[txhurl]

OTOH, if I view the “Stage_5:5[y]” line as “ready to dish dirt,” the two castles may be white hat assets who can do the dishing.

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Q’s form gives we programmers the rash because it means very specific things in coding, and we don’t guess the Q team are developers. For example:

>>701978
USMC activated.
US (3).
Q

The (3) is called an occur in cobol, and means ‘occurs three times’ which to a coder means there are three homogenous Marine sets activated for something. You really don’t realize how much coding resembles sigint dialect until you see Q speaking it.

[Cboldt]

-- Q's form gives we programmers the rash because it means very specific things in coding --

Yeah, with syntax all over the map.

The parenthetical is also a convention used in algebra/math, and can have the same "times three" function.

It can also be used to designate a sub-part, rather than multiples.

I see two lines ... "USMC activated" then separately, "US (3)"

If we follow your convention strictly, which is what the computer will do, it is not USMC times three, it is US times three.

I figure Q, while insisting all of the syntax has explicit meaning and every single character is chosen carefully with all of history and all of future in mind, is not exactly that careful and consistent. Q is also dealing with a form of war, where predictions and outcomes are uncertain. All that as prelude to our decoding chore being more complicated, because the rules of syntax and construction aren't strict.