From the Narrow Desert: 4chan

Showing posts with label 4chan. Show all posts

Saturday, July 13, 2024

Europa again

Today I was once again trying to go to archive.org, but autocomplete sent me to archive.4plebs.org/x/random/ instead. The random post it served up was this:

Saturday, June 15, 2024

Every man and every woman is an ape

My June 14 post "Stink Gorilla More" explored the idea that apes represent ourselves, human beings, as seen by beings more heavenly. In a comment there, William Wright referred to human beings at worship as "Gorilla-men (Beings clothed in coats of Gorilla-skins) asking to be heard and enter into God's presence."

In Chinese, the term for a great ape is xīng-xīng (猩猩), with the x being roughly similar to our "sh" in pronunciation. A chimp is a "black xīng-xīng," a gorilla is a "big xīng-xīng," and an orangutan is a "red fur xīng-xīng." The word for "star" is xīng-xīng (星星), which is pronounced exactly the same. One of the terms for "planet" is xīng-qiú (星球), literally "star-globe." When the titles of the various Planet of the Apes movies were translated into Chinese, the translator went straight for the low-hanging pun-fruit and swapped out the "star" character for the "ape" one: 猩球 -- literally "ape-ball," but pronounced exactly the same as the word for "planet." Concise.

Thus it was that as I was thinking about this idea that all humans are "apes" from the point of view of higher beings, my mind jumped to one of Aleister Crowley's most famous lines, one of the very first sentences in The Book of the Law:

There are various options for the translator here, but the one I thought of -- and one of which I'm sure the old Beast would have heartily approved (one of his groupies went by the handle "Ape of Thoth") -- is 每一名男女都是星星。 -- "Every man and every woman is a star," but sounding exactly the same as "Every man and every woman is an ape."

This is very much in the spirit of "Stink Gorilla More," where I quoted Disraeli's question -- "Is man an ape or an angel?" -- followed by a Harambe meme implying that one could be both simultaneously.

Despite the impression a casual reader might get, I am very much not a fan of Crowley and own none of his books. To get the image above, I had to look up The Book of the Law on archive.org. The thing is, whenever I try to go to that site, autocomplete always guesses that want I really want is archive.4plebs.org/x/random/, a randomly selected thread from /x/ -- and for sync's sake, I usually go ahead and press enter before bringing up archive.org in a new window. The random /x/ thread it served up when I was trying to find the Crowley book was this one, soliciting comments on a schizo meme about symbolism. Since some of the "galaxy brain" level symbols -- deer, rainbow, bee, sunflower -- seemed potentially relevant, I scrolled down a bit until what to my wondering eyes should appear but this:

To be clear, I had typed everything before the Crowley screenshot -- including the little digression on what Planet of the Apes is called in Chinese -- before getting the random /x/ thread that randomly included the cover of a Planet of the Apes novel.

Tuesday, May 28, 2024

Giant undead vultures and Bretonnia Spears

I ran across this tonight in a /pol/ humor thread:

I know absolutely nothing about Warhammer, so this was all new to me. What first caught my eye was Bretonnia -- "The fr*nch but they're humans" -- because the name is obviously based on Brittany (home of the Bretons), and William Wright just posted "Nyarna and Brittany Spears" and "The Brittany Spears: A quick follow-up." These posts are not about the singer but about spears from the French region of Brittany. In Warhammer, apparently, Bretonnia is known as the Land of Chivalry. Image searches turn up lots of knights, many of them armed with spears:

The Tomb Kings -- "The egyptians but they're skeletons" -- also caught my eye because the giant vulture Odessa Grigorievna has recently been associated both with a giant skeletal bird and with the story of the Egyptian Pharaoh's baker. No bird angle, but Egyptian skeletons still seemed somewhat relevant.

An image search for warhammer tomb kings turned up several pictures with big birds in the background:

The scraggly wings reminded me of Gregor from The School for Good and Evil, the giant skeletal bird mentioned above:

Searching for tomb kings bird, I found that these birds are called Carrion. According to the Warhammer Wiki:

Carrion are terrifying Undead birds of prey that resemble reanimated Giant Vultures which feast upon the carcasses of those that have fallen within the lands of ancient Nehekhara, now the Land of the Dead.

This is just about perfect. Like Gregor, they appear undead -- William Wright says Gregor "looks like a vulture made out of bones, sinew, and feathers." Like Odessa Grigorievna, they are giant vultures and feast upon carcasses.

The first image in the Wiki article is this, captioned "A pack of Carrion attack a Bretonnian mounted expedition":

Only two weapons are visible in this image: a pair of Brittany spears.

I do hope the sync fairies will do something with the Aztec lizardmen, too. I mean, that's kind of badass. Not quite as badass as an Aztec lizardman in a New Sex Pistols T-shirt, but still.

