"And then he said..."

Perplex City, the £100,000 game to find a valuable cube buried somewhere on the planet, is building up to a climax - and they've set us a particularly tough task as part of it. One strand of the game involves solving puzzlecards, 256 puzzles ranging from the easy and the familiar right through to the all-but impossible.

Card #256 is one of the last wave of puzzles to be released, and it seems to be a test of whether it's possible to track down one individual with no details about them other than a photo. It's a real-life test of six degrees of separation.

Check out the photo below. This is the guy we need to find - he could be anyone, anywhere on earth. We've been given a hint that his name is Satoshi. The location he was in when he took the photo of himself has been identified by players as Kayserberg in Alsace, near where there used to be a training college for a couple of Japanese multinationals. Progress, but still not a lot to go on, since he could be on the other side of the world by now - and probably is.

Perplex City card #256, Billion to One
The text down the side translates as “find me” - can you help do that?

The chances are you won't know who it is, but maybe you know someone you could ask and take us one step further down the six degrees?

And if you can help at all, go here to the website we've set up.

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Time for another look at the search terms that have brought people here*. Fewer political ones than in recent months, and a bit of a historical flavour here and there.

• 25/05, 22:49:02 Google: he said 1…
• 26/05, 14:14:30 Google: davina james-hanman Old student union political acquaintance of mine
• 26/05, 16:26:36 Google: ben ramm ming campbell Fight! Fight! Fight!
• 27/05, 18:18:52 Google: l33t spk w00t
• 29/05, 03:39:37 Google: “Leah Darbyshire” “So long, farewell, auf Wiedersehen, good night”
• 29/05, 08:37:36 Google: “and then” 2…
• 29/05, 10:10:52 Google: tony pond tr7 70s rally driver with a way cool car
• 29/05, 15:56:11 Google: and he said… 3…
• 30/05, 00:13:44 Google: and then 4…
• 30/05, 08:51:10 Google: he said… 5…
• 30/05, 15:21:27 Google: colditz castle reid Pat Reid: former Escape Officer
• 30/05, 17:23:54 Google: dressed in waterproofs Dahling, everyone who’s anyone is in Gore-Tex this year
• 31/05, 05:47:19 Google: eurovision 2004 ruslana blog If she wrote one, I missed it. Damn.
• 31/05, 19:06:18 Google: Wartime Uxbridge The Polish War Memorial and RAF Northolt, probably
• 31/05, 19:46:05 Google: “julia goldsworthy” “good looking” G33k girlz r hawt!
• 01/06, 06:53:12 Google: HE SAID NO HE DIDN’T
• 01/06, 12:19:05 Google: wymondham abbey graveyard A wonderful place for a lazy summer’s day
• 02/06, 04:29:09 Google: he said about me What? What?
• 03/06, 22:46:50 Google: highton hitchin My old Deputy Head - now inside for offences against boys
• 05/06, 00:58:36 Google: “he said, “ 6.

* refers to the JournalSpace version of this blog, where this post originally appeared.

Brilliant. No sooner do I add a podcasting link that runs off my blog’s RSS feed than the podcasting site falls over and the feed packs up. Maybe a new post will kick-start it…

Edit: All seems well now. Wonder how long for?

I can’t imagine many people (or even any people) signing up for this, but you can now subscribe to podcasts of this blog using the Talkr button in the right-hand nav column, so long as you don’t mind hearing it in a robotic American monotone that bears no resemblance to my own Home Counties mumbling. You can also listen to any single post (the recent ones, anyway) by using the ‘listen here’ button on each post.

You can find out more about Talkr by following this link - I first saw it on Tom Reynold’s blog a while ago and it turns out to be extremely easy to set up and run with, producing results that are useful and comical in equal measures. You can also use it to get spoken versions of any other site that produces an RSS feed, even if the site owner isn’t signed up.

Part of me now wants to write posts with lots of rude words, or comments on American politics, for the fun of hearing the voice say “up your bum, President Bush”.

But that would be childish.

Edit: it seems you have to wait for your RSS feed to update when you make a new post, which makes sense I suppose. Unfortunately, that seems to take eight hours for me on Journalspace.

The latest challenge thrown up by the ever-fascinating game Perplex City requires players to take part in a personality test in order to schmooze a researcher who holds a key piece of information. It's a nice take-off of the meme craze. Here's my results for today's (second) challenge.

Random's View On What is it like to be a citizen of Earth?
My Interpretation Parcback Someone Else's
Fascinating. Earth is one of the most complex sophisticated and varied worlds in any universe. It is populated by billions of people who speak hundreds of languages and live in frozen wastelands and urban jungles and desert dunes and chains of tropical islands. And this is the best you could come up with? It is not always possible to translate a creative vision into reality. Have you considered a change of career?
	Oistin Meade's Earth Psychology Tests! Live from Perplex City !

