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This is likely dumb as hell, but I have no idea how to find out more about this. PC Gamer magazine (at least US version) would have these weird little snippets on the last page of every issue, bottom right. They’d never acknowledge it, iirc once someone wrote in asking and they were like “what stories?”. I’m mainly curious how long they did this for and their reasoning, but I can’t find a combination of search terms that gets me there. I’m sure it was just some dumb creative writing thing from an editor, but I thiiiink they may have followed an arc issue to issue? I found some old scans online and included a screenshot: 
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Jul 27, 2021 22:17
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fritz posted:I'll produce more lists. For the love of God don't. I already found at least four books that I own and a couple more that I’ve read, and I'll feel compelled to keep looking. Is this what OCD feels like?
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Jul 27, 2021 23:08
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Xotl posted:Yeah, any chance of a better scan or even the current one with less jpg artifacts or whatever? It is sounding like that might as as good as it gets at least at the moment. I think they took a picture of the polaroid at their folks' house and haven't gotten back there recently.
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Jul 27, 2021 23:24
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Zopotantor posted:For the love of God don't. I already found at least four books that I own and a couple more that I’ve read, and I'll feel compelled to keep looking. what have i done
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Jul 27, 2021 23:28
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fritz posted:If somebody with better eyes has a guess as to the distribution of letters, I'll produce more lists. ISFDB should have covers for these things too, and if nobody comes up with anything better I'll see if I can wrangle something there. My impression is one word, 5-8 letters. I'm thinking wide, stylized fonts. Sorting by first letters like C & O, potentially a stylized G or T. Some horror books published by Coronet have the look I have in mind, but can't find a match! Edit: This is the perfect white whale puzzle. I'm hooked. ThePopeOfFun fucked around with this message at 23:42 on Jul 27, 2021 |
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Jul 27, 2021 23:37
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Xotl posted:This is really cool, but the impression I had was that the title was one word and the smaller text directly underneath was the author's name. I assume it's title/author rather than author/title because if it was a big enough name I assume someone would have recognized it by now, but that's a guess. I'm seeing it (the main white part) as two lines of text, with the second possibly ending in -TING. ___ Hunting maybe?
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Jul 28, 2021 00:05
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I tried feeding it into a bunch of online neural network upscalers but there isn’t enough there for them to work with, apparently.
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Jul 28, 2021 00:10
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Just letter wise, I'm seeing it as something like (made up word) Gammoid Stars, but it seems like maybe there's a hyphen between the words... This is gonna break my brain Martman fucked around with this message at 02:49 on Jul 28, 2021 |
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Jul 28, 2021 02:46
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That fonting looks odd to me, like there's some roger Dean / psygnosis stuff going. I see what looks like a lower case i but it looks directly connected to an n. And the letter before that could be a stylized p or R?
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Jul 28, 2021 03:18
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Scaramouche posted:That fonting looks odd to me, like there's some roger Dean / psygnosis stuff going. I see what looks like a lower case i but it looks directly connected to an n. And the letter before that could be a stylized p or R?  it couldnt be more clear
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Jul 28, 2021 03:26
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You dolt, you forgot to enhance it!
