Oh, the wonders of the internet! You never know what you might find, how far it might travel, and who might lay claim to it.

Recently a video has been making the rounds that shows some sort of blob-like, pulsating masses living in a sewer pipe. Whatever they are, they appear to be animal (although slime molds have not been completely ruled out yet) and despite their ability to move, they seem to be attached to the wall of the sewer pipes by some sort of mucous or film. In some portions of the recording you can see this mucillagenous layer floating in the water beneath the bulk of the mass. Early speculation at the Cryptoworld website ranged from bryozoan to freshwater jellyfish to tubifex worms. Although tubifex worms sometimes clump, they are an aquatic species and the blob shown on the video exists at least partially out of the water. Another popular explanation, bryozoans, typically create colonies of calcium structures, much like corals, however not all species do so. But while comments were still being posted and debates were raging about just what the video showed, a couple of television news sources surfaced, each identifiying the blob.

The only problem is, there are at least two different stations, from two different cities, in two very different parts of the country, both identifying the creatures as something found beneath their streets, and both offering different explanations of just what the blob is.

TV News 14, out of Raleigh, North Carolina is identifying the blob as a colony of tubifex worms found in a private sewer system by the Raleigh Public Utilities Department.

But Fox 31, out of Denver, Colorado went with the bryozoan explanation when they reported a similar story in January of last year, and quoted a water system worker who claimed this particular colony was actually residing in the Crestview Water System, in a pipe near the intersection of 76th and Pecos.

Although the images are surprisingly similar, it is defintiely possible that they are from two different colonies, filmed in two separate locations, on different dates. The images supposedly coming out of North Carolina, for instance, display a late April, 2009 time stamp. However, given superficial appearances and the habitat, its highly unlikely that they represent two separate organisms. Although I’m in no way an authority, or in any way qualified to make a defintive identification, based on what I have read about the life cycles and habits of tubifex and bryozoans, I’m leaning more toward the latter as an explanation for our mystery blobs.

What do you think?

ANOMALY Magazine Welcome’s Brian Worsham!

• Adam Gorightly’s Untamed Dimensions - UFOs, LSD and Me
• Maker Faire 2008 in Austin, Texas
• Citizine Community Political Forum in Austin, Texas 10/28/2008

Audio Clips of PSI-OP RADIO…

• PsiOp Radio 5/31/2009: What a Police State Doesn’t Look Like
• PsiOp Radio 5/24/2009: Mack White on Torture & Gitmo

Masonic Landscapes…

• Masonic Cemetery in Gonzales, TX 5/3/2009
• Floyd Anderson Travels to Nashville & Louisville
• The Grassy Knoll, the Federal Reserve, and the Freemasons: A Dallas, TX Glimpse at Humanity’s Struggle to Free Itself

Lectures at Brave New Books in Austin…

• Jim Marrs Speaks on UFOs at Brave New Books 3/21/2009
• Barry Cooper of Never Get Busted Again and Kop Busters Speaks at Brave New Books 6/6/2009
• Dr. Katherine Albrecht Speaks on Microchips at Brave New Books 3/2/2009
• Bob Schulz at the University of Texas 3/17/2009

Some of Brian’s Favorite Alex Jones Interviews …

• David Icke on the Alex Jones Show 6/15/2009
• Kinky Friedman on the Alex Jones Show 6/3/2009
• Webster Tarpley on the Alex Jones Show 3/25/2009
• Austin Police Chief Art Acevedo on the Alex Jones Show 1/22/2009
• Joe Rogan on the Alex Jones Show 1/22/2009
• David Icke on the Alex Jones Show 1/8/2009
• Webster Tarpley on the Alex Jones Show 12/5/2008

www.anomalymagazine.com/category/vid-of-the-week/feed/

www.anomalymagazine.com/author/brian-worsham

www.anomalytelevision.com/site/author/floyd-anderson

Randomness, randomness, randomness is the order of the day today.

So, random ramblings and links.

