Mysterious countdown on "Pronunciation Guide" channel



Pronunciation Guide, a long-running, not-widely-viewed YouTube channel that provided guidance on English pronunciation, has turned into a weird sort of mystery. A series of daily videos have appeared in the channel, counting down from 76, and promising that "something is going to happen." The videos are accompanied by clicking noises that have been decoded as a low-rez bitmap that show the bottom part of a man's torso. This Google Doc has detailed analysis.

On CNet, Michelle Starr points to pretty good evidence that this is the start of an alternate reality game by Thomas Bender of Synydyne, who registered PronunciationBook.com the day after the channel went live. If so, it's a pretty amazingly long lead for an ARG; the Pronunciation Guide videos have been running for three years.



It's down to Day 61 at the time of this writing, and each video includes a creepy phrase, repeating "something is going to happen," followed by several seconds of strange clicking noises. Interestingly, going back through the videos, several of these strange phrases appear in his other videos: "I'm trying to tell you something, but you're just not listening" from May of last year, for example.

The clicking sounds at the end of each video have been the subject of much speculation, with many users positing that they are Morse Code. However, other users who have been studying the mystery believe it's something else again; by using spectography to convert the audio files into visual data, they've managed to create an image file that seems to reveal the lower part of a man's torso in the style of the Lord Kitchener "I Need You" army recruitment poster.


Pronunciation YouTube channel turns into a spooky mystery [Michelle Starr/CNet]