9 posts tagged “the countdown”
While I was gone, people felt compelled to be awesome, allowing me and many other people to "beat the system." But even with all knowable evidence on the table, what can we assume from these things? Screens from the search videos for your consideration, click to enlarge:
Recap:
For more than thirty days, an advertisement was floating around US video and game sites that featured a countdown. When you clicked the countdown, a clip played, followed by "SUBSPOTS", followed by another clip then "MAIA STURN." When you googled the name Maia Sturn, forum posts showed up covering topics like the iPhone SDK and moblogging. Later on, February the 29th allowed the advertisement to open a link to Maiasturn.com, which featured a screenshot of a saved draft from her blog detailing her future trip to New York City from London. Eventually the countdown hit 0, and a new link was revealed: emergencysubnet.com. Going to this website, only UK IPs (or masked IPs) were able to view the contents of a time sensitive access UI detailing subspot locations, archives activated by keywords, and a video of a girl (the same from the advertisement clip) asking for help.
Who is Maia Sturn? What are subspots?
http://grace-monday.vox.com/library/post/the-countdown.html
http://grace-monday.vox.com/library/post/gotta-go-gotta-go-gotta-go.html
http://grace-monday.vox.com/library/post/zomg.html
Emergencysubnet.com glimpses + complete video of girl
http://grace-monday.vox.com/library/post/go-go-gadget-uk.html
http://grace-monday.vox.com/library/post/gift-from-the-uk.html
Condensed theories up to now:
Maia Sturn didn't take the plane to NYC until today (May 10) based on the observation that her blog post was simply a saved draft. The countdown itself was for her trip. If this is true, eight hours plus after the countdown had finished, something would have had to happen that I just haven't found yet.
Something horrible is happening in London (fictionally of course) that's being kept so secret, that subspot usage is leaking out into the public beyond its general awareness. What's happened or happening, I don't know and haven't thought up yet. It would have to be so easy to miss that it wouldn't effect every day life, yet so severe that it would deserve subspot sectors being activated and used.
Things that make no sense:
Why post an advertisement for whatever on US sites but make the advertisement website only UK accessible? That wasn't an accident, Geo-block isn't free afterall. And if the campaign has moved so far away from Maia Sturn herself, why bother giving her a story if it's just going to dribble down to subspots and government conspiracy theories?
Now, we wait. Will this be an ARG or a viral marketing campaign for a movie? Are we going to take bets?
What we know: the woman's user id matches all the recent reportings of activity. From this list of activity, we can assume that SE/SE/NW are directionals, with numbers and letters being a grid like in Battle Royale. The first number before that, I have no idea.
EDIT: I seem to have broken my example below. Or the countdown just ran too long and blacked out on me. :(
What has happened so far: The countdown finished and up rose the website emergencysubnet.com. For the whole morning, the website itself mutated from showing clips of a woman pleading with a camera like it's the end of her life, to what you are looking at above. The UI is on a timer that after a point will power down the thing entirely.
Navigating: Upper left-hand corner doesn't seem to link to anything for me, though people say it's video of a girl. The upper right-hand button will navigate you to this, and there aren't any links besides the seal on the upper right that navigates you back to start:
Yesterday, when I was coming out of Westminster tube, I spotted a very weird swirly image on my Treo where the network coverage logo was meant to be. I started digging around on other forums and it turns out they are backup military / government telco networks called Subspots which are designed to operate in select areas in the event of terror attacks, nuclear war and so on.
I stayed up for an error message? Immediately after I saw that, I just went back to sleep. Slept four hours and here I am, awake enough to try and figure this out.
And I had no success with the uninstalling and reinstalling of Flash 9. Boyfriend who works with Flash at work says the guy who made the website is either fucking with us or really, sincerely doesn't know anything about Flash and fucked up. We did a sexy Flash version check, even. There has to be a reason, however, that some people can view the page while others cannot, so I'm sending the URL to my best friend out in DC and my ex in LA to see if they can view it. You can never be too sure. I've tried grabbing this website on a PC and on a Powerbook and still no dice.
