Imagine if someone tried to chronicle human history by its musical bands. :D

Yeah, all the best one's are insane!

Here's a better one from the same era;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmcA9LIIXWw

Major hair!

LOL... major hair indeed! You could use them to make clothes!

BTW, I presume you never gave away the Precipice code I sent you for your giveaway, no?

Did I screw up?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBH97ma9YiI

Don't send them!

Indeed! I never did add it nor gift it. Accept apologies!

LMAO. No biggie! :D

Whoever wants Precipice of Darkness 3... PM me. Warning though. I am not sure if the codes work.

Gather 'round chirren and listen to this 'ere story of the fall of the fortress o' Novotnus. Now y'all done heard the tale proper, it's all the ol' Colonel's been yammering about these days. Poor man, lost his fries when them foxes raided the chicken coop. This is not that, mind ya. No, this is the hidden story of the monumental week-long battle of wits that you mostly sleep through or wander off chasing petticoats, when the old geezer tells it. But that's 'cuz he tells it all riddlly-like and confuddling. Here now's the details... oh fine, run off after them skirts again. Ingrates.

Anyoldways, you all remember how the hero was being chased by an army of vicious cats. Whether y'all think that's just sexual innuendo's beside the point, the fellow ended up at the bottom of a stairwell with five doors and loads of gibberish in front of him. Turns out the gibberish wasn't quite gibberish enough. See, the stuff on the floor had meaning to it! The first, "ZVENAQN", was just ROT13 for "MIRANDA", but even some of you figured out that much. For the rest of you hay-brains, that's the Caesar cypher. Might as well learn something.

Now, the numbers right next to that, 7 18 24 12 8 4 21, these were a tad trickier. See, first they weren't numbers at all, but just letters of the alphabet. You know, this stuff that's there besides U, S, and A. So that turns out to read "GRXLHDU". More gibberish you say? Well, yeah, but then if you'd learned something from the last trick, you'd know letters can be other letters, too. As it happens, them cats had a thing for that Caesar fella, so here they used his cypher thingy not once, but twice! First time, it's the same old ROT13 trick and turned it into "TEKYUQH". Then, they became all wiley 'n stuff and used a Keyed cypher!

If y'all recall the old geezer's tellings, he kept rambling about some "Mistress". Turns out, it was that same Miranda hussy from the floor, and it seems them cats had a thing for her. The walls too, apparently. Some funbags that one must've had! Oh? Now you're all paying attention? Well... keep paying it! Anywhat, they used "MIRANDA" as a keyword. Use a Keyed Caesar cypher with 0-shift (so not really a Caesar at all, but you go tell them pussies that) and MIRANDA as key, and the gibberish, that was gibberish before, and numbers before that, becomes "TINYURL". Aha! So all that was written on the floor was "MIRANDA" and "TINYURL".

You'd think, by this point, you're halfway there. Boy, would you be wrong! Remember them doors, with the gibberish on them? Well, turns out there was even more gibberish beyond them, but for now the intrepid, resourceful, but mostly mule-headed adventurer needed to get past them. Try the tinyurl, you say? Well, DUH, what else! But it ain't so easy; never is. See, if you just take the stuff off the doors, verbatim, it doesn't work. You can try doing fancy-shmansy stuff with it, like decoding it as Base64, but that just sends you to the lands of unicycles. There be dragons there. Dragons on unicycles! So don't try it!

Once you realise the cats' fetish for all things Caesar and Miranda, things go slightly smoother. So, the trick turned out simply to require running the stuff on the doors through the Miranda-keyed Caesar-but-not-really cypher, with a shift of 0 - same as the stuff I just told you about a minute ago. Take that, then run it through the tinyurl and you'll get somewhere! The old geezer even spelled it out for you once, but you were too busy playing hookie with his nieces or, for the less ambitious ones among you, his sheep. So, one last time, here's where the doors led:

tinyurl.com/n2fev38
tinyurl.com/n93o48p
tinyurl.com/l6konoa
tinyurl.com/m6eaojy
tinyurl.com/mxao4x4

Feel free to take a peek in each, 'cause I ain't tellin' you all that was in them. Ask the Colonel, he'll gladly take up a few of your hours. The gist of it was, each room had a little bit of word-sized gibberish above and a paragraph-sized chunk of more gibberish written on the floor, or on paper, or on the freshly flayed skin of inattentive youths... Good, some part of you's still lis'nin'.

Now the bits up top, they were easy. The first two used a simple cypher called Atbash, I guess because it has the sophistication of bashing something with at 2-by-4. The third was easily recognizable as a Base64 encryption, and the last two used a trivial cypher. That's fancy talk for saying they were actual, honest-to-goodness, un-encrypted plain words! Which you'd have known, if you weren't... bah, forgetit! In total, the words past each door read "DEFEAT", "WAR", "LOVE", "RETRIBUTION", "WISH".

