If you’re an appreciator of strange things on the internet (and no, on the internet a site called The Mary Sue does not really qualify as strange), of procedurally generated twitter accounts or mysterious YouTube channels, you’ve probably already been tearing your hair out about this all day. But if you aren’t, you might be mighty puzzled. Remember Pronunciation Book, that weird internet thing that some folks thought was counting down to new Battlestar Galactica? Well, it’s not. Perhaps you follow infamous supposed spambot Horse_ebooks on Twitter, for its thoughts on repeating random semi-related words over and over again? Prepare for disappointment.
For much of this story, we’re going to defer to our own expert on Weird Internet, our sister site Geekosystem. It turns out that both Horse_ebooks and Pronunciation Book were both being run entirely by actual people as viral marketing for their performance art and related alternate reality game, Bear Sterns Bravo.
Originally created by Jacob Bakkila, a creative director at Buzfeed, and Thomas Bender, the vice-president of product development at Howcast, these projects have now been woven into an Alternate Reality Game (ARG) by the Syndyne art collective…
You apparently play a a Wall Street regulator who can arrest or bargain with Bear Stearns employees for crimes that they may have committed during the Financial Crisis. Which Financial Crisis? We don’t even know, because this doesn’t feel like it’s taking place in the world we know at all. But then again, what did you expect from the people who brought you“sandstone gully gully gully gully gully gully gully gully gully gully gully gully”?
You can even sign up to join as a “regulator” or a “banker” to get access to the deeper parts of the game – for $7, of course.
Also there’s some character named Dalton involved? You should probably just read the Geekosystem post.
But wait, I hear you cry, you said something about a performance art installation. Yes. Yes I did. It’s up for one day only, mere blocks from our New York offices. So naturally our Geekosystem coworker Victoria trooped out to it, and walked in even though the door said this:
So you should go read her post about it after the sacrifices she made of entering a really weird space. And now we return to our regular coverage of… whatever it is we do here.
