max2019: that pornbot ARG

despite the title, this arg is entirely safe for work! here's a place to talk about everything we know so far, theories, updates, discoveries, anything like that!

to start off, i'll post what we know so far. do let me know if i missed anything (almost certainly) or got anything wrong! switching into proper syntax for readability.

So, the ARG started when popular blogs started receiving messages from what looked like an ordinary pornbot with the URL sexygirlmax2019. Only, the messages they were receiving were anything but standard pornbot fare. They were things like "hey peebrain- you teleport?" "hi pea for brains...can you teleport?"

The links sent are also unusual, and lead to this neocities page. At that point in time, most (if not all?) of the "[thing] me here" links didn't exist. The "remember Anita" link also wasn't there. The page begins with:

I believe that the page used to say 'click here to instantly teleport" as opposed to "transport" but I'm not sure. It also has a dead video feed, an image of a woman, and more text.

Spoiler: textwall discussing the neocities page

All the [x] me here lines are links, along with the image of the woman. If you click the image of the woman, it takes you to /seraphim.html, with an image of a bare-legged woman sitting on a car. The text reads "Click here to instantly"

That takes you to /cherubim.html, with a staticky image and high-pitched audio. The audio displays the same image of a woman's legs, if run through an SSTV converter. The site text once again says "Click here to instantly."

That takes you to /firstsphere/thrones.html and displays an even more corrupted image. The text reads "Click here." This takes us to /secondsphere/dominions.html, which initially displayed four identical images of an eye, seemingly drawn in mspaint. Now, the fourth image is one of a cartoonishly drawn angel girl with blonde hair, holding a yellow flower. That fourth image is the link. This page has no text.

The next page is /secondsphere/powers.html and has the same image of the angel girl, along with text which reads:

This time, the image of the angel is named "max1.png"

The next three pages progress in similar fashion, with the same text. The angel image is steadily more corrupted as we progress. First we start off with /secondsphere/light1.html and max2.png, then /secondsphere/light2.html and max3.png, and then /secondsphere/light3.html and max4.png. This takes us to /secondsphere/virtues.html, which is a black screen with the text "connection lost" as a link.

This is where things start to get interesting. This takes us to thirdsphere/principalities.html, which has an image of an angel and a human called wrestling.gif. (I've heard from my Local Angel Nerd that this painting is Samael wrestling with Jacob). In the gif, the angel disappears briefly. The page has text on it which reads:

If you inspect the source code, this page also includes hovertext saying "it hurts" and text reading "Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst make me clean." That line is the leper's prayer from Luke 5:12 of the King James Bible.

After that page, the next is/thirdsphere/archangels.html. It has an image of an angel and a woman (Angel Nerd and googling inform me that this is Gabriel and Mary, specifically the Annunciation.) The image is corrupted and spliced with a street, and again the angel briefly disappears. The text reads "Click here to go to a happier place."

This takes us to /thirdsphere/angels.html. On this page, there is an image of a guardian angel standing over two children (Bernhard Plockhorst's The Guardian Angel, specifically). The image is corrupted and, for a third time, the angel briefly disappears. The tab has a specific webpage title, unlike the other pages--this one says "found you". The page reads "Being present for a child's growth and development is very important." The link leads to this tumblr which I'll talk about indepth later. Inspecting the source reveals text from Luke 5:13 in the King James Bible, reading "I will; be thou clean."

That's where that specific chain ends. I'll make more posts later going into depth on what I know about the other links on the neocities page, lovely5500, and the other tumblr blogs we're aware of (sexygirlmax2019 and sceneteenz) when I have the spoons. Go ahead and talk and share what you know though!

 

Alright, going through the rest of the neocities page. There's a lot of useful info on max2019arg.tumblr.com, but it's all kind of disjointed and smattered with the usual tumblr discourse, so ymmv on how useful it is.

Spoiler: another neocities textwall

/cherubim.html's SSTV image changed to this:

/secondsphere/virtues.html apparently briefly displayed an image called "Celeste" that displayed part of an angel girl with blonde hair and a halo.

