Gevel wrote:The way I see it, they've only done one ARG with us and now forums like this has a few too many people thinking any future news from Mike and Marcus will be fed to us in the form of subtle mathematical equations and the like. I think there's something to be said for overthinking things. It's kind of a shame that ever since Geogaddi and all the mystique they gave that album in interviews regarding their love of academics and subtle messages that now that's all some people associate them with. Between Geogaddi's release all the way up to the ARG for the TH announcement, I don't think they even ever teased fans subtly with anything like what is being assumed now, did they?
I'd say that for TH, that was almost done under duress and was kind of a necessary evil as part of their comeback - social media proliferation and 8 years had passed since a proper album, so I think Warp really turned the screws to get them to agree to something like that. It ended up being very true to their aesthetic, but I think if it were really up to them, they would be doing something more like this.
In this case, it's an incredibly passive and subtle ARG, it's just a numeric/time based version of the black box that used to be on their website prior to TH. It has a few people wondering but ultimately 99% of their fans will probably just wake up one day to an announcement, the entire timeline will be documented on BoCpages after the fact and people will say "huh interesting" and move on to anticipating and enjoying the release once there's actual news.
Ultimately an ARG heading up to an album release is just something fun for the fanbase to chew on, it's not going to change any actual plans, the passage of time will get us to where we're going without any input on our parts. It is funny that BoC has done such a good job of priming their fanbase to wait that a 4 or 4 1/2 year gap between albums is looked at as potentially unreasonable.
You could almost look at it as a social experiment at this point, who believes and who doesn't? The flip from 48 to 84 this year probably bred a few new skeptics but it's something I anticipated shortly before they started back up again.
Valotonin wrote:Opothocary, I apologise for being mistaken to a certain extent. As long as it is something you aren't devoting serious amounts of time to, there is no harm in looking for connections. I had this mental image of someone hunched over a keyboard, constantly going over BoC posts and devoting a lot of their time to trying to find connections between them and it was worrying me somewhat. As you say, it is a bit of a hobby to you that you barely spend any time on and just focus on once in a while, that's absolutely fine. I am sorry for my preconceptions about your actions.
Thanks for your concern but again it's all math and waiting out time, obsessing accomplishes nothing once you "get" whatever it is that they've apparently established with their next step. You can make a quick likely guess or two on the next ones on an enthusiast message board and then move on with your day.
I saw what they did with Dayvan and within a couple minutes realized they had indeed went the mirror route, flipped to 84 and that the addition/multiplication steps had reversed (now we multiply in odd months) and that was the end of it. A few days later, I think we were talking about something in Telegram/WATB and I went to look for a video and realized they had added one more, a few more minutes of mulling it over led me to what I posted earlier in the thread and that was it. I have definitely spent more time posting about it than thinking about it, and that's probably the point.
Going back to what I said about it being a social experiment, I think it's a little like those 3D pictures they used to sell at all the malls in the mid 90s, I could never see the hidden picture for the life of me in those, no matter what. I really was like the guy in Mallrats who couldn't see the sailboat in the picture, so I totally get how some people see something here and others don't.
I've thought about it, and I think in my case it was easy for me to pick out a pattern last year because a substantial part of my job (I flip burgers for the internet) involves handing out allotments of static IP addresses to our subscribers in CIDR blocks, ie. a /30 eats up 4 IP addresses, /29 is 8, /28 is 16, etc. so I spend a lot of time thinking in 4s when dividing up a class C block of IPs in my day to day life. It's basically like I was already primed for it ahead of time and I'd say maybe many people weren't.
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