I was just thinking this morning about a weird experience I had in 2010 that helped to shaped my musical experience.
There used to be a weird Twitter account that had a lot of buzz around it called @horse_ebooks. A lot of people speculated that it was a bot, retweeting brief and broken excerpts from financial help books. Long story short, it turned out to be a bizarre form of viral marketing for an even odder online (and very campy) game.
It took me about an hour to play through the thing.
I remember thinking towards the end of the game “hmm.. what a weird game and wild fuckin concept for online marketing. Not sure I get it, but whatever. I kinda dig it.”
When I finished the game the credits started to roll, and seemingly completely out of left field, this thumping, pulsing, catchy, out-of-place beat starts playing.
My first thought was. “Yo- this sounds like Aes! But wait, I know all his stuff. I have his whole discography on my iPod nano. This can’t be Aes. Also, there’s absolutely no way this can’t be Aes, because it sounds exactly like him. This cannot be someone else.”
And that was how I discovered Breakdance Beach, and the day that I learned about HMM. At that time the only project that was out was “Are you gonna eat that?” No local record stores had it. This was 2010- there was no real streaming for small artists that was easily accessible. I found a torrent file that sat in my Queue for months before I deleted it because it had 0 seeders.
Just curious to see if that was anyone else’s experience in discovering HMM(?).
I recently stumbled upon a YouTube channel called Atrocity Guide which goes into some deep dives of weird happenings largely on the web. The creator has made several episodes about Alternate Reality Games that bleed into real life as well as other internet phenomenon.
When watching the very interesting episode titled The Cyber Fiction Saga of Horse_Ebooks and Pronunciation Book , the host beings talking about Bear Stearns Bravo, an alternate reality game that I believe Henry Zebrowski was involved with. At about 14 minutes into the video, there’s an actor that I thought looks exactly like him.
Further, the creators of that game were also involved with “This Is My Milwaukee” which I seem to remember some Last Podcast Network members showing up in.
I’m pretty positive it’s Henry in the Bear Stearns Bravo game. But I just wanted to check in with the community to confirm. Because I was pleasantly surprised when I saw it.
I am in no way affiliated with the Atrocity Guide channel or with the group that made the game. Just a hardcore Last Podcast fan who thought this might interest the community.
I'm curious to hear some opinions on the beautiful black-bound Berserk volumes published by Dark Horse. They look quite frankly amazing to me, and I've been tempted several times to buy; but I already have most of the Kindle releases via Amazon and typically just read Berserk on my phone (it's not a bad experience really — pinch to zoom is very fast and I've got a rather spacious Note 10+ screen).
My main hesitation with the physical volumes is that they're quite big and heavy. Not fun or easy to lug around a complete collection — I plan to be moving a few times and/or possibly living life on the road in the near future. Also, the pages of any physical book inevitably get dirty with time (unless one plans on always reading with gloves on).
A digital alternative to the large format Berserk volumes is to use a large format e-reader such as an Onyx Boox or Sony's digital paper. But I actually tried that in the past (with an Onyx e-reader) and found the experience to be too sluggish and unnatural to be especially enjoyable (for me, personally).