CNN is reporting that Microsoft has announced they are giving a limited number of American consumers a limited opportunity to obtain cheap upgrade copies of Windows 7. After that date American consumers will have to pay full price for the OS that Vista should have been. As per usual, there will be a slight price break for those upgrading from the previous OS, and it looks as though they are extending this pricebreak to those who decided not to downgrade from the perfectly usable XP to the broken Vista. However holdouts using older versions of Microsofts Windows OS will need to pony up a little extra for the full version. Unless of course they are in Europe where, in order to comply with anti-monopoly statutes, Microsoft will provide browser free versions of the full software for the upgrade price.

Thanks for screwing your countrymen over during a recession Bill! We appreciate that! I mean, first you let us have Vista before its ready (at a princely sum, natch…) and now you’re gonna let us subsidize the bonus cash your losing for being forced to provide Europeans upgrades at a fair price. Thanks AGAIN! Capitalism rocks!

In other news, Michael Jackson may or may not be dead. TMZ (a source nearly as reliable as Vista is stable) has been reporting the King of Pop passed away last night after suffering a heart attack. Other news outlets refuse to confirm his death, but seem to have no problem leading off with headlines that read “Jackson Dead: according to unverified reports”.

We here at Anomaly won’t believe he is dead until we see the death certificate in news sources with just a touch more legitimacy than TMZ. But if it turns out reports are true, we are expecting a trend where Jackson death deniers claim he wanted to escape fame for obscurity, a la the King of Rock, and faked his death to that end. We’ll also expect reports of Jackson sightings to start pouring in from Las Vegas before the end of the month, (hopefully sharing fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches with the other King.)

*Update, CNN has confirmed that Jackson has indeed passed away. Our thoughts are with his family and children at this time.

Time now to go home, pull out the vinyl, put on “Off the Wall” and try to forget the controversies of the last two decades while the sheer unadulterated talent washes over us.

Max Klinger would have never stood for such nonsense!

On Thursday of last week we here at Anomaly Magazine commented on several odd run-ins with the law taking place in the state of Ohio. Not to be outdone, Toledo’s mayor has two odd stories in the news this week.

The first involves the 70 year old mayor, Carty Finkbeiner (and no, we didn’t make that name up, but we wish we had) breaking up a fight between teenagers in the park, even going as far as to call one kid back with “Come here fatso.”

The other story, one that we can’t believe we missed for the Thursday round up of “don’t Buckeye police have anything better to do”, involves the mayor and the city ticketing folks who parked in their own gravel driveways based on an odd law against parking on unpaved surfaces.

Not surprisingly the three term mayor is reportedly facing a special recall election in November.

This is what we think of your "community service", Buckeyes!

So, we missed the “because it’s Thursday” feature last week. Sorry about that. I had a whole thing on weird law enforcement planned, but I read Mack’s articles on the tasering of grandmothers and thought to myself “this is too serious an issue to dilute with frivolous arrest stories.”

But this week we’re back, and leading off with the neatest free, educational game I’ve seen in a while; Wolf Quest. I mean, where else are you going to find a game that encourages kids to “harass grizzly bears with your mate” and pee on things?

You can check out the promotional video here.

Now, on to the pre-empted police insanity; it seems that cops in Ohio really have too much time on their hands. I mean you’d think that with a failing economy, rising unemployment, and a prescription drug problem that had reached epidemic levels BEFORE the recession put everyone in crisis and desperation mode, they’d have bigger fish to fry. But not so. No, Ohio is intent on excercising all due dilligence to ensure that responsible citizens learn to stay in their place! And that place is apparently NOT contributing to the good of their communities.

First, we have the 81 year old Akron man, a retired construction worker, who dared share his experience with road crews and even give them a hand prepping a pothole in front of his house for patching. His reward? A charge for criminal damaging.

Not to be outdone by their colleagues in Akron, Sandusky police arrested a man for mowing the grass in a public park after the cash strapped city had to cut back on seasonal maintenance. But while those charges may be dropped, the state still isn’t done embarassing itself or its citizens.

