Something is going to happen in 0 days

GWC Community Off-Topic/Other
#1

Today is your last chance to guess what the promised something is. This piqued my easily piquable curiosity last summer…

But then this crossed the Dradis: dailydot: Is this YouTube series counting down to a new “Battlestar Galactica”?
GeekOSystem: Yeah, So It Turns Out 77 Days Is Definitely About Battlestar Galactica After All [UPDATE: Maybe Not?]
What in the world made Gaby Dunn ever think this could be about Battlestar: TLDR: Episode #1: Something Is Going to Happen in 7 Days (podcast interview)

Or maybe not, a Chief as a character and, admittedly more than a few, coincidences does not BSG make… or Halo for that matter. Safe bets: definitely a story, definitely science fiction. The hints imply a point of no return singularity event but perhaps one occurring in near future cyberspace, here, on Earth2.

In fact, big props to geekdad Jason, Something Is Going to Happen Tomorrow: 77 Days of Pronunciation Book

for observing the modest phenomenon of Pronunciation Book is mimicking the opening plot of William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition. Supposedly Al Quaeda uses digital watermarking but this is a rare instance, for me firsthand, of someone using it since, well, Gibson’s book. See 77 Days Wiki: Spectrogram

The biggest question is in what medium will the thingie be revealed. From the elaborate quality of the prose and technical sophistication employed in the hints, if it’s a podiobook or webcast series, I’d sure listen or watch. Why should anyone care? Pronunciation Book was a legitimate, if quirky, three and half year old YouTube channel. A countdown of 77 days is a flicker in its oldbie existence. Viral hype stunts just don’t get receive this much forethought, persistence and dedication. In any event, I hope the fifteen minutes go well today. The Muses are so fickle and this was wildly successful considering it was done so on the cheap. Worse case, I’m subscribed to new TLDR podcast and bumped into another hail fellow well met kindred spirit BSG fan Gaby Dunn. Even if she was wrong. Was she? :slight_smile:

//youtu.be/YCZKKZWPwjc

#2

And the video released yesterday points to this (at least the link does) http://www.bearstearnsbravo.com/ which is an interactive YouTube video/game. It’s not BSG related at all.

#3

Two interesting points prior to the widely anticipated vindication of low expectations. Well, that and count on 4chan hive mind to get to the bottom of any Internet sensation with ruthless extreme prejudice.

As linked above, Gaby Dunn had already ferreted out who and what was behind Pronunciation Book and contacted them directly. She agreed to a voluntary news embargo only to find, “I’ve waited like everyone else for the big reveal. Then I read about it in the New Yorker.”

dailydot: The unhappy ending to the Internet’s most suspenseful countdown
Huge problem for the ARG planners: the connection between Twitter’s horse ebooks to YouTube’s Pronunciation Book remained largely unknown, never popularized, never able to convert Twitter fame into YouTube fame. Dissatisfied with PB’s relatively low audience compared to quarter million Twitter following of horse, their financial backers pulled out leaving them with all promotion but suddenly no money to produce the game itself. Yet and still, exploiting Google auto complete to synthesize the horse ebook’s daily non-sequiturs was genius.

Five minute video primer on Horse_ebooks: The Most Beloved Spambot on the Internet by New York Time’s Jenna Wortham

Here’s someone calling the phone number listed, active for yesterday only, at bearsternsbravo.com: Calling Bravospam (Horse_ebooks 2)
Gawker sent a video crew down to the listed gallery address to witness the three people answering the phone on other end: Horse_Ebooks Has Been a Buzzfeed Employee Since 2011

Gawker discovers one of the three performers is none other than… Susan Orleans, the “blogger,” who “broke” the New Yorker story: Horse_ebooks Is Human After AllNot a story then, but a planned press release. “In the past few weeks, plenty of people have noticed some synchronicity between the accounts, and have been scrambling to figure out their provenance…” This is what they wished would have happened, but didn’t. This is why Gaby Dunn’s source was frantic that she not break the story beforehand.

Really Disturbing Precedent: Corporations spend millions annually attempting to spawn internet buzz and memes, to purchase unplanned, accidental, spontaneous notoriety. For decades, domain squatters have bought up domains hoping to sell them to those corporations. Companies like Microsoft buy out other companies, in order to brand their products as Microsoft products, or ever better, simply to shut them down. Monetizing and commoditizing internet popularity is nothing new but this is almost always public knowledge, a matter of legal public record. In December 2011, horse ebooks was dubiously awarded 2011 Twitter Account of the Year by UGO.com. In September 2011, some random guy (Bakkila) bought the Twitter account from its Russian spammer creator. The transfer in ownership, and change in authorship, was kept secret. "The goal was not to appropriate the account but to become the account,” - Jacob Bakkila, New York Times, The Human Behind a Favorite Spambot, Horse_eBooks

The secret sauce behind horse ebooks unintentional fortune cookie humor: hilariously poor English phrasing from a Russian spammer. But now it becomes deliberate and calculated, assembly lined scraped from Google autocomplete. Admittedly, this was done by performance artists. Their grandest ambition is asking $7 to play their ARG game, made on a weekend with no money. I’m afraid all of this will happen again, but in the future this kind of hijaacking will come from much larger concerns with corporate coffers.

Back to regularly scheduled old fashioned internet snark of innocent sincerity. I hope it doesn’t become an endangered species.

//youtu.be/_7_vLHo0ipg

#4

“A more psychological definition of gaslighting is ‘an increasing frequency of systematically withholding factual information from, and/or providing false information to, the victim - having the gradual effect of making them anxious, confused, and less able to trust their own memory and perception.’” - Urban Dictionary

“He told me that he’s fairly certain that they chose journalists, like they picked us, some of us, to use as part of the game.”

TLDR#1 Update: The World’s Most Elaborate Gaslighting Exercise: Gaby Dunn on Living Your Own Personal Truman Show