[Puzzle] My first puzzle! (Solutions up)

Posted roughly nineteen hours after I said I would.
Nice going, Cake. >_<

Anyway. Some notes.

• No sharing answers or links.

• There are eleven parts/questions that must be solved.

• The questions gradually decrease in difficulty. I promise none of the other questions are as hard as the first one. <_>

• You know that Google Plus One thing? That +1 thing? I bet they're going to come out with PlusTwo or something for premium Google users. Give it a year or two. Just wait, and remember, you heard it from me first.

• Hint to the first part/question may or may not apply. It all depends on how you interpret it.

• I want feedback on the puzzle, since this is my first one. That's why the giveaway isn't really that great. >_>

• You have one week.

• Random question: Any of you ever played FunOrb? It's a dead site now (although there are plans of JamgfLeX [not actual name] returning in 2014-15), but I'm just curious. :)

• More hints may or may not be provided by me. It depends on how nicely the hint is asked for, how many people are stuck, and how much time is left.

• There are no uppercase letters in ANY of the questions, answers, or hints.

• CV $0.01 required.

• One player and one solver from every itstoohard link is me, in case you haven't figured that out yet.

To start you guys off:
dis be a link
pmbygfybc

EDIT: Added a note.

EDIT2: I accidentally put the wrong combination of letters in. Whoops. That is what you need to solve the first question. --->
bmpyfgycb
Apologies to all. Think of this as an extra hint, I guess.

EDIT3: Added a note.

EDIT4: After reading this thread -->click <---, I realized that this puzzle probably falls into the first category of puzzle described, as it is not exactly clear what I'm asking for in any of the "questions," except for Q3 (the hint), Q4, Q10, and Q11. So what does this mean? MOAR HINTS FOR YOU TO MAKE UP FOR CREATING AN UNINTENTIONALLY INCONSIDERATE PUZZLE/WRITING BAD QUESTIONS. I'm not rewriting the questions or answers that no one has gotten to yet because I don't feel like it. I also added a note.

Hints

General Hints

1) there is a reason for everything i have done regarding this puzzle and giveaway
2) google is your friend. google is an especially helpful friend for many of these questions.
3) my itstoohard question titles and descriptions do not help in finding answers
4) hint 1 applies to nearly half of the questions.

Question-specific Hints

Q1 -
1) two ways to figure out the first question: more work but with the help of the hint provided, or the shorter way, but the hint won't help you.
2) [added a hint somewhere on my profile]
3) hint on my profile ---> shorter way, hint on itstoohard ---> longer way.
4) answer is in the format --> rxdixxxxd <--- where x can be any character besides x
5) decryption necessary
6) the answer is a band i like
Q2 -
1) symbolism
2) look closer...
Q3 -
hint on itstoohard is sufficient for now.
Q4 -
1) the answer is also the name of a band i like
2) a valve game released in 2007 will help you
Q5 -
1) i want the artist
2) album title = from xxxx xx sirius
Q6 -
Q7 -
hint on itstoohard is sufficient for now.
Q8 -
why do you need a hint for this
Q9 -
Q10 -
Q11 -

Itstoohard Hints

Q1) track 5 of a spoon album
Q2) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ia1xag2LUjE
/r/RoomDetective
Q3) where?
Q4) hint not necessary [er... sorry about that... i couldn't think of a good hint at that time. that 'hint' won't actually help you find the answer...]
Q5) lyrics not necessary
Q6) hint not necessary
(i'm not trying to be douchy - there wasn't supposed to be a hint on this question, but i had already entered 60 minutes for the hint delay.)
Q7) http://www.steamgifts.com/forum/fJxM3/what-is-a-cupcake
Q8) freebie
Q9)
Q10)
Q11) bruteforcing not necessary

Solution(s)

In my reply to chour's feedback on the giveaway, I said that I did have ideas for the logical progression of this puzzle, but I couldn't think of enough questions for one theme and decided to put all the questions I already came up with for each theme and lumped them together. This explains the random/distracting feel of the puzzle.

The three ideas I had chosen were music (Q1, Q2, Q4 sort of, Q5, Q6), relation to the content of the threads I created (Q1, Q4, Q7, Q10, Q11), and answers corresponding to the next question/answer (Q1, Q2, Q3). That last idea is why the eleven questions aren't all together, but separate.

The two questions that don't fall into any category (Q8 and Q9) were random.

Q1) radiohead

Alright. There were three ways to solve this one, although the third, and easiest, wasn't available until half an hour was remaining. I'll start with the hardest and most idiotic one.

Using the updated combination of letters I gave you, "bmpyfgycb," you had to rot2 --> railfence decrypt --> reverse. Rot2 came from my little soliloquy about Google PlusOne where I bolded PlusTwo. My first hint under general hints should also have been a clue, for the reasons that there must be a reason behind my including that random bit and that "everything" and "PlusTwo" are the only words that aren't headings that are bolded. The bolded thing also should have hinted that that clue applied to the Google bit, if you couldn't deduce it from the fact that the Google thing was way too random.

There was no information in the thread about where to get railfence from, but I reasoned with myself that since the puzzle was posted only two days, I think, after zelgh posted the basic sg puzzling guide, people would know to try various deciphers from the link zelgh included. Obviously, I thought wrong...

Even if someone had known to bruteforce all those deciphering techniques, they also would've have had to be familiar with daehoidar in order to know that railfence was the correct decipher. And once they successfully passed the railfence step, the itstoohard hint, which referred to the song "Written in Reverse" off the album "Transference", gave the last step.
Idiotic, you see.

Luckily for you guys, this solution could easily be modified.

Second solution = rot2 --> unscramble.