In the southern Ohio town of Reading, for example, the police are earning the citizen’s tax dollars by harassing business people over their decorations. Specifically a bikini clad mannequin that has the prudish elements of this Cincinnatti area enclave fuming. I suppose when you’re bitter that your gerrymandering to get rid of a popular Democrat Congressman not only doesn’t work, but that same Congressman leaves the House of Representatives and takes over the Governor’s seat, you got to get your kicks where you can*. Good on you Cincinnatti. Now you can be known for something besides your racism and disappointing sports franchises.

Finally, wrapping up our Ohio weirdness, we have a 90 year old widow from the Columbus area causing a stir when she attempted to donate a WWII artillery shell to the Motts Military Museum in Groveport. Although her husband had held it in their home as a souvenir, without incident, for over 60 years after receiving it in appreciation for his service during the war; her donation led to the bomb squad being called out until it was confirmed that the shell was safe.

Luckily for her, Ohio broke its pattern of punishing a sense of community and history and didn’t arrest her.

*For those from outside the state or region, there have been several attempts to kill the working class Democratic hold on the southeastern portion of the otherwise red state, usually from redistricting to dillute the  strongly Democratic portions of the state by placing small swathes of them in largely Republican districts, as occured when the western part of Scioto County, where Strickland’s ancestral home stands, was moved from his Sixth District into the strongly Republican Second District of then Congressman Rob Portman.

Sgt. Major Gary Griffin, Travis County Constable’s Office Precinct 3, applauded Deputy Chris Bieze’s actions by saying he “didn’t break nothin’.” (LINK)

You got that? Bieze didn’t break nothin’. That’s good. I’m glad he didn’t break nothin’. We’re all glad. Would’ve been too bad if he’d broke somethin’.

When Griffin said this, he was making the point that the woman should be glad Bieze used a Taser instead of a nightstick. People get hurt by nightsticks, you see, whereas it don’t hurt people none at all to get hit by a Taser. Don’t break nothin’.

It is revealed in the same story that Bieze is the Taser instructor for Precinct 3. Presumably, then, as the precinct’s resident authority on Tasers, he is aware of the potentially harmful effect of sending 50,000 volts of electricity into the neck of an elderly woman, to say nothing of the injury she might have suffered falling to the ground.

Yet he did it anyway!

You will recall that, earlier in the confrontation, Bieze shoved the woman—shoved her so hard it knocked her backwards a step or two, and could have easily knocked her down and broke somethin’. This was done for her safety, Bieze later said, to get her away from the traffic.

Which sounds dubious to me. Is this how you would have ushered an elderly woman away from traffic. Take the test below to compare your handling of the situation to the way Deputy Bieze handled it. It’s multiple choice, so it should be easy …

(1) You’re a cop. You’re trained to deal with the public. You pull over an elderly woman for speeding. She’s upset, refuses to sign the ticket. You order her out of the car. Once she’s out of the car, you realize you need to usher her away from the traffic for her safety. You have three choices. You can: (1) calmly explain why she needs to move and gently place your hand on her shoulder, (2) scream in her face and punch her violently in the shoulder, or (3) stick your thumb up your butt, waddle back to the squad car, and cram another donut into your fat swinish face.

(2) You’re a cop dealing with an upset elderly woman. You’ve just made the situation worse by screaming at her and shoving her. You’re also the precinct’s Taser instructor. You know that Tasering an elderly woman could cause cardiac arrest or that she could hurt herself and break somethin’ in the fall. Faced with the dilemma of how to get her to comply with an order, you have four choices. You can: (1) Taser her anyway and hope she don’t break nothin’, (2) use your nightstick and hope she don’t break nothin’, (3) stop barking orders and try using the calm tone of voice one usually uses when dealing with agitated, elderly, or infirm persons, or (4) radio headquarters with your immediate resignation and get a job more suited to your abilities, such as shoveling shit at the dog pound.

(3) You’re a cop. You have just Tasered a 72-year-old grandmother. All the bad choices in your miserable, worthless, futile, pointless, rotten life have led up to this unfortunate moment. What can you do now to redeem yourself? You have three choices. You can: (1) render aid to the screaming injured woman who for all you know, might’ve broke somethin’ when she fell, (2) continue to bark orders and threaten her with more Taserings even though it is now impossible for her to move, or (3) take out your Taser, pull down your pants, and shoot yourself in the ass, you fucking idiot.

