Please note that all blog posts before 8 April 2007 were automatically imported from LiveJournal. To see the comments and any LiveJournal-specific extras such as polls and user icons, please find the source posting at http://brianenigma.livejournal.com/2004/07/I hope Dreamhost still likes me. This afternoon, everyone who had a site hosted on “gaz” was probably not liking me. You see, there seems to be this “game-like-thing” that is going on, and I am helping provide a service to catalog stuff (as well as the ever-popular Unfiction and half a dozen other sites out there). Basically, the story goes something like this:
Several big people in the Unfiction community received mysterious packages. These packages contained a little honey-bear filled with–guess what? You guessed it! Honey! Well, there were also these pesky little letters in there, too. When put in the correct order, the letters spelled out I L O V E B E E S. At first, I figured this was an amateur attempt at that old game related to the movie AI.
If you are unfamiliar with this thing (the “Alternate Reality Game” or ARG), it is basically a way of telling a story such that the “readers” are immersed in it. For all practical purposes, the “characters” in the story seem to be real people–they have blogs, they respond to email, sometimes they even have phone numbers or appear in person (when the budget of the people telling the story allow for hiring actors). Usually, there are little puzzles to figure out along the way that either unlock the next chapter of the story once solved or at least give a deeper understanding of plot, characters, or motives.
So, yes–back to ilovebees. It turns out this is http://ilovebees.com. Here we have a website of a retired teacher in the Bay Area (now a beekeeper) that was created by her niece…with one little problem. It seems to be in the process of being taken over by…something. Hacker? Virus? Artificial intelligence? It gets weird because text is randomly inserted in pages (why the pages look funny) as well as images (why the images seem to have “static”) that sort of tells a story. To help figure things out, I set up some resources on http://bees.netninja.com.
THEN, it seems the Halo 2 (a video game) trailer came out in theaters. No big deal, right? There have been trailers for video games before in theaters–something in the Warcraft or Diablo franchise, I believe. In this case, though, at the very end where they show the XBox logo and xbox.com…well, for a split second it flickers and becomes ilovebees.com, then cuts back. Along come the Halo fans. They pour in by the thousands. Slashdot writes an article with direct links to my site. IGN writes an article, also with direct links.
So, yeah, the sysadmins at Dreamhost have probably been cursing my name today. It took a few minutes to ssh into the box today and the “w” command (to check the system load) did not return after a couple of minutes–instead the connection died. It seems I have served up about 3.5 gigs this month, 3G of which was over the past three days. So who knows where this is going or where it will end up, but it is kind of cool.
