From the Narrow Desert: Randonautica

Showing posts with label Randonautica. Show all posts

Friday, October 6, 2023

Bigfoot? Bigfoot.

Sometimes there really does seem to be something paranormal about Randonautica, the app I described in my January 10 post "Ask for a mini T. rex, and ye shall receive a mini T. rex." As you may recall, it works by generating a lot of truly-random map coordinates within a specified radius of the user and then identifying anomalies -- either "attractor" anomalies with an improbably large number of randomly generated points near them of "void" anomalies with an improbably small number. While it's generating the points and finding the strongest anomaly, you're supposed to "visualize your intention," which is supposed to affect the whole process in some mysterious way.

As recounted in the linked post, the first two times I used it I randomly chose "mini T. rex" as my "intention," and both times it led me to something answering to that description.

Today I wanted to do some walking, so I thought why not use Randonautica again. I had just been reading the cryptid section of Joshua Cutchin's Ecology of Souls and remembering my childhood obsession with Bigfoot, which I had been sure was lurking somewhere in the woods of suburban Maryland and could be summoned by continually ringing a concierge bell I had bought for the purpose (the neighbors must have just loved me!) -- so when the "visualize your intention" thing came up, I thought, "Okay, Randonautica, point me to a Bigfoot!"

If a cul-de-sac outside Baltimore seems an unlikely place for Sasquatch hunting, it's got nothing on urban Taiwan! Nevertheless, Randonautica delivered. Everyone knows these trickster spirits delight in puns and in granting requests in an over-literal way. Here's where I ended up:

That's a footprint and the English word foot, both very big (the wall was approximately seven feet tall), with a big finger pointing it out for me. (Except for the finger, that's the logo of a very small local office supplies company. I used to work for the older and much more successful "Hand" brand, "Foot" being to them what the Byrds, the Monkees, and the Allegators were to the Beatles.)

Along the way, Randonautica led me past a little clothing shop I'd never seen before. One of the T-shirts caught my eye through the window.

Some time ago, I discovered David Talbott's fringe astronomy theories and watched a bunch of YouTube videos about them on the "Thunderbolts" channel. Since then, the algorithm occasionally suggests more videos in that vein. A few weeks ago, it suggested this one:

I didn't watch it, but the thumbnail makes the main point clear enough. According to the theory, at some point in the distant past our "sun" was actually an alignment of several planets, which were much closer to the Earth than they are now, and electrical discharges between them formed an eight-rayed pattern (the "octopus" configuration discussed in my March 2022 Tarot/sync post "Lightning from the Sun?"). When this eight-pointed "sun" was not visible, that would be "night," and this video presumably tries to back that theory up with linguistic evidence that the word night is derived from eight with a negative prefix (see also acht/Nacht, huit/nuit, etc. -- clever, really).

The T-shirt is obviously supposed to mean "Number Eight," but the sync fairies don't care about intentions. It says "No Eight," with a night-black background and what looks like a partially illuminated planet. Does it say Neptune? That would make sense, since it's the number eight planet. I couldn't see much more from outside, so I tried googling "no eight" "neptune" to see if I could find the T-shirt online. I couldn't, but I did unexpectedly run into an old friend -- twice, in case I missed it the first time:

The Eight of Cups is normally Saturn in Pisces, but I guess this one blogger identifies it with Neptune. Note that the card shows a night sky with a crescent, just like the T-shirt.

Since I couldn't find the T-shirt online, I went into the shop to take a look. Here's a clearer shot of it:

It was a strange shop. Here's another of their T-shirts:

That's a guy on a bicycle, made up of random letters of the alphabet, together with a few repeated lines from Aesop's fable of the North Wind and the Sun (plus a little introduction explaining that the North Wind is cold). In Aesop, the Sun proves itself stronger by making a man take off his coat, the North Wind having failed to blow it off. In this version, weirdly, the Sun denies the North Wind's ability to make typhoons and huge waves.

There was also this little gem. I'm not sure if it's meant to be worn by a man or a woman, but either way, it's a little weird.

Since the unplanned an unexpected strikes so many, why even bother trying to plan anything?

I'm pretty sure "double cuppin'" is a reference to that cough syrup drank singers of a certain race are always on about. How this stuff ends up printed on T-shirts in Taiwan, I'll never know. (Having just looked it up, I see these lyrics come from an American song that includes the line "Tomorrow got a flight headed to Taiwan" -- to rhyme with a reference to cocaine being "all white like Parmesan." Real art gives me chills sometimes.)

