It occurs to me that my enthusiasm is a little in-jokey, which is kind of sucky for the folks who don’t recognize the reference, so here’s a hint: https://www.base64decode.org (copy and paste).
The encoding bit was the visceral, in-character, icing on the cake, but mostly my admiration was for the commitment to the characters from the RDSA. In my imagination, someone serendipitously ran across an interesting image1 that reminded them of our little game, and then shared that in a way that was kind of both a puzzle and a treat. (I don’t know if that’s really what happened, but I like my version).
1. or maybe not a real image? I have a certain affinity for old-school sci-fi paperback cover art, to the extent that I buy books I’ve no intention of reading based purely on their covers, but I’ve so far been unable to determine if the referenced tome is real or imaginary.
Still, to my mind, the worst offenders are know-nothings: they are feckin’ anathema . It doesn’t matter to me whether it’s some academic who learned some “rules” and has applied them indiscriminately for 35 years, or whether it’s someone who figures that his opinion is just as good as anyone else’s… without researching the topic.
