Monday, March 18, 2024

Skeletor, hieroglyphic-bearing arthropods, and the Judgement

Some unmanned untethered free association here. It's a constitutional right, after all.

My last post, "Eclipse skull and crossbones" called up a vague memory of a meme in which He-Man's arch-enemy Skeletor was standing with the sun directly behind his head, making it look as if he had a halo -- or an eclipse with a skull instead of a moon. I tried and failed to track it down. One of the search prompts I tried, though, skeletor halo, did turn up eclipse imagery:


In addition to the skull imagery, we have crossed bandoliers, suggesting the X-marks-the-spot of the 2017 and 2024 eclipse paths, centered on Makanda, Illinois. My post "Makanda" is about the coincidence of seeing Makanda on an eclipse map shortly after reading about a giant spider named Makanda in a Colin Wilson novel.

This giant spider connection made me take notice when -- casting my net a bit wider and just searching for skeletor meme -- I found this:


Skulls and spiders led me to the black-and-yellow garden spiders that are common in much of the United States: I've seen a few in North Carolina with markings that make the cephalothorax look like a death's-head. I can't find a great example of this online, but here's something to give you the general idea:


Besides the vaguely skull-like cephalothorax (much better examples exist but apparently not on the Internet), note the posture, typical of this family of spiders, with the legs arranged in an X and the death's-head at the center. (Incidentally, I used a similar garden spider photo to illustrate a post about giant spiders: "Whitley Strieber with between two and four giant spiders.")

The spider pictured above has a fairly uninteresting bumblebee-type pattern, but many garden spiders have much more intricate designs. When I lived in Maryland, I used to make detailed sketches of their markings in a notebook, thinking of them as "hieroglyphics" and imagining that they might mean something, though I never made any attempt to crack the code.

That memory of copying down "hieroglyphics" off the backs of spiders reminded me of something I'd read about several months ago in the Cultural History of the Book of Mormon: a fringe Mormon called Goker Harim who claimed to have translated the writings of the Brother of Jared off the back of an insect of some sort -- a beetle? a spider, even? I found the reference in the Cultural History -- it was a cicada -- and tried to track down the source document online for more details, but to no avail. (I'm not going to pay $9.99 to download it, sorry.) Though I failed to find any details of the story of how the cicada was found and "translated," I did finally find a Word document with a picture of the cicada's markings and an accompanying essay:


It's called "The Judgement Tablet" -- with the British spelling of judgement, even though the author is (I think) American. The essay begins thus:

The Judgement Tablet, also called the Covenant Tablet of the Gentiles, is an advanced style tablet. It has a base and top section in addition to the usual four glyphs. It was written by Achee [i.e., the Brother of Jared] and preserved on a cicada. Written on it is the whole course of history from before creation till after the Final Judgement.

One of the coincidences noted in my last post was the use of the phrase "judgement day" -- British spelling -- by two different Americans in connection with the skull-moon theme. The cicada tablet essay doesn't actually use the phrase "judgement day," but "Final Judgement" is close enough.

Eclipse skull and crossbones

Besides Makanda, the "eclipse crossroads" in Southern Illinois also includes Carbondale -- which has an interesting city logo:


That design looks a little too perfect to be a coincidence, and sure enough, it's not. It was introduced months after the 2017 eclipse and explicitly references the two eclipse paths:

[Carbondale Mayor Mike] Henry said the logo is an abstract crossroad, which fits with Carbondale being the "eclipse crossroads of America." In the middle of the design, it looks like a keyhole, which Henry said suggests the door is always open in the city.

He may think it looks like a keyhole, but to me a round white shape superimposed on a white X looks like a skull and crossbones, a theme that came up in "Human skull on the ground, turn around":


In a comment on that post, I added, "The motorcyclist’s jacket shows a star (like the sun) being eclipsed by a dead white object (like the moon)," a link reinforced by "The eclipsing moon as a skull."


Notice the phrase "judgement day" there -- spelled the British way even though it was posted from America.

The article about the Carbondale logo said that a lot of people had been mocking the logo on social media -- some of them stooping so low, the mayor is shocked to report, as to "draw vulgar things on it on Facebook" -- so I wondered if any of these cowardly basement-dwelling idiot anonymous troll-demons had worked the Jolly Roger angle. An image search for carbondale illinois skull and crossbones turned up further confirmation that the moon is a skull:


That image came from the 2013 archive page for a blog called Skull-A-Day. The image itself is from a December 7 post of skull art by Justin Ferreira; and on the same archive page is a December 29 post in which a reader from Carbondale, Illinois, submitted a photo of milk in a sink forming a skull-like shape.

The crescent moon skull design -- with the face on the concave surface of the crescent, and with dark orbits suggesting dark glasses -- reminded me of the old Moon Man meme.


This led me to look up and reread A. T. L. Carver's proposal that, just as Pepe the Frog is the ancient Egyptian god Kek, Moon Man is Thoth. The last bullet point got my attention:

Okay, so both Moon Man and Thoth:
  • Are associated with the moon
  • Have a crescent moon aspect to their heads
  • Deal with words and vocalizing
  • Are “judgement day” figures who lay down the law and establish an order

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.)

