Weird Fiction

Ninety-five instances of lupine-like creatures have been reported in our files.  These phenomena are described as large wolf-like animals, typically yellowish or green.  The actual size has been compared to details collected at close proximity, indicating that the “animal” does not look like a regular wolfhound.  Sounds are reported.  Conspicuously, there are several areas from which repeatable bursts of lupine-like creatures have been reported.

Sample cases include: January 1859/Virginia/black dog-like creature chases man, July 1893/Russia/animal with long hair seen, July 1927/Illinois/cat-like object seen, May 1953/Nebraska/shrieks heard, cats seen, dogs and sheep eaten, December 2009/Elsewhere/assault and battery, wolf-like snout, April 2025/Argatha/lupine-like creatures are seen, denizens remember that lupine-like creatures exist

Methods have their limits of applicability and their are some phenomena that a given technique or approach cannot validly evaluate.  If a humanoid believes that lupine-like creatures are hostile, the humanoid might “see” reports clustering around military bases.  Pattern recognition is a strange bird, all told.

Dispatch from the Intradimension.  Simultaneous Environments:

“Since Sputnik and the satellites, the planet is enclosed in a manmade environment that ends “Nature” and turns the globe into a repertory theater to be programmed.” – Saint Mcluhan.The mage, tuned in to heralds thru vectors unknown, proclaimed “Since Sputnik and the satellites, the planet [has been] enclosed in a manmade environment that ends “Nature” and turns the globe into a repertory theater to be programmed,”

WE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN GEO ENGINEERS (((WFT))), a repertoire in its own right, channels derelict theory objects.

Global programming by humanoids started out bluntly. Including but not limited to rejected screenplays, programmed into ficto-quizzical milieus…but i digress. Humans have always been geo-engineers, but up until the 21st, this was mostly an artisanal enterprise with primarily local feedback loops. The result of the Cold war listening services, the transistor, and as of yet unknown incidents in Roswell, New Mexico was a global remix culture that eats away at any attempt at silence and reflection, by amplifying everything into ear shot. The Ethnosphere was diverse, robust and at times oppressive, and I approved.  Shots are fired and ears consume. But then the temporary procurement of petrochemicals allowed man to overshoot his carrying capacity. Because, of course, there is no such thing as an “earlid.”

The existential threat of atomic annihilation that caused puny humans to realize that to intervene with wisdom, one must constantly monitor Gais’ heartbeat. There is no such thing as a blink reflex to protect the ear from foreign bodies. The creation of Weapons of Mass Destruction was a sad birthing pang of Climate Hacking culture. Project Mogul, however, single-handedly ushered in an emerging market for majestic eyes only. In the face of unprecedented degradation at the hands of the human species, Gaia has started to create conditions for human self annihilation. Foreign bodies, capable of emitting a sound that can travel over 3,000 miles though Earthôs noisy oceans are feared. Luckily in the pointless race to out-arm rival nation states, humans created disembodied ears that could hover over the planet, seeking out sound waves signalling the testing of atomic weapons.  Despite numerous reports from scientists who say that this would require an incredibly large noise-making apparatus, one much bigger than that of a flying saucer , rumors persist.

MIND CHILDREN GET EARACHES Majestic eyes only know what they see, and to see is to believe, but believe me you, it is the ear shot that has been overlooked, nay, overheard!

Prior to the first artificial satellite that was supposedly launched into orbit in 1957, humans’ disembodied ears took the form of high altitude balloons. “A swarm of great invisible bees might have been about me in the air.” These floating ears  hovered over the planet, seeking out sound waves signalling the testing of atomic weapons. The sound seemed to thicken the very atmosphere, and I felt that my lungs worked with difficulty,” claims one denizen of the post-world.

Did the shadowy listeners with their telematic ears know they were unleashing an always-on information environment that converted the globe “a repertory theater to be programmed”.  Humans never got around to inventing earlids, and the telematic listening devices of post human progeny have stupefied —yet linger on— phantom limb-like. With everyone acting the part, and making music there were not enough eyeballs on the planet!!! When colonies collapse they are tasked elsewhere, a forced migration to a netherworld or intra-dimensional space using Internet Protocol technologies to securely intervene in the cloaked form of deep sound channels, or often enough, more mysterious bloops. In built early warning systems of planetary illness manifest locally and everyone was too busy listening to the human echo chamber!  “It’s their sound,” one whispered gravely. Can you really blame them?  “It’s the sound of their world, the humming in their region. After all there is no such thing as an ear lid. The division here is so thin that it leaks through somehow.

