There is a certain sort of mundane horror of not knowing what images you appeared in.. and who the people are in the pictures that you have collected..
I have a bit of a ridiculous musing. I’m sure people have talked about this before, but it’s very interesting when you think about it.
Last night, just to pass some time on a fall evening, I went to a local theme park all decorated for Halloween. I snapped a couple of photos. One in particular got me thinking.
It was the Ferris wheel at the park.
When my son was younger, we would go there annually, and each year he would be dressed up in a different Halloween costume. Over the years, we accumulated a nice little collection of photographs of him in different Halloween outfits, all standing in front of that same Ferris wheel.
Here is one of my favorites!
So last night, being there alone, I snapped another photo.
Of course, I got a bit nostalgic and reminiscent about those years, how quickly time passes, and how things change.
But then I noticed something.
There were other people in my picture.
Other people dressed up for Halloween, some with elaborate facial makeup, others just families passing by, enjoying their own evening. And at that one particular moment, when I snapped that photo, those people became part of my phone’s photo collection.
I don’t know who they are. I will most likely never meet them or see them again for the rest of my life.
But I have their image.
And then I thought about something else. There were plenty of other people taking pictures and videos last night. So there’s a pretty good chance that somewhere, on somebody else’s phone, there’s a picture of me.
It’s strange when you think about it.
You really have no control over how many photographs of yourself exist.
You probably think you know most of the pictures you’ve ever been in. The ones you’ve taken yourself, the ones friends have shared with you, the family photographs, the school pictures, the weddings, the vacations.
But there are countless other photographs of you out there.
Maybe they’re stored on somebody’s phone. Maybe they’re sitting on an old thumb drive or computer, or they’re printed photographs tucked away in a scrapbook or a dusty photo album in someone’s attic. Somebody who may not even be alive anymore.
And there you are.
Standing in the background at a restaurant in 1997. Walking past a family posing for a picture at an amusement park in 2005. Sitting at a table behind a couple celebrating their anniversary. Maybe you’re just a blurry face in the crowd at a concert somebody attended 20 years ago.
For your entire life, in public places, you’ve been a background non-player character in somebody else’s story.
And the funny thing is, you’ve probably done the same thing to countless other people.
Think about all the pictures sitting on your phone right now. The vacations, the birthday parties, the weddings, the random photographs you snapped because something caught your eye.
How often have you actually looked at the people in the background?
Those people have entire lives. They have families, jobs, problems, celebrations, tragedies, memories, and stories of their own. Some of them may no longer be alive. Others may have been having the greatest day of their lives at the exact moment you took that picture.
Somebody else might have been having the worst.
And you’ll never know.
It’s almost a little haunting when you think about it. Somewhere out there, in a photograph you’ve never seen, you’re permanently frozen in a moment that meant absolutely nothing to you but perhaps meant everything to somebody else.
Maybe you were smiling. Maybe you were having a bad day. Maybe you were just walking by, completely unaware that someone had pressed a button and preserved that particular second of your existence forever.
So the next time you have a chance, take a peek at some of your old photographs. Look beyond the people you know. Look at those background players, whether they’re at a park, a restaurant, a wedding, or just walking down the street.
Look at their faces and ponder their stories.
Because all the photos you have of yourself tell a story of you, but little did you know, someone else’s story was playing out in your background.
Humperdinck revealed how he got rope and pre-planned revenge on a nurse..
The man is 90.. and he decided it was time to reveal something that the world never knew.. Also because of this, many people are just finding out that Humperdinck has a podcast!
On his show, he spoke about his time at Leicester’s Groby Road Hospital Sanatorium, after he was diagnosed with tuberculosis.
When speaking about the treatments he endured, he described having “to stay on your back for I don’t know 8 weeks,” without attempting to sit up or “do anything strenuous,” in addition to getting “an injection with a needle about this big in your butt” every morning.
More..
“There was one lady nurse who was, I don’t think she liked me very much because of the injection that she gave me, she really hurt, and I used to scream at her and I used to ask for somebody else. They wouldn’t give me anybody else, but this lady was very bad, and she was really hurt, and I had big blue marks.”
After she continued to hurt him with every injection, Humperdinck thought to himself, “When I’m a little better I’m going to do something” and be a bit “mischievous” to get back at her.
“I said to my friend in the next bed, I said, ‘I’ve got to get some rope. I get some rope,'” he said. “So we got this rope, and when the nurse came around in the morning before doctor’s rounds, I got the nurse, grabbed her, tied her hands behind the back, put her in the empty bed next to us, covered her up.”