Sunday, March 17, 2024

Russian AI, the Pokémon dragon calendar, and a game you can play in your living room with your pet gorilla

I dreamed that I visited Francis Berger’s blog and found that he had posted a long series of images tiled in a grid layout. These consisted of maybe 8 to 12 unique images, which occurred again and again in an unpredictable sequence like the digits of an irrational number. If the same image occurred two or three times in a row, this was represented with a larger rectangular version of the image, occupying the same space as two or three ordinary square tiles.

The images were colored line drawings of fantastic creatures, mostly somewhat dragon-like. There was a red dragon which seemed to me to be the most important one, and a few of the other creatures were pale blue or cyan. I think one of them looked a bit like my Pokélogan, and there was another that was like a mermaid but less human-looking. Overall, the images suggested the Pokémon aesthetic.

I understood that the grid of images was a calendar of the future, and that whenever there was a long red dragon series, that was a time period when something big could be expected to happen.

I wondered where Frank had gotten the images themselves and figured that they were AI-generated. I refreshed his blog and found a new post gushing about this fantastic new AI service. It was Russian and accepted only Russian-language prompts, but all the cool kids were using it anyway because it was totally uncensored and had no coded-in diversity. Frank also seemed very impressed with its capabilities and wrote that it “may well be the first AI to become an EI.” I didn’t know what EI stood for, but I took it to mean that he thought it had the potential to become literally intelligent, like a human being. (This is of course totally inconsistent with the real Frank’s views on so-called AI.) I can’t remember the name of the Russian AI except that it began with the letter Pi (which is used in Russian as well as in Greek).

As examples of the AI’s amazing capabilities, Frank had posted an image of the mermaid creature and a short video of soldiers on horseback with the word Russia in Russian behind them. I thought both of these were of mediocre quality and couldn’t see what he was so excited about.

Later I saw a commercial for a game based on the group of creatures from Frank’s calendar post. There were some plastic objects about the size and shape of bottle caps, each with a different creature on it, and you could stick these on various surfaces around your living room. These would light up in an unpredictable sequence, and if you had the whacker (which looked like a hand towel), you had to whack the lit-up object before the light went out and then throw the whacker to another player. The commercial said you could even play it with your pets, and it showed a toddler and a silverback gorilla playing together, tearing around a living room and jumping and diving like baseball players to whack all the lit-up objects in time. Both child and ape seemed to be having a great time, but I couldn’t help wondering who would want something like that going on in their living room.

Friday, March 15, 2024

Makanda

In my last post, I quote the passage in Colin Wilson's Shadowland where Typhon tells Niall that he plans to introduce him as Colonel Niall despite the fact that he is not a colonel. A few paragraphs later, Niall's spider companion -- heretofore known only as "the captain," reveals his name for the first time:

Typhon placed his mouth close to Niall's ear. "If you don't mind, I'll introduce you as Colonel Niall. Most of the men here have military rank."

"Of course. Whatever you think best."

"And I'll describe you simply as an envoy from the spider city. Telling them the truth would make everyone ask you how it came about. Or would you prefer that?"

"Of course not." Niall was only too glad to avoid attention.

Typhon asked the captain: "Do you have a name we could use?"

"Among my own people I was known as Makanda."

"Then let it be Captain Makanda."

Today I clicked on an /x/ thread about the upcoming solar eclipse and found this:

Merry, Pippin, Mary Poppins, secret names, golden straw, square heads, and fake colonels

A recent post by William Wright, "March 12 and 13 timelines: Shelob's Lair and a change in the wind," mentions both the Tolkien characters Merry and Pippin and the P. L. Travers character Mary Poppins, but without noting the similarity of the names. I had a vague memory of having posted something about that similarity and wrongly thought that it must have been a comment on William's blog or a post on my own blog inspired by something he had written -- I mean, when else have I had occasion to write about those characters? A search of my blog turns up no mentions of Pippin, and the only Mary Poppins reference is in passing, as an example of a movie I had seen that had Dik [sic] Van Dyke in it. It was on March 14 that I ran the search and found the Dik Van Dyke post. In the comments, Debbie mentions "an episode of the Twilight Zone released on March 14, 1963 called The Parallel."

I finally found what I was looking for, not in anything connected with William Wright, but in a heretofore unpublished sync note from 2015, a time when I was not blogging. Here is the note in question:

Reluctance to reveal one’s name before the time is right (also: M-ry P-pp-n, straw is gold)

2015 Nov 18 (Wed) – I had been reading The Two Towers but took a break for a week or so to read What the Bee Knows by P. L. Travers. Today I finished the last four or five pages of Travers (I had almost finished last night) and immediately after finishing picked up Tolkien again.

