Gorillas in the Myst

Welcome to the post with the strangest and most conveluted title I've managed to come up with. In fact, I'm quite proud of it! Yesterday (Saturday) I woke up at noon and went to bed at 3:00 AM. That's being awake for 15 hours. This morning I woke up at 6:00 AM. For those of you who haven't done the math yet, that's 3 hours of sleep. In fact, my alarm clock went off as my roommate got into bed to go to sleep. . . that's how early I was up today. It's now midnight and I'm still awake since 6 AM, a time of 18 hours, meaning in the last 36 hours I've been awake for 33 of them. What happens when I'm deliriously tired and I decide it's a good time to blog? Really weird freaking titles like "Gorillas in the Myst", but that's ok because I can explain why I titled it that.

Two weeks ago I was sitting in the main lobby of MIT, Lobby 7, chatting with a friend. Suddenly I see a guy in a banana costume sprint as fast as he could across the lobby. This is weird. Then, even weirder (but perhaps more understandable) a guy in a gorilla suit appeared, sprinting after the banana. The ran several laps around the lobby before fleeing into a hallway that shoots off from Lobby 7. This is just when my roommate walks through lobby 7, so I jumped up and ran over to tell him the good news:

"JAMES! A GORILLA JUST CHASED A BANANA DOWN THAT HALLWAY! LOOOOOOOOK!"
this is when I notice the girl James is walking with. She's holding a suitcase and I've never seen her before. This is the exact moment when I remember that James had a close friend from home come visit.
"Uuuuuh, Amelia, this is my roommate, Snively."
"Um, hi. I'm not normally like this, it's just that there was this banana and he was running around and this gorilla -- "
"Snively, it's ok, we need to go"
"Right, ok, nice to meet you!"

Alright, so that's the gorilla part of the story, what about Myst? I discovered that my school is one giant game of Myst.



For those of you who don't know, MYST is a computer game whose plot revolves around dumping the main character (you) on some abandoned island with no people. Your goal is to get off. Everything on the island is a clue or a piece of a puzzle and you have to think through how everything is tied together in order to escape. People have been known to spend days tackling MYST, writing everything down in spiral notebooks and getting frustrated enough to actually take several years off their lives. Sounds like MIT, right? Here's the real reason why I think MIT is like Myst. I picked up a pamphlet today and read something interesting. Apparently in a hallway that I walk every single day there are random black and white tiles on the ground. I've noticed them before but I've never paid any real attention to them.



There are 18 of these rectangles down the hallway and according to the pamphlet THEY SPELL OUT A SECRET MESSAGE IN CODE! Leave it to MIT to actually tile a cryptic message into a hallway! The tie-in to Myst is that everything is a clue, even if it may not appear as such at first.

Well, knowing that there was a code waiting to be solved was just too much for me so I wrote down all of the different combinations of blocks and loaded them into a spreadsheet. I noticed something fairly important while recording the patterns of tiles: what looked like a key in tiny writing at the bottom of a wall. Here's what it looked like:



*Ponders* A CLUE!

I haven't had a lot of time to really try to crack the code yet, so I figured I'd give you guys a shot at it. I'm going to post the diagrams of all the tiles and the key that I found. Good luck!

Key (Not Solution)
Tile patterns (top left across the top row then bottom left across bottom row.)

Let me know if you figure it out, but don't post the solution. Post vague hints but don't ruin it for everybody.

So there you go, Gorillas in the Myst. I'm tired, it's time for bed now!