By lavenderSiren MSPFA MSPFA shinyjiggly Tumblr shinyjiggly SoundCloud lavendersiren.itch.io Bluesky lavendersiren Other → #bacafe Next track by this artist.
Released 6/17/2013.
Duration: 0:47.

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Tracks that reference #bacade:

From Fandom:

• #bacafe by lavenderSiren
• Ballad of the Guardian by lavenderSiren

Artist commentary for #bacade:

lavenderSiren: (album art credit research document, sic) 8/11/2025

- bacade anmd #bacafe: I think TT? Might have been a rare other v2 staff member

lavenderSiren: (ARG puzzle post-mortem, Tumblr) 12/23/2013

The Legend of Bacafe: the beginninging

Ah, puzzle six. Where do I even start with this integral part of SBARGv2? Well, I guess I could start at the beginning.

When we were making the first puzzleset, the team had this huge list of different types of puzzles that we could use. We drew heavily from that list early on when looking for ways to hide the completely arbitrary answers. My idea of making a puzzle was pretty much “encrypt it with one thing after another”. That method tended to make the puzzles too hard for most of the community to handle.

Anyways, for puzzle 6, I chose “hidden message in a midi”, “confusing poem”, “morse code message”, “some kinda hex code”, and “alternate annotation of a color code” and smashed those all together.

As some savvy folks might know, the hex color originally used in this was 0xBACADE, which was chosen because it vaguely sounded like a pronounceable word and it worked within the letter range of note names and hexadecimal notation.

Anyways, as the story goes, the players got the puzzle and didn’t know what to make of it. This could be partially because the answer was hidden in an inconspicuous arpeggio, alongside the hint in another track and a meaningless set of block chords to make it sound cool. Also, the fact that nobody even knew what the hint was trying to refer to.

At some point, I believe it was either anomolousEntity or Noodles who had typed in the url just wrong enough to stumble into the puzzle directory, where all of the puzzleset files and answers were stored. (I had actually thought it was NN who broke it, which was the reason for a Sweet Chronos and Hella Cronos page that never saw the light of day due to inaccuracy towards the situation)

At this point, the staff (especially chaoSeed, who pretty much ran the server stuff and didn’t exactly anticipate for that kinda stuff). We were all paranoid that they were gonna like, tear us in half and stuff (and this was the first time we had to deal with this sorta thing since a few of us were new to the whole ARG thing). But instead of breaking down completely, we picked ourselves up, translated it into a character interaction, fixed the security hole, and changed the remaining puzzles just enough for it to not be so easy. For puzzle six, the difficulty wasn’t even really changed that much, there was literally a change of just one letter and that was enough to have the answer less of a give-away, since they couldn’t exactly reverse-engineer the thing with just the meager progress they already got with the old answer due to a lack of context.

Anyways, the puzzle continued to be an uncrackable enigma, and I was really starting to worry that they may never get it. I really thought I was a horrible puzzle designer at that point. I wound up venting my frustrations as “I hate the guardian for making this puzzle”, even though technically I was the guardian in question.

Eventually, through continuous vague hints, some of which trying to remind them about which things got changed between the first version’s mp3 track that would make a difference and analyzing the rest with a midi viewing tool thing, they cracked the code and everything was alright again. paperParadox was given the honors of submitting it and claiming the victory over it. As a prize, they got an mp3 of the remix, but with an extra loop and something extra. if anyone remembers the “shipping picture commissioned by Lord English”, an edited version of that was databent into the second loop in an unreadable form to give the feeling of “oh crud we shouldn’t have messed with that now it’s all glitchy and stuff” or something.

In frustrating celebration of this, anomolousEntity create a fantroll which had succeeded in being disturbing by his description alone, if only for the fact that I interpreted the “unseen master” as one of the GM’s that may or may not have been myself, and let’s just say the thought of being handed a fresh heart ripped from some poor shmoe’s chest is kinda freaky for my standards. yeah……

But for some reason, I actually found Bacafe the fantroll to be compelling and probably one of the more interesting things created by the SBARGv2 fandom.

Next bacafe segment will probably go over the tons of other places the hex color has shown up in.