I defy anyone to watch this video (above) and give me one good reason why Travis County Deputy Chris Bieze was justified in Tasering a 72-year-old grandmother during a traffic stop.

Yes, she was argumentative. Yes, she failed to comply with the officer’s order. But does this justify use of the Taser?

Originally, Tasers were intended to be used by police only in situations where a gun might otherwise be used–that is, in situations where lives might be in danger. Rule of thumb: If a situation doesn’t require a gun, it shouldn’t require a Taser.

And yet, increasingly, police are using the Taser not in dangerous situations, but simply to enforce compliance.

In the video, the situation is under control at first. Then the woman refuses to sign the speeding ticket. This, of course, is her right.

Deputy Bieze then orders her out of the car. This is his right.

She argues with him, which may not be smart, but it is her right.

Bieze responds by screaming in her face and shoving her backwards. This is not his right.

Later, he will say he shoved her for her own safety, to get her out of the traffic. But it is quite apparent that the shove was not kindly meant.

You know the kind of shove. It is the same shove that has started many a bar fight—a hard shove, a bullying shove, ugly, vicious, violent, and mean, nothing nice about it.

And it escalates the situation, of course. The woman gets angrier. So angry that she gets in his face, saying, “You’re gonna’ push me? A 72-year-old woman?”

This, by the way, is her right. She has been physically assaulted by this “man,” and is well within her rights to object, whether the bully who shoved her is in uniform or not.

A few minutes pass, during which time Bieze talks on his radio. She stands there quietly, arms folded. Bieze orders her to stand back. She continues to stand right where she is, arms folded. Again, not a good idea, but is it a threat to the officer’s safety? Of course not.

Bieze next tries to grab her arms in order to handcuff her. She pulls away. Again, not a good idea, but is it a threat? No, it is not. This isn’t a 35-year-old, 200-pound maniac high on PCP. This is a 72-year-old woman pulling away, not attacking. Only the most pathetic, sissy-pants baby could feel threatened in this situation.

Bieze threatens her with the Taser. She dares him to try it. Again, not a good idea, but again, no credible threat to the officer’s safety.

In short order, Bieze removes the Taser from his belt and zaps her—a great-grandmother, mind you—with enough electricity to send her flying backwards to the ground.

And then, while she’s lying there screaming, Bieze orders her once again to put her hands behind her back.

Now, perhaps, until now you’ve seen some justification for Bieze’s actions. But where is the justification now? How is she still a threat? And how, exactly, is she going to obey the order while she is paralyzed with pain?

Between screams, she manages to choke out the words that she cannot comply with the order, and somehow—by a miracle of God, I guess—this maniac Bieze manages to get a grip on himself and decides to stop torturing her.

Which is a good thing, because a lot of cops don’t stop Tasering someone after they’re down. They’ll keep on and on Tasering three, four, five, six, a dozen, fifteen, twenty times, until they get tired of it, or the victim dies.

Is this the kind of society we want? A society that sanctions the roadside torture of elderly women for not following orders?

It’s not the kind of society I want, but apparently it’s what the Travis County Sheriff’s Department wants, because in the video a department spokesman actually defends Bieze’s actions.

This tells us all we need to know about the Travis County Sheriff’s Department: roadside torture is official policy and everyone—even little old ladies—are fair game.

This does not make me feel safe. In fact, I think we would be safer without police if this how they serve and protect.

Please visit Mack’s website and blog:

www.MackWhite.com / www.MackWhite.blogspot.com

Plus, Thursdays have held a soft spot for me since college. My alma mater, Shawnee State University, was on the quarter system instead of the semester system. This meant they were always tweaking the scheduling, trying to find the most efficient arrangement. At one point classes were scheduled either on Mondays and Wednesdays, or Tuesdays and Thursdays, with lab and studio times available on Fridays. This essentially meant Thursday became our Friday, and a ritual of Thursday night drinking and debauchery ensued. When my group of small town co-conspirators decided our irregular poetry readings and open mic events needed to happen on a monthly basis, we continued our Thursday tradition, and the Third Thursday Open Mic for poets and musicians was born. As we got “real jobs” and founding performers started moving away, it became more difficult to maintain. But we still found time to dedicate one night a month to the celebration of Thursday, and, at last report, new generations of college students in small town southern Ohio are keeping our Third Thursday event alive and kicking.