After my walk, I read a few more pages in Ecology of Souls -- the book responsible for making me think of Bigfoot -- and found this:

This may be what several Penobscot tribesmen observed when spying on medicine man John Neptune, who met the approach of "an immense eel" not with terror but affection, gently cradling its head and "drumming on it softly."

That's the only occurrence of Neptune in this 1405-page book, and I read it just after a sync involving a Neptune T-shirt. The combination of Penob-scot, fearlessness, and "an immense eel" made me think of a Moody Blues song:

Captain Scott, you were so bold
Now you're looking rather cold
Out there in the snow
What did you find there?
Did you stand a while and stare?
Did you meet anyone?

I've seen polar bears and seals
I've seen giant Antarctic eels
I've still not found what I'm looking for

The reference is to Robert Falcon Scott, the Antarctic explorer, who I'm sure never saw polar bears. By a strange coincidence, an East India Company ship called the Neptune (admittedly a popular name for ships) was piloted by a different captain also named Robert Scott, perhaps a relative.

Wednesday, April 5, 2023

Big Bird and the Blue Sun

I found this out randonauting tonight:

It was on the wall of a "Sesame English" school that licenses the characters from Sesame Street. There was no "Bird," just "Big." I recently mentioned Big Bird in "Sync: Don't be confused. Back up the heavy burds." The background also got my attention: "The sky was yellow, and the Sun was blue," as in the Grateful Dead song "Scarlet Begonias."

This is not the first time Big Bird has been associated with yellow-blue reversals. There was that one time he was captured, painted blue, and promoted as the Bluebird of Happiness.

This in turn made me think of the They Might Be Giants song "Birdhouse In Your Soul," with its repeated references to a "blue canary," as well as one mention of the "bluebird of friendliness." (Big Bird, while claiming variously to be a lark or a "golden condor," has sometimes been identified as a canary.)

One assumes that "Birdhouse In Your Soul" was inspired by, among other things, Emily Dickinson.

"Hope" is the thing with feathers --
That perches in the soul --
And sings the tune without the words --
And never stops -- at all --

The blue canary in the song never stops at all, either: "My story's infinite / Like the Longines Symphonette / It doesn't rest."

If you look back at the first Big Bird image, you'll see that the blue sun is rising over a few curved but mostly horizontal red and white stripes. This same image with the same colors appears in the iconic Obama poster which also invokes Dickinson's "thing with feathers."

The blue sun made me think of the blue star Sirius -- but of course that star is associated with the dog, not the yellow bird. The "blue canary" in the song also made me think of Twitter, so I decided to check that website -- something I very rarely do. It turns out that, as of just a few hours ago apparently, Twitter's blue bird has been replaced with a yellow dog!

Another thing the blue sun made me think of was an Indian roommate I had many years ago, who told me that "blue is the radiance of black," and that Krishna and Shiva are portrayed as blue to show that they are black yet radiant. If that's true, then Big Bird's blue sun is equivalent to the Black Sun, a Nazi symbol.

How about that? How often do you see Big Bird juxtaposed with Nazism? Oh, wait, I just saw that yesterday, in this gratuitously offensive meme from 4chan. (Sorry about this stuff, guys. I may have mentioned a time or two that the sync fairies ain't got no class.)

Oh, and Hitler's in a boat. I just read in William Bramley's The Gods of Eden that "the swastika . . . which most people associate with Naziism . . . is a very old emblem. It has appeared many times in history, usually in . . . societies worshipping Custodial 'gods.'" He mentions elsewhere that these "'gods' traveled into the heavens in flying 'boats.'"

So -- this is a very weird sync-stream. We'll see if it goes anywhere.

By the way, on the same randonauting excursion, I ran into yet another double-D lemniscate, once again connected with the yin-yang symbol.

Saturday, March 11, 2023

Still knocking

I ran across this while exploring a random street in a small town. It would have been quite a coincidence even in America, to say nothing of a country where only 4% of the population professes any form of Christianity.

This is a print of Christ at Heart's Door by Warner Sallman, an evangelical Protestant artist. The heart shape formed by the lighting and the door frame is a deliberate element of the composition.

Saturday, February 18, 2023

The seal of Melchizedek and lots of other things (syncfest)

Recent sync motifs have included the lemniscate (lazy-eight), two Ds, two doors, and doves. This reminded me that A. E. Waite, in his book The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, called the lemniscate floating above the head of his Magician

the mysterious sign of the Holy Spirit, the sign of life, like an endless cord, forming the figure 8 in a horizontal position. . . . With further reference to what I have called the sign of life and its connexion with the number 8, it may be remembered that Christian Gnosticism speaks of rebirth in Christ as a change "unto the Ogdoad." The mystic number is termed Jerusalem above, the Land flowing with Milk and Honey, the Holy Spirit and the Land of the Lord. According to Martinism, 8 is the number of Christ.