"See me here." leads to /documentation.html, which displays an image titled purify.jpg, along with more audio. If you inspect the page source, you can also find this image. I brightened it in image editing software, and it appears to be a stormy sky over flat black ground.

"Hear me here." leads to /hearme.html, with another vocaroo recording, and text below reading "I'm so sick." over and over again.

Apparently there was a page called /secondcircle/thirdcircle.html, but this no longer leads anywhere. When it did, it played audio that decoded into this SSTV image. Follow the url in that image, and it leads to another image--this time of an angel with meme text overlaid on it that reads "I NEED TO GET TO ANITA BEFORE SHE ENDS UP LIKE CELESTE."

"Smell me here." links to this tumblr post by sceneteenz. The text reads:

The symptoms list originally did not have any bolded lines--that's new.

"Touch and talk to me here." links to this video post on lovely5500. The audio in that video resulted in this sstv image of a frog.

The stream on the neocities homepage was briefly live, and people captured this still.

/secondcircle/thirdcircle.html apparently was live at one point, and led to this page. I'm not entirely clear on how people got to this or the next two pages, so if anyone knows fill me in! /secondcircle/secondcircle.html is a red page with another image of four red eyes seemingly drawn in mspaint, this time with each eye weeping. The text reads "Interrupted." /DAYONE.html contains this text:

Per Dante, the second circle of hell is Lust. Important to note, since this started with a pornbot!

/DAYTWO.html was added recently (6/24/18) and contains this text:

/DAYTHREE.html has been added as a page on the site, but is so far empty.

The "Remember Anita." link leads to /internetconnections.html, which has a list of links labeled by month and year, from January 2009 to April 2018. They go through multiple pop culture references for each time period (including...oh boy...mspaintadventures.com, dirkjake deviantart fanfiction, "You Can't Fight The Homestuck" youtube video, and Octopimp's "magic cupcakes" youtube video.). The links also include a sexuality quiz. The text on this page reads "Anita and Max's internet memories" at the top, and "This is truly the experience of a contemporary guardian angel." at the bottom.

The final link under April 2018 leads to this art piece. Google tells me the Annunciation refers to when the angel Gabriel informed Mary she was pregnant. This is, therefore, the second time the annunciation has been referenced in this ARG. The vocaroo embed on this page plays minecraft music.

I think that's everything on the neocities page, so next I'll go through sexygirlmax2019 I think?

 

Alright, so, sexygirlmax2019.tumblr.com, as stated upthread, started by messaging people and asking if they could teleport. Her posts on her own blog start off like pornbot posts, and gradually get more eloquent/branch out slightly.

Spoiler: all of sexygirlmax2019's tumblr posts

Post one:

Post two and three:

Post four:

Post five:

Post six:

private-cams.site is an actual link, although /teleportation-methods is not.

Post seven:

Post eight:

Post nine:

Post ten:

Post eleven:

Spoiler: sexygirlmax2019's messages

When messaged (you can no longer message her unless she's following you), she would send various stock messages like:

When a user messaged and asked about Anita, she said:

[the user asked about Anita again]

When asked about Celeste, she had this to say:

 

The messages did originally say teleport.

I admit I’m just a bit suspicious of how quickly the image decryption happened. Like if I’d put this much time and effort into something like this I’d definitely have a friend or two in the know if not a sock. Once people get the idea about the images then of course they’ll jump on that, but does anyone really get a link to a disconcerting webpage and go, hmmm, better run all these images through this software I conveniently have handy in case of steganography?

 

ONWARD. Next up is lovely5500.tumblr.com--this is revealed pretty quickly to be Anita, per her sidebar.