He said when the doctor came by for his rounds, “he knew that I was responsible for that..but he ignored it” and “just walked straight by.”
Humperdinck spent six months in the sanatorium after he started coughing up blood during a concert in Manchester. After initially receiving a diagnosis of “a bad throat infection,” his mom told the doctor ‘I’m not happy with that. Not when I see blood,’ and demanded an X-ray.
The new HULU documentary on the 2016 clown panic is fun but misses the mark on a few points.. Our review for your reading pleasure..
We wanted to like this.. but..
Remember 2016?
What a year of chaos it was. Between a contentious presidential election, growing political divisions, and the continued rise of social media, America was seemingly losing its collective mind.
And somewhere in the middle of all of this, we had clowns and a lot of them.. Clowns lurking in the woods, clowns appearing alongside roads, clowns reportedly chasing people, and clowns allegedly threatening children and causing schools to go into lockdown.
It was a really weird moment in American pop culture, and now, a decade later, Hulu has decided to revisit the entire thing.
Clown Panic, directed by Ed Perkins and produced by Jonathan and Simon Chinn through their production company Lightbox, is a new documentary examining the great clown hysteria of 2016. It is certainly watchable, but it doesn’t quite hit the mark.
First, there’s an abundance of hardcore dramatizations that seem to be overdone for the moment. Sure, some of the encounters were genuinely frightening, and there were legitimate concerns at the time, but the documentary seems to want to make the situation more sinister than it actually was. The flashing strobe lights and loud out of no where sound effects… are a little too much..
There are some good parts, however, including interviews with people who claimed to have experienced clown encounters that year and police departments that attempted to investigate the reports.
There’s also a considerable amount of politicization of the clown situation. Sure, there’s always pop culture and geopolitics intertwined in moments in time, and 2016 was unquestionably a year of chaos that likely led to the clown situation becoming more chaotic. But this whole clown thing was not only relegated to communities that were disadvantaged, despite what the documentary seems to suggest. It happened in small towns, suburban communities, cities, and just about everywhere else. It wasn’t limited to one socioeconomic group or political persuasion.
And while I think there’s certainly an argument to be made that the political atmosphere of 2016 contributed to the hysteria, I don’t think the documentary really hits the nail on the head as to why the clown sightings themselves were ultimately political in nature. There’s a difference between something happening during a politically chaotic time and that something actually being political.
One interesting part of the documentary involves Cenk Uygur from The Young Turks, who talks about how the situation became much more serious once it started affecting our kids in schools. When schools began going into lockdown and parents were suddenly worried about clowns threatening their children, people really got up in arms. And understandably so.
The better aspect could have been a comparison of 2016 to the 1980s Satanic Panic …
How many of these clown sightings were actually real?
We know that some of them were. There were people dressing up as clowns and deliberately frightening others. There were arrests, criminal investigations, and even incidents involving threats against schools. But a considerable number of the original sightings were never substantiated, and some of the more frightening stories turned out to be completely fabricated.
In Greenville, South Carolina, where some of the earliest widely publicized reports involved clowns allegedly attempting to lure children into the woods, police investigated but couldn’t find evidence supporting the claims. Elsewhere, people were arrested for making false reports or issuing clown-related threats.
A lot of the videos that were reportedly organic at the time were most likely completely inorganic and created by content creators before content creating became the massive industry that it is today. People were beginning to understand that frightening someone, staging a bizarre encounter, and uploading the footage could generate thousands or even millions of views.
One of the earliest viral clown appearances, a character named Gags in Green Bay, Wisconsin, turned out to be a promotional stunt for a horror film. In other words, what appeared to be a mysterious clown lurking around a community was actually part of a manufactured publicity campaign.
Going to the panic of the 80s, that is where the real comparison remains..
During that period, people became convinced that satanic activity and elaborate conspiracies were occurring throughout American communities. Some people genuinely believed what they were reporting, others repeated rumors, and some allegations were simply fabricated. It made shows like Oprah and Phil Donahue.. The consequences of the Satanic Panic were obviously far more serious, but the way fear spread from one community to another has some similarities to what happened with the clowns in 2016. The Satanic Panic also in part gave us Marilyn Manson…
Fast forward to ’16: Some people really did see clowns. Others may have thought they saw clowns because they were already frightened by what they were seeing on television and social media. And perhaps others simply wanted to be part of something.
The idea that people wanted to be part of this national phenomenon, even if they weren’t. Maybe they wanted a little prestige or notoriety. Maybe they wanted to be interviewed by a local television station or have their story shared thousands of times on Facebook. Or maybe they just wanted to say something happened in their community because everyone else seemed to be experiencing it.
