I have roughly one-or-two-dozen telephones that I will be selling, and this is the first. I was for many years an enthusiastic collector of telephones, but the time has come to thin the hoard. They are simply taking up too much space on the shelf.
This is a lovely pink Western Electric model 2500. I have several in this line, and I will assure you that pink is the most suitable color for a Western Electric model 2500, particularly if you have any bad news to deliver. Speaking on the pink WE 2500 is like whispering into a washed-out rose petal, by which I mean that it softens the blow.
I have stored this delicate heirloom in my shed, but I will assure you that my shed is very dry and the climate agreeable year-round. Dashiell always insisted that the shed was to be well insulated. Since his passing, I have continued to follow this advice. Additionally, the telephone was in a small box, sheltered by wood shavings.
I do not remember when I first acquired this telephone, but I know that it was only in rotation in my house for a very short time, and here is why:
This phone only dials one number correctly: 270-301-5797.
I do not recall how I arrived at that discovery. Dashiell had piercing tinnitus that kept him up nights, and sometimes I would find him come morning hunched wincing over the receiver, dialing away, unsystematic and helpless. Maybe he came across it during one of those nights? I really don't remember.
A telephone that dials only one number is likely not useful to very many people. To avoid disappointment, please DO NOT place a bid on this telephone if you intend it for any of the following uses:
1. Day-to-day telephone usage -- as I have said, it only dials one number.
2. Communicating with the dead -- the telephone is not suitable for this purpose.
3. To dissect for curiosity -- I have inspected the phone, and its bowels are unremarkable.
4. Repair and resale -- I feel that it would be dishonest to suggest this phone can be repaired.
I can recommend that you buy this telephone for:
1. Holding the receiver to your ear to listen to the dial tone and reflect.
Included but not pictured is one Consolidated Power Co. cable required to operate this phone.
I do not have postal service at my home. My daughter-in-law will pack and ship the telephone carefully and promptly. She sometimes includes a peppermint if she is feeling wistful, but I will make no promise of candy.
For those of you not up to date with PC gaming, Kentucky Route Zero is an episodic magical realist adventure game has garnered significant acclaim from critics and many NeoGAF members. The developers are notoriously slow with releasing actual episodes (dubbed Acts), but make up for it for releasing short interactive interludes. There have been three interludes so far: Limits and Demonstrations and The Entertainment. As for the actual Acts, three are released so far: Act I came out in January 2013, Act II in May 2013 and the latest, Act III, in May 2014. There are two more Acts in the works, but nobody knows when they're coming out (but hopefully earlier that May 2016).
Phone number is a real number in Kentucky, I called it the other day, and it's the exact same thing that the Unity game has, down to same voice overs, same numbers to press for menus etc.
In the time since this was posted, there's been some digging done.
In regards to the game itself, people have found out that there were actually different models for the phone. No one really understood what the trigger was for getting one phone over another. Thanks to someone on the steam forums and my persistent prodding, we were able to discover that there is a dev menu you can use to switch your phone model on the fly. I wrote up a fun little guide on how to do this.
After talking with Brandon Boyer on twitter earlier, I decided to dig around to see where the game decided what phone you got. So far, these are my finds:
The Pink phone model will show up if you have:
No save file, or potentially a specific flag hasn't been switched relating to the Act 1 part of the save file.
The Black phone model will show up if you have:
Completed Act 1, or at least had a flag switched in the Act 1 area of the save file.
The Beige/Speakerphone model will show up if you have:
Completed Act 2, or at least had a specific flag switched in the Act 2 area of the save file.
There are two other phone models (angular/80s style and a white version of the pink model), but I have yet to trigger them. For some reason,
I had completed Act 3 when it came out but my Act 3 save file does not trigger another phone model. Neither does switching "Limits & Demonstrations" or "The Entertainment" to completed/not completed.
I still have to figure out what exactly is the trigger, but maybe my findings can help someone else work through it as well. I simply made a few copies of my save file for safe keeping, and then deleted the original. I then would start up Here and There, back out, and then transplant portions from my normal save file back into the new, freshly generated save file.
Besides the changing phone model, there have been some neat discoveries. I will be throwing a lot of spoilers out here, so don't click unless you had no plans on experimenting. For example,
the phone can actually ring, up to 4 different times. Each time you answer, something new will play.
Relating to that spoiler,
One of the phone calls will be a 40 minute long recording of a numbers station, which you can listen to here. Through some insane work, members of the Steam forums for KRZ were able to deduce that part of the numbers were an encoded message, which comes out to be the following stanza from Sextus Propertius's Elegies.