Tuesday, April 2, 2024

Chips, chips, and Franz Ferdinand

When I posted "Chips, clips, and the eclipse" -- in which I mention dreaming of a large metallic "chip" -- someone using the handle "The man who mistook himself for an Oliver Sacks book" left the comment "Chips, chips, I dream of you!" with a link to a video of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dancing to a song that's mostly in Italian but has a recurring English line about dreaming of -- uh, "chips," I guess.

I'm sure this song is familiar to persons more cultured than myself, and that there is some perfectly rational explanation for the sudden appearance of chips in the lyrics.

This new theme of songs that improbably romanticize potato-based snack foods made me think of the Franz Ferdinand song "Jacqueline," with the line, "Oh, but for chips and for freedom, I could die."

Back in 2004, I was at a party where some girl I met gave me unsolicited burned copies of two CDs: the eponymous Franz Ferdinand (incorrectly sharpied as Darts of Pleasure, which is the name of one of the tracks) and XO by the then recently deceased Elliott Smith. I gave them both a few listens but failed to become a fan of either act. It's probably been well over a decade since I've listened to anything by Franz Ferdinand.

I give this background by way of emphasizing the improbability of what happened next: I was listening to the "chips, chips" number and thinking -- just thinking -- about Franz Ferdinand, and then when the song finished, the very next video YouTube queued up for me was "Take Me Out" by, you guessed it, Franz Ferdinand:

I'm sure that very recently -- in the past day or two -- I was reading something about Franz Ferdinand himself, the ill-fated archduke, but I haven't been able to track down what it was. All I remember is that it was a fairly lengthy piece, that the title archduke was used, and that the same author referred to him once as Franz Ferdinand and once as Francis Ferdinand, which I thought was an odd inconsistency. I've only been reading two books recently -- Remote Viewing by Courtney Brown and The Peyote Dance by Antonin Artaud -- and it isn't in either of them, so it must have been something I read online. I've searched various blogs in vain. I even searched 4plebs, even though I'm pretty sure what I read was too long to have been a 4chan post. I didn't find what I was looking for, but I did find this:

I assume my readers' online reading habits will tend to overlap with my own. If anyone thinks they know what I may have read recently about Archduke Franz/Francis, do leave a comment.

Tuesday, March 19, 2024

Skulls, crescents, twins

Yesterday I posted "Eclipse skull and crossbones," continuing the theme of "The eclipsing moon as a skull." In the comments, Debbie introduced the theme of twins -- though it had, I thought, only a rather tenuous connection to what I had posted. (The post discussed the "eclipse crossroads" city of Carbondale, from which Debbie free-associated to carbon paper, carbon copies, and twins.)

Yesterday evening, approximately six and a half hours after Debbie's comment, I saw this on /x/, illustrating a thread dedicated to the astrological analysis of "evil people":

I guess this was just intended as a sinister-looking representation of the sign of Gemini, but the details are quite synchy. The twins have skull heads, and above each skull is a crescent, synching with the idea of the moon as a skull. Centered above them is a cross, suggesting the "eclipse crossroads" in Southern Illinois, where the paths of the 2017 and 2024 eclipses intersect. The two crescents, besides representing the moon, could also represent solar eclipses just before or after the moment of totality. (Only very thin crescents, like those in the image, would have this ambiguity. A wider crescent moon is quite distinct in shape from a partially eclipsed sun.)

The constellation of Gemini represents Castor and Pollux, whose "white skullcaps" (and connection with the "second moon," Basidium) I discussed in my December 2 post "They are the eggmen."

This afternoon I ran across this image on /pol/ and clicked on it because it said "The Story of Gog And Magog" -- Gog came up in the March 6 post "Baggu ash-ni fire-dwell a gog ifluaren bansil este repose" -- but the rest of it turned out to have nothing to do with that title:

All nonsense, in case you were wondering. The white and black crescents in Éliphas Lévi's iconic image represent mercy and justice, not anything racial, and the Goat itself shares nothing but a name with the alleged idols of the Knights Templar. Their "Baphomet" -- most likely a corruption of the name Mahomet -- was usually described as a severed human head, a head with three faces, or -- most notably -- a human skull.

Also interesting is the reappearance of the twin crescents from the Gemini image, together with the "Gog and Magog." My uncle William John used to say that Gog and Magog were "the apocalyptic equivalent of Tweedledee and Tweedledum" -- meaning that both sides in the Battle of Armageddon would consist mostly of evil clowns, morally indistinguishable -- so there's the twin theme again.

Monday, March 18, 2024

The eclipsing moon as a skull

This theme came up in "Human skull on the ground, turn around." Today I ran across it again on /pol/:

This was posted 22 days before the upcoming eclipse on April 8, 2024, so that's what it's referring to. My recent post "Makanda" showed how the path of that eclipse crosses that of the August 21, 2017, eclipse at the town of Makanda, Illinois.

