Eggs

I found this strangely broken seating during MJC’s recent “Romantic Spots” quest. It has four “Sit” buttons rather than the normal two, and two people can therefore sit at each end of the couch. Much good clean fun can be had with combinations of the different seating poses; I provide images of a couple of the least racy variations.

I’m pretty sure that what is going on here is that two identical 2-seaters have been placed in exactly the same location. I’ve put this in the “Eggs” category because it seems to me that this isn’t likely to be completely accidental.

What I’m unsure of is whether this is really MJC’s idea of romantic…

Above the door to the tomb in (There) Egypt, an inscription in hieroglyphics caught my eye. Being a suspicious kind of person, I wondered whether this was perhaps not some ancient language, but rather an English phrase transliterated using an ancient alphabet (people do this kind of thing for a laugh all the time, even in children’s books).

Assuming the black dots were word boundaries, a bit of work with an alphabet chart from the Royal Ontario Museum gave me “TUMB UF UR AXPAKT?TEUNS”, or more smoothly “Tomb of Our Expectations”.

I’m not sure whether this is some kind of morbid joke about a project that went wrong, or an uplifting statement about the kind of visual detail and quality There’s art team can produce when appropriate. Either way, the inscription sounds like it is a quotation from somewhere, and if you have any idea where it might originate I’d be interested to hear from you. Google, usually my friend in times of need, came up with only one hit for the phrase in an article by the Bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Spokane…

I don’t really count El Templo del Pollo as an “Easter Egg” in There because it is not really hidden, just a bit off the main map. The “Demand Chickens” room pictured, though, is a little less well known and requires use of the hoverpack trick to get into. Plus, it has more eggs!

I got pointers to this from one of Josie2’s recent quests. I have obscured some details of the image so as not to spoil the fun too much for people who want to find this by themselves. You can easily see that it is in one of the Monkey Crater paintball zones, though, and if you went looking in one of those for a big stone structure with no apparent entrances, you’d be looking in the right direction…

In the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, the Magrathean planet designer responsible for Norway leaves his signature on a glacier. Somewhere in the desert on Caldera, I recently found this plaque performing much the same function.