SPOILER WARNING: This post is about some potential puzzles in the new website. If you want to discover them for yourself, stop reading here.

 

I’ve been following the recent promotion with the ciphers and then checked out today’s newsletter with the H.Q. Walters website. I noticed some typographical errors in the posts, and given the community ciphers, I thought this might be some sort of puzzle. Thus I started recording some of the observed typos, starting at the chronologically earliest entry and working my way backwards (blogs list things in reverse order, with the most recent being earliest, so I started with page 7).

For May 18, we have “What I heard made me realize that thought my parents may be gone,” – the T should not be there.

For May 21, we have “but apparently the vacuum of my parent’s absence” – the S should be before the apostrophe, as we know the author has been referring to plural parents

For May 25, we have “I decided the quite of the woods could let my mind wander.” – the E is in the wrong spot.

Later on May 25, we have “Hopefully whatever was out there would fall of a cliff and perish.” – there is an F missing.

Also on May 25, we have “Never had a felt so in danger in the woods I had explored as a child.” – There is an A placed there instead of an I

For June 4th, we have “There is also the upcoming festival I must attend in my parent’s stead,” – another S

For June 18th, we have “I am concerned that arriving at the lodge will allay my fears and I after this evening I can put this party behind me.” – an extraneous I

Also on June 18th, we have “pretending I care about their wealthy investments, who is marrying who, and their prying questions” – should be whom, giving us a missing M

Further on June 18th, there’s “I knew my parent’s friends were particular,” giving another S

On June 25th, we have “I feel like a gray ghost, wondering from place to place.” Should be an A for wandering.

Lastly, on June 25th, we have “The chatter died done and someone killed the music in the study.” Should be “down” instead of “done”, with a W.

Noting all these down, I have the string “tsefasimsaw,” which isn’t particularly insightful. However, recalling that I was reading the entries in reverse order from the way they’re on the page, I swapped it, giving “wasmisafest.” Acknowledging that the who/whom issue is a common mistake and may be unintentional, I removed the M and got the hidden phrase “Was I safest?”

Exploring the website a bit further, I noticed that the blog entries were identified by page number (/page/2/, /page/3/, etc.). I tried force-browsing to /page/8/, but instead of being presented with a journal entry, I was presented with a search bar. I tried searching on variations of “Was I safest” but received no results. I did note, however, that searching on the word “page” revealed a May 14th entry, though I haven’t found any way of reviewing the full text (and it appears to be boilerplate for a blog, so this may be a red herring). You can view this at https://hqwalters.com/?s=page. But given that is as far as I’ve gotten thus far, I thought I’d share my results with the community and see if anyone else has had any success with this.

There may be something with the numbers (May 14, May 18, May 21, May 25, June 4, June 18, June 25, July 9), so I’ll be playing around with those a bit and will post anything I come up with, though perhaps the hidden phrase is the only puzzle in this site.