So, a while back I wrote this node called puzzlelink. It was an attempt at using pipelinks in an entirely new way. It seems that no one, even the noders who know me IRL, was able to read it, so I'm going to go through the full text step by step so you can judge if what I did was worthwhile. This is not a case of "I'm so smart that I have to spoon feed you all the details." This is a case of "I did a really poor job of explaining myself and offered no help or reward." So I hope this is fun and not lame or pretentious.
The initial stuff at the top is just tangential distractions. But you might notice that they are all hardlinked. In fact, every damn character in this node is pipelinked to something. If you don't check each and every one, you could miss something. I try to take this attitude to E2 as a whole.
The pipelinks in this node are most easily viewed with Internet Explorer, not Netscape, and I don't know a damn thing about Mozilla so don't ask. You might want to open a second window to check out puzzlelink while you keep this one legible because I'm not going to duplicate all the pipelinks here. You'll see why in a bit.
Start with the grid of numbers: 1 - 4. Note that they are not simply hardlinked. They are pipelinked to each other. The outer order makes a Z pattern, but the inner order starts at the bottom right corner and makes a square. 1 2 3 4 = 3 4 2 1.
Proceed to the grid of letters: A - D. Check those pipelinks. Hey, words! A B C D = is nested. message The. Using the number pattern as a map, rearrange them. Follow that same square. You get: "The message is nested." Although you could probably solve that little puzzle on your own, this sets up the behavior which will be used to decode the first hidden paragraph. Derive the pattern from one set, follow that pattern in the second set.
For now, skip the elemental grid and proceed to the first paragraph. Notice that the whole thing is pipelinked. Yes, you have a lot of work to do. Check the first word. The is piplinked to "45-69-". Check the second word. quick is pipelinked to "75-79-". Just to get a sense of how this is going to work, scan past the paragraph and check out the grid of numbers 1-85. 45 69 75 79 = "We are imprisoned and". See? It's starting to make a pretty sentence out of chaos. I'm not going to transcribe the whole hidden paragraph, that would ruin the fun.
The second hidden paragraph is nested a little differently, and this method might be tough to read depending on your browser. Go back up to the elemental pentagon. Check the first word, air. It's pipelinked to "Do--water". That means you should store the word "Do" --maybe write it down somewhere, or copy and paste-- and then proceed to check water next, which says "you--earth". The upper four elements spell out "Do you get it?" while spirit (not, in all cultures, a part of the elemental tetrahedron) is pipelinked to "maze" (not a part of the sentence), just to give you an overview of this node. It's a word maze.
So, checking the first word in the second paragraph gives you "Juxtaposition--This2", and here I admit it gets confusing. The next word you need to check is the 2nd "This", but only the capitalized "This"es count. The lowercase ones are counted separately. Sorry about this, I consider it an annoying design flaw. The second "This" starts the sentence "This is not perfect" and is pipelinked to "creates--to2". "Juxtaposition creates the illusion" are the first four words of the second hidden paragraph.
I noded this explanation separately for the same reason that the solution to a crossword puzzle is published on a separate page. Now that you know how to do it, you'll probably find it much more satisfying (if you enjoy this type of thing at all, and I wouldn't be surprised if you didn't) to tease out the hidden text on your own. I'm not saying that the hidden text is a work of genius or anything, or even that it makes total sense. But it is meant to dovetail with its own format-- to get you thinking about why we're addicted to words, and how they function. And how much possibility (especially around here) goes unexplored.