RadiKS at FoBiK:

Communication 1: Pregame

Greetings FoBiK GC,

I am coming to you live via a nifty wireless Danger toy, which RadiKS 
will have with us during the clinical trials this weekend.

We will be on AIM as CENSORED non-stop, and this email address will 
also reach us anywhere with GPRS coverage...  If GC is able to keep an 
AIM window open at HQ, we'd love to share with you a running commentary 
of the pleasures and pain of FoBiK.

We can also send pictures.  Lowres, but who cares....

Cool, eh?

Live from the road....

   - chris / RadiKS
--cmd

Communication 2: Hertz

First picture from FoBik...
--cmd

Communication 3: Start

GC had teams face their fears, including a strip tease, body painting, 
singing, and I had to stuff cheese in my ears.

Fobik is a cure for fear.  I no longer fear cheese.

Great start!

Lots of pictures attached.  I hope they look ok.
--chris / RadiKS

Communication 4: Kicking Ass

RadiKS is kicking ass in Fobik.

First clue involved piecing together pictures on a cd case that lead us 
to a statue of praying hands in a Hayward cemetery.

There we got 45 words and 45 definitions and had to match them.  We did 
this over lunch at Vals.

First side effect of fobik - munchies.

That led us way up into chabot park, where we got two small chess boards 
and a series of chess moves.

Lance had a flashback to megahard, and said "semaphores!" and we nailed 
it fast.

Next was a creek in morega area, with a very cool enigma machine we had 
to assemble out of pvc pipe.

Solved that fast, and passed a ton of teams.

Got to dinosaur hill park even ahead of advil.  They pulled in as we 
were leaving.  There we had to factor a bunch of roman numerals into 
primes.

We again sped thru - got it in 16 minutes with great teamwork.  Go 
RadiKS!

Now we are pulling into the mall at concord.  More soon....
--chris / RadiKS

Communication 5: First Sunset

Game has been great so far, and we are still way up in the front of the 
pack.  What a change, sure feels weird....

First sunset is happening...

At the mall we got a clue of a schematic for a machine on a big drafting 
sheet.  We had to work out how fast each gear is spinning, which mapped 
to letters.

That sent us to the uber-cool Port Costa, where we had to solve a tile 
puzel.

That took us to crocket, in the shadow of the new bridge being built.  
There we found a cd with a reversed intro, and 26 tracks.

Taking the last letters of the track names, and reading backwards, we 
got instructions to take a long drive to black point.

We are enroute now....

Game has been way cool so far!

More pics attached.
--chris / RadiKS

Communication 6: First Flaw

Fobik has had its first few setbacks, but still rocks.

At black point we found small books hanging from a wire suspended under 
a bridge.  It required some creative climbing to get down.  It was fun 
watching other teams struggle.

The clue was a niftily modified beale cipher based on sympathy for the 
devil.  That lead us to the lagoon by the marin civic center.

There we got an xxx rated audio cd, with a message from marry muffdiver 
and friends.  The whole message was made up of curse words, and was 
interleaved.  Fun to solve, goatfuckers.

Next was a pier in mill valley.  There we got a clue based on the bar 
codes of kuwaity import food.  Fun, and clever.

That sent us to the east battery in sf, where we found a braille message 
in a shit stinking tunnel, that we had to solve by touch.

That sent us to the cafe, a gay club on market in castro.  We had to 
cruise the packed club trying to find a guy wearing a fobik tshirt.  
When we did, we had to cronfront our homophobia by extracting the clue 
from his pocket.

He gave us a drty fckng cl wth n vwls.  Fckr.

But just as we solved it, we got a call from gc saying that the next 
location had been compromised.

Wah!!!!  We were in 4th place leaving the cafe!!!

This was the first flaw on an up to this point perfect game.

Gc told us to go to the 22nd street caltrain stop.  There we found 34 
bandaids stuck to the wall - and had to identify them by smell.

