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hayjeon · 5 years ago

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Practical Tips on getting your fics out there!

I’ve gotten an influx of these types of questions here recently, and the more i thought about what i was gonna add, it became really long :(

disclaimer: a lot of the things i bring up are just from personal experience as a writer on this site, what my followers have told me they appreciate, and what i tend to look for when im looking for fics to read! If you don’t like these tips then pls move on :)

although i’ll mention them, i’m also not going to be focusing on cliche tips like “write for yourself” or “grammar issues” cause those are pretty obvious!

1. accessibility of your blog

when you’re trying to get your name out there, make sure that you’re creating an inviting experience for any potential followers! this includes:

a memorable url! be creative!

have some fun designing your blog’s aesthetic! (i love cute blogs because it reflects a bit of the writer’s personality), and (i prefer blogs with white backgrounds because it’s easier to look through/read, say, in contrast to a pitch black one where the words need to be white!)

put your masterlist link in your bio (even better if you can link most recent fic! found this most helpful when i revisit authors that i like and can easily see if they’ve updated or not)

an organized and easy-to-navigate masterlist (personally, i prefer masterlists organized by band, instead of types of fics ie. i hate when i have to choose between drabbles, oneshots, and series masterlists; i really prefer to see them altogether!) --> see section 3

organized tags (if you’re going to be posting a lot of non-fic-related content like pictures or videos, tag them properly so followers can sort through and find your fics easily!), or (if you’re going to be writing in different mediums like drabbles, or answering asks, make sure to use a unified #mine or #writing or #fics to centralize your content)

2. get your name out there!

write write write! once you have some fics that show your talent, don’t be shy!

join writing groups: when i first started out, I joined a bunch of groups that would reblog my fics in the midst of the content of much bigger writers; these blogs developed a following, and as a result of my content mixing in with bigger blogs’ content, so did my own tumblr! there’s been a stigma recently with these groups, but im sure you can find one thats supportive and not clique-y!

send your fics to rec pages: what’s the harm? the only bad thing that can happen is that they ignore you! who cares! get out there!

if you can do the above, i really encourage you to ask your fave writers for advice/to read your fic: again, the worst that can happen is that they say no or don’t respond or don’t have enough time, but it’ll be a good opportunity to get some feedback! i for one read (or try to read) every single rec that falls into my inbox. if i like it, i’ll #rec it, and if i don’t, unless the writer asks me for feedback, i move on!!

utilize your tags!!: i’m not entirely sure if this is still the same or not, but from my memory, it’s the first 3-5 tags that matter the most? so utilize them well; push back the tags that aren’t really relevant (ie. #writing, #fics) and push more the main subject line of what you wrote (ie. jungkook fluff, bts smut, namjoon angst). these will populate your fics into the tags better!

headers!: when i’m scrolling through an infinite page of fics, the headers catch my eye the most; try being creative! you can find a lot of info out there on how to make ur headers super aesthetic, but i can share my tips too! --> see section 3

3. your masterlist

here are some practical tips!

organize by band, not type of fic/member/centralize your masterlist: i went onto a blog recently and clicked their bio mlist link to find a page full of 20~ish “JUNGKOOK MASTERLIST”/ “JAEHYUN MASTERLIST” and when i clicked on each one, they only had like 2 or 3 fics per member. i think it would’ve been better if she’d centralized all her fics! that keeps whoever is looking interested and more likely to click on another fic while browsing

add info about the fics!: when scrolling through a masterlist, it’s easy to get lost; try to add some snippets of info (ie. a short sentence you liked from the fic, a quick summary, a description of the au/scenario, or even a header!) this all gives some info about the fics you have tagged!

headers: this isn’t a requirement, but i personally love a good header on fics i read and i love making them myself as i finish up a fic and get ready to upload it; here are free sources: unsplash for HQ stock pics, crop/edit/filter in VSCO, and then add aesthetic script with fontcandy)

try to fill it up!: after i visit a blog after reading one good fic, i usually browse through their mlist to see if there are any more that i’d be interested in. if there’s a lot to look forward to, i’ll almost always follow; try to write as much as you can in the first few months to try and fill up your mlist and give blog viewers a reason to visit your blog again, follow, or even reblog your content!)