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Jul 28, 2021 04:38
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to me, it looks like it says Asimov like this but i couldn't find any Asimov covers that match so i don't know
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Jul 28, 2021 05:56
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fritz posted:ISFDB has front covers, I don't know if they have back covers. I don't suppose you could try it with either one or two words, up the lower boundary from 1970 to 1973, and limit it to books published by Ace or Bantam, could you? Xotl fucked around with this message at 06:14 on Jul 28, 2021 |
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Jul 28, 2021 06:10
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It looks like is says GRAMP-PIG and now I wanna read that story. Ninja edit: Or CRAMPY DOG
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Jul 28, 2021 07:06
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What if those are Russian alphabet letters 
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Jul 28, 2021 07:24
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I've spent way too much time on this loving book, so here are my thoughts to save someone else some effort. Let's assume it's sci fi since that's the only vague lead we have. The front cover layout most closely resembles the famous Penguin designs of the early 70s. In my mind these Ballards are close for the structure of the title/text, but not the illustration:  However hard I squint I can't see a Penguin logo either on the cover or the spine. I've also trawled through the ISFDB by cover for Penguin in the 70s without much luck. Looks like Panther and Signet also used that sort of layout a few times:  (Panther) (Signet)Their branding is less obvious, but - again - I've gone through both publishers on the ISFDB by year, by cover and drawn a blank. The ISFDB doesn't have every cover, so there's a chance it's something niche by one of those publishers but eh. They also occasionally have back cover scans on the ISFDB and I have never seen an example of those five 'arches' that we can see. I agree with whoever said they look like how photos from a movie/TV show are sometimes presented, which makes me think it could be a novelisation, but who knows. In terms of just looking at cover, the main text (which could be the title or the author's name, depending on the publisher's design preferences) looks like it starts with 'CZ' to me, which would narrow things down a lot - but also open the possibility that it's in an entirely different language as others have suggested. FWIW I couldn't find anything relevant in the ISFDB for either title or author name that would otherwise fit. The main text looks like a single word, maybe two. Sci Fi titles are generally pretty verbose. It could run onto the next line, but that looks like it's in yellow, compared to the main title's white, to me; but that seems like a fairly common device for distinguishing between title and author name eg:  I can't make out much of the illustration, but to me it looks like a helmeted head, with a red highlighted area where the mouth would be. Like Darth Vader's respirator thing in a triangle. Impossibly vague, but I think you'd know it if you saw it. That's about all I've got.
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Jul 28, 2021 09:35
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oh my gosh my av
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Jul 28, 2021 15:19
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ThePopeOfFun posted:My impression is one word, 5-8 letters. I'm thinking wide, stylized fonts. Sorting by first letters like C & O, potentially a stylized G or T. There are 1006 single-word titles with 5-8 letters. Coronet novels prior to 1990, not filtered by title length. quote:2017 War with Russia, A City of Bells, A Far Sunset, A Plague of Demons, A Report from Group 17, All Fools' Day, Avalon, Avalon, Big Planet, Biggles: The Movie, Bloodstone, Comes the Blind Fury, Cybernia, D.A.R.Y.L., Dark Crusade, Darkness Weaves, Downtime, Fistful of Digits, Gwen in Green, Harvest Home, Killer, Kronk, Ladygrove, Mindspell, Motherlines, Nocturnal, Shall We Tell the President?, She, Slaves of the Klau, Star King, Stowaway to Mars, The Ancient Enemy, The Anome, The Asutra, The Auctioneer, The Black Charade, The Boat of Fate, The Brave Free Men, The Bright Cantonese, The Clan of the Cave Bear, The Cloud Walker, The Crystal Cave, The Devil's Footsteps, The Earth Tripper, The Enemy Stars, The Face, The Gray Prince, The Haunting of Gad's Hall, The Highest Ground, The Hollow Hills, The Journal of Edwin Underhill, The Last Enchantment, The Long Loud Silence, The Mammoth Hunters, The Other, The Secret People, The Sirens of Titan, The Slaves of Heaven, The Tenth Planet, The Throne of Saturn, The Valley of Horses, The Venom of Argus, The War Games of Zelos, The World Shuffler, To Sleep No More, Walk to the End of the World, War Day and the Journey Onward, Who Needs Men?, Wild Talent Ramc, can I ask people about this elsewhere?
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Jul 28, 2021 19:00
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Anukahn posted:What if those are Russian alphabet letters My understanding is that would be unlikely.
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Jul 28, 2021 19:01
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fritz posted:Ramc, can I ask people about this elsewhere? Go for it. Why should we be the only ones to be haunted by this?
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Jul 28, 2021 19:02
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fritz posted:There are 1006 single-word titles with 5-8 letters. It could be the author’s name too
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Jul 28, 2021 19:07
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And 'probably sci-fi' is an educated guess by the family member. It seems reasonable from what I know, though, and how the book looks.
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Jul 28, 2021 19:10
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I still feel that “Sexualis 1984” was dismissed far too hastily.
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Jul 28, 2021 19:25
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shadow puppet of a posted:I still feel that “Sexualis 1984” was dismissed far too hastily. Geoffrey Ramdagger's only publication. edit: only genre publication.
