An educational YouTube site goes rogue and starts an ominous and mysterious countdown.
Sounds like the plot device for a high-tech thriller, but this is happening now.
Two weeks ago, Pronunciation Book, a channel that gives audio examples of how to pronounce certain words, started to get a little weird.
The video for “77” seemed innocuous enough, the phrase “Something is going to happen in 77 days” certainly included the correct pronunciation even if it was framed rather bizarrely. The videos that have followed over the course of the last fortnight, however, ratcheted up the creepy.
The audio message so far looks like this:
77: “Something is going to happen in 77 days.”
76: “I’ve been trying to tell you something for 1,183 days.”
75: “I’m awake now. Things are clearing up. I’m not saying the words anymore.”
74: “I’ve got a minute, let me tell you what I think is going on.”
73: “Tension between the districts has spiked in the last few months.”
72: “You can see it in the markets. Everyone’s ready for a storm.”
71: “They’re singing a new song in the streets of the zone.”
70: “I have plenty of information to keep me company.”
69: “No one is ready. He watches the market.”
68: “I’m not talking about a disaster, I’m talking about a love triangle.”
67: “We fell into the jungle for a summer of dollar/duller crime.”
66: “We were young heroes, gorgeous liars.”
65: “Turn off the lights and drink a cold glass of water.”
64: “No one is singing, everyday’s the same.”
63: “We should have listened to chief.”
(Courtesy of http://intothedeep77.blogspot.co.uk)
Each new entry ends with the line “Something is going to happen in X days”
But what? Well, The Daily Dot believe they have uncovered the mystery and claim that it points to a reboot of Battlestar Galactica. Their article here examines older videos in the series and how they relate to the colonists time on New Caprica, suggesting that any new series might focus on the time when the colonists were settled on under Cylon occupation.
This would be all kinds of awesome as far as I’m concerned. I think that setting has plenty of potential for providing solid drama, either as a TV Film or mini-series, and I would love to see it explored.
This piqued my interest, and so I delved head long into the 77 Days Research Document. It is an incredibly well put together document that delves into the mysteries of the videos, to an extent that I can only be amazed by and applaud. After reading all 46 pages and side notes, and after showering to scrub the conspiracy theories out of my pores, I’m not quite so convinced that this is a BSG thing. There are videos in the Pronunciation Book series from last year that tell a narrative, hidden within their advertised lessons; these are listed in the Google document and have little relevancy to BSG.
My best guess is that this is an elaborate and well planned ARG for a big upcoming media release; but exactly what that might be is unknown at the moment.
The countdown runs out on September 24th 2013. I guess we’ll find out then.