4. try not to reproduce cliche fics:

honestly tumblr’s writing community (and armys) has grown insanely these past few years and, unfortunately, even from my perspective, in the past 3-4 years, all the writers have sort of become blended together in my brain. but, i can say that the ones who consistently stand out are the ones who produce consistent content and think outside of the box!

i tend to gravitate towards fics that have really interesting plotlines (ex. btssavedmylifeblr’s VOID is always a surprise to read because it’s sO unique! i usually don’t read ot7 fics but this one is legit my fave)

I know it’s tempting to try and just write typical smut fics to try and gain some traction, but tumblr is already too overloaded by that kind of content; try to write something that’s special and unique! this will set u apart from the thousands of other writers here --> see next section

5. create unique fics:

this is also personal to my writing style, but i get so bored writing just casual fics about the members, and it affects the fics i choose to read too; i prefer unique fics which you can achieve through:

circumstance/au: create a fun au!; don’t just create an arranged marriage, create an arranged marriage in joseon dynasty, or between a werewolf and a hunter! (shameless self plug); don’t just give me friends to lovers, but give me spiderman!jungkook friends to lovers! (ie. cupofteaguk’s exchanges)

jobs: give them out-of-the-ordinary jobs; don’t just give me enemies to lovers, but give me rival!anchors who end up loving eachother! (ie. jimlingss The Newscasters)

fun dialogue: create good back-and-forth, (something i’m still working on!)! this will help your characters develop personality, and that way, readers will start to develop that themselves as well (ie. dad!yoongi from insemination wars by prolixitae is such a specific character that i love so much!, or obiwrites’ garden characters were so memorable!)

create memorable personalities: don’t give me a flat character, try to develop 4d personalities in all of your characters! (im still working on this too!) this way you can really make an impression on your followers! a great way to practice/recognize this is: “Ask my Character.” Can your followers ask a specific character a specific question, and would you be able to deliver an answer that is very specific to that character’s tone/voice/personality? If yes, then ur doing well! If not, try to think of ways that you can make tht specific character from a specific story, really unique and separate from your other characters.

6. some practical writing tips

be yourself, write for your own pleasure, blah blah blah; yeah you know already haha but here are a few more practical tips!

grammar check: if you can, try and hone your grammar! makes for an easier read

write like you: i personally LOVE this by obiwrites, but even the way she writes exudes her personality and is so specific; try not to be caught up in adding hundreds of synonyms and exquisite language; in fact, simpling it down and being more concise and honest with your writing is better than a superfluous sentence; this will also give ur characters so much more dimension and funk

use those commas/sentence variation: try to use more commas; this will feel like you’re the narrator to your own story; it also makes it more fluid to read in my opinion, over those short. clipped. sentences. (ie. “he came over, sitting down on the corner of your bed with an expression you’d never seen before” over “he walked over. he sat down, looking sad.”)

half-half dialogue/narration: a fic with too much dialogue can get confusing, and a fic with too much narration can get dry; try to balance them out, and weave in and out of each!

quality over quantity: don’t feel burdened to write a 30k word fic. in fact, i think some of the shorter fics (ie. any of versigny’s stuff) made a bigger impression on me over the longer fics because they were short, left me wanting more, and were just so high-quality in such small quantities. try out your hand at drabbles and one-shots, and don’t feel too burdened to try and develop a series right off the bat!

abandon pigeon-holes: i’m guilty of this; i start series and then end up with no vision for the stories and they end up giving me writers block. its okay. just stop or discontinue them or leave them on a hiatus; it’s okay. your priority is yourself, and if abandoning certain works are part of that, then go ahead. it’ll help you progress more.

and finally.......

i’ll add more as they come up! but if you liked this, then pls lmk! i’d love to give more tips and tricks; i think i started this blog 3-4 years ago when there weren’t as many writers here, but im glad you’re thinking of starting out/wanting to grow more! don’t feel intimidated! it’s not all about the notes/followers but creating a blog you’re proud of.

so write what you’re proud of, or interested in, and keep going. i truly thoroughly had so much fun writing this post. if there are any writers who read through this and have some more advice, pls msg me!

all the best to you!

