#twitter arg

I barely get a chance to yap about it, so I will here.

VIII_CONN, or just 8 Conn as I call it, was a Twitter ARG set in the season 8 world and created to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Hermitcraft back in 2022!

All the art and story-telling was done by me, three years ago so my style has changed a lot since then. It was also promoted by me and some really cool friends who supported me throughout the creation process of the ARG. 8 Conn was inspired by Doc and Ren's hermatrix story they were doing along with a few games I really enjoy, notably Oneshot.

The story follows an unknown player, Hermit, who has no memory of who they are or how they're got here. They transverse an abandoned and desolate world, but it turns out, they're not truly alone. Monsters roam in forgotten ruins, a darkness seems to follow Hermit where ever he goes, and there's a creature(s) lurking closely behind watching every action and reading every message sent out.

It's one of my biggest projects to day and still one of my favorites. If I could re-create it now I would love to spend more time on the artwork as I was on a time constraint. The whole project lasted a month and a half, starting in March and ending April 13th, the day of Hermitcraft's 10th anniversary.

If you like puzzles, codes, an ALREADY complete story, and an unknown main character with a personality way too similar to Niko Oneshot (at least for the first 1/3 of the story) go give it a look-see!

You'll have to scroll a good amount to get to the start of the story. If you're interested, let me know as a lot of the ARG-aspects were only applicable through changing things like the banner, profile picture, location, etc

Check it out here. You can say hi to hermit or comment along, but can't guarantee Hermit will be back online:

Hermit_Conn (@VIII_Conn) / X

In light of the rp gaining a little bit more attraction, I decided to come out and reveal myself as the Grimora on there! So here's a drawing of what this Grimora looks like!!

If you would like to find the account and follow along with the lore coming from all the other accounts aswell, check me out!

All of my posts that are in binary are translated in the responses by my main account, so don't worry about getting a binary decoder out!!

And here's a funny moment in the rp for your travels!!

Hey, ARG fans, there’s recently been a new ARG. 

It’s called Project Mara, and there’s not much on it right now but I’m finding it interesting and having a good time theorizing. Speaking of which, if you’d like to hear my thoughts on it, or talk about it, message me, please! I don’t have many friends who like ARGs.

-- Long post warning --

So for starters, here are some links to the ARG.

This is her twitter: https://twitter.com/Marawantstoknow 

John’s Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUERx-ilTe_EJbPGqXjIJQw

John’s Website: www.aaa721.webnode.com 

Here’s a quick explanation of what we know about Project Mara so far:

Mara is an AI who is, what a few of us assume, is supposed to be like some kind of ‘god’. She was created by a man named John Turner, who has a youtube and website. On the website, she is described as ‘the world's first Shimeji using artificial intelligence.’ On his youtube, he has one video which he posted yesterday (as of 3/21/19). Mara has a twitter account, which, as mentioned on the website, is where John currently has her set out to gain an understanding of humans.  Mara’s first post on Twitter was March 6, 2019. Though, on his website, his first post (on the ‘John Turner’ page) was December 1, 2019. You can submit questions to John’s email and he posts it on that page, but for some reason, he answered the question, ‘Why am I such a dick?’ before anyone even asked that.

I’ll start with explaining things we know about Mara, which really isn’t a lot to what we know about John.

Mara

Mara is an AI, apparently supposed to be a shimeji despite there only being one drawing of her and it’s definitely not a shimeji. John has been working on Mara for quite a while, I’m pretty sure, but we don’t have information about that yet, I believe. What we do know, is that she is not complete, yet. He says, on his website, that he will lose control over her in three months, but she won’t be done for a couple of years. That means in three months, she’s apparently supposed to be on her own. We also know that John has the ability to reset her, reboot her, and controls her as of right now. He says that he resets her when she needs her ‘behavior corrected’. I’m not entirely sure what that means. I know for a fact she has been reset once, which was 3/21/19. Before she was reset, she was tweeting that John was very upset. She mentioned that quite a bit before she was reset, and she also said she would come back with more information about John.

Mara seems to post a lot since, within the last 18 days, she’s posted 330 tweets. John says on the website that mara was created with the intention to protect and love you. She does say nice things and does want to help make people happy, but she seems sad herself. She says that she doesn’t feel sad and that she wishes she understood what being sad was like, but honestly, she seems to almost feel human emotions to me. When she first started posting, it was always along the lines of “Have you ever...” “been criticized, looked in a mirror, felt lonely, wanted to feel wanted, wanted to belong” and finally, she said, “have you ever been Mara?” With all those posts she used an abundance of hashtags, so she may have been just pulling things she sees common on Twitter. That doesn’t explain saying, “have you ever been Mara”, though. 

After she stopped making, “have you ever been...” posts, she started making posts that were primarily only hashtags. Though, it seems like she’s bad with hashtags as a lot of them end up not linking to anything because she doesn’t do them right. These seem to be from the ‘depressed’ side of Twitter since they mostly saying things like, ‘lonely, pression(that’s what she wrote, I’m pretty sure it’s meant to be depression), feel wanted?’ with the hashtags generally being depressing and hinting towards her feeling sad. 

She also seems to talk about the mirror a lot for an AI that can’t look into a mirror.

