Georeactor Blog

In the spirit of Topics I would read a deep dive on and part-2, but for personal mysteries:

Niche Unexplained

• When I worked at the museum, we had a daily standup meeting. One time, someone I barely knew thanked me for working on their issue. It sounded like I had come over and helped them through it, but I never remembered, even when we followed up on it. Lost day? Work prank?
• I was alone at a hotel at Disney World, and saw in broad daylight a car-sized balloon, hovercraft, or UFO gliding over land and water.
• Right after Election Day 2020, there was a group working in the building across the street from me in Myrtle Beach, until 1 or 2 am. People were usually masking and limiting contact at this time, so it was sus.
• One late night in Chicago, I saw police blocking multiple intersections as a truck went through. I would describe it as having big racks of oxygen tanks.
• I was sitting in a NYC Chinatown park waiting for someone, and I remember it as these guys in Halloween masks with a camera, confronting another guy on a bench and taking his photo? I was talking into a phone connected to a battery pack, so they likely took my photo, too. I don't remember clearly.
• When I was a kid I would semi regularly have a health issue which would terrify me if it happened today. I never hear anyone talking about it in their childhood experience.
• When I was visiting Minneapolis the light rail pulled away and there was a driver trying to exit a parking garage without going onto the track. I was wearing sunglasses. I felt sympathetic to the situation to the point I looked for traffic and considered his experience level driving in this city. I had fully dissociated when he suddenly yelled, "Maybe they shouldn't have built the light rail! That's what I think!" Because of the wording and how I had just been in his mindset it felt more like he was repelling a psychic connection?
• I feel like sunbeams used to be more visible, with more dust and hairs?
• There was a brief spree of XSS links on Digg, Reddit, and/or Myspace which made everyone upvote links on mouseover events and take over the site. I remember a similar bug going viral on Facebook. It had a nasty rumor tagging someone, and when news media contacted her, she professed no idea what they were talking about. Everyone on Facebook at the time would have seen this, but there's no mention of it even in articles about Facebook and XSS issues, so I guess it was a dream?
• While I was waiting in a car with someone, I could make a windshield cloud up in a little halo by hovering my fingers next to it. This must be a body heat / circulatory thing. The person I was with couldn't do it.
• At an after-work dinner, I turned a paper chopstick sleeve into a circle which I could idly roll back and forth by hovering my hand? Cringe, but also confusing. When the other people at the table asked the trick of it, I was wondering too. Maybe I was blocking an air current?
• How many US states have rattlesnakes and cacti? More than you expected? Did you know there are land-dwelling crayfish? I was a big nature kid, and just recently finding out that my home state has a tiny population of endangered rattlesnakes weirds me out.

Solved, I guess?

• When I was a kid, we had a popcorn ceiling. At night I would fixate on a point and zone out for a second, and then all the other popcorn bumps would revolve around or flow past it for a few seconds. I knew that couldn't be physically happening. Now that I know the term "popcorn ceiling" I found a few reports, including in an autism subreddit (?).
• When you look out on Lake Michigan from Chicago, on a clear day will let you see lights on the horizon from deep into Indiana. Photographers have captured Chicago's skyline from Michigan in ideal conditions. This leads to debate about whether the atmosphere, gravity, or height makes it possible to bend light and see more places across the lake. After a complaint about steam from a plant in Indiana, I verified that I can see that from 40 miles away. Based on where that was, my windows don't even face Michigan. One night I looked out and saw something that I could not figure out, even with the binoculars. It was like colorful segments of a wall, and was much too big and too close (possibly bigger from reflecting?). I have also seen fata morgana one time after a few weeks of looking for boats and stuff.
• Finger blur
• In my evolution vs. intelligent design era, I would email state legislators about their state fossil or something. One guy responded positively but also cc'd admin at an inappropriate website. I thought that maybe his email app was infected, but he likely was a creep?

