![You suck at protoshop. No, you [i]really[/i] oo.](http://blog.gg8.se/images/you-suck-at-photoshop-you-really-do-your-awful.png)
XKCD Binary Heart Transcription+the SCH mystery
January 4th, 2009
Since I felt like having too much time, here’s a transcription of XKCD Binary Heart.
111011101100110010101 111001010011110111010 101101001011011000100 111101110110011001010 111100101101111011101 010110100101101100011 011110111011001100101 011110010100111101110 101011010010110110001 001111011101100110010 101111001010011110111 010101101001011011000 110111101110110011001 010111100101101111011 101010110100101101100 010011110111011001100 101011110010110111101 110101011010010110110 001001111011101100110 010101111001010011110 111010101101001011011 000100111101110110011
Interpreted as ASCII written with binary, it says:
iloveyOu ilOveyou iloveyOu ilOveyOu iloveyou ilOveyou ilOveyOu ilOv
That’s the easy part of the mystery. The tricky part is why the O’s are lower and upper case like that. I have no clue, but there’s a discussion on the XKCD forums . Someone called “kemosabi” posted a Perl snippet that produces the letters SCH:
#!/usr/bin/perl
while () {
$x .= $_;
}
$x =~ tr/01//cd;
$y = pack(”B*”, $x);
print “$y\n”;
$s = $y;
$s =~ tr/Oo/01/;
$s =~ tr/01/ /c;
print $s, “\n”;
$s =~ tr/01//cd;
print ” ” . join(” “, grep(/\d{5}/, split(/(\d{5})/, $s))), “\n”;
print ” 010 ” . join(” 010 “, grep(/\d{5}/, split(/(\d{5})/, $s))), “\n”;
#print $s, “\n”;
$s = “010″ . join(”010″, grep(/\d{5}/, split(/(\d{5})/, $s)));
print pack(”B*”, $s), “\n”;
__END__
011010010110110001101
111011101100110010101
111001010011110111010
101101001011011000100
111101110110011001010
111100101101111011101
010110100101101100011
011110111011001100101
011110010100111101110
101011010010110110001
001111011101100110010
101111001010011110111
010101101001011011000
110111101110110011001
010111100101101111011
101010110100101101100
010011110111011001100
101011110010110111101
110101011010010110110
001001111011101100110
010101111001010011110
111010101101001011011
000100111101110110011
Output
iloveyOuilOveyouiloveyOuilOveyOuiloveyouilOveyouilOveyOuilOv`
1 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 0
10011 00011 01000
010 10011 010 00011 010 01000
SCH
Fast forward a few episodes to this strip:
The three “pointers”, 0×3a28213a , 0×6339392c, 0×7363682e look a bit suspicious… Repeating bytes, MSB is never set. This smells ASCII!
Sure enough, here’s what it says:
:(!: c99, sch.
I don’t know what the first line means, maybe it’s a little joke in the style of UNIX shell tricks. The second line could possibly be referring to the C99 standard. And the last line is sch again. It’s no doubt related, but how? There could be a deeper meaning to the letters SCH, or it could just be a reference back to that forum post. What do you think?
More Tetris comics
April 30th, 2007I have this nifty visitor tracking system, that lets me see how people browsing my blog came here. And since I’m already high up in Google’s rank, possibly because I’m situated under 8bitcollective.com, I get quite a few search engine referrals. Moste people who come here search for something things related to Gameboys, for example Gameboy circuit bending, but appearantly one person got here just a few minutes ago by googling for tetris comic. And I will take this opportunity to show what else among the results.
A comic taking on a more philosophical view of Tetris. (Made by Kristen Gudsnuk and originally posted here.) Update: Kristen left a comment and informed me that he (she?) only drew the falling block, while someone called “Terminal” put it in the celestial context it’s in in the picture. Did I get it right?
It has the rather long title: “Tetris Can Mean A Lot Of Things But It Cannot Define The True Meaning Of Life Because The Answer Is Impossible Since The Answer To Life Is Tetris Itself”
I also found scans of original feature comics from Nintendo Power, published some 15-20 years ago. Look at the bottom for a three page comic and a pretty good beginner’s tutorial to the game. (I never saw that guide, but I still learnt those strategies all by myself)
The Howard & Nester Comics Archive
I also found an entertaining japanese video, where some guy plays Tetris from hell. He just can’t get it right. (;
If you’re a Tetris lover, this is a must-see.
“Tetris” Is Japanese For Comic Gold - Kotaku
And oh yeah, I will do a photo tutorial on how to make a ledboy, when I make the blue one, I promise. The nothing can stop me, I have a Gameboy RGB pixel! (*Moahahahaha*)