Here is Anita's about; various gifs at the bottom have changed. (a rotating angel statue, a ZZZ gif, two more at least although I'm not sure what they were). I believe it also originally said that she "liked angels, beanie babies, and apple pie~"

Anita seems to have started this blog sometime around six months ago, which lines up with the December 2017 tumblr link on the neocities /internetconnections.html. She mostly just reblogged memes (including a SBAHJ meme. help me lord.), until two days ago when she first started making personal posts. I'm not going to catalog the posts before that, or the unrelated image posts she queues up, but fwiw she does seem to queue mostly pictures of cats, dogs, frogs, beanie babies, and angels.

Spoiler: all of anita's personal posts and asks

Post one:

Post two:

Post three:

Post four:

Post five:

Post six:

Enricks appears to be a different, older ARG. How much it is or is not related to max2019 is debatable. Enricks is unrelated.

Post seven:

Post eight:

Post nine:

Post ten:

Post eleven:

Post twelve:

Post thirteen:

Post fourteen:

Post fifteen:

Post sixteen:

Post seventeen:

Post eighteen:

Post nineteen:

Post twenty:

Boy that's a lot of fucking Zalgo!

Post twenty-one is this video post discussed upthread.

Post twenty-two:

Post twenty-three:

Post twenty-four, Zalgo Boogaloo:

Post twenty-five is an image of a stormy sky, with the following caption:

Post twenty-six:

Post twenty-seven:

Post twenty-eight:

Anita also has a sidebar link titled ":3" which apparently at one point led to a kitten livestream. Later, it led to a dead-end URL on her blog titled "shes-going-to-find-me-soon." Now it leads to a similar dead-end URL titled "my-room."

AGH I FORGOT TO PUT THIS IN, ETA:
when messaged, anita says she has a brother here:

 

yeah, good point! i'm interested in ARGs and like to keep tabs on new ones, but i haven't even heard of SSTV before this, it's definitely sus.

 

From the Enricks site:

Spoiler: images

The last six numbers are hex. Guess what color it corresponds to? Look rather like anything at all?



So I don’t know what the significance of a blue key is, but I guess the rest of the numbers are the blue key?

 

Steganography isn't really out of place in an ARG, I assume. I know I'd personally have tried that out if I actually got involved in stuff like this, but the reason I'm not actually doing that is precisely that I'm kinda paranoid and have weird pattern-matching.
SSTV is also not really out of place, and it's not exactly hard to identify a SSTV signal even from audio.

 

I actually do have image encryption/decryption software... somewhere, because I studied it in college. I can barely be bothered to view source to see if there’s anything in the html so maybe I’m not the best measure of this, but I just cannot imagine going to that kind of bother without a pretty good reason to expect you’ll find something. If anything vaguely suspicious sets off your need to scan an image, you’re gonna get burnt out extremely fast by all the disappointment of millions of totally normal images. I dunno.

 

ack, edited the lovely5500 with an image I forgot to add. ON TO SCENETEENZ.

Spoiler: sceneteenz's non-ask posts

Their first post is this sickness stench post discussed upthread.

Post two:

Post three:

Post four:

Post five:

Post six:

Post seven:

sceneteenz then went on to answer asks. The next two posts are after closing their askbox.

Post eight:

Post nine:

Post ten:

Here is sceneteenz's new avatar. (The previous was one of the tumblr defaults--specifically the pyramid one this avatar is based off of).


ETA: new day, new posts by sceneteenz. feels pretty endgame-y.

Post eleven:

Post twelve:

Post thirteen:

Post fourteen:

Spoiler: sceneteenz's answered asks

Ask one:

Ask two:

This one was edited--the "anymore" was not there originally.

Ask three:

Ask four:

Ask five:

Ask six:

(big kin worm mood hat)

Ask seven:

Ask eight:

Ask nine:

sceneteenz has since closed their askbox.
thaaaat should be everything so far?

 

oh no, people who are super into arg puzzles like this think of all sorts of insane shit to try. It boggles my mind. Some of them have seen or done dozens of ARG games, they know most of the common tricks by now and then go through them whenever you're presented with new info. Plus they can sometimes tell when a certain puzzle is in effect. When a good ARG community has formed and shares information (and with how this has blown up, there probably is one by now), it can get really hard to stump them for more than a day. And once someone tries a thing once and gets results, they know to try that thing again.

