Marble Hornets T-shirts and Season 2 DVD available!

Hey, everyone!  Today, the Season 2 DVDs of Marble Hornets went on sale!  You can pick them up at the Marble Hornets DVD website, along with T-shirts emblazoned with either the Operator Symbol or the words “Marble Hornets.”  The Season 1 DVD is, of course, still available, and if you haven’t gotten any of the items yet, there is currently a discount pack that includes one of the two T-shirt designs and both the DVDs.

All the information should be on the site, and the DVDs in particular are very reasonably priced, so if you want to support these young filmmakers and/or have respect for the work they’ve done in promoting and defining the Slender Man Mythos, I recommend you buy something!

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Looking for Help

Slenderbloggins is going through an overhaul, and is looking for help.  Currently, these are the people we’d like to request help from.

Article Writers: want to look in-depth at an entry of Marble Hornets?  Have a review of your favorite blog that you’d like to share?  Feel like writing up summaries?  Don’t worry about a lack of time, because you won’t need to dedicate yourself to being a regular writer!  Slenderbloggins is going to be taking submissions, and a quantity of writers can update faster than a quantity of writing by a single author.  So please, if you feel the inspiration to write something, let us know!

Video Content Creators: Not much of a writer?  Prefer to create videos?  We’ll also be taking any sort of video submissions: technical aspects, reviews, analyses, etc.  Again, there’s no obligation to be a regular contributor.

Technical Designer: Many of us are still noobs when it comes to web design.  Experience with WordPress and PM Wiki are very welcome.

Wiki Editors: We have a database we’re working on creating, and until we can get it to the point where it looks good enough to launch, we’re going to need to start filling things in a bit better.  If you’re knowledgeable about vlogs and/or blogs, please consider helping out.

News Hunter: We’ve got our sources, but there are still things that slip past our notice.  If you do a lot of research on the Slender Man and what’s going on in the fandom, we’d love your help!

Content Writers and Video Creators will need to apply to the Slenderbloggins forums when they go back up, and anyone interested is encouraged to contact Andy, Slenderbloggins owner, at da_ladybug_man@yahoo.com.

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A Change in Methods

Hey, everyone, Andy here!  Happy late holiday season!  It’s been a while since we’ve been able to put out some content, and I apologize for that.  Allow me to explain the absences and such.

Slenderbloggins is going to have to go on temporary hiatus while I figure a few things out.  It’s become clear that the current way of staffing things isn’t going to work, as almost the entire staff (myself included) is unable to make the necessary commitment to update as often as we can.  So, after we figure a few things out, I’m going to be changing the way Slenderbloggins does things.

With the current way of doing things, the original goal of Slenderbloggins is going to be impossible.  A small group of people cannot cover a mythos this vast and put out additiona content about it.  Instead of being a small staff running a fansite, Slenderbloggins is going to be crowdsourced.  That means that you, the readers, will probably be the ones writing the articles.  We’re dropping down to a small staff and some editors.  We’re going to try to get the forums running again so that there’s a place for people to contribute articles to put on the main site.  Do you want to write an article, review, summary, or something else?  Do you want to create a helpful video?  Congratulations!  You no longer have to apply to staff to do so!  All you have to do is submit something in the appropriate forum section for feedback, and if it’s good enough, we’ll publish it.

In addition, instead of a team creating a list of Slenderverse works, we’re creating a wiki to serve as a digital archive for the mythos, detailing series, the connections between the series, smaller ‘verses within the Slenderverse, and creators.  I’m not linking it yet, since we need to be able to create some security measures to keep spambots out, but it has been created and filled out some.  You’re welcome to plug your own series, but if you do, please keep in mind that all information should be factual and neutral.

That’s how things stand at the moment.  We’re going to be on hiatus for a while while we get the forum and wiki up to presentable standards, and figure out a staffing situation.

Thanks for your time, and I look forward to seeing contributions from you all in the future!

-Andy

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Slenderman audio visual tutorials now on slendervloggins channel

Hello! It is moi, Everardo Valencia, or otherwise known as that guy who make the slenderman tutorials, or as “CochinoSanchez”. I come bearing news about my tutorials. As some of you just MIGHT know (and by that I mean like only 10 people), I have started my Slenderman series on the same channel as the tutorials. So, to prevent any interference with the series, I have started uploading my tutorials over to the Slendervloggins channel. Be sure to subscribe to get your dosage of distortion tutorials of the faceless fiend Slenderman!

Here is the first tutorial:

channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/Slendervloggins

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More Updates

Your friendly neighborhood webmaster here. A few things are changing around here, some that you might not even notice, some that we hope you’ll enjoy.

