Call us jaded, but usually when we think of the Internet, we think of a cesspit of erotic fan fiction, toxic message boards and comments sections filled with ignorance, anger and bad grammar, punctuated by the very occasional glimmer of the web’s potential for greatness, usually in the form of reddit AMAs.
One of those glimmers came a few days ago when a Japanese Twitter user posted a plea for help from fellow net users in decoding a message left behind in his late uncle’s diary.
The cryptic diary entries in question spanned around seven pages and appeared to be total gibberish. Hoping, we presume, that the decrypted message would reveal the location of some sweet pirate booty buried by an ancestor generations ago, the user beseeched the good people of Twitter to help him make sense of it.
And boy did Twitter deliver. A small, crack team of puzzle geeks, who apparently had already solved the NYT crossword puzzle for the day and were itching for a challenge, managed to figure the message out in just four short hours.
Of course, while their efforts restored our faith in humanity and the power of the Internet to do good, the team failed to uncover directions to buried treasure or even a loving parting message to the uncle’s family. Instead, the decrypted message was basically just a regular diary entry, which the Twitter user’s uncle had seemingly written in code for the fun of it. There’s some stuff about the weather and getting a camera fixed or something, but sadly not a single mention of monkey idols or treasure chests.
Still, we’re sure having the message decrypted brings the kid some peace of mind and serves as a good reminder that the Internet is good for more than just the latest video game news and dog memes.
Source: Yahoo! Japan News
Feature image: @xamilax