www.ilovebees.com

[Maple Leafs]

For those who are into puzzles and/or conspiracy theories.
http://www.ilovebees.com/

It certainly seems to be a clever marketing campaign (I won't ruin it here), but you have to admit it's remarkably well done. Internet viral marketing done right, for a rare change.

[Pumpy Tudors]

I don't get it.

[Raiders Army]

I don't get it either.

[korme]

must be a canadian thing?

uhh, bbor, frog, is this funny? interesting? anything? is the mcindoe smoking something? is his hair poofy again?

[Maple Leafs]

Neither do I, to be honest.

As far as I can tell this is the first stage of one of those Internet mysteries. Apparently the last big one was a few summers ago, and was loosely tied to the movie AI. I only vaguely remember hearing about that one, but apparently there are plenty of folks online who just live for this sort of thing.

The idea is that the masses play along with the concept and try to figure out what's going on. The bee site is an obvious clue (with the way the pages change, the countdowns, the corrupted images, etc). But it's pretty detailed. As an example, someone apparently figured out that the images were corrupt because they were encoded with extra strings. Sure enough, they ran a program to find out what the strings were and came up with all sorts of strange quotes and literary allusions.

So it's a puzzle... I guess. Imagine the kind of thing QuikSand or Jim would come up with if they had a fullt-time team, a budget and about a year to do it.

[Maple Leafs]

Here's a site that explains what's going on:
http://mirlandano.com/quickstart.html

Humorous side note: go to the site and scroll down. Apparently, like us, they've come up with a forum "code word" to mean "we've already done this, cut it out". We use "Kirby Puckett". Look what they use...

[Mantle2600]

Trout!

[QuikSand]

I might be interested in working on this some, if there were others here who would be game. Dunno if this is really my cup of tea...

[MizzouRah]

Halo 2 is coming out in 31 days!

Todd

[caspanky]

Don't you mean it comes out in 3 months? Last I checked the date was 11/9

[MizzouRah]

Originally Posted by caspanky

Don't you mean it comes out in 3 months? Last I checked the date was 11/9

When looking at that ilovebees site - it had a countdown of 31 days to something or another, I relate that to Halo 2, since that site is related in someway to Halo 2.

The smiley face was me joking around.


Todd

[TazFTW]

The demo comes out in 31 days.

[Yossarian]

in the halo 2 preview movie clip thing, the end 'bit' shows the xbox logo which briefly changes into this url then back again. its some kind of 'viral' ad gimmick for halo 2

[Maple Leafs]

From what I can tell, there's no doubt that it's related to Halo 2. But apparently that's not the answer to the puzzle... it's not like people will work through it, and at the end find themselves at a web page saying "You win! Now go buy Halo 2!"

From what I understand, the A.I. puzzle was only very loosely based on the movie at all in the sense that it had an artificial intelligence theme. The folks who work on these sorts of things apparently don't mind the marketing tie-ins, since it's not too over-the-top.

I won't even pretend to have the intelligence or the patience to work on solving it... to be honest, most of the puzzles people post here pretty much tax my attention span to the limit. But I will check in on the web sites from time to time to see where the story is going.

[QuikSand]

Originally Posted by Maple Leafs

As far as I can tell this is the first stage of one of those Internet mysteries. Apparently the last big one was a few summers ago, and was loosely tied to the movie AI.

There were several of us at FOFC who spent a little time with the big online AI puzzle. It's true that it was only very loosely related to the movie... in fact, the time I spent with the online puzzle was far better spent than the time I invested in actually watching the movie itself. (Ugh)

However... I think that I lack the patience necessary to really get into this sort of thing. The AI puzzle had a few actual "puzzles" early on, where you had to do some codebreaking and stuff... but a lot of it was just brute force (doing we searches on key words used in the narrative, that sort of thing) which I didn't find all that intoxicating. My recollection was that the FOFC contingent on that one gave about two or three days of meaningful effort, and then petered out.

FWIW.

[Yossarian]

I had a look at the 'official communit wiki'

The 'Dana' girl (who's the 'technical one in the family' who does the work on the site) has 'fled' to china for a holiday to get away from 'the operator'.

People emailing have had responses and 'dana' has a blog etc..

its a really 'cool' immersive way to hype up the game.

[Maple Leafs]

More summary of how the puzzle-solvers are doing:
http://bees.netninja.com/wiki/index.php?title=Puzzles

It sounds like this puzzle elements may have started appearing on a few other sites. Presumably they'll spread more and more over time. Not sure how it ends... whether it's just a normal story arc, or whether it goes until someone "solves" it.

[Maple Leafs]

For anyone who was interested, the ilovebees.com site went through it's second major corruption on Tuesday (apparently, all major updates in the game happen on Tuesdays and Fridays). It's now even more messed up than before.

One of the pages now lists a series of numbers which appear to be GPS co-ordinates. The folks who are trying to solve this have been going crazy in their forums, but haven't had a breakthrough yet. People are actually going out to the locations with cameras to look for clues, but so far they can't find anything that connects the locations.

So if you thought "Churchill" was frustrating, go here and watch people tear their hair out.