Know Your Grifter Tactics - Bad AI

Gotta admit I’m not 100% sure it’s AI generated.  But it sure feels like it.  Well, sounds like it.

This ad is relentless.  It’s been showing up on my YouTube video beginnings for what feels like an eternity.  It’s trained me to hover over the skip button, because the annoying part is right here.

A lot has been posted about AI generated images.  They often get things subtly wrong, like eyes are always in the same position, limbs at awkward angles, and AI still has a problem with extra of missing fingers.

Well, there’s also audio problems.  And I love the Comcast voice assistance for doing strange things with pronunciation.  It amuses me, because I KNOW it’s a voice assistant.  I can read, so I know the correct pronunciation.  One common error is Roman numerals, it’s not Rocky 2, it’s Rocky eye-eye.  And there’s words not in the dictionary it takes a guess on.  To make up a movie name as an example, let’s say you wanted to make a movie about a female abominable snow person called Yetigirl.  The AI might guess it to be Ye-tig-earl instead of Yeh-tea-girl.  A movie about Pinkerton detectives ends up being Pin-cur-ten instead of Pink-er-ten.  Etc….

But this guy, he’s selling investment advice.  And although the audio looks like it’s slightly out of sync, the lip movement appears to match the actual words.  But it does have a mistake that a self respecting, intelligent investment adviser shouldn’t make.  English, can at times be a stupid language.  And LIVE can be pronounced as rhyming with either GIVE or HIVE.  And he’s super proud of how he gives all his picks for free on his rhymes with Givestreams when the sane world pronounces live streaming as rhymes with Hivestreams.

The ads way too long for me to bother with even for research purposes of what site he’s promoting.  If you can’t do a proper hive stream, I’ve got no faith in whatever it is you’re selling.

Bad Villains Part II - Two Takes In the Vegas Shooting (2017)

Looks like what we really need is a great generative AI to figure out what the real story is.

Just recently we had this take on this old story:

https://gematrinator.com/blog/2025/03/28/the-las-vegas-shooting-as-a-pi-riddle-for-nikola-tesla

While back around the time the shooting took place we had things like this:

https://freetofindtruth.blogspot.com/2017/10/23-32-99-223-mandalay-bay-shooting-from.html?m=1

Keeping in mind that these are alleged super sleuths uncovering hidden truths in reality instead of fiction, think about how differently the villain is painted in these two versions.  They aren’t even close.

For example, Thanos and the Infinity Gauntlet story.  The character had certain attributes beforehand.  Things we knew about his personality and powers and motivations.  Trying to craft fiction around that and not alienate long time readers requires some effort to at least pay homage to the Thanos we know and love.  Or hate.  Acquiring the stones took some effort instead of just rewriting the character from scratch.  A stretch that would require an Oz level, “Ignore that villain behind the curtain.  Here’s what the guy is really like.”

Lazy writing doesn’t get called out by those that don’t know the back story.  The old Vegas villain was created in a time when the outrage porn was Freemasonry was a big scapegoat and open anti-semitism was more prevalent.  Now this version of our Thanos surrogate has a backstory about Tesla, Pi and eclipses.

Did Terry Brooks rip off Tolkien?

https://thetolkien.forum/threads/j-r-r-tolkien-terry-brooks-similarities.1149/?amp=1

Or was it just an influence and a loving tribute? Enough similarities to make it close enough to appeal to loyal Tolkien fans?  Or a copyright violation cause for a damages settlement in court?

Stephen Paddock was a real person, so some care should be taken into getting it right, especially if you label yourself as a “truth seeker”. But the writers do have one common denominator.  The truth is truthier if you give them money.  One is a Patreon for sports betting, the other is a website teaming with shitty ads or a membership fee to avoid those.  And you’re going to want to keep those subscriptions current because in another five years Truth will come out with a different story.  Totally rewriting the villain with the same name.  Clogging up the internet’s arteries with more misinformation and disinformation.