Even Mind Children get ear aches. “But, if you listen carefully, you’ll find it’s not above so much as around us.” A ringing in the ears. “Symbols of Project Mogul that inflict us.” Humans never got around to inventing earlids, and the telematic listening devices of post human progeny are phantom limb-like. Project Mogul is not a disease but a symptom resulting from a range of underlying causes that can include ear infections, foreign objects in the always-on information environment, unexpected iruptions in the audiosphere. Ear lids are like firewalls? Project Mogul was an original sin of techno-utopianism. Information limiters I suppose.  To think that a psycho-accoustic geography of the entire planet could heighten what was local. Imagine if the always on information environment was auditory and not textual. As with cell-phone induced insect diaspora, the bee colonies are collapsing, unnoticed because everyone is manning the spy satellites. At least with text you can stop reading…..

Fluttering betwixt and between an aggregation of billions of queries, data from multiple sources, The Polterzeitgeist, is a “scary spirit of the times” indeed!  A long-tailed apparition, a free-floating signifier with varied appendages – several terminating in USB ports, another in a “trumpet”, and still another phantom limb affixed with a yellow globe; a whimsical reminder of this haunter’s conquest over the global brain!  This eccentric spectre  grazes on even the most infotoxic terrain— honing in on patterns, for better and worse, kicking up a shitstorm, then dissolving again into the ebb and flow of our networked cosmos.

Schooled by the orb-like, plate-tossing “noisy ghosts,” yes, of course. Duly informed by the so-called “proto-poltergeists,” too.  The Society for Paranormal Investigation characterizes these techno-spirits with “unexplainable behavior in electrical and electronic equipment. Lights flicker, strange sounds come from speakers, phones dial themselves, computers get odd errors, etc…also been known to destroy appliances and more delicate items.” Following such behaviorial tropes of the proto-poltergeist, a degraded comparison to the presence of the Polterzeitgeist might be satisfied with a nod to the electrical blackout in the Northeastern climes of the United States in the latter part of the previous millenium.  Indeed there were reports of UFO sightings during that infamous power outage, strange bright objects claimed some.  When a massive blackout again occurred, in 2003, the  uncanny “strange glow” was  an after-image: Humanoids thoroughly spooked by the absence of light pollution.

Estranged from its obvious shadow form, a miasmic data cloud in its own right, The Polterzeitgeist could be construed as an emblematic husk of the Spiritual Telegraph, albeit ambiguously, if not dubiously, aligned in its intentions and unfathomably amplified in its capacities for teleprescience.

Advanced forms of the Polterzeitgeist service diabolical data-veillence and censorship schemes concerning as-of-yet unknown cultural codes.  Such theory objects are pilfered from the daydreams churning forth out of grandiose wish fulfillment fantasies imaged incessantly by the hive mind.  Mind Children get headaches, as would you, if your thoughts were snatched away by this pavor mentum!  The rise of second-wave vampling is often over simplifed as an analgesic defense mechanism for such disturbances.   Query:  Recurrent Spontaneous Psycho Kinesis, if you please, and if you dare! This Owl is up to its elbows in panopticoncentrated ubicomic relief as it is —for now!

Salutations, Happy New Year, and without further ado—findings from that intrepid embedded journalist, i.e. yours truly, The Metaphortean Researcher.

If the Metaphortean agenda is, at times, detoured when traversing this ficto-quizzical terrain; the latest (((WFT))) endeavor, “The GIF Economy,” makes up for this harassing labor tenfold. The GIF Economy, a menagerie created under the auspices of the antiquated Graphic Interchange Format, invites denizens of the Interweb to create, appropriate and share GIF animations that more or less illustrate core tenets of the Weird Fiction Mythos.

Of myths and menageries, recall the origins of cinema. Muybridge, as eccentric shepard, herding animals into animations. Capturing their movements, indexing the species, accumulating a Noachian archive of images. Antecedent innovations–magic lantern shows, the zoetrope, the thaumotrope and their kin contributed likewise in caging the vital principles for playback and analysis.

The GIF is in some respects a stationary species, a living fossil, a holdover from the kinship of philosophical toys. Of particular import: the “wonder maker,”or thaumotrope. A smallish disc on a string, with images on either side, spun by its user so as create a third image by way of superimposition. The thaumotrope, a cine-molecular conceit in two frames looping is the common ancestor of GIFs today.

