CHOU ARG THREAD
- Thread starter cooldude43
- Start date
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think a bunch of us hit "puzzle solved, mission accomplished" after the first crack and dipped. chou's been hinting (heavily) that we cracked the beginning of an arg, not the whole thing. so here's a state of the union on what i've found since the dairy book and the new screenshot dropped, plus where i need help.
what we already had wrong
the F#/Gb noteblock from the original block grid. i called it flavor in the big writeup. chou specifically called this out OOC. F# and Gb are enharmonic equivalents (same pitch, two names) and i don't think we've actually used this clue yet.
what i found in the ORIGINAL audio that we missed
before the SSTV VIS leader (which starts at 0.8s) there's a deliberate frequency pattern in the first 800ms. eight 100ms slots alternating:
1900Hz, 1500Hz, 1900Hz, 1500Hz, 2300Hz, 1500Hz, 2300Hz, 1500Hz
if you treat 1500Hz as the spacer and the others as data tones, with 1900Hz = 0 and 2300Hz = 1:
0 0 1 1
four bits at the literal beginning of the file. chou's clue was "you're looking for an ending without holding the beginning." we had THE END as the polybius keyword. this is THE BEGINNING. literally placed at the start.
what those four bits mean on their own, dunno yet. needs more pieces to combine with.
the new audio (n2j9hm.wav)
20.5 seconds of bird sounds. it's STEREO and the two channels are almost perfectly anti-phase (correlation negative 0.06). when you sum L+R you get a near-silent Mid channel, when you subtract L-R you get all the bird noise.
ran every analysis i could think of on this thing. SSTV markers in each channel, mid/side decomp, LSB stego on the int16 samples, frequency band isolation, phase diff between channels, gap analysis. no hidden SSTV. no LSB data. no buried tones.
i think this wav is a POINTER not a payload. chou's basically handing us "tracks" so we can map the book pages onto something audio-shaped.
the book pages
these aren't a riddle to decode. they're a poem describing audio waveforms. mapping them:
- "it's not a line, it's a track" : audio track
- "up to the wire, down to the dirt" : signal going positive and negative
- "bouncing off the posts" : sync pulses
- "four layers of iron keeping the Lair boxed in" : the four layers we already broke (leader, VIS, SSTV, polybius)
- "the shiny pieces up high for the flock to peck at" : the obvious peaks (the visible decoded image)
- "the real rot is buried in the valleys" : the actual hidden data is somewhere we have to dig for
- page 3 "rip the posts out... break the fence... jagged loop forever" : recursive, repeats, can't escape by just walking forward
- page 1 "don't look straight" : self explanatory, read it sideways
the book title
UZFKJLNUFJXHNMPHIICWUZJ
23 characters, listed as the "by" line. one problem with this being a polybius cipher under our existing key: it contains an X. our THE END grid doesn't have X. so this is encoded with a DIFFERENT polybius square, probably with a different keyword. we need to figure out what that keyword is.
the tree
cooldude noticed the tree at the new screenshot location is missing logs at position 1 (bottom) and position 3 (from bottom). that's another binary marker probably.
position: 1 2 3 4 5...
log?: 0 1 0 1 ?
need exact log count to know the full pattern.
the sign
"can you believe they called me crazy?" : chou in character
asks
1. exact log count on that tree, including the missing positions
2. anything else at the screenshot location, item frames, chests, redstone, other signs, weird builds
3. WHERE the Chou's Dairy book came from. chest? lectern? NPC drop? item frame on a wall?
4. someone record the F#/Gb noteblock from the OG block grid actually playing. if it's tuned to F#, what's the actual pitch? does it loop? does anything happen if you hit it from a different side?
5. other locations on the server with chou's fingerprints. the first puzzle was spread across 3 places (block grid, screenshot location, audio file). this one almost certainly has more sites we haven't found yet.
