text input box, and a submit button. HetMasteen made up a pretty good summary of what we saw, complete with screenshots of each image. With everything we throw into the box, we're taken to eye.html, merely a series of pictures that show an eyeball, and then a raven flying away, eye in his beak. Later on(I'll explain how we found it in a future post) we discovered that "red earth" didn't take us to eye.html, but rather to earth.html, the same sequence as eye, but with a small Earth in the raven's beak. We begin digging to try to find out what might be pertinent about the pictures we're seeing. We found out that the images were Magic Lantern slides. Call it a predecessor to moving pictures. We found out through much digging(and I'm sorry, I can't find in the forums where) that the slides for The Raven's Magic Lantern were painted by Joeseph Boggs Beale, proclaimed by victoriana.com to be American's first great screen artist. We never really got too far into the site before drizjr discovered via a reverse IP search that there was a very similar URL to AYAB- www.areyouabordernevermore.com. AYABN automatically redirected to our next site, and our biggest puzzles up to that point, at www.blackhillsradiocontrol.org.
Aj 'kin- sun priest. Ajkin.com was quite cryptic. A simple black page with a text box and a submit button. That's it. Oh, and the text box doesn't show regular letters- it shows what appeared to be bits of bar code. The thought occurred to us that we could make an alphabet using the ajkin text box. Type each letter until we had a full alphabet- A would equal a thin bar and a thick bar, B thick, thin, thin, thin, etc. BrianEnigma noticed that the bar codes seemed to be consistant with morse code. Shortly thereafter, phyzix figured it out- "red cloud." Typing red cloud into the text box and clicking the submit button took us to a new page within ajkin. We were presented two Mayan hieroglyphs, and nothing more. Shortly after the discovery, Giskard and vpisteve noticed that the "eyes" of the left glyph were clickable, and took us to yet another page(screen cap courtesy of DeadByDawn), an animated map of central US with spots that appeared to be smoke over 5-6 spots on it. The spots were prominent cities- Indianapolis, IN, Chicago, IL, Minneapolis/St Paul, MN, Kansas City and Topeka, KS, and Denver, CO.
A very, VERY long time passes. There are minor changes to the map shown at ajkin, even major changes- but no hints as far as what to do next, where to go, or who to blame. The borders on the map completely dissolve and reform with new borders. We're tearing the internets apart to try to find something, anything. A message!! From Tom?? What does it say??? "The followers interview has been approved" and "Are you BORED yet?" Tom is poking us. With a sharp stick. Still going nowhere though... and the next day, we get yet another prod. The borders of the states are now changing to morse code. "Are you a..." Are you a what? Within hours, drizjr figured out where we go next. areyouaborder.com.
The sun god was here and weThis was accompanied by 2 different bar codes. The bar codes on the right are identical to those on the left, except where the ones on the left have decimal numbers, the ones on the right are Mayan, and the decimal bar codes have double the stars- smaller stars that are in the same formation as the larger, but at a 50% scale. After many, many pages of speculation and even an attempted game-jacking, xnbomb and GCDOA made a discovery. The numbers at the bottom of the bar codes were 20724697187. xnbomb parsed these numbers out to the only possible IP address- 207.246.97.187(for those unfamiliar with IP addresses, no set of numbers can exceed 255). After GCDOA did a quick whois search, 207.246.97.187 became Ajkin.com.
thought it might be time to
begin again
-Tom 2man
PS Always look for what you are mssng
Hey guys. tygr20 here. Let me kick this off by saying if you don't know anything about Tom Tooman, you may very well have come to the right place. I'll try(along with the others) to make this a comprehensive "The Story So Far" type blog, perfect for getting you caught up on all things Tooman, and for just generally helping you learn and understand all the things that fall into this game. I guess I should start by explaining what exactly this is.
CBS runs a television show called "Jericho." Jericho ran its first season in 2006, and was regarded as a generally good TV show, with a serious cult following. However, as the first season ended, CBS announced their intentions to cancel the show after its first season. This sent the fans into a frenzy and started the now infamous "NUTS for Jericho" Campaign. In this movement, fans of the show sent CBS over 20 TONS of nuts. CBS announced season 2 of Jericho would begin filming.
In the meantime, SpaceBass and Scarpe Grosse of Unfiction received cryptic letters. These letters are now posted in the trailhead of Unfiction's Tom Tooman forum and at Despoiler. The only information we had(at the time) about the sender was that his name was Tom Tooman, and he was from Lame Deer, MT. Progress aside, more of the letters started popping up- notably to Douglas Rushkoff, a teacher and documentarian, as well as a known author. A fourth letter was received by the writer of a popular blog, who asked that neither he nor his site be mentioned in any affiliation with anything Tooman. I'll post details on this inital letter shortly, including how it all matters.
