The counter resets.

[walks on-screen in my sweatpants, eating a bagel] well boy do i have good news for you

hi, i’m marn and i host a podcast about alternate reality games (args) with a co-host who is so horror-adverse that we have a separate spinoff podcast where we watch horror movies together for charity sometimes. have you ever wanted to know what args are all about and get involved in reading up on/playing them without dipping your toe too far into jumpscares and fucked up guys who look at you? great! let me tell you about some args that are an absolute fucking delight.

frog fractions 2: ff2 is my favorite arg to point at as an example of a highly successful arg that was also goofy as hell. you may have heard of the ‘[x] is frog fractions 2′ meme - that’s because frog fractions 2′s kickstarter was made on the premise of ‘i am not going to tell you when the game is done, or what it’s called, and i will only reveal how to access it once someone finds it and emails me to confirm that it is in fact ff2′. this arg is everything that lead players to actually find the game, including an obama shaving simulator, secret agent party lounges, and dubiously ethical time travel. WARNING: you will have to look at exactly one fucked up guy but it’s a francis bacon painting i promise zagmar is not real and cannot hurt you.

waking titan: alice & smith my beloved. this is an arg they made to promote some dlc for the video game no man’s sky, which you may have heard of. i have never played no man’s sky and i still enjoyed reading about this arg very much. it’s about a research organization trying to create an ai that has infinite processing/precognitive power in order to tell them if they live in a simulation or not. things, as you may suspect, do not go well!

the beast: the grandfather of args! the arg that provided a foundation for how args are today! the beast was made to promote the movie a.i., and has basically jack-all to do with anything about the movie. it was written by an actual science fiction novelist, run in the early 2000s when dial-up internet was still a thing, and features a cast of like 30-50 characters with complex lives, web pages, and relationships. it’s also a murder mystery about a guy who might have gotten killed by a boat.

must love robots: a lot of these are about robots. i know. this one is a romantic comedy about a guy, his robot roommate, and a bunch of meddling arg players trying to help said robot roommate find a girlfriend. it’s short and very sweet, there’s a pastor who hates robots in it, there’s a robot dating site that eerily predicted a lot of data-stealing controversies of the present day. and lots of youtube videos, if that’s your thing.

this is my milwaukee: also one of my favorites. this one is a little spookier than the rest of these offerings, but mostly in a dark comedy/’sense of unease’ way. it’s about the milwaukee tourism board trying to convince people to come back to milwaukee after a vaguely defined apocalyptic event wiped out a large chunk of the midwest. the trailhead video for it stands on its own as a short film very well, and it’s also by the guys who everyone got really mad at for turning horse_ebooks into a different arg for a fmv game satirizing the 2008 economic crisis.

art of the heist: sorry for linking to my own podcast on this one but other sources are hard to find and this arg is batshit and i love it so much. audi (yes the car company) spent millions of dollars to market its cars by incentivizing people to break into them for arg clues. they paid for players to go to coachella. they staged a fistfight at e3. they gave out phones to players. they won an award for this arg and it was extremely well deserved because i love every single piece of information about it.

As of this morning, Hurricane Dorian looks like it's on track to miss Florida. The Internet Detectives called upon Helios in order to help redirect the storm, so send your thanks to that sun boi upstairs. Thank you, Helios!

- CircleHunter

Did he not feel pa-a-a-a-a-a-ain when he was hu-u-u-u-u-u-urt?

I mean

I mean

I mean

I mean

Did he not shit?

Did he not drerj?

The real goal was reuniting a son with his long-lost father. Congratulations!

we also know this episode aired before the episode where pearl turned 16

while the non-continuity & non-chronological order of the series means that assuming that pearl was 15 in welcome to the chum bucket is a fool’s gamble - it’s reasonable enough that if there is an episode about her turning 16, her character was likely conceptualized as being 15 years old prior to that point. but either she was 15 or she was 16 in welcome to the chum bucket … and either way, that’s about as long as pearl’s been alive.

we also know that pearl is krabs’ biological daughter … through a combination of facts … and were given reason to believe that something happened to the mother of his child shortly after pearl’s birth that made him depressed. she’s not around anymore and no longer apart of their lives in any way shape or form.

we also know plankton and krabs were childhood best friends, going on to have an on-again-off-again friendship for years prior to spongebob getting a job at the krusty krab … and the two are shown to occasionally have moments where they truly, genuinely care about each other deep down, despite the rivalry …