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ARG or NOT
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FLmutant
Decorated


Joined: 29 Oct 2004
Posts: 244
Location: Orlando, FL
elfis wrote:
So, I realize my two main posts here at Unfiction's Unforums (anybody go to FT's Unconvention?) laid out many threads to choose from, but I've been disappointed that noone has chosen the one strictly to do with Theresa Duncan and her WOTS blog. Nor DreamsEnd's ideas about same and their use / incorporation by Matheny.

Any comments on those subjects?


A story needs a hook: I can only read so many pages of rambling like that last example before I get bored if there doesn't seem to be a point. That link lost me about the time the rambling with no clear point finally crystalized for the writer into clarity!

Quote:
I also think we will be able to trace this ARG, and perhaps the whole phenomenon of ARGs, back through everything we know as media manipulation, government population, and mind-control, through cult conspiracies, on through to the reptilian masters, who shall make chattel of us all if they're not stopped.


I'm sure that their next ARG would have been much better if the Repitilian Union of Puppetmasters & Mind Controllers hadn't had to kill them like that. Perhaps it is intended as a send-up of conspiracy theories in a less surrealist Robert Ashton Wilson fashion?

I'm not sure that any of us really know what point you're trying to get at, buddy. We're trying. The Reptilian Puppetmasters just need a better "Story So Far" website if they are going to attract any players Smile

PostPosted: Sun Dec 02, 2007 4:24 pm
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elfis
Boot


Joined: 08 Oct 2007
Posts: 27
Location: Tejas

 		Howdy FLmutant.

I wasn't asking about Matheny's / "Connolly's" rant about alien reptiles. Sad how so much dialog about the paranormal and parapolitics can be sidelined by reference to Icke and his reptoid rulers stuff.

I was asking about the DreamsEnd blogger's ideas about there being an ARG or viral marketing around the deaths of Theresa Duncan and her Wit of the Staircase blog. And I was also wondering what if anything this community might have to say about Matheny and his past (and current?) ARG related activities.

But I suppose it's all just too complicated to sum up quickly.

Oh well, at least some semi-mainstream news sources are finally picking up on the WEIRDNESS of it all:

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2008/01/suicides200801?printable=true&currentPage=all

http://www.mediabistro.com/fishbowlny/magazines/so_whats_up_with_vanity_fairs_art_world_suicide_story_72843.asp

http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2007/12/how_well_did_jeremy_blake.html

http://www.somareview.com/blog.cfm?datekey=071206

http://www.somareview.com/blog.cfm?datekey=07120702

http://www.mediabistro.com/fishbowlLA/newspapers/updated_beck_interview_about_alice_in_wonderland_film_in_2003_72536.asp?c=rss

Peace! And have a great weekend.

SMiles

FLmutant wrote:
elfis wrote:
So, I realize my two main posts here at Unfiction's Unforums (anybody go to FT's Unconvention?) laid out many threads to choose from, but I've been disappointed that noone has chosen the one strictly to do with Theresa Duncan and her WOTS blog. Nor DreamsEnd's ideas about same and their use / incorporation by Matheny.

Any comments on those subjects?


A story needs a hook: I can only read so many pages of rambling like that last example before I get bored if there doesn't seem to be a point. That link lost me about the time the rambling with no clear point finally crystalized for the writer into clarity!

Quote:
I also think we will be able to trace this ARG, and perhaps the whole phenomenon of ARGs, back through everything we know as media manipulation, government population, and mind-control, through cult conspiracies, on through to the reptilian masters, who shall make chattel of us all if they're not stopped.


I'm sure that their next ARG would have been much better if the Repitilian Union of Puppetmasters & Mind Controllers hadn't had to kill them like that. Perhaps it is intended as a send-up of conspiracy theories in a less surrealist Robert Ashton Wilson fashion?

I'm not sure that any of us really know what point you're trying to get at, buddy. We're trying. The Reptilian Puppetmasters just need a better "Story So Far" website if they are going to attract any players Smile


PostPosted: Fri Dec 14, 2007 7:02 pm
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elfis
Boot


Joined: 08 Oct 2007
Posts: 27
Location: Tejas
elfis wrote:
Howdy FLmutant.

I wasn't asking about Matheny's / "Connolly's" rant about alien reptiles. Sad how so much dialog about the paranormal and parapolitics can be sidelined by reference to Icke and his reptoid rulers stuff.

