Slashdot Mirror
The Final Round of ILoveBees
Ensign Trolltalk writes "The Alternate Reality Game ilovebees (previously covered here and here) has entered its endgame, with the presumably final round of telephone calls taking place Sunday October 31st. Anyone wishing to get involved before it's over should check out the latest axon list (available here in more human-readable format with GPS coordinates, city, state, call time, and links to maps) and be prepared for anything. On Thursday November 4th, live "Combat Training Exercises" will be held in New York, Chicago, Austin, and San Francisco. It's believed that attendees will get to see and play Halo 2 before the game's official release. See the 404 page for details on these events."
I answered an axon in the first group (11:00PST). Melissa wasn't on the line as normal, and I wasn't asked a question like normal. Instead, I immediately got the sound clip for that axon group. Looks like they're doing things a bit different today. Sound clips are available on recipe8 once enough people have answered phones and heard them, but you should still go to your local axons and answer in order to make sure the clips get unlocked, and also because things may change later in the day. We don't know if there will be live calls today or not, but it's certainly a possibility.
From what I can gather, there is another transmission due on the 4th of November, with what I assume will be the actual wrapup of the story.
for those interested, there are a number of sites to get up to date, though you're pretty much at the end of the arg now... even so, http://ilb.extrasonic.com/ is a good start, and http://www.thebruce.ca/ilovebees/ has transcripts of all the audio, and a timeline and text compilation of all that happened before the axon phase.
Read this and this
What do you call having the "victim" not doing jack about all the supposed blog/site "hacking" attempts?
First (speaking in-game, of course), Dana's blog wasn't hacked, only the ilovebees.com website. If you read Dana's blog, you'll see that she attempted to restore the website, but was unable to do so. Her attempts to fix the site caused harm to Melissa, though, and led to Melissa labeling Dana as an attempted killer. Dana stopped trying to fix the site in order to avoid antagonizing Melissa further.
What do you call having a fake and "unrelated" web in the official trailer, the fake page getting "hacked" after being mentioned, and sending a lot of nonsensical gibberish?
It was in the trailer because you have to let people know about the site somehow. And of course it's a "fake page" because it's a game -- it's no less fake than any other game out there.
And it's only nonsensical gibberish if you don't attempt to understand it.
What do you call lots of people traveling several miles to GPS coordinates of a pay phone just to hear some pre-recorded messages?
First, many people traveled HUNDREDS of miles. In fact, I think a few Europeans few to London in order to visit Europe's first axon.
Second, nobody drove anywhere "just to hear some pre-recorded messages". Many of the calls were live, and these were critical introductions of interactive elements that were neccessary to advance the plot.
Also, it was fun. Fun is fun regardless of the purpose of it or the reason for it.