A sock or a friend is possible but I also totally believe its just people who do a lot of puzzle ARGs

 

good point, yeah. i've been following hiimmarymary lately and there was--i thought--a really wild puzzle in there a bit back that required you apply a specific photoshop filter to a specific image, and the community solved that super fast.

the max2019 community is pretty huge! apparently the discord already has more than 1000 people in it--i'm scared to go in X3

 

also, there are people who will Absolutely just go put stuff in SSTV decoders or whatever, even stuff from like, video games


i know this because SSTV stuff was discovered hidden in game content or files in portal 2, cuphead, and undertale, just in games i've played or been really into

 

That’s totally fair! It was more that the timeline between anyone realizing there even was anything other than a weird pornbot and the image stuff being solved seemed oddly short, but I may have my chronology wrong.

 

anyone got any THEORIES?

i think it's pretty obvious by now that max is anita's guardian angel. probably separated from anita sometime in april 2018 (something happened then? sceneteenz says april is "always grim" and the /internetconnections.html page doesn't have any other entries in april except for that last post. maybe celeste died in april?) max is stuck in limbo, and managed to climb her way out of the second circle of hell.

max probably has sickness stench. i'm...not sure if anita has sickness stench? /DAYONE.html says "Anita's symptom's are not related" so...enricks????!?!? maybe???
but on the other hand...the zalgo text, the damp spots on the couch in the video...are those from anita, or from max trying to get to her? what's the significance of the annunciation? WHY IS THERE SO MUCH DAMN HOMESTUCK?!

 

Thanks so much for this!

Spoiler: Enricks site translation from Reddit

Google Translation of the Front Page

Enricks a complex disease that can be devastating to the individual as well as family members. Patients will receive adequate support and counseling are useful in the fight against disease Gomex is the medical term that is often thrown patients suffering Enricks it is very important to understand the medical before. any further progress plan is Enricks Gomex the growth of glandular tissue in the human body.

Gomex planned to occur as a result of genetic mutations in the cells of the glandular tissue. Genetic mutations cause a significant change in the growth of normal cells may be abnormal structure and configuration of cells in Gomex plan may appear to be pseudo-stratified and often irregular in shape Gomex. The plan is good or bad, depending on the activity in the cells. Almost all types of plans in the state before Enricks Gomex with pronounced changes in cancer cells.

Plan Gomex also be the source of tumor pituitary plans Gomex, Gomex plan Gomex kidney, liver Gomex, breast Gomex, bronchial Gomex and many other thyroid Gomex plan also affects the endocrine. tubular exocrine glands in the human body. Some of the most modern methods of treatment is non-invasive and painless, depending on the stage of progression of the disease. Therefore, it is important to spread knowledge about the disease in order to avoid complications.

After that, each time you click the picture afterwards, the Google Translations become completely unreadable. I think it might say the same thing in Thai as it does on the front page, but with each picture click it is just uhh, Zalgofied a little bit more, making the translations weird as funk.

Google Translation of the "Contacts" Page

If you have trouble viewing our website or log on to online banking to access your current browser is up to date. Banks, Internet service provider does not support Internet Explorer 5 for the site was not created to support the use of Internet Explorer 5 on both the website and Enricks, Internet Explorer supports 3, 4, and 5, and Firefox 2 and 3, but if you with high knowledge of computers and do not know the browsers are not recommended to upgrade to Internet Explorer 5 also I have found many sites for downloading still beta and does not support the use of Internet. Explorer 5.

So to summarize slash check that I understand the plot

So far we have

Anita: presumably human girl, likely early twenties going by the internet culture timeline 15 according to Tumblr bio, likes cute things and popular internet culture, is currently sick with Lynks Enricks/sickness stench, lovely5500.tumblr.com, a Homestuck

Enricks: causes Zalgo text and eventual death, needs help from a guardian angel to cure, might be the same as sickness stench?

