- Joined
- Nov 30, 2022
I had never heard of I Love Bees before looking into Jim. The way you describe it is different from what I was getting from the blurbs of info I've seen here and elsewhere. Going to IRL locations and puzzle solving? Was this kind of a lite version of Cicada 3301 ad for Halo?
Yes but this was way back in 2004. It took the base idea of the guerrilla stealth marketing of Blair Witch project but put a different spin on it, making it a much more collaborative experience. This was old Bungie, who still had a lot of the more esoteric and deep lore people from the early days of Marathon around and so they were allowed to go crazy with it.
IIRC the basic idea of it was that there was this website, I Love Bees from some beekeeper woman and her love of bees and apiary stuff that was hijacked by a A.I. from the Halo universe (a Cortana like deal) due to it being sent back in time I think. And because of this the site started getting corrupted and the A.I. tried to break free and go back and people had to do all sorts of things and connect the site to other sites and find files and there was even a case of them having to find a specific payphone to get a call from the A.I. at a certain time which happened during a hurricane so there was this one nerd camping by a payphone while most of florida was getting flooded around him so he could get the code.
I honestly think this is a bigger piece of the puzzle that is Jim Stewartson than you realize. He may think in his schizophrenic mind that because he helped create modern ARGs with his work with the I Love Bees and the NIN stuff that he has some sort of "unique expert skills" on "decoding" the QAnon "connections matrix and lingo" because of it.