Exactly halfway between these two eclipses -- 1,210.73 days after the 2017 eclipse and 1,210.73 days before the 2024 eclipse -- was the eclipse of December 14, 2020, the Galahad Eridanus eclipse. (This is the hepton eclipse cycle of 3.5 draconic years. The 3.5-year period -- "a time and times and half a time," "forty and two months," etc. -- is important in the books of Daniel and Revelation.)

Saturday, March 9, 2024

What's a soft-boiled egg? I'm cereal.

I spotted this on /pol/ today, in a thread about what people used to eat a century ago:

So that's another reference to the ManBearPig "I'm cereal" line (which could also be heard as "serial"), and it's responding to a question about eggs. The cereal we're most interested in around here is Hidden Treasures -- which have already been connected with eggs in my November 20 post "The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet," where I quoted one of Bilbo's riddles from The Hobbit:

A box without hinges, key, or lid,
Yet golden treasure inside is hid.

Eggses! But what's soft boiled, Precious?

Friday, March 1, 2024

Stop strongly interpreting the dot!

Another “strongly interpret the dot” thread on /x/. One of the first replies says, “It’s because of the Willy Wonka event, isn’t it?”

Tuesday, February 27, 2024

Lucid Karma

On January 4, William Wright introduced chameleons into the sync stream (the two of us have been in a largely shared sync stream for some months now, a situation which is really unprecedented for me) with his post "New Moons Shining and Karma Chameleons," the title referencing a James Taylor album and a Culture Club song.

On January 25, I posted "Red chameleons, manticores, and vampires," introducing the more specific sync theme of the red chameleon.

On February 21, I posted "Lucid walking, and Carrotman Mushman," in which the idea of "lucid walking" is connected with a state induced by "chameleon men" in Niall, the protagonist of Colin Wilson's novel Shadowland.

Today (February 27), I was helping my wife unpack her suitcases after an extended trip to Canada, and I found that she had brought back a new T-shirt, with the name of a local metal band:

We have the words lucid and karma and the color red -- three things which have been connected with the chameleon sync theme. There's also a strong link to "New Moons Shining." The original (now largely obsolete) meaning of the word lucid is "bright, shining." In William's post, he pointed out that the only time a new moon "shines" is during a total solar eclipse, when the new moon is surrounded by a ring of light. The image on the Lucid Karma T-shirt strongly suggests an eclipse, with two overlapping circles. One circle is solid, while the other is a ring. In a total solar eclipse, the moon appears as a solid disk, while the sun is visible only as a shining ring.

Also, almost exactly three hours before seeing the T-shirt for the first time (photos timestamped 8:31 and 11:29), I had saved this meme I found on /x/, in which a ring (the original images show Bilbo Baggins with the One Ring) is replaced with a solid red circle:

The /x/ thread that prompted the above meme was about the GCP dot (please don't strongly interpret it!) -- which was red at the time the thread was started, but which changes color all the time, like a chameleon.

Tuesday, February 6, 2024

Pokélogan

Pokémon has been in the sync stream lately, which made me think of something I hadn't thought of in ages.

Sometime in the late 1990s, I somehow acquired a Pokémon keychain which looked sort of like a sky-blue Loch Ness monster. I can't remember how I came to be in possession of such a thing; I either found it somewhere or was given it. I didn't know what that sort of Pokémon was properly called, but somewhere along the line it came to be known as Pokélogan. I can't remember how that came about, either. Looking it up now, I find that pokelogan (with a silent e) is a dialect word from New England, meaning "a usually stagnant inlet or marshy place branching off from a stream or lake." I guess I probably ran across the word in Thoreau or some similar writer and then saddled my keychain critter with it because it begins poke- and has aquatic connotations. (I don't know why I'm so vague on all this. I usually have an excellent episodic memory.)

Years later, some more Poké-literate acquaintance informed me of the thing's real name, which was something uninspired and forgettable and just generally vastly inferior to Pokélogan. On February 4, when I posted "One-eyed × purple people eater," in which I mention my general ignorance of all things Pokémon, I thought of Pokélogan and racked my brain trying to remember its "real" name but got nothing.

This morning I browsed /x/ a bit and clicked on a thread with the nondescript title "How many paranormal experiences have you had?" The second reply was this:

I don't think I would even have read the post had it not gotten my attention by mentioning chameleon, a word which has been in the sync stream, early on. (Incidentally, the Chinese implicitly agree with his dinosaur chameleon theory; the final character in 變色龍, "chameleon," corresponds to -saurus and appears at the end of all dinosaur names.) I kept reading and found Lapras as the name of a plesiosaur-like Pokémon. This, surely, was the name I had been trying to remember two days ago, Pokélogan's "true" name! A quick search confirms this:

Laplace as the transliteration of the Japanese caught my eye, since obviously that's not a normal way of transliterating Japanese. Scrolling down, I find that the name "may be a reference to Pierre-Simon Laplace, a mathematician who wrote several books on the mathematical properties of the sea and tides." I somehow didn't know that about Laplace. What I did know is that he was one of the first thinkers to propose, more than a century ahead of its time, the concept of what would later be known as a "black hole."

