I shall recount my processes so as to provide much needed elucidation. I began by recalling the Portal 2 ARG and its use of the SSTV sounds and images. I noticed that SSTV has already been utilized for the Pizza ARG, and presumed that it would not be used again. I stuck with the idea of sounds, and considered a Morse Code signal, as, story-wise, it could certainly tie in with the recent updates to the bmrf website (also, people being trapped may use Morse Code to alert those on the outside, e.g. Black Mesa, Adrian Shephard, “Rescue Soldiers”, etc.).
Since Morse Code is, at its core, a binary language, it did not seem that unreasonable, and so I searched for a site which could translate hex to Morse Code. The site which popped up was Cryptii.com, and not only does it provide a conversion to Morse Code, but also md5 and sha-1 hashes, various types of cyphers, 64-bit encoding, as well as other numerical sets. While the first few attempts with the Morse Code hypothesis provided promising results: The first binary conversion of B32B003A can be translated to ‘Edge’, however, the remaining portion of the binary string would render ‘Malooska’, which did not seem to be a coherent meaning.
I input the unconverted B32B003A again, and noticed that the text conversion issued a character, ꊀ�. I searched the character, and a hit came up on a site called graphemica.com, stating that it is the unicode for “YI SYMBOL WAT”. I found this to be rather peculiar, and so I tried the next for blocks of hex, and discovered that the majority of them translate into characters from the Hangul alphabet, according to the site. I found it odd that so many of them would produce a Korean character, and concluded that this may be a promising lead.
As for my use of pencil and paper in opposition of of using the unicode inputs: It’s simply something which I prefer when working a problem. Also, there is something quite charming about breaking a code with pencil and paper.