6. anyone catch chou doing anything weird in the world recently? building, placing signs, planting trees, etc.
tldr: we cracked the first puzzle. we did not crack the arg. chou laid out a four-bit "beginning" marker in the original audio that we walked past, plus a new screenshot, a new wav, a book, and a tree. the pieces are clearly meant to combine but the combination needs more breadcrumbs we haven't found.
what we already had wrong
the F#/Gb noteblock from the original block grid. i called it flavor in the big writeup. chou specifically called this out OOC. F# and Gb are enharmonic equivalents (same pitch, two names) and i don't think we've actually used this clue yet.
what i found in the ORIGINAL audio that we missed
before the SSTV VIS leader (which starts at 0.8s) there's a deliberate frequency pattern in the first 800ms. eight 100ms slots alternating:
1900Hz, 1500Hz, 1900Hz, 1500Hz, 2300Hz, 1500Hz, 2300Hz, 1500Hz
if you treat 1500Hz as the spacer and the others as data tones, with 1900Hz = 0 and 2300Hz = 1:
0 0 1 1
four bits at the literal beginning of the file. chou's clue was "you're looking for an ending without holding the beginning." we had THE END as the polybius keyword. this is THE BEGINNING. literally placed at the start.
what those four bits mean on their own, dunno yet. needs more pieces to combine with.
the new audio (n2j9hm.wav)
20.5 seconds of bird sounds. it's STEREO and the two channels are almost perfectly anti-phase (correlation negative 0.06). when you sum L+R you get a near-silent Mid channel, when you subtract L-R you get all the bird noise.
ran every analysis i could think of on this thing. SSTV markers in each channel, mid/side decomp, LSB stego on the int16 samples, frequency band isolation, phase diff between channels, gap analysis. no hidden SSTV. no LSB data. no buried tones.
i think this wav is a POINTER not a payload. chou's basically handing us "tracks" so we can map the book pages onto something audio-shaped.
the book pages
these aren't a riddle to decode. they're a poem describing audio waveforms. mapping them:
- "it's not a line, it's a track" : audio track
- "up to the wire, down to the dirt" : signal going positive and negative
- "bouncing off the posts" : sync pulses
- "four layers of iron keeping the Lair boxed in" : the four layers we already broke (leader, VIS, SSTV, polybius)
- "the shiny pieces up high for the flock to peck at" : the obvious peaks (the visible decoded image)
- "the real rot is buried in the valleys" : the actual hidden data is somewhere we have to dig for
- page 3 "rip the posts out... break the fence... jagged loop forever" : recursive, repeats, can't escape by just walking forward
- page 1 "don't look straight" : self explanatory, read it sideways
the book title
UZFKJLNUFJXHNMPHIICWUZJ
23 characters, listed as the "by" line. one problem with this being a polybius cipher under our existing key: it contains an X. our THE END grid doesn't have X. so this is encoded with a DIFFERENT polybius square, probably with a different keyword. we need to figure out what that keyword is.
the tree
cooldude noticed the tree at the new screenshot location is missing logs at position 1 (bottom) and position 3 (from bottom). that's another binary marker probably.
position: 1 2 3 4 5...
log?: 0 1 0 1 ?
need exact log count to know the full pattern.
the sign
"can you believe they called me crazy?" : chou in character
asks
1. exact log count on that tree, including the missing positions
2. anything else at the screenshot location, item frames, chests, redstone, other signs, weird builds
3. WHERE the Chou's Dairy book came from. chest? lectern? NPC drop? item frame on a wall?
4. someone record the F#/Gb noteblock from the OG block grid actually playing. if it's tuned to F#, what's the actual pitch? does it loop? does anything happen if you hit it from a different side?
5. other locations on the server with chou's fingerprints. the first puzzle was spread across 3 places (block grid, screenshot location, audio file). this one almost certainly has more sites we haven't found yet.
6. anyone catch chou doing anything weird in the world recently? building, placing signs, planting trees, etc.
tldr: we cracked the first puzzle. we did not crack the arg. chou laid out a four-bit "beginning" marker in the original audio that we walked past, plus a new screenshot, a new wav, a book, and a tree. the pieces are clearly meant to combine but the combination needs more breadcrumbs we haven't found.