Weird to think about

• If a coworker told me that they were getting parasite treatments I would think, "gross, they probably got marked-up turpentine off of TikTok". If they said "I take probiotics because my daily energy level comes from healthy gut bacteria" that would be totally acceptable. And I have donated to charities to supply people in other parts of the world with anti-parasitic medicines. Is it nuts to take parasites more seriously?
• How real is quantum immortality?  I can accept parallel universes on a foundational level (different laws of physics) or micro level (quantum noise but not macro effects). Quantum immortality seems to suggest either some version of you survives impossible damage, or you avoid that danger so your survival continues. Is there a version of me writing this who then lives to be 200? What % of me-s already died in nasty accidents? Suppose the chance that humanity got through the Cold War and that I was ever born was only 5%. As we go forward, that would mean that we are already in a weird probability pocket where we A) look back at past dangers, our reactions, and resolutions in bewilderment and B) now have to live with our selected hyper-weirdness, and C) given a hyper-weird path, we can only expect weirdness to accelerate as we collectively survive.  Sometimes this is my explanation for the past decade?
• So many people on TV, in politics and activism, who go into niche communities, tend to be 'odd' in some other aspects of their lives, because for most people the general path feels very safe and you have to break with the general path (for good or for bad) to end up with your daily life being exceedingly rare.
• I've never been to a hypnotist show. People seem confident that it's real, but also that only some people can be hypnotized (?). John Mulaney has been public about quitting smoking after seeing a hypnotherapist. Scott Adams (the Dilbert guy) has posted favorably about "waking hypnosis" and describes Donald Trump speeches as "deep technique that I recognized from the fields of hypnosis and persuasion." If hypnotism were magic I'd expect a random population to support a candidate rather than an intensification of existing political lines. If hypnotism is just speaking persuasively or improv, then what are we even talking about?
• After reading pop science on split brains, schizophrenia, aphasia, dissociative identity, I've wondered if the brain has multiple points of consciousness. When you think 'ugh, why did I say that?', the specific you that's thinking that just wasn't in the pilot's seat. The you reading this is convinced that you are in control almost all the time. You zone out when wordlessly pouring cereal, and can't contemplate that another 'you' is in full control then.

Confusing being a human

• I can't believe that StumbleUpon was a thing. I had StumbleUpon on a work computer visible to the office.
• I went to a small conference for a few years, and a woman asked me for my acne treatment to help her daughter, and I said, I didn't do anything! She was very insistent!
• Looking back to how I spent time as a kid, I feel repulsed by how often we were doing anything to fill up time. Re-reading a library book about crafts which we didn't do. Tracing a coloring book. Following ants. Inventing rules to Risk so I could play board games by myself. Tracing a road atlas across the country. Losing my mind while not falling asleep.
• "Stupid" was a bad word, and we always had trouble playing a racing game because my mom noticed there was a character who called you "quitter" at the end. Because of this I love every conservative Christian story about how their family couldn't use tons of words. There are some subcultures on this.
• The World is Flat had a cultural moment in 2005. That got my brother pilled and he majored in econ/poli-sci. I also got pilled and said a bunch of cringe nonsense in my college interviews about globalization and cultural preservation.
• My dad brought a chocolate cable car back from a San Francisco work trip, absolutely insane, maybe shoebox size?, and we carved little pieces of chocolate off for what feels like WEEKS. This would be a great gift that I would eat immediately today.

Memory

• Research suggests that memory, even flashbulb memories, are false. A portion of college students re-surveyed a few years after 9/11 forgot not only where they had been, but that four planes were involved. I don't think that I would forget so easily? Either memory studies are missing something, I am in a special bracket, or everyone thinks that they belong in a special bracket? I'm not claiming perfect recall. I can't name every teacher who I had in 2001. When I search for stuff on Gmail I am surprised by situations and interactions in old emails which I completely forgot about. And I can't remember if I've had a room with a camera obscura effect from window shades, or if that's just absorbed from the internet. But flashbulb memories, I feel like they exist.
• When I lived as a nomad, that maybe helped me anchor memories and events to specific places. Also if something is a unique event in a familiar location.
• At a recent family wedding, I pulled up a photo of my little brother carrying a baby alligator. This was a great hit at our table. Then I remembered that the bride commented on this photo in 2007! I have to think some mental tagging is how I remembered the photo now and not at the first event where he brought his girlfriend. Also at the wedding, my brother told us about reading The Truth About the Neutron Bomb, reviewed 2022. Interestingly he thought that he'd gotten it at my grandparents' home, and not while visiting me a year later. He also highlighted the same part that I did when showing it to him (Oppenheimer's basketball court rally after the bomb succeeded). I was already thinking about memory so I listened but didn't probe the reality of it.
• Earliest memories - sort of difficult to place this, but we had a crib with a Muppet Babies design (our only exposure to this series AFAIK) and I remember dreaming about Muppet Babies floating, someone trying to give me scrambled eggs and I could only kick them away. More concretely, I can remember jumping out of a car saying "I'm five" when I was still four.