#max2019 arg; ¿can you teleport? | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

max2019info · 6 years ago

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MAX2019 ARG: FULL SUMMARY

so heres a full summary. some of the details may be slightly out of order (due to the first couple days being so disorganized as coverage began) but this will cover all major events

BEGINNINGS + DAY ONE:

what appears to be a pornbot messages several prominent users with the message “hey peebrain - you teleport?”. investigation of the account leads to a neocities full of strange images, audio, and links

[sitemap of the neocities]

the neocities updates to link to the blog, lovely5500. this character is a 15 year old girl named anita.

she reacts initially with confusion to all the messages, but looks into the neocities site. she establishes that she is sick, her mom will not take her to the doctor. her text is periodically zalgofied .

she recieves an ask containing the text

Struggle with thy doubts!

Cast them aside!

Forsake not thy faith!

Sickness will not take thee!

she reveals that her grandpa got this poem when he had become sick, but had died

later that day, the neocities site updates with a link to a livestream depicting anita’s room

finally, the page DAYONE on the neocities updates from a blank page to contain this message

I saw Anita I updated sceneteenz blog for productivity... Anita's symptom's are not related but she will see Death too if i cannot get to Earth-sphere The eye of H.U.R.L is ever so watch-ful I saw Death today Thank you for listening

Not recorded well enough. I spoke into my microphone again and i will embed it here

Limbo is so hot.

Resurfacing from the second circle was "the hardest thing I have ever done."

I am being pushed down but I will not allow myself to sink.

this also introduces the blog, sceneteenz

in a post from january, they describe something called “sickness stench”

by this point, players have figured out that the blog, sexymax2019, is the character max (an angel). we have learned that she is trapped in limbo, and speculate that she is anita’s guardian angel. we also learn that the sickness max is afflicted with is a result of being in limbo, and it is causing anita’s sickness.

during the first day, we also find a link to this image, introducing the character celeste

we do not yet know who celeste or sceenteenz is, but sceneteenz becomes more active as their blog gains attention.

SCENE AND ANITA DEVELOPMENTS AND DAY TWO:

sceneteenz posts throughout the day, revealing plot important information that:

angels can communicate through SSTV signals (a method we have used to decode some information)

angels can be defined as uniform resource locators (URLs), thus confirming that H.U.R.L (hierarchy of uniform resource locators) means HIERARCHY OF ANGELS

angels will disgusie themselves as “internet archetypes” to avoid the attention of HURL (explaining max’s pornbot persona)

sceenteenz likely IS an angel, but doesnt associate with H.U.R.L anymore

april is a “grim” month for them

if someone is infected with sickness stench too long, “they die!”

we also learn some things about sceneteenz

they have no concept of gender

theyre scene (its a lifestyle)

throughout the day, sceneteenz and sexymax2019 continue to communicate via tumblr instant messages, emphasizing that H.U.R.L is watching

on anita’s end for the past couple days, she describes feeling worse, and the sickness seems to be affecting her more heavily

after this post, anita uploads this video showing a figure (theorized to be max) writhing to distorted audio

later on anita’s blog, we get this:

she has remembered more about max, and links to this page of “anita and max’s internet memories”. ranging from 2009 to 2018, it catalogues anita’s interests over time, including lolcats, homestuck, fanfiction, and tumblr.

on the night of day two, we get an update to the DAYTWO page

Anita remembered.

I saw the "expanse in the midst of the waters."

I am in peril. Heaven is crashing down on me.

the final two days of the ARG were very eventful, and require their own summaries:

DAYTHREE SUMMARY HERE

DAYFOUR (ENDING) SUMMARY HERE

GAME DEV QUESTIONS ANSWERED HERE

#max2019 arg #pornbot arg #angel arg #mod f

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canmom · 6 years ago

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Teleportation ritual

(this is part of the ‘Max2019’ ARG that’s been taking place on Tumblr over the last few days! you can read timelines in various places e.g. here, on @max2019arg or in this google doc, or in the discord)

The instructions I’m following in this post were provided by the Seraph @sceneteenz, as a ritual to help Anita aka @lovely5500’s guardian angel Max2019 escape from Limbo, and the control of H.U.R.L., the Hierarchy of Uniform Resource Locators aka angels. This will, if the ritual works, save Max and Anita from death by ‘sickness stench’.

Look, it makes sense in context!

T: Transmit a song that holds sentimentality to your mind. Listen closely to it.

The music of Keiichi Okabe, composer for NieR, DoD 3 and NieR Automata, means an awful lot to me at the moment. I’ve been listening an awful lot to Black Song from the DoD 3 soundtrack:

youtube

It’s a beautiful song, and reminds me of the feelings DoD3 and the NieR series in general create, of loss and hope and dealing with a hopeless world caught in seemingly endless cycles of cruelty and grief and oppression and struggle, and choosing to live anyway.

