Time’s up.
First, the clues. There were only three clues in total passed around at the beginning of the challenge, each to four players. Here they are:
Find the topic that shares a name with an earlier Mole challenge. Your first thumbprint will be in the bag.The Fiction & Poetry board is a good place to begin your exploration.One of the thumbprints is located on a profoundly obvious board within the forum. Obvious, that is, if you’re paying attention to URLs.And here are the results:
- The first player online after the challenge was posted, Belle quickly deciphered her clue (the first listed above) to pinpoint the location of a thumbprint in the Aleta topic The Prisoner’s Dilemma. While she was up, she found a second thumbprint in Ishkabibble Scene Eight.
- Ninety was next at the bat and the first to crack his own clue, the second listed above. Obviously this was a gesture toward Elliot’s fic The Exploration, where Ninety found a third thumbprint.
- Bulbs stepped in at this point to contribute two more thumbprints: one in Choobs’ fic The Trouble with Loans, and another in the topic Short Stories by StellarWind Elsydeon. (He too had received the second clue and promptly scoured the writing board, though Ninety narrowly beat him to the Exploration print.)
- Ninety brought home another thumbprint that had been hidden in his own topic “Untitled/unfinished Story”.
- Bulbs nailed another one as well, from Burgled Boullogne, making seven to that point.
- Sem reeled in three thumbprints from various locations: the topics Merry Christmas!!!!!, Past Whitefall and FRUITY RUMPUS ASSHOLE FACTORY.
And… that was it. No further thumbprints were found. Only ten all told, making for a measly
10 EP out of the
30 you might have won. Was there sabotage? Oh yes, I think so. But before we line up the suspects, I ought to reveal all of the thumbprint locations. Here they are:
Also, one small concession: If you clicked that spoiler, you’ll have noticed the thumbprints were diffused across a number of different image servers. This was to foil anyone who might simply put “photobucket” or some such into the search engine and find all thirty thumbprints without any effort. Unfortunately, the plan backfired when it came to light that a couple of the thumbprints appeared to have expired. Critically, these included
the thumbprint marked by the third clue, the one no one apparently figured out except
Ninety: the URL clue, which pointed to the Gaming board (whose URL designation is “thumbs”!). I replaced these over the course of the challenge, but they might have eluded people who legitimately did look at the right posts, but never got to see those thumbprints. I feel bad about that, so I’m giving you guys a bonus
2 EP in compensation for those two missing images.
But now it’s time to ask ourselves: who’s to blame here? Why is it that, bonus aside, you guys only brought in ten thumbprints out of a potential thirty? How did this challenge fall so far short of expectations?
I might as well start with
Ninety, since I just mentioned him.
Ninety the joker. Mister funny guy. Sure was hilarious, that trick of his, putting a thumbprint in his signature, wasn’t it? But this joke had a bitter aftertaste, posing as it did a legitimate obstacle to finding thumbprints in topics where Ninety had posted heavily.
Belle, who admitted how distracting his signature was, no doubt felt its burden as she combed the RP boards for thumbprints. No one, for instance, located the thumbprint hidden in the ORP The Last Best Hope – and why should they have noticed it buried in
Biscuit’s post, while scrolling past half a dozen of
Ninety’s bogus prints? Make no mistake,
Ninety’s signature very likely cost the team on this one. But his work didn’t end there. Despite finding three thumbprints,
Ninety posted a grand total of
none of their locations in this topic, denying his teammates any chance to examine those locations and try to find the common factor (about which more later). In fact,
Ninety went the exact opposite route of openly taunting his teammates! First he
posted a screencap of a thumbprint in its natural habitat with no word whatsoever on where that print could be found. Then, as
Biscuit and
Ninety were trying to figure out the “thumbs” clue,
Ninety posted a screencap of the relevant address bar, yet failed to clarify which board that indicated. Players, be advised: in this challenge,
Ninety had a literal laugh at your expense.
At least it should be pointed out that one of the thumbprints
Ninety found, the one in The Exploration, was publicized anyway thanks to
Bulbs, who made mention of that finding in this topic. But let’s just take a look at
Bulbs, shall we? He found three thumbprints of his own, plus he got beaten to the punch by
Ninety on that one print… and what did he post in this topic?
