Almost 94 minutes. Simon, bless you. Everyone is making shorter and shorter content, when I am here going, “but I don’t Want to have to find a new video to watch every 60 seconds!” I know the push is for “more videos in less time,” so I specifically wanted to say thank you for the longer duration videos you make. Edit to add: Kevin, I say that you make a 12 hour episode now. I can just put it on at the start of the day and listen. Simon I’m sure will be cool with that.
Because RU-vid rewards channels with shorter videos because, I speculate, of a combo of videos watched and combined watchtime equalling high engagement thus more likely to reccomend it to more people.
My theory is the Cicada puzzles were all created by Simon many years ago. He was playing the long game, to give himself content for a really long, interesting video.
Only an adept in Thelema and Solomonic Literature and Knowledge with Cryptography Knowledge can solve it. Both Occult, Social Engineering, and Steganography skills are needed
Blessed be the Simon and all his clones. They will lead us to a new and somewhat confused utopia once they claim all of yt. (Y'all think that's good enough to snag a high priest job......or at least keep me out of the basement as either writer or food?)
@@borja1000totally inaccurate. He speaks in tangent and detailed paragraphs are exactly what he needs/prefers to have proper context and all of the info necessary.
@@Duckduckobtusegoose I absolutely agree. The tangents I complain about are the comedic ones. He doesn't use them on all the channels, only a few and they are annoying for, besides driving the topic away, they are badly delivered making them unfunny.
What I find interesting is the subtext of it all. Cicada reminds me of the time I used to lurk on the Cypherpunks usenet group. Lots of people talking about exactly these issues and incredibly complex cryptography. The Cicada puzzles are ingenious and cover a lot of suggested encryption mechanisms, but what they don't show is how people can work together. This is why they failed. They recruited people who were exceptionally smart, but filtered for individualistic types, then expected them to work in a team. People don't work like that. In my mind Cicada is like a modern digital monastery where instead of copying books in the scriptorium, they diligently craft open source software. But our culture doesn't work like that anymore, and even a monastery materially supported the people who worked there (and still do). Also, the most powerful thing about open source software is the collaboration, sure you have a single person curating the commits, but without communication, teamwork, and shared vision you are sunk.
I think the biggest clue as to why we know this was done by one person and not a group of people is because of what you are saying. And yes, I realize there were posters set up "around the world" but big deal, you can pay someone money (and could pay money in 2012, too) to just print something out and tape it to a lamp post. This was one clearly smart person that had limited social skills thinking they could make a group of other smart people that would work together only because they were intelligent. It was a fantasy they created for themselves that they could get teenagers who believe in uncontroversial things like liberty, privacy, and personal security to work for free for hours on end. Let's be honest, the only people who had the time to do Cicada were smart kids, but they were doing it for a proverbial pot at the end of the golden rainbow. When you take away the pot of gold, there's literally no reason for them to continue working like this. I do disagree somewhat that this type of stuff isn't controversial, though. There are three-letter agencies in the US that would not have been happy about this sort of thing at all in 2013 when Cicada 3301 started. Look at how they reacted to Snowden and Assange. Look at the propaganda driving us to more war. These agencies can't justify their existence if easy to use open source solutions existed for the average person and nation-states were no longer needed.
I love the scriptorium idea. I can just see them hunched over their machines in silence. Clad in rough, itchy wool they eschew worldly comforts for the privilege of serving all mankind. Days filled with contemplation of the beauty of well scripted code with that ineffable poetic meter I imagine they're well wrought code will have. Other than that their waking hours consist of writing code, obviously, or eating perfectly balanced and nutritious meals that are beige and contain no flavours at all. Nothing is allowed to stimulate them, other than the CODE for which they strive.
I can attest to how addictive this type of puzzle solving is and how the quickly the enthusiasm fades when the puzzles dry up having played Ingress when it first started. When it began, Ingress used very Cicada 3301-like cyphers to reveal the game's storyline. A whole online community sprung up on Google Plus and other places to solve the clues and coordinate with your faction on the actual AR part of the game. Being able to know that you cracked a cypher, or at least contributed something crucial that led to that outcome, was a big thrill. When that part kind of died down (or became too commercial or something, it's hard to remember now) my interest waned and I dropped out of the puzzle solving part. But I did continue to enjoy the game for a while after. I even went so far as to walk around in the rain, in the middle of the night, ON MY BIRTHDAY to take over the whole town for my faction. Blew everyone's mind, on both sides. lol Fun times.