By night we suffer, wandering; night frees the imprisoned spirits,
and his cage abandoned Cerberus himself strays. At dawn the law demands return to the
pools of Lethe: we are borne across, and the ferryman counts the load he’s carried.
They are currently hacking away at the other numbers used, trying to determine if there is a hidden message there.
Another one of them is
what sounds to be some sort of morse code style encrypted message. They are currently hard at work deducing if there is any sort of logic there or if it is a red herring.
Additionally, if you
leave the phone off of the hook and wait a few minutes after being told you've run out of time to dial, the phone will slowly fade in a new audio file. It sounds like the rustling of leaves and rain through treetops, but the recording is absurdly low quality.
I don't think that's the best way to play them. I, for one, took fairly long breaks between the first three acts and played whenever I was in a particular mood and I think that might have only enhanced the experience.
I've had a few people mention the same, including Boyer, so I'm wondering what the flag is that gets switched. I'm going to need to do a lot of testing the save files to figure it out, which I don't quite have the time for right now. But I might be able to sneak some work in here and there until I find out how it all works.
I don't think that's the best way to play them. I, for one, took fairly long breaks between the first three acts and played whenever I was in a particular mood and I think that might have only enhanced the experience.
I consider it one of the best (if not the best) video game of the past two years, but that's just me.
I feel like playing the episodes as they come out is really part of the experience. Each episode is extremely packed with information about the characters, references to all sorts of stuff, and the imagery all sticks with you even months after you've finished the most recent episode. I'd forgotten that a central part of Episode 3,
Xanadu
is focused on during Limits and Demonstrations. Which came out a year and a half before Episode 3 did.
I dunno, for a lot of other Episodic titles I rarely found myself thinking about them as frequently between episodes as I do for KRZ. It is such a unique and powerful experience, and if they can somehow keep their insane bar of quality up til the end it may end up taking the seat as my favorite game of all time. And I do not throw that type of praise out lightly.
In the time since this was posted, there's been some digging done.
In regards to the game itself, people have found out that there were actually different models for the phone. No one really understood what the trigger was for getting one phone over another. Thanks to someone on the steam forums and my persistent prodding, we were able to discover that there is a dev menu you can use to switch your phone model on the fly. I wrote up a fun little guide on how to do this.
After talking with Brandon Boyer on twitter earlier, I decided to dig around to see where the game decided what phone you got. So far, these are my finds:
The Pink phone model will show up if you have:
No save file, or potentially a specific flag hasn't been switched relating to the Act 1 part of the save file.
The Black phone model will show up if you have:
Completed Act 1, or at least had a flag switched in the Act 1 area of the save file.
The Beige/Speakerphone model will show up if you have:
Completed Act 2, or at least had a specific flag switched in the Act 2 area of the save file.
There are two other phone models (angular/80s style and a white version of the pink model), but I have yet to trigger them. For some reason,
I had completed Act 3 when it came out but my Act 3 save file does not trigger another phone model. Neither does switching "Limits & Demonstrations" or "The Entertainment" to completed/not completed.
I still have to figure out what exactly is the trigger, but maybe my findings can help someone else work through it as well. I simply made a few copies of my save file for safe keeping, and then deleted the original. I then would start up Here and There, back out, and then transplant portions from my normal save file back into the new, freshly generated save file.
Besides the changing phone model, there have been some neat discoveries. I will be throwing a lot of spoilers out here, so don't click unless you had no plans on experimenting. For example,
the phone can actually ring, up to 4 different times. Each time you answer, something new will play.
Relating to that spoiler,
One of the phone calls will be a 40 minute long recording of a numbers station, which you can listen to here. Through some insane work, members of the Steam forums for KRZ were able to deduce that part of the numbers were an encoded message, which comes out to be the following stanza from Sextus Propertius's Elegies.
By night we suffer, wandering; night frees the imprisoned spirits,
and his cage abandoned Cerberus himself strays. At dawn the law demands return to the
pools of Lethe: we are borne across, and the ferryman counts the load hes carried.
They are currently hacking away at the other numbers used, trying to determine if there is a hidden message there.
Another one of them is
what sounds to be some sort of morse code style encrypted message. They are currently hard at work deducing if there is any sort of logic there or if it is a red herring.
Additionally, if you
leave the phone off of the hook and wait a few minutes after being told you've run out of time to dial, the phone will slowly fade in a new audio file. It sounds like the rustling of leaves and rain through treetops, but the recording is absurdly low quality.
