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rydenyuri · 4 months ago

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Brendon Urie singing Northern Downpour 2008 vs. 2011 (x) (x) With Ryan vs. Without Ryan

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rydenyuri · 5 months ago

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PATD’s puzzle hype: part 2

(the main post)

So I thought that Panic at the Disco was done with the puzzles after the first month, but the clues were only beginning. The next phase started almost a week after they had revealed the album title on January 10, 2008. (This stuff was my least favorite part… the next phase was way cooler, promise).

The site’s title was “PRETTY. ODD.,” the Honda Civic Tour logo design was the banner, and then the previous image of a blank puzzle showed up again. The new puzzle was posted at 9pm EST, so evidently that whole theme was still going strong. The image’s file name was “heylookanotherpuzzle.jpg.”

The source code was updated to say “Hope you weren’t about to leave” and then the second line came a bit later: “Because you might miss all the fun.” Then a single puzzle piece showed up and the entire new puzzle image was called “canyoufindtheotherpieces.jpg.” This looked like it was maybe going to be some potential album art:

So fans realized that we had to scour the internet searching for pieces that could be assembled to reveal the cover art (or at least we hoped that’s what it was). I was able to take relatively good notes of the previous clues, but this part turned into chaos that I stopped caring about by the end. The problem was that the puzzle pieces showed up at different times… so you could check the correct site, but maybe you were there a few hours early & missed out.

I didn’t see screenshots of where every piece was found, but it seemed like they were mostly hidden in areas that FBR wanted you to visit. There was one piece in the magazine covers on Panic at the Disco’s myspace:

This next piece was found on the FBR street team site:

Then the band posted this myspace bulletin:

and this is where things got really weird. The Hush Sound was doing a promotion that was rather creepy, so this part of PATD’s puzzle was basically a cross-promotion that tied into that.

The link in the myspace bulletin took you to a FOE page that had recently been created for someone called the Medicine Man whose occupation was listed as “healer of minds.“ There were some videos with creepy titles, a song file that was a kind of chant, and a bunch of other stuff that I skimmed past because I didn’t want to dig around on this page that kind of scared me lol. The Hush Sound’s cult fans seemed into it, though, since they were busy posting things like “we are the ones, the ones, the ones who are the fans. We are the ones, the ones, the ones who want the answers. Medicine man, what you may see, is obsession to a tolerable degree.”

Most of the Medicine Man’s clues didn’t seem like they were meant for PATD’s fans. It was hard to know whose “puzzle” he was referring to when he talked about finding a piece to the wrong puzzle. I didn’t think his riddle thing from January 18th was anything we needed to pay attention to, but some fans spent a lot of time on it:

So far so good… You have proved you could take simple clues, But as riddles get harder, you could lose. With every clue and riddle I speak, My meanings will continue to sneak. Things are not always as easy as they seem, For there are many twists in my elaborate scheme. I am the one, the one, the one that taunts, I have the answers that you all want. Prove me wrong, and you will be rewarded With special gifts, you will be awarded. 1 of 29 will make things harder than they were before By English standards, you’ll be back in 1944. Good luck….

Some people honestly thought that the Medicine Man was created by Panic at the Disco for their puzzle, so there was a lot of confusion at this point. (I remember people trying to blame Ryan for doing too many drugs so I just want to repeat: the band members were not involved in these promotions. All of the ideas & actions came from FBR’s marketing team). Some more fans gave up around this point because things were too complicated or weird. The next piece was found on the Medicine Man’s FOE page, though:

(side note: some people found these pieces in a different order. here’s what it would look like if you found the one above first)…

Ok moving on… P!ATD’s site added “You might want to look around a bit first” into the third line of the message in their source code and then another puzzle piece showed up in the top row (so there were only two pieces actually in the puzzle when you went to look at the site. People were just photoshopping the others in and passing that around in case others had found stuff. Fans on the boards were at a different place than fans on other sites so this whole thing was kind of a mess to follow if you didn’t care too much.

The bottom right piece in the image above was found on the Decaydance myspace.

The next puzzle piece was found in part of an AbsolutePunk thread in the link on the comma after the word “tour”:

Then the source code on PATD’s site was updated to add “Who knows what you could find” as the fourth line in the message. Another puzzle piece showed up on the actual site (the one above the corner piece on the bottom right):

The puzzle pieces were showing up at different times so the more important pieces were delayed… like they weren’t available yet no matter how hard you looked. I had definitely lost a lot of enthusiasm by this point. The next piece was found in the photos on FBR’s facebook:

So we knew the orange banner probably said “Pretty Odd” at this point, but there were a lot of different guesses for what the “W__ to the _____” would say. ”Welcome to the black parade” was the best thing I saw anyone come up with ha. The next piece was found in FBR’s store (you didn’t buy it… you just saved the image. and I actually don’t remember spotting this before, but I just noticed that the “price” is the album’s 3/25 release date).

The fans who were signed up for text updates from Cobra Starship got a text with this link: www.fueledbyramen.com/jigsaw. That page’s source code said “thanks for your digits” and there was a puzzle piece sitting there:

I had expected a piece to appear on PATD’s purevolume in the blank space where the second album’s cover art should be. I was wrong about that, but at least one did show up on their purevolume:

So the puzzle looked like this now (again, I didn’t edit this. I just grabbed it from what other people were sharing. thank you to everyone who cared enough about this puzzle mess to actually create edits like this).

and the site’s source code was updated to add a fifth line in the message: “you should stay at least one more day.”

Ok my notes become less detailed the closer I get to the end… I was really over this puzzle by January 20th because there were other cool things happening. I knew the final cover art would be posted soon anyways and it wasn’t like this process of searching was fun. The few notes I added after this point make it sound like someone found the missing bottom piece on FBR’s youtube. The missing pieces on the left and top right were obviously found too but idk where… I only saved this updated image I saw someone share:

The main thing I cared about was that I knew FBR would hold the most important piece hostage until the very end haha.

Then the completed puzzle was up on a lot of places like FBR’s site, Pete’s blog, & PATD’s site, so it was hard to miss:

The lines went away too. I think this whole puzzle was a really good way to make fans form a connection with the next album! Like maybe the whole process became super annoying, but I still feel more invested in that cover art than I have with any other album.

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rydenyuri · 5 months ago

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