![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Repo Men: So Far
I'm a bit pissed. iJournal froze on me when I first started typing this entry, so I switched into Dreamwidth's web interface to type in there, but somehow I deleted a good chunk of my entry. Edit-Undo only seems to do so much, which is basically nothing at all. Great.
Anyway, if you've been hearing about all this "Repo Men" stuff and wondering what it's all about, here's a primer: the folks at Universal Pictures, who are putting out the "Repo Men" movie starring Jude Law and Forest Whitaker on 3/19, have teamed up with Wired Magazine and Lone Shark Games to create a viral "reality game" that features four real-life people: Ciji Thorton (f - @antiforgeye), Will La Ferriere (m), Usman Akeju (m), and Alex Gamble (f) who are in possession of artiforgs, or artificial organs, made by a company called The Union. But these four are in severe arrears on paying for their handy organs, hence the hunters: repo men who are out to reclaim the artiforgs...for a price. $7,500 each, to be exact, for a grand total of $30,000 for anyone that could possibly catch all four runners.
This is a huge marketing scheme/advertisement to build up buzz about the movie, but it's also a great way to interact and make use of all the technology and new media out there. They're doing this similarly to how The Joker took over major media outlets prior to the release of "The Dark Knight," which resulted in all kinds of events from cake collecting to "I Believe in Harvey Dent" rallies. Now, it's a bit different: there's the #repomen hashtag on Twitter, folks to follow, websites to visit, barcodes to scan, and clues to decipher. All of this if and only if you sign up to be a hunter at Wired Insider.
Media outlets got a head start with a packaged delivered by The Union, containing an artiforg brain, dossiers on the runners, posters, and other stuff + info, which helped get the hunt underway. The best one is probably ARGNet, which contains a lot of good links, so check it out if you're interested in what this is all about and to get started.
The March Wired issue starts us off with a few clues:
(1) On the ad for the movie, Jude Law and Forest Whitaker have letters on the tattoos on their necks--letters which you'll notice are not present on the official movie posters, which means this is something special for the Wired mag ad and might have something to do with the contest they describe on the same page, about signing up to be a repo man/hunter. The letters are (on Whitaker): ADFORO and (on Law): CURITY.
(2) Flip through the rest of the mag until you find an AD FOR OCURITY (get it), a company that supposedly makes retinal-scanning sunglasses. Would be handy for catching Ciji, the runner with an artificial eye. There's a note at the bottom that says questions will be answered at wired.com/????? and coincidentally, five letters in the ad vertically spell out "ARGUS" which happens to be five letters fitting in our five question marks. Going to the site reveals a blog with more info on the runners, plus the tasks they have to perform for the secret organization Groundswell in order to stay off-grid. Those tasks might end up being the runners' downfall, since we know just what they are and can figure out if they've done them and where--helping us trace them.
Scanning the barcode on the same ad supposedly takes you to The Union's mobile website, but I've only heard that it works with the iPhone/iPod touch app "Red Laser," which is also hinted at in the "A" section of the OCURITY ad. When I scanned it, a UPC database site told me it was for...you guessed it, OCURITY retinal-scanning sunglasses. A.K.A. No help at all. Sad to think if I don't have an iPhone, I'm screwed out of barcode-esque clues, but I'm not holding my breath that I'll be the first to discover any clues, here.
Go to The Union website and watch the tasteless Jack Cola ad, which will have a "static" effect when you hover over it, switching to the "2057 Product Catalog" for The Union's artiforg collection. You can then see a commercial for the artiforg liver, then the product catalog including the other missing artiforgs, like the heart, eye, and kidneys.
You can watch The Union ads "on your local network" about the artiforgs, namely the liver, though there are some downright bizarre ads featuring sex and torture in-between the smiley-ladies talking about how awesome it will be to have a shiny metal liver for only $756,000.
At first I thought it was those that led to some Wizard of Oz clues, but instead, that seems to come from The Union website/product catalog, which features offer codes that are simple alphabet ciphers. They seem to indicate that each of our four runners are playing a role a'la Scarecrow, Tin Woodsman, etc. The Wikia explains. The fact that it's a cipher should have been my first guess...I'm usually pretty good at those, but others beat me to it and did so without much explanation, so I was kind of befuddled. Give me some time, I hope to catch up and get things even as they get more complex!
