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Horse_ebooks Is Human After All
An anonymous reader writes with word that two of the more intriguing memes of recent times have been outed as elaborate performance art. Bizarre Twitter-centric entities @Horse_ebooks and Pronunciation Book aren't really inexplicable, it turns out: "[These feeds] have been running for the past several years, both have the hallmarks of automation, chugging along anonymously and churning out disjointed bits of text in a very spam-like fashion, but neither is as it appears."
The Escapist has a bit more, now that the horse is out of the bag.
Same type of stuff. Anyone ever run yowlines on their startup-sequence?
And we can look forward to more great "pieces" from them as soon as they've finished wiping.
It sounds like Happy in Paraguay.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
I have no idea what this is even trying to say. I can't even parse the first sentence.
of course, of course
Bad art often occurs when 'artists' replace quality with novelty.
See horse_ebooks and Pronunciation Book for perfect examples.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Between this, and the news that Mick Jagger is becoming a great-grandfather, there's just no hope anymore.
Best Slashdot Co
Nothing like getting a bunch of borderline Autism Spectrum Disorder technology nerds to argue about exactly what makes art the most useless endeavor in the world.
What doesn't kill you only delays the inevitable
They took the idea from "The footage" from that Gibson's book?
And it's the first time I hear about them.
No soup for you! NEXT!
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This is the first I've ever heard of either of these accounts and after glancing at them I still fail to see why anyone would give a crap? It's like staring at a random word generator. Neither intriguing nor captivating. Giving them a day of fame here is a waste of my time and undeserved food for their troll of a project.
Slashdot: News for twitter-obsessed tweens?
Can I get a double tall, half caf, caramel whip with nonfat milk? OKthxBye.
Hey, Windows users, there is no such thing as "forward" slash, there is only slash and backslash.
1) a single fuck
That is all.
The final video this morning had one more picture encoded in the audio.
http://i.imgur.com/DloO0OO.png
Wtf is this boing boing? Get this shit off slashdot
Bakkila and Bender said they will no longer maintain Horse eBooks and Pronunciation Book. "No one wants to work on a painting forever"
After which, Bender lit both on fire and used them to light the Le Grand Cigar and mumbled something about "stupid meat bags".
In other news, the FBI is looking for a piece of the US constitution that historians have discovered is missing. And apparently George Burns grave has been robbed.
Neither link explains wtf this is actually about.
First, Horse_ebooks is a twitter feed.
This twitter feed started out as part of a network of spam twitter accounts to promote the (probably illegal) sale of ebooks from a russian seller. It often includes random lines of text from the ebooks that it's trying to spam/sell in an attempt to avoid being classified as spam. Basically, bayesian poisoning.
Some folks thought it was amusing because it would create odd non-sequiturs, and in the same way that people started posting zombo.com links, it perputated, though apparently only among folks with their heads way far up the twitter lower GI.
So, it was experiencing some popularity for hard to define or reproduce reasons.
At this point, 2 guys who work for internet media companies purchased the twitter account from the russian spammer who operated it, in 2011, after it had shown up in a few non-internet specific publications. Apparently they couldn't figure out how to milk commercial value from it, and continued to sporadically post from it, claiming it was some sort of art project, though it's more likely that they just never capitalized it and tried to mimic the previous behavior.
The only reason you're hearing about it now, is because these accounts are now being used as part of an alternate reality 'game', like Halo's "I Love Bees" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Love_Bees ), and so are being promoted widely for that reason. I would argue that it's a 'game' per se, but whatever.
Interestingly enough, it's claimed that this was all held in great secrecy until now, yet I note nearly simultaneous news releases from a large number of primarily internet-only media sites, not just now, but previously since 2011. As if they were all in on it. Most of the recent articles have some permutation of the claim that it's a well established meme, and that it's a "persistent mystery on the internet," almost as if they were given a press release and are just regurgitating text.
Personally speaking, I'm fairly well aware of memes, and I hadn't heard of this one. Perhaps it's just because I avoided twitter? In any case, it looks and feels like someone's trying to artificially force something to become viral when it's not really that appealing to begin with.
Hopefully though, my sleuthing has saved you from having to look this stuff up and perpetuate it, and you can continue to ignore it.
posting to remove mod mistake, oops
This reminds me of that story once posted here about Grandpa and SlashCock. This site is getting way stupid and liberal, guess the two go hand in hand.
"Performance Artists" fail Turing Test.
Pictures at 11. (Assuming we can find pictures of them adequately clothed.)
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