I really felt like this was the best thing I've written for Simon, so I'm really happy to see that everyone enjoyed it! Unfortunately, that means it's all downhill from here... Oh yeah, also imgur = imager and Tekknolagi = Technology. Didn't think I'd need to give pronounciation guides for those, my bad.
Thank you, I Really enjoyed this episode. It was very well done! Plus I am sure that you will find some more exciting and interesting mysteries for the future! And maybe that will be 2 hours long...
This one was amazing. I was vaguely familiar with this one and loved every second of it. I love listening to long form content while painting miniatures or sorting magic cards and this was perfect for that. Even though I only followed half the puzzles.
Okay so I really love puzzles and cyphers to the point that there's just random bullshit written in codes in every notebook I own and will just make up a new one when I'm bored, but even I think Cicada 3301 are kinda pretentious. I was on board to begin with, but when it's that many layers deep with a book with only like 10 copies ever, I get the feeling whoever made it would be a right prick to have a conversation with. I'm also under the belief that if the only way people can solve your puzzle is through brute strength, you've made a bad puzzle. There's a different between a difficult puzzle and burying the lead too deep.
I totally agree. Another huge proponent of cicada's philosophy revolves around a strangely aggressive, and impenetrable anonymity. There are some good things about it, but I can't tell if it's laced with pretentiousness or paranoia... I'm willing to hear out any thoughts about it.
@@rjohnson2813 that's actually super interesting I never knew that bit. I just know enough people with an aptitude for encryption and those dudes tend to be a little out there 🤣 calling paranoia is an easy guess
As someone who went to a nerd school filled with a bunch of hyperintelligent people I can confirm that sometimes having some not as smart but really project management/ people savvy members is crucial to the survival of any group project
Having those with good emotional intelligence and communication skills helps keep the hyper intelligent working with one another and “the normals”. Bonus points if this person(s) are well versed in high functioning autism… a common issue among “the gifted” without these individuals, these geniuses would never work together and would certainly never explain anything useful they did to everyone else. The necessity for a “rail-roader” is KEY! Someone who would be viewed as put together and organized my the masses, and jokingly called OCD….. a gifted mind is a much a prison as it is a playground of ideas. Keeping these people invested and focused on a single project is a hilariously complex task. This comes from someone who focuses on education of those with higher functioning autism. Their grasp of the world at large is complex and strong, their grasp on the direct world around them is…. Shockingly fragile.
I would not rely on anyone hyperintelligent when it comes to "how to survive". we aren't smart enough. fact. (I am over 130. and I still learn so much from normal, smart, not into nerd-stuff people. hyperintelligent is waaaaay to overrated, and normal, but smart is so dang underrated. I won't stop solving puzzles of all kinds though. I love to decode and can't stop. cicada is fun (most parts). hope one day they come up with more puzzles. I just jump in for fun. and they never disappointed me.
@@Lilshiro123 lol. "just" iq points. and just a few points over 130. not really "hyperintelligent" - just a bit over the "average". but take all the "modern" stuff away from me and ask me to make a fire with just the stuff I can find - I would struggle so badly. hahaha. I know what it needs, but I don't have the skills to light things up without a lighter or a match. ;)
When I heard "do you think information should be free?" I immediately thought of Aaron Swartz, he was being charged for hacking into the MIT college website in 2011 to download a bunch of information journals they had under a pay block. He heavily advocated for free knowledge. He could've gotten a long time in prison but he hung himself in his apartment before he could go to trial and be sentenced. This obviously predates Cicada, but it makes you wonder if they were inspired by his actions, or if he was connected to it in some way. Heck they even could've done it to honor him in some way. I'm sure this could be confirmed or denied by doing some really deep digging, but I'm not interested in doing it, so I'll leave that to someone else if they want to.
there are a LOT of hacktivists who believe all information should be free, so while its possible they were partially inspired by Aaron, i think they were inspired by everyone equally, or maybe they came up with the idea themselves and learned of other hacktivists later, who knows
I actually learned mayan numerals for a job at a science museum that was hosting a mayan exhibit. It's my coolest yet most useless skill. The only time I use it is when I tutor kids in math, i use mayan numerals for answer keys on things like flashcards and what so the kids can't cheat. That said I would've been completely useless solving every other puzzle Cicada laid out. Great video!
