I started thinking about how I could put it online, and I liked the continuous presentation idea in my head — not a strip per page with the usual forward/back navigation, but one big page that you scroll through everything. One of my pet peeves about having a comic per page is that I feel like the person dropping in the middle of a story arc might not go back, and miss context. Or if they do, they step back one at a time, which gives them the story arc exactly reversed. The continuous format doesn’t solve it, but it makes it easier to slide around the timeline.

And I pictured the lazy load effect in my head as well, which I thought was pretty cool. Those images can actually load a lot faster, I have the javascript slow down the image views so you can see the animation. I think it was the idea of the image animation that actually pushed me into creating a website for it. I laughed at myself — ah Christ I’m buying another domain apparently.

But what to call it? I engaged the random generator in my head and “sswhat” dropped out. That dude I’m drawing started as a margin doodle in college, and has kind of an unfortunate name I don’t like anymore, but his initials are S.S. So “s. s. what” is kinda, “okay, this guy, and what the hell?” I was surprised to find there was a six-letter domain still available (even if it is basically nonsense), so that pretty much sealed it.

At the moment it’s on a M-W-F update schedule, and right now I have enough drawn to go through to mid-August. I am tempted to make it a weekday update thing, but…ugh I just don’t trust myself being able to continue making them to keep up with five updates a week. Though if I switched to that right now, it’d be enough updates til July 10…mm. Don’t know. Still pondering.

Here’s the puzzle again, with all the hints:

The idea is: the bottom part is the maze, and the top part is the rules that tell you how to get through the maze. I did a few things to try to point towards the solution:

• The ^3 inside the maze is the only thing that’s green. So I was hoping it would be clear this was a different thing than everything else.
• I hoped that this would suggest the “arrow, number” pair is meant to indicate a direction and distance to move.
• I wasn’t sure whether to make the .com green as well, but I figured the nature of it made it unique enough.
• I placed the hints for entrance/exit at about their vertical levels, so putting those together shouldn’t have been too bad.

But how to traverse the maze was apparently the difficult part. The top part is the rules, and I should say it’s three rules. Some conjectured it was 12 separate rules, or that it had to do with specific letters, but no. My responses to these would have been: if they are 12 separate rules, I don’t think the arrows make sense for traversing them. And there doesn’t seem to be any good correlation between specific letters in the rules and letters in the maze.

It’s basically this: each letter inside the rule represents a class. For the first two I alternated: items 1 and 3 have the same direction and number. So for the first we see “J” and “B” are down 1, and “f” and “r” are left 1. The most immediate thing that differentiates those letters is upper/lower case.

If we’ve gotten this far in working things out, we know that up 3 in the maze starts us on “s”. That’s a lower, so following the first rule, we go left 1, and land on “S”.

Next rule, “e” and “I” are up 1, “H” and “m” are down 2. In that case it seems to be vowels/consonants. We’re on “S”, so go down 2, and land on red W.

The third rule is the trickiest, because I don’t have any two the same. I was hoping by now you’d be able to build on knowledge of the previous — and anyway you’re standing on a colored letter at this point, and the rule is clearly about colored letters, so that might have helped feel like things are working to this point. I see now that the red samples were vowels and blue samples were consonants, but that would not likely be the thing, because what would you do with a red consonant? Which is what we have here, so the rule must describe it somehow.

In this case it’s: red lowers go down 2, red uppers go right 3, blue lowers go right 1, blue uppers go up 1. We have a red upper, so we go right 3 to “H”.

Then the arrows in the rule loop up back to the first one again, which take us to “a”, “t”, and “.com”.

All of which spells out sswhat.com, which apparently is a new site I’ve created. Hope that’s not too terribly anticlimactic, but there it is.

As I forgot to ask them how I can refer to them publicly, I’ll say that Sam solved it on Friday, so he gets the mug. Cryptique solved it about a half hour later, but I think I’ll send him something else as well, as soon as I figure out what that is.

I had one where the solution was a new domain I had opened up, and Mark made the observation: “Greg’s secret contests usually lead towards a new web site he’s creating” (or similar). So this time I decided to embrace it. I have a new simple thing I felt like putting in a new domain, but I’ll have a puzzle for you to find it. If you get there first I’ll send you a SpinnWebe mug.

I’ll publish the puzzle here in a post on Monday the 6th at 12pm CT. And since my contests tend to be difficult, for every day thereafter that week, I’ll publish a hint. So it’ll get easier, but presumably it’ll get easier for the other three people who are trying to win it, too. The image will be posted with gray areas; each gray area conceals a hint which will be revealed in subsequent days. And just so we’re clear, everything about the puzzle is inside the image itself — you don’t have to bother looking in source code or checking image meta info or anything crazy like that. I’ve been known to be a bastard that way with puzzles, but this time Sean graciously offered to playtest the puzzle before I finalized it, so I think this one might actually be possible.

Hey actually here’s the mug now!

They’ve been sitting in my attic for a while, I forgot how cool they are.