(When I watch the ad, I can see the following letters, in this order: E T O R A P - K F (or E) I T. I didn't see any others, but it might be because I can't pause fast enough. However, when the title screen starts to come up, there are few more barcodes, and one of them is longer: 846514846994946325568641. I tried Googling it and came up with nothing, but my barcode scanner can't scan the actual barcode. :(
The top barcode has the code D-609; can't make out the one beside it, but when Jude Law's name comes up later, he's got code: L-521, while Forest Whitaker's got code W-860. I doubt that the code starting with the same first letter as the actor's surname is a coincidence, but I don't know if it actually MEANS anything. It might tie back to the Wizard of Oz stuff, since the total letters are DLWS--the letter prefixing all the codes, including the next one.
The final title screen has barcodes scattered all over it; at least some are red herrings, as they're pretty hard to read (and I have a nice resolution on a 15" screen, so I doubt they should be IMPOSSIBLE to read at this size), but those I can are: 8754/746/413877748746797. I put the slashes in there to indicate a set of three numbers that were placed "higher up" than the rest of the numbers.
"R" and "P" both have barcodes in the letter that have the numerals 28541. Under "Men" is code: S-028 and the barcode number 63821972413877748. You'll notice that this last barcode contains the same 15 numbers as the one above it, which I doubt is a coincidence, but again, I don't really know what it means.
The "Coming Soon" bit contains a new barcode and the numbers 36146537, plus the URL to the website (where I'm watching the trailer, Repo Men Are Coming, since RepoMen.com is hosted by a squatter) and the Wired magazine link to "join the hunt."
@kylethehobo has a Flickr stream with pictures of all the runners from various ages, which will hopefully make them more recognizable to all.
You can go to the Repo Men website and Connect to Facebook and "play" repo man with your own Friends List, but the max number of artiforgs you can collect is 8. Not sure if that's in a given time period or for your account as a whole, and I don't know whether "collecting" via Facebook nets you anything, like access to a special trailer or some such.
Anyway, since I'm totally new to this, I have no idea what'll happen or when, but damn, it would be cool if those runners (or even one of them) made their way up to my neck of the woods and somehow left clues I could decipher. I could definitely use $7500, that's for sure! I'm all for helping others and working together though, so I hope this has proven helpful or at least interesting to somebody.
Barring a Heist from the MacHeist directorate anytime soon (though a nanoBundle sale is apparently coming up in 4 days), this seems like it's got the right amount of suspense and tech-based fun to keep me busy between classes, clean-up, and chores. The contest ends 3/25.
Anyway, if you've been hearing about all this "Repo Men" stuff and wondering what it's all about, here's a primer: the folks at Universal Pictures, who are putting out the "Repo Men" movie starring Jude Law and Forest Whitaker on 3/19, have teamed up with Wired Magazine and Lone Shark Games to create a viral "reality game" that features four real-life people: Ciji Thorton (f - @antiforgeye), Will La Ferriere (m), Usman Akeju (m), and Alex Gamble (f) who are in possession of artiforgs, or artificial organs, made by a company called The Union. But these four are in severe arrears on paying for their handy organs, hence the hunters: repo men who are out to reclaim the artiforgs...for a price. $7,500 each, to be exact, for a grand total of $30,000 for anyone that could possibly catch all four runners.
This is a huge marketing scheme/advertisement to build up buzz about the movie, but it's also a great way to interact and make use of all the technology and new media out there. They're doing this similarly to how The Joker took over major media outlets prior to the release of "The Dark Knight," which resulted in all kinds of events from cake collecting to "I Believe in Harvey Dent" rallies. Now, it's a bit different: there's the #repomen hashtag on Twitter, folks to follow, websites to visit, barcodes to scan, and clues to decipher. All of this if and only if you sign up to be a hunter at Wired Insider.
Media outlets got a head start with a packaged delivered by The Union, containing an artiforg brain, dossiers on the runners, posters, and other stuff + info, which helped get the hunt underway. The best one is probably ARGNet, which contains a lot of good links, so check it out if you're interested in what this is all about and to get started.
The March Wired issue starts us off with a few clues:
(1) On the ad for the movie, Jude Law and Forest Whitaker have letters on the tattoos on their necks--letters which you'll notice are not present on the official movie posters, which means this is something special for the Wired mag ad and might have something to do with the contest they describe on the same page, about signing up to be a repo man/hunter. The letters are (on Whitaker): ADFORO and (on Law): CURITY.