This clue was tough - it was a sub cipher with no wordbreaks.

Gc asked us to go draw in wordbreaks to help the following teams.

That sent us to a hotel room on harison where we found a bruised and 
bloody fobik researcher who had been left for dead.  She gave us food 
bag, and a fobik antidote to drink.

We solved a picture clue, which sent us into the woods on yerba buena 
island.  Now we are working on a satanic cube clue on Treasure Island.

Fun stuff!
--chris / RadiKS

Communication 7: Afterward Part 1

My appologies that there were no further updates.  At yerba buena island 
my brain started to shut down, and it was hard to remain focused on the 
clues, much less on the Danger logging.

Now it is monday, I am on a flight to LA, and I am sorta well rested.  
Not.  Still exhausted...  Have been barely functional today...

Anyway, back to our thrilling story....

The demon cube proved to be particularly heinous, and it was the first 
clue that really had us stumped.  It was also late enough that we were 
crashing...  Adam lead the charge to solve this one, and we drove to the 
makeout lot on Treasure Island to park and work on this.  There I had my 
first brief nap.

This was actually the first time that we had to call GC for help.  The 
clue consisted of 9 little l-shaped segments, and we had to assemble 
them into a cube to read the message on the outside.  But - our weary 
brains became convinced that this was impossible.  Doh!

Eventually with some help we got it, and were told to go to the stone 
gazebo by lake merrit in oakland.  There, we had to solve a puzzle drawn 
in chalk on the floor of the gazebo for a member of gc.

This seemed to be rather hastily put together, and it turns out it was - 
GC put this together on the fly to slow down the lead teams that were 
too far ahead of schedule.

The actor from GC then gave us a picture of the oakland skyline taken in 
panorama from nearby on the lake.  But the buildings had all been 
shifted to be in different locations.

It took a while to recognize all the buildings, and then our brains 
turned to mush.  The encoding wasn't all that complex, but we just 
couldn't see the last 10% of the solution, and after way too long we 
called for help.

The coded message lead us to a public storage in oakland, and gave us a 
gate combination.  But when we called in to confirm with GC, they told 
us not to break into the storage area, but to solve the clue on the 
outside, and we will return later.  ?!!???

Outside the public storage, we found a clue bag with a stinky meat 
necklace in it.  Gross!  Worse, there was only one other clue left!  It 
seemed as if we had dropped to near last place!

But - we didn't know this at the time, but GC had reordered the clues 
for the frontrunning teams only, because the public storage wasn't 
accesible until 730am.  We got there around 6am!  So, we had a big extra 
jog inserted into our route that others who came later didn't...

Anyway, the rotting meat necklace was a sub cypher that required us to 
identify the gross bits of food.  Fortunately, there were word breaks, 
and the message started with "goto", so it wasn't to hard to solve.

While we were spread out on the sidewalk working on this, a freaky guy 
wandered up to us and said "hey, that's a great necklace.  Is that one 
of those african necklaces?  You could get a lot of money for that"  he 
then tried to offer us a beer, which he chugged and then threw into the 
street.  He then wanted us to give him money for gas.

We ignored him, and he went away...

The stinky meat necklace lead us all the way down to a park in union 
city, where we had our sunrise experience wandering around a park 
looking for a shopping cart graveyard, which was bizarre and cool...

There we found some pictures of rotting corpses, marked with strange 
symbols.

We went to krispy cream to work on this, and I nearly fell asleep in my 
donut...  We needed a tip from GC to realize that we needed to cut the 
pictures into strips, and they also pointed out some serious typos in 
the clue.  Woops!  But, with that info, we started to make progress...


--chris / RadiKS

Communication 8: Afterward Part 2

Ok, more...

The cut up picture clue sent us to a park at vallejo mill in Niles, 
where we found that gc had left different clues for different teams?!?  
We had a little baggy waiting for us labeled RadiKS, with three strips 
of paper and three white powders inside.  Most of the other teams were 
being instructed to take a big envelope with some sort of board 
inside.