I was asking about the DreamsEnd blogger's ideas about there being an ARG or viral marketing around the deaths of Theresa Duncan and her Wit of the Staircase blog. And I was also wondering what if anything this community might have to say about Matheny and his past (and current?) ARG related activities.

But I suppose it's all just too complicated to sum up quickly.


Oh, it looks like someone else was asking about Matheny's projects over here in News/Rumors:

http://forums.unfiction.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=18776

And could the recent ANONYMOUS / CHANOLOGY attacks against Scientology be described as utilizing ARGish viral marketing techniques for activism efforts?

http://dreamsendweb.com/2008/02/02/dear-anonymous-meet-theresa-duncan/

PostPosted: Sun Feb 03, 2008 3:41 pm
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MageSteff
Pretty talky there aintcha, Talky?


Joined: 06 Jun 2003
Posts: 2716
Location: State of Denial
elfis wrote:

I was asking about the DreamsEnd blogger's ideas about there being an ARG or viral marketing around the deaths of Theresa Duncan and her Wit of the Staircase blog. And I was also wondering what if anything this community might have to say about Matheny and his past (and current?) ARG related activities.


To do serious research on ARG connections - you have to get the answers to several questions...

1. Are Ms. Duncan and Mr. Blake real living people who work in the fields as presented? - if yes, then chances that it is an arg is small if they are the main characters. While ARGs may reference real people as part of the blurring of lines, generally speaking real people are not the central characters. As both people are well known in their fields, supposedly, it should be easy to check on that information. Theresa's work appeared in several magazines Artforum, Slate, Salon and Bald Ego; Jeremy's in the movies Punch Drunk Love, History of Glamour, his works are displayed at Art Galleries (including on-line at Corcoran.org), and mentioned in the Minneapolis Review and by National Public Radio after his death.

2. Are their deaths real? - if yes this is definitely not an ARG, as it would be a real life police issue. While being immersed in the story is what has the appeal, we don't want to be in conflict with the real authorities, and adding false trails for Police to follow is something that I, as part of this community, do NOT want to see happen. The kernnel at the center of the story can take some info from reality, but over all, it should be a fictional story and not a real life one. I don't think anyone would be able to convince Vanity Fair to run a story about their deaths if it were not true. With all the scandals involving reporters at well respected publications, they would not take the chance of running anything that was a false story without a disclaimer on it somewhere.

3. How reliable is the source of the information? - in the case of the dreamend blogs, the write has stated that he isn't that familiar with ARGs. As he did not do any investigation into what comes from truth and what is not truth, then how can he even ask if this is an ARG? The basis of ARGs is that we look at all information, where it comes from, how reliable are the sources, when we are not certain if something we see is an ARG or Viral marketing, or even some hoax. Do your homework, use the resources available to you.

*Google and Wikipedia used to provide some of the information used in this message.
_________________
Magesteff
A small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has. - Margaret Mead


PostPosted: Fri Feb 15, 2008 1:56 am
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Kim Trail
Kilroy

Joined: 12 Jul 2008
Posts: 1

 		{Apologies for the lengthy post. Elfismiles made several claims early in this thread that are simply untrue. I tried to ignore these false statements for as long as I could, but the record needs to be straightened.}

elfismiles wrote:
While within their inner circle at www.RealityCovered.com he found that one of the other anonymous researchers within that group (username KT aka KymTrail - [chemtrails were a part of the MAJESTIC game]) had amassed quite a threads worth of data on ARGs and their possible / probable use as a disinfo tool. So when he very shortly thereafter was exposed to the Theremy Saga via another arena of this story (Rigorous Intuition blog/forum of Canadian satirist Jeff Wells) he was primed to view WOTS as a rabbit hole.


Miles - your recount of events is disingenuous at best; at worst, it's bs... "muckraking" indeed...

elfismiles wrote:
amassed quite a threads worth of data


In actual fact, there were 3 interrelated threads, of which only 2 really had anything to do with ARGs.

Thread 1 - 17 posts (I wrote 8)
Thread 2 - 8 posts (I wrote 2)
Thread 3 - 152 posts, but not about ARGs, more about hoaxes
(Most of that was from March 08 - the forum had been pretty much hibernating for a few months.)

So, "quite a threads worth of data" is actually 10 posts, posted during a few days 6 months prior to Ty Brown seeing them.

elfismiles wrote:
on ARGs and their possible / probable use as a disinfo tool


Actually, that was your idea. Why you are trying to pawn that off on me is beyond me. The reason I was posting on that was because of a conjunction of 2 events: 1) you raising the point again on Above Top Secret forums, and 2) a comment that a third party made in a private email (that has nothing to do with anything we are talking about). Further, when asked directly by Shawnna, you could not provide evidence for your claim that ATS had an official connection to the Majestic ARG. That was the start of these 10 posts - me looking to see if there was evidence of that connection (ie, your unsubstantiated claim.)