Boyfriend just suggested I delete cookies (or just find the specific one) to see if that makes any difference. I deleted specifically all cookies relating to maiasturn.com, emergencysubnet.com, and a few other random ones. Didn't make a difference. I have my best scientists working on this. I'm going to go carve a mountain out of mashed potatoes.
As of 1020AM PST, they did not foresee my ability to press refresh over and over again! Boyfriend pinged the server so it's still up. Also semi-worth noting, maiasturn.com and emergencysubnet.com's servers are both located in the UK.
Less than three hours left. And sort of like New Year's Eve, I will either be super excited or really "whatever" when the clock hits that time. I'm putting my money on morbidly disappointed, simply because my bookie told me it's a sure thing.
I honestly didn't spend much of today theorizing anything else about this whole debacle. All my interpretations of the bits and pieces are mostly on the table, the rest are hard to put into words. When it comes right down to it, this is a clever ploy by some company to sell something. And while we're all betting on a movie, I really sincerely want it to be for something silly like socks or those things that help people pick up golf balls on the green or maybe one of those plastic lids you put on soda cans to keep the soda from losing its fizz but they never work anyways because you can't fight the Scientific Law of Fizz. Also, we're feeding the machine, man. Kidding, but not really.
Casually I glanced at some of the movies coming out later this year. We have quite a few apocalyptic movies on the roster which disgruntles me because I wonder just which one of these movies this promo could be about. I think that's the reason why I've stopped theorizing: I've completely and totally accepted that this is a commercial for something, and like a DVR, I'm fast forwarding past it.
A little bit of me, some weird unnatural part of me, sort of wants this to go on because playing a tin-foil hat Nancy Drew is fun and kinda hott. But on the other hand, ARGs are like LARP'ing or furries: you probably don't want to be caught doing it, because everyone else is going to think you're a fruit.. and it's probably because you are.
So, prediction right now:
I say, whatever it is, it will be disappointing.
Boyfriend says, "they'll keep giving you clues, or a new word will pop up."
Monies on the table! I'd say go with boyfriend's prediction because he use to do websites for EA and knows how these things work from a financial prospective. I'd say go with my prediction if you enjoy nothing and hate being put on for no good reason.
20 hours. And I didn't call anyone a liar, I just think it's silly. :P I'm waiting to be added onto her Facebook but I haven't gotten far at all.
Also seems worth mentioning that a flight, nonstop, from London to NYC is on average eight hours. If the countdown is to her flight, then we won't be hearing anything for eight hours. It seems to me that even though she wrote that blog post weeks ago for her trip, it was only in Compose mode and she hadn't posted it yet. Which means the countdowner thingy could be for her flight completely, considering how many forum posts by her are popping up. She couldn't possibly be on that plane yet. Saying that hypothetically the countdown is right and at 4AM PST Maia leaves London for New York, she'll be there at noon PST. What could happen during those eight hours in flight? It isn't like she could blog from the plane due to the repeated inability by airline companies to initiate WiFi on long trips. Unless Virgin has put something together and I missed the news.
Another thing is, assuming the girl in the clip is Maia looking for subspots, we'd have to assume she's in Alaska. Otherwise, what's the point with the coordinates? How does she get from NYC to Alaska? Who is this guy she's meeting there? Maia herself, through the subspots forum posts, doesn't seem to know about them or talk about them. She seems the least likely candidate to use them or notice them. On the other hand, she works for a cellphone/PDA company. Something really shitty would have to happen for her to use subspots.
So! If people, according to the subspots forum posts, are using subspots accidentally, maybe something in the UK has happened and they're keeping it under wraps. There was that big earthquake, but people are saying that was caused by subspot testing. What if something horrible is happening and Maia is leaving and she misses the big bang, would she bother going back to London? My boyfriend theorized that maybe she's kidnapped in NYC and brought to Alaska but that seems silly since kidnappings don't happen for no reason. He pointed out that she could know something that would warrant her kidnapping considering the forum post about that one person's portfolio.