And here's yesterday's part one:

Random's Personal Assessment
Upon your death please donate your brain to medical science. You can keep your liver. Like your hero TJ Hooker you tackle challenges head-on with determination and vigour paying scant attention to the law. This devil-may-care attitude may work for fictional crimefighters but it can be counterproductive in real life. Your responses to the inkblot test suggest that you are unable to censor your own thoughts. Your stream of consciousness gushes like the rapids of the Mazy River and anybody entering into conversation with you is likely to drown. There are a number of excellent cognitive therapists in Perplex City who may be able to help you overcome your problem. I am not one of them.
	Oistin Meade's Earth Psychology Tests! More tests coming soon live from Perplex City!

For those who haven't come across it before, PxC is an alternative reality game with a prize to the winner worth £100,000 or $200,000. We are currently placed in the upper end of the 25,000 or so players but it could easily be won by someone who hasn't yet signed up. The easiest way to describe it is as a version of Masquerade for the internet and mobile telecommunications age. Check out the website here.

You had to be there…

But if you were, grab any you fancy.

White stilettos.

This post by SusanG on the Daily Kos about the South Dakota abortion ban is very, very angry and very, very brilliant. Read.

In South Dakota, I Am Disposable

Imagine this: One day you wake up and discover an entire state has passed a law that declares you are worthless.

You are no longer a person. You are a package - a package for a potential person. Picture the styrofoam Big Mac carton tumbling along the shoulder of the interstate. Remember the discarded, dented Budweiser can you kicked aside at the campground to pitch a tent. Recall the time you scraped a month-old Popsicle wrapper from the side of your garbage can. That's you.

The full thing's well worth a look.

Edit - From JM: sexist asshat - Google - Googlebomb.

I got this email from another.com, which allows you to have an extra nine email addresses that are aliases of the main account one. I had “no-terminal-five@heathrow-airport.co.uk”, or something very similar. I'd almost forgotten about it, in fact, until this came.

Dear Andy,

We write with reference to the alias email address you have @heathrow-airport.co.uk

Following a complaint from the BAA, we have to withdraw this domain name from the service within the next 7 days. Any emails sent to your address at the domain name after this date will be returned to the sender.

Any other alias will be totally unaffected and your account will continue to operate normally in all other respects.

Please accept our apologies for any convenience that this may cause.

Yours sincerely

Nichola Howroyd
another.com

Spoilsports.

You couldn't do this over here. Someone - probably those great defenders of children, the tabloid press - would call it a shopping catalogue for paedophiles. But over in Tampa, Florida, there's a project called the Heart Gallery that's making a real difference for kids with no families who are hoping for adoption.

Briefly, amateur and professional photographers in Hillsborough County, Tampa, take portraits of children in local foster care, display the pictures and the kids' stories in a gallery (sometimes with audio messages from the children), and invite the public along to have the hearts ripped out of their chests and get the kids adopted. It works, a lot. Something like 40 per cent of the children end up with families as a result.

People make strange decisions when it comes to adoption. I know - I'm adopted myself and I'm told the first couple who looked at me back in '68 rejected me because I was too old (five months!) and too Spanish-looking. So my first thought was that this was a bit dodgy - a sort of Darwinian selection process where the pretty get selected and the ugly and ill-favoured disappear back into the mud.

But it's not - the photos are wonderful, and they're of all sorts of children with all sorts of appearances. You'd want to give not just any of them a home, but all of them.

Apparently there are about 70 of these galleries across the US, but this one is the first to include audio messages from the kids. I can only imagine what it's like to listen to them. They must be the foster care equivalent of the 9/11 answerphone messages: for a lot of these kids, not finding an adoptive family is a kind of death - the death of opportunity, the final chance gone to lead what most of us would term a normal life with loved ones and ambitions and a realistic chance of achievement.

I heard about this over at Heck's Kitchen, where JM linked to it because her sisters are among the photographers (in fact, one is an organiser). She also linked to a great article from the local press (links at the bottom of this post, and a hat-tip to Jenny for the text that my second paragraph is ripped off from).

As I get older, I find I feel more and more strongly about adoption. Not my own adoption - I'm very relaxed about that - but about the subject itself. What that means in practice is not something I fully understand - I don't know where that particular thought process is taking me. I don't even really know how to finish this paragraph about it, so I'll just let it trail off here unsatisfyingly while I let the thoughts brew a while longer.

But I do know that I think the Heart Gallery of Tampa Bay is a bloody wonderful thing and I wish it was possible to do the same everywhere.

• The Heart Gallery of Tampa Bay
• Judy Hill at TBO.com Life: Open Heart To Special Child With Valentine
• Judy Hill at TBO.com Life: A Few Hours, A Few Gifts, Many Hopes
• Jesse Miller Photography
• Heck's Kitchen