The Secret Message Contained in One Million Checkboxes

In my XOXO post on Monday, I said that Nolen Royalty, the creator of One Million Checkboxes, had told “one of the wackiest internet nerd stories I’ve ever heard”. Well, Royalty has now put that story online, both in the form of a blog post and a YouTube video:

I panicked. There were URLs in my database! There were URLs pointing to catgirls.win in my database!! Something was very very wrong.

I assumed I’d been hacked. I poured over my logs, looking for evidence of an intrusion. I read and re-read my code, searching for how somebody could be stuffing strings into a database that should have just contained 0s and 1s.

I couldn’t find anything. My access logs looked fine. My (very simple) code was ok. My heart rate increased. My girlfriend patiently waited for me to join her for dinner. And then — wait.

Wait!

I saw it.

It’s a great story — read/watch the whole thing. It reminds me of the palimpsest (layered communication) that the aliens use to communicate with Earth in Carl Sagan’s Contact (and the 1997 movie). Not only because of the in-game message left for Royalty but for the way that there turned out to be many ways to “play” or “beat” OMCB.

• Nolen Royalty
• video