Good luck, everybody

I'm embarrassed about this one.

The Witness will be September's release for the Visible Zorker project, but it's already done for Patreon supporters. So I've scanned my Witness feelies for the app already. (You can see the high-res scans here at the Internet Archive.) It's a classic package. The 1938 newspaper is probably Infocom's high point for pure immersive scene-setting.

But the matchbook caught my attention.

My original matchbook feelie from The Witness.

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That's a curious symbol. It's sort of a generic "look at this Chinese symbol" symbol. But is it actually Chinese? The Witness has this uncomfortable schtick of "obviously Asian, but no definite nationality". The Linder house is full of Orientalist tat; some of it is Japanese style, but only the "small Shinto shrine" in the entry betrays an actual tradition.

If you know Chinese: just hold off. I'll get there.

So I immediately suspected that the symbol is a fake. After all, everything else on the matchbook is some variety of joke. "Brass Lantern", come on. The street names are Joel Berez and Al Vezza, two Infocom execs. The phone number "Chandler-1729" refers not only to Raymond Chandler, but to the best-known anecdote about the mathematical prodigy Ramanujan.

I did a quick image search to try to verify (or disprove) my theory. There are certainly a lot of symbols like that one:

But they all seem to be bilaterally symmetric, or nearly so. None of them have those squiggly bottom inserts.

Well, what about those inserts? They look awfully suspicious, especially upside down:

Surely the right side is the Latin letter A. The left side is less obvious, but maybe an S? Or an E, or... this isn't really coming together. If it were SG, for "Stu Galley", then I'd buy it; but I can't make that work.

Maybe more context would help. Infocom's delightful packages were designed by G/R Copy, aka Giardini/Russell, aka the demon Jeearr. Did they have an "SA" on staff?...How would I know?

At this point I started as…