#writing tips #story talk #if ur a writer pls lmk if theres anything u wanna add #if ur a reader then pls lmk any questions or comments!

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marcilled · 6 years ago

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The Xylo ARG: a summary

Have you or someone you follow been getting cryptic asks like the one above? They always just say one of the two following things:

a303d61a3714b71b459a9e65921078 OR a303d61a-371-4b71-b45-9a9e65921078

Well, good work, you’ve managed to stumble into a new tumblr ARG which I’ve taken to calling the “Xylo ARG” or “Shiloh ARG”. I’ve already talked about this on my blog already, but I thought it might be a good idea to have a post summarizing what the hell is up with these asks and what the deal with this ARG is.

The main blog and focus of this ARG is here: @xylophonetic

If you haven’t already read my previous post about this, you should check that out. It includes some speculation and theories that I didn’t include in this post, most notably my theories about this string of characters being a UUID, as well as some observations that this hex number actually corresponds to 5 unique colors encoded in hexadecimal.

Since my previous post, there’s been some developments, but sadly I and the others I’ve been discussing this with over discord haven’t come up with any major leads, or if we have, they haven’t led anywhere yet.

That being said, I thought it might be useful to make a post summarizing some of what we already know about this. I’ve never done an ARG and don’t even really know much about them, but I was one of the people sent one of these asks so in a way I’m a small part of it now. I figured I’d make this post since I think I was the first person to really analyze what was going on here and notice that there’s an actual blog associated with these asks people have been getting. Obvs a lot of these discoveries weren’t made by me tho, I’ve not devoted much time to discovering things, there’s a few others involved in trying to figure this out too. (y’all, feel free to hop in the replies/reblogs if you want people to know you’re helping with this).

Anyways, let’s get onto the actual post. This might get lengthy, so it’ll be below the cut. Heads up- this post contains creepy imagery, depictions which might be described as “body horror”, as well as mentions of parental abuse. All posts referenced should have a link provided unless they were deleted before the creation of this post. Got it? Let’s dive in.

First off, let’s recap on how this all started, and how me and a few others came to realize that this was, indeed, an ARG we’re looking at. (Presumably, anyways- all of the happenings are too strange to just be the work of some crafty aesthetic blogger… probably.)

It all started with a couple of popular tumblr users getting asks like the one linked at the top of the post here. Just this cryptic hexadecimal string, sometimes with hyphens, sometimes without. It’s unclear how many people these anonymous asks were sent to, but if you look up the text you’ll find a couple other popular tumblr users that were sent the ask. It’s always anonymous, and I don’t know of anyone who’s received direct messages from the blog owner(s).

After pondering it a bit, I decided to look up the ask I got on tumblr, and noticed a blog which had this string of characters as its url. And that’s where things started getting interesting.

The blogs

The main blog relating to this ARG appears to be https://xylophonetic.tumblr.com/. Her URL has changed a couple times since we first discovered it, the url was originally a303d61a3714b71b459a9e65921078. From now on I’ll be referring to this blog/blog owner as “Shiloh”, as that is and has been the name stated on the blog. (Also- her pronouns are she/hers as mentioned here.)

There is also another blog relating to this story, which I hadn’t mentioned in the previous post (because at the time we did not know about it / it had not been created yet). This blog originally had the url a303d61a, but has since taken the previous URL that shiloh used: https://a303d61a3714b71b459a9e65921078.tumblr.com/

This new blog was originally titled “Safe?”, and doesn’t appear to have any name associated as far as anyone can tell, so from here on I’ll be referring to them as “safe”. It’s unclear if “safe” is a character that has been mentioned by Shiloh before, but it’s certain that they are associated with the ARG because they swapped urls with shiloh. At time of writing, the “Safe?” blog has had its title changed twice, first to a series of three emojis, then to an eye emoji. We will continue to call them “Safe” until there is a more appropriate name discovered/decided on.

