mfw all these NEETs googling erabbits because they have no jobs to get fired from
Part one is here.
So something a little bit funny happened while I was working on this part- I went to the active 8chan thread on Erratas to ask about the autocaptions thing, and when I came back the next day... boom. Thread not found.
Now this isn't entirely unusual. The thread was fairly old, and while 8chan seems to move a lot more slowly than 4chan I expect they also prune old threads that have been pushed to the bottom of the stack by more active ones. But still, that's some amazing timing...
The 404 page text refers to the April 1st hacking even though this clearly isn't the cause, but I'm going to assume that's an oversight.
https://archive.is/dbQ2Y
https://archive.is/9HUx8
So, welcome back to Erratas, the incredibly erratic (hurr hurr) internet mystery covering everything from massive corporate conspiracies to copyright-claimed Lincoln Park anime videos. Here we will continue to dig into various leads, find more connections, and invent danker memes than ever before. And as always, no one has any idea what any of it is supposed to mean.
ChronosforLife
Attached to the ChronosForLife youtube page is a Google+ account under the name of "Lee Watson". The page's only post is an image of the AOL logo, posted on October 15th. This same image is used as the avatar for the ChronosForLife channel. Additionally the posters in the mom's videos have the phrase "AOL keyword: Jurassic Park".
Thinking the Lee Watson name is an anagram ala Tod Ellsworth, I took the letters of AOL out of it and found the remaining letters could be arranged to read "newest".
So my theory is that we were supposed to look for the newest results for the AOL keywords "Jurassic Park"... But I have no idea if that's actually possible anymore. Other anons in the threads from that time suggested this as well, based on the posters, but no one seems to have tried it.
One anon examined the audio from CFL's videos and discovered that the first two had a different audio format from the other three- the first two had full stereo, while the others had dual mono (where there's two tracks, but they're entirely identical). This might support the videos being made by two different people, ie Chronos and his mom.
I've also seen mention that one anon looked at the codecs of the videos and determined they were legitimately made on a Windows 95/98 computer. However, I've yet to find the original post about this, nor do I have any way of verifying it myself.
Speaking of Chronos' videos-
At some point, DJ Rozwell had commented on one of the Deep Internet songs made from CFL's video "i hope things turn out okay for that guy and his mom". The comment is now gone.
Tod Ellsworth
https://archive.rebeccablacktech.com/mu/thread/S62062952
One intrepid anon decides to confront Tod head-on and posts a comment asking what "erratas or bust" means.
... And, about a day later, the phrase was removed. It was soon after re-added as "Erratas or busts", and later changed further to "Erratas or rusts". It's noted this phrase is an anagram of book title Sartor Resartus... which seems to have nothing to do with Erratas. Others believe the phrase would keep adding and changing letters until it became "erratas or eratas" from CFL's fourth video, but no changes are made after this.
Tod makes a new post to his Twitter, a short video of a computer-animated George Bush head. The footage was apparently taken from a video uploaded to Youtube the day before demonstrating a program named "face2face", recorded off a computer screen using a smartphone camera. The significance is unknown.
Uploaded to his Youtube account at the same time was a "666 Trapslime" remix of a Gorrillaz song... which was blocked in most countries for copyright. The thumbnail featured the much-parodied album cover for Gorillaz' Demon Days, with the lower right quadrant replaced by the police sketch. The description:
Classic track from his deleted Soundcloud. (What ever happened to Trapslime anyway? He was just blowing up!)
The track originated from the Soundcloud track of one "greenboots" aka Beatrice Moss, a member of the KFC Murder Chicks. As such, the video description referring to Trapslime as "he" seems a bit... odd. A reasonable assumption if Tod didn't know who Trapslime was, maybe...
One anon was able to download the video via proxy and reupload it with no copyright issues.
KFCMC's tumblr and lost Bandcamp page
While their Tumblr still links to it, KFCMC's Bandcamp page has apparently been deleted since before the Tumblr page was found by 4chan. On March 08, the page briefly went back up before being taken down again. One anon thought to look for a cached version of the page, and found... hooooo boy.
http://archive.4plebs.org/x/thread/17484964/#17497616
Styled in an eye-comforting fuchsia on chartreuse, the text describes the album as... a video game, one based on the novel Cortex Rampage (the name of the album) by one Tod Ellsworth. Billed as "the first truly interactive gaming experience", this "game" has you engaging in "vehicular combat" while flying a Ford Crown Victoria... which, you know, is a car, not anything that can fly.
Interspersed in the bullet point list of features are lines from the Mall of America telling BLM protestors to fuck off as well as bizarre comments about nuclear weapons not existing and the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki having been faked.
Yeah, you're probably best off just reading it yourself.
The track list itself is relatively normal. PSNEAKYSYS, previously seen on the album uploaded by Tod, has been theorized to mean "pretty sneaky system" as a reference to Erratas. Track 14 is from a collab with /mu/tant Soma, which was mentioned previously on 4chan during the time when it was made; I'll be covering that in the next part.
Another track is said to have been distributed on a February 2007 Official Playstation Magazine demo disc... which, assuming they don't mean the Ireland edition of the zine, wouldn't exist as the magazine went defunct in January of that year. The title, "Heart of Lothar", is a reference to some piece of Doom development lore.
So clearly some of this is just nerd jokes and the Chicks being artistically weird, but there's still some points of note... mainly, the mention of our good old friend Tod. So there's yet another unexplained and unexplainable connection, but that's not what really blew minds.
Intruigued, anons went searching and found that Tod Ellsworth really is the name of an author- specifically one who wrote a short story for a Space: 1999 fanzine ... way back in motherfucking 1979. What the fuck? Is this an insane coincidence, or does the rabbit hole really go this deep?