Max: Anita's guardian angel, trying to reach her but can't for some reason, in Limbo, the owner of sexymax tumblr and neocities site? possibly also a Homestuck

Guardian angels: known as Hierarchy of Uniform Resource Locators, everyone has one, use the internet and image puzzles to communicate these days

sceneteenz: knows a lot about angels, a former/fallen angel?, possibly Max?, if they are Max, they communicate more clearly and directly than on the neocities site and sexyman tumblr

Celeste: existed probably, dead?, ???

ETA: updating my understanding

 

no prob! it helped me sort things out in my head too, and i got to indulge SPERG URGE TO SORT

HA, I WAS THINKING LYNKS TOO
anita says in her about that she's fifteen and seems pretty immature, but if that's true she definitely read homestuck at a, uh, tender age...
(nine year olds please don't read homestuck. don't do it)

i'm nooooot sure if enricks = sickness stench, but it definitely could be.

i am also not sure if sceneteenz is max, it's really confusing on that front. there's some stuff that makes me think it's max (DAYONE.html, most notably), but otherwise they seem weirdly...detached, compared to max's desperation

i think H.U.R.L. might be all angels in general, not just guardian angels, but i'm also not sure on that

 

$20 says that the creator is a fan of or aware of Night Mind. Honestly I was surprised that there wasn't a reference to Slenderman in the internet culture timeline especially since Jeff the Killer was there in both serious and meme form.

oh shit yeah her bio did say that (aaaaaaa so much info to keep track of, this is what makes args hard for me) but like...that means she was 5 when she started getting into internet culture which seems a little too young for me (I say like there's not video evidence that I was using the internet at 3 but in my defense i was playing flash games on Disney or something not following internet culture) but that's probably just that kids are getting into online cultures sooner these days.

I thought they had the the same symptoms but the way the enrick's site is written with the repeating Gomex fucks up my word processing so I could be wrong on that.

yeah! like "I saw Anita I updated sceneteenz blog for productivity..." indicates that Max is sceneteenz but everything else suggests otherwise. I think we need more info here.

oh yeah good point. rn guardian angels and angels are interchangeable in my head until we have more than one kind of angel to deal with.

Clearly the most important info we should try to find out is what Anita and Max's favorite Homestuck characters are

 

agreed on all fronts
relatedly, the saddest sadstuck of all: night mind is aware of this arg and is uninterested. ;; big bummer for me just because i sometimes have trouble following all the different plot threads and NM's summaries help a lot with that, but oh well!

no worries!
yeah, she'd have to have started using the internet as a tiiiiny. i thought maybe an older sibling was helping, but apparently she only has a younger brother??? i mean, i remember helping my lil sib around the internet when they were 6/7, but...that was supervised and not really the kind of stuff that anita seemed to be into. i'm wondering if maybe error on the creator's part?

man, enricks confused the shit out of me, same hat. i'm gonna go look at it again because i don't remember any symptoms mentioned but i absolutely could have missed it.

agree 100%, this is one of the areas where i think we have a lot of clues and questions but not enough to start drawing any real conclusions [thinking emoji]

The Most Vital Question Of Them All.

 

Same hat! I'm only caught up with and understanding EMH and TT for the first time bc of his recent livestreams. I'm hoping the plot will kick in big time later and he'll get interested. He's covered things he wasn't initially interested in before. I'm sure he gets tweeted every arg trailhead in morse code and doesn't get into things until there's substantial plot bc otherwise he'd never have time to actually make videos. (i think it was actually someone on Kintsugi who first linked me to NM)

I know a couple who's small child is (or was) very into Minecraft and Five Nights at Freddy internet culture and that's probably largely bc her parents are internet people too. So maybe Anita's parents got her into it young. especially since the early memories are mostly silly internet videos

I'm joking but also lbr you know things if someone's answer to that is Vriska or Eridan