For starters, I’ve updated the staff page to include all of our new staff members. Welcome everyone, I look forward to working with you.

Next, we’ve added a second ad box. For now, I’m sticking with the little squares. I don’t like looking at ads myself, so I won’t force them on you. However, we do try to keep them unobtrusive, and your views help pay for things like a custom URL (slenderbloggins.net instead of slenderbloggins.wordpress.net). Most ad-block programs come with a little icon up by your browser’s address bar, and if you click it there’s an option to allow ads on the current domain. Please allow ads to be shown on Slenderbloggins.

Third, I’ve been told to announce we have something new to share with you all. A forum, for all your discussing needs. You can find it at slenderbloggins.net/forums. It’s still new, and there will be quirks as we’re still figuring it out ourselves, but it should be ready for you all to enjoy. Happy posting!

Fourth, we have broken 100 Twitter followers. Anyone who isn’t following us currently can, we are @Slendertweets. We’re also on Facebook now! Thank you to all of the Twitter followers and readers right here on the site, you’re all wonderful.

Finally, we’re putting together our list of works. Thanks to Chase’s Master List and her generous heart, we’re off to an excellent start, but the information still needs to be organized and I need to make sure I didn’t miss anything when I was monkeying with the code. It’s a start though.

If you see anything that doesn’t look right, used to work but now doesn’t, or wish to critique what little code I actually need to use on top of the WordPress software, email me at MrStumblr@gmail.com. I’ll be glad to hear from you all and I’ll try and squash any bugs you point out to me.

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Site Updates

Hey, everyone!  Andy here, and I’ve got a bit of site news to update you all on.

First of all, I’ve finished up with the applications, and I’ll be adding the new staff members to the staff page soon.  Apologies to those of you I didn’t hire, but thank you for the applications, and feel free to apply again the next time I’m looking for more staff!

Now that we have more staff, we’ll hopefully be able to work a bit more quickly on some summaries.  We’ve got several vlog series we’re slowly but steadily working on, and a few more in the wings.

We also have a bit of a surprise: a fan managed to record a lot of footage from the Marble Hornets crew’s panels at GMX and has sent them to Slenderbloggins to upload, so be looking forward to that.

We’re also trying to get a more stable schedule, and when we’ve gotten things sorted out a bit more, it will hopefully be fairly stable.  The plan at the moment is featured fanart on Tuesdays, an article or video on Fridays, and a brief list of all the major updates in the Slenderverse within the past week.

That’s the plan so far.  Stay tuned for more updates in the future!

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Marble Hornets Season 1 Summary

The story of Marble Hornets begins with a brief introduction by a young man known only to the audience as “J” (the J is later revealed to stand for “Jay”).  He explains that Alex Kralie, a college friend of his, was filming a student film called “Marble Hornets,” but slowly became more irritable over the course of filming and suddenly dropped the project altogether.  Alex cited “unworkable conditions” as his reason for quitting, which Jay found odd, as the set was fairly close to where Alex lived and grew up.

Jay asked Alex what he planned to do with the tapes.  Alex’s response?  “Burn them.”  As a fellow film student, Jay didn’t want to see Alex’s work go to waste and asked him for the tapes.  Alex agreed on the condition that Jay never mention them again.  Shortly after, Alex moved away and cut off all contact.

Jay was too freaked out at the time to watch the tapes, and forgot about them for a while.  However, he eventually remembered them and decided to start going through them, posting his findings on YouTube. Each of his findings are titled “Entry #” and then the number of the entry in chronological order

At first, he didn’t notice out of the ordinary.  Then he comes across a piece of footage that doesn’t fit with the rest: Alex running through his house at night.  At the end of the footage, Alex turns the camera outside, capturing a figure in a business suit on film.  The figure’s head snaps towards Alex, revealing that it has no face.  The tape ends.

The next couple tapes, Jay starts noticing things.  Many tapes have severe video or audio distortion.  Others show Alex acting irrationally, constantly filming everything (with a frequent emphasis on trees).  He also is shown to be scrawling cryptic sketches on any available paper he can get his hands on.  Others still show further encounters with the enigmatic figure that appears in the first entry (who will henceforth be referred to as the canonical name of the Operator).  The Operator appears to have been following Alex, and is provided as the most likelysource of his paranoia and irritability.  We also learn that Jay was personally involved with Marble Hornets; he helped with location scouting and several other aspects of production.  Strangely, Jay either does not remember many of the events he was involved with, or is simply denying that he remembers them.

Around this time, YouTube user totheark begins posting video responses, some of which contain disturbing video or audio footage directly related to the videos Jay posts—for example, the audio from a video that’s missing some, or video footage of Jay himself during the events of Marble Hornets.

