Blueface, melatonin, and the pink planet

The "Free Will Paradox" music video, which I posted on October 28 in "Moving pictures on book covers and translations of Heidegger," is what gave rise to the "Blueface" sync theme. I had posted a still from the video which shows a man against a blue-green background, and it reminded Debbie of a picture on her dress, in which the man is himself blue-green.

The video was synchy enough to make me want to track down a copy of the novel Ari Barak and the Free-Will Paradox, and one of the first places I looked was archive.org. As I've mentioned many times before, every time I start typing archive into the address bar, autocomplete gives me https://archive.4plebs.org/x/random/, and I usually click first to see what I get. Clicking on my way to search for Ari Barak, I got a thread about how tart cherries cause absurd dreams (and are possibly sinful to eat) because of their high melatonin content. As documented in my October 29 post "Melatonin and a black fedora," this led me to do some brief research on melatonin. I then started reading a free sample of Ari Barak and found that it, too, referenced melatonin.

So, the same video led to the sync themes of (1) people with blue faces and (2) melatonin.

Andrew Anglin is back to doing somewhat regular meme dumps, which is great since the meme dumps and the Duke of Earl material (see "We can't stop him, folks") are my main reasons for following him. Late last night I checked out his latest, "Memetic Monday: Delivered on Time, As Always" (posted on Friday). Before the memes proper, there was some stuff about the blog itself, including this explanation of why it has been redesigned and now has a black background:

I like it better black. White light from the screen literally makes you gay. I hope you know that. It makes you gay. If you’re not gay already, you are probably against that. If you are gay, it’s possible you want to become even more gay, but you can go elsewhere for that.

As evidence that white light causes gayness, he included this image saying that blue light causes reduced sperm quality. Close enough, I guess.

Of course, by posting a very large version of that image on his site, Anglin was filling his readers' screens with blue light and suppressing their melatonin -- and by reposting it myself, I'm doing the same thing. My sincerest apologies to any of my readers whom I may recklessly have turned gay. My purpose is to point out how the blueface theme and the melatonin theme, having had their origin in the same video, now find themselves reunited in this PSA. If I can't point that out without a bit of sexual collateral damage, that's just the way the cookie crumbles. At least if you run into this guy, you'll know how to answer him.

Among the memes themselves, one stood out for its connection to the old "stealing pumpkins" theme:

I'm going to put this here because it relates to the blueface theme. Earlier this week, either Monday or Tuesday, I read the preschoolers the story Miss Nelson Is Missing (1977) by Harry Allard and James Marshall. At one point in the story, the kids speculate that their missing teacher may have gone to Mars, and there is this illustration:

The preschoolers have been learning about the solar system. When I showed them the above picture, one of them was certain it couldn't really be Mars, because "Mars is red, but that planet is pink!"

Then on Wednesday I read Arrowsmith's latest sync post and posted "Richard Arrowsmith on 3i/ATLAS." One of the things Arrowsmith posted -- and I reposted, due to its blueface connection -- was this panel from one of Alan Moore's comic books, showing Dr. Manhattan on Mars.

Here, too, Mars is shown as pink rather than red, and the text explicitly mentions "the shifting pink sand."

In Miss Nelson Is Missing, the sweet-tempered Miss Nelson disappears and is replaced with the brutally strict Miss Swamp, who in the end turns out to have been Miss Nelson in disguise. People with "swampy" names have of course been a theme here for a while.