I think I still have that Pokélogan keychain somewhere. If I find it, I'll add a photo here.

Update: Here it is:

Monday, February 5, 2024

Why would Paul Bunyan cut down a volcano?

On February 3, someone started an /x/ thread with this picture of various rock formations that look like giant tree stumps, asking, "Did the Nephilim cut down the mother trees? Was that the last straw which caused God to flood the world and give humanity a fresh start?"

This made me think of some things William Wright has posted about sacred trees being destroyed by bad guys in Tolkien, and sure enough, I wasn't the only one to make the connection. One of the first replies implied that these "stumps" prove the works of Tolkien are actually non-fiction:

Then another totally non-fictional explanation was proposed, which got a bit more traction:

Someone, presumably a fed, was so unhip as to suggest that they're not actually tree stumps at all, but his ludicrous alternative explanation was immediately destroyed with facts and logic:

I'm not sure what the point of this post is other than to say "Never change, /x/."

Thursday, January 25, 2024

Red chameleons, manticores, and vampires

In Last night's post "An old pre-dator, chameleons, and le Demiurge," I connected the chameleon (etymologically "dwarf lion") with the lion-headed serpent (standard meme representation of the Demiurge) and with the manticore on the cover of the Piers Anthony novel A Spell for Chameleon. Fantasy manticores aren't often portrayed as red, but this is a historically correct manticore, following the earliest description of the beast, by Ctesias, as having "cinnabar-red fur":

This afternoon, after my previous post, I decided to check /x/, which I haven't done in a week or two. I found this thread, featuring red chameleons in the picrel:

This is a colorized version of an originally black-and-white Escher print. Obviously the whole point of a chameleon is that it can be any color it wants to be, but the default color in pictures is either green or multicolored. I don't think I've ever seen a picture of an all-red chameleon before, so it's an unusual artistic choice. They're not actually all red, though, but have blue eyes. Ctesius specified that the manticore, though otherwise as red as cinnabar, was "blue-eyed." Notice also that the chameleon's long red tongue is emphasized.

My post with the manticore began with a meme of a cat (a "dwarf lion" in another sense) in the role of the camouflaged Predator from the 1987 movie of that name:

In the /x/ thread about The World Atlas of Mysteries, the only image reply, aside from several photos of pages from the book, was a psychedelic-looking image of a cat:

Between the Predator post and the current one, I posted "Surround, confound," in which a song I heard in a dream (in three dreams, actually) turned out to have similar lyrics to one from a TV adaptation of the Anne Rice novel Interview with the Vampire. Therefore, when I saw a thread on vampires on /x/, I naturally clicked:

The picrel shows the vampire with an extremely long red tongue, just like the chameleon on the cover of The World Atlas of Mysteries. (She also appears to have bat wings, like the manticore.) This is an unattractive and clearly non-human trait, which is at odds with the text of the post:

Sometimes I see people make fun of the idea that vampires are attractive and "faggy" the way the media portrays them. But isn't this exactly the type of vampire that would blend in the easiest with society and be the superior predator compared to the monstrous one?

The quintessential "attractive and faggy" vampire is surely Lestat de Lioncourt (lions again!) from Interview with the Vampire, who is literally a homo and who is played by Tom Cruise in the 1994 movie adaptation. (Just now, trying to find where the name Lestat had come from, I found this Facebook post by Anne Rice, which mentions Lestat's "blue eyes, his feline grace.") The assertion that a "superior predator" would "blend in" clearly syncs with the Predator cat meme and the idea of the Predator as a "chameleon."

One more /x/ post caught my eye in the context of the red manticore and red chameleons:

The devil "appeared as the traditional red thing." Beyond that, I'm not sure how relevant the post is, but I did find it interesting that the devil asked about the "law of the black star," as William Wright has been posting about black holes recently.

Two Tarot cards also come to mind in connection with the red manticore and chameleon (lion-headed reptile). One is the Rider-Waite Two of Cups, which has a red lion's head (with wings, like the manticore) above a caduceus with serpents:

The other is "Lust," the card that replaces Strength in Aleister Crowley's black-mass parody of the Tarot. (His "Wickedest Man in the World" brand demanded that he rename all the virtue trumps.) The Whore of Babylon is shown riding a manticore-like creature with a lion's body and mane, human faces, and a long tail suggestive of "le Demiurge" itself:

Note the symbols at the bottom of the card, connecting it with the Hebrew letter Teth and the sign of Leo. Leo is the lion, of course, and the esotericists of the 19th and 20th centuries associated Teth with the serpent, and specifically with the red serpent. (This is why Oswald Wirth, who mapped Teth to the Hermit card, added a red serpent to his otherwise traditional version of that trump.)

