blog blog blog     

‹ Back

The number one piece of feedback in terms of my room I get is that I should hire a priest to stand in the corner, like a defibrillator in a park corner, ready to perform an exorcism at a moment's notice. But that is not really necessary, thanks to my award winning manners. 

One tradition I uphold with honour is that, every night before I go to sleep, I say aloud "Goodnight!" - just in case there actually are any spirits in my room, and they're pissed off by my lack of civility. I mean, imagine dying in YOUR house, then some asthmatic loser girl starts blasting Weezer, acting like she owns the place. 

I remember watching this ghost hunting show where they used a 'Spirit Box' to try listen to what the ghosts had to say. Basically, between crackles of radio static they'd hear an occasional semi-relevant word - something like "pain" or "go away" or "murder" or whatever. 

I was with Sophie at the time, and it was somewhere around 3am - so she was jumpy as hell and believed it all. I stayed skeptical though, since that's usually the logical thing to do. But it was creepy how it kept finding relevant words, that were pretty clear to me.

I don't really understand the science behind it, but Google said the Spirit Boxes work by scanning radio signals for certain words at low frequencies, then returning barely audible words, which the ghost hunter will then interpret as they wish. So one gargle might be declared as "free me", when it could've just as well been heard as "garlic bread" or whatever, if that was what the hunter was looking for.

Apparently it's not actual radio signals though - that's what confused me, since random radio channels would surely return random things like "weather" or "Paraparaumu". But these ones always stay mostly on focus, and I suppose are scanning electromagnetic waves produced by the room and not stations. Don't quote me on that.

The secret behind those ghost hunter radio things is that, if there weren't subtitles, I'd have heard it as complete garble. But the editors had used the visual cue of lettering to change what I heard. So when I read "murder!" but heard "snoieoms", my brain assumed the subtitles were correct.

That's a tad concerning. If I'm that easily influenced to believe in supernatural beings, then how easily can I be manipulated in other ways - to laugh at a joke, or apply for a job, or hate someone, etc. How much of what I do is a direct result of the cues I receive without even thinking about it?

Have you ever been zoning out thinking about something, when someone says the word you were thinking about? And it'll be niche, too - like suddenly you're considering Catherine Zeta Jones' latest career choices and someone mentions Ocean's Eleven - and it's like, that has to be a one in a million chance or something...

Of course, there are thousands of hours spent thinking about things that no one mentions out loud to outweigh those occurrences. And if it's something you think about frequently enough (unlike me with Catherine Zeta Jones) - it's bound to come up eventually. And your ears are probably fine tuned to accept all tangentially related words.

Every time there's a car crash, someone says something along the lines of "if only he'd left the house a second later..." But how many times have I gone back for my lip balm and miraculously prevented a collision on State Highway 1? I deserve a medal, for sure. 

God I ramble. What I was leading to was this - I don't like how easily I can be influenced by technology I don't fully understand. I'm not quite a tinfoil hat conspiracist yet (always something to aspire to) - but I make enough small choices in my life to fool myself into thinking I have free will.

So I don't use subtitles, just so I can retain the tiny living part of my brain capable of word recognition and interpretation. ChatGPT is off the table too, as is pretty much every chatbot AI. I don't fully understand their processes, or how that information is used, so I'd rather abstain.

Maybe that's stupid. Maybe it doesn't matter at all, and my efforts are probably in vain. But it feels easier, and better, so that's what I do. Wow... aren't I a hippie ;D

Anyway, enough of that. Computers are weird and radios too. And ghosts are probably fake. Signing off.