Hi Simon! The question "what does 'it' refer to" actually is a linguistic fluke! The answer is nothing, it's a requirement of English basically to have an explicit subject (for instance just saying "is dark" is not grammatical in English - this has to do with our syntactic node structure) so we supply what's called a "dummy subject" to fill the gap. I hope that's a neat fact for you! I had a lot of fun learning about that sort of thing in my syntax class Edit: may be worth mentioning that pro-drop languages (meaning they don't need subject pronouns) don't have this fluke, but many languages that AREN'T pro-drop use this kind of dummy pronoun
@Brandon Quist Korean is the same. I freelance as a proofreader in Korea and can speak some Korean. I've had to turn down some jobs because between a bad translation job and bad source material, I literally couldn't fix the messed up translation. The weirdest job I had was a French children's book translated to Korean then translated to English. They had dropped a lot of information for the first translation, like the teacher's name, so translating it to English made it extremely awkward. I don't know why they didn't just use the original French. In the end, the payment really didn't match the effort
@@Josway37 in the specific instance of this sentence, from a purely semantic perspective and in isolation (and assuming that there are no other reasons for it being dark, such as being in a room with poor lighting), yes, but given that this is a pattern that we observe in a whole class of verbs over a variety of languages, it's generally accepted that these verbs have a common semantic reason for exhibiting this kind of behavior, even if there are decent standins sometimes on an individual basis. Your instincts are good though in that, much like Simon, we tend to want to assume that there's some kind of direct reference (and I think there's a case to be made maybe that this is part of what allowed this feature to develop in this way, since it fits in with our initial assumption that it must somehow reflect an implied subject)
I love these longer format videos. I listen to you and watch while I play games or work on my campaigns on the other screen, and it's just a delight. Not having to swap and find new videos all the time is more ideal, so thank you very much for this.
MIDI is actually still pretty commonly used amongst (digital) musicians when they want to share the exact note structure of something. It's also a nearly universal format in the singing synthesis world.
I was surprised to see the elder futhark in one of your videos. I am not surprised that you don't recognize the language they used because it is a dead language, but it is not a made-up language. It is more of a reconstructed language, largely because we don't know if we even have all of the characters of this particular language. But it would be the one that the Old Norse would have used in their writing. The few examples we have are mostly on stone carvings. I am honestly very impressed that these people, whoever they were, took the time to learn it well enough to use it in their code. And I understand why you would see it as a made up language as it is very often utilized for Dwarven characters. This was a very interesting video. Thank you Kevin for diving deeper than I've ever seen anyone dive into Cicada, and Thank you Simon for what sounds like your voice very nearly giving out by the end of reading it.
Just like the other commentator said, Anglo-Saxon runes, not Elder Futhark. I learned Elder Futhark as a teen and just used it to exchange letters with a friend about whatever stupid nonsense 15-year-olds talk about with their friends.
I found it funny that Simon has apparently never seen runes like this. I'm from the bottom of Africa and even I thought, oh those look like some kind of Scandinavian/Norse runes (I wouldn't have known they were Anglo-Saxon exactly)
77:45 Simon, there is also the issue that most Tech corporations dealing with encryption in the US work directly with intelligence communities like the NSA whom often require their own backdoors so even if a user were to create a timed package or something, there's probably a master cipher for decryption. The CAKES program, given the timing of the project, specifically had in mind circumventing large scale intelligence agencies, some of which we may not even know exist. Up until the revelation of the PRISM program, people figured it was, at best, rumor but not likely. Turns out, PRISM was the least threatening of the covert programs the US was running. Realistically, anyone knowing how those intelligence agencies function would avoid any encryption system you can get via the internet. For reference, there's a small company out there that makes laptops with physical switches that you have to toggle for any component that could collect data (modem, microphones, touchpad, camera). These are intended for the security conscious (or warry) much like someone opening up there cell phone and disconnecting the mic, camera GPS and inserting a switch for the communications systems. Think Enemy of the State but worse.
Simon: it’s a fake language; looks like something someone would make up as alien text in a movie or something. the ancient Norsemen: am I a joke to you
@@hellviper944 i thought they were runes of some sort too. im no expert, so i wouldn't be able to specify nordic or druidic or wiccan, but considering the previous reference to crowley, i wouldn't be surprised if they were occult in nature. or maybe some language from a video game.
@@timmanning5206 Well, if you are interested in fantasy at all, real, actual runes are used as a written fantasy language a lot. Though, if you aren't, or you've never been into Paganism in any way, then I guess you probably wouldn't know that. I used to be Pagan, with an interest in Norse and Celtic mythology, so, I guess I just take for granted that they're runes, and may look like an alien language to someone else lol
This has to be my favourite Simon video to listen to/watch. It's fun hearing him get excited as he ponders things, and learns about it. I smile to myself when I hear him say "Is that a card game?"