As for the big chunks of gibberish... well, them's real tricky buggers and all the hapless hero could figure out of them was that they were deeply encrypted. So deeply, in fact, that the first of them bits wasn't even right! Now, you could reason that them words from above had some purpose in this here decyphemering, or that at some point you'd be doing Caesar, or Miranda, or Miranda'd be doing Caesar, or any of a right big samplin'o'clusterfucks. But see, each piece of text was scrambled at least twice over, so that the hero of legend and story was completely stumped and stupefied, and sprouted cobwebs while thinking it over, and even got to nibbling on his trusty sidekick and, by that point, sexual steed. It got so pathetic that in the end the "mistress" couldn't even stand it herself and just blurted out the answer. Now, it was all in Morse, but it gave a good and solid solution all the same:

-.. . -.-. .-. -.-- .--. - ..--.- - .... .. ... ..--.- .. -. ..--.- .-. --- - .---- ...-- ..--.- - .... . -. ..--.- .---- ..--.- . -... --. .---- ...-- .... --- .--. ..- ...- ..--.- ..--- ..--.- . -... --. .---- ...-- .. ...- - .-. .- .-. . .-. -..- .-. .-.. ..--.- ...-- ..--.- .. ...- - .-. .- .-. . .-. -..- .-. .-.. .. ...- - .-. .- .-. . .-. -..- .-. .-.. ..--.- ....- ..--.- -.-. .... --. . .-. --. . ...- --- .... --. ...- -... .- ...- .- --- -. ..-. .-. -.... ....- ..--.- -. --. --- -. ..-. ..- .. ...- - .-. .- .-. . .-. -..- .-. .-..

Didja catch that? No, that wasn't the chickens inviting you over for a quickie, you nitwits! Chickens got ate by them foxes, remember? Sickos. It's Morse for

DECRYPT_THIS_IN_ROT13_THEN_1_EBG13HOPUV_2_EBG13IVTRARERXRL_3_IVTRARERXRLIVTRARERXRL_4_CHGERGEVOHGVBAVAONFR64_N GONFUIVTRARERXRL

Remember ROT13? Caesar? Nah, didn't think so, here's the solution:

QRPELCG_GUVF_VA_EBG13_GURA_1_ROT13UBCHI_2_ROT13VIGENEREKEY_3_VIGENEREKEYVIGENEREKEY_4_PUTRETRIBUTIONINBASE64_A TBASHVIGENEREKEY

And there you got the entire solution for each of the four en-gibberished rooms laid out. As expected, a lot of Caesar fetish, again, but this time on top of an added layer of infuriation. So, the quick and dirty of it is, you have to perform them decryptions in order.

For the stuff behind the first door, do a Caesar, then an Übchi double columnar transposition, using the word up top, DEFEAT, as a key. That second bit is sophisticated Fritz code from the Great War, Huns used it to talk dirty things about our mommas. We know 'cuz we did likewise. Hehehe.

For the second door, do a Caesar and then a Vigenére cypher with the keyword WAR, like it says up above. See, simple! If you don't know what's a Vigenére cypher, don't worry. He was probably just some smart-ass who spent his time sending elaborately encrypted fart jokes. Edumacation pays, I keep tellin' ya!

Next, the third door even used two of them Vigenére cyphers. First one used the word up top, LOVE, while the second one used Miranda. No, you ain't getting no cookies for guessing that one; where there's Caesar, Miranda always came following. She was loose like that.

Lastly, and it couldn't come soon enough, the mumbo-jumbo behind the fourth door needed to first be bashed with an Atbash, then Vigenéred with the word up above, RETRIBUTION... Nah, didya think it'd be that simple? Course not. Remember, back at the bottom of that stairwell, there were some chicken-scratches on one of the doors, this fourth one, in fact? That was morse code again, and it spelled BASE64. You ever wonder when it would, if ever, come in use? Course not! You were too busy wi- GIT AWAY FROM THAT SOW, RIG-- well, that solves that... Where was I? Oh, yeah them chicken Morse scratches. Well, turns out they came in use right there at the end. See, ya weren't s'posed to just use the plain word RETRIBUTION, but as the solution told you, PUTRETRIBUTIONINBASE64. Now Vigenére with that! But without the equal signs.

Now, once all that was done, and the hero had solved the great riddle of Novotnus, he uttered the vow - that's fancy for swore - and lifted the curse. Course, he didn't utter it properly, what with the first part being all jumbled and whatnot, but at that point even the walls had had enough of wailing and rooting for him, they just wanted this thing to end. So they supplied the missing verse and pretended it had all happened legit and shit, and the curse was lifted, and the hero went debauching.

Umm... congrats again, Spin... even if that hurt. :-p

This is not critique, just a simple observation.

Now, don't get me wrong.
May I ask whom and what purpose do these walls of text serve?

Promoting your story-writing capability, or...?
I got nothing against it, but as a simple observer, just letting you know it's probably becoming annoying and boring getting past second paragraph for most of the users lurking around this topic. Mostly when it's being repeatedly re-posted (the wall of text itself).

Ever thought about this?
Or am I missing something?

Is this an assault on me?

This entire thread is an assault - on everyone...

People like to drop keys in this thread. Some people just drop them as text, other as symbol substitution, others as first replies. Every now and then someone drops them as a puzzle.
Spinorial did take the time to solve a puzzle, and then wished to explain how one solves that. Thus the wall of text.

There is also a second thread that used to be the default puzzle thread, but not that many people use it.

Indeed!!! GAAAAH! ATTACK!

I tried to get people using that thread :(

I mean, it would be good to have a thread to just drop keys in, and a thread for puzzle solving.

I know. But the ninja giveaway is no longer a key drop thread, but a place for people to hangout in. Keys are still dropped here, but this thread is more often used to chat, which is not necessarily a bad thing.
So for someone wishing to make a puzzle, the active thread is more enticing than the buried one :/