This person who she is meeting in New York City is a marketing type, she's also meeting with IBM people. IBM does research mostly when they're not making IT stuffs. It's feasible that IBM could be contracted to do research on this company for the government's supposed (from all the Wikipedia and forum posts) subspot crap.
This is just thinking out loud though. I'm just really curious that if this whole big thing is for a movie, what could that movie possibly be about and is this a separate storyline/character from the movie? Will the movie have absolutely nothing to do with Maia herself, and simply be about some sort of subspot post-apocalyptic crap? I can't see how this movie would be more interesting than this mystery. I can't honestly be the only person who's come to these conclusions. Seriously, I'd feel ridiculous if I were.
My boyfriend has suggested I cull information about movies that're coming out this summer, but IMDB usually filters pretty well things that the production companies don't want getting out. If this grand scheme of a mystery has nothing to do with a movie whatsoever, well, I'd just be wasting my time. But I don't see how coming up with ridiculous conspiracies about the information that's on the table so far isn't a waste in itself, so it seems worth looking into.
Something worth keeping in mind: for a flash advertisement on a high traffic website to exist for six months, the usual cost comes to around 50k. This nulls any sort of scorned exboyfriend theories or anything that has to do with anyone who DOESN'T have monies.
I know people are reading this. If you have any ideas you'd like to throw out there, please do. We're all in the same boat.
Can I just tell how much this fucking countdown thing is bugging me? And if it ends up being some sort of LOST bullshit, I will just cry and stab myself in the ovaries because I hate LOST. I really, really thought it could have been a LOST thing since on the character's Facebook she lists LOST as one of her favourite tele shows, and that she says "lost hours" in her blog post but that's simply way too presumptive and easy.
What we know so far story-wise: Maia Sturn is a woman working for Stockton Design Group in London. They make cellphones or PDAs. She's flying to New York City under the assumption of work. She's taking a plane here. Subspots, PDAs, and some beat-up looking chick. She posts a lot under cellphone forums and news topics and also likes to blog from her phone. She particularly likes the iPhone for some ungodly, poorly written reason.
In the past day, a few more faux forum posts of hers have popped up on Google. I'm also embarrassed to say that my post about this whole ordeal is usually second from the top. If you came here looking for information on the countdown, I don't know any more than you do and I'm just as irate and addicted.
Now, if it happens that the countdown reaches zero and the whole thing just disappears, I won't be disappointed. But if it doesn't go away and this is all some stupid ARG thing, I'll become angry and feel like I just wasted my weekend playing Nancy Drew. But if this is some sort of movie promo thing, fucking A. I'll be first in line because I enjoy being swindled.
To those of you assuming this is a LOST video game promo: I severely doubt it. The LOST video game is being released by Ubisoft. They're French, so naturally they don't give a damn. If this video game were coming out by EA, we'd have reason to assume this. EA pulled some sort of crap like this before (read: Majestic). However, the LOST video game is already out on shelves, why bother hyping up something that's already hyped up enough? While we cannot entirely rule out this is a LOST thing, we CAN rule out that it has nothing to do with the video game. They would have started this campaign months and months before the video game's release.
Maia Sturn as an anagram: I was watching Sneakers a few days ago, and "Setec Astronomy" naturally was an anagram for Too Many Secrets. The thing with this theory of Maia Sturn being an anagram for something else: there's almost 800 results for that name being rearranged into something else, making it incredibly hard to just cherry-pick something and assume that's what's up. If the viral marketing or ARG people had any sense in them, they would have picked an easier name with less results, to make it easy for us lazy detectives. If, however, you have more free time than I do, please peruse this list of anagrams for Maia Sturn and find something seemingly relevant if you must. Also, here's a tourniquetted version where I tried to remove all the rubbish words. My favourite on that list is by far "a anus trim".
Collection of Maia Sturn forum posts:
March 3, AVforums: Mobile blogging?
March 6, Core77.com: Injected Molded portfolio caseDoes anyone know of any software that allows you to bash out a blog post on the fly on say a PDA device? I know stuff exists already, but ideally i need a fast way of attaching an image and some text to automatically appear on a blog. I tend to come across a lot of street art i want to photograph and blog on, so would be great if i could: take a photo, quickly type a few words, then email to said-blog and then it auto-appears?