It’s apparently not just me and my friends that have a soft spot for Thursday (or Thor’s Day). I have it on good authority that football fans love it because a lot of games are broadcast on Thursday. People start getting geeked for Friday. And in Austin, it’s not the alliterative Third Thursday, but the First Thursday of every month that brings celebrants into the street to experience art, music, and community.
And then there is this guy, 41 year old Peter Bielecke, who liked to rob banks on Thursdays.

To each his or her own I suppose. Me, I’ll stick with poetry and music. I don’t think I’m so keen to know what kind of Thursday rituals they practice in the prison system.

What kind of Thursday traditions do you practice or know about? Share them with us in the comments section or start a thread in the Anomaly Forums!

Wikipedia

Wilhelm Reich Museum

If you’ve followed the Elfis Network from the beginning then you know of my early interest in Alternate Reality Gaming and their potential for “mucking up the works” for paranormal and parapolitical researchers. You may also know that my interests were rekindled in 2007 by the provocative hypotheses of blogger DreamsEnd, who speculated that the mysterious suicides of artists Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake were some kind of sophisticated art hoax or viral marketing / alternate reality game. After a very rough period of defending his theories online, blogger DreamsEnd temporarily pulled up shop, taking down his websites. My own re-investigations into ARGland dwindled and I too went back to my normal para activities…

That is until I became aware of a new blog that was following many of the threads explored by DreamsEnd; KadesKorner. Here was another blogger (with a writing style nearly identical to that found at DreamsEnd) writing about many of the themes and topics we’d been exploring during the Theremicity period: Andy Kaufman, Election Fraud, Andy Stephenson, false identities, the Franklin Coverup, the Octopus and PROMIS, Middle East parapolitics and … Theresa Duncan and ARGs! And through “Kade” I learned of a new ARG to watch out for; what has come to be called TGATT or The Great And The Terrible aka I’m Sorry. But before getting off into the I’m Sorry mindfu…, er um, ARG, let’s take a peek at some of the more interesting ARGs and Viral Marketing campaigns that have been bleeding through their alternate ARGiverse realities into our own.

Before proceeding I want to say yet again that I do not think of ARGs as being any worse than other forms of entertainment like movies, television, videogames, etc. Which is to say I think they are interesting to examine from a variety of perspectives from artistic to academic but especially with an eye towards socio-cultural manipulation, as in propaganda, psychological warfare and parapoplitical machinations. My aim is not to accuse any of the many wonderful writers and designers who put their combined creative energies into the development of such gaming and advertising campaigns. I find it fascinating to see what memes are at work (and play) within the collective unconscious and from where and to what ends those mythic perturbations lead. I strongly feel that “play” in general and ARGs in particular are excellent modes for information transfer that can facilitate fun educational and learning experiences.

It is quite common for Alternate Reality Games to incorporate certain recurring SciFi themes including, what else but Alternate Realities like so many science-fiction novels, movies and television shows. Themes like time travel, other spacetime dimensions and continuums, aliens, UFOs, cryptozoological critters, dystopian futures are common fodder.

Some ARGs even try to educate their players and larger audiences about possible ecological futures such as World Without Oil. So we shouldn’t be surprised to see ARGs incorporate real-world (OOG - Out Of Game) events and entities even while they dwell on those para-themes that so much of the public at large considers kooky and unreal. Things like the BCCI scandal, Secret Societies, New Age Mind Body phenomena, Paranormal Investigations, Flu Pandemics and even musings about the year 2012 are all the subject of past and current ARGs.