(2) Flip through the rest of the mag until you find an AD FOR OCURITY (get it), a company that supposedly makes retinal-scanning sunglasses. Would be handy for catching Ciji, the runner with an artificial eye. There's a note at the bottom that says questions will be answered at wired.com/????? and coincidentally, five letters in the ad vertically spell out "ARGUS" which happens to be five letters fitting in our five question marks. Going to the site reveals a blog with more info on the runners, plus the tasks they have to perform for the secret organization Groundswell in order to stay off-grid. Those tasks might end up being the runners' downfall, since we know just what they are and can figure out if they've done them and where--helping us trace them.
Scanning the barcode on the same ad supposedly takes you to The Union's mobile website, but I've only heard that it works with the iPhone/iPod touch app "Red Laser," which is also hinted at in the "A" section of the OCURITY ad. When I scanned it, a UPC database site told me it was for...you guessed it, OCURITY retinal-scanning sunglasses. A.K.A. No help at all. Sad to think if I don't have an iPhone, I'm screwed out of barcode-esque clues, but I'm not holding my breath that I'll be the first to discover any clues, here.
Go to The Union website and watch the tasteless Jack Cola ad, which will have a "static" effect when you hover over it, switching to the "2057 Product Catalog" for The Union's artiforg collection. You can then see a commercial for the artiforg liver, then the product catalog including the other missing artiforgs, like the heart, eye, and kidneys.
You can watch The Union ads "on your local network" about the artiforgs, namely the liver, though there are some downright bizarre ads featuring sex and torture in-between the smiley-ladies talking about how awesome it will be to have a shiny metal liver for only $756,000.
At first I thought it was those that led to some Wizard of Oz clues, but instead, that seems to come from The Union website/product catalog, which features offer codes that are simple alphabet ciphers. They seem to indicate that each of our four runners are playing a role a'la Scarecrow, Tin Woodsman, etc. The Wikia explains. The fact that it's a cipher should have been my first guess...I'm usually pretty good at those, but others beat me to it and did so without much explanation, so I was kind of befuddled. Give me some time, I hope to catch up and get things even as they get more complex!
(When I watch the ad, I can see the following letters, in this order: E T O R A P - K F (or E) I T. I didn't see any others, but it might be because I can't pause fast enough. However, when the title screen starts to come up, there are few more barcodes, and one of them is longer: 846514846994946325568641. I tried Googling it and came up with nothing, but my barcode scanner can't scan the actual barcode. :(
The top barcode has the code D-609; can't make out the one beside it, but when Jude Law's name comes up later, he's got code: L-521, while Forest Whitaker's got code W-860. I doubt that the code starting with the same first letter as the actor's surname is a coincidence, but I don't know if it actually MEANS anything. It might tie back to the Wizard of Oz stuff, since the total letters are DLWS--the letter prefixing all the codes, including the next one.
The final title screen has barcodes scattered all over it; at least some are red herrings, as they're pretty hard to read (and I have a nice resolution on a 15" screen, so I doubt they should be IMPOSSIBLE to read at this size), but those I can are: 8754/746/413877748746797. I put the slashes in there to indicate a set of three numbers that were placed "higher up" than the rest of the numbers.
"R" and "P" both have barcodes in the letter that have the numerals 28541. Under "Men" is code: S-028 and the barcode number 63821972413877748. You'll notice that this last barcode contains the same 15 numbers as the one above it, which I doubt is a coincidence, but again, I don't really know what it means.
The "Coming Soon" bit contains a new barcode and the numbers 36146537, plus the URL to the website (where I'm watching the trailer, Repo Men Are Coming, since RepoMen.com is hosted by a squatter) and the Wired magazine link to "join the hunt."
@kylethehobo has a Flickr stream with pictures of all the runners from various ages, which will hopefully make them more recognizable to all.
You can go to the Repo Men website and Connect to Facebook and "play" repo man with your own Friends List, but the max number of artiforgs you can collect is 8. Not sure if that's in a given time period or for your account as a whole, and I don't know whether "collecting" via Facebook nets you anything, like access to a special trailer or some such.
Anyway, since I'm totally new to this, I have no idea what'll happen or when, but damn, it would be cool if those runners (or even one of them) made their way up to my neck of the woods and somehow left clues I could decipher. I could definitely use $7500, that's for sure! I'm all for helping others and working together though, so I hope this has proven helpful or at least interesting to somebody.
Barring a Heist from the MacHeist directorate anytime soon (though a nanoBundle sale is apparently coming up in 4 days), this seems like it's got the right amount of suspense and tech-based fun to keep me busy between classes, clean-up, and chores. The contest ends 3/25.