unforum

[amandel]

Unsettling is a too bland word to describe the vid. Update on the I Am Not a Fan blog.

And, Thanks, casper29 for the interesting "nickel tour" recap of WI I

[kosmopol]

Thank you casper29 for summary. Now I'll follow it too.

[Nabi]

[kosmopol]

Oh wow thank you Nabi. I didn't know, uF was so in it! Now I have many lecture to read

[Nabi]

Just noticed something as I was rereading threads!

The e-mail that got sent out to those with accounts on the Happy Cube forums was sent from the address squeedleklotchSPLATgmail.com. The original trailhead thread here points out Jack Q. Pembry's website linked from his Happy Cube profile early on, and the 'photos' page (see here) mentions "the squeedleklotch" right below the first drawing. Googling turns up a lot of general WI-related stuff pointing to it being a general username Jack used, blah blah.

I'm not quite sure how automated e-mails from proboards work, and wondered if it could just be an automatic thing that lists the board maker as the sender. (I have no clue if Jack made the board or not, but bear with me here.) So, I read up on gmail (that is, I Wiki'd it), and it wasn't widely available to general public use until February '07. Jack registered back in August '04 (see here).

So my thought is, either the new boardmoderator has done his research, or it could be the original guy coming back to the game. There's some support for the second idea in this, where someone was apparently banned yesterday by Jack.

No clue if this seems obvious to everyone else or not, but I thought I'd point it out anyway. Hopefully it's of some use.

Edit: Really should've seen this earlier, but two threads (here and here) were moved by Jack, so, all the more evidence.

[elsporko]

Augh this whole thing is so confusing >.<

I followed the entire thing back in 2007, not sure if it was real or fake. Suddenly the "T'was all for boners" post comes up and everything just kinda stops.

Now it starts up again, and I'm seeing multiple explanations on what's going on and if this is all real or not. I've read that the entire thing was faked by SA goons, with all the videos and whatnot done by Bambos, a quote from boardmoderator posted on the 19th:

"A lot of people doubt Bambos made the original videos, apparently. It's apparent he, at the least, edited them a little - adding color at one point and maybe even addin music where there was once simply random pitches. Bambos is hesitant to talk to me much about the videos, though he assures me they are his own. I believe him - he's a professional video editor. I simply think he wants to move on with his life and do something that's more than just a viral video for the internet."

But then, a post from Bambos himself, way back in 2007 that was linked to in a post today on the 20th:
(it's a little long, so I'll just post the link)
http://thehappycube.proboards.com/index.cgi?action=display&board=hackjobjohnny&thread=102&page=8#1591

Here he says he never made the videos, and it was all given to him. He says he tried to recreate the videos but couldn't match the originals.

So what's the truth here? Was the entire 2007 era all faked, or was there some truth to it? Is there any way to tell if Bambos is telling the truth about not making the videos, since there's different stories?

This whole new thing on Bright is interesting, but it also makes me feel a bit skeptical about the whole thing. It's freaky to think that someone's been following this so closely, long after the whole thing stopped. A lot of the names mentioned in Bright's blog are real people that disappeared under mysterious circumstances ( http://thehappycube.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=bright&action=display&thread=115&page=2 if you scroll down, you see a lot of missing persons links) which adds to the entire thing. I know that some ARGs are just marketting, or just for fun, but I always thought that (though this is, admittedly my first ARG or anything of the type ) this was real. Since this whole Bright thing comes into play, possibly involving actual murders and disappearances of others, this is why I have to ask stuff like this.

There are SO many questions... What did Bambos really do with the videos, did he make them? If he did make them, is he behind the revival of it with Bright? And if he didn't, then who made the videos, and is it really Bright making the 7th and onward?

Is Bright real, or is this just some plot device to stir up the entire story again?

Why are some people still calling this a game, if the entire Bright story is real? Is this how some people just view things like this? I've never participated in an ARG before other than this, so I can't really say I'm in the know

I'm not necessarily looking for answers, I'm just posting my thoughts and maybe someone else can explain something to me and the rest of us, or maybe build their own ideas on top of mine.

EDIT ADD-IN: This is a huge post, sorry

[Nabi]

Or... nevermind my previous post, I guess. Boardmoderator says Bambos gave him the password for stuff.

[Spyder Byte]

So, even though this is my first ARG and I'm jumping in during the revival, there are some things I found out that weren't mentioned here, and I have some theories.

When the game ended, Bambos said that a friend of his was the one who outed him as the PM, and he was admittedly enjoying it and tried to bring it back. He says this all in the post that elsporko mentioned.

Honestly, I think this is still just a game. It all started on something awful, which from what I hear, is largely made up of trouble makers and spammers. Bambos said that the videos were given to him, but he is also an experienced videographer and you could get those sounds through a synthesizer with some tweaking.

Boadmoderator last night gave insight into who he really is, telling the players he's a kind of "private detective" of sorts, and that JB was actually a specially addressed mental health patient. You can read all that here:
http://thehappycube.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=bright&action=display&thread=120

In most cases, with someone so obviously disturbed, it would have been both the legal and responsible thing to have put him into an institution, and in almost all cases, this is what happens. But JB was left on his own, alone, in an apartment. Not to mention, he's been going around threatening the previous PMs and administration on the project. They say he's on the run, looking for answers, and posting from libraries. They claim they can't track him. Even if they could just locate IP addresses, any actual authorities would have at least found his trail. So, JB credible? Not really. The fact that the people mentioned in the missing person's post are legitimate missing persons is a bit unnerving, but still he could have just looked them up.

But again, I could just be completely wrong.

Also, I'm not sure if anyone pointed this out at any other time, but it guess it wouldn't hurt to point it out again. Pembry is the last name of a character in Silence of the Lambs who was violently mutilated from what I remember.

[Nabi]

Just posted about this on Happy Cube, but it bears mentioning here as well. There's a new video on the account that was used to upload the seventh. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0e5DClHw4zs

It's very different in style, but I'm curious about the significance of it. Maybe we'll see a blog post about it in time. Can anyone better versed in these things guess at whether the order of the spliced footage has a specific meaning...? Things get repeated, but it's not a plain loop.

[elsporko]

Is there any way to disect the URL of an imageshack link to find out more about it? Similar to the way you can with photobucket images and facebook images, to find out who uploaded it, and see other images in their album.

Boardmoderator posted a picture of Joseph Bright here:
http://thehappycube.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=bright&action=display&thread=121 . The link to the image is http://img42.imageshack.us/img42/1359/josephbright.jpg .

Is there any way to look at the URL and try to find out more? Would be a sneaky little find if we found an album filled with images to be used for the rest of the story that he hasn't posted yet

[Kaliayev]

Well, this got wierd quick. Looks like the boardmoderator account has been compromised...seems "in game", but with this ARG, who can truly tell?

[kosmopol]

OK, I see, we need a wiki...
The whole story looks interesting, but I'm helplessly lost here

[bluesylvia]

Wiki for the new WI is here: http://josephbright.pbworks.com/

[Caffiend]

I would suggest treating this as an entirely new case though i most certainly does seem to have connections to the previous WI , ill watch this as it develops.

[IronJ146]

Seriously...I got chills just reading this thread title, and thought that needed to be pointed out...