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Letterboxing | |
August 31st, 2018 | |
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Let me preface this by saying my snark here is entirely fictional | |
and I have the greatest of respect for other people's hobbies... | |
* * * * * * | |
Geocaching is bullshit. Seriously? Let me poke in some numbers and | |
walk there and boom! a seeeeeecret thing. Tada! (play "Link gets | |
the triforce noise" in your head). Oh sure, there's clues to solve | |
but at the end of the day the whole physical aspect of going | |
somewhere could be removed and replaced with a checkbox that says, | |
"Yep, got it." | |
Now letterboxing... that's the shit right there. None of this | |
fancy schmancy technology. Instead, good old fashioned vague | |
pioneer directions like, "Go west-north-west for 45 paces until | |
you near the tree that looks like an old man taking a piss." | |
That's some real adventure! Not the old man taking a piss, the | |
dire--you know what I mean. I love letterboxing. I will stamp the | |
shit out of some letterboxes. I will leave hitchhikers along the | |
way and have grand adventures in state parks. Mmmm, saucy hobby. | |
The reason I bring this up is not to bash geocaching (though that | |
was fun) but because Christy (who loves her some GPS) reminded me | |
of an idea I had a while back for letterboxing which, I suppose, | |
could be channelled for the dark arts in her hobby as well. My | |
idea was to make a series of box challenges which led from one to | |
the other and eventually were all pieced together into an Uber | |
challenge. Not the car service kind, but like--you know what | |
I mean. | |
The theme was cryptography, which I felt was fitting. The simplest | |
box used a Da Vinci cipher. The box then gave a piece of the | |
puzzle to the next clue which was an Arnold cipher. Then on to | |
a straddling checkerboard. Then the big one was a VIC cipher. And | |
when you took the pieces from all the boxes together and | |
concatenated all the strings you found, it would be a PGP key you | |
could use to decode the final message to the final box. | |
I got as far as that and some basic clue planning, then I got hung | |
up on where I wanted to hide the boxes and never got around to | |
doing it. So, if you are out there and you letterbox, please go | |
ahead and steal my idea. I'd like to try and find your box | |
(snicker). If you're a dirty geocacher, I guess you can do with it | |
what you want... ugh. | |
;) |