#and sincethe discord happened. the tag became super inactive

[oflgtfol]

can you PLEASE talk more about the guy fieri arg because seeing those three words together made my brain feel like it was collapsing and i need to know more

OKAY. to start things off i will say here is my guy fieri arg tag in chronological order, so you can see how it actually progressed over time. now, for the in-depth explanation:

JANUARY 22nd, 2021: THE BEGINNING

the tumblr icon on desktop changes to have guy fieri's facial hair and sunglasses. the featured post on the side of the dashboard was also a drawing of guy fieri. when you did inspect element on the dashboard, an ASCII art of guy fieri showed up in the console.

but the real confusion was that a banner appeared at the top of the desktop dashboard. it said "Welcome to Flavortown" in an obnoxious script font and has a photo of guy fieri on the side. when you clicked on it, it brought you to the blog fieriframes.tumblr.com, which is a blog that is like horrendously dedicated to created gifsets of diners, drive-ins, and dives. when i say this blog is horrendously dedicated, i mean a new gifset like every 3 hours. and it had been running for several years at that post (and it's still running apparently!!!). and it only ever got like 0-3 notes which is sad, so much effort for so little traction. absolute dedication

so everybody is a bit perplexed. why is tumblr promoting this random blog? you google "Guy fieri" and it turns out that it's his birthday today. woo! perhaps tumblr is just being fucking weird and deciding to celebrate guy fieri's birthday for no reason. whatever

most people brush it off as tumblr being silly. but a few curious people look a bit deeper. you look at some of fieriframes' posts and realize that the dialogue is... peculiar. it obviously is not from the show itself, or weirdly cropped in a way that no human would ever do. some have weird glitched cutoffs, or weird things edited onto them?? and the image descriptions were very insane and janky, not describing the gifs properly at all. the only thing the IDs captured correctly was the dialogue.

it's all very strange. but it looks like perhaps the reason the blog runs so regularly is that the gifsets are computer-generated, which would also explain why they're edited so weirdly. in the end it's all easy to brush off still

THEN ENTERS: et in arcadia ego

if you scrolled far enough down the blog to find last night's posts (yes, it posted so often that you had to scroll that far just to access posts from last night), you'd find the weirdest fucking gifset ever. the coloring is all black and white. the dialogue captions are the most cryptic ever, creepy almost even. the people's faces are blurred out by some black circle with white eyes. and in the image description, where it typed out the dialogue within the gifs, a few choice words are colored red.

if you look closely, a certain tag stands out. "et in arcadia ego." if you searched the blog for that tag alone and sorted by chrono, you'd see that the blog had been posting similar things once a day since december 28, 2020. the first few posts were relatively normal, with minimal editing other than the dialogue choices, but they quickly took on the black and white aesthetic and consisted of longer gifsets.

i began to trace through the et in arcadia ego tag and string the red words along together, because i figured they would form some sort of message. as of january 22nd, that message was:

carry my bones across the threshold soon it will be night you already have the map did you find me where is the world i know who you are

i then began compiling the complete list, including original dialogue as well as the red words, in this post.

aside: doctor phil m&m explanation

literally as this arg was slowly falling into place, with everyone crawling through fieriframes, the ASCII art in the tumblr dashboard inspect element code kept getting updated as well. it was switching between the guy fieri art, mentioned earlier, and also ASCII art of the doctor phil m&m meme in the "you know i had to do it to em" pose.

among the small group of people following the arg, this became a joke. and it eventually became a meme to crack ship guy fieri and doctor phil m&m. hence, phileri was borne. people made sideblogs specifically for the phileri memes, and then valentines day 2021, tumblr staff then pinned one such blog phileri-lovin.tumblr.com to the top of the dashboard with the "OTP <3" banner

JANUARY 23, 2021: THE CONTINUATION

as it was no longer guy fieri's birthday, the flavortown banner disappeared. the guy fieri tumblr logo disappeared. the featured post went back to normal. and the dashboard inspect element code stayed solid on the dr. phil m&m, no more swapping with guy fieri anymore. the tumblr dashboard was back to normal for most people. but this was not the end of the arg.

people continued to search through fileriframes in order to find more strange posts. among them was this post, in a similar aesthetic style to et in arcadia ego, but without being tagged. also, the dialogue is not in the latin alphabet, and the ID is unhelpful by simply listing a bunch of question marks. apparently those characters are from the Voynich manuscript, and using some cipher i don't understand, they discovered that the caption says something like

They used the (mord tanis tmuhh)

upon googling for any more information about this arg, i found that reddit users had found it before tumblr. here, they explain that tanis is some sort of podcast or something. tanis in particular is another recurring theme on fieriframes a la posts such as this.

my unfortunate break with the arg

so i stopped paying attention after like january 24th because that's right when my spring 2021 semester was starting. i don't know where it went from here or how it ended but i'm assuming it's as utterly insane as the start was. i think i read somewhere that it finished towards the end of february so that's like, a whole extra month of insanity. from an arg based around guy fieri.