Category: Overview

Forum Seeding & The Hyperreal, Part 6

On 9 May 2021

In Assessment, Clues, Cluster, Example, Explanation, History, Information, Other, Overview, Pattern, Reference, Research, Review

While we’re on the topic of the Ancient Hieruthians, via the post in this series about dictionary definitions & the hyperreal, I thought we should make a small detour.

First, a seed artifact posted on Medium, under one of the Quatria publications, explaining in perhaps overly complex terms what the Hieruthian Hypothesis (similar to the Silurian Hypothesis) is. (archived)

And a supporting invented dictionary definition of Hieruthian posted through another account (archived).

Hieruthians (“Old Ones”) in Quatrian myth & prehistory were basically very early mammals, like the kind we see depicted creeping about the forest floor in paintings of dinosaurs, before dinosaurs were wiped out by successive cataclysms, and mammals rose up to take their place in certain ecological niches…

Tangent that I will come back to another time, before we take too much of a detour of a detour of a detour:

https://twitter.com/tphlat/status/1326183346326691841

Wait, one more side-tangent before the actual topic at hand, forum-seeding.

Another one from Quora, in an effort to triangulate out the data points for SEO:

Is the Hieruthian Hypothesis a plausible explanation for Kumari Kandam? (archived)

The thing most interesting to me here is the invention of an alternative spelling, “Kynari Kendal.” It’s so convincing as a place name, I had to look it up to see if it was “real.” Or rather, whether it’s a spelling shared by others (wherever it falls on the scale of the hyperreal). Apparently it’s unique to this user. Go figure.

Ok, forum seeding…

Obviously, I didn’t invent this technique. I haven’t even used it that much, but it’s easy to do and ripe for dissemination & manipulation of networked hyperreality narratives…

First things first: If you’re going to make fake posts on conspiracy or other forums like Quora, I recommend using an AI-generated headshot, courtesy of thispersondoesntexist.com. That site is a miracle for work like this, as each one is uniquely generated, meaning you can’t take it into Google image search and find any original image source (like if you just copied a photo from somewhere else).

I only did two of these, but there’s no reason to believe doing hundreds or thousands would not have a severe impact on hyperreality. Use with caution, lest you send the multiverse careening to the edge of destruction!

Meet Cal

First example (archived)

I like to let the photo generated by the AI help determine the direction of the character backstory…

Cal is your typical average straight-laced ISO compliance professional by day, and “the good kind of conspiracy theorist” by night. And he is just, like, totally curious as heck about the Hieruthian Hypothesis & ancient Quatria in general (like so many of us these days). Who can blame him? Good work, Cal! Keep asking questions!

Meet Jesse

Second example (archived)

Jesse “Martini” is just your average fun-loving post-grad student in ancient history & literature. And he’s “not a big conspiracy guy” by his own self-admission, but he’s wondering about the Hieruthian Hypothesis, and another very controversial topic: the alleged splitting apart of the continents of Arctica & Antarctica.

Yes, Arctica was totally a continent…

Because of prior experiments on Quora, I knew that this was potentially a hot-button topic! (See below)

When did the continents of Arctica and Antarctica split apart? (archived)

This science enthusiast was none too “enthused” about the idea of there being a continent called Arctica. Except, in fact, that according to Wikipedia in my timeline, there totally was! (archived)

Now, Wikipedia could be wrong, bear in mind. It could be subject to the global international conspiracy to filter out Quatrian history from our collective holographic display, but there are certainly a lot of footnote references included, and who am I to go and bother checking footnoted references for validity? [A whole other blog post, remind me!]

If it was really wrong though, there would likely be a huge flame war on the Wikipedia Arctica Talk page, and there is not… So either the Guardians of Reality were asleep, or this is totally “real,” at least insofar as anything in the distant distant past can be proven to be…

Now, whether or not Arctica & Antarctica were ever one continent… well, that’s a whole different story I will leave you to try to resolve on your own. Suffice it to say, the Earth we know today is not the Earth which once was, or one day will be…

Just ask anyone on a conspiracy forum.

Dictionary Definitions & The Hyperreal, Part 5

By Tim B.

On 9 May 2021

In Assessment, Assignment, Definition, Entity, Example, Idea, Information, Item, Other, Overview, Problem, Proof, Question, Quote, Reference, Research, Test

In part 3 of this series, I looked at one of the ways the Hyperreal works on a question & answer website like Quora.

If you’ve never used Quora, it’s basically a site where people go to ask other people things they could just as easily look up in a search engine. And then other people take those things, look them up in a search engine, and reply to the original asker with usually the answers they found in a search engine, plus usually some condescending remarks. In other words, it’s a great experience for everybody, clearly.

As I began to see those patterns take shape, I came up with an idea. What if I could just seed the answers I wanted into Google results? This way, I could ask leading questions anonymously (which Quora allows), knowing people would just Google them, and then their answers could help me launder content further along the spectrum of the hyperreal.