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Jul 28, 2021 19:57
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"you're going to love being dead! The fringe benefits far outweigh the eternal rotting smell." this is a quote I've been trying to find the origin of forever. there was this old warcraft 3 custom game called FM Vampire Hunters. it was pretty good, one side was vampires and the other side was humans, it was the genesis for lots of cat and mouse style games that eventually got incredibly sophisticated. when the vampires killed a guy there would be an audio sting of someone saying "naughty... Naughty vampire" and the quote above would play. what's the quote from? I'm sure it's from something. would also like to know where the audio is from but that might just be stock from waredit.exe the map couldn't be newer than, say, 2007 but is probably closer to 2000-2004.
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Jul 28, 2021 22:15
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fritz posted:Geoffrey Ramdagger's only publication. the book is probably one someone would feel cool leaving out where your family could see on a hotel table during a disney trip
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Jul 28, 2021 22:17
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Jul 29, 2021 00:28
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now gnawing over what if it is some other genre of book or thing and that is some weird print ad on the back of it
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Jul 29, 2021 01:24
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That looks like a change to the bit from hitchhikers guide when they find the computer.
Ghislaine of YOSPOS fucked around with this message at 01:59 on Jul 29, 2021 |
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Jul 29, 2021 01:37
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Ramc posted:Go for it. Why should we be the only ones to be haunted by this? If this book crawls out of my my phone’s screen and drowns my rear end I am going to be upset! Well, upsetting if I don’t get to read the title up close and become thread hero before I drown. 
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Jul 29, 2021 02:03
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Jul 29, 2021 02:04
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Ghislaine of YOSPOS posted:That looks like a change to the bit from hitchhikers guide when they find the computer. If you're referring to the discord screenshot, it's a reference to "The Last Question," a short story by Isaac Asimov. It's a series of scenes of times in future-history where people have asked their computers, "how can entropy be reversed?" and the computers keep responding, "insufficient data for a meaningful answer." You can tell it was written in the 50s because all the computers have "AC" in their name (for "automatic computer," as in e.g. EDVAC).
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Jul 29, 2021 02:58
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DontMockMySmock posted:If you're referring to the discord screenshot, it's a reference to "The Last Question," a short story by Isaac Asimov. It's a series of scenes of times in future-history where people have asked their computers, "how can entropy be reversed?" and the computers keep responding, "insufficient data for a meaningful answer." You can tell it was written in the 50s because all the computers have "AC" in their name (for "automatic computer," as in e.g. EDVAC).   
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Jul 29, 2021 03:08
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I just took a quick look at the book, my first real look, and the title looks like DECEPTION.
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Jul 29, 2021 03:08
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Ghislaine of YOSPOS posted:"you're going to love being dead! The fringe benefits far outweigh the eternal rotting smell." Dota exploding but not FMVH is a travesty and if I had money to waste I'd put together a team and get the ball rolling. It was the best part of dota (ganking) pretty much streamlined. God it was good I think the naughty vampire god quote is from blade so maybe that?
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Jul 29, 2021 03:09
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Ghislaine of YOSPOS posted:there was this old warcraft 3 custom game called FM Vampire Hunters. it was pretty good, one side was vampires and the other side was humans, it was the genesis for lots of cat and mouse style games that eventually got incredibly sophisticated. when the vampires killed a guy there would be an audio sting of someone saying "naughty... Naughty vampire" and the quote above would play. what's the quote from? I'm sure it's from something. would also like to know where the audio is from but that might just be stock from waredit.exe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBYYQ6-yVr8
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Jul 29, 2021 08:38
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Ramc posted:Go for it. Why should we be the only ones to be haunted by this? I asked the File770 people and they came through: http://file770.com/pixel-scroll-7-28-21-so-put-another-file-in-the-jukebox-baby/comment-page-1/#comment-1358136
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Jul 29, 2021 09:36
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I am... free? What am I supposed to do with my evenings now? (Author was the big word, and it was two lines? I never had a hope)
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Jul 29, 2021 09:44
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Yeah, why am I disappointed it didn't take a little longer?
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Jul 29, 2021 09:52
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Screencaps for the sake of thread completeness:   Metaline posted:Yeah, why am I disappointed it didn't take a little longer? You've been conditioned by mystery-solving podcasts to expect a long winding journey before the big payoff 
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Jul 29, 2021 10:48
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