This passage is from page 301 of Travers’s 303-page book:

This idea of the secrecy of the name, the taboo against making it known, goes back to man’s very early days, to the time, perhaps, when he had no name. During the war I spent two summers with the Navaho Indians and when they gave me an Indian name they warned me that it would be bad luck both for me and for the tribe if I ever disclosed it to anyone. And I never have. For one thing, I do not want to receive or give bad luck, and for another I have a strong atavistic feeling –– one, I think, that is strongly shared by unlettered people all over the world –– that to disclose one’s name, or take another’s before the time is ripe –– well, it’s dangerous. I tremble inwardly and withdraw when my Christian name is seized before I have given it, and I have the same hesitancy about using that of another person. An Indian –– or a gypsy –– would understand this very well. It is a very ancient taboo and I relate it –– though I don’t suggest that anyone else relate it –– to the earliest times when men built altars ‘To the Unknown God.’ If I were ever to build an altar, I would put that inscription above it.

When I opened up Tolkien, my bookmark was between pages 606 and 607. The very first line:

Here it is with some context from pp. 605-606:

‘Nobody else calls us hobbits; we call ourselves that,’ said Pippin.

‘Hoom, hmm! Come now! Not so hasty! You call yourselves hobbits? But you should not go telling just anybody. You’ll be letting out your own right names if you’re not careful.’

‘We aren’t careful about that,’ said Merry. ‘As a matter of fact I’m a Brandybuck, Meriadoc Brandybuck, though most people call me just Merry.’

‘And I’m a Took, Peregrin Took, but I’m generally called Pippin, or even Pip.’

‘Hm, but you are hasty folk, I see,’ said Treebeard. ‘I am honoured by your confidence; but you should not be too free all at once. There are Ents and Ents, you know; or there are Ents and things that look like Ents but ain’t, as you might say. I’ll call you Merry and Pippin, if you please – nice names. For I am not going to tell you my name, not yet at any rate.’ A queer half-knowing, half-humorous look came with a green flicker into his eyes. ‘For one thing it would take a long while: my name is growing all the time, and I’ve lived a very long, long time; so my name is like a story. Real names tell you the story of the things they belong to in my language, in the Old Entish as you might say. It is a lovely language, but it takes a very long time to say anything in it, because we do not say anything in it, unless it is worth taking a long time to say, and to listen to.

As a second, related sync, the next page of What the Bee Knows (i.e., page 302, the penultimate page) refers to the book Mary Poppins in the Park and the character Mary Poppins (who, of course, is P. L. Travers’s creation). The Tolkien passage features the phonetically similar “Merry and Pippin.”

As a third ancillary coincidence, the paragraph immediately before the one quoted at the beginning of this entry (beginning on page 300) tells the story of Rumpelstiltskin, beginning thus:

‘Rumpelstiltzkin’ was another of my favourites, for its meaning lay very close to me. Everyone knows the story of how the miller’s daughter, in order to become a queen, promises the little old man her first child if he will spin her straw into gold. Of course he does it. It is no problem. To him they are one and the same.

The very first words of page 622 of The Two Towers are “When straw is gold” –– from the song with the Ent and the Entwife.

The fact that two of the syncs feature the very first words of one of Tolkien’s pages is itself a noteworthy coincidence, I suppose.

I looked up this old sync note yesterday, March 14, 2024. It is part of a sync log file consisting of a series of such notes in reverse chronological order, like a blog. Immediately after the note quoted above (and therefore written immediately before it) was this brief one:

Square heads and hairy bodies

2015 Nov 16 (Mon) – Skype. Amber asked me about an alleged trend in Taiwan where people cut a dog’s fur so that its head will be a perfect square.

2015 Nov 17 (Tue) – Read in P. L. Travers’s What the Bee Knows: “the wild women of ancient Russia with square heads and hairy bodies”

This got my attention because I am currently reading Shadowland by Colin Wilson, in which there are several mentions of human beings who have been genetically engineered to have square heads. The first such reference is on p. 342:

Niall . . . blinked with astonishment, suspecting that his eyes were deceiving him. The man seemed to have a square head. Niall pointed to him.

"Is there something wrong with him?"

"No. That is one of the karvasid's experiments. He thought that a man with a different-shaped head could be made more intelligent, but he proved to be wrong. They are very stupid."


Recall that before finding these old sync notes, I had searched this blog for Mary Poppins and found an old post where the March 14, 1963 Twilight Zone episode "The Parallel" was mentioned. Since finding that on March 14 was a bit of a sync, I read the summary of that episode on Wikipedia. An astronaut returns to Earth and slowly realizes that he has slipped into a subtly different parallel universe. One of the first clues is that everyone addresses him as Colonel even though in the universe he knows, he never held that rank. Later that same day, March 14, I read this in Shadowland:

Typhon placed his mouth close to Niall's ear. "If you don't mind, I'll introduce you as Colonel Niall. Most of the men here have military rank."

People with square heads, and a non-colonel being addressed as a colonel. Two pretty specific and unusual themes!

Wednesday, March 13, 2024

AI art still has a long way to go

I was trying to generate some line-drawing illustrations for Aesop's fable of the Tortoise and the Hare. Stable Diffusion had other ideas:


Actually, that looks like a much more interesting story.

Skeletor, hieroglyphic-bearing arthropods, and the Judgement

Some unmanned untethered free association here. It's a constitutional right, after all. My last post, " Eclipse skull and crossbone...