Solution: Evening Posts
Answer: VULGARITIES

Written by Dawson Do

This puzzle initially comes with a lot of information, but inspecting the number of Comments will lead you to the first hint. Using the number of comments as an index into the alphabet gives the phrase: ZINE COVER DATES

As clued by the title and the fact that all the posts are from Saturday, the ZINE referenced by the phrase is “The Saturday Evening Post.” “The Saturday Evening Post” is well known for being the magazine that employed the artist Norman Rockwell, who bears a similar name to the poster, Percevel1 Stonegood.

The number of Likes indicates the year of the magazine cover and the post’s content references the cover’s art. These covers can all be found on The Saturday Evening Post Art Archive. Finding the dates and using these as an index into the alphabet gives: MARCH FIFTY FIVE

Post Comments Letter (Comments) Cover Name Likes/Year Month Date Letter (Date)
1 26 Z Triple Self Portrait 1960 2 13 M
2 9 I Golden Rule 1961 4 1 A
3 14 N Thinking of the Girl Back Home 1919 1 18 R
4 5 E Thoughtful Shopper 1924 5 3 C
5 3 C Ocean Voyage 1923 9 8 H
6 15 O Chain of Gossip 1948 3 6 F
7 22 V Runaway Pants 1919 8 9 I
8 5 E Graduate 1959 6 6 F
9 18 R On Top of the World 1934 10 20 T
10 4 D Milkmaid 1931 7 25 Y
11 1 A Working on the Statue of Liberty 1946 7 6 F
12 20 T Partygoers 1935 3 9 I
13 5 E First Flower or First Crocus 1947 3 22 V
14 19 S Cupids Visit 1924 4 5 E

The only Norman Rockwell cover from March of ’55 is eponymously named, “Norman Rockwell Album.”

This clues the next step of the puzzle, which is to match songs from Lana Del Rey’s album “Norman F— Rockwell!” The poster’s profile picture references the album’s logo and was meant to serve as a confirmation.

Each post also references a song title from the album. Once all of these are paired, the posts can be reordered into album order. Then, the number of Shares can be used to index into the song titles, giving the phrase: LINKING ONE TERM

This clue suggests that there is one word from the song titles and one word from the posts that can be linked. Additionally, the number of words in each post and the number of letters in each cover’s title are equal, indicating that this word will act as an index. Indexing into the cover titles using the linked term gives : ANS VULGARITIES, which are very present throughout solving this puzzle.

Album Order Cover Name Song Shares Index into song Term from song Term from post Letter
1 Triple Self Portrait Norman f—————— Rockwell 20 L f— freaking A
2 Ocean Voyage Mariners Apartment Complex 4 I mariners sailors N
3 Partygoers Venice B———— 3 N venice italian S
4 Cupid’s Visit F——— it I love you 4 K I love you ily V
5 Graduate Doin’ Time 3 I time moments U
6 Thinking of the Girl Back Home Love song 7 N song tune L
7 Thoughtful Shopper Cinnamon Girl 9 G cinnamon spices G
8 Runaway Pants How to Disappear 5 O disappear vanished A
9 Golden Rule California 8 N california state R
10 Chain of Gossip The Next Best American Record 14 E best historical I
11 On Top of the World The greatest 1 T greatest biggest T
12 Milkmaid Bartender 5 E bartender server I
13 First Flower or First Crocus Happiness is a butterfly 18 R butterfly pollinator E
14 Working on the Statue of Liberty Hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have - but I have it 28 M dangerous hazardous S

  1. Percevel is Norman Rockwell’s middle name. ↩

Author’s Notes

This is one of my favorite albums ever, (except I don’t think I’ll ever think of it in the same way). When I realized the answer fit for the metapuzzle, I decided to take the risk of using this wholesome + not-so-wholesome concept.

Unfortunately, the puzzle turned out much more difficult and underclued than our testing had suggested. Sorry for to all the teams stuck on LINKING ONE TERM (read: basically all teams who got to this point), as I was pretty stubborn about wanting to spell a cluephrase using the song titles (and thus using essentially all data collected), even if it meant a less-than-ideal phrase. Also, the fact that only one term in each post connected to a song title should have been more pronounced. Lesson learned.

Credit to the Bootstrap user karthikricssion for the CSS used in this puzzle page.