Quest4Treasure Archives

You're welcome to share your ideas here or get right down to digging. I only speak for myself, but I dont see the point of teasing some notion and not being forthcoming. Others here have been at this a lot longer than me and the there are rare times I've seen someone tease a solve, when they are actually en route to a dig site or a date marked on their calender for when they plan to call in sick, but then there are times when people tease a solve and continue to tease but eventually give up because they never had a lick of real evidence. I've had my own ideas about some universal solve process before and done my best to demonstrate how they might work, such as the geometric lines on a city map anchoring the jewel to a general location for Cleveland or Chicago, but despite all my efforts, there isnt any guarantee that I'm manipulating the scale and producing a false positive. I've also looked for in book hints and possible applications of the Litany of the Jewels, but once again without success, given the wide variety of possibilities allowable when taking my pick of alternate meanings for words in the dictionary. I dont think anyone gives a f*** about consensus. The baseline for sharing ideas is simple. People shuffle around ideas, hold on to the hopefuls, bust or disprove the fodder, or troll if they've succumbed to their own self-contempt. If you want progress, put your ideas up or pick up a shovel. The SF puzzle is a fascinating. I find it really difficult to reconcile a solution that seems vastly more complicated than Cleveland or Chicago. SF is a big place. Theres a lot of areas to consider other than GGP. Strawberry Hill isnt ruled out afaik, and many reports about digging in Golden Gate Park have been reported already. My personal favorite location is the roads edge near the Palace of the Legion of Honor among the cypress trees and benches overlooking the GG Bridge, but I have many doubts as well, like I said, its difficult to reconcile an approach that seems unique to the deconstructions of the already discovered casque locations.

JUD_SUB_ROSA wrote:: This next spoiler then reaffirms the localized area of the casque. ... This to me, is a verification of the localized area that the darkened leaf below the table represents. Nothing "reaffirms" or "verifies" any interpretation of a clue until the casque is found. Many clues could represent general city information, or they are too subjective to know what the author's real intent was. Only a completed dig with discovery of a casque (or its remains) will retroactively prove any of our conjectures here. Please do not claim otherwise.

JUD_SUB_ROSA wrote:: Look for the X symbol along the border of the dress, near the table leg. There is a very small red circle under the X. The small red circle is in and on the border of the dress. There is also a small red dash on the dragon tail. The red dash on the dragon tail is just below and in alignment with the line under the John Jude Palencar signature. Although I can see those marks in the scans, I've just been looking at a clean 1982 edition of the book in good light, and they're not visible. I suspect they're artifacts created by the scanning process. In the original, those areas are simply black.

JUD_SUB_ROSA wrote:: If a full sized painting were to be photographed, then the photograph downsized to fit within the dimensions of a book, some details from the original paintings are probably not going to show up. JUD_SUB_ROSA wrote:: This is noteworthy. Having copy and paste THE SECRET paintings from thesecret.pbworks.com. They are high resolution photographs of the paintings. And I firmly believe that if that were the case, the editor would reconsider relying on any clues which could not be seen in the book he wanted to publish. He had the control. Also, you talk about thesecret.pbworks.com as if those are "photographs" from the original paintings -- they are not! Those are also scans from the book, the same scans from the same old scanner that are posted everywhere. I have the book and a magnifying lens, and I can see which artifacts are in the printed images and which are introduced by the scanner. It has been suggested that we need to redo the scans using a more modern scanner with higher resolution, but those would still be inferior to looking at the book. The original paintings are not part of the treasure hunt, only what the publisher approved in the form of the book.

Looking at the book, it is very clear that the circle and dash are not present.

I see the circle you are referring to in the scanned image. By zooming in, it is clear that this circle was in the image being scanned, not an artifact of the scanning process. However, such errors were very, very common in the printing process, and are often unique to a given copy of a book. My copy of The Secret (an original 1982 printing) does not have that red circle, but it does have other tiny glitches not apparent in the scanned images. Everyone's copy has idiosyncrasies. They can be ignored.

forest_blight wrote:: ...this circle was in the image being scanned, not an artifact of the scanning process. However, such errors were very, very common in the printing process, and are often unique to a given copy of a book. I don't have my copy handy right now, but I do recall it having a lot of "glitches" in the ink. They are often in the form of a tiny circle or bubble of a single color, an obvious flaw in the 4-color printing process and not part of the original painting. Any scans made from the book will reproduce that flaw, of course, and then add its own noise to the pixels. The books is not made of pixels but it does have a dot matrix within in each ink layer, and when those are misaligned (either on the printed paper or with the scanner's lines, or both), the artifacts are maginified. In other words, we see what we want to see, and I tend to see tiny specks (in the ink as well as the scans) as flaws and not intentional clues.