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Horse_ebooks Is Human After All

Posted by timothy on from the emperor's-new-clothes-are-very-postmodern dept.

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.

17 of 72 comments (clear)

  1. So it's Zippy the Pinhead for the new millenium by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Same type of stuff. Anyone ever run yowlines on their startup-sequence?

    1. Re:So it's Zippy the Pinhead for the new millenium by buswolley · · Score: 4, Insightful
      I'd like to note that the article summary fails to define the subject, and assumes the reader is already informed. I have noticed this lapse in many articles on slashdot recently and it is frustrating. Sure I can look it up on Google, but why would I when the article does not have any clear explanation of why it would interest me at all?

      I mean...I am reasonably informed on many geek matters, but I do not have time or interest to follow up every new internet trend.

      --

      A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.

    2. Re:So it's Zippy the Pinhead for the new millenium by buswolley · · Score: 2
      Except I thought maybe ppl thought there was a horse typing messages.

      However, I agree. Others have been worse, and I just wanted to use this post a platform to make a point more broadly about the editorial process at Slashdot and tenets of Writing 101.

      --

      A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.

    3. Re:So it's Zippy the Pinhead for the new millenium by IronChef · · Score: 2

      I looked up "horse ebooks" on Twitter and I assure you, it still isn't interesting.

  2. Bad art.. by TechyImmigrant · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:Bad art.. by CanHasDIY · · Score: 2

      IMO, anytime the word "art" is prefaced with the word "performance," it's pretty much a given that said "art" is, in reality, total crap.

      --
      An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
  3. Re:What? by strength_of_10_men · · Score: 2

    God damnit! I wasted precious lunchtime trying to figure out WTF this was all about and in the end, I'm still not sure. I should have just gone to Zombocom where at least I can get positive re-enforcement in a nice soothing voice while I browsed the rest of /.

  4. Re:What? by strength_of_10_men · · Score: 2

    sorry for the messed up link

  5. Let's try to define art. Again. by SoupGuru · · Score: 3, Funny

    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
    1. Re:Let's try to define art. Again. by CRCulver · · Score: 2

      Wow, I didn't expect someone to validate the OP's point so fast.

    2. Re:Let's try to define art. Again. by SoupGuru · · Score: 2

      Discussing art on Slashdot is like discussing cross-stitching on a drag racing forum. Like discussing particle physics on a doll collecting forum. Like discussing baseball stats on a recipe trading forum.

      --
      What doesn't kill you only delays the inevitable
    3. Re:Let's try to define art. Again. by H0p313ss · · Score: 2

      He's not really trolling - it's brilliant meta performance art!

      *dances across Slashdot wearing a tutu and a Firefly t-shirt smeared in peanut butter while humming a 20's era swing tune*

      --
      XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
  6. Move along, nothing to see here by Shaiku · · Score: 2

    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?

  7. Day job by mccrew · · Score: 2

    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.
  8. Re:So it was just a lame ass art project. by NatasRevol · · Score: 2

    Now?

    --
    There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
  9. Here's the missing information. by quietwalker · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Here's the missing information. by Obfuscant · · Score: 2

      Thank you. I read both links in the summary and still couldn't figure out what was going on. It didn't help that the articles are poorly written. At one point they both say that these two people who were doing this had been keeping their identities secret from the places they work. How they did that and functioned as the higher level management they claim to be is a mystery. "Who is your director of development?" "I don't know, it is a secret."