"And then he said..."

Quite the most bizarre day of my life, when I got up at four in the morning, drove to a frost-covered wood, and dug up a prize worth £100,000.

I remember sitting at home looking at the Cube I’d dug up - shiny, silvery and as heavy as two house bricks - walking away to do other things with the evening, but having to return to it again and again to check it was real.

And of course, at that moment in time, no-one knew it had been found except us and to everyone else the game - the first and, as it turned out, only season of Perplex City - was still on.

Well, anyway, that was a year ago and it’s old news now for most folk.

For a few, though, it’s still interesting enough for the anniversary to be marked with a series of interviews.

The first to be published was with me, and you can read it - and others - here.

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So, well, yes, it's been a while since I last posted. Quite a bit's happened, actually.

For starters, we're probably only a month or so away from the publication by a small San Francisco press of an anthology of short stories that includes one of mine. More on that when I have more, but right now I'm tremendously excited, because it's the first time in a very long time that any of my fiction will have been published.

Also taking a lot of my time is MyBathroomFinder.com, the first step in our fledgling business empire. It's starting to find its feet and generate traffic. Not a lot of income yet, but it's early days.

And the other big thing is Perplex City, the £100,000 / $200,000 treasure hunt and alternative reality game that's been running for the last two-and-a-half years. 50,000 players, 92 countries.

We won it.

If you're used to my usual writing style you're probably waiting for me to qualify it and say something like “well, what I actually mean is that 5000 of us were declared 'winners' but only one person got the prize and it wasn't us”.

Well, as it turned out it was us.

It's been a very weird couple of weeks, with a lot of nice messages of congratulations from people (including some of the ones who came closest to winning it themselves) and some emails and phone calls from friends I'd lost touch with and who saw it in the news.

There's an awful lot to say about it, so I built a small website with the story and a link to my Flickr photos. Go explore, Digg it or stick it on del.icio.us or whatever if that's your sort of thing - I'll still be here when you come back. And believe me, no matter how surprised you are at the news it's nothing to how stunned I am, as I look back at it.

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.

I suppose I ought to try and write in this again. November 2002, I set it up. It’d be a shame to let it fade away. Have been working a lot - full time, for the first time in ages. A bit in Islington, a bit in Oxford (horrible drive), and a bit near Wycombe. And before that the council elections - two of my candidates got in, three or four more lost to blatant but unprovable fraud. I came second from last in the ward I was standing in, which was the plan. Didn’t want to win. Still playing Perplex City - we’re now about 130th out of about 27,000. Would quite like to win that - no-one pays you £100,000 for being a councillor.

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.