Tag: weird

Lowering Our Boggle Threshold

~ cafebedouin

“Paranthropologist Dr Jack Hunter, editor of the newly released anthology Deep Weird: The Varieties of High Strangeness Experience, notes that psychical researcher Rene Haynes coined the concept of the ‘Boggle threshold’ to describe this phenomenon – “the point at which a researcher says ‘no I’m not taking that, I’m not accepting that any further, it’s too weird’.”

Hunter believes that we need to lower our ‘Boggle thresholds’ a little bit, and start paying paying attention to the more bizarre paranormal experiences – because “when we do that, we can start to look for parallels or patterns across experiences, and we see that there are striking similarities even between some of the most outrageous ‘high strangeness experiences’ and some of the most widely accepted transpersonal religious experiences.”

-Greg, “Deep Weird: The varieties of high strangeness experience.” DailyGrail.com. February 23, 2023.

Always Judge a Book By Its Cover

~ cafebedouin

“Some books win awards, some win our heart, and others… only serve to confuse.”

–https://alwaysjudgeabookbyitscover.com/

Eating People is Wrong’s commentary made me LOL. But, it was the Chuck Tingle book that convinced me to post this website. I don’t know why I even know who Chuck Tingle is, probably has something to do with the “weird fiction” phase I went through mid-2019, but I’d like to do my part to increase his readership.

How to Destroy the Earth

~ cafebedouin

“This is not a guide for wusses whose aim is merely to wipe out humanity. I can in no way guarantee the complete extinction of the human race via any of these methods, real or imaginary. Humanity is wily and resourceful, and many of the methods outlined below will take many years to even become available, let alone implement, by which time mankind may well have spread to other planets; indeed, other star systems. If total human genocide is your ultimate goal, you are reading the wrong document. There are far more efficient ways of doing this, many which are available and feasible RIGHT NOW. Nor is this a guide for those wanting to annihilate everything from single-celled life upwards, render Earth uninhabitable or simply conquer it. These are trivial goals in comparison.

This is a guide for those who do not want the Earth to be there anymore.”

qntm, “How to destroy the Earth.” qntm.org. April 4, 2003.

For the record, I’m favoring: “A variation on [the cooked in a solar oven method involving] turning the Sun into a gigantic hydrogen gas laser.” Of course, swallowed up by the Sun as it becomes a red giant seems to be a certainty, if you are prepared to wait 5 billion years. I think I’m going to wait, everyone.

Grovertruk

~ cafebedouin

All you really need to know is that someone decided to document a van life buildout that features a firepit. The fact that this was inspired by Groverhaus, which was a dangerous and crazy decision a guy named Grover and his wife decided to build an add-on to his home without professional help, is interesting backstory.

If you like this kind of thing, then try subscribing to Garbage Day. It’s the cream of notable weird on the Internet without actually having to use sites like Something Awful. Win/win.

Bonus: Check out “the the Fieri Frames blog, which takes screenshots from Diners, Drive-Ins, And Dives and puts weird and unsettling captions on them,” as another example of what Garbage Day gives you, this time from Tumblr.

Imagining Chapel Perilous

~ cafebedouin

“Once you are in the Chapel [Perilous], Wilson insisted, there are only two ways out: as an agnostic, or a stone-cold paranoid. “There is no third way.”…

…Like so many drugs, the Imagination is both poison and cure, and we are not getting rid of that paradox any more than we are getting rid of pop paranoia or conspiracy politics or apocalyptic psyops. Living with Imagination does not involve the transcendence of pathology, but something more daemonic, more ironic, and also probably more tragic. The Imagination provides forms of sense-making that do not deny the chaotic disorders of our inner wilderness, and it nourishes us to the degree that we approach it as an ally to barter with rather than an overlord to slavishly believe or a “cognitive bias” to avoid.

—Erik Davis, “Wilderness of Mirrors.” Burning Shore. No. 8., August 25, 2020.

Marginalization and Being Weird

~ cafebedouin

“One thing I think this illustrates is how non-transferable experiences of marginalisation are. bell hooks obviously has more experience of marginalisation than I do – she is a black woman in the US, while I am in most regards a fairly privileged white man. But I am also a queer neurodivergent person, and the experience of small towns for people like me is literally the worst.

If you’re sufficiently “weird” and live or go to school in a small town, chances are pretty good you know almost nobody like you, and it’s awful. In a large city you may still struggle to find people like you, but those people are at least there and once you’ve found a few you will find more through them. It is possible to build a community of people like you, and to build a love ethic within that community, in a way that I don’t think people like me are ever going to really find in a small town.”

-David R. MacIver, “The conditional love of a small town.” DRMacIver’s Notebook. April 27, 2020.

Recommend David’s blog in general. Personally, I find I agree with much of what he says. I’ve been “weird” to other people my whole life, but I’ve never identified as being “neurodivergent”, a term I’ve only come to know in the last few years. However, it is a useful way to understand being out of step with the world and helps bring a sense of normality to being different.