Author: Tim B. Page 186 of 204

Tom Delonge UFO explainer

On 2 August 2017

In case you were wondering…

I’ve never liked Blink 182, so cracking the lead singer, Tom Delonge’s (pronounced da-long) strange fascination with all things UFO is a bit of a chore since there seem to be a bunch of bad quality Youtube videos on the subject which are gently serenaded by the group’s irritating tunes.

Putting that prejudgement aside, I’ve been vacationing down the ? ? which I keep seeing come up on /r/conspiracy related to Tom Delonge’s quest for UFO disclosure.

Anyway, I watched a bunch of bad videos on the subject so you don’t have to – or maybe so you can two. idk. Either way, I recommend starting here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_96N-w74xE

This video is often referenced elsewhere. Basically, in the Wikileaks DNC dump, we can find references to emails between John Podesta (then presidential advisor) and Tom Delonge about high-level talks around possible UFO disclosure. Here’s one such email from Wikileaks for reference.

I tried watching Delonge’s appearance on Larry King but found it unbearably boring, so follow that link if you want.

This video of somebody named Grant Cameron interviewed in a hotel room at a UFO conference about mostly Delonge is long and rambling and has a few interesting parts.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9686CJRpUIM

So take this for whatever it’s worth. Anyway there is a Reddit thread which basically summarizes the video here.

“In a recent interview UFO researcher Grant Cameron claims to have some info regarding Tom’s upcoming announcement.

The goal of the operation is to get the story out through Hollywood

It’s a billion dollar project backed by one of the richest people in the world

100-episode series that will run for 5 years, directed by Spielberg amd J.J. Abrams

“It’s not gonna be full disclosure, but it’s going to be massive.”

By ‘disclosure’ we’re talking about public announcement/acknowledgement by the US government that extraterrestrials exist, and we’ve been in contact with them as a species since… whatever date. Roswell? The 1950’s? Not fully sure here and doesn’t really matter, as each researcher seems to have their own ideas.

Anyway, I’ve also found some bizarre mentions of Delonge on Reddit within the last week or so. Something about some predatory behavior (of others) and possibly human trafficking? It’s all pretty suspicious, taken as a whole.

Apparently Delonge’s media company which he wants to pin all the possibly-real/possibly-misinformation disclosure stuff onto as a franchis is To the Stars, and he has a book series with Peter Levenda, called Sekret Machines — the spelling of which “drives me nuts” but oh well.

But yeah, that’s basically that. Now you know probably everything you might ever need to know on the subject — and then some!

Green angel

By Tim B.

On 1 August 2017

In Entity, Feeling, Intuition, Received

Spotted in the trees, twice. Shifting forms in wind, reveal at turns sacred and grotesque forms. May form faces and bodies.

Water dragon (3 heads)

By Tim B.

On 1 August 2017

In Character, Definition, Entity, Received

Received:

Water dragon with three heads, depicted on cards (3) rising out of water.

Javascript rapid word input tool

By Tim B.

On 31 July 2017

In Action, Feature, Feeling, Function, Operation, Pattern, Process, Program, Review, Thing, Workflow

I went off on pretty much a tear earlier investigating the possibility of coming up with some kind of rapid communication board which would allow you to input words, not letters.

I went once or twice around the bend, and found the closest match in an app called DocsPlus which gives you the ability to create customizable word-bars. There’s a 28 day free trial. It’s interesting, but my use case is to be able to rapidly paste in the results of these sentence creation actions into Firefox in a spreadsheet. It was too combersome with switching back and forth between tabs to access other word bars.

So I cooked up some Javascript I’m still tinkering with which looks at the moment like this:

Keyboard that inputs words not letters

By Tim B.

On 31 July 2017

In Pattern, Process, Question

Is there a way on Mac OS X Sierra to enter whole words rapidly, instead of letter-by-letter, as per normal typing?

I’ve experimented a lot with Dragon Dictate for text entry and it can work well under specific circumstances – one of which is having an allowance for vocalizations in the workplace (not always convenient).

What I’m after is to basically be able to set up word banks, and then rapidly plop in values from each group to form descriptive sentences for SEO on a high volume of images. Since many of the subjects of the images repeat again and again, I’m wanting to split them up into re-usable chunks.

So it could be a little like this, genericized:

[Person][Action][Preposition][Location]

Where each item is a bank of related words, which I can quickly flip through to find the correct combination, something like:

Man walking on a beach

I have aText, which is a decent basic text expander app, and I see people talking about some autocomplete options in Mac OS, but so far nothing quite fits the bill.

I guess the closest I’ve come so far has been finding (more on iOS) some applications for augmentative/assistive communications boards, like so:

If I were able to customize this kind of thing with my own word banks, and make it into like an app that can be called up system-wide (or at least in Firefox), and which will output strings of text into Google Sheets + allow for easy switching to regular text/letter-by-letter entry style, I would be pretty much golden…

Maybe I’ll just have to cobble it together myself though, it looks like.

Until next season

By Tim B.