Love the use of prime numbers, and the consistent use of patience tbh. Cicadas taking 17 years to even hatch being both prime and the biggest indicator of the waiting game in the animal kingdom. It's a really interesting group and concept and I've really enjoyed looking at their works through the years
Okay, so I'm only a third of the way through the video, so I apologize if this gets covered later. I've heard this mystery before (covered by Red Web) and hadn't heard about the "second chance puzzle". The painting used for one of the puzzle steps had me make a huge connection. 1) the magic eye puzzle of the holy grail/the message that this isn't the quest for the holy grail 2) they waited a year and a day before the next puzzle which has huge significance in medieval law, wiccanism, and even play a big part in the plot of Sir Gwain and the Green Knight- a story in the collection of late medieval Grail/King Arthur lore. 3) (the new piece of info from this video that made me realize a connection) the painting of the woman in a boat is called "The Woman of Shallott" By John William Waterhouse based on a poem by Lord Tennyson of the same name. It's a sad poem of a cursed woman and her non-interaction with Lancelot and (spoiler) ends with her dead body floating in a boat to Camelot. All three of these things are Holy Grail/King Arthur related. Maybe I'm just finding connection where there is none. I mean I am in school to be a medieval art history professor and so these things would stand out to me. But I just found it fascinating.
I'm past that but like...I wonder with all the books and poems...if some clue wasn't hidden in Tennyson's poem. The exacr like this picture reffers to is "It was the closing of the day: She loos'd the chain, and down she lay; The broad stream bore her far away,The Lady of Shalott"
A good puzzle can be deduced. They started with some smart and interesting puzzles but with the second puzzle thread it became just random cyphers thrown together without any meaningful logical path. Just brute force this and let a program solve that. It's lazy and pretentious to the max in my opinion. Still a great episode. Thank you very much, Simon! 🙂
Exactly my issue with it. It's not a logical puzzle where the intelligent and diligent can have the ability to solve. It's a series of gates to check if you have aptitude in highly specific programs. If you do, great. If you don't, you are locked out.
This whole story makes a nice parable disproving ideas of shadowy organizations and groups running the world and the Hollywood idea of how such organizations might work. my guess for the group is they have one or more idealists who are incredibly delusional and pretentious about what they're trying to do and then some more analytical puzzle/game theory nerds doing the grunt work, but they don't have any actual major power, maybe just a rich kid in the mix or some bored techbro with a bit of money. The reality of who they likely are is boring, the super cool hacker group changing the world is boring and childish, their manifesto is pretentious words hidden by pretentious puzzles. A cool Latin phrase and a mysterious logo despite claiming to have neither name or logo. And beside them is the stark contrast of Anonymous in their prime: a gloating chaotic hoard of masked goblins gleeful in their basement dungeons with no delusion about the reality of who and what they are, poking at power to prove it can bleed, but still not capable of a revolution of any kind despite superior numbers and ambition than this private puzzle club.
MIDI files can actually sound extremely good, and is behind a lot of what we today can do in electronic music. Basically, a MIDI file is not a music file as you would think of it normally, instead it's a set of instructions for what pre-recorded sound files of instruments to use in order to play a song, sheet music for computers. When you play one of these, it uses the prerecorded tones that comes with a now-mostly-defunct part of your computer that USED to be called a sound card, the ones we have today are compact enough to fit in a small USB dongle or pair of headphones, but the ones back then were much more advanced, and contained extra hardware, some of this being a read-only memory module of pre-recorded sounds analogous to what you'd find in a synth keyboard. How your bleep bloop MIDI file sounded when you actually played it was thus determined by how complex it was when originally written and how expensive your sound card was, better cards (generally) had higher quality sound bytes. This is incidentally exactly the same thing keyboards do, except they can both play and write MIDI files on the fly via direct user input, so we are still using this format for things. (And they are tiny because all the bits that normally take up space are already on whatever it is you use to play it on.)
I love how this is exactly what decoding the unknown is made for. This episode has no mystic or devine influences yet is a great mystery with plenty of stuff to discuss. one of the best episodes...though the ghost stuff can be good fun too ^^
Fantastic video !! Please make more of these (even tho they're beasts to make). On a side note, I love that it offers an excellent timeline for understanding Internet tech evolution, uses and changes in the last decade ... Imma include this in my optional course videos!
Simon talking for an hour and a half about my favorite internet mystery? What a blessed Friday. Two things: First, someone made a Cicada 3301 movie. It's embarrassing. Don't bother. Second, I think it was just a group of well intentioned cryptography nerds. It's way more fun to come up with cool, difficult puzzles with your friends than it is to actually produce meaningful change. Once it came time to actually make something of value they started losing interest slowly. They were also probably pretty young, and started growing up and caring more about things like steady jobs and making and providing for their families, and less time chatting on the internet about how they wanna change the world.