There is also, technically, a third blog- this blog uses the URL previously used by Safe, and it appears that this blog may just be for keeping the url hoarded. However, there’s still some interesting things on this blog, and even some possible hints. The blog is https://a303d61a.tumblr.com/ and will go unnamed unless things begin to appear on that blog as well.

Okay, now that we know a bit about how this started, and what blogs to be on the lookout for, what is there to know? Well, if you take a look at Shiloh’s blog, you might not even realize what you’re looking at is a part of an ARG at first. From first glance, it honestly just looks like an average aesthetic blog. She reblogs lots of aesthetic type posts from various bloggers, a lot of which may not mean much in the long run, but some of the posts she reblogs do give a bit of insight on some of the different “characters” in this emerging story. However, she also sometimes posts very cryptic things- many original posts contain very strange and cryptic photos or text that’s been purposefully obfuscated or otherwise altered. The same string of text “a303d61a…” is present throughout the blog’s history. There’s also other posts from Shiloh that imply that she is (or, was) in danger, or that she was sick, that she’s afraid of certain other characters, etc.

So, these “characters”… who are they? There are quite a few distinct “characters” involved in this, some seemingly more relevant than others. I’ll give a brief overview of what we know about all of them, but first, I should say what is known about the central character here: Shiloh.

Shiloh

While we don’t know a lot about Shiloh herself, there are a few things we can say for sure. Shiloh likes to reblog things she likes or thinks are interesting, much like your run of the mill aesthetic blogger. However, she also posts her own strange, cryptic photos sometimes- often times with many filters and photo manipulation used to make them look strange or hard to decipher.

Shiloh seems prone to deleting posts often, for one reason or another- or posting things then rapidly deleting them. This has been noted to happen even late into the night without much rhyme or reason. The “Safe?” blog is sometimes used to archive some of these deleted posts, although not all of the important/noteworthy posts are actually saved in this way. Shiloh has even been shown to go back and frequently edit old posts, sometimes multiple times. Her (and the other blogs’) urls, titles, icons, blog colors and headers have been known to change at random.

She also seems to not have total control over her blog/account- she’s posted before about her url or icon changing out of her control, and seeming confused or upset by it. See here. She’s also posted before about how she’s “regaining control” and such.

As well, it seems that for a time, Shiloh fell ill with some unknown ailment. Or rather, unknown to her- “they won’t tell me”. It’s unknown who “they” is in this context, but Shiloh seemed sad that she could not see Nat any longer- and also that her mother was preventing her from going out due to this illness. Notably, after posting this, she posted “im not a monster im not”. Perhaps people, possibly her mother, were telling her her illness made her monstrous??

Yesterday evening (may 16), she posted that her fever is gone and she is doing better now. Perhaps she has recovered from her illness– although she still seems confused about what is happening.

Aside from those things, she has also posted a photo here, tagged as “#me”:

(original post)

There’s a lot of uncanny images like this on her blog, and I can’t include every one of them- but this is, supposedly, Shiloh. There’s also another post in her “#me” tag, but it is simply a reblog of some art. Not sure if it is important.

Safe?

I’ve covered most of what we currently know about Shiloh herself, but there are many other “characters” at play in this story. Most of these characters we only know about based upon things Shiloh has said about them, or posts she has tagged them in. “Safe?”, on the other hand, we only know about from their blog, and how they interact with Shiloh.

Safe is a bit of a mystery right now. It’s unclear if they(?) are even one of the characters mentioned by Shiloh or not, or if they are an outsider completely. Regardless of who they are, they seem hostile towards Shiloh.

Safe’s blog was not known until two days ago (may 15th) around ~4pm. When we discovered it, our initial thought was that the blog could be unrelated to the ARG itself, and it could potentially just be somebody who was following along and taking time out to archive the posts. Shiloh is known to delete posts sometimes after all, including ones that seem pretty important.

As time would tell though, it became clear that Safe is another actor in this story, although they seem to be even more mysterious than Shiloh.

Safe seems to reblog many of Shiloh’s original posts, sometimes adding tags or even editing the post in certain ways. We have reason to suspect that Safe is a malevolent force, as they have reblogged the photo of Shiloh and tagged the picture “#it”, in spite of her specifically requesting not to be called it. They’ve also reblogged posts from her that say “cold” and tagged it “freeze”, and a post saying “warm” with the tag “burn”, as if wishing harm on Shiloh.

