Quiztime - Issue 2!

Learning some new reverse image search tricks

“Who’s that sexy gender-ambiguous seafaring cat?” - @americanruse

Today’s (Friday Dec 17, 2021) edition of quiztime comes from @fiete_stiegers. Let’s get started!

Step 1 - Translation!

First, let’s see if we can translate any text in this sign. Hopefully we’ll end up with something unique that will help us pin the location down.

Unfortunately part of the sign is cut off, but we’ll see what we can get from the fragments here.

Here’s the right-hand side, in English:

“Solve all puzzles…” “Solution number…” “can you…” “In the house of G….” “A Little About…”

For the fragment on the top, “Kutselspaß” seems to translate into “kissing fun.” I’m guessing we’ll need more context for a full translation here. Also, it looks more like the word fragment is “Katselspaß”. For what it’s worth “fun” translates to “spaß” and “cat” translates to “katse”.

Unfortunately, these fragments didn’t get us very far. We got to a few blogs about Casa de Papel’s German adaptation, then started poring through a few sites for various amusement parks.

Step 2 - Giving up

Discovering new reverse image search dorks and new cryptids

After about an hour of this we turned in and tried to find the answer. Here’s where we learned a new trick for reverse image search.

We first turned to Yandex for reverse image searches, which was not very productive:

Yandex, true to its Rusophone bias, served us a number of collisions with “Matroskin the Cat,” “a very economical, sensible, and rational personality” who “looks for financial benefits in everything” unlike the footloose and fancy-free creature in today’s Quiztime image.

The successful quiztime solver would have pivoted to another search engine. However, Bing wasn’t too fruitful either:

The persistent solver would have turned to Google. Don’t forget Google can also perform reverse image searches! You just have to have a saved copy of the crop you want to search and upload it from there:

After scanning your image, Google will try to fill in a search query based on what it thinks is in the picture you uploaded:

“Fictional character” indeed. Let’s replace this query with a dork that filters for sites with a .de TLD.

Here’s a familiar face. Let’s see where this came from.

Clicking through this link takes us to—OH EXCUSE ME

Well, anyway, it looks like The Creature is the official mascot of Trassenheide, a Baltic Sea resort in Germany.

Getting the exact coordinates from Google Street view has been a challenge here, but so far we can narrow this down to somewhere in the vicinity of the campground, at about (54.091835,13.8872108).

For the record, the Creature is a “Holiday Fox” named Fiete, a cat who was transformed into a Fox.

The more you know.

Until next time,

The Difficult Hell Man and RanRan.