Here are just a few of the more recent ARG / Viral marketing threadlines from over at the biggest ARG community, Unforums.com:

• [CoralCross] Vaccine: Surviving Hawaii’s Next Pandemic
  
• Electron Innovations
  
• Trailhead? It starts with the flu
• XenoVaradox
  
• [TRAILHEAD?] The Mosaic Collective
• [ARG] “Who Killed Amanda Palmer?”
• [D9] District 9 and Multi-National United (trailhead)
• Institute for Human Continuity(NEW INFO!)
  
• The Secret World
  
• [Trailhead] The Brotherhood
• This Is Not A Game- Novel
• [Viral] “There’s Something In The Sea” - Bioshock 2?
• [TRAILHEAD?] Strange Object
  
• STOP TARP ARG
  
• [Trailhead] www.topsecretconspiracy.com
• [Trailhead] Stop The International
• New Jericho ARG?
• [TRAILHEAD]Dollhouse ARG
• [Viral] The Truth Today: There are Nazis on the Moon!
• [PIE] New Game? PIE Network (trailhead)

So … in just these few ARG links we have a smorgasbord of paranormal and parapolitical topics (even cryptozoological) as the basis for various marketing and gaming campaigns.

“Stop The International” is promotion for the movie called, you guessed it, The International. Check out the movie trailer. It is clearly inspired by the real life parapolitical scandal known as BCCI which many folks referred to as the Bank of Crooks and Criminals International. The movie features a bank known as IBBC.

Click here to view the embedded video.

“Who Killed Amanda Palmer?” evokes David Lynch’s television series Twin Peaks simply by the title (Laura Palmer’s murder was the centerpiece of the show) though this game is in fact an effort at promoting singer songwriter Amanda Palmer.

“Institute for Human Continuity” has a website that looks very professional and purports to be a group whose efforts are to make certain that humanity continues no matter what disasters and crises the universe might throw at us. It especially focuses on the growing myths surrounding the year 2012 as the end of the world. In fact this ARG is marketing for the new movie 2012. You can see the trailer at WhoWillSurvive2012.com and below:

Click here to view the embedded video.

On one of the games’ other websites, This Is The End, (a less sophisticated looking site) you can watch rough vignettes featuring Woody Harrelson as “Charlie Frost” pontificating on the year 2012 and Terence McKenna, among other possible world changing events. Apparently, Harrelson has a starring role in this new film by Roland Emmerich.

Click here to view the embedded video.

And then there is this little viral marketing campaign for Monsters vs. Aliens …

“Top Secret Conspiracy” - I reported about this during the live Mother’s Day broadcast of the weekly radioshow I co-host with Mack White (PsiOp Radio). Disney commissioned a viral marketing campaign to promote their Monsters vs Aliens movie by having a series of strange news sites circulating news articles and videos reporting on aliens, the paranormal and conspiracy theories. The tone of the sites are certainly not going to confuse anyone with whether the material is fact or fiction.

However, in classic ridiculing fashion the main news hub site, TopSecretConspiracy.com, successfully comes off as a kooky paranoid website and in one of the site’s Expose Your Truth videos, attempts to smear, by not-so-subtle association, former Presidential candidate Ron Paul by linking him with conspiracy and UFOs.

The main character behind the TSC website, “Jeffrey Freedman,” produces investigative videos. In this particular one we are shown “amateur footage” at an office going-away party (like that in the movie Cloverfield - that also had it’s own ARG / viral campaign). During “Jeffrey Freedman’s” bookend commentary sequences you can clearly see part of a “RON PAUL REVOLUTION” bumper sticker with just the “VOLUTION” portion showing but featuring the telltale backwards letter L and characteristic red on black stencil script. The sticker is layered on top of a background covered with several UFO related pictures including what is probably an aerial photograph of Area 51. Thus you have the linking of a kooky conspiracy nut / UFO buff with the Ron Paul Revolution. Then again, that is exactly what could be said about my own online presence.

Click here to view the embedded video.

But hey, it’s all worth it I guess, when, in another episode of Expose Your Truth, we see webmaster “Jeffrey Freedman” investigating the government’s manipulation of science fiction at the 2008 World Science Fiction Convention.

Hilarious! Shades of Hugh Manatee Wins.

And dig the faked book and magazine covers including a spoof of Heinlein called Weirdo in a Weird Land.

