#like i can do 10 grayscales but if u told me to color id start procrastinating | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

humansoulsarg · 5 years

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We Welcome All Solve

This post https://pangenttechnologies.tumblr.com/post/185253110867/ not only celebrates the 2019 Spice Girls Reunion Tour, but also contains some (come to be expected from) Pangent Lore upon deeper investigation.

Included in the post are several images from the Spice Girls’ Spice World 2019 concert in May at Etihad Stadium. It does appear Lottie and Eric were able to attend this concert. I’m not clear on how the timelines align or work or what not, but I’m glad they were able to find their way into this amazing synchronistic Spice World.

The graphic image posted that states:

We welcome all ages all races all gender identities all countries of origin all sexual orientations all religions & beliefs all abilities: Spice World

contains three rows of grayscale shading at the bottom. These can be recombined as Red, Green, and Blue layers to create a color image which follows the Standard Pangent Color Code:

The numbers decoded from this combined image can be interpreted as decimal ASCII as follows:

57 57 51 119 50 122 103 51 122 49 119 104 111 117 48

993w2zg3z1whou0

And the 15-character lowercase alphanumeric value we recognize as a mediafire link: http://www.mediafire.com/?993w2zg3z1whou0

This leads to a ZIP archive - concerted.zip which contains an MP3 - concerted.mp3 with clips of Spice Girls songs.

Thanks to a very helpful stranger who happened to be wearing a Spice Girls shirt one day in the cafeteria and spent time with this MP3 file (Thanks LT!!) it was discovered all the clips were from the 1996 SPICE album, and the track numbers were significant.

timestamp # track name 0:00-0:03 1 wannabe 0:03-0:12 9 naked 0:12-0:17 1 wannabe 0:17-0:20 7 who do you think you are 0:20-0:25 1 wannabe 0:25-0:27 7 who do you think you are 0:27-0:30 1 wannabe 0:30-0:32 10 if u can’t dance 0:33-0:34 5 last time lover 0:35-0:37 1 wannabe 0:38-0:40 10 if u can’t dance 0:40-0:42 6 mama 0:43-0:47 1 wannabe 0:48-0:50 10 if u can’t dance 0:51-0:52 1 wannabe 0:52-0:55 10 if u can’t dance 0:55-0:58 2 say you’ll be there 0:58-1:00 5 last time lover 1:00-1:03 1 wannabe 1:03-1:05 5 last time lover 1:06-1:08 7 who do you think you are 1:08-1:13 9 naked 1:13-1:16 1 wannabe 1:16-1:18 10 if u can’t dance 1:18-1:20 2 say you’ll be there 1:21-1:25 1 wannabe 1:26-1:28 5 last time lover 1:28-1:30 1 wannabe 1:31-1:33 10 if u can’t dance 1:33-1:36 9 naked 1:36-1:39 1 wannabe 1:39-1:41 10 if u can’t dance 1:42-1:44 8 something kinda funny

The durations of the clips were significant as some track numbers repeated, but a workable ASCII decimal string was found from this sequence:

119 99 117 117 105 106 110 102 51 57 99 102 115 109 108

wcuuijnf39cfsml

Another 15-character mediafire ID:

http://mediafire.com/?wcuuijnf39cfsml

This time to blackbird.zip which contains blackbird.jpg (an image of a blackbird) and blackbird.wav (an audio file in Kansas City Standard format)

The KCS WAV file decodes to Vigenere-encrypted text with password ‘argentina’ - so it’s from Lottie.

blackbird.txt - https://pastebin.com/Ry6hiXe1

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Packing up, for the weekend. Well, not the weekend. The back half of a week, and then the weekend, kind of. A few days off, for once. Special occasion. Pushing my luck. Working remotely, but that’s nothing new. Hoping everything’s not on fire when I get back.

At the moment, there’s nothing about these projects that I can take for granted. I can’t just leave town and know that everything’s going to be all right. No, it’s going to be a damn mess.

Rachel was sick for two days so Eric and I were sick for the better part of three weeks. He wasn’t sleeping well, worse than usual. Neither was I, and I’m still not sure why. He’d get up and walk around at all hours like a zombie. It was unnerving.

That was three disgusting weeks, and so this is gonna be the first fun week in awhile. We’ve even got a kid taking care of Rachel, for a couple of the nights. So, fun.

I’ve never been good at having fun. When I was a kid, sometime in my teens, a friend dragged me to a heavy metal concert and once they started playing I immediately needed to get the hell out of there, away from the noise. It was so loud it rattled my organs and made me want to throw up. Nobody had fun that night, I’m sure. I hadn’t discovered that earplugs were a thing yet. I wear earplugs every night now, or I did before Rachel.

Things have gotten back to normal, by which I mean I’m working with a team again and getting twelve dipshit emails every morning from each of them because they don’t know how to tie their own shoes without me writing a visual tutorial.

I hate to make this a generational thing, but working with men over fifty, in particular, is like dragging their whole weight up a mountain, or carrying them, when they should be able to walk on their own. They don’t listen and need to be told what to do at every step. Every day it’s like nothing I’ve done matters and they’re back to square one.

