Crowley, Gibson, the occult, and LonelyGirl15

The mystery (or hype) surrounding YouTuber hot hit LonelyGirl15's authenticity has extended into the bizarro via Brian Flemming's Weblog.

I blogged about her last month in my kid geniuses or fakes post.

For some time, YouTubers have been crying foul about her and who she purports to be. Whatever is the "truth", I get sucked into the video responses and comments every time she posts.

But check out Brian F's musings. He links to William Gibson's most recent novel which I read ages ago - Pattern Recognition. I had forgotten about it until I spotted his post from Friday.

Cayce Pollard is an expensive, spookily intuitive market-research consultant. In London on a job, she is offered a secret assignment: to investigate some intriguing snippets of video that have been appearing on the Internet. An entire subculture of people is obsessed with these bits of footage, and anybody who can create that kind of brand loyalty would be a gold mine for Cayce's client. But when her borrowed apartment is burgled and her computer hacked, she realizes there's more to this project than she had expected.

Indeed. Even Alice over at Wonderland is wondering whether LG15 is in fact an Alternate Reality Game.

In her latest video, LG15 talks about some religious ceremony she has been chosen to take part in. Her parents are not allowed to see her take part in it and she has to diet and "memorise stuff" for it.

Now this has just got the commenters cracking out the occultist conspiracies all over again. Religious rantings are dotted all over the shop. Brian F points out a number of inconsistencies to the "story" and her vids too - some of which I had not really noticed before. But most interesting is the theory that her religion is linked to occultist, Aleister Crowley. Indeed, one commenter suggested she was going to be taking part in this.*

What's great about this is that everyone wants to be detective and everyone has a theory. I spent a good two hours comparing the alleged Aleister Crowley photo on her wall with ones on Google images. That was after reading up on him and other occult/cult activities. (Update: I went back to the video on 6 August where you can see the picture - it is this one to the right. Check it out. It is above the candles at 1min 52 secs in)

God help me if my search history ever get published "by accident".

Whatever the truth is, whether it is a clever ARG, a marketing campaign, some clever kids having fun, or some cult's attempt to indoctrinate YouTubers, it's much more fun than the shite on telly.** And yes, by blogging about it, and hitting on all those Crowley pics, the "campaign" or whatever it is, is working innit.

*Oh, and remember her "friend" is called Daniel. Or DanielBeast on YouTube. Those subscribing to the "she's a satanist" theory are delighted with this.
**Well, in-between Kath and Kim, and Dragon's Den, that is.