HAL 9000: I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do
Words of the day: Cogitabund – meditative; engaged in deep thought
Digitorium – silent piano for practising
Inspirational!
Nothing happened today. Zero. So I thought I’d share some unusual inspiration. Usually inspirational quotes make me feel lonely. Like peering through the window of a party I’m not invited to because I don’t relate to the perky thinking. Not that I’m miserable, I think life can be beautiful and people can be great and possibilities are endless if we can figure them out. But all the gushing sentiment rings hollow to me. It’s twee.
Then I discovered online artificially intelligent inspirational quotes (ie a computer creates them using existing inspirational quotes as a template). They tend more towards the bizarre, the nonsensical and the cynical, which suits me to a t. And who can disagree with ‘Choose not to be horrible’?
And this is something we all need to remember, right?
Word of the day: Afflatus – divine breath, inspiration
All Seeing Eye
Today Mike found a drone lying in one of the gardens at work, under an Acanthus. I’m not sure if it got out of control, flew into the garden and then the owner couldn’t get in to retrieve it (the garden is gated) or if our residents are so rich that the owner couldn’t be bothered trying to find it. And I’m not sure what they were using it for. Do people fly them for fun like they flew remote controlled planes? Or only to take photos where they shouldn’t?
The managers in the office are trying to spread the rumour that they’re using it to spy on us. I really hope Barry doesn’t find out about this, he’ll probably assume that it’s mine and I’m watching him. If he can believe helicopters are spying on him, then being paranoid about a drone is easy.
Word of the day: Bombilate – to hum, buzz or drone
Solved
Just to sum up what everyone has worked out about the advert since it seems that it did make some sense if you’re more knowledgeable about markets, children’s books and life than me.
Calmgrove – the bear is Paddington who was from darkest Peru and could talk. I suspect this is an invoke sweet things trick to mask their devilish intent.
Jasper Hoogendam – Winnie the Pooh was originally from Winniepeg, hence the name. Not in the ad, but still interesting.
Colin McQueen – in rugby the Lions have a coach from New Zealand (kiwi) and the cheeky chicken refers to ‘having a cheeky Nandos’. I have no idea what either has to do with banks.
Shaily Agrawal/ – pointed out that bear is a market term for someone who takes risks. I don’t really want my bank to take risks, because that’s what caused the economic crash last time. Maybe that’s the subliminal bit, they rename recklessness as ‘open mindedness’ and then throw in the bear.
I, after a foolishly long time, worked out that being shut on bank holidays is what banks do.
So to translate
Keep an open mind because being open minded has opened doors to Paddington Bear, who’s secretly a risk-taking banker; rugby coaches from New Zealand; and a cheeky Nandos. Now is not the time to batten down the hatches, it’s time to stay open, except when we’re shut. Because we are not an island, well we are, all the surrounding water makes that clear, but people can still visit, which is nice. And the world is big, and it has bears and lions, unlike the UK which only just got bears and has no lions to speak of.
But what are you talking about ?
I look at this advert every morning while waiting for the train, but it’s nonsense, isn’t it? Can anyone give me a hand? Does it have a subliminal message? Or had they run out of ideas so decided to blurt out any old bollocks?
It’s for the bank HSBC. Maybe it’s like adverts for alcohol – they aren’t allowed to say a highly toxic product is nice, so they go all surreal instead. Or maybe they feel such contempt for the public that they believe we’ll be humbled by whatever they say.
The text:
Keep an open mind because being open minded has opened doors to talking bears from darkest Peru Kiwis who can coach lions and Portuguese chicken that’s cheeky. Now is not the time to batten down the hatches, it’s time to stay open. Except on bank holidays. Because we are not an island we are part of something far far bigger.
Thoughts that have occurred to my morning addled brain as I stare across the tracks…
- Is Peru dark?
- I like to think I’m open minded, when am I going to open a door to a talking bear?
- Is this about a circus?
- If that’s a Brexit reference, it’s only going to annoy people.
- Most things open on bank holidays now. Are they thinking of decades ago?
- Is this supposed to make me want to open a bank account? It doesn’t.
So anyone got any ideas as to what this might be on about? Does it make you want to switch to HSBC?