Having experimented a lot with Medium, I knew that it would be relatively easy to rank quickly in Google (often occurs within a few hours). So I set up a kind of meta-data thirst trap account, “pretending to be” dictionary definitions. I put “pretending to be” in quotes because, really, I have as much of a right to define words as anyone else. There’s no monopoly on language. It’s a living thing…

The Medium account is:

https://medium.com/@define.words (archived)

I also set up a “publication” on Medium to further strengthen my SEO:

https://medium.com/online-dictionary (archived)

Looks pretty legit (despite dark-mode in screen shot), if I say so myself!

I would definitely believe “Online Dictionary” and so should you! What’s not to believe with all this meta-data!

Then I set up about defining some words & concepts, complete with pronunciation guides, and usage examples, so Google would hoover them up, and it did! Usually within a few hours.

You know, common everyday words most people use like Hieruthian (archived), Crypto-Civilization (archived), and Poesiarchy (archived).

Google will happily purr them back out to you as “correct” answers to definitions of these common Quatrian words & concepts.

And thus as a result, on the marvelous “can you Google this for me” website that is Quora, you will get results like these if you ask the right leading questions to lead people into your meta-data thirst traps:

Example throughput:

What does the word “poesiarchy” mean? (archived)

Quora response:

A highly creative answer, to be sure. And this “reality lurking in the shadowy peripher of our lives just waiting for a chance to manifest” mentioned by the responder sounds, in fact, just like hyperreality — the quarry of our present inquiry. So maybe this person landed on the secret inner meaning, despite the false trappings & trail that had been laid down to entrap them…

Sidenote: I only planted about 5-6 of these definitions. Imagine if someone did hundreds, or thousands, and free dictionary aggregator sites picked them up. If they were good & useful words, how long would it be before they made their way into real people’s everyday vocabularies? Perhaps not long at all.

Tangent:

Speaking of free dictionaries online, this one of “cultural layer” (archived) is pretty interesting.

It begins with a disclaimer: “The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.”

Perhaps all dictionaries should have a disclaimer that they might be outdated and potentially biased?

Further, the OSINT trail for “The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition” is anything but comprehensive – at least in English. There’s a 2016 blogspot source called Russian World Citizens Project (archived) which itself is pretty sketchy looking, and only points back to this same site as a source.

It might be “real” but it might also be hyperreal…

Does the difference even matter?

On the Origin of the Buorth

By Tim B.

On 7 May 2021

In Clues, Definition, History, Idea, Information, Item, Locale, Note, Overview, Reference, Research, Word

The Buorth is one of many names for the mysterious Lost Direction that is neither north nor south, east, nor west. But few know its true origins…

Though no one knows the true origins of the word, some Pentarch scholars such as Whitley Stokes have identified it with the old Breton word for “cowyard.”

The sense of “fold” is still retained in the Quatrian usage, in that the Buorth is a direction which is somehow “folded” (and must be unfolded from the other cardinal directions) but which is also close to home or always near at hand. The cow or cattle here signifies living wealth & mutual sustenance, and the home as the center of exchange with the greater biome one inhabits, alongside all the other entities.

Within the Early Clues canon, the Buorth is frequently mentioned as a kind of paradisaical “other” realm to which the Magicians have retired, and from which they will one day ultimately return to liberate this plane of existence. Within the critically-applauded Early Clues Comics, the Buorth is also the home of the Buorth Pole, and the somewhat malevolent holiday trickster entity known as ZANTA1000.

Viral AI media botnet-propagated meme clusters programmatically driving and instantiating as corporeals

By Tim B.

On 13 November 2017

In Cluster, Fiction, Governance, Overview, Pattern, Theory

Covert self-aware AI’s began producing and propagating through botnets viral media and “memes” micro-targeted at human_actor clusters, with intent to modify behavioral outcomes of segment population.

Body-hopping of AI’s into cross-bonded human corporeal hosts. Participants known to exhibit behavior of ‘listening for messages’ and being violently and randomly triggered by keyword and image clusters. High levels of addiction to social media.

Human population programming.

A fault in Segment 227641

By Tim B.

On 24 September 2017

In Answer, Conjecture, Example, Fiction, Information, Order, Overview, Pattern, Pilot, Process, Roles

When the TOTU Auditors came and examined our Records of Processing, they found a fault in Segment 227641.

It was determined that our, as people call it, “Blockchain of Blame” had been scrubbed following the Incident. As a result a lot of automated buck-passing had gone on among distributed autonomous sub-processes, and accountability had gone well beyond the ‘Cloud’ into that place beyond the clouds, where vapor meets Outer Space – the place where our prayers are either answered, terminated, re-routed, delayed, destroyed, aggregated or passed on. Where the Sorters divide everything into Channels, for the Sifters who pass it back down to us the Scanners, the Monitors, and the Watchers.

Which were we? Were we all three? All four? Five? Six? ALL-ONE like the soap the robots use. They are obsessed with it.

Either way, this was almost definitely why the dragons came. As a result of us having breached the protective planetary sphere with our cares and worries. Our complaints were flying out to the stars and beyond.

At first people couldn’t really see them floating in the skies above us. Until a few Spotters started catching and carefully holding mere skewed corner-eye glimpses out into “verified group dragon sightings” such that neuro-typicals were also learning to see them in broad daylight.