I explained my interest in ARGs as a metaphor, which had been jump started by your article, in the first post of the first thread:
KT wrote:
you'll notice that the basic ARG design principles closely match the characteristics of an effective cointelpro/disinformation campaign (well, "IMHO").


Not that I found a shred of evidence that ARGs had "possibly/probably been used as a disinfo tool", - I don't think that was ever my contention. I was much more interested in what the designs of ARGs, which had been fairly well studied, could tell us about other "artificially created virtual realities", like hoaxes and disinformation.

Here is what Ty wrote in the 1st thread on July 24th 2008:
DE wrote:
I thought I'd bump this and say a couple of things. First off, the ARG/disinfo similarity has really been a fruitful idea for me. And I shutter to think how similar techniques could be used on unsuspecting people.

Opened up a whole new world to me...or, more accurately...gave me another lens to go back and look the world over with.



elfismiles wrote:
he was primed to view WOTS as a rabbit hole.

elfismiles wrote:
Part of the reason that the DreamsEnd blogger became convinced that the WOTS blog and the Theremy (Theresa --> Jeremy = Theremy) deaths were part of an ARG was due to his being preconditioned on the idea of ARGs being used as disinfo.


I wholeheartedly assure you that no one primed Ty or "preconditioned" him in any way - except for Ty himself...

The ONLY reason we contacted him was to share notes regarding SRI.

It was Ty who brought the story of Theresa Duncan's death to us. AND it was Ty who was trying to fit every facet he uncovered into an "ARG" mold, basically from day 1.

Shawnna and I spent a week saying that we did not think it was a hoax or a game - in fact, my response to him on July 25 was "I may be splitting hairs, but it sounds like you are trying a bit hard to shove things into an ARG bucket..." - and I spent what little spare time I had trying to explain that things he was interpreting as sinister actually weren't. This came to a head when Ty tried to convince us that a mention of the name "Nolita" was actually a veiled clue relating to "Lolita", when it was actually a reference to a neighborhood in Manhattan (NOrth of Little ITAly.)

That was evidently the straw that broke the camel's back, because that is when he started accusing us of manipulating him. Which is the furthest thing from the truth.

If you really want, I can go through Ty's posts and systematically show you how he ignored common, everyday explanations for things, and leapt to the most sinister interpretations he could conjure...

Ty claimed that all the photos of Theresa Duncan are "purposefully blurry", when in fact they were probably taken with cell phone cameras in low light situations with the auto-shutter setting on. (To make matters worse, he disproved his own point in the same post, by showing many non-blurry photos of Duncan.)

Ty claimed that I used some spooky technology to mask my phone number when I called your radio show, when in fact I had called with a prepaid long distance calling card, and really had no control over what number the phone system was telling you.

Ty stated that he thought that Duncan's wikipedia entry was disinformation because he couldn't find any other reference to her movie project "Alice Underground" - which actually does have other internet pages about it.

Ty claimed that I had found a reference to "Alice Underground" online when he couldn't and that made him suspicious that I had planted that, when in fact all I did was google "Theresa Duncan" "Alice Underground" and look at the hits that google gave me.

Ty found it suspicious that Theresa Duncan painted in her lower lip to look fuller, as if she is doing that to disguise what she really looks like... Tip: google make your lips look fuller (for about 100,000 links...)

Ty said he found it suspicious that Duncan's blog was "too literary" - she was a writer! What exactly does he expect a writer to be on her blog?

Ty claimed that Jon Gaskell's Pointblank piece on Johnny Gosch was a self-admitted "April Fool's prank", when in fact a careful reading of the email chain shows that he is not saying that - he was identifying another piece as a prank.

Ty called the 0100101110101101 group "19373" because that is what is translates to in decimal - when in fact it is (intentionally) "4bad" in hexadecimal.

Ty repeatedly misquoted Eve's anagram "A Lonely Wit, Aloha" as "To A Lonely Wit Aloha", which he used to prove it wasn't an anagram of Natalie Holloway.

Etc etc etc ad infinitum ad nauseum... I could do the same with every conclusion that Ty jumped to...