I think you're exactly right. I just followed along with this from a distance and that was always my assumption as well. Not to say that whoever was behind all this didn't go onto something different invovling lots of coding and hacking, but they obviously had a LOT of free time on their hands.
Ah c'mon, the movie wasn't THAT bad. I mean I wouldn't pay for it, but if you have a streaming service that has it free (Hulu I think has it), it'll mildly entertain you for 1.5 hours or so lol
This does seem completely rational and might even explain the "final" puzzle. Still, they had some measure of resources and were apparently quite good at covering their tracks so it seems like they had to be adults working in tech. As Simon says, the skills they wanted would easily land you a job.
@@herzkine That's pretty easy to guess. The solution to the book is unlikely to be a huge money spinner, even assuming they were profit motivated which, based on everything we seem to know, they weren't.
Definintely love the long ones, Simon. More long ones! Oh, and this was interesting, if not a little mind numbing. Not from boredom but from trying to keep up with the puzzles. Oh, and that one page of the "First Book" looked to me like it was in Futhark runes.
"I found it so cool back in the day- er i mean not me, someone who might be like me" best part of the whole video. Simon it's your own rule! Don't write down/record your crimes 🤣
You're the best. You all put together a production that I find myself watching until the end. I hope you never leave you tube. Thank you for years. You are appreciated.🙂
MORE LONG ONES PLEASE! Seriously though I love the long-form stuff. I binge videos like this of yours at work. Literally save every video from you that I want to see each week and then binge them all for 12 hours come my weekends factory job. So yes please more thank you
Loved this one! I’m a big fan of the long form videos. I understand that they do not please the algorithm gods, but I really enjoy settling in for a well written deep dive. And Simon, you have some great writers! Kevin, great job on the script, that was a fascinating rabbit hole. (Although hey, Telnet was awesome! Back in the mid-90s I spent more hours than I want to try and count logged into MUDs and MUSHes via Telnet. They were text based, but they were the best MMOs we had at the time.)
This is all taking me back to when the internet was still very interesting & still had a lot of potential for good…before it became a complete dumpster fire with seriously negative impacts on society. Which is why I love Simon’s channels. They are actually videos containing quality information that in most cases make you think. I wish more channels were like his.
well, any technology has good and bad. Whar makes it seems worse is the number of people using it and "optimization". Back then we had these shock sites that almost everyone with internet acess would stumble upon but the number of people using was so low that the impact was localized.
"before it became a complete dumpster fire with seriously negative impacts on society" - what, when it was crawling with paedos? No, it's definitely preferable in it's teen-stress-inducing, clickbaity narcissicm-feeding version, like it or not.
I blame Big Business and the General Public's involvement now with the Internet. Rock & Roll used to be Cool and Underground ... nowadays it's used for advertising by Big Business and the General Public is so used to it, so all the "Street Cred" it had before has ... diminished. Same could be said for the Internet.
@@names_are_uselessgone are the days when the only adds you had to block were porn. Scams were obvious scams back then. You knew you were taking a risk when downloading things, but your whole life couldn't be accessed through Internet.
I have one of the Magic the Gathering cards with the phone number on the back! They released ten, and that story was HUGE when it released. It was indeed a cool promotion.
I was about to be utterly shocked that you have one of those cards, then I saw your name lol. Your collection is beyond insane, and also it's a nice reminder that I should probably sell the handful of misprints I have laying around
@@themisprintguy Never cared for grading cards, I'd rather be able to use them. If I had something that rare I may feel differently, but even my set of power I sought up MP copies so I wouldn't feel bad playing with them
57:16 Simon explaining the Ship of Theseus, then asking how “we cannot step in the same river twice relates to that?”, then starting to explain how it relates to that, only to then ask the question both of them pose without realising that THAT’S HOW THEY RELATE TO EACH OTHER!
Freaking AWESOME! Its my birthday, and I get an hour and a half DTU, by my favorite of Simons script writers as a present!!! Gonna be a real good day!!!! Kevin may not love all that writing for such a long episode, but we sure love the end results, the longer the better!!
I absolutely loved the dynamic between the writer (I’m sorry I forgot the writer’s name - I am writing this comment retroactively). The interplay between the writer/script and Simon’s banter was really entertaining and lifted my spirits after a very long day. Thank you all for making my day a little better!
