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.

1 comment:

WanderingGondola said...

Hm, had a look at that /x/ thread. I don't check the dot often, never mind the GCP project site, so I wasn't aware of the "new dot" -- actually a ring of dots -- linked in #37315049.

The image in the thread's second reply caught my curiosity. A reverse search turned up the context: it's from the weird demo for a Sega Dreamcast game called Shenmue, where instead of showing part of the full game's story, the player must search for one of Sega's then-directors. The screenshot comes in at the end, where it's shown the whole thing was a dream as the director had fallen asleep in his office. The demo isn't particularly interesting except for a synchronistic start-up (0:00-0:07), the director's appearance (18:36-20:58), and the premonitory stacks of unsold Dreamcasts (the system was a commercial failure).

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