In an attempt to find Alex or gather more information, Jay meets with Tim, one of the actors in Marble Hornets, yielding more insight into Alex’s declining stability.  Tim claims not to have noticed anyone or anything out of the ordinary, even when Jay prompts him by asking about a guy in a business suit.

Shortly afterwards, Jay gets an anonymous tip as to Alex’s location.  The tip points to an abandoned home, and he goes to check it out.  As he explores the house, he collapses into a violent coughing fit.  He takes several things from the house before he finally leaves: a partially full pill bottle (which has a torn label and is empty when he later checks on it); a bullet casing (which later goes missing); and several of Alex’s scrawlings.

At this point, totheark becomes more threatening, posting third-person footage of Jay collapsed on the floor. He eagerly invites Jay back to the house when he announces his intentions to return.  When Jay finally does return to the house, he finds a masked man lying in wait for him.  The masked man attacks, and Jay flees the house after a brief confrontation.  In the process, he loses the knife he brought with him, along with his memory of the attack.  Afterwards, totheark uploads a video saying that Jay has been keeping secrets.

His encounter with the masked man is part of what probably contributed to Jay’s decision to reveal that he’s been filming himself, much the same way Alex did.  The other half of the decision was largely influenced by the content he found on one of his own tapes: footage depicts the masked man who attacked him at the house appearing in his room while he sleeps, after which both he and Jay disappear from the room for a while.  The response by totheark shows that during that time, Jay had a very close encounter with the Operator.  Jay also theorizes at this point that totheark is the masked man.

Jay resumes looking through Alex’s footage, and finds footage of Tim, who is complaining of cold and is having a coughing fit similar to the ones Jay has been having.  However, Jay soon finishes the tapes, and has few leads left.  After examining one of Alex’s drawings more closely, he finds a phrase reading “at the tower.”  He assumes it relates to the red climbing wall he saw while he and Alex were location scouting in an earlier tape.  Jay inspects the tower and finds a metal case with a tape hidden inside.

The tape shows Alex and Seth, the camera man during the production of Marble Hornets, exploring a run-down building.  After wandering around for a while, they have an encounter with the Operator.  Seth drops the camera, and when the video comes back, the scene is different.  Alex is talking to the camera, claiming that all he can remember is what was on the camera.  He says that Seth, Tim, Brian, Sarah, and (curiously) Jay are all “gone” (Brian and Sarah were both actors in Marble Hornets).  He does not, however, elaborate on what that means.  This is also evidently the event that finally convinced Alex to stop production and burn the tapes.

Jay returns once more to the house to attempt to find some last clue.  However, the masked man and the house itself seem to be forcing him in circles within the house.  He eventually finds himself in what is most likely the house’s basement—which happens to be the location Alex and Seth had been exploring in the tape Jay found at the red tower.  Jay encounters the Operator and passes out.  His camera ceases to function afterwards.

Jay’s paranoia increases, and he begins to use multiple security cameras in his apartment.  They capture him walking through a door that apparently only opened on one side, and disappearing through it for two hours.  The danger to Jay quickly grows more apparent as his account is hacked with a strange and threatening video (presumably from totheark) and his apartment is destroyed in a fire.  Jay decides to stop investigating the videos, and begins moving from hotel to hotel.  However, that changes when a package addressed to him that contains a tape shows up.  The tape reveals Alex to be alive, well, and sane, and the dialogue with his girlfriend Amy (who is filming) implies that he has been so for a while.  Alex seems uneasy with her filming, however, and asks her to turn it off.  The Operator then appears inside the house, surprising Amy.  She and Alex escape out a window, and the tape ends with an image of the word “HELP.”

Jay, upon finding that Alex is alive, reconsiders his decision to quit.  He decides to attempt to find Alex, starting by traveling to the return address on the package.  He warns the audience that he doesn’t know when he will next update.  This ends season one of Marble Hornets.  Season two begins seven months later.

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Featured Fanart: I’ll tell you fairytale

Today’s featured fanart is “I’ll tell you fairytale” by DeviantART user lOsal.  While the description is in Russian, a translation roughly states that it’s about kids making friends with the metaphorical “monsters under the bed” and other things that scare them.  Because they’re so openhearted, children are able to love without exception, and the artist drew this in an attempt to depict that openheartedness.

Normally, I’m against this sort of portrayal of the Slender Man, but there’s just something about this one I like.  He’s not romanticized, and he still very much looks like a monster—he’s just portrayed as vulnerable.

So what do you think of this image?  Is this an unacceptable portrayal of the Slender Man, or is it a sweet depiction of childlike innocence and trust?  Be sure to click the links above to check out the full-size image and more work from the artist!

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Happy Birthday, Slenderbloggins!

Take a look at this post.

