Acknowledgement of an Easter Egg on Our Site

Cicada

We’re such wannabies

I can’t resist Easter eggs

They’re delicious.

Some (read: none) of you out there probably wonder what I do when I’m not working on Blasted Science posts or delaying the completion of our first video. There are a few answers to that, but I can almost guarantee that my unorthodox partying style is not popular reading material. But when I’m not writing or slacking off, I’m pretending to be Cicada 3301.

Don’t start mashing those arrow keys on our home page: this secret ain’t a simple Konami cheat code. There’s a long, complicated series of steps that will eventually lead to something. But we’re not as smart as Cicada; anyone with a web browser and a few megabytes of disk space could probably figure it out. Will there be a reward for finding the Easter egg? That’s a very good question. Hopefully I can scrape together some funds before anyone finds it.

What you need to know

Randomly throwing you into the fray without a few useless hints? We aren’t that savage. These bullet points are your Bible from now on:

  • I have a serious addiction to cryptography. Scratch that, I have an addiction to a word that is closely related to cryptography and sounds like a dinosaur. The name of that dinosaur is important.
  • No password is completely arbitrary, but I doubt you’ll get many on the first try.
  • No password is cheap. Don’t worry, they’re all lowercase and fairly short.
  • A recent post of ours has a screenshot of a web browser. It was completely accidental, but it might be helpful to those of you who don’t immediately guess the first step.
  • To those who don’t like downloading lots of sketchy software, I have bad news for you. [Update: read some of our newer posts]
  • There is one point where you have to google [something] + “easter egg” and the solution should be one of the first results.
  • <3 imgur and pastebin

That’s all you need to know! We wish you good luck. Now go break your legs and knock yourself out.