My opinion coincides with something Simon touched on; it was a group of smart people who wanted to do things they felt were important but realized that having taught them not to collaborate or work with others was a bad idea so that’s why the ‘veteran’ members stopped interacting with the group and shut it down eventually. It also seems to fit with why they didn’t seem to discourage collaborating in the later interactions. It’s also possible, in my opinion, as the one member mentioned he was a kid who got bored, it’s possible the actual organization were around similar ages and upon realizing their ideas were simpler in theory than reality, or just that their grand plan wasn’t really tenable, they too lost interest.
This makes a good deal of sense It probably didn’t help that they had to realize pretty fast that MOST people playing only cared about the mystery and not the ethos of the group and it’s goals. Privacy from the government is very good and enforceable, but privacy from other private citizens is a different matter…. if you create a mystery that is intended for those who are inherently curious and frankly nosy….. they are going to care about learning who you are more than they care about what you have to say. It’s like expecting the mystery gang not to unmask you at the end.
Exactly! I looked through all his videos thinking I might have missed it because I didn’t remember it. Then I remembered that he doesn’t always release them in order.
@@fadyaboujaoude Yeah, as Simon said in this video, this was recorded in January of this year. This is basically 4 months old. I bet that Jen didn't edit it all in one go. I wouldn't either, this would get tedious quick.
7:54 This is comfort content, so whether a person is tuning in for entertainment or to shake off depression or even just sleep,… … you might as well take your time❤
This is my favorite video done on this channel by far and one of my favorites by Simon ever. The literal decoding of the unknown is so fascinating. I hope we get some more encryption and decryption type stuff in the future
Simon & Kevin, This was one hell of an episode. It was really neat and I only heard of bits and small pieces about this stuff. Right from the beginning of the show I was leaning toward the NSA doing somethings like this. They are always looking for people who are good at cracking sites. Become a hacker and get a job at the NSA should be there moto.
Dammit, here I'm sitting 30 minutes in thinking they've mentioned onions and layers so much I'm shocked they haven't made a Shrek pun! 47 minutes in and there it is! 😂
More long ones Kevin pls and thank you ❤️ Love your guy's work the writing(especiallyKevin's), Simons narration/tangents, Jen's editing. Its a perfect blend that makes me want more decoding and casual criminalist.
I think the music score to all of these videos is so highly underrated. Seriously cracks me up when the daft music starts during Simons rants and confusion. Hahaha.
You know which group this really reminds me of? That group of, it ended up, rich people who decided to have these mysterious metal columns constructed and set up somewhere out in the desert, with the wisdom of the ages engraved upon them in several languages, to guide humanity in a post-apocalyptic future to rebuild a utopian society. Except they couldn't agree on what the message should be, so they basically each took a column, and said their own thing, and most of it was super obvious and/or super trite, and none of it would in any way be useful to rebuild society (or practical in any way at all, really; certainly nothing about germs, or what killed them, or how to make a microscope or telescope or anaesthetic or anything), mostly because they were a bunch of wankers lol. Sorry if I'm being a bit incoherent; it's late here and I don't remember much else about it offhand. But I'm pretty sure it was another of Simon's videos; might even have been this channel. In any case, something about the flavor of Cicada feels similar, if you know what I mean? Maybe it's the pretentious surface, but underneath it's all a bit shit really, that's reminding me so much of them haha. Be funny if it *was* them lol.
I’ve been speaking Spanish since the day I was born but it took this British man pronouncing it for me to realize cicada is Latin for “dried” probably refereeing to the dried exoskeletons they leave behind
That was actually really enjoyable! Sat through the entire thing and enjoyed it all without my brain turning off 🤣. Kevin is really becoming one of my favorite writers!
100% agreed, plus I like that Kevin’s local to me in MA which may be biasing me a little, but still I think he’s comprable to the O.G. Callum (seriously curious about what happened to him) in terms of balancing humor with the video subject! The ending of the Dark Room Soup episode about not being opposed to murder and reminding Simon that he was American was hands down gold
What I found out about myself from this video: I loathe cryptography. I also have *extremely* strong feelings about the answers to vague philosophical questions used in hiring, & thus would NEVER get hired by any company using those in their hiring process. This team is amazing for keeping me involved for such a long video about this topic!
Applied for a job in a bakery. They asked more questions about my life, my worldview and my plan for retirement than the actual job. Just let me bake cakes. That's why you exist.
The real puzzle is the question: "Who could be the people who are simultaneously fascinated with advanced cryptography and inane high-school-level philosophy and political theory?" And the answer is quite easy: Lame libertarians who will ask you to work for free.