The Alley of Sinister Children
I stumbled down a back street today and found myself in a tiny road with many flowers and statues of children hanging from the balconies. Each one was dangling from a different house, so this is a small of community who got together and all agreed to decorate their homes with strung up children. At first I found it interesting, but I didn’t like the one with no hands, bit too much like a Saw movie to me. I didn’t hang around very long after that, the vibes were not reassuring.
Frieze! Or I’ll shoot!
Alien Resort was asking about the picture I put up yesterday. It was one of the sculptures from the outdoor art Frieze at Regent’s Park (I turned the picture upside down because I liked the way it messed with perspective). Anyway, I thought I’d put up the other pictures from there, since it was an interesting exhibition.
Quite annoying though, despite cordons around most of the art and signs saying Please don’t touch, people were lifting their kids over the ropes and letting them climb all over the art. I like that the public feel less intimidated by art and rules now, but it seems like only the intimidation was stopping us from trashing everything.
^ This is part of the sculpture that I used in yesterday’s photo, there were four of these bridge-like structures with words that didn’t make much sense on them.
Jaume Plensa – Laura Asia’s Dream
I thought this was beautiful, so peaceful ^
^ I’m not usually keen on Tracey Emin’s art, but I thought this captured a feeling well. And I liked the way she was just lying on the grass, as if she’d collapsed there and didn’t want to get up.
^ A rabbit, leaping through the air on the back of four elephants. This looked like the penultimate scene in a kid’s book.
Well, this disturbing hunk of chunk looked like it would step down and start thumping people. Just looked up the artist, and she’s great. May do a blog about some of her art soon, it’s the stuff of creepy dreams.
There were other sculptures too, which I’ll probably post up at some time. I hope you enjoyed these!
Freaky deaky Clematis
I’ll be honest, this photo was taken a few weeks ago. Or months. I don’t really pay attention, time does its thing whatever. Anyway, I found this while weeding in one our more exotic gardens and asked around my colleagues to see if anyone knew what it was. We thought because of the leaves, it must be a Clematis, but none of us had seen a flower like this.
After I got home I did some googling around and discovered this photo, so the centre of Clematises do do this, but is it normal to do it this much?
Like the segments of an orange. Barely a flower at all.
This has just been a week when I’ve proved how little I know about plants, right?
I’m attracting trouble again
This morning I was making my way to the station, when I think a guy threatened to punch me. It was very odd.
I was walking beside a main road, when I saw him coming towards me on my side of the pavement. He wasn’t big, but he was wiry, tense and with a look of utter rage and hatred, staring straight at me. At about fifteen feet away, he began punching at the air in front of him, all the while looking at me. I stepped to one side so that I wasn’t in his path, he stepped to the same side, still punching. I stopped, not sure what else to do. He kept coming, still punching, I didn’t move. Finally he stopped and stood in front of me, fists flailing in my direction, but not quite reaching. I stared at him trying to find an expression that didn’t look scared or aggressive, I probably just looked blank. Then with a jabbing finger he pointed to one side, presumably to suggest I walk around him. I did, waiting for him to thump me as I walked past, he didn’t and I caught the train. Too strange to deal with at seven in the morning.
At work we got guilted into using the new mess room.
‘We redecorated this for you all! Why aren’t you in it? Don’t you like it?’
So the smokers sat outside the new room on rocks (no benches here) and the rest of us sat inside on the most uncomfortable chairs in the world. They have some fancy new ergonomic design (remember they were acquired from another business that was throwing them out) and they slope downwards. So when you sit on one, you slowly slide off. The only way to stay on the chair is to constantly press your feet against the floor. This is fucking up my back. I’m going to pinch an old, battered wooden chair from one of the gardens and put that inside.
Word of the day: orey-eyed – expressing anger through the eyes
No more Jack
For the past few weeks I’ve been investigating Jack. He wrote in a letter, found in one of our gardens, that he’d been abused by the Illuminati (see my previous posts for more details). I’ve been trying to work out if the letter was a joke or the Illuminati attack was real, or just real to Jack. Now I think I know the answer.
Searching around online I found a comment he had made on a blog called Synthetic telepathy and psychotronic weapon tortures by 100,000 FBI and NSA secret spies.