Maia
March 7, Shinyshiny: iPhone/iTouch SDKThought I'd share this bit of info, we have had a couple of intern positions over at where I work, (Stockton Design Group) and one of the applicants brought in a truly gorgeous portfolio. I can't post any images for confidentiality reasons, but basically the guy had a really slim, clean injection moulded case holding a book that presented his product design portfolio.
The work inside his book was great too, and the case really enhanced it, (not to mention wow the office). Judging the cover sometimes matters!
- Maia Sturn
Looking forward to getting my hands on the iPhone SDK - maybe I can get it via work if you need some corporate connection to get hold of it.
I want to try making a virtual trackwheel, as I thought that was the perfect reduction on the iPod interface.
Maia Sturn
March 7, BoingBoing: What are the laws in each US state on driving while cellphoning?
March 6, Engadget: iPhone SDK conference
I can't wait to see what the gaming companies are going to come up with.
The possibilities are endless (with both tilt and touch)I highly doubt there will be a 3G iPhone - well at least hope not! :)
March 3, Porsche Club GB Forum: Speedster Hardtop
Hi, Maia Sturn here
This is by far my favorite... I'd be delighted to relieve the owner of it, but I think London's a bit far from Oz!!Do you know of any good dealerships in the UK?
Thanks,
M
x
March 7, Porsche Enthusiast Site: I'm new here, be nice!
My name is Maia Sturn. By day I'm a product designer for Stockton design group in London and by night I'm a Porsche addict.
I love 911s but I'm determined to buy my baby one day... she's going to be a silver '56 356 Speedster. I'd murder someone for it LoL!
M
Something to ponder: if she's posted these all recently, but that blog compose screenshot was released a while ago, just WHEN is she leaving for the states? When the counter has counted down? If she hasn't left yet, what are we watching in the clips? Is this a message from the.. WOOOORRRLD OF TOMORRROW?
For your additional reading pleasure:
Initially I wasn't going to post about this or talk about this or even attempt to think about this but this past morning whilst browsing websites on my boyfriend's computer that doesn't have ad-blocker on it, I noticed this advertisement.
If, for some ungodly reason, you cannot watch the advertisement it's basically of a running clock counting down to this Monday. When you scroll over it, it displays a bunch of numbers which I've assumed (and semi-confirmed) are coordinates to a place in Alaska. Clicking on it, you see a woman with an injured hand leaning over to turn off a camera she's looking into. She has a metal key necklace around her neck, a dark room only lit by burning candles in the background. Her face is dirty and maybe injured as well. Then the advertisement switches back to black and reads: SUBSPOTS. Subspots is another term for something fancy that can be boiled down to emergency cellphone towers that enable use of communication during super ultra crazy emergencies like, I don't know, a nuclear holocaust. You click SUBSPOTS and you see blurry footage of a girl in the woods holding up what, everyone generally assumes, is a cellphone. The camera pans in the opposite direction, and people suspect something blurry passes the camera but I think it's just standard brush. Screens are located here.
After some point in time, the advertisement briefly allowed access to a website under MAIASTURN.com, that displayed a screenshot of a blog post that reads:
Another funny and weird thing is: Maia Sturn has been randomly popping up on websites lately. "She"'s posted at cellphone forums asking about the iPhone SDK and even on Shiny Shiny and Engadget. And anonymous people have been posting on other forums, spreading around this symbol:
So. The countdown, at this very moment, reads one day and sixteen hours. That means, before the clock strikes Monday midnight, we should have our answer. Or just more questions.
The biggest thing that bugs me out of this entire ridiculous thing is that she, in her blog post, chose to use a span style tag instead of a standard b for bold tag after she had used a standard i for italics tag. Is there a reason she would use a span style tag over a regular b tag? Why?
Driving while using you mobile phone has been banned in the UK for some time now.
It still doesn't prevent the odd idiot doing it though (and in one instance I saw a chap lighting a fag and changing the CD at the same time)
Maia Sturn