In his web post immediately following the "Nolita" episode, Ty wrote:
Quote:
So if my rationality did slip...I had just a little help, both from people clearly playing games and also from some synchronicity. I had lost the ability, I think, to tell the difference. ... And somehow, it is appropriate, that for a short time, I accompanied Theresa Duncan on her trip into what we are now labeling madness. I followed her down the rabbit hole. Only in this case... I came back out.


Unfortunately, for one week last July, I felt like Ty was trying to drag us all in with him.

Ty went back down :( I refused to go in after him again...

Thomas Pynchon wrote:
"Paranoids are not paranoids because they're paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations."
(Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow - quoted by Duncan on her blog)

Quote:
"Neurosis," Blake says, "is a broken record in your head." The cumulative effect is somewhere between a great expressionist painting and a bad acid trip.
from http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.02/blake.html

Professor Pan wrote:
...you seem intent on creating a deep, dark mystery out of this sad affair. And in the process, you're attributing malign intentions to artists, ontological mavericks, and tricksters. you really are just working your own brand of creative mojo on their public output. You're essentially creating a meta-game of your own, integrating possibly non-relevant ideas and people into what is very likely just the sad story of two smart, creative people who, for whatever reason, killed themselves.


gothamcityinsider wrote:
Yes, you are right, just because she was into hoaxes or she was paranoid or she made mention of the CoS terrorizing people doesn't mean that's how she met her end but we can only work with what clues we've been given and so far the only ones we are privy to and the only ones we can really scour is what's on the internet - an arena prone to misinformation and labyrinthian rabbit holes. Personally, the deeper this seems to go, and the more subcutaneous we search, the more I feel like it was a simple but tragic Romeo & Juliet. .... because we seem to be searching for every possible alley to avoid what may be the glaring truth; the simple truth; the TYPICAL truth.


PostPosted: Sat Jul 12, 2008 11:53 pm
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Euchre
uF Game Warden


Joined: 29 Aug 2007
Posts: 3342

 		I read much of this and just shake my head.

The especially paranoid minds among us have an amazingly keen ability to seek information and theorize based on even the most minor of details, and yet probably are completely missing the real conspiracies. There's no better disinformation than letting a fool deceive themselves.

Twisted Evil
_________________
Any sufficiently plausible fiction is indistinguishable from reality.
Any sufficiently twisted reality is indistinguishable from fiction.
Welcome to the new world of entertainment.
ŠEuchre 2007

PostPosted: Sun Jul 13, 2008 2:11 am
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cigarman
Veteran

Joined: 27 Jun 2008
Posts: 89
Location: chester in the united kingdom

 		wtf i consider my self to be of normal inteligence but im sorry most of this goes way over my head "Foily!"

PostPosted: Sun Jul 13, 2008 7:54 am
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Shawnna
Kilroy

Joined: 13 Jul 2008
Posts: 1

 		The whole episode was surreal and if I weren't in the midst of it all myself, it would have been over my head too.

Confused

KT is the only individual I know who can keep his own head straight when surrounded by those bordering on delusional. I can personally vouch (not that that means anything) for everything he's outlined above.

And Euchre hit the nail on the head as far as DE was concerned with this

Quote:
The especially paranoid minds among us have an amazingly keen ability to seek information and theorize based on even the most minor of details,


PostPosted: Sun Jul 13, 2008 1:37 pm
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elfis
Boot


Joined: 08 Oct 2007
Posts: 27
Location: Tejas

 		Thanks for clarifying all that. Since I've not seen any of the alleged material from your closed community I can only defer to your version of events. I apologize for any inaccuracies in my version of events but considering what I knew of the story I tried to put forth as accurate a snapshot as possible for this here ARG community.

PostPosted: Sat Jul 26, 2008 1:03 pm
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Mr. LeBlanc
Guest


 		That dawg is dead.
Here is hoping all of you are having an 08/08/08 filled with good fortune. It is indeed a lucky day.

Not so, I'm afraid, for Dream's End. His blog is no more. Killed by the internets.

Aaaarrrrgh.

PostPosted: Fri Aug 08, 2008 10:23 pm
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Kyra's Vengeance
Boot

Joined: 10 Apr 2009
Posts: 30

 		Bump for good times and togetherness.

PostPosted: Wed May 20, 2009 9:19 pm
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ndemeterModerator
Entrenched


Joined: 28 Jul 2004
Posts: 1037
Location: Sunny California!

 		Yeah. Thanks for making my brain wanting to leak out of my ears. Twisted Evil
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PostPosted: Thu May 21, 2009 12:49 am
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