Final Destination vs. The Menu

SPOILERS AHEAD

Specifically, Final Destination 2, although it doesn’t really matter.

There’s always been a wide range of social commentary in films, sometimes better hidden than others.  Sometimes well done and sometimes not so much.  And in my opinion nothing makes a movie better than a compelling villain.  Thanos is a compelling villain.  He’s got a point that isn’t totally wrong.  It’s his approach to the solution that is found objectionable.  If it was, “I, Thanos, am so cool that I deserve all the money in the universe” he would be a more boring villain.

Like Thanos, and the lesser villains in The Menu there has been a fair amount of anti capitalist messaging.  This is usually not very well done, for example the opening action scene in The Beekeeper.  The villain is cartoonishly and completely obviously evil because he’s greedy and corrupt.  There’s no intrigue or plot development other than a sledgehammer over the head THIS IS THE BAD GUY.  In turn, these movies don’t help with intellectual thought about what is wrong with capitalism.  It’s more like a simple, “Thou shalt not steal”.  And if you do Jason Statham will smite you.  Even to the point where psychologically they are counterproductive.  A single vigilante beating up and shooting bad guys doesn’t happen in real life.  The justice system is also designed to (not) work the way it does.

I love both Final Destination 2 and The Menu.  FD2, has what I consider to be the Saving Private Ryan of opening scenes in the horror genre.  Sometimes I have watched just the opening scene and bypassed the entire remainder of the film.  It’s light entertainment.  Background noise while doing something else.  While the four times I’ve watched The Menu has been focused, because it’s a remarkably well done movie.

Getting to the point finally.  Final Destination 2 is a gematria narrative quality approach to villainy.  Death itself is the villain.  You already know who is going to probably die in a gruesome fashion before the movie completes.  And reusing the established formula, you know that any survivor is subject to a “no, you didn’t escape” finale or sequel bait narrative.  The lack of quality in villainy is expressed by the lower level villains in the movie.  Within normal villain writing there’s a hierarchy of villainy.  Low level obstacle villains.  Middling dilemma villains.  And the ultimate challenger, the mirror villain.

We know that in FD2 that Kimberly, having the vision of the highway crashes, is the protagonist.  The thought that Death itself would be cheated is ludicrous.  So any entertainment value is in what happens to the other established villains, the people that death was cheated out of by Kimberly’s vision disruption of Death’s plans.  For example the character of Evan.  Evan is a terrible character by design and a terrible character by writing standards.  He has just won the lottery, has an answering machine message from some girl that obviously only cares about him now that he’s wealthy.  Any anti capitalist message - greedy assholes deserve what’s coming to them - is ruined by the cartoonish portrayal of his being a complete asshole.  In a short time it’s established he deserves to die.  We know he’s going to die.  And like poorly written gematria narratives the death of Evan and others, even those we might care about a little more, are insanely arbitrary.  The not a great villain of Death itself always wins in the end.  But it makes money.  And people do love themselves money more than actually thinking things through long term.

On the other hand, The Menu has its own cartoonish capitalist villains.  Like even, these people deserve to die and we root against them.  A man who’s left by his girlfriend hires an escort, knowing she will be killed at the end of the night.  More worried about his last fling “looking good” by having a date than her well being.  Finance bros who, well, only care about their investment in the restaurant.  A rich couple that proves that they don’t even care about their investment fancy restaurant food.  It’s just a status symbol.  I have my private jet.  A bunch of cars.  And I eat at the most expensive and exclusive restaurants.

What FD2 gets right in its own shallow way is the attempt to elevate its villainy to the dilemma villain.  Kimberly doesn’t need to have a sword fight with Evan to make it to the next stage.  He’s not an obstacle to Kimberly.  At best learning about his death and the manner it came to be is a clue for those that have survived to this point.  But there’s no payoff.  No AHA! moment that Kimberly gets a genuine clue on how to survive.  If it’s your first time with any FD movie you don’t realize it