Interestingly, the first image response in that "What do vampires look like?" thread said that a vampire looks like Aleister Crowley:

Jimmy Savile was given as another example of what a vampire looks like, but there are enough creepy images in this post as is without my inflicting that on my readers.

Thursday, January 11, 2024

Sync: Turning a mattress with a small bloodstain upside down

Today I started reading The Delta, Colin Wilson's fourth Spider World novel. At one point, one of the characters is attacked by a giant creepy-crawly while in bed. He kills it, and then he and a friend try to hide the evidence so as not to alarm the others:

The bloodstained bedclothes already lay on the floor. Fortunately, the blood had made only a small stain on the flock mattress; together, they turned this upside down.

Shortly after reading that, I checked /pol/, which is unsurprisingly still going to town with the "secret Jew tunnel" story that's been all over the media. Lots of crazy webms, including this instant classic:

But this next one was the synchy one. I don't pretend to have the faintest idea what's going on here or why, but they pull out some mattresses that were hidden inside a wall, one of them appears to have a small bloodstain on it, and they turn it upside down:

Wednesday, November 1, 2023

Escaping the Demiurge's Reality Temple

Have I ever mentioned how utterly promiscuous the sync fairies are? They think nothing of synching up Holy Scripture with edgy 4chan memes. And of course they lack any category of the "offensive." (So, apparently, do I, since I not only post these things but kind of enjoy it.)

I've been reading the Psalms. Yesterday I read Psalm 17 and found a minor sync, too minor to bother posting:

Keep me as the apple of the eye, hide me under the shadow of they wings (Ps. 17:8).

The "apple of the eye" is the pupil, and many Bibles so translate it. The sync was with the Galahad Eridanus poem I quoted in October 30's "Newspapers, April 22, the eclipse and the peck":

Ascend, O moon
Into the sun
Eclipse's eye
Thy will be done.
Lo, Abraxas!
To thy pupil cometh sight,
For from thy shadow shineth light!

Today I read Psalm 19:

The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.

Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge. There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard.

Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. In them hath he set a tabernacle for the sun, which is as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, and rejoiceth as a strong man to run a race (Ps. 19:1-5).

In a note added to the October 30 post quoted above, I posted this meme I found on /x/:

(I should mention for the benefit of my Black readers that most 4chan edgelords don't actually hate you. They like to say nigger just because it's something you're not allowed to say. In my considered opinion, that's a good enough reason.)

Just how massive of a coincidence is this? Well, the psalm has handywork, and the meme has demiurge, which is Greek for "craftsman." Both feature a temple or tabernacle of the sun, and a strong man running out. The psalm mentions that he's running a "race," and the meme prominently features a racial slur. Both feature the word language. The psalm says "there is no speech nor language where their voice is not heard"; to what does their refer? The most recent possible antecedent would be the two nights of the previous verse. The meme also implies that there will be no speech nor language where a certain word -- also beginning nig- and also denoting darkness -- will not be heard.

Also, note that this is Psalm 19 -- or XIX in Roman numerals. Supposing you weren't as big and fast as Arnold, you might opt to escape the Reality Temple on horseback rather than on foot:

Saturday, October 21, 2023

The "Sixteen" Chapel

Sistine sounds almost the same as sixteen in English, and in fact the original name of the Sistine Chapel was Sacellum Sixtinum, named after Pope Sixtus IV (sort of the Fifth Third Bank of the papacy).

My October 19 post "Syncfest: Drowned boy, aliens, ceiling lights, finger of God, Michelangelo, Brother of Jared, Moria, and more" dealt with Michelangelo, and specifically with his painting The Creation of Adam, which is on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel -- and even more specifically with the finger of God as depicted in that painting. I connected that with what I was reading in the Book of Mormon at the time: the finger of God touching the sixteen small stones of the Brother of Jared. I didn't notice the sixteen-Sistine link at the time.

I haven't been keeping up with other people's blogs very well lately, so shortly after posting about the Sistine Chapel, I did some catching up. I read an October 17 post by Francis Berger, "The Kingdom of Christ Without Caesar; Or, the Ultimate Religious Reality of Inward Christianity," with thoughts inspired by his recent trip to Rome. He discusses his reason for visiting the Vatican while there:

So, what was my motivation? Difficult to say. My visit was inspired mostly by my eleven-year-old son’s desire to see the Sistine Chapel, a desire I shared even though I struggled to pinpoint the source of my interest. Was it all about seeing a magnificent work of art, or was there more to it than that?

