Yet Another Shout-Out in Smallville: The Official Magazine

The Magazine

Smallville: The Official Magazine is a great bimonthly (used to be monthly; get the details on the News and Updates page) magazine with awesome articles, photos, and interviews pertaining to our favorite show, Smallville.  I try to pick up a copy when I have time to get to our local comic book store, but, unsurprisingly, it's been SOLD OUT whenever I go.  I was pleased as punch to have my site appear in Issue #5, ecstatic to have my site appear in Issue #6, and so, naturally, I wanted to check out Issue #7, which contains Part Three of the three-part Ezra Small series of articles.  As expected (and hoped for!), Issue #7 mentioned SESPS again.  This time, however, the shout-out was different-- the actual address itself was included, unencrypted, in the Ezra Small article!

The Direct Mention

This month's Ezra Small article begins on page 36.  The mention occurs in the first complete paragraph of page 37 and reads as follows:

Oh, excitement beyond excitement!  Before, the only people who would have found my humble website would have been those determined enough to descramble the encrypted messages at the end of the Ezra Small articles.  Now, though, even the laziest of fans have the address of my little site.  This is truly thrilling!  However, an Ezra Small article simply wouldn't be an Ezra Small article without a good code snippet to tease readers.  Here's this issue's chunk of code, in context:

So, not only can we expect brand-new Prophecies in future issues of Smallville: The Official Magazine, but we have another snippet here that's begging to be decoded.  Though I haven't managed to decode it yet, here's the work I've done so far.  First, I capitalized (for easier reading) and isolated the encoded section:

The most common extension for pages on the Internet is .html, so I assumed .SLBA stands for .HTML.  Seemed like a pretty obvious place to start.  This gives us

I replaced the other occurrences of S, L, B, and A with H, T, M, and L, respectively.

This might be the point where I start to go wrong, but, to me, the last part looks like it should say EZRASMALL.HTML.  You would get this by substituting E for T, R for H, A for K, and S for J, and leaving the Z alone, which would then leave us with

I then replaced the other occurrences of T, H, K, and J with E, R, A, and S, respectively.

At this point, I guessed the URL was meant to read

I didn't, however, know the domain.  KSite's amazing MadCoder ran some sort of high-tech scripty thingy and was able to discern the full URL from the letters of the previous step (FANES.YTHDME.CET/RIYHSUDRLP/EZRASMALL.HTML).  The full descrambled URL, then, reads

So there we have it-- the new snippet, decoded.  I'm going to check out this site and find out what it has to offer.  Don't forget, everyone-- brand-new Prophecies will appear in upcoming issues of Smallville: The Official Magazine, so make sure to head to your local comic book store the day the new issues arrive!

© 2004 shirkie