E: Examine an appendage. Think about the effect your human brain has on it.

I am looking at my hands as I type this. I realise looking at one’s hands is a cliché about being on drugs, but what an incredibly complex and amazing thing they are, the complexity of the movements, the incredible coordination of signalling through my nerves it takes to let me type these letters so quickly into the computer, the muscles and tendons winding back into the arm and up to the shoulder.

I mean look at all that stuff! And what’s more like, all this forms from just the information that can be packed into a single cell and its interaction with the womb it grows in.

Human robots are pretty impressive but we aren’t anywhere close to making anything as sensitive or flexible or capable of as many movements as a human hand and brain.

L: Look into your own eyes in a reflective surface and come to a conclusion about yourself as a being living the human experience.

Yeah, I’m doing that huh.

However messy and futile and confusing it is. Somehow I’ve been put in the world to live a life in it, pushed around by things way bigger than me, and ultimately the contribution I make to its course will be tiny, but that’s what all of us are doing I guess.

I don’t know how much of a general “human experience” there is, but I’m having a human experience.

These are some of the organs I use to sense the world and other people. Light gets absorbed at the centre.

E: Engage in the washing and cleansing of your human hands. Embed a photo of your hands to the internet.

It’s surprisingly difficult to take a picture of your own hands!

P: Pick a plant from “outside” and examine it. Take a photo of this plant and embed it to the internet.

This plant is growing outside my house. Unlike a lot of the plants nearby, it was not planted by my parents or another human, or deliberately cultivated in a particular area.

I’m not sure what kind of plant it is, but it’s done an astonishing job of growing through all these stones and, I believe, the plastic mat underneath them!

The rules of evolution are simply survival, and duplication with errors.

Here’s another plant I took a picture of!

This is a fern that was growing somewhere near the Haytor granite formation. It’s probably not been so long that this fern has died. I found the way its leaves are slowly unfurling incredibly beautiful.

Ferns were some of the earliest plants to evolve, and while this fern has evolved and changed just as much as other plants, it’s incredible that this particular general form of life has stuck around for the last several million years. Unfurling, spreading seeds, taking in sunlight, dying, being destroyed by bacteria, coming back...

And occasionally a person will walk past on a family visit and think, ooh, that looks pretty, lemme take a picture, and a bunch of data in some rather abstract sense ‘representing’ the fern will be stored on her computers and copied around the world to Dropbox’s servers, and who knows how long this picture of the fern will last...

The picture will outlive the fern. Ferns, however, will surely outlive the picture, and the species that took those pictures.

O: Observe the sun or moon in the heavens above. Take a photo of it and embed it to the internet.

It is very dangerous to look directly at the sun, of course. So I just pointed my phone in the right direction and hoped.

The laws of thermodynamics are based on simple, statistical principles. Entropy - the number of ways that the microscopic constituents of the system can be organised corresponding to our macroscopic observations - always increases.

This is why it is difficult to create a ‘closed loop’ economic system. We need resources to be in particular, differentiated states to give us the uses we want, but temperature tends to average out, objects get broken, chemicals get mixed up; instead, the world’s economies work in an extractive way, taking in resources from the ground and putting out waste.

The world’s ecosystems, on the other hand, work as a ‘closed loop’ system, where energy is constantly being transformed, necessarily inefficiently, between different forms but somehow always cycling around the system, which can persist for literally billions of years. How is this possible? Surely the laws of entropy would demand that the system ultimately breaks down?

Thinking about this, I believe there are two aspects. First, the Earth is constantly radiating heat away into space across a broad spectrum of wavelengths. Radiation in space is a very high entropy part of the system, so the Earth as a whole can ‘dump’ entropy into that.

The necessary corollary of that is that the Earth is constantly losing heat as it sends energy into space. Thus, the Earth needs a vast source of energy to maintain itself at a constant temperature. How is this achieved? Well, the sun of course. The heat gradients produced by the sun drive the chemical processes of life; heat comes in from the sun, and goes out into space in all directions.

This will last for as long as the sun lasts, which is to say, there’s a few more billions of years in it.

No matter the social relations regulating it, industrial production based on mining and depositing waste cannot last for as long as life has. And the incredible engineering limitations and energy costs of space travel make it very unlikely that it will be possible to feed the ongoing accumulation of production and waste by a kind of imperial expansion into space.

Instead, it is necessary to produce a ‘closed loop’ economic system modelled after life, where every single part of every single product is ultimately reused.

The fact that life exists, and is stable and even able to recover from global catastrophes like asteroid impacts and adapt to steady orbital-dynamics driven cycles of climate change, shows that such a ‘closed loop’ system is possible; whether it’s possible for humans, and whether it’s possible to transition to such a system from the current capitalist system that depends on endless accumulation and growth of the number of commodities, which are built from necessarily limited resource inputs, is a lot harder to answer.