Random unnecessary detail: painting of medieval clothed woman in a boat was The Lady of Shalott by Waterhouse, based on the poem by Tennyson. It's basically about the consequence of seeing something you're not supposed to, put in a romantic setting.
I love the delivery of these videos. Simon being kept in the dark until the script is dropped almost completely deletes the barrier between l337 speaking nerdologic experts and us. The everyday average Joe's, who don't know how to pronounce Cicada either.
Watched a few short form videos on the topic, but it was amazing to hear every step and piece of information explained!! Really appreciate the details and infographics along the way :)
This was really well done, thank you both! I love the long ones too. My theory on the "job": since I've made ARGs in the past I know it wouldn't be that complicated to set up a thing like that and make it appear to be a job, but the other workers are actually members of the creation team (puppet master, as it was called back when I was doing them) It's possible that was another part of the puzzle that team members slowly grew bored of over the course of a year when neither it nor the final rune book had been solved. Though, if it were me, I'd definitely write an alternate path to get the next puzzle if the players couldn't solve it and then reward whoever inevitably solved the original puzzles 6 years down the road. But because there isn't actually a story element except what the players speculate on, I doubt it's an ARG. A group of brainy people that got together to do something and grew bored/became tied more to adulting that bled members as time passed? More plausible.
Giving this ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Although I kept waiting for the twist, and thought, maybe this was a heist story. Then I remembered, this wasn’t The Casual Criminalist. 😂 I need to start paying attention to which channel I’m clicking on so I don’t confuse myself. Lol.
sorry simon but Kevin, please do more long ones! this one was great and with new information that I haven't gotten the last time I was looking into 3301 wich was back in 2018.
This was absolutely fascinating and by far the best video I’ve seen about the group. Thanks to everyone for your time and dedication in making it happen!
Simon I don’t know how you made it through this episode. Just listening to it required me to take a break to catch my breath. This is a lot. Thank you for your service to our entertainment and education!
Watching Simon in the wild is absolutely hilarious. I am a BIG fan of Biographics and all of the other channels he hosts and I IMMEDIATELY subscribed once I learned this was a new series. Love Simon in the wild lol. I would love to have Simon read my eulogy should I meet an untimely early demise lol.
This is the best episode of decoding the unknown i've seen so far! I love it. Wow who could've known that a group of teenagers/loners who inhabit 4chan, with too much time on their hands would NOT make an amazing elite team of freedom fighters. Shocking.
The amount of times where hes like "what is x?" And IMMEDIATELY reads "if you dont know what x is..." was hilarious lol. I'm glad he went into this blind, it was a fun journey to experience and not just curated like other channels would with this type of stuff
that message for the winners weirdly gave me V for Vendetta energy but i think that’s just because of Simon’s accent- anyway great video! i’ve been wondering what the name “Cicada 3301” referred to ever since i first heard it (by which i mean i didn’t even know if it was a real puzzle, a conspiracy theory, an ARG, or something else entirely), but this video included plenty of detail so that even an internet rando like me could figure it out. bravo to all of you for the work you put into this absolute beast Xx
Thank you Simon, Kevin, and Jen. I truly enjoy the episodes you put together and appreciate all of your hard work. One thing Simon, the page you showed where you said it looks like a made up language. In reality it is Runic. Yes it is a dead language these days. And most people have 0 clue about it. It was used by the vikings way back in the day. And yes you all are correct on there really isn't an easy way to translate it. It doesn't substitute Runic characters for our letters. And some Runic characters can represent more than one letter or sound. I greatly enjoy the mysteries. Thank you all again.
Here’s how a midi file works: as Simon got the first part mostly right, it’s just information about pitch and rhythm to play for each midi track. This information would then be read by your hardware (typically your pc but this also applies to video game console hardware) which is acting as the synthesizer. In other words, your PC is the “synthesizer” producing the sounds and the midi file is just the “fingers” telling the keys what to play-which hardly uses up any memory.
To elaborate slightly: MIDI was created in 1981 and wasn’t really for audio files as we think of them today (in fact, PCs capable of halfway decent audio wouldn’t exist for another decade.) MIDI was created as a means for electronic musical instruments to interoperate with each other, so the reason it only contains minimal data like a note’s pitch & velocity is because that’s the only data you really _need_ if you’re connecting like a keyboard and a guitar and a synth together. What’s cool about MIDI is that, because you’re just receiving data about the notes, you can edit & arrange MIDI files basically like you would sheet music. And you can swap different “voices” to translate those notes into different sounds, so you can take a performance on a keyboard and make it sound like an organ or a guitar or whatever. When PC audio finally started getting good enough that people might actually want to hear it, MIDI was pretty much the choice. Musicians with high-end PCs wanted to use MIDI for its intended purpose, and its small file sizes made it one of the first practical audio formats for things like videogames.