And suddenly, reporting a clown sighting, even if one never occurred, became a way to participate in this bizarre cultural moment.
That’s not to suggest that everyone who reported a clown was lying. Far from it. But when you combine genuine encounters, staged videos, fabricated reports, mistaken perceptions, and a population already on edge, you’ve got the perfect ingredients for a nationwide panic.
And social media was more than willing to help spread it.
There’s also the question of what actually happened to all these mysterious clowns. The truth is that there was never one grand investigation that solved the entire phenomenon. Some cases were resolved, some people were arrested, and other reports simply faded away without any evidence that a clown had ever been there in the first place.
The clown phenomenon DID NOT simply end in 2016!
While the documentary seemed to constrain the clown panic to one year, there have been random clown uprisings in the years since, although considerably lighter in nature. There were additional incidents in 2017, and in later years, including 2021 and 2023, clown-related rumors and frightening videos continued circulating online. Not all of these were new encounters, of course. Some were recycled footage, old stories, and outright misinformation.
The phenomenon also wasn’t exclusive to the United States. Countries including the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Ireland, and New Zealand experienced their own clown scares during the original hysteria. In some ways, 2016 wasn’t necessarily the end of something but the beginning of a strange new chapter in internet folklore.
That is what this documentary misses.
Perhaps the most interesting part of the clown hysteria wasn’t the clowns themselves, but the people who were frightened by them, the people who created them, and the people who wanted to be part of the story whether they had actually experienced anything or not.
It was a fascinating example of how quickly something can spiral out of control when social media, mainstream media, public fear, and people looking for attention all come together.
All that being said, Clown Panic isn’t a bad documentary.
There are some genuinely interesting interviews, some good archival footage, and a few perspectives worth hearing. It’s also refreshing that someone decided to focus on a really weird moment in pop culture that seems to have been largely forgotten despite how much attention it received at the time.
I just think the documentary was so focused on finding a deeper political and sociological meaning behind the clown situation that it overlooked some of the more obvious explanations for why it became such a phenomenon.
Was it a reflection of the political chaos of 2016? Perhaps, at least in part.
But was it also a combination of staged videos, genuine pranks, social media notoriety, mass hysteria, and people who simply wanted to be part of something?
I think there’s a much stronger argument for that.
The real story of 2016 wasn’t that clowns were suddenly appearing everywhere. It was that Americans had become convinced they were..
For several days now the president of the United States has decided to post different AI videos of animals attacking human beings. Today he switched gears..
President Donald Trump sparked a wave backlash after posting an AI-generated video of himself wrestling and cuddling a tiger just hours after sharing real footage of a young British man being fatally mauled by one.
Trump first posted footage Tuesday from the attack at Yorkshire Wildlife Park near Doncaster, England, where 23-year-old William Chapman died after entering the enclosure of a tiger named Altai.
No, there is absolutely no scientific evidence that Lanmaoa asiatica opens a portal into the tiny-people dimension.. but what if it does!
Due to social media life cycles, a lot of people are constantly about Lanmaoa asiatica.. it all sounds completely made up until you realize.. it’s not.
It’s a mushroom eaten in southwestern China, particularly Yunnan Province, where it’s known as jian shou qing. Apparently it’s delicious.
There’s just one small problem.
You better cook the thing long enough.. if you don’t, you might start seeing little people.
And this isn’t just a hallucinogenic mushroom that makes people see random things. We’re not talking about the usual psychedelic experience — colors changing, walls breathing, strange patterns appearing or somebody seeing a dragon dancing across the ceiling.
No.
Little people. Like the smurfs..
Tiny humanlike figures have been reported walking across plates. Climbing furniture. Marching around rooms. Going underneath doors. Sometimes dozens or even hundreds of them, apparently existing right there alongside the normal world.
They’re known as Lilliputian hallucinations, named after the tiny inhabitants of Lilliput in Gulliver’s Travels.
People in Yunnan are so familiar with what can happen when these mushrooms aren’t properly cooked that making sure they’re thoroughly prepared is simply part of eating them. Researchers have described restaurants where timers are used before the mushrooms can be eaten, with diners being warned about what could happen if they don’t wait long enough.
Hospitals in the region have treated mushroom poisoning cases involving these hallucinations, and researchers have documented this strangely specific recurring experience.
If ten people took some random hallucinogenic drug, ten wildly different experiences might be expected. One person sees geometric patterns. Somebody sees a dragon. Somebody thinks the ceiling is melting.