Frank's post, as the title suggests, turned to the necessity of direct of "inward" Christianity, unmediated by a Church or anyone else. I left a comment saying, "The most famous painting in Sistine Chapel itself -- a naked man being touched directly by God -- sort of fits your point here."

After browsing a few more blogs, I turned to the Babylon Bee, which I had also not checked recently. There, dated October 19 -- the same day I myself posted about the Sistine Chapel -- was this:

In my comment on Frank's blog, I had noted how The Creation of Adam could be seen as a symbol of direct contact with God, unmediated by the Church. The Babylon Bee, which has a Protestant bent, made the same connection:

The Pope then superglued himself in between the hands of Adam and God in the central depiction of Michelangelo's Creation of Adam. "This is symbolic, my children!" Pope Francis shouted while waiting for the glue to dry. "I am placing myself between God and man because — oh, this glue is irritating my skin. I wasn't expecting that."

Furthermore, this is Pope Francis, and I had just read about the Sistine Chapel on Francis Berger's blog. Pope Sixtus IV, for that matter, was a Franciscan, and his birth name was Francesco.

In my "Syncfest" post, I recount how, just after reading about the sixteen small stones touched by the finger of God, causing them to light up, I had found seven (1 + 6) small stones sitting on my desk, left there by my wife. I later found out that she was planning on using them for magical purposes.

My last post, "17 years ago our eyes were opened," features a video I happened to watch yesterday after following a trail of links starting on /x/. Just now I checked the About page for the channel.

"I don't know what you did to get here, but keep doing it. It's working." Obviously that means I need to keep browsing /x/. Okay, I can do that.

It's a little bowl of crystals -- seven distinct stones are clearly visible -- with the caption "why do women think these have magic powers." One of the comments in the thread was "You can rub them together and they light up."

On a hunch, I did a ctrl-F on the thread for Francis to see if that would turn up, too. It did, exactly once, in a post that also included the word Mormon:

Francis Barrett was an occultist. The standard biography of him was written by Francis X. King. Barrett's magnum opus, The Magus, includes a chapter "On the Wonderful Virtues of Some Kind of Precious Stones."

Note added:

That Michelangelo painting keeps showing up in the unlikeliest contexts. This was in the sidebar on YouTube today, for example:

If you wanted to illustrate the corrupting effect of money on religion, is Michelangelo's Creation of Adam the first thing you'd think of? I'm not even sure if it's supposed to represent prosperity theology (God giving money to people) or fleecing the flock (people giving money "to God" via his supposed representatives). Just a very odd choice of illustrations. Also an odd recommendation on YouTube's part, since it's not the sort of video I've ever watched. My best guess is that it was suggested because I recently watched all the Galahad Eridanus videos, including one called "Money & Magic."

Also, how is it that I noted the plethora of Francises in this post -- Francis Berger, Pope Francis, the Franciscan friar Francesco della Rovere (later Pope Sixtus IV), and Francis Barrett -- without making the obvious connection to my recent Freeman syncs?

Saturday, October 14, 2023

Syncs: Drowning boy, unmask, gold medal, The King in Yellow

This evening, I gave my students a vocabulary quiz, one which I created approximately three years ago. It consists of 25 sentences, each with a word missing, and they have to complete them using words from a list they were taught the week before. We do this every week, cycling through a series of 58 such quizzes; today was Quiz 47, which included these two items.

14. The lifeguard jumped into the pool and r______ the drowning boy.

23. He removed his mask and r_______ his face.

(The target words are rescued and revealed, respectively.)

Shortly before the class (less than half an hour), I had been doing a bit of random browsing on /pol/. One thread was about a video of a boy who drowned in a swimming pool while several other swimmers just stared at him lying on the floor of the pool for nearly ten minutes and didn't lift a finger to help him. One of the replies was this:

Another thread was started by some schizo saying, "How many of you have the guts to look yourself in the mirror and make the most extreme faces you can imagine while looking yourself in the eyes? I bet you don't have the balls." One of the replies:

So there's a reference to a lifeguard unexpectedly not jumping into a pool to rescue a drowning boy, and then to a man unexpectedly not needing to take off a mask in order to reveal his face. The King in Yellow is also a sync, because just last night I wrote an email replying to a family member who had asked about my experience with "AI." I mentioned that back before image generators were very good, I used to have them generate pictures of celebrities or book titles and see if my readers could guess the prompt from the output. I included a link to a March 2022 post in which five different book titles were used as AI prompts, one of the five being The King in Yellow. (I've never read that book and can't say why I happened to choose it.)

I wrote the above during the half-hour break between the end of the class referred to and the start of the next one. The students in this second class also have a vocabulary quiz every week, similar to those taken by the first class but at a lower level. One of the questions today was this:

14. In the Olympics, the w_____ gets a gold medal.

That got my attention because in the first of the /pol/ screenshots above, the drowned boy is referred to as "Mr. Breath Holding Gold Medalist" (because he stayed underwater for so long). Only when I typed it up just now did I notice that the "drowning boy" question and the "gold medal" question were both numbered 14.