This is my first episode of decoding the unknown I am an OG BB... But I think I first started with top tens and biographics... anyways I find this experience more reserved with you sitting down something about you being on your feet on The Blaze gets you hype af, AM I RIGHT PETER??!! Anyways I just wanted to say something while there were still only 50 comments so you might see it LOL, I dig your work Fact Boi...from florida with love.
listening to Simon talk about technology is both entertaining and frustrating... For the record ISO files can be used to make an image of ANY storage disk that is formatted in a modern file format (FAT, FAT32, NTFS, NTFS3, etc...) Windows added a built in virtual drives that can read ISO files by default. Generally though I have only had to use ISOs to image hard drives when moving from an old computer to a new one without loosing my current windows environment.
25:10 the thing about a MIDI file is that it does not record the sound of a song, it is not an audio format. Instead, it is the computer equivalent of the roll of punched paper in a player piano, it conveys instructions to a MIDI instrument (usually, keyboards, synthesizers) about what sequence to play each key. But, the sound of a MIDI file is mostly a function of the settings, the "voice" of the device. If you have a MIDI capable keyboard which is set for "beep beep boop" sounds when you press the keys, that's how it'll sound when playing a MIDI file. But if you set the keyboard/synth to sound like a saxophone, the midi file will sound like sax.
Of all the inceptions by Jen, i laughed the most at the one "allegedly" at the end shortly followed by the skeleton Jen about three quarters through. About the questions somewhere in the middle, most are easy clicks - even the ones about the color looking the same for everyone. "My green doesn't look like your green" is unprovable until we can swap bodies, although i'd wager you'd still interpret it the same way with different eyes. The mathematical concept behind the SSSS coding is parity and checksums as used in a RAID (not the Shadow Legends type, but data storage). And about the releasing data by dead man switch: It should be possible with a circle or interlocking circles using the parity principle. If you have a circle of 5 people and four have 1 and 0 at random per bit, you get the fifth persons data by combining all data bits by XOR. So if the fifth guy went missing, the four others can reconstruct his data without any one individual having it. This is the simplest example, other ECCs use more complex combinations to reconstruct more data or allowing for multiple failures without losing the data. So if you had 011010 as the data, the other guys could have 001011, 100101, 110100 and 000000, thus not owning the data but being able to reconstruct it as a group and send it out.
Ok Simon I'm binge watching this channel after Into the Shadows, and I have to say I'm loving it, I'm very amused at your reaction to everything the writers throw at you here. I'm slightly younger than you and I can name, reference or land every joke, concept, meme and even the mysteries themselves, I've been using computers for 3 decades and the Internet for 2 and a half. I agree only a person with a very peculiar set of interests and skills will understand and know about the cases you discuss here (and the myriad of jokes from either Katy or Kevin), I've always wanted to comment on what a whale of a time this channel is, BUT YOU NOT KNOWING SHREK IS ABSOLUTELY UNFORGIVABLE YOUNG MAN, THERE ARE ONLY 2 GENERATIONS ON THIS MARVELLOUS SPECK OF DUST WE CALL EARTH AND THEY ARE BEFORE SHREK AND AFTER SHREK. YOU ARE FAILING TO REPRESENT YOUR GENERATION. Thank you for the laughs Whistler boi, Kuddos from Mexico!
@@Nastyn1nja808I do know Shreck first movie, but all I know about dragon ball is that it's an anime. And it had guy named Goku or super syan or something, and he can change his hair colour. And there is a guy named vegetarian or something and he is maybe an alien? Surely Dragon Ball isn't as mainstream as naruto, bleach or death note? Or Shreck... Perhaps it depends on what contry you grew up in.
Scrolled through comments looking specifically for your usual timestamps, I think I've said it before on a previous video to that k you for your continuous work. If anything but to skip the notoriously annoying mid roll ads.😂🙂 Though for ones like this, I thank you so I can skip the unnecessary, or parts that I am already knowledgeable of, so again, keep up the good work. You're pretty consistent and I am thankful fornit!🙂🙃
I found that totally fascinating. Also the length was great as I got a lot done whilst listening and occasionally screaming at the screen ‘they’re runes!’
Haahaa, me too. I very much appreciate Simon for his humor, but also for making me feel better about my extremely ecclectic knowledge base. The only thing I had also never seen or knew about was the Cicada puzzle itself, and the new Tron movie.