Nonetheless, some of the most compelling clues we’ve gotten yet have come from the Safe blog. Particularly, it was the Safe blog which posted the following:

Sadly, the post was later deleted from both blogs, and there is no web archive of it, or fullsize versions of the right and left pictures. Here’s the fullsize of the center picture, though:

This post originally came from Shiloh’s blog, although I believe the images were not in the original post– Safe seems to have a habit of editing Shiloh’s posts and adding new things.

These pictures are tantalizing because of the caption: “room 371″. If you’ll notice, 371 is a subset of the string of text tying all of this together…

a303d61a-371-4b71-b45-9a9e65921078

The significance of this is currently unknown. However, there was some speculation that Shiloh may have been hospitalized due to her illness- these images do look somewhat like a hospital. However, this conflicts with what Shiloh herself has said- she is at home. So, what is room 371? We just don’t know, at the moment.

Another series of posts from Safe that just happened today only further the mysteries surrounding them. Today, they reblogged the post in which Shiloh said her fever was gone and edited the text to make it say “SHE MADE ME SICK”. It’s unclear who “she” is, in this context- but this seems important.

Also today, safe changed their blog title from “Safe?” to a series of three emojis- a safety pin, an old key, and a dagger. This is significant because of another thing I’ll bring up later. At time of posting, they’ve changed their blog title yet again to be just an eye emoji.

Beyond the posts about room 371, and other mysterious edits and reblogs of Shiloh’s content, not much is known for sure about Safe. There are some theories that Safe is actually Shiloh’s mother, or that they are a reflection of Shiloh’s inner thoughts and feelings about herself, but for the time being these are simply theories with not enough proof to back them up yet.

Other Characters (Nat, Melody, Zach, Brian)

Now, it is time to get into the other named characters in all of this. These other characters we only know about from things that Shiloh has said, or posts that she has reblogged and tagged in their name. For some characters, we only know of them at all due to her tags.

First, let’s start with “Nat”. Nat is one of Shiloh’s best friends, and clearly someone she cares about a lot. Shiloh was very sad when she could no longer see her after falling ill. A scroll through Shiloh’s Nat tag will show a variety of posts, although there seem to be some strong connections to love, tarot, and cats. Also, sometimes, space.

Something interesting to note is that in the tags of this post, Shiloh seemed to imply that Nat also has a blog, but “she changed urls”, and Shiloh doesn’t seem to know what her url is anymore, simply saying “weird”. While this is purely speculation, it’s possible that Nat’s blog could have been tampered with, in the same way that Shiloh’s was previously (possibly by the person who runs the Safe blog?)

After Nat, we have a minor character: Melody. It’s possible they could be more important, but right now, I can’t find any posts where Shiloh directly mentions melody- we only know of melody from various posts tagged with that name. Interestingly, one of the earliest posts on the blog (and an original post, too) depicts a pair of boots and is tagged as “#melody”. There’s a slight pattern of celestial bodies and plants, but nothing too significant to comment on here.

After Melody is another minor character: Zach. Here’s Shiloh’s #zach tag. A common theme here seems to be certain mammals (an opossum and a squirrel) and two pictures of pocket knives. Recently, Shiloh has posted that zach is a friend of hers. Other than that, not much is known of Zach.

That brings us to Brian- another interesting character. Here’s Shiloh’s #brian tag. There’s a few original posts here, with some cartoon characters dancing and hugging. There’s also the same pocket knives that zach was tagged in.

On the surface there might not seem to be a lot here about Brian, but in actuality I have reason to suspect that Brian may be Shiloh’s brother. I believe our first hint at this was this post:

It would make sense that her brother would be there at her home, albeit unexpectedly. Another post that re-affirms this hunch is this now deleted post:

the tag #brother was put alongside #brian here. Also, there is this post which also mentions there being a brother:

There may be other characters, as there are a lot of tags in use on the blog. However, these 4 are the most obvious ones, having names that are… just ordinary people names.