The fabled Kentucky autocaptions address was apparently on their Bandcamp at some point before it was put on their Tumblr, but I'm still having a hard time detangling the timeline and determining if it was there before it showed up in the video.
Incidentally there's a semi-recent post on their Tumblr replying to an ask, saying they'd try to get the page back up again. That was two months ago now. It's still down.
Speaking of their Tumblr-
The vast majority of their posts are "aesthetic" shit- gifs of grainy VHS footage from old "retro"/outdated looking shit. It's an internet subculture thing I'm not sure how to explain. It's just... a thing.
Some pages back they reblog a review of their music, saying they made the blog in the first place for things like this but got sidetracked. This honestly seems like normal behavior.
At some point they apparently had a post explaining that they don't want to ship physical products because they distrust the post office because of "scandals". This post is gone, but remaining (currently page 3) is a post where they explain further... without explaining much.
Anonymous: What about the post office gives you the creeps? I've used it a couple of years now and they seem to be fine, just curious lol :)
this is probably a controversial view, but there’s a lot to suggest they’re tied in with a lot of the government’s more unsavory activities: spying, profiling, general disregard for constitutional rights, all that fun stuff. lots of stuff sent to us, an inordinate amount really, has never made it, and vice-versa. (not to say i’m in favor of the way they got fucked over by the fedex and UPS lobbies either, though)
... for some reason, archive.is for a while refused to archive some pages of their blog. I don't know if that's a problem with tumblr/archive or some erratic meme magic at work. They're archived now, but...
https://archive.is/http://kfcmurderchicks.tumblr.com/*
Also notable on their Tumblr:
- random dinosaur gifs/images; for example there's two on page 2
- lots of X-Files screenshots and gifs, mainly of Mulder and Scully
- "Anonymous: Have you ever been to hawaii?" "As a band? No."
- "this youtube vid was a huge formative influence on us most likely kfc murder chicks would not exist without the atari teenage riot x spawn AMV"- sounds like the sort of "anime Lincoln Park AMVs" Chronos mentioned and the tribute videos his mom produced.
- Right after reblogging a photo of stacks of VHS boxes from a random blog, "Anonymous: Very random, but what your favorite movie?" "i’ve always been a big fan of the carnosaur movies." "Carnosaur" is apparently referring to a series of JP knockoff movies.
- "Anonymous: What do you know about Erratas?" "uhhhh like magic/yu-gi-oh errata…?"
Beyond that, it's all aesthetic shit for like 16 pages. And also... uh, whining about anti-SJWs?... Well, it is tumblr, after all.
Exer Erb
In late March of 2016, a youtuber named Exer Erb appeared on the scene and began covering Erratas. He apparently made some good headway over the course of multiple videos- it's hard to say, because in early May, his channel vanished.
Now of course, people on the internet can vanish for any reason, but given the timing and context it struck people as more than a little bit suspicious. With Chronos' story about the removal of his mom's videos and the copyright claim on Tod's newest video, it was easy to declare that Exer had been hit with the Erratas stick for knowing too much.
Only his first video on Erratas, as well as a video on another 4chan mystery called "Hekate Station", are known to have been saved.
Some anons came to believe Exer was "behind" Erratas, with many of these accusations coming in a thread just days before Exer was found to have deleted his channel. One piece of evidence for this was the "weird russian site" shown in his third video on Erratas (ie the second update)- this being a torrent tracker site where a lost KFCMC album was found. However, the webpage was apparently found on /x/ before the video was made, and not likely some secret insider knowledge Exer accidentally let slip.
Youtuber Toxicologist discusses Exer's disappearance. Due to the similarities in their channel content (spooky internet lore and text-to-speech), some also believe Toxi is secretly Exer, but there's no real signs of that being the case. Toxi hasn't covered Erratas beyond his first video, so it's not like he's milking it.
It's also important to note that Exer did not cover the Erratas event exclusively, apparently having videos on all sorts of /x/ lore. Before Erratas, he also covered This House Has People In It in a video that seems to have been posted fairly often on /x/; he's referred to as "the guy who made that THHPIT video".
One anon gives an alternate theory, that researching Hekate Station (the subject of his last video before deletion) might have driven him insane.
The 4chan bans
At the same time, once the Erratas story had gone viral (or whatever the 4chan equivalent of "viral" is; I believe it might be "cancer"), anons started being banned for bringing up the topic. Threads about it in /x/ would be shut and 404'd unceremoniously, and the belief spread that "erratas" had become kind of an internet Candlejack- you say it too many times, and the mods know to come for you. Of course this clearly wasn't the case since some threads on it would stay up, but enough were getting nuked to spread the idea.
Not helping was the fact that, while most users were banned for "spam/flooding"- as you'd expect if the offense was bringing the same damn topic up over and over again- some received a ban reason message of "copyright infringement".
Of course this is rather hard to verify since nuked threads and banned users mostly don't make it to the archives, but there are mentions of it:
https://8ch.net/x/res/21600.html
http://archive.4plebs.org/x/thread/17296804/#17296804
http://archive.4plebs.org/x/thread/17699693/#17699693
Now once again this could have had a perfectly normal explanation- the mods could have been messing with people or could just have gotten fed up with the subject- but the context made it incredibly paranoia-inducing.
For bonus "fun", a much older thread that mentions "erratas" in a much more typical context, with an OP complaining about mods deleting threads... :P
http://archive.4plebs.org/x/thread/12985393/#12985393
This about wraps up the events and information from the "active" period of the... thing. For the next post I'll be delving deep into the 4chan archives, in search of the roots of DJ Rozwell as well as any missed details. As such the next post is going to take much, much longer than this one... Please, hang around.