Notice anything about it?  For those of you who don’t read post titles, you may not have noticed that it was posted on October 28, 2010.  Today is October 29, 2011.  I’ll admit that, with everything that’s been happening in my life lately, I forgot that yesterday was the one year anniversary of the day I started the original Slenderbloggins.  A year ago today was the day I actually started posting relevant information, so I guess that’s still reason to celebrate, even if it’s a bit belated!

So what are we going to do to celebrate?  Well, we’re going to…not do much.  To tell you the truth, I’ve been incredibly busy lately (my appendix decided to break up with me over midterms, so I’m behind in every single one of my classes).

However, I did inadvertently celebrate by introducing my anime club to Marble Hornets.  We ended up watching the entire series, starting at approximately 9:30 PM and finally finishing at around 2:00 AM the next day.  Reactions were pretty positive.  At the very least, they enjoyed it enough to watch all 51 episodes and totheark entries released.

And I guess we can celebrate on-site a bit belatedly as well!  It sounds like Entry #52 is coming out soon, and I’m fairly sure it will be the end of the season (though there is a good chance I’ll be wrong).  When it releases, Slenderbloggins will release a general summary of Season 1.  In addition, we’ll be working on filling out all these “UNDER CONSTRUCTION” pages you’ve been seeing around so that they actually have some purpose.  And I’m also close to finishing up applications.  I have three people in mind and will be making my final decision as soon as I get the chance to talk to them all one-on-one a bit.

But for now, I guess I’ll just post some reflections.

The site started small, and I’ll admit that I was a huge noob when I started.  I decided that after reading the TV Tropes site, reading Just Another Fool, and watching Marble Hornets, EverymanHYBRID, and TribeTwelve, I’d know enough to be the guy imparting knowledge to others.  A year later, and I’m still not sure that I’m the guy to be turning to for information.

Back then, the plan was always to go “in-game” with Slenderbloggins.  Thanks to the initial paranoia and excitement, I was able to do a lot of what I did with nothing more than embellishment (though there were admittedly some flat-out lies in there).  While I admit that I now regret my decision to go along with my friends’ requests to help with the in-game portions, I am glad that they at least sustained my interest enough to get me to the point where I knew how to continue the blog and ultimately have enough content ideas to turn it from a blog into a fansite.

The site has moved to its own URL, and has expanded its focus a bit.  While it’s hard to tell how many readers we currently have (even on the old WordPress site, gauging follower count is far more difficult than it is on the more popular Blogger), there are 31 followers on YouTube and 95 followers on Twitter (I’m ecstatic at being so close to that landmark 100)!  We average about 100 pageviews a day and have made approximately –$40 (it used to be –$50!).  While it’s hard to say exactly how many staff members there currently are given the circumstances, Slenderbloggins has grown from a staff of one to a staff of about ten!  And believe it or not, Slenderbloggins actually resulted in a romance which, while it unfortunately didn’t work out in the end, resulted in nothing but positive memories.

And now, I’d just like to finish with some thanks.

First, and most importantly, I thank all of my readers, especially those who have been with me from the beginning.  Second, all my staff members, past, present, and on temporary leave, for all the work you’ve done on the site.  I can guarantee that it would not be what it is now without you.  Specifically, I’d like to thank Daniel, who helped me get the site up, generously provided hosting, and has been a really good friend for the past year or so.  I’ve probably mentioned how much I owe this guy before, but it’s worth mentioning again.  In addition, I’d like to thank Maduin, Omega, Ash, and Zero for taking the time to exchange a few e-mails with me when I was starting out, with special mentions to Ash (who actually convinced me to continue with the site instead of ending it like I had originally planned) and Omega for being a great rival and friend—and hopefully, a great future collaborator (be on the lookout for news about our upcoming non-Slender project).  To Tom, for letting me know that even some of the big names read and enjoy Slenderbloggins, and to anyone who’s ever encouraged me or just let me vent when I get down about Slenderbloggins or the mythos in general.

And finally, to Broeckchen, someone special enough to deserve a separate paragraph of thanks to.  For taking interest in my blog.  For choosing Slenderbloggins as a place to post your crazy (but awesome!) theories.  For recognizing certain ties that even I hadn’t caught, for being the first person to help write for the site, and most importantly, for an amazing five months and continued amazing friendship afterwards.

Well, here’s to our first full year!  And hopefully, to many more!

-Andy

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Last Call for Applications

Just letting everyone know that applications are coming to a close, and I’m close to making my selections (please don’t ask for who I’m considering, though), so if you’re going to apply, now’s the time!  I’ll be accepting applications for a day or two before finalizing my decisions and letting you know who the new staff member(s) will be!

-Andy

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