Mother and Father

Beyond the already named characters, there’s two more distinct characters mentioned on Shiloh’s blog- “Mother” as well as “Father”. There are very few posts about Father, but a great deal about Mother. I’ll just preface this right now by saying that Shiloh’s mother seems abusive and openly hostile/aggressive towards Shiloh. As for her father, not much is known of him, but he seems to be absent from Shiloh’s life, likely due to having divorced her mother at some point in the past.

If you take a quick scroll through her #mother tag, you can see that there is a strong association with birds. This seems like a very consistent thing- perhaps Shiloh’s mother is a bird. Or maybe she just connects her with birds for some reason. Either way, if there’s bird imagery, there’s a good chance that it relates to Shiloh’s mother (although there was one bird image tagged as #brian, too).

Some of the earliest posts on the blog make references to mother in this way, too:

Another motif in the photos tagged as #mother are glowing eyes:

As discussed before, Shiloh’s mother seems abusive. Here’s some posts showing Shiloh expressing fear of her mother:

As well as some recent posts from earlier today (may 17) which tell a lot about how Shiloh feels about her mother:

(source for the last one)

It has been stated that Mother doesn’t like any of Shiloh’s friends:

It’s also been shown that Shiloh’s mother tells her she can’t go out and can’t see nat anymore due to her illness. I also speculated earlier that her mother may have been the one to call her a “monster”.

Additionally, this cryptic original post is in the #mother tag:

full tags are #fear, #heart, #love, #mother, #love love.

There’s a lot of hidden text in this image, including the mysterious hex string, as well as phrases and words such as “fear of the heart of love”, “like anything”, etc. It is a bit hard to make out, and difficult to reverse all the filters done to make the text illegible to begin with.

Adding to the series of mysteries surrounding Mother, earlier today Shiloh posted a series of pictures that appear to depict a path to a river. When asked about them, Shiloh stated that “mom doesnt like the river”, and that “she thinks its dirty or something”. Curiously, she says that her mom is scared of fish.

There have also been some theories that Mother is the one running Safe’s blog, antagonizing Shiloh when she gets the chance. There’s credence given to this theory by taking into account this post, where Shiloh talks about having her blog changed without her control over it. In the post, you can see that her icon was changed to this image:

An edited version of the full photo remains on Safe’s blog. This is a photo that was created by a neural network (source), and contains many bird-like features, so we’ve taken to calling this picture “mother bird”. The fact that Shiloh’s icon was changed to this while the blog was not under her control seems to imply that her mother was the one messing with her blog. Considering how much urls swapped between Safe and Shiloh, it seems as though there’s a link between Mother and Safe, although, again, this is speculation.

There is also this post on Safe’s blog, which depicts feathers / knives side by side, along with a caption from Shiloh saying “she’s coming”:

The post is now deleted from Shiloh’s blog. Given the feathers/bird motif here, and referring to a hostile entity as “she”, it’s probably safe to assume that Shiloh was referring to Mother.

At the very least, we can say that both Mother and Safe are openly hostile/antagonistic towards Shiloh, if not the same person.

As for “father”, there’s only a few posts referring to a father, and only recently have there been any original posts. Shiloh seems to associate him with suited businessmen, and there are many posts implying that her parents had a very testy relationship. It seems as though they divorced, and now Shiloh’s father is no longer in her life. Aside from some possible resentment possibly stemming from him not being there any longer, it’s hard to say much about Father, other than that he’s not around any longer.

Other tags

There are many tags in use on Shiloh’s blog, many of them seemingly mundane, something you’d expect from any run of the mill aesthetic blog. Still, there are a few tags which incite some intrigue, or are worth speculating about.

One such tag is #home. Shiloh makes many references to “home”- never “my house” or “where i live” or any other word- only ever referring to it as simply “home”. The images in the tag are often very lush and green depictions of nature- they could just be pictures of landscapes, or sometimes they are pictures of humble cottages in the wilderness. Sometimes they can depict houses that are rotting and decaying. All these pictures seem to signify what “home” is to Shiloh, and I think that “home” is a specific location.