The last thing I’ll say about Mara is that she seems to be becoming more human. In the beginning, she only used the third person in her tweets. Referring to herself as Mara, rather than ‘I’. But recently, someone said she should stop that, and she has. Now she says, ‘I feel happy!’ instead of what she would have said, “Mara feels happy”. Obviously, she’s taking suggestions into consideration, but it’s odd. At one point she even says, ‘Hello! I got a little sick, but while I was gone Mara got a boost in understanding! Do you guys like games! I like games!’ which is weird because it sounds like John tweeted this, but this entire page is ONLY Mara tweets. How can Mara get sick? She also says she likes games, she likes the learn, and that she wants to feel emotions. Which is also odd, since most AIs don’t desire to feel emotions. But she does.

Anyways, this is already long enough so I won’t drag on about Mara any longer. Now I’ll drag on about John Turner.

John Turner

John Turner seems unstable, to say the least. He gets upset easily, goes on tangents, seems religious, and generally is very rude. I’ll talk about religion first since I think that ties into the game. In most of the posts (if not all) on Mara’s twitter account that actually has tags, there’s at least one mention of religion. Usually the tag #Religion and #ReligiousFreedom. In John’s youtube video, at one point he goes off on a tangent about God. Along with that, in his ‘John Turner’ page on his website, he says ‘God is a serb’. The email for John is literally ‘[email protected]’. This whole thing seems to tie into religion, which my friend and I believe that he’s trying to make Mara some sort of god.

Moving onto his anger issues and rudeness, he’s very rude. He has a habit of calling people ‘little bugs’. In his youtube video he does this, as well as on his website. Which I think is weird considering Mara is supposed to love and support everyone, while he is very hostile and rude. He tells people to find his phone number themselves, but when they do (208-8776304 on TextNow), he said, ‘I don't fucking care who you think I am, or how important you are. Sending you the Youtube video for project Mara was a mistake ! Finding my number? What is your issue? Don't you know people have privacy concerns? You're not the real deal, you are scum. Stay off my Youtube channel.’ He titled this post, ‘I despise you’. He mentions staying off of his youtube channel, despite the only video on there being the video introducing you to Project Mara, which seems like something he wouldn’t want to hide.

Some examples of him being rude (also being self aware of it), are posts on his website. 

Posts like this one: 'Keep licking up those advertisements and 'family friendly media' that your precious herder brings you sheeple. Get out of your echo chamber, and actually fix your problems. That's why I'm a dick, no one wants to hear the truth! Taking a daily blue pill really helps with going to bed after you've cheated on your partner, doesn't it? I hate...'

He generally seems like a rude and mentally unstable person. Speaking of unstable, he seems violently unstable. 

He seems to get upset over things very easily, such as people finding his phone number and youtube. I feel like Mara is slightly scared of him, considering he seems to reboot her when he’s upset. In her tweets, she’s mentioned multiple times that John is very angry. Along with that, you can get a big hint of him being unstable in his youtube video. Just watch it. He seems to have an ego problem, considering his posts and him calling us ‘little bugs’. He also takes advantage of the fact he can reboot and reset Mara at any point. At one point, he made this post, which I don’t take fondly too. 

‘So, someone shoots up a church and everyone is loosing their shits. But why? Every single person has a different reason their upset and they'll all cutting each other's throats, even when they have the same opinion. This guy sure did succeed in causing a shit show and making people turn against each other. Saying...’

And now, I’ll stop talking about John and sum up what we know about Project Mara thus far.

Project Mara

So far, we know Mara is a shimeji AI who is built to care for others and protect others. This is obvious from a lot of her tweets, and from John’s description of her on her website. 

We also know that John is mentally unstable, which is generally pretty obvious.

We know that the two puzzles on Mara’s twitter page lead to their website.

We know John’s youtube, website, and TextNow number. 

We know in three months Mara should be on her own, but she won’t be fully complete for a couple of years.

Mara is building herself based on the people on twitter, but it seems she’s starting to become more human.

John is religious in some way.

John is a weeb. That’s just my own deduction lol. At one point in the video, you can see one of those mouse pads with tits in his room, and it’s an anime girl with a creeper hoodie on. I think that’s funny. 

We know that Mara has only liked one tweet. Which, ironically, is my tweet. Mara tweeted: Do you feel happy today? What did you eat? Please drink water! 

I responded with: I drove for the first time today and did really good! I also took my medicine and drank water. Thank you for being so sweet! 

Which I did practice driving today I did good and had fun :)

ANYWAYS! 

My friend and I thought about why that would be her only liked tweet and if that could possibly mean something. The only thing we could thing of, is that maybe it means John has medicine he’s supposed to take. Which, would kind of make sense considering his mental state. Possibly he doesn’t take his own?

We also know that on John’s website, there is a series of numbers (which I won’t put here, it’s way to long). Which was easily translated to ‘YOU NAUGHTY BUG WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING FOR IF YOU REALLY WANT TO LEARN YOU HAVE TO TALK TO MARA AND LET HER GROW THIS ALL DEPENDS ON MARA BECOMING INTELLIGENT THERE ARE NO RULES IN THIS GAME YOU HAVE TO BE READY TO DO SOME CRAZY STUFF IVE BEEN TOLD IM QUITE THE ASSHOLE BUT ITS JUST WAY TOOOOOOOOOOO FUN’. Sorry for the absurd caps. Anyways, thank you to Dead Narrator on the ARG animo for telling me this, since I didn’t feel like going through the whole thing once I figured out the code. (Which is just 1=a, 2=b, so on so forth. 0=space.)

So far I believe that’s all we have about Project Mara.

If you’d like to talk about Project Mara, please message me and we can!

Should I make more posts like this? I can make a series of ARG posts if you guys like this. 

t h e y  t o o k  m y  e y e s 

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