You still would've had had to known what Radiohead was in order to get the solution, but it was much easier than before. The hint on my profile was the fourth link down, "....", which linked to unscramble.net. If you used the unscrambler there, you wouldn't have any luck, but hopefully you would've realized that you would need to unscramble "dorahiaed" and that "dorahiaed" was a proper noun.

Third solution = guessing/deduction.

With thirty minutes left, I gave away the first letter to the answer with three others already revealed. The first letter should've made Googling/guessing a lot easier. You would've been able to guess at the second letter (a), the fifth letter (o)after getting the second, and then Googling a band called "Radioxxxx" if you weren't familiar with them.

Other hints for Q1 should be self-explanatory.

Oh, and the question... sorry if "idk" threw some of you on the wrong track. I just couldn't think of a question at the time and assumed that since the letters (and "correct" letters later) were provided right after the link, you guys would assume something needed to be done to the letters.

Q2) xendless xurbia (with or without underscore) OR xurbia xendless (with or without underscore)

Ahh. There was a lot of stuff going on in this question.

The question was "down is the new up", a song by Radiohead. This song appears as the second song on "In Rainbows" bonus disc. Xendless_Xurbia comes from the poster of the same name, which features black arrows pointing downwards inside white arrows pointing upwards. Therefore, "Down is the New Up".

Using the itstoohard hint, you can see the Radiohead Xendless_Xurbia poster in the background. You might have deduced the relation to the question (since after a Google search, you can see that "Down is the New Up" is a Radiohead song), but I included the /r/RoomDetective part just in case. /r/RoomDetective is a subreddit where users are to either deduce things about a person based off of their room, or submit images of their own room(s) for others to deduce things. While I wasn't looking for you to deduce anything about the guy in the video, the inclusion of /r/RoomDetective should have told you that you should be looking in the background and around the room. My "look closer..." hint should've helped you out with this as well.

Without the itstoohard hint, you could've solved it by typing "down is the new up" in Google Images. Images of arrows pointing downwards inside arrows pointing upwards appears many times. If you do reverse image searches using any of those images, you'll eventually find Xendless_Xurbia.

The hint about symbolism was mostly because of these three links. I don't expect you to read all of them; I'll explain their significance here. My hint was pretty stupid, though... There wouldn't have been any possible way of someone getting to any of those three links without already having knowledge of what Xendless_Xurbia is AKA already having found the answer.

But anyway. The first link is a forum thread about the meaning of "Xendless_Xurbia".
...Actually, the thread explains the symbolism better than I can. If you want to know, read the sixth post down (by Pulkpulldoors).

The second and third links are about the coincidences (actually, probably more intentional than coincidental) between Radiohead and zero, one, and ten. The second link included the binary code "1010101010". I actually don't know what that code has to do with anything else in the article, but if you put that code into xlate, you get "a". And if you encode "a", you get something different. In other binary translators I tried, it wouldn't decode. I found that pretty interesting, so I made "a" the answer for Q7 and capitalized it in my "What is a cupcAke?" thread.

Xurbia Xendless (with or without underscore) was also an accepted answer because "Xurbia Xendless Limited" was the Label on which "In Rainbows - From the Basement" was released, and "Down is the New Up" is from "In Rainbows".

Q3) australia

Pretty self-explanatory after the itstoohard hint.

"Tales from Outer Suburbia" is possibly my favorite graphic novel ever (I haven't read a lot of the other ones that are considered good, though). The author, Shaun Tan, is Australian, and the book is a series of little snapshots into life in an Australian suburb.

This question can be solved with Google searches.

Q4) liars

The answer is from the quote "The cake is a lie," from the video game Portal. Assuming most, if not all, of you know even a little bit about Portal or this quote specifically, you should have been able to answer the question without any problems.

If not, then if you remembered my "What is a cupcAke?" thread, you could've gotten it.

The hint about the answer being a band I liked was just something extra for you to check so that you don't waste too many guesses if you didn't get the references.

Q5) gojira

Continuing on/going back to the music theme.

After the itstoohard hint, you should've been able to tell that "unicorn" was a song. My other hints on here told you part of the album name and that I was looking for the artist.

Using the Google drop-down search box or just a bunch of Google searches ("Unicorn by _", filling in a letter in the blank and repeating for each letter until you find an artist with an album called "From xxxx xx Sirius"), you should've been able to find it.

Q6) mephiskapheles

This also continues on with the music theme. I included the wrong lyrics accidentally (it was supposed to be "Yum yum bumble bumblebee tuna", not "Yum yum bumblebee bumblebee tuna"), but it shouldn't have been hard to find.

The only thing that might've thrown you off was that this is also a jingle for Bumblebee Tuna... but yeah.

Fun fact: Mephiskapheles is considered "the world's first satanic ska band." :P

Q7) a

Pretty easy to identify after the hint. In my "What is a cupcAke?" thread, one of the post-scripts said that there was no particular reason why the "A" was capitalized, but I lied. :)

This question made use of General Hint #1.

I admit the question didn't give any indication as to what I wanted for an answer, so sorry about that.

Q8) freebie

Freebie.

Q9) green

From the video "Don't Hug me I'm Scared" by thisisitcollective.

I liked the video. I didn't like the quote "Green is not a creative color." Green is my favorite color. >:(

Answer can be found after Googling the question.

Q10) yes

Hints from Q4 and the "What is a cupcAke?" thread made it simple. If not, you could've just tried the obvious answers - yes or no.

Q11) 19 OR nineteen

From this thread. "Posted roughly nineteen hours after I said I would."

This again makes use of General Hint #1.

I want feedback on the puzzle, guys.