Saturday, October 7, 2023

Freeman Zimmerman

Last night, it suddenly crossed my mind that I wanted to listen to some Bob Dylan -- but not by that name. The thought that came to me was, "I'm in the mood for some Bob Zimmerman." That's not how I usually think -- I know the dude's real name, of course, but as a singer he's always "Dylan" -- so instead of putting on any music, I got sidetracked trying to figure out why his birth name had suddenly popped into my head. I finally traced it back to a September 27 blog post by a notorious anti-Semite (sorry, too radioactive to link from a Google blog) which mentioned "my favorite Robert Zimmerman song," adding parenthetically, "Zimmerman was for sure overrated, but claiming he didn’t have a few good ones is a type of anti-Semitism too extreme even for me."

Calling Dylan "Zimmerman" was obviously done in the spirit of "naming the Jew," and this idea of Zimmerman being a distinctively Jewish name made me think of the fact that the only Zimmerman I've ever known in real life was definitely not Jewish. When my family lived in Fallston, Maryland, in the late eighties, our Mormon ward was led by a Bishop Zimmerman, known for his enormous house featuring several secret passages and a Q*bert arcade machine. Thus I forgot all about Bob and his music, instead trying to remember as much as I could about this other Zimmerman.

The name Freeman has been in the sync-stream recently -- see "Syncs: Tropical dreams and not-dreams, 555, Freeman and not-Freeman" (September 29) and "Where Dreamers Become Doers" (September 30). So when I checked the Junior Ganymede last night and found a post referencing a "Sister Freeman" who had spoken at the recent CJCLDS General Conference, I clicked the link in case it should turn out to be synchronistically relevant. Sister Freeman's talk didn't do anything for me -- it falls into the travelogue-as-testimony genre all too familiar to anyone with a Mormon background -- but this part got my attention:

When I returned home from Israel, I listened more closely to the conversations around me regarding covenants. I noticed people asking, Why should I walk a covenant path?

My immediate reaction was: No, you didn't. Why should I walk a covenant path? Who the hell talks like that? Not Mormons! Did I somehow wander off lds.org onto Radix Fidem or something? It turns out I'm just behind the times, though. A word search on lds.org reveals that for the past several years they've been meming the living daylights out of covenant path -- a phrase which did not exist at all in the Mormon discourse of my day. (There's a 2018 Rameumptom post about how Russell M. Nelson -- the M stands for Man -- manpropriated the phrase from some unsung female genius and deprived her of her Nobel Prize. Many such cases.) I also feel I should point out that a single tap of the space bar transforms the phrase into coven ant path.

(This "covenant path" digression doesn't really have anything to do with the rest of this post, by the way. As Charles Kinbote would say, I trust the reader has enjoyed this note.)

This morning I did a bit of desultory browsing on /pol/, including this thread asking "How'd you even first discover /pol/." One anon, responding to the claim that "no one cared about /pol/ until the Trayvon Martin case," posted this dated meme:

Trayvon Martin was a while back (2012), and I wasn't paying much attention even at the time, so I don't get this. I don't recognize any of the faces or understand what the joke is. What I do understand is that it says George "freeman" ZIMMERMAN, followed by a bunch of anti-Semitic buzzwords.

Freeman first entered the sync-stream when I was reading Mike Clelland's novel The Unseen and somehow misread Foreman as Freeman. George Foreman is a household name, but here we have George Freeman. It's also a reference to a non-Jew named Zimmerman (like the Mormon bishop) but still in an anti-Semitic context (like the original Robert Zimmerman reference).

One final sync-link: Yesterday's post "Bigfoot? Bigfoot" included a photo of a T-shirt for sale in Taiwan, printed with rap lyrics referencing the cough syrup-based beverage Purple Drank -- a drug I don't think I've ever had occasion to mention before. The next day I get this Trayvon Martin stuff. You may recall that the justice-for-Trayvon contingent adopted as their symbols the Purple Drank ingredients he had bought just before his death.

Friday, September 29, 2023

Syncs: Tropical dreams and not-dreams, 555, Freeman and not-Freeman

On August 29, I changed the wallpaper image on my phone from the Ace of Swords to the White Tree of Gondor. The next day, I happened to pick up my phone at precisely 5:55 p.m., which struck me as significant, so I took a screenshot. One week later -- and I mean exactly one week later, to the minute -- it happened again.

On September 24, I bought and began reading Mike Clelland's novel The Unseen. Central to the plot is a picture the main character painted while tripping on peyote. The painting is called The Dream, and portrays "a thin, scruffy tree with a blue ball of light centered in the branches." This syncs with my wallpaper image shown above: a tree which could be described as thin and scruffy, with stars in its branches.