To back up this theory, there’s also the tag #camp. There’s not a lot in this tag, but it seems to evoke this feeling of some summer camp or something that Shiloh went to once perhaps. Maybe “camp” could come up again in later posts? I guess we’ll see.

There’s also the tag #you, which would seem to be the opposite of the #me tag. However, there’s just some songs and other various reblogs in this tag.

Misc. observations / speculation

The new(?) blog at the url https://a303d61a.tumblr.com/ may be otherwise empty, but the blog’s title and description are somewhat curious. As of time of writing, this is the entire contents of their blog:

My device doesn’t have a new enough version of unicode to support displaying some of these emojis, but the emojis in the title are:

safety pin 🧷 old key 🗝 dagger 🗡

The emojis included in the blog’s description are:

rainbow 🌈 tooth �� scissors ✂️ wilted flower 🥀

Also worth noting, is that these three emojis were briefly displayed as the title of Safe’s blog earlier today.

I get the feeling that these emojis may be a pretty significant hint. Something that reinforces this suspicion in me is the fact that Safe made a post tagging Shiloh’s blog, similar to how this new blog made a post tagging Safe. However, the post Safe made includes a safety pin emoji, which is one of the three emojis included in this blog’s title.

This is purely speculation, so feel free not to believe me, or reinterpret it how you wish of course, but: Perhaps Shiloh’s blog is like a safety pin, holding the story as we know it together. But, what we really need to find is the key. The key will lead us further, until we find the dagger.

I also find the emojis used in the description curious, because Shiloh has posted pictures of scissors (actually, lawn clippers?) before. Additionally, Safe has made a post about teeth and eyes hurting before. Interestingly, this post was edited from the original– Shiloh’s post was about her mother seeming angry, but Safe changed it to say “teeth hurt eyes hurt”.

Another potential lead that @ skippsblipps discovered, was a pattern in this old post from Shiloh.

Aside from the obvious secret message mixed in amongst the text, there seems to be a pattern of when the “a303d…” string of text repeats, and when there is something other than the original “a303d…” string. In their words:

“if we count only where the code was exactly the original code, its 6 , 1 , 2 , 1 , 4 , 2 if we count where the code deviates, its 1 , 3 , 3 , 3 , 1″

There’s a chance that this post could be absolutely random nonsense, or that we were only meant to look for the words within the text, but perhaps there’s something more here.

Closing thoughts

I said it at the start, and I’ll say it again: I don’t know a damn thing about ARGs. And, hell, after spending hours compiling stuff for this post, I’m still pretty clueless about where this one might lead. My main hope with this post was to inform anyone who’s curious about this ARG about what we’ve discovered so far, as well as to fill people in who may have missed stuff.

Also, I’d like to apologize if this post jumps topics around a lot, or if it can be a bit hard to follow. Honestly I think that’s just a result of all of the different loose ends in this ARG being hard to follow themselves, although I tried my best. I had to keep updating this post as I typed it, because new posts kept coming in and new discoveries/speculation kept happening. So, sorry for any confusion.

Sadly, many posts on both blogs end up getting deleted, and never archived. That’s why I’ve taken the liberty to archive each and every single post and tag I linked to in this breakdown on the internet archive, which is also why this took hours to make this post because I had to ctrl+c and ctrl+v like a million times. If you notice any of the links I put in this post are broken, just paste the url into the wayback machine and you should at least pull up the archive that I took at the time of typing this post. I couldn’t archive every single thing on all these blogs, just the stuff that I thought was relevant.

If anyone else is inspired to hop in on this ARG because of this post, please feel free to add your thoughts/speculation in the replies, reblogs, whatever. Also please don’t expect me to answer all your asks & speculation, I did this post because it seems like nobody else is paying attention to this and I thought it was cool and deserved some time and attention. I fully expect people smarter than me to outpace me and discover all the secrets and that’s cool with me, I’m just along for the ride. I hope my post helped. Thanks for reading!

EDIT: I’ve made an update to this post here, go read it!

#xylo ARG #shiloh ARG #a303d61a3714b71b459a9e65921078 #a303d61a 371 4b71 b45 9a9e65921078

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