saiyanqueenreads:

The Confusion Hill Journal Heist
aka Journey With A Stone Nacho pt5

So with my offerings in hand, or tube, I entered the gift shop to make my tribute to the Cipher Hunt treasure box. I’d been thinking about what I could offer up months in advance, and I decided that I’d print a small poster of one of the GF coloring book project pages I’ve been working on for about a year and another print of the first thing I ever designed digitally, since it happened to be a Bill poster.

When my friend Eric saw me off, he also handed me a contribution for the box. Now he’s not into Gravity Falls himself, though he’s seen every episode once with me in support of my fandom. But he’s got mad digital art skills… So he combined two of my obsessions and created a Journal page about certain mutant turtles rumored to dwell in NYC. I think it’s amazing! He even used linen paper and distressed it. Lucky for me he made me a copy too.

Whoever picks these pieces, just know that, as of writing this, they’re literally all three 2-of-a-kind pieces.

(Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4)

And now we come to the… unexpected twist in my relatively normal tale of making the pilgrimage to Confusion Hill up to this point.

So when I first popped to treasure box open, there was a hand-made Journal 3 notebook laying on top. You can see it in the first photo of the box open and I moved it out of the way for the rest of the photos. But when it came time to choose what I’d be taking home after I made my contributions (one for me, one for Eric). I decided that a notebook that looked like Journal 3 would be neat for drawing and taking cosplay design notes in. So I chose that for myself, and a pack of cards for Eric….

Flash forward to me sitting at the San Francisco airport waiting for my flight home. My phone is full of photos, my heart and brain are full of emotion and happy memories. But my stomach is empty. I’ve got time, so I grab a dinner at some overpriced place that has phone chargers, unzip my travel backpack and grab a pencil, ready to take notes…

Only, the notebook is NOT blank inside….

…

..

OH. MY. GOD!
I’ve stolen the guestbook!!!!!

I’m looking at hundreds of entries, signatures, sketches, messages, even a photo; all filling the pages of what I thought was a blank notebook offering, but is turning out to be a message book for visitors who made the pilgrimage to see Bill’s statue.

I feel terrible! These are meant to be shared with other fans and added to, not to be taken away by one fan. But there’s not time to return it before my flight. I don’t even have a car anymore…

I stared at (what I’d mentally started dubbing) the GuestJournal hard while I ate airport dinner. By the time I reached the final pages I realized that most of them were pretty filled, but there was one last, perfect, blank place for a message of my own; the black binding page in the back.

I was going to sign it, but how was I going to make up for stealing it in the first place??

It wasn’t until I got home and slept on it and had time to do some more looking into the treasure chest online that I realized what I could do. You see, I found out that there’d been other guestbooks placed inside the box too. Obviously they were not still in the chest, so I can’t be the first person to make this mistake. Other people took home other guestbooks, or the other guestbooks filled up and were eventually removed. That made me feel a bit better. (Though I still worry, because some of the dates are really, relative to cipher hunt, old… Please don’t tell me I stole the ORIGINAL GuestJournal!)

But there is this lingering feeling I have:

These messages are meant to be shared with other fans. And since I’ve got the GuestJournal now, I’m going to do my darnedest to make sure they still can be shared!!! I’m going to archive each and every entry of the GuestJournal and post the entries online.

That way I hope that not only those who signed it will be able to see the messages of those who came before and after them, but that those without the means to travel to Confusion Hill can still read about the excitement and enthusiasm seeing Bill inspired in Cipher Hunters.

I hope that this will make up for unintentionally stealing the GuestJournal before its time was quite up.

But I do need a bit of help:
I’m small potatoes. I’ll fully admit to that. I have less than a hundred followers, and many of them are from different fandoms than Gravity Falls. And in order to feel like I’m really doing due diligence, I’d like to get these pages out to a broad audience.

So, I humbly ask that if you read through the entries and are touched, please reblog. Particularly those that have reach, and a GF fanbase that will see it, please reblog these messages. I want them to be shared, to remind us all that we’re part of an amazing fandom and community. I’m tagging the user names I found within the entries and those who I follow here on Tumblr. It’s the only way I really know how to get the ball rolling, since I don’t really use other social media much. The rest is up to the GF Tumblr community. Reblog, link to Facebook, tweet, whatever you think is worth doing to let our fandom see how much Gravity Falls and the Cipher Hunt, and the pilgrimage to Bill’s statue means to us fans.

