---------------------------------------- Letterboxing August 31st, 2018 ---------------------------------------- Let me preface this by saying my snark here is entirely fictional and I have the greatest of respect for other people's hobbies... * * * * * * Geocaching is bullshit. Seriously? Let me poke in some numbers and walk there and boom! a seeeeeecret thing. Tada! (play "Link gets the triforce noise" in your head). Oh sure, there's clues to solve but at the end of the day the whole physical aspect of going somewhere could be removed and replaced with a checkbox that says, "Yep, got it." Now letterboxing... that's the shit right there. None of this fancy schmancy technology. Instead, good old fashioned vague pioneer directions like, "Go west-north-west for 45 paces until you near the tree that looks like an old man taking a piss." That's some real adventure! Not the old man taking a piss, the dire--you know what I mean. I love letterboxing. I will stamp the shit out of some letterboxes. I will leave hitchhikers along the way and have grand adventures in state parks. Mmmm, saucy hobby. The reason I bring this up is not to bash geocaching (though that was fun) but because Christy (who loves her some GPS) reminded me of an idea I had a while back for letterboxing which, I suppose, could be channelled for the dark arts in her hobby as well. My idea was to make a series of box challenges which led from one to the other and eventually were all pieced together into an Uber challenge. Not the car service kind, but like--you know what I mean. The theme was cryptography, which I felt was fitting. The simplest box used a Da Vinci cipher. The box then gave a piece of the puzzle to the next clue which was an Arnold cipher. Then on to a straddling checkerboard. Then the big one was a VIC cipher. And when you took the pieces from all the boxes together and concatenated all the strings you found, it would be a PGP key you could use to decode the final message to the final box. I got as far as that and some basic clue planning, then I got hung up on where I wanted to hide the boxes and never got around to doing it. So, if you are out there and you letterbox, please go ahead and steal my idea. I'd like to try and find your box (snicker). If you're a dirty geocacher, I guess you can do with it what you want... ugh. ;)