Anyway, that’s a picture of the sun! It looks like a lens flare because phone cameras aren’t designed for taking pictures of the sun, and bright light scatters off part of the camera system. Lens flares are fascinating.

R: Record the sky outside. Embed it to the internet.

I’m not sure if this is calling for a video recording or an image. Since it’s a sunny day and not much is happening there’s probably not much point in recording a video so let’s just put a photo up.

Notice the very distant hills are slightly bluish and washed out. This is due to light scattering in the atmosphere, the same reason the sky appears blue to our eyes!

That leads us, I suppose, to the old cliché question that rarely gets a good answer: why is the sky blue?

The major mechanism of atmospheric scattering is Rayleigh scattering from atoms and molecules much smaller than the wavelength of light. I won’t go into the details in this post, but the scattering intensity is proportional to \(\lambda^{-4}\) where \(\lambda\) is the wavelength of the light. This means short wavelengths, towards the violet end of the spectrum, are scattered much more strongly than red wavelengths.

Why then, is the sky blue and not purple? There’s two aspects to this question: the incident light and how it’s scattered, and the way the human eye responds to light.

These two plots show the intensity of light at different wavelengths in sunlight, and in ‘diffuse sky radiation’.

The sun’s radiation is closely approximated by a ‘black body radiator’ with a temperature of 5800K. The differences are generally explained by specific interactions between chemicals in the sun with light - see absorption lines.

A black body at this temperature peaks with light of 499.6nm, which is a greenish blue; it falls off quite quickly as we move into the purple part of the spectrum towards 400-450nm. If we look at the plot of the intensity from a blue sky, we see that the spectrum peaks close to 500nm as well, similar to the sun. So why does the sky seem like it’s a different colour to the sun?

The colours we sense are determined by the activation of the three types of cone cells in our eyes. We receive a mixture of light at different wavelengths; each wavelength of light activates the cone cells more or less. Depending on the relative proportions the three cone cells are activated, we see different colours. (If two different spectra of light activate the cones the same amount, they look the same to us - this is the basis of computer colour and painting!)

So the colour we perceive is determined by all the wavelengths in the light we observe, not just the highest ones.

Sunlight does not appear greenish blue to us, but rather more like a pale yellow, due to the energy in the rest of the spectrum towards the yellow and red end. It’s pale because it’s activating all three of our cone cells a similar amount. That makes sense: because we evolved under this sun, we see its light as the ‘neutral’ colour against which other colours are measured. If it activated the cone cells very different amounts to each other, it would appear ‘saturated’, i.e. strongly coloured.

Rayleigh scattering pushes down the red and yellow parts more than the blue parts. It doesn’t completely suppress them; light is scattered at all wavelengths, but more so at shorter, blue-purple wavelengths. So the S cone is activated a little more, and the M and L cones are activated a little less, and the light seems bluer.

This is actually something that people doing computer graphics tech have to worry about! In Physically Based Rendering: From Theory to Implementation, the authors illustrate this with this pair of images:

Anyway, I hope that was interesting. Let’s carry on!

T: Tally the amount of times you exhale in 30 seconds. Embed it to the internet.

I exhaled six times in thirty seconds. However, it’s difficult to count breaths without consciously controlling your breaths, so I was probably breathing omre slowly than normal.

A: Allow yourself to rest shortly. Allow your human body to do this.

Some forms of work are necessary to maintain our existence. Many are not, or are only made so because capital has a gun to our heads. Rest is good.

T: Tell another human that you love about something you thought about in the recent daytime.

I’m going to be sending this post to a lot of people I love very much shortly. And I told people just now about cuddles, which have thought about a lot in the recent daytime.

I: Illustrate a picture of something beautiful you remember during an unconscious state with a simple tool on paper. Embed it to the internet.

I have a great deal of difficulty remembering my dreams :(

I remembered dreaming about sleeping in a bed, one of three trans women, talking about things I can’t remember anymore. It was good. I struggled to draw it. This was my best attempt:

This is pretty messy and tiny on the paper. I find it very hard to draw pictures that aren’t tiny, where my mistakes can be hidden by the small size. I find it very hard to draw without an undo button.

O: “Oxygenate” once.

I assume that means: breathe in. So I did that.

N: Finally, Nourish yourself. The ability to go through the biological process of the creation of energy is what makes you human.

I will go and do that as soon as I’ve posted this.

Your sacrifice was not in vain, sceneteenz. This is for you, @sexygirlmax2019. I hope this ritual honours the spirit of the whole thing.

And to whoever created this ARG: thank you for finding a way to make a human connection through platforms designed for anything but.

#long post #max2019 #max2019arg #teleportation ritual #sceneteenz #t.e.l.e.p.o.r.t.a.t.i.o.n.#physics #light #rayleigh scattering #evolution

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