Click here to view the embedded video.

“Coral Cross” - When fiction becomes fact. So you’ve heard about all those anti-terrorism drills and training exercises that seem to “go-live” and become actual real-world disasters … like with America’s 911 and London’s 7/7 … only this time the bomb is Swine Flu. Apparently this fictional educational global pandemic ARG has had to morph into what’s now being called “The world’s first Emergent Reality Game.” From the CoralCross.org website:

Coral Cross is a serious game that aims to increase public engagement with the possibility of a flu pandemic.

It started out as an Alternate Reality Game set in the year 2012, but when the H1N1 ’swine flu’ outbreak occurred in late April 2009, it was promptly redesigned to support real-life needs against the backdrop of current events.

This is not to imply that the flu presently in the news will necessarily turn into a pandemic. It is simply pointing out a fact that no amount of expertise can change: the future is unknowable.

As a result, Coral Cross has become the world’s first ever Emergent Reality Game, an exciting experiment in using gaming techniques to promote real public awareness and impact real events.

The initiative was commissioned in 2008 as part of a public engagement demonstration project by the State of Hawaii Department of Health, funded by a grant from the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and produced by the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies.

“PIE - Paranormal Investigation Expert” -This one was brought to my attention by a friend over in the Anomaly Community Forums. As soon as I went to their website I could tell it was ARGy. It’s the story of a group of paranormal investigators who believe that a mysterious global phenomena recurs before every  significant technological jump…

“To play along, users must download the “Recruit Toolkit” comprised of JavaFX 1.1 and NetBeans 6.5. Players then use the toolkit to unlock clues, solve challenges, and help the two Paranormal Investigators make The Jump happen!”

“STOP TARP ARG” - A hilarious ARG within an ARG played out at this year’s SXSW media festival. This “Stop the Troubled Assets Relief Program Alternate Reality Game” featured mock protesters and activists at the SXSW ARG panel discussion “protesting” against the money wasting of an ARG using TARP bail-out money. You’ve got to check out the TARParg2009forthekids.org website. Here’s a quote from the SXSW website:

According to Cain, working on the T.A.R.P. Bailout has been very productive: “I’m happy to work hand-in-hand with the United States government and the Treasury Department in particular to bring the next level of alternate reality gaming to the youth of our great country. This ARG will bring users in the 12 to 18-year-old demographic range the facts about the U.S. banking system in a fun way while enforcing in them the belief that the United States economy is growing stronger with each passing day. Plus we plan to work with a major candy company to give out treats.”

Well, I’m gonna cut this short and save the TGATT / I’m Sorry and Last Statue stuff for another post. And you can always check out the latest ARG discoveries over at DreamsEnd…

Some References:

• Majestic Art of Electronic Disinformation, Elfis X - Spring 2001

• Blue Rose Report podcast 14 part 1 and part 2 - October 2007

• This is Not a Game: The Mysterious Death of Theresa Duncan - July 2007 more articles available here This is not a Game: Original Articles and here KadesCorner.

• Andy Kaufman Press Conference Disappoints, Hacking Democracy, Franklin Uncovered?, Andy vs. The Octopus, A Brad and Two Andys, Hamas Ultra: This is what mind control looks like…, Theresa Duncan and the Temple of Doom!, Joe Matheny vs. the 98%, Trailhead: I’m Sorry - KadesKorner

• Bank of Credit and Commerce International - Wikipedia

• World Without Oil - Educational ARG

• Woody Harrelson Joins Roland Emmerich’s World-Ending ‘2012’ - Mtv

• PsiOp Radio 73 - 090510 - Mother’s Day Special

• io9 - Monsters Vs. Aliens Vs. Cloverfield! - Monsters versus aliens

• Video recovered from office party reveals real story behind MONSTERS

• 9/11 war games before and during the attacks

• 7/7 Mock Terror Drill: What Relationship to the Real Time Terror …

• Message to a Manatee

• Coral Cross: ARG about pandemic flu - Boing Boing

• Slicing Code for PIE Theory: A Sun Microsystems ARG

• Sun Microsystems Feature Story: PIE Theory