Three Days Later

On Wednesday morning I woke up at 5:30am after having some strange (but inoffensive) dreams. I woke up to a twitter message that bothered me incredibly. Actually before I tell you about what I came across let’s pause momentarily and dwell on something I had read the week before…

Laurel Papworth wrote a fascinating article on social storytelling via Twitter. Amongst her musings on twitter as a device for storytelling was this little gem:

Erlene was involved in a car crash moments after tweeting this, and passed away at the scene. One of her friends drove past and saw erlene’s car. I find her last words oddly moving: at 3:06pm on May 24th “cats do not like elephant hats on their heads”.

I’ve known people who have been a lively part of the quote-unquote “YouTube Community” who have died; most notably Roger aka TheBoringDispatcher aka TheFailedVlogger. Call me naive if you must, but I generally take things at face value.

So with my previous experiences and reading material in mind, I woke up to this little gem from the twitter account @RandomProdInc:

The RandomProdInc Channel on YouTube is run by three people – Tom, Sam and (if we are to believe what we are told) the ill-fated Dan.

In the midst of my horror and concern, I wrote a blog post reproducing the image above. I figured nobody reads my blog anyway and since this was important and newsworthy, I would make a short (30 second) video so that those on YouTube could be informed.

Now apparently British humour is much more cutting edge than Australian humour. Apparently telling people your friend has been hit by a vehicle of some description and has died is the height of hilarity. It really is the cutting edge comedic device of the moment, apparently. (Did I use the word apparently in this paragraph enough?)

So in this time I’ve worked up a lot of people – including myself – into a real frenzy. One of my subscribers decides that the 30 second video is opportunistic and designed only to promote my blog. An ‘exchange’ takes place*. In this time I’ve tried every avenue of contacting the RPI camp to see if they can either confirm or deny the original twitter remark.

I privatised the video and the blog post (although the blog post still appeared in the RSS feed for some people). I turned off my laptop and I refused to turn it on until today; three days later.

Anyway I am happy to confirm that Dan is not dead. A message I received from RandomProdInc on YouTube reads:

Aaaaaaahhh

Sorryy

No

A group of us are faking out some drama thing thats following us. I was messaging most people who replied to me last night on twitter explaining, but i kinda started editing that proper epic movie thing and forgot

“Some drama thing thats following us.” The mind boggles. But I have had more than my fair share of drama this week. Dear Readers, if you are thinking about faking your friends’ death on Twitter – please don’t. No, really. My fragile mental state can’t deal with it. Okay? Thanks.

* I would like to talk more about this ‘exchange’ and YouTube in general, however this will have to wait for another blog post.

Tagged as: death, Twitter, YouTube