Mysterious countdown on YouTube channel
As pointed out on CNET a couple of months ago, a YouTube user called Pronunciation Book has recently switched from providing pronunciations of English words and phrases to counting down toward September 24.
The countdown has only ten days to go. Since the countdown started, each day's post has started with a mysterious remark (sometimes a brief sentence, sometimes a couple minutes of poetic talking), and ended with “Something is going to happen in n days.”
For example, here's 17:
Water flows easily through the aqueducts and storm tunnels. Towers transmit waves that run to join radios in cars and trucks and houses. Paper rolls through the offset press. A conveyer belt feeds rock and sand into a concrete plant. The air conditioner cools its room on summer evenings. Inspection arms confirm the jars' dimensions. Rails hold up trains that hold cargo. Roads hold up trucks that hold cars. Streetlights turn off as the sun rises. Satellites connect boats in different oceans. Powerful monitors emit new prices.
What are you. What are you. What are you.
Something is going to happen. In 17 days.
And I quite like 16, but it's too long to include the transcript here, so I'll just link to a pastebin transcript.
And starting with 14, the first phrase of each video is a line from what looks like it's going to be a sonnet.
A bunch of people who've been intrigued by all this have started keeping notes in a Google Doc. It includes using a spectrograph to convert some audio noise at the ends of some posts into what appears to be an image of someone pointing a finger at the audience; links to a related Tumblr; speculation and theories about what the channel could be for; and so on.
The most prominent theory, and the one that seems by far the most likely to me, is that this is the buildup a new Alternate Reality Game. There's quite a bit of quasi-evidence supporting that theory. On the one hand, I'm disappointed that the most likely explanation for Mysterious Organized Weirdness these days is that it's an ARG; on the other hand, I like that ARGs have introduced a steady stream of Mysterious Organized Weirdness into the world.
Anyway, I'm looking forward to finding out what it is that's going to happen on September 24.