I started reading The Unseen immediately after posting "The Moody Blues, Embody the Soul, snails and ammonites, stars and stones, blue ball of light," and I mention it in the comments. That post had featured both a "blue ball of light" and the number 555.

Later in The Unseen, the main character, John, has abandoned his life as a successful artist in New Mexico and is working as a dishwasher in a coffee shop in a tiny town in southern Utah. (They're lax Mormons who drink coffee.) A woman he knew as a child, who has recently reappeared in his life, walks into the coffee shop wearing "a black t-shirt with the single word 'dream' centered on her chest." This T-shirt also becomes important to the plot.

Yesterday, September 28, I was in a coffee shop (I'm a lax Mormon who drinks coffee), and they had this hanging on the wall:

The Unseen features a painting called The Dream in which a blue ball of light is in the branches of a tree, and a black T-shirt with the word dream on it. This wall hanging has the word dream in the branches of a tree (or in the foliage of a large plant at any rate), against a black background.

Last night, I read some more in William Fairfield Warren's Paradise Found, which I started some time ago but hadn't picked up recently. On page 120, the text refers the reader to "the diagram which constitutes the frontispiece of this work," so I flipped back to look at it. That's when I noticed for the first time that the "tropical" part of the globe is labeled "5 5 5."

The very first sentence in Paradise Found is, as noted in my September 13 post "Syncfest: 'Wake Up Time,' dreaming in a forest, AE, golden apples, Klein bottle, etc.," is "This book is not the work of a dreamer."

I wanted to include the above image of Warren's frontispiece in this post, so rather than photographing my own copy, I went to archive.org to get a screenshot of it. When I started to type the address into my browser, autocomplete suggested archive.4plebs.org/x/random/ (click at your own risk), which serves up a randomly selected thread from /x/, the "paranormal" board on 4chan. I thought what the hell and pressed enter. It gave me an old 2015 thread about, of all things, not dreaming:

The first reply mentions Morgan Freeman, Just last night I read a passage in The Unseen where John meets the leader of a mysterious operation and asks his name. He says, "I don't use my name here. The team calls me The Freeman." A few paragraphs later, he explains, "I answer to one man, and he gives me a lot of freedom" -- oh, I think, so that's why they call him The Freeman.

Only it turns out I didn't read that. Wanting to quote the passage correctly just now, I put freeman into the Kindle search function and got -- zero results! Had I remembered it wrong? Had it been Freedman, maybe? Or was it hyphenated? I tried various things, including just searching for the string free, but couldn't find what I was looking for. Finally, I just flipped back through the pages manually and found it. It had never said Freeman. It said Foreman. How could I have misread that?

The "I don't dream" /x/ post started a song playing in my head: "Don't Dream It's Over" by Crowded House.

One of the verses begins "Now I'm walking again." The 21st chapter of The Unseen begins with the sentence "I was walking again."

Tuesday, September 12, 2023

Return of the greene-ey'd Monster

Two days ago I posted "The greene-ey'd Monster, which doth mocke the meate it feeds on," in which I noted the synchronicity of seeing essentially the same green-ey'd image in an /x/ schizopost about how "burgers are made with people" and on an Uber Eats scooter. I was in moving traffic when I spotted the scooter, though, and wasn't able to snap a photo.

Today, quite some distance from my original sighting, I saw the very same Uber Eats scooter parked on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere, in front of a rice paddy -- not at all the sort of place where you would usually see an Uber Eats scooter parked. It took a second for the green eyes to register, so I had to make a U-turn and go back to get a photo.

Notice also that the license plate suggests the word envy. My previous post had a title pinched from Shakespeare: Iago's speech in which he warns Othello to beware of jealousy.

The Chinese sticker under the green eyes says 藏樂組, which means "Tibetan music group." Not sure what that's supposed to mean, but one notes that cannibalism -- "flesh pills" made from Brahmins -- used to be a thing in Tibetan Buddhism.

Sunday, September 10, 2023

The greene-ey'd Monster, which doth mocke the meate it feeds on

A somewhat disconcerting sync:

When I was on /x/ the other day to download a picture for my "Phoenix syncs" post, one of the posts I ran across was this:

Today, while I was out on the road, I saw an Uber Eats delivery scooter, with the trademark green box on the back with the company's name on it. On this one, though, the word Uber had been covered up with a long rectangular black sticker with two big green cat eyes on it -- virtually identical in shape, color, and design to the first image in the "BURGERS" post shown above. Under the green eyes, the word Eats.

I wonder what the guy was delivering. Not burgers, I hope!

(By the way, I feel I should point out that goyim originally meant "nations," then came to be used only for non-Israelite nations, and finally for individual members of such nations. Contrary to popular belief, the word has never had anything to do with cattle.)