I’m working my ass off, inbetween depression naps. Working harder than usual because I’m interested. Genuinely.

For the life of me I don’t know why Pangent proper is letting me do this, and get away with it. Either X has other things on his mind or he’s finally given up on me. With Leslie’s help we now have a plan. I won’t go into it to jinx it but I think we could survive this. Have a future. Get out of this whole mess with our human souls intact.

I’m enjoying the science again. Enjoying the research. Enjoying doing for real all the stuff that Management wouldn’t let me do before. It’s only been two weeks but a couple of days were genuine breakthroughs. People at Pangent, people who I thought were nutty and useless and liars, suddenly came through with research that changed everything.

So this is the plan, or part of the plan. Project SOS. Save our souls. Shut everything that’s dangerous down and call it a success. Bring this to a conclusion before it’s got a chance to kill us, but in a way which looks good on paper.

In my life I’ve taken on so many projects that are bigger than I can handle. I pretend they’re not, and the scope gets larger and larger, and they take so much more time than I pretended they’d take. And at the end, best case scenario, I think, Well, that just barely worked. Mistakes were made. Mistakes were fixed, as best we could and a little too late.

And a project shouldn’t be like that. A project should be manageable. I shouldn’t be shooting the moon and losing my grip on the project, my time, my health and my sanity. But for the most part those are the only projects I remember. Where I tried to do something great and got halfway there, fucking up the other half along the way. Those were almost the only projects worth a damn, where I was punching above my weight a little. I don’t know what the lesson is there. Maybe there isn’t one. Dare to be great and you’ll always be a goddamn mess who gets part of the way to genius, with a few small errors on every page.

People think I’m a pessimist. I’m an optimist really, an outrageous optimist. I plan every project as if doing the impossible is going to be easy. I know in my heart of hearts that it’s going to be tough, and take a chunk of my soul, and turn into a whole entire mess, but I plan out these projects as if I’m Superwoman, made of steel. A cutout of Ginger Spice, spicing up the world.

I forget how to be afraid, when I should be. I forget to set my sights lower and be more realistic about things.

A few weeks back I was walking out by the shops, in my blue sweater, sometime round sundown. As I passed the grocer, three teenage boys walked by me, hooting and hollering. It wasn’t even coherent enough to be catcalling.

Children. They were just children. They kept shouting nonsense from thirty feet away. Swearing a blue streak, calling me the N-word, as if that makes any sense.

I turned. I must have thought that required a response. “Yeah?” I said. “Fuck you!” I flipped them off.

I was calm. They could have been anywhere from 13 to 18, I honestly couldn’t tell. They just looked like children. I didn’t know how to be afraid of them.

One of them shouted, “The fuck did you say, bitch?” They were a long ways off now, but one of them, in a red hoodie, came running up to me at full speed. And he punched me, or tried to. He whiffed, right off the side of my head. Bad aim. I didn’t feel more than a slight breeze.

He was right in my face now, breathing hot air like a steer in a bullfight.

“I said, fuck you.” I stayed calm. We stared each other down for a moment. He was ready to fight. He spat and he swore, and he saw I wasn’t backing down. And he had, in that moment, a decision to make.

He ran off with his friends.

I kept walking.

That whole time I couldn’t make myself be afraid. And I should have been.

They were just kids. Teenagers who looked about twelve and were probably seventeen. But there were three of them. And if they’d wanted to, or had better aim with their punches, they could have …

Hm.

I did feel nervous, afterward, once I’d had time to process the whole thing. I crossed the street. I went to a different row of shops. And I looked over my shoulder the rest of the night.

They clearly walked there. No one was watching them, and they had nothing better to do than get into trouble.

Every time I pass that row of shops I think about them now. But I wasn’t afraid at the time. I didn’t know how to be.

I haven’t worn my blue sweater outside since then.

The other day a guy tried to stop me in the street. “I just want to ask you something,” in the way that men do when they’re panhandling for money. He didn’t seem like a sex creep so it could have been worse, I guess. I kept walking, and he kept talking, pretending to be offended, like I was the bad guy here for ignoring him.

“What, are you scared?” he asked indignantly.

That got me. I turned.

“No.” I wasn’t scared. I stared him down. “You got something to say?”

Silence, for a moment. Then he said, “Aw, forget it,” and backed off.

He made a decision.

There was a dead blackbird in the road. I took a picture. I had to get too close to the cars to take a picture.

Why did I need to do that? Commemorating its death, like it means something. “Much to think about,” I guess.

Dead blackbird on the side of the road, just far enough away from traffic. Must have hit a windshield. Body completely intact, enough that I kept hoping it would show some signs of life.

It was still there on the way back. No one ran it over. I hope nobody ever does. That it stays that way forever, or until there’s nothing left of it.

A beautiful bird. Making people think about death, if they’re walking that way, so close to traffic. Maybe I’m hoping it teaches people how to be afraid.

Much to think about.

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#puzzle #puzzle solution #human souls arg #submission

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