Waite's concept of the lemniscate as the "sign of the Holy Spirit" is adapted from Éliphas Lévi, who called it "the emblem of life and the universal spirit." In my 2018 post "The Rider-Waite Magician," I was unable to come up with any very straightforward connection between the lemniscate or number eight and the Holy Spirit. I cited Irenaeus saying that the Gnostics called Sophia both "Ogdoad" and "Holy Spirit," and I noted that Noah (one of the "eight souls saved by water") releases the dove in Genesis 8:8, but these are rather tenuous links. All in all, I was confused by Waite's choice of symbols and wrote "the universal sign of the Holy Spirit is the dove, and the question arises as to why Waite did not use it, preferring instead the serpent-like lemniscate."

Yesterday I found a much more direct link. In my December 2022 post "More weird student telepathy/coincidences," I mention discovering the symbol some Mormons call the "seal of Melchizedek," an eight-pointed star consisting of two interlocking squares. Such research as I did on it at that time led me to conclude that prior to Hugh Nibley's 1992 book Temple and Cosmos, "there's no tradition of associating the eight-pointed star with Melchizedek."

In the comments on my February 9 post "Hourglass and hexagram," I noticed this "seal of Melchizedek" figure in the background of Lorenzetti's allegory of Temperance with an hourglass. This led me to do a bit more searching on the symbol, which led me to Tim Barker's 2010 post "The Seal of Melchizedek." He found this in Henry Pelham Holmes Bromwell's Restorations of Masonic Geometry and Symbolry (1905), identifying a somewhat different eight-pointed star as the "signet of Melchizedek."

This is a unicursal octagram, standing in the same relation to the Mormon seal of Melchizedek as Aleister Crowley's unicursal hexagram to the Star of David. The accompanying text says it is "composed of lines continually reproduced to infinity" and is a symbol of God as "universal, infinite, and eternal." The symbol also incorporates eight hourglass-shapes, and we have already accepted the hourglass -- particularly when its two chambers take the form of Ds or deltas -- as a variant on the lemniscate and the double-D.

Then, with just a bit more poking around, I discovered that it has apparently always been extremely common for Orthodox icons of the Holy Ghost to take the form of a dove inside a figure almost identical to the Melchizedek star. Many, many such icons can easily be found online. Here, as one example, is the Holy Ghost as portrayed in a 15th-century Byzantine icon of the Holy Trinity.

There's no Melchizedek connection here, of course, but it does shed some light on Waite's use of the figure-eight as a stand-in for the dove, and on the current synchronistic link between the dove and the lemniscate. We've already linked the lemniscate with the hourglass, the hexagram, and the two squares of a digital-clock eight. The seal of Melchizedek, like the Star of David, includes eight triangles, and it is made up of two squares and thus encodes "4 + 4 = 8."

I discovered all this last night (February 17, in case it takes me more than a day to finish this post). Today (February 18), I went out to do some randonauting. I wanted to walk to my destination, and I wanted my starting point to be somewhere other than my home, so I decided to get some coffee, leave my motorcycle parked at the coffee shop, and walk from there. On my way to the coffee shop, I passed this -- a dove on a green door -- and stopped to take a photo:

Just to the right of the dove, it reads "white dove" in Chinese. The character for "white" is very similar to a digital-clock eight.

When I parked at the coffee shop, I noticed this on the scooter parked right next to me:

Notice the flourish on the M, which looks a lot like Euler's version of the infinity symbol -- a mirror-image lazy-S.

Later, Randonautica took me out in the sticks, where I found this:

Okay, seal of Melchizedek, you have my attention! Note that here they appear on a ladder-shaped structure. "More weird student telepathy/coincidences" began with the idea of the solfeggio scale as a ladder or staircase and ended with the seal of Melchizedek. Jacob's ladder ties in with Israel (Jacob's new name) and the Star of David (comprised of triangles pointing up and down); also with Beth-el, baetyls, and the namarudu. In the Fourth Gospel, Jesus (whose name is 888 in Greek numerals) identifies himself with Jacob's ladder: "angels ascending and descending upon the Son of Man."

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Going back to the coffee shop where I parked, it was the same one I visited in June of last year, when in my post "More 333 syncs" I noted its strange décor -- a wall decorated with photos of some writings of Aleister Crowley. Today something else caught my attention, too, so I took a photo that includes it all:

On the right is the wall of the stairwell, with two triangles forming an hourglass-like shape. One is pointing up, and the other down, confirming what I just wrote about the connection between the Star of David and Jacob's ladder.