Only a reference to that Exploration print. Never any mention of the discoveries for which he ended up properly taking credit. Even that post about the Exploration print was pretty half-assed, since
Bulbs didn’t even link to the exact post where he and
Ninety found it. “
Don’t remember which post that was, huh
Bulbs? Gee, that’s almost a forgivable lapse of memory, except that there’s no way to lose track of which post in The Exploration had the thumbprint, because
it’s the only one I edited on July 21. Something as simple as doing a Ctrl + F on that page for “Househellhound” or “Jul 21” would bring you around in very short order to the right candidate. Now, is it fair to say that might just have honestly not occurred to
Bulbs? Fine. But together with the fact that he deliberately kept three more thumbprint locations to himself, I’d sooner brand this as
playing dumb than actually
being dumb. If
Bulbs is the Mole, we may have just now witnessed the foundations of his strategy. Don’t let him get away with these kinds of slipups.
As long as we’re running the gamut of all players who actually contributed to this challenge, let’s make sure
Sem stays well within our sights. You talk about playing dumb.
Sem’s was the most alarming disparity of all between the thumbprint locations that he PMed to me and those that he posted here in this topic. Not only did he commit the by-now-familiar act of failing to publicly post the locations of his three thumbprints listed above, he even fouled up in the exact opposite manner. You see
these two posts he linked to there? Those were both legitimate thumbprint locations.
Sem never PMed their locations to me. He did not technically find them for the purposes of the challenge, in which I’d clearly stated you have to send each location to me by PM, and so the team drew no profit from them. Of course it would be bad enough if those two thumbprints had been all he found, but the facts that he (a) found those two but never PMed them to me, and (b) found three others but never posted them in public, seem almost irreconcilable! Are we really to believe
Sem accidentally messed up
in two mutually exclusive ways with the five thumbprints that he tracked down? Surely simpler to give credence to the notion that
Sem the actual or would-be Mole saw a chance to throw the challenge in two distinct ways. (Although I’d be remiss in not pointing out that after all, one of the rest of you
could have clicked on those two Househeld links he provided, noticed that the thumbprints were still there, and PMed me just to make sure. Whether a mistake or sabotage,
Sem’s deviation could have been easily corrected that way. Please don’t skip out on double-checking your teammates’ contributions. The pot will only benefit.)
I don’t want to make a habit of bringing up
Belle last in these things, but while in the second challenge
Ninety’s six-questions-in-one post was the real main attraction and
Belle’s stumble was more of an afterthought, she provided the real showstopper this time.
Belle sabotaged the challenge. There, that’s out in the open. I’m not even going to be cagey about it, because I technically can’t: my own actions put the lie to that notion. If anyone actually went back and checked that list of thirty posts against the thumbprint locations that were mentioned in this topic (again, I know, I’m being adorabloodthirsty here), they would notice a rather striking fact: out of the four locations
Belle linked to in
this post,
only the first two ever actually harbored thumbprints. Those other two, Ninety’s TF2 hat post and Cendra’s Rie illustration? Never contained prints. A bald-faced lie on
Belle’s part. And the reason I’m not dancing around that is that I was complicit in the sabotage: when she came forward with the idea of posting decoy links, I went in and actually
fake-modified the posts she had in mind, without actually changing any content, just to make it look as if there’d been thumbprints there and I’d edited them out. I can’t hide that fact now, nor would I want to! So it comes down to this:
Belle sabotaged the challenge. No point in guessing whether it was accidental or intentional as with the others. Instead we have to take things up to the next level and ask: did she sabotage the challenge because she’s the Mole and felt like committing an act of open treachery? Or is she just a regular contestant working overtime to reel in your suspicions?
The really important lesson here is, of course, that if you come to me with an idea for how to shake things up in a given challenge, I’ll help you out. With a
smile. The next question is determining what’s to be gained from approaching your fellow players with such ideas, too.
But enough of that. God damn I’ve typed a lot over the course of the day. I’m barely awake enough to reveal what the Hidden Theme was that tied all thirty of these posts together, and would have made them all easy to locate if anyone had worked it out. But I will.
It was the word “search”.
Fine. No more from me. The first quiz goes up in the morning. Once again:
you will not have access to this board during the quiz. I hope you’ve made whatever preparations you see fit.
Best of luck to you all. To our first gallant loser, I extend my condolences in advance.
THE TEAM POT: 45 EP
THE MOLE’S POCKET: 25 EP