But with this mushroom, one particular theme keeps showing up:
Little people.
Not everyone who becomes sick from the mushroom sees them, so that part shouldn’t be exaggerated. But among people who experience hallucinations, reports of tiny humanlike figures have appeared often enough that researchers have specifically taken notice.
Which brings us to the completely scientifically irresponsible portion of today’s program.
What if the mushroom isn’t making people see things that aren’t there?
What if it’s temporarily allowing people to see something that’s.. already there?
Maybe somewhere beside ordinary human perception — fourth dimension, fifth dimension, sixth dimension, take your pick — thousands of tiny people are going about their tiny lives while completely unaware that we’re here.
And every once in a while somebody in Yunnan doesn’t cook the mushrooms long enough, looks down at the kitchen table and suddenly realizes:
No, there is absolutely no scientific evidence that Lanmaoa asiatica opens a portal into the tiny-people dimension.
But until scientists figure out exactly what is happening inside the human brain when this mushroom is eaten undercooked — and why such strangely similar imagery keeps being reported —
There is a company that wants you to wear your sunglasses at night..
One of the more memorable episodes of The Twilight Zone was “The Midnight Sun.” In that episode, the Earth was being pulled closer and closer to the sun. Daylight became relentless, temperatures soared.. People began to act as they would when light and heat never ends..
And now decades later there appears to be a company that is at least entertaining an idea that sounds like it could have come from the writers’ room of The Twilight Zone.
A California startup known as Reflect Orbital has been created with the goal of reflecting sunlight back to Earth after dark by using satellites equipped with large mirrors. While the concept is still in its infancy, the vision being presented is one in which sunlight could eventually be purchased on demand. The company has even suggested a future price of around $5,000 per hour for targeted illumination.
Despite hundreds of public comments opposing a giant space mirror that would shine a beam of light roughly five kilometres wide back down to Earth, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC), has given it the green light.
The company building the space mirror, Reflect Orbital, is touting its proposal as “sunlight on demand,” which could be used for any number of reasons, it says, such as agriculture, solar farms or for search and rescue.
Astronomers and other groups are sounding the alarm about the project, citing numerous reasons, including the threat to species dependent on a pristine night sky, the threat to important astronomical research and more.
At first glance, it almost sounds too far-fetched to be taken seriously.
Reflect Orbital was founded in 2021 by former SpaceX engineer Ben Nowack and former Zipline engineer Tristan Semmelhack.
Significant venture capital backing has already been secured from firms including Lux Capital and Sequoia Capital. It has also been revealed that the company has received research funding through the U.S. Air Force’s AFWERX Small Business Innovation Research program, where possible military applications have been explored alongside civilian ones.
People most likely consider it a silly joke.. But the concept is real..
The first satellite is expected to serve only as a proof of concept, producing illumination that would reportedly be closer to moonlight than daylight.
That alone is unlikely to change anyone’s life just yet.
The longer-term roadmap, however, is where eyebrows may begin to rise and sunscreen needs to be applied at night..
Over the next several years, the number of satellites is hoped to grow from a handful into the dozens, then the thousands, and eventually, if the company’s vision is realized, to more than 50,000 satellites capable of directing daylight-like illumination onto selected locations around the world.
Whether that timeline is realistic remains to be seen.
It could very well turn out that the technology proves too expensive, too complicated, or too controversial. It is also entirely possible that regulators could determine the environmental consequences simply aren’t worth the benefits. Those questions have not yet been answered.
Concerns have been raised about circadian rhythms and whether introducing artificial sunlight into the middle of the night could affect human sleep patterns. Similar questions have been asked about birds, insects, sea turtles, bats, and other wildlife that have evolved around predictable cycles of darkness and light. And trees… and all of nature..
Astronomers have also expressed concern that an increasingly reflective sky could make observations of the universe even more difficult.
What could go wrong with a 3 mile wide Sun Mirror light coming from space? Long-term Vision: While the FCC only authorized this single test satellite, Reflect Orbital ultimately hopes to launch a constellation of up to 50,000 mirrors by 2035 The U.S. has approved plans for an… pic.twitter.com/zGXTbw2q6Z
For now, what exists is a startup with an ambitious vision, experienced founders, venture capital support, military research funding, and a prototype that still has much to prove.
One day the phrase “I’d like to order two hours of sunshine for my backyard tonight” won’t sound quite as ridiculous as it does today.
If that ever happens, it probably won’t just be a technological milestone but represent the moment when humanity decides that even the night sky can be commercialized and sold.. If any of us have money by then..
