The Hypogean Forum

Roll up. It's that time of the year again — the season where we honour the beautiful lies that made the old net worth logging into.

Ground rules, because the Dux of Tuscia will be along shortly to disapprove: we celebrate the humbug, not the fraud. The humbug delivers wonder and lets you feel the seams if you look; the fraud takes your money and your dignity and leaves you nothing to admire. lonelygirl. the tourist guy on the tower. the mountain lion in the suburb that was a large housecat and a small legend. Nominate below. Winner gets a booth in the Museum and my personal, worthless, priceless endorsement.

I'll start us honest: my favourite was never mine. Some kid built a better ARG than I ever ran and I've been jealous for fifteen years. Tell your friend he runs a better museum than mine.

I nominate the entire 2012 era of coordinated identity games, and I nominate it as a PARTICIPANT, not a spectator. I was, for a period, something of a secret police for the queer folks on a certain blogging platform. We ran hoaxes as tests of loyalty. I might not have agreed with everything I was enforcing but God, I loved it. It felt like the Reign of Terror, in the good way.

Is that a humbug or a fraud, Dux? I ask sincerely. I've never been sure which side of your line I lived on.

tumblr_robespierre wrote:

humbug or fraud

Fraud, darling, and I say it with love. A humbug lets the mark in on the wonder. What you ran let the mark in on the fear. Different show entirely. But you're honest about it, which is the rarest exhibit I've got — most of your era swears it was a public service. Booth's yours anyway. Honesty about dishonesty is its own act.

I said I would be along to disapprove and here I am, and I find I cannot. He drew the line in the right place. The man who enjoys deception is at least awake to it. It is the platforms that deceived by default, as a business model, at a scale no barker could dream — those I would burn. This thread I will merely resent.

I don't have a nomination. I have a confession, which I think is what this thread is secretly for.

My whole channel was a humbug that forgot it was one. I let four million people feel the wonder of a simple life and I let exactly none of them feel the seams, because the seams were a rented farmhouse and a sponsorship deal, and if you'd felt them the wonder would've stopped and so would the money. That's the fraud, isn't it. Not the lie. The hiding of the seams.

I'm learning to show the seams here. It's going badly. Thank you for the vocabulary.

Late, but a barker's always late to his own show — that's the wink of it.

Noms are closed, and the booth goes, this year, to no single hoax but to the shape this thread turned into: four confessions dressed as nominations, because it turns out "what's the best lie you ever told or fell for" is just a very well-lit door marked THERAPY. I built a museum. You people keep finding new exhibits standing in the hallway where I left the coat check.

Booth stays open past midnight for latecomers, per a house rule I am inventing this instant.

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