| Lost Experience: Dharma Wants You! |
| Tuesday, 29 July 2008 | |
 Sadly, Comic Con is over. Hundreds of fanboys and fangirls all across the nation are packing away their intricately crafted Wolverine costumes and homemade lightsabers for next year, but all is not lost! Rising from the burning ashes of the San Diego Conference Center, today we're greeted by the next stage in the Lost ARG. This morning's email continues the ARG by announcing the arrival of the Dharma Initiative Eligibility Test, located at www.dharmawantsyou.com. The test itself is quite simple: you're asked to identify what words you associate with a series of images and then you answer a set of hypothetical questions like "You just stole a child's toy. Why?" The answers are all multiple choice. But of course, it wouldn't be Dharma if they didn't have a trick up their sleeve... The email announcement this morning was a pleasant surprise. Gone is the hideous gold and brown of the Octagon Global Recruitment emails, replaced by a bold new look for the Dharma Initiative (a very modern look, at that):  As with previous emails, upon viewing the source code for the email, there is a hidden message in the html that points to the following YouTube video from RuckusGuy: Great shades of "God loves you as he loved Jacob"! That's a whole lotta subminal content. From various sources across the net, it's being reported that the language in the background is Icelandic, and that it's saying: "Those who come to the Dharma Initiative will have to travel a long way across the sea at a considerable speed. Work will include being outdoors and physical labor. You may also experience some [instability of time along the way]. Hopefully you, like many others, feel that your social duty is more important than your personal safety."I've taken the liberty of compiling the extra frames that appear in the video and arranged them for your viewing pleasure below: Going to www.dharmawantsyou.com brings up the eligibility test I mentioned above...  ...which as far as I can tell, it's impossible to fail. The images it shows you are exactly the same as the ones hidden in the video. However, some of the text images ("Who is your constant?") are from the actual test administered in person at Comic Con, and don't appear elsewhere. It doesn't matter what answer you pick, or how many different ways you try it, you will always pass (obviously because they want people to join the next stage of the game). However, after completing the test it asked me to register. I filled in my information completely, uploaded a pic of myself for my avatar, and then hit submit... and it failed. No matter how many times I tried it, I kept getting an error message saying "Problem with Registration - Deleting Temp Avatar - Code is not well formed". I'm hoping that the registration problems are just a symptom of the massive traffic the site is receiving (the email went out today and the site is getting hammered) and not some kind of tricky pseudo-test to access the next area of the site, but you never know. In addition, "RuckusGuy" also managed to capture the following video which is currently just blowing my mind: In it, Dr. Marvin Candle breaks the illusion and admits who he is and what he's working on. The spooky parts are that the film is from 30 years in the past, sent to the present to warn us about "The Purge" and to request that the Dharma Initiative be reconstituted and it's work continued. He also mentions that he and the others are unable to escape their destiny, which could mean that the Purge is part of the theorized time loop the island may be in. Last season, I hypothesized that Ben and Widmore had been through this scenario time and time again, which is why Ben thought Alex was safe. However, when Alex died Ben realized that Widmore had somehow managed to "change something" resulting in the predetermined events being changed. The voice behind the camera sounds remarkably like Daniel Faraday. My guess is that he uses the island to travel back and film Candle's plea, then finds a way to transmit it to the present. The big question is: why? What's Dharma up to? Does God love you as he loved Jacob? Who's behind the camera in the Candle video? Post a comment and let us know! Comments (3)
  berkyo wrote...
Nice work. Thanks for putting it all in one spot. i have started a pc folder/file on these things but it is as haphazard as my hand written notes.
|| July 29, 2008
berkyo wrote...
Hi, me again. I think there is just a boatload of people who slept late after being up all night waiting and they are swamped at the site.
|| July 29, 2008
 Peter wrote...
@berkyo - Thank you. I do what I can.
 I've been browsing forums and it looks like a wide-spread problem, so I'm going to try it again later when the traffic dies down a little. I may even film it and post the video here for those of us who don't want to take the test themselves (although I don't know why they wouldn't).
http://www.bleepinggeek.com || July 29, 2008
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