@psychicpumpkinpi, @shooting13star, @mistrel-fox, @gravityfallsrockz, @pinetreepreserve, @gfdatingsim, @sightkeeper, @gfhunklescalendar, @hollycrowned, @enlightening-gravity, @eregyrn-falls-art, @fractal-fourcube, @radiatorspringsclassic, @mythomagically-delicious, @mistrel-fox, @i-love-animation, @doberart, @pedestrianwolf, @thesnadger, @doubtingsalmon, @lokisadvocate, @ancientouroboros, @novantinuum, @danidery, @kiki-kit, @kevmclarty, @packook @gravity-what, @tyrnn, @hellmandraws, @as-be-low, @professor-cinnamon-roll, @rwallaceart, @summerhomegravityfalls, @betweenevery2pines, @determinedtoart, @invisibletinkerer, @fernikart57

Edit: Since there has been concern about getting the GuestJournal back to its rightful place, I wanted to assure folks that it will ABSOLUTELY be sent back.

Below the cut you’ll find every entry in the GuestJournal.

Keep reading

Safely returned it yesterday. Since it was getting full we added a new one as well, but the old one will be left for the memories.

CodeMageddon DAY 1 SUMMARY

codemageddon17:

The first clue went live at about 9am PST!

[X] [X]

Our CodeHunters on Discord were able to solve this clue within a half hour, determining that the location of the clue was at Confusion Hill, California! (shoutout to Discord user DizzyDwarf [ @dizzydwarf1 ] who solved it first!)

Confusion Hill was home to the 11th clue in the original CipherHunt last summer: a jar of eyeballs. Confusion Hill is also the final resting place of our beloved Bill Cipher statue.

There rests at Confusion Hill a plaque honoring the grave of someone named Minnie. CodeHunters were quickly able to piece together that this must be the location of our next clue.

Unfortunately, we had a time crunch. Confusion Hill would be closing at 5pm, and no one currently online lived close enough to the location to be able to make it there in time.

The CodeMageddon Organizers/Time Agents imposed a time limit: CodeHunters had until 7pm PST to find the clue and inform the rest of the discord server. If it was not found by then, they would release the clue themselves (however, the physical clue would still be at the location if anyone wanted to go find it later).

We thought that would be the end of it. But around 2pm PST, @timetravellingscientist (Discord: Xantusia) announced that they were about 2 hours from Confusion Hill and would be able to go get the clue!

A few hours later, the clue was posted on Xantusia’s twitter:

[X]

After decoding using Bill’s substitution cipher, CodeHunters were presented with a url: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B6ja8q80UrkMT2IySE9oUG5ETE0

The drive contained two files.

The first was a photograph. The photograph is “one of 1000 mileposts funded by the royal bank of Scotland to mark the creation of the National Cycle Network”

The second was a coded message. Using the Bifid cipher (Message: lsgovthdtatqyvvev, Key: umxdibwlhfzpocsrvnteqagky, Groupsize: 5, the message was revealed to say: lookatthemetadata

The meta data for the photograph read: Dragon, CH8

‘Dragon’ turned out to be in reference to the Welsh flag. ‘CH8’ is a postal code in Wales. It is most likely that the particular totem in that photograph is located along the bike path in the CH8 area, and will have to be found in order to discover the next clue.

Unfortunately, as it is currently the middle of the night over in the UK, no one was available to head to the location and check it out. So our intrepid CodeHunters took to Google Maps street view, scouring the area until they found the specific totem in question, securing a more precise address: the totem in question is across the street from The Crooked Horn, Brynford, Holywell CH8 8AX, UK.

Beyond that, the hunt has been put on hold until tomorrow, when our UK CodeHunters can go investigate in person.

Happy Hunting! x

hopecvon:

ruzuki:

hopecvon:

grendinator:

ruzuki:

Guys that is a freaking Special Blacklight Edition Journal 3 they’re giving away as a prize they aren’t joking around jfc

-and a Pop and a blind bag figurine…

(I already have the journal so I’m not going to play this but wanted to spread the word that there is a fanmade hunt that is apparently starting very soon…)

They posted this code too soooo yea

This they tweeted today too

I FUCKING CALLED IT YOU GUYS
LET’S MAKE THE ANNUAL INTERNATIONAL GF SCAVENGER HUNT A THING

I’m down with that idea! Yes let’s make this a tradition!

I believe that’s the idea with CodeMageddon

Just saying I really hope it catches on and we do actually have more scavenger hunts in the future.