During my college’s freshman orientation week, a peculiar sign was posted alongside the announcements of shows, meetings, etc: it had the headline “Greetings Freshthings!” and purported to be a three-part scavenger hunt across campus. This sign had the first part of an email address, and the next two signs were supposed to have the remaining parts. There was no goal or reward started aside from getting this email address of unknown source. The flyer also had logo on it: a golden apple and the words “Chaos Reigns”, probably some Discordian Society thing.

Having recently discovered the Discordian Society, being particularly interested in chaos, and also just thinking scavenger hunts are fun, I followed the instructions on this first sign. It led me, appropriately enough, to a landing over a store called Entropy, and I found the second sign. This one was disguised as an advert for parking with “top floor of the East Campus Garage” bolded. Only the same golden apple logo indicated that it was part of the scavenger hunt, plus another partial email address.

So I followed it to the top floor of the East Campus Garage. As soon as I stepped out of the stairwell I was greeted with two stickers of the same golden apple logo–and nothing else, no sign or email address in sight. I scoured that parking garage for 20 minutes, looked all over for any kind of sign, used all of my escape-the-room-game intuition. I even peeled the two golden apple stickers off the wall to see if the rest of the email address was written on their backs. No luck. The last part of the scavenger hunt was gone.

What gets me is not knowing whether there ever WAS a third sign. Maybe it was taken down, or maybe the second sign was less obvious than it seemed and the third sign was actually not in the East Campus Garage. But maybe there wasn’t supposed to be a third sign at all. I saw tape residue on the wall near the two stickers–maybe a third sign had been taken down?–but the residue looked old and it was a different shape than the tape used to hang the other signs.

And for “Chaos Reigns”, it kind of makes sense. A quest with no end. Absence of meaning. Theories of communication entropy talk about that sort of thing, a signal that directs nowhere. Maybe the point of the scavenger hunt was to make a statement about the futility of following a path, or just to make its players wonder, to make them create their own conclusions.

But maybe I should be following Occam’s Razor here–maybe it really is as simple as, there was a third “yay you did it, here’s the end of the email address” sign and it was removed by university staff.

And it drives me crazy that I’ll never know.

Submitted by Van from USA

There was this guy in class when I went to middle school who used to carry around a cloth napkin into which he disposed his nasal waste several times a day. One day he accidentally (or so I presume) left the oozing, gooey napkin on a bench. I say by watching how a teacher sat down right onto the disgusting square of snot and cloth apparently not noticing that something that you do not want sticking to your pants stuck to her pants.

She walked around with the napkin stuck to the back of her jeans for a good part of the day until a co-worker realized it was not part of the pants design and told her.

Submitted by Carla from UK

I was in the peculiar area of Christiania in Denmark and sat on a blanket by the water when I noticed an elderly woman with fabulous grey dreadlocks using some kind of homemeade contraption that allowed her to travel by bike across the water. All my thoughts stopped and I just watched her ride along the coastline happy as can be.

Submitted by India9 from Sweden