even if rabbit is not posting genuine clues, feedo is 10,000x the troll with his endless prattle making this already enormous thread longer and harder to wade through than it needs to be.

more on topic, i am curious why everyone talks about running XOR and modulus operations on the bitstreams?  maybe i need to read through everything again, but just looking at the painting all i see (and it stands out very prominently) is an ampersand, which would indicate to me an AND operation.  also it seems perhaps more than a coincidence that there are 3 leaves attached to the ampersand, pointing to the knight, the queen, and the phoenix.  3 bitstreams to AND together perhaps?  also there are letters/numbers in the phoenix's neck, has anyone discussed them or their possible use?