On the left is the wall of the second floor, featuring some pages from Crowley's Equinox of the Gods and a Chinese translation of a quote from Victor Hugo: "L'esprit de l'homme a trois clefs qui ouvrent tout : le chiffre, la lettre, la note. Savoir, penser, rêver. Tout est là" ("The human spirit has three keys which open everything: the number, the letter, the [musical] note. To know, to think, to dream. Everything is here.")

What's on the rest of that page from Equinox? Oh, just a dove in a vesica piscis.

And how does the author identify himself in the very first paragraph?

For those who came in late, the double-D and the lemniscate entered the sync stream through a restaurant called D∞D (with a lemniscate for an ampersand), the street address of which is 666.

What about Hugo's three keys? The number, the letter, the note. Well, in the current sync stream, the number is clearly 8 and the letter is D. And the note? To ask the question is to answer it. I originally thought D∞D was supposed to be DOOD. A post I have already linked twice recounts how "one of my young students ran up to the stairs to the classroom, shouting, 'Do re me fa sol la ti do!' as he did so." What note begins with the letter D and is also the 8th note of the scale (the octave) and thus the only one to appear twice? DOOD is an anagram of do do, the beginning and end of the scale. It's also dodo, of course, an extinct member of the dove family.

There is a dodo in Alice in Wonderland, so this ties in with recent Lewis Carroll syncs, too.

Then I went out randonauting. I didn't encounter a mini T. rex this time, though I did see a little dinosaur in a ditch:

My February 12 post "What if Dot got in the Green Door?" featured photos from an old textbook called Journeys. One of the other things I found in that book, which I noticed at the time but didn't post, was this story about Al and Lop:

Al is an alligator, and Lop is a rabbit with a long tail. (An alligator bites it off in the end, which is why rabbits today have short tails.) In this picture, Lop crosses a river by running across the backs of swimming alligators. (Note that this is on pages 118 and 119. Today I found a monstrous reptile floating in water with the number 191.) This caught my attention because of something I wrote in my February 2021 post "Walking on water."

I've read a fair bit of kooky channeled material in my day, and one of these books -- I believe it was, ahem, Pleiadian Perspectives on Human Evolution by the late Amorah Quan Yin -- featured the arresting image of Jesus and Mary, during their sojourn in Egypt, crossing the Nile by walking across the backs of swimming crocodiles. Moses never did that! Neither, of course, did Jesus, but the image captures some of the inner meaning of walking on the sea.

Lop's feat reminded me of a virtually identical one attributed by an eccentric New Age writer to a famous Mother and Son. Today I saw this on my Randonautica route:

The brand name is 母子鱷魚, "Mother and Son Crocodiles." At the bottom of the sign it reads 玩水鞋, "shoes for playing in the water." Shoes, of course, are for walking, not swimming.

When I posted about Dot getting in the Green Door, I noted that Dot is short for Dorothy and posted a picture of Dorothy Gale knocking at the green gates of the Emerald City. So it is appropriate that one of the other things I found on today's ramble was a ruby slipper:

I also ran across a hexagram:

Then there was this:

It was the infinity-sign lemniscate that first caught me eye, but then I noticed lots of other things. There's a big T, as in Mr. T and T. rex; and a snowflake, which is a close cousin to the hexagram. There's snow in one corner and Sn-2 in the other -- a link to the old Tintin and Snow Snow syncs (alligators there, too). Note also the OPO, which will be relevant to what follows.

Then there's the word Megmilk -- reminding me that one of the meanings of double-D is "large breasts." Come to think of it, the lemniscate suggests a pair, and b00b belongs to the same family as d00d and n00b.

Four minutes later (going by the timestamps on my photos), I saw this:

What caught my eye here was the letter O, which is made up of an orange 6 and a purple 9. Then I noticed the hexagram visible on the polyhedron. Then I noticed that if you turn it upside down it reads do. Only one do, though, unlike the earlier syncs related to dood and dodo. Oh, wait, what's this?

The op photo and the oppo photo were taken seconds apart and have the same timestamp. This is just dood upside down and inside out.

Finally, I passed a liquor store that had a bunch of eights.

That's a total of five figure-eights in the shot. One of them is advertising unpasteurized beer that is only 18 days old, but the digit 1 is represented by a beer bottle, leaving 8 as the only numeral. The others are for eight-year-old Scotch. One company wanted to emphasize how fresh their drink is, while the other wanted to emphasize how old it is -- but they both chose the same number. Of course this ties in with 8 as a symbol of time and time travel.