It turns out that the powder clue was another created on the fly by GC 
to slow down the lead teams, and this is where the fast teams that had 
skipped the public storage were being routed back.  But it left us 
confused, because there were so many paths crossed.  It was now 
impossible to tell which teams were ahead or behind...

The powder decoded to tell us to go back to the storage area - a LONG 
drive way back up north, in traffic.

We eventually got back to the public storage, but now it was noonish.  
In hindsight, we realy wish that GC had just offered us the option to 
nap for an hour in the AM - we could have waited for the storage area to 
open.  Ah well...

Inside the storage locker there was a very cool coffin, and nothing 
else.  There was nothing to take inside.  But when we let the lid slam 
shut, the coffin started howling and groaning and screaming - and the 
noises could be mapped to morse.

We found out later that the coffin was supposed to only activate when 
somebody layed down inside and sealed the lid.  That would have been 
cool!

The morse howls sent us to oyster bay park by the oakland airport.  This 
is where most of the teams got the meat necklace, and where we were now 
supposed to get an ouji board that the other teams had been getting in 
niles.  But, a team just ahead of us had just taken the last one!

Suck.

GC advised that we should let them give us the answer, since they didn't 
know if any boards would be left in the park way back down in Niles.  
Also, we were now in the back of the pack and running out of time.  
Yipes!

So, we took the answer - and headed off to a cemetery in Fremont.



--chris / RadiKS

Communication 9: Afterward Final Installment

In the fremont cemetery, we found a fresh grave, and dug up a shrunken 
skull head.

There were a ton of vans all parked in the lot - so we feared that this 
was a tough one.  It was.  Inside the skull were two long strips of 
paper, covered with grids and dots.   But there were to many possible 
ways to interperet the data.  But once GC confirmed our assumptions, and 
pointed out that the dots might NOT be binary, we got it.  Off to a 
porta potty in Sunnyvale, right near my office actually.

GC let us know that the toilet had been compromised, and gave us the 
address of a house in sunnyvale for our final ritual.  But the toilet 
was on the way, so we stopped to see what was there.

GC said that even if we wanted to get the clue, we wouldn't want to.  
And I could tell that FoBiK had worn off, because I was now afraid.  The 
clue was an issue of Teen Beat that had a cleverly encoded message.  But 
somebody had knocked the magazine rack into the hole of blue death.  We 
could see the clue floating within reach, but declined to go in.

At the house in sunnyvale we were given an exorcism in a dark room by 
candlelight to purge our souls of fobik.  Then we were given the final 
clue - a simple pentagram puzzle that lead us to a park in sunnyvale 
where GC had rented the rec center for a post game party!

We crossed the line around 3:30 I think, and got a huge cheer as we came 
in.  Yeah!

I have no idea what our ultimate rank will be because of the extra 
detour and clues we did, and some of the others we were forced to skip.  
But I don't care - I am really proud of how well RadiKs did this time 
around.  For once, other team saw OUR calling card!

This is definately our best outing ever - if we keep this up we will 
lose our reputation as the bane of every game control.  But - I think we 
still kept alive the RadiKS spirit of maximizing our fun, and absolutely 
minimizing our calls for help.

Go team!!!

I can't wait for the officual wrapup from the most excellent FoBiK GC!

   -- chris / RadiKS

Favorite Location; The Cafe.  Port Costa.  The bridge, both of them...

Least Favorite: Damn public storage (but only because of the limited 
hours)  And the mall, because of traffic.  And oyster bay, because our 
ouji board was missing....

Favorite clue; Factoring, because our teamwork was perfect in solving 
it.

Least favorite: Damn devil cube.  It nearly broke our spirit....  But it 
was a cool clue and fair.  The skull puzzle on the other hand had too 
many possible ways to solve.
--chris dunphy / PalmSource