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Yes, here it is: ilovebees.com.

More Karma whoring.

Did you know they alsO publicise hALO 2 through this website.

ilovebees and other ARGs come to mind. Maybe not the type of interactive storytelling meant in the article but they are are certainly relevant. Any story that has me and my friends driving around town finding payphones at designated GPS coordinates just to unlock more pieces of the plot is definately interactive. This is not to mention the puzzles, and the latest development, actually interacting with characters via phone conversations.

But i gotta say, alot of the messages are very cool, almost like Nintendo's ilovebees.com on a much smaller scale.

The ilovebees.com thing is actually from Bungie in regards to Halo 2. It's not like it's the first time they have pulled this stuff either, although admittedly it was never on this scale. For more general information on Bungie, including similar stuff (like box acronyms), and also Marathon and how it relates to Halo, see the Marathon Story Page.

Hmm... Sounds like ilovebees.com's hostile AI wasn't kidding when it said it had metastasized. Now it's gone from Spying on Dana to spying on everybody...

GTA 3 had the Liberty Tree. Vice City had Kent Paul's 80s Nostalgia Zone! Both of these sites were launched and continuously updated a few months prior to the release of their respective games. Does San Andreas have one of these yet? If not, it's no big deal. We've still got I love bees to keep us entertained.

This could only make it more so. My only gripe: I can't setup the game to split the screen vertically for 2 players...

If you haven't tried it: the Halo campaign is fantastic, but multiplayer halo is unbelievable.

Even with the limited map selection the plethora of game type changes you can make produce a game that never gets old.

I wonder if I can convince a local movie theatre to try this out... :)

ps: halo2 comes out 11/9
pps: http://www.ilovebees.com/ Yes it's related.

I am wondering if the new promotion ARG (Alternate Reality Game) for Halo2 is to promote Red vs. Blue.

The game just started a couple days ago and is being pursued at http://www.immersionunlimited.com/. The website the world is flocking to is http://www.ilovebees.com/.

So, with a game that is not like a game promoting a game is definately something that will bend your mind.

http://www.xbox.ilovebees.com/ also links to the above site as some smart cookie at http://ilovebees.blogspot.com/2004/07/damage.html/ found.

woop! first /. post!

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...Dana in "about me" page. this pic alone makes this page worth checking out

I don't particularly mind these types of marketing campaigns, as I have the incredible ability to be cynical and just look at something else, without getting all riled up or looking for grand conspiricies. If something worth watching happens at ilovebees.com then I might go and have a look, otherwise I'll just move myself along.

If there was anything in this that would upset me, it would be the orginal location of the theatrical trailer MSN Entertainment. If anything about microsoft should be attacked it should be the total contempt that this site has for its visitors, shoving unrelated ads down a visitors throat (in the actual Halo Theatrical Trailer stream itself) for the mere priviledge of watching said trailer. Coupled with the arrogant assumption that I would have to watch it in IE6 with Windows Media Player. Wrong Microsoft! Once again, technology saves me. :)

It might be worth noting that even when this article was the first item on the Slashdot homepage, the page loaded very quickly. Now, it's pretty obvious that this is guerilla marketing, but it seems to me that this fact just makes it more glaringly obvious that ilovebees.com is not some poor innocent site that got hacked.

On this page, there is a paragraph of text. After a little digging, I found it came from Gulliver's Travels. Another piece?

There is actually another audio file that no one seems to have noticed yet: http://ilovebees.com/queen-piping.wav

On the page http://ilovebees.com/hives.html, this sound file is played. it sounds a bit weird to me. is this just some stock bee sound you can find online? it sounds like something might be hidden in it backwards or something.

Ladybee777 "odd behavior cry for help"

Woke up Tuesday to an alarming email from Aunt Margaret. (Apparently, so did quite few of you, as evidenced by the many "I think your aunt has completely lost it" messages I received.)

It took several hours to finally get a hold of Aunt M on the phone. Before I could say a word about the "odd behavior cry for help," she had her own email question for me:

Did I have any idea why all of her Hotmail would disappear overnight?

I logged in as ladybee777 to check out the damage. Old password worked fine. But no mail in any of the folders...? Weird. (Where was the concerned reply I had sent her that morning?)

Wrote a quick test message and sent it off to myself. Nothing shows up in my gmail inbox. Try again, this time to an older account. Check there: Nothing. Again. Rinse. Repeat. Nothing. Like a little Maxwell's Demon siphoning off all ingoing and outgoing messages. (And apparently sending out its own.)

So Aunt Margaret's email appears to have gone the way of the China countdown. Hijacked. Repurposed.

My first instinct: ask Hotmail to kill the account entirely. But then someone calling him (her?) self "xnbomb" sent me a very persuasive email that made me rethink things. Read for yourself:

It seems that snippets of various emails that have been sent to you by my colleagues have been reassembled and sent back, apparently originating from your aunt's hotmail address. I'm not really sure what it means at this point. But it tells us that we can communicate with these entities using email. In the absence of having a clear idea of just what is going on, the first priority is to communicate, that is how we can learn more. It's at least possible that we've stumbled across something extraordinary here, and our first priority must be to learn all that we can about it.

It's for that reason that I'm going to suggest that you take no further action that interferes with what's going on at ilovebees.com. There's another reason too, one slightly more disturbing. Consider this passage from the end of the tale hidden in the images:

"The day will break and the sun will rise when the Queen returns to rule, and further let it be known that retribution on any who hinder the return of the Queen will be swift and terrible.

This is a significant warning, namely that any interference with that process will be regarded as a hostile act, and will be responded to accordingly. I don't know what the SPDR is capable of, but I'm not sure I want to find out.It's for this reason that I suggest that you don't do anything else to get in the way of this business. If your aunt's business needs a functioning web site immediately, purchase her a new and similarly named domain and get her web site going there. But let this follow its course... while it could just be some hackers being jerks, there is at least a chance that this is something unique and important and wonderful, a window on a world that we may have never seen before, nor will ever see again.

Optimistic and curious, yet with the good sense to be terrified. This seems like a pretty good fix on the situation -- thanks, xnbomb.

I am, of course, wildly nervous about letting the bug(s) continue wreaking havoc entirely unimpeded. But nothing, and I mean nothing, I was doing on the tech side seemed to make a damn bit of difference anyway. So it seems like a good plan to switch gears from active damage control to... well, what?

(ideas?)

P.S. Have decided to try to shield Aunt M from the latest development, so for now I'm telling her it's a widespread Hotmail glitch. I hope I'm doing the right thing.

When I was younger, I used to have really bad asthma. My mom would make me something similar to this. However, she didnt use sugar. She used lemon and garlic. It really worked, too. It was a big time expectorant and anything that didnt belong was coughed up quickly. In fact, once I dried out my sinuses good and proper. It felt horrible!
Anyways, the site is pretty cool. Good marketing tool.