I got a rather odd email yesterday, with the Subject: header Help me identify a youtube video and solve my grandfather’s mysterious death. That’s eye-catching, to say the least, and the text of the message was also interesting:
There’s a youtube video involved in my grandfather’s odd circumstances of death. Please take a look at the attached picture and pass it along.
This frame belongs to the video I’m looking for and it’s the only evidence that I have so far: it’s a snapshot of the computer screen he was seeing when he died. If you ever saw the entire footage or recognize any detail of this picture (where and when was it filmed, who posted the file and, foremost intriguing, who is that creepy bald man) please report it to:
To perform a blind seach in youtube’s database is harder than to find a needle in a haystack, so any accurate hint will be a blessing.
The URL goes to a blog about a man listening to communications from his dead grandfather over a vintage radio. Or maybe I should say “blog,” because the whole thing has a hard-to-define air of a viral marketing game in the i love bees mode…
For one thing, the blog very well written, probably a little too well written. It’s also too focussed– there isn’t much of anything that distracts from the advance of the story. If you go down to the bottom of the first page and read the entries in chronological order, it reads like a novel.
There’s also the fact that some of the entries are dated months ago, but there isn’t a single comment, not even spam. And the general lack of outgoing links is also un-blog-like.
And, of course, the “Find this frame of YouTube video” scavanger hunt is just too perfect a game task…
It may be that this is a real blog by a real person who has a thoroughly bizarre life, in which case, I’m sorry about your grandfather and the creepy bald dude, and slandering your blog. It just reeks of “alternate reality game,” though.
Anyway, whatever the reality behind it, I’m not the right person for this: I haven’t the faintest idea how you would begin looking for that video, and I don’t have the time for alternate reality gaming. But if this sort of thing appeals to you, well, click through to the blog, and have fun.