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.