Oh, one more thing. In my February 9 post "No B in Harley-Davidson," I mention seeing a "Keep smiling" sign at D&D (number 666) and another one at a barber shop that had a 666 license plate on the wall -- but I didn't get photos. Now I have:

Notes added:

Megmilk ties in with Waite's statement that the number eight represents the land flowing with milk and honey.

The alligator's name, Al, is a Crowley/666 link:

The above is from Equinox of the Gods.

Sunday, February 12, 2023

Randonautica delivers mini T. rexes once again

About a month ago I posted "Ask for a mini T. rex, and ye shall receive a mini T. rex." Sometimes, it turns out, you don't even have to ask.

In that post, I recount my experience with the app Randonautica, which generates random map coordinates for you to visit. You're supposed to "visualize your intention" while the coordinates are being generated. Both times I tried it, my intention was "mini T. rex," and both times it led me to something more or less within spec. Since then, of course, the mini T. rex has been a regular feature of the sync stream -- a rare instance of a sync that I actively summoned into my life.

Today I tried Randonautica for a third time. This time, though, I visualized the Green Door and enchanted garden from the H. G. Wells story instead of a mini T. rex. The spirits of randomness apparently remembered me as the mini T. rex guy, though, and once again led me to a mini T. rex -- two of them, in fact.

There was also a green door -- behind a red one:

A letter D next to a figure-eight:

And owls galore:

The owls in that last photo are juxtaposed with the treasure chest and compass rose from the cover of Journeys (see "What if Dot got in the Green Door?"), a horseshoe ("Choronzon 333"), and a six-pointed star.

Speaking of six-pointed stars, Randonautica also led me past this oddly decorated Mercedes.

There was no hexagram on the car, just the words. I used the exact same phrase, “Star of David (hexagram)” in “Hourglass and Hexagram.”

Tuesday, January 10, 2023

Ask for a mini T. rex, and ye shall receive a mini T. rex

There's an app called Randonautica which generates truly-random map coordinates in one's vicinity. You can choose either just a random point or an "anomaly" -- an area with an unusually high or low number of randomly generated points nearby. I discovered it on /x/ a few weeks ago, and on December 30 I decided to give it a try.

While it was generating an anomaly, it told me to "visualize your intention," the idea being that this will psychically influence the random number generator. I hadn't known in advance that an "intention" would be required, so I just visualized the first random thing that came to mind -- which was, for some reason, a miniature T. rex. Years ago, I had had a dream in which I saw an Audubon-style illustration of a mini T. rex perched on a tree branch, with a caption that read (in a language that looked a bit like Latin and a bit like Esperanto) "He's angry because he has a short tail." Then a few months ago I listened to a THC episode in which mini T. rex sightings were mentioned. That was quite some time ago, though; I have no idea why the mini T. rex would suddenly come to mind on December 30.

Anyway, Randonautica gave me a "void anomaly" that was about a 40-minute walk away, and I set off. When I arrived, the destination turned out to be a stretch of river with an unusual number of birds. There were a few black-beaked egrets of a species I had never seen before, a night heron, a sandpiper of some kind, and a bittern patiently crouching on a rock waiting for something good to swim by. As I was standing there watching the birds, a dumpy black moorhen suddenly came running past, waddling as fast as she could go, but without her wings extended. The general body shape, and the apparent lack of forelimbs, made me think, "Hey, there's your mini T. rex!" -- even with a short tail, as in the dream, though it would be hard to say "he has a short tail" of a bird with such an exaggeratedly feminine physique.

All in all, I thought it was a tolerably good "mini T. rex." I mean, what was I expecting -- that a literal dwarf dinosaur would somehow materialize?

⁂

This morning I had some free time and decided to go for a walk. Rather than follow one of my usual routes, I though why not try Randonautica again? When "visualize your intention" came up, I was once again unprepared, so I went with the mini T. rex again. I guess I didn't really visualize; I just repeated "Mini T. rex! Mini T. rex!" over and over in my mind.

After about 10 minutes of walking toward my anomaly, though, I suddenly felt an overwhelming urge to turn around and retrace my steps, which I did. After less than a minute of backtracking, I was cut off by a scooter which suddenly pulled over right in front of me and parked illegally, with the back half of it sticking out into the road and blocking my path. Basically, I had no choice but to notice this scooter.

Let's zoom in a bit.

That, my friends, is a mini T. rex, delivered right in front of my face just 10 minutes after ordering. Most of his tail is even cut off by the edge of the scooter, which appears to have made the poor chap a bit angry.