On 26 July 2017

In Feeling, Intuition, Thing, Weather

There is a state I often find myself in, when working outside. The “closing things down for the day” routine. Shutting the doors to the shed where the chickens live. Putting tools away. Knowing I won’t come back out again today to play with whatever I was working on. Or maybe I will, but if I don’t, then there will be no (extra) harm that will come because of my neglect.

I sometimes feel myself amplifying that feeling out to the end of the season. If it snows today and summer ends in a sudden bluster, it will be okay. It’s not usually (or at least not always completely) true, but in my mind it somehow has to be. Battening down the hatches against the end of the world.

I’ve never found myself thinking so much towards future years. Not in terms of what will I do one day but the future in a matter-of-fact way. That today will be roughly like the next, and the next, and the next. Perhaps on into years, as the trees planted this season grow taller, as the small jobs I do fixing or building around the house get done, and others take their places.

Public records databases used by Private Investigators

By Tim B.

On 16 July 2017

In Research

I’m in no way a licensed private investigator. I’m not even sure that I would want to become one. But I have been exploring a bit how this works, and sort of the lore around it.

One thing I’ve always been curious about around the PI-types as we see represented in media, is these “special” databases we sometimes see, where they can do “deep research” onto a person — or say look up license plates. ? Minor boring stuff like that.

Turns out there is a whole industry around that, which I won’t pretend to be very versed in. Around this topic, I found two main documents which referenced maybe a dozen or so variations on public record searches as a paid “information service,” and from those have basically boiled down the ones that have piqued my curiosity the most being LexisNexis Accurint and Thomson Reuters Clear.

Outside of PI-types, we see a lot of materials marketed towards also people who do legal research, some social media searching, and fraud detection and prevention and others (not to mention criminal investigation, which is outside my interest area). ?

This first video from Thomson Reuters is fun because it makes use of the “crazy wall” TV trope:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJDkoF8_oLE

And one from the many different Accurint videos out there:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0te8ER9xUw

The privacy/data protection cross-over on these videos should be pretty obvious. In another one from TLOxp, we hear the mention of public records “plus proprietary technology”:

It doesn’t seem to be the most discussed topic ever, but I would wager that for certain of the information services operating in this space, that at least a few of them must be purchasing and correlating data from other agencies, such as the dreaded data-brokers.

It’s something I’ll continue researching and publishing about, as the subject seems vast, deep, and curiouser and curiouser the further in you go…

Amazon Prime Minister

By Tim B.

On 16 July 2017

In Conjecture, Question

If there’s an Amazon Prime, is there an Amazon Prime Minister?

To weirdos with questions

By Tim B.

On 16 July 2017

In Action, Assessment, Conjecture, Intuition, Pattern, Question, Research, Theory

I’ve been ? investigating what it takes to become a licensed private investigator in the province of Quebec. Kind of just for fun, really, as an extension of a burgeoning interest in privacy and data protection. Apparently there is a 135 hr training requirement, but no one seems to be able to point me to an equivalent training that’s both available in English and online.

Okay, fine. So sue me for living in a French province in a bilingual country and asking for resources in English. I get it, there’s a charter to protect the French language from being overwhelmed in a predominantly English-language culture. But still. We can do both, right? I think that’s the ideal.

Anyway, I’ve been simultaneously querying a variety of agencies for help: from associations, to training providers, to provincial authorities in neighboring Ontario. My hobby is emailing people I don’t know, with some weird questions. So I’m actually pretty used to this now.

Ontario has, by comparison, an only 50 hr training requirement which is significantly less than Quebec. Unclear still if you have to actually *be* a resident of that province to be licensed there.

I don’t know though what your practice would conceivably consist of though. If you’re licensed in one province, but operating in another. Maybe I’m going about all this in the completely wrong direction. One possible pathway would be to have the operating province recognize the license given in the other. But for what benefit and to what eventual end?

I’m really not an expert on these things. I’m just someone with a lot of questions. ? ❓ But here’s the thing you find when you start asking the people or the agencies, or the people who are out there and who *are* the experts: no one necessarily knows the answer. The questions may never have been asked before. A specific pre-built answer may require interpretation and invention.

And few people acting in official capacities are comfortable being publicly wrong. So it’s a natural human response, I’m sure, to just not to want to answer weirdos with questions. At least that’s commonly where I end up on these hare-brained tangents of mine where I end up emailing a dozen different people for help or answers with a specific question or problem.

There exists, a certain, I guess we could call it ‘tenacity of research‘ which one may possess or perhaps develop as a personality trait… such that following through with it in fullness, and learning to harness and direct it, may actively create answers that didn’t exist before through a radical act of questioning. In the course of asking and answering certain questions, you may through patience and persistence become the eventual expert. You might just invoke an unthing into being.

I don’t know what any of this means, though vis-a-vis where we started. Except, if you gotta ?, then ?. If you look and you find there’s no answer, you make one out of what’s available and what you can dream up.

▲ Triangulon Message

By Tim B.

On 21 June 2017

In Announcement, Entity, Event, Thing