Tuesday 29 April 2014

Eric on a Mission ?

There has been a marked increase in chatter between the Jen and Eriic twitter accounts today (@EricHusch and @JenTheUndergrad

Eric is in NY and last night found this page of Ship of Theseus in his pocket, the writing on it says "Flushing Meadows 19:00 30th", for which we are assuming is the 30th of April.

It is definitely worth keeping an eye out on the twitter accounts to see what is happening.

There is a Storify link for all the recent tweets provided by @MyTheseus

Tuesday 22 April 2014

(S)pecial Delivery

A little while ago Mulholland Books announced that there were making a reading group kit available to help you and your friends discuss S.

We have heard of a few kits arriving, but now we have one of our own.

The first thing to note is a letter from J.W. Dominguez who is the mysterious author of the Eotvoswheel.com website which has a large amount of information on V M Straka and who the potential candidates of Straka's identity may be.

Speaking of the website, part of it is reproduced in a special dossier, the front page of which is a reproduction of the Ship of Theseus cover (first picture).

The letter goes on to say there are instructions for solving a playfair cipher, which slightly disappointingly is the same cipher used for the Mulholland Books competition around the time that S. was launched, but it is a good one for people that haven't seen it yet.

Thee are a couple of erasable coloured pencils so that you can add your own notes to Jen and Eric's

There is also, as is becoming "the tradition" with S., a postcard, of Brazil. The postcard has a custom 'S' stamp which is a very nice touch.


Interestingly other people who have received the kit have reported that they received different postcards, and the original image of the kit published to advertise it shows a different card again.

However all the different cards seem to be images of Rio de Janeiro, which in itself may be significant.

The letter from J.W. Dominguez says "we encourage you to write and mail a postcard to Straka's translator, F. X. Calderia." The letter also says they will collect the cards and post them online.

I don't think this will be restricted to just the cards sent out in the kits, so if you can send a postcard of your own to the address in the picture I think it would be a great idea.

The final part of the kit is a CD with the first Radio Straka transmission on it, we haven't listened yet to see if it is different to the broadcast version on NTS Radio, but if there are any differences we will let you know.

The last paragraph of the letter says "I've never got a straight answer about how Mullholland books got hold of Jen and Eric's annotated copy of Ship of Theseus, but I'm glad they did. It's been a tremendous boon to Straka scholarship. I hope you'll enjoy it as much as I have"

Just want to finish up by saying what an excellent way of encouraging people to read S. with friends this is and it is great to see that S. has not been just published and forgotten, but is still actively being thought about.



Monday 21 April 2014

Chapter 10 Poll Results

The results of the alternative chapter 10 poll results -



It seems pretty clear that most people think we haven't seen the original chapter 10 ending yet.

Thursday 17 April 2014

Hidden By Clouds

@MCrinitus has been able to send us a new message, firstly pointing us again to transmission 4 of Radio Straka.

I say again as the previous evenings small puzzle of the picture of Ariadne's thread had also led us to transmission 4 of Radio Straka.

Next we received this cryptic message, followed closely by the part page of text below.





This text contains a hidden message and if you want to see the solution then you can reveal it below.

Click here to see the solution


If you examine the text closely you can see some underlined letters which in themselves are not a word, if you then look at the tweet clue and the text in the passage "..each time I approached they would step to the left.."

You take the letter to the left of each underlined letter and you get the word "miracle"


Our reward for solving the puzzle appears to be page 236 of the V M Straka book Miracle at Braxenholm



This book is discussed by Jen and Eric in the margin notes of Chapter 1 of S.

S. Reading Group Kit

In case you missed the announcement on Twitter, Mulholland Books announced a Group Reading Kit that people can request to help them read S. with friends.

The kit looks rather cool and contains physical versions of some of the things we have seen online, like material from the Eotvos Wheel website, and a CD of the first Radio Straka broadcast.

There are even a couple of coloured pencils to make your own book notes in.

We think there may be the odd extra clue thrown in with the kit, as you can see from the picture there is a cipher to solve and a postcard. Fellow S. blogger Debbie has analysed the postcard and the image is "Rio de Janeiro, Public Park and Monroe Palace, Brazil" possibly related to the world fair in 1939.

The kit is only available for those in the United states and only available while stocks last, so if you want one, I would get requesting quickly.

Click here to visit the Mulholland Books website and request your own copy of the kit.

I am not in the UK myself, but I have friends in the US that have ordered one so we will see the contents once they arrive.

(Apologies for not posting this here sooner, I got rather ill recently and simply forgot !)

Wednesday 16 April 2014

The New S.

In S. there are a few threads that on first reading needed further explanation, or at least that was our feeling when we read them.

One of these threads is prompted by the solution to the Chapter 4 cipher solution "Avoid Grand Central - key stolen - assume bag gone - I failed" This is FX Calderia trying to send Straka a message about a bag that was supposedly hidden in Grand Central Station in New York.

Now fast forward to the last few days, we talked about the activity of @MCrinitus on twitter, in relation to the discovery of the new chapter 10 alternatives and the page found from "The Winged Shoes of Emydio Alves"

The first part of this puzzle was a picture of a coin, which is Mercury (Winged Shoes link of course)

Then from @MCrinitus we had the cipher clues and once that was solved, the page from the Winged Shoes of Emydio Alves.

