This is Not Tom (Archive)


Tweet from John Green: "(This Is Not Tom is a novella I've been writing for months accessed by solving complex riddles concocted by @hankgreen and @thisisnottom)"


TiNT is, or was, a series of puzzles created by an anonymous Nerdfighter, with help from Hank Green, back in 2009, where each puzzle’s solution lead you to a chapter of an unpublished novella by John Green called thisisnottom.

It was similar to the series of puzzles that John created before the release of his 2017 book, Turtles All The Way Down, but the actual puzzles were created by a Nerdfighter (with help from Hank), and not John/Rosianna.

Each puzzle started with a landing page hosted on the thisisnottom website, or a youtube video hosted on the thisisnottom channel, and you would have to solve a puzzle on that page/in that video in order to get a password to move on to the next section of the puzzle.

Each puzzle eventually ended with a chapter of the novella.


A group of Nerdfighters who met on the discord server created to talk about the TaTWD puzzles in 2016 decided to try to re-solve the puzzles, as walkthroughs and guides were hard to find, and it seemed like no one had a full working guide for the very last clue (Clue 18, leading to chapter 3.2.1) at all and very few people had ever actually solved it.

We solved Clue 18, and then went back and solved most of the clues from the beginning with the goal of creating a walkthrough for future puzzle solvers, and collecting a transcript of John’s TiNT novella.


At some point, we noticed that the domain for this website had expired, and grabbed it to make sure no one else took it. As such, all of the original puzzles and novel excerpts are lost.

We have contacted John about giving the domain to him, but in the mean time, we are using it to host our archives and transcripts of what thisisnottom used to be. You can find copies of the original novella, our transcript, and other TiNT-related things below.


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