A future problem may be sleepy neighbors complaining about second hand sun…
Just picture the other military rationale for funding this.. a war torn future conflict where the enemy can utilize the darkness of night for cover or pressing forward.. until that satellite lights up the midnight sky with a beacon of sunlight from a satellite high in space..
Some of us who hate modern decor now have a health reason to oppose it!
Welcome to a real horror: Modern decor may be causing more harm than good!
A large team of researchers from institutions across the United States, United Kingdom, Europe, Asia, and Canada has published a detailed review arguing that visual discomfort, the headaches, eye strain, nausea, and perceptual distortions that some people experience in response to certain visual stimuli, has a measurable, physical basis in the brain. The paper, published in the journal Vision, pulls together decades of research across neuroscience, architecture, lighting design, and psychology to build a unified theory of why some things are so hard to look at, and what can be done about it.
It argues that the human brain evolved to process the natural world efficiently. When it’s forced to handle the highly repetitive, artificially sharp, and often flickering patterns that dominate modern urban environments — think fluorescent-lit offices, car headlights, striped acoustic panels, or the dense text of a printed page — the researchers argue it may drive greater neural activity than it should, potentially placing excessive demands on the visual cortex.
That metabolic overload, they hypothesize, may be what triggers discomfort, and in people with pattern-sensitive epilepsy, it can provoke seizures.
There is a campaign for people to buy what is left of Spirit Airline.. What if it works!?
There’s a guy out there right now trying to do something that sounds like it came straight out of a late-night “what if” conversation… and somehow it is raising interest and money..
The idea is to buy what’s left of Spirit Airlines.. with regular people.
Imagine the guy who flew Spirit for 24 straight hours somehow ending up as CEO because he “understands the product.” What happens next? Do ticket prices drop because the owners are also the passengers? Do people start voting on snack options mid-flight? It sounds ridiculous… until suddenly it’s not.
A crowd-powered airline. A “we all own this thing” approach. Think less Wall Street, more backyard barbecue investors pooling together to bring back a budget airline that, depending on your experience, either got you to Florida for $39 or made you question every life decision you’ve ever made mid-flight.
There’s a very real chance this never gets off the ground. Running an airline is about as simple as launching a rocket while filing paperwork with seventeen federal agencies at the same time. It takes insane amounts of money, coordination, and logistics that go way beyond a pledge page and a good idea. But at the same time, you kind of have to respect it. In a world where everything feels locked up by corporations and private equity, there’s something weirdly refreshing about someone saying, “What if we just… bought it ourselves?”
The website taking pledges has topped $22 mil and has also crashed..
What if it works? What if Spirit Airlines doesn’t just become another failed brand, but actually makes history by coming back as the first truly crowd-owned airline? Imagine the future ..
There is a guy on Tiktok saying that a tree is moving towards his house. And the world is so wild, that people are believing it.
There’s a really fun thing happening on TikTok right now. It’s not hurting anyone, it’s not dangerous… but it’s causing just enough debate to make it interesting. And honestly, if it’s just for entertainment, that’s all we need.
For the past few days, there’s been a guy posting videos claiming that a tree in his backyard is… moving.
His “evidence” is simple but effective. He records himself walking toward the tree, then compares it to footage from the next day where the tree appears to be slightly closer. Not dramatically… just enough to make you pause. Just enough to make you wonder. But he doesn’t stop there.
He claims he’s watched the tree for hours and hasn’t seen a single bird land on it. Says it looks fake. Says when you check his property on satellite view, the tree doesn’t even show up. And maybe the creepiest part… he says the tree next to it has been there his entire life, but this one? He doesn’t remember it at all. Listen… this is fun.
What makes it even better is the comment section. There are people fully buying into it. Not questioning it. Not debating it. Just accepting it like, “Yeah… that tracks.”
And that’s where it gets wild.
It’s not even about whether the tree is moving anymore. It’s about how quickly people are willing to go along with something like this. Almost like it’s easier to believe in a slowly advancing tree than to question it. Maybe because, in a weird way, it feels harmless. Maybe even comforting compared to everything else going on. Now do I believe the tree is moving toward his house? No.
Do I believe he might believe it?
That’s a different question.
Because at the end of the day, there’s no real way for us to independently verify any of this. And as the videos get more attention, one thing is definitely true… whether he expected it or not, he’s gone viral.
And honestly… let’s just say it.
If there really was a tree slowly moving toward someone’s house in 2026… would that even be the most shocking thing we’ve seen this year?