Around this time, possibly because of the first words of page 268 of TWSOEA "The statues look down on him", ‏@MyTheseus tweeted this picture of the outside of Grand Central Station where there is a statue of Mercury, @MCrinitus almost immediately retweeted that.

Almost immediately after we also got this tweet "We have taken from the defeated What they had to leave us - a symbol.", this quote is from a TS Eliot poem Little Giddings in a book called The Four Quartets, M Crinitus has been tweeting lots of small excerpts from these poems over the previous few days so the poems seemed very significant.

This is the full verse that goes with that quoted line -

Whatever we inherit from the fortunate
We have taken from the defeated
What they had to leave us — a symbol:
A symbol perfected in death.
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
By the purification of the motive
In the ground of our beseeching


Then this prompted ‏@MyTheseus to tweet this picture of the clock with four faces (quartets) inside Grand Central Station.

So we are now tying in to S. because of the Page 122 link, however now things are going further as we have the following passage from the same place that the alternative Chapter 10's came from -

I am not proud of what I have done or who I have become. Straka believes or believed, however you want to look at it, that everything can be rewritten, everything can be reborn. I'm not so sure.

There are threads that, when pulled, may unravel the entire tapestry. I, unknowingly, pulled such a thread. Then in my efforts to put it all back together I have become so entangled that I can barely move.

Let me explain. In order to see the birds it is necessary to become part of the silence, and I was very good at it. Somewhere in Time, I waited beside the clock with four faces and the Nightingale approached.

I had invested years of my life in reliable, unquestioning service. And I continued that service. I waited for the Nightingale to look away and I stole a key, part her soul, before fading back into the silence. I had done this before to various people in various ways. This time I made the mistake of looking back and seeing what I left behind.

As fate would have it, I was to deliver the key and the bag we had taken to the Château. But I remembered the Nightingale's panic and my curiosity got the better of me. I opened the bag.

It is one thing to see a book, just one story bound up and hidden. It is quite another to see an entire life all at once. Pictures, letters, notes, histories, stories. I still haven't read them all. But I began to see the birds for what they were, struggling and floundering as their ships filled with water. Fighting to reveal truth to the world in any way they could. Trying to keep those at the top from crushing those on the bottom. Fighting to change the world.

And I changed.

But what I have done can not be rewritten by what I do now. I have killed in cold blood. I have murdered, poisoned, even killed by defenestration, all for the man in the Château. Yet the blood is not on his hands. It is on mine.

All I can do is let you peak into the stolen bag in hopes that you may preserve at least some of it.

For the moment we are assuming "The Nightingale" is FXC, does this also mean the Château mentioned is Vevoda's Château, or as Tonzi in the comments points out, more likely Bouchard's Château ? Is this person then an agent that is now on the run from his former masters ?

There is one more small part to the events of the last few days that might fit in to this new chapter of S. we are discovering.

In amongst all this new activity over the last few days Doug Dorst released this picture on Twitter. It is of course a guitar chord, and after several attempts to decipher it's meaning the final concensus reached is that this is A flat diminished, or as it is more commenly written "Abdim".
Keen readers of S. will now make a connection, ok it took us a few minutes, but on page 248, the person who hands the valise to S. is Abdim

It is our supposition that this is directly related to the M Crinitus activity, as the bag in Grand Central is similar or even the same as the one S. receives.

So are you looking forward to taking part in the new journey of S. that has just started ?

Thursday 10 April 2014

The birds that watch the garden

A few days ago we noticed that a new twitter user @MCrinitus (Greater crested flycatcher) has been tweeting some interesting things, especially around the time of the release of the new chapter 10 versions.

A little while ago this tweet was posted, to our minds an obvious encrypted message encode as a railfence cipher

I struggled to get a clean translation, but it turns out it was all to do with the number of spaces between the letters. @MrToasty found the solution first -

The Caduceus gives life to those that are dead, but it stands for so much more. Who is Emydio Alves?

Once this answer had been found we got another tweet from @MCrinitus - "I am old. I am tired. And now I head to the garden for a rest. Maybe there I can watch the ships sail" along with this image which appears to be a page from a book, and we are assuming it is actually from "The Winged Shoes of Emydio Alves".



The page has definite similarities to Ship of Theseus with him starting and ending in the water.

Wednesday 9 April 2014

Three More Chapter 10 Alternatives Uncovered

As you will have seen yesterday evening we published an alternative version of the end of chapter 10 of Ship of Theseus.

Previously we had an alternative from Jen Heyward on her Tumblr Blog The Jen Heyward Tumblr which had the translation reference of 273.

Then a couple of days ago translation reference 289 was released by @CFish6, @SisterTsion, and @justingarver

Yesterday we published translation reference 290 which has also been published by this French blog

Then today translation reference 291 was published by @JillaggieARG, @Osfourcage and whoisstraka.wordpress.com

If you look at the translation numbers 273 to 291 implies that there are potentially 19 versions of chapter 10 to uncover.

Tuesday 8 April 2014

Alternative Chapter 10 Uncovered

Singed and battered, but still legible, an anonymous source has delivered this alternative version of the end of V M Straka's Ship of Theseus.

The Great Crested Flycatcher (Myiarchus Crinitus)