In other reports, a GIF is dithered, limited to 256 colors, life in a browser, and its most splendid mega fauna typically weigh-in at no more than 1000 kilobytes. Of lines of descent, curvature and segmentation, there are a variety of speciation events to consider. Technocultural isolation, reduced meme flow and, of course, the Anomaly.
Crypto-zoetropical studies have made strides in identifying anomalous forms of animation including circuit-bent video games and data-moshing and other glitchcraft. This emphasis on cine-molecular variation within moving image arts is not, however, the distinguishing characteristic of the GIF animation, per se.

Limiting GIFs to a thaumotropical ancestry shot thru with pulses of the crypto-zoetropical is, at best, destined for deletionpedia if we do not consider the role of memetics.

Is this for instance a duck, or a rabbit? a still image or moving? The onlooker has no choice but to oscillate between animals ad infinitum. No need for a film projector, the mechanics are mental, part of a well-oiled cultural apparatus, a meme machine. Another two-frame loop, activated from within the mind, no strings attached. It is the strength of the meme pool that most vividly “animates” this of course. It’s pattern recognition rather than sequential logic.

Relatedly– the Bigfoot exists as moving image in an oft looped film sequence, recorded circa 1967, featuring the classic cryptid tromping through a clearing in Northern Californian woods. Over the years, skeptics and believers alike have poured over this filmstrip in attempts to understand the contents. Experts from both camps have broken down the sequence into discrete images in hopes of either exposing a hoax or proving the existence of Bigfoot as a living animal.

Memetic anatomy is what’s paramount here– “Bigfoot” begins and is sustained as a putty like thought-formation: rumor, report, filmic capture, tabloids, mass media and mass amateur mediation via digitized images, mashups, homages, reference hoaxes, spin-offs and jokes. This interplay of memetic nodes is amplified by computer networks, distributed globally across the Interwebs. Network realism is the lifeblood of a cryptid’s survival, photo-realism is secondary, actual occurrences sheepishly clawing at third place.

GIFs have facilitated Bigfoot, other cryptids, various memetic phenomena, yes. Strikingly, as context is collapsing galactically, globally and locally, the authority of photo-realist regimes does not compute. GIFs are contemporary cryptids, living fossils re-fueled, despite playback problematics and varied chokeholds posed by modern day browsers. Valuable operatives in a paradigm shift towards the ficto-quizzical! GIFs take the helm as stand alone memetic organisms thriving within the pervasively networked information environment. Abundant in internet forums, redolent of embarassing webcam moments, panopticoncentrated CCTV blips, celebrity gaffaws, unintended celebrities, faux-error messages, geocities artifacts, pop cultural in-jokes, optical illusions, visual trolling pranks and deeper, darker abysms of vile intent, GIFs prevail.

Hybridities and mutation are commonplace, as one memetically charged GIF infrastructure is piggybacked by another’s visual variant, thus altering the species. Modular and multiplex traits proliferate rhizomatically ‘cross the Interweb via recursive instantiations of memetic debris and endless bouts of ludic recombination,  Initially short lifespans beget meandering permutations and coalessences that irupt into novel and derelict theory objects. This sprawl is facilitated by automated GIF animation sites, the mandate to recombinate, manageable possibilities and the sublimely abject aesthetics that are ever present and richly wielded in GIFs.
Having successfully erected obliteratariums for the study of denizens of dark webs and negative net space, i.e. the obliterati—Weird Fiction here laterally move this stronghold of greymarket R+D, aiming at the polterzeitgeist that is, in other words, the GIF ridden, memetic lifeworld of Interweb phenomena today. Temporary Autonomous Clones and temporarily autonomous Lorkurers are stationed in the foyer, sifting through incoming GIFS, classifying visual projectiles and building up a reservoir of GIF animations online and on site. Ultimately, these galleries-cum-GIF strongholds likely to crop up offline, elsewhere, globally– will be as rest stops and road-side attractions for the space-time implosions predicted to manifest in the coming age of ubiquitous computing and spimal taps. Weaponized whimsy, symptomatic of second-wave vampling?

Again, dear readers, this ficto-quizzical is a curious lot for the fleshy mind of a mere Metaphortean Researcher to process in full. Till next time!