The San Francisco Connection

Shortcut SFCon

General

• In most literal terms, this is a new link which is to connect Perplex City to Earth; specifically, the link will connect to San Francisco, California, USA.
• In a more pragmatic sense, this will be a live event in San Francisco, and will be similar to the London PCAG event.
• The event will take place August 12th, 2006.

• For information available pre-event, see: SFCon:pre-event

Website Information

• http://emergency.perplexcity.com/
  • became available after a mass mailing/plea on Friday.

• http://emergency.perplexcity.com/main/main.php
  • Became available on Saturday, around 10:45 PDT

Meetups

As a game, Perplex City has but one rule: Any occassion with more than 2 cube hunters must involve alcohol. In this vein, a number of meet-ups and organized gathering of masses have been planned, both pre- and post- event. As follows:

• A clearinghouse of event coordination is at the unForums.

• Mind Candy is having a "post-event thingie down near the Palace."
  • From the event page:

Q: Will there be any social activities afterwards?
A: We are currently considering organising something afterwards. We're well aware that players will want to get a drink or meet up somewhere, and so at the closing presentation we will at least let all players know about possible places to go.

• Endgame - map - link
  • Sunday, August 13th, 10-5
  • Right around the corner from the 12th Street/City Center BART station (red/yellow lines).

What is Known

On the Ground

As per usual with live events, reports from the scene are slow to come in. Here's what we know:

Running around the city

Many of the players ran off to all points in the city, to solve sundry puzzles and riddles.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

Back at home-base, a large multi-page maze was presented.

On-Line

In IRC

"To aid your progress, it would be wise to collaborate with your fellow helpers. In order to do this, you should join the chat room called #pxcsflive on irc.chat-solutions.org. If you don't have an IRC program, you can connect online here by typing "pxcsflive" into the channel box."

That is largely in-game. Meta and spec can take place in #pxcsflivespec also on irc.chat-solutions.org.

Hits

The page http://emergency.perplexcity.com/main/main.php requires a large number (250?) of unique website hits before another batch of 'clues' will go active. At this point, there have been 7 sets of clues. Now only UNSOLVED clues are shown.

Clues

Once the page went active, we were given, on-line, a number of qestions and numbers. Questions were in the fForm of:

• 674303 - Real life web slinger entangles Manhattan with what?
• 676817 - When is Scarlett Kiteway's birthday? (ddmm)
• 688743 - How many millions did ROgers Communications Inc pay for a comma?

Answers were to be typed in on the same page (/clues.html)

Unsolved questions

Early on (though not early enough, probably), we on IRC adopted a page to keep track of what clues were left:

The_San_Francisco_Connection:_Unsolved_Questions

As anyone solved any question, they were to be REMOVED it from the list.

Then, as we were approaching completion on this list, with just 88% left, the source page changed to a list of remianing clues.

http://emergency.perplexcity.com/main/clues.html

Results

When a correct answer is submitted for the first time, the message given is:

Congratulations! The answer you entered was correct.

Your contribution has been added to the group's progress. Keep at it, you are important in reactivating the link.

When a correct answer is submitted the second time onward, the following is given:

Congratulations! The answer you entered was correct.

Someone else has managed to solve this before you, but keep going and you should get a first solve soon.

When any incorrect answer is given, this is the result:

Sorry, your answer was incorrect.

Please try again, the connection won't open without you!

Results

Here's a link to the official result video [Sente's Message] and another copy on YouTube [Sente's Message] Additionally this is the [Summary] page. Note at the bottom links to a couple of third power phone messages: [Third Power Agent - 1st phone message] [Third Power Agent - 2nd phone message]

References

• The Perplex City Sentinel
  • news in brief, 22-JUN-06 "Academy Mum on New Link"
  • article, 13-JUL-06 "Iona Interviews... Adrian Hon" (link)