| Day 1 - Monday, July 25 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Leo Buscaglia was a professor at USC who was also known as "Dr. Love." After a student's suicide, Dr. Buscaglia was motivated to begin a non-credit class called Love 1A in order to teach that "social bonds are essential to transcending the stresses of everyday life and enriching it above the limitations of poverty as well as crossing communication gaps between generations."
The wallpaper says Acorn Wallpaper. And there just so happens to be a website for Acorn Wallpaper at http://acornwallpaper.com/. Whoever decorated the room Christina is in used the Vintage Grey Floral Living Wall Covering. Trying to add the wallpaper to a cart just gets you a message that the company is closed. Unfortunately, the lack of any stand-out clues led players on the site led players on a wild goose chase. If you look carefully at the Vintage Grey Floral Living Wall Covering photo, you'll notice that there are some very faint words over the top of the image. These spell out your.wall.com and going to that site takes you to a passworded directory. Total jackpot, right? The problem is, wall.com is a legitimate website and it doesn't seem likely that this game would piggyback off a non-owned site. It appears that whoever set up the Acorn Wallpaper took the image of the wallpaper from DesignYourWall.com without bothering to notice that there was a watermark over the top of the image. (If you look at some of the other sample photos, the same watermark can be found.) I can't even begin to talk about how many ways this is just plain wrong, so we'll just move on and hope the PMs don't show this level of ineptitude throughout the rest of the game.
The receipt is from Java Bird Coffee Shop and there is a web address at the bottom that takes us to http://javabirdjobs.net. Oddly, on my work computers the image slices don't match up at all (there are vertical white lines all over the page) but it resolves fine on my home computer. Since I didn't see anyone else complaining about it, I'll just chalk it up to one of those weird web browser bugs. There are a couple of odd things on the website though. One is that, according to her receipt, Christina ordered a LG CAFFE MOCHA for 4.39. Except that's not on the menu for that price. The Large Mocha on the webpage is 4.25. So why the difference in price? Then there is also the fact that the muffin on the webpage doesn't have a price listed at all. Does that mean that muffins are free at Java Bird Coffee? The last odd thing is that if you take a look at the /images directory, there are a number of images that aren't used on the site with the name javabird_janriski-1. Is that the name of the person who took her?
The menu was found to be from the very real Yang Chow Mandarian & Szechuan Cuisine in the San Fernando Valley. I guess this combined with the fact that the Acorn Wallpaper receives things from the Port of Los Angeles points to the idea that Christina may be being held in Southern California.
It's joked about quite a lot that this is a receipt for [a] one night stand. And then of course the speculation starts that maybe Christina had a one night stand with the person who kidnapped her and now they are getting even for it.
According to the sunrise and sunset tables, the sun does set in the Los Angeles area at 8:00pm PDT. So if Christina is accurate about the timing, combined with the wallpaper and take-out menu, she is very likely somewhere in the LA area.
|
| Continue to Day 2 - Tuesday, July 26th >> |