Synthetic telepathy and psychotronic weapon tortures
This is the introduction to the blog
“Pervert FBI and NSA psychopaths are secretly and illegally conducting non-consensual, sadistic, synthetic telepathy experiments and psychotronic weapon attacks on hundreds of thousands of innocent citizens in the United States and elsewhere.”
This is a site to provide information for people who believe they are being remotely abused by the FBI (or some other government body) through psychic means.
There is a list of symptoms on the blog for people undergoing these attacks, it’s very long so I won’t copy it here, but some of them are what a schizophrenic might experience:
- Artificial “bee stings”, especially while trying to get to sleep.
- Voices, either very insulting, or telling you things that indicate you are under surveillance.
- Very unnatural inability to sleep, as if large amounts of caffeine have been consumed.
- Reading and broadcasting private thoughts.
- Frequent break-ins and poisoning of food.
- Has no privacy even for his/her private thoughts.
There are nearly five hundred responses to the blog from desperate scared people, describing their attacks. And Jack has written one of these.
Many of the replies are heartbreaking and odd, such as this one
“I woke up one morning and my face had changed into an old lady’s face and my body is not my own. My skin is gross! like old lady skin. My boobs are completely different like they deflated. My mind is tortured 24/7. I hear voices and they’re terribly rude and talk shit all the time. Its normally my step brothers voice. Things go missing all the time, its like a funny joke to them. I don’t have ovaries anymore. I woke up and they were gone. I got it checked it out. I’m only 29 and my entire life just vanished one day. My days are pre recorded like clock work. I don’t know how long I’ve been here. I just dealt with the weird stuff going on hoping something would change me back. My soul left my body. I know this asssholes play games with me. I’ve tried killing myself but there’s something holding me back. wtf. I know this isn’t real. It should be easy to kill myself. Conspiracy theory. Has anyone else gone through something like this?”
This blog showed me there a lot of people like Jack, who believe they are being tortured from a distance, but their accounts only read like mental illness to me. I know I could be wrong, but with the brain injury I experienced paranoid psychosis for about five years and I recognise a lot of the thought patterns.
This is from Jack’s long reply to the blog (most of which is a repetition of the letter):
About 8 years ago he [Oliver] began forming an abuse network and handing out super high level computers with pretty much all the freemason/illuminati technology there is on them under the condition they do what ever he says, abuse anyone he wants to and tell any lies about anyone he tells them to. Either positive lies to get him and others in his group more power or lies to dishonestly degrade anyone he wants. His group began treating me badly in the real world and mistreating me (these are people I new from a young age.).While they planned my abuse.
This maybe explains more about the man who abused Jack’s father:
At first they began pretending they where helping me by making me a big man. They hit my brain and my body with ‘funny radiation’ twice and began influencing my mind while giving me a hard time. I ended up in a mental health ward. They also began abusing my father who is a really good man. They gradually began abusing me more and more. After about 2 months they where constantly verbally abusing me, controlling my mind to mess me up, hitting my brain and body with damaging cancer causing radiation.
After looking at his Facebook page and the reply, I am finally convinced, this is not a joke or an art project. Jack is a seriously ill guy who has built up a whole paranoid narrative around people he has known for years. It is possible for psychosis to build on real life experiences, but I don’t believe Jack actually knows anyone in the Illuminati or the Freemasons, certainly there’s no sign of this on his Facebook page.
Now I’m sure that this is illness, I think I need to walk away. Much as I enjoy exploring a mystery and sharing it with you all, somebody’s mental health and suffering aren’t something to play with. I’ve done my best to be respectful of Jack’s situation and his privacy, but I don’t think that is enough anymore. I won’t shy from writing about mental illness, but it has to done in the right way, to be helpful, and I don’t believe this is.
I’m not saying this will be gone forever and forgotten, sometimes little mysteries end up connecting in unexpected ways, but I’m going to stop poking around and just hope that Jack gets whatever help and peace of mind he needs.
I’m also probably going to take a break from blogging this week. I’m not sleeping and when I do I have too many nightmares, it’s all making me sluggish in the day. Once I’ve finished work I’m only fit to stare into space. I reckon I need a week off to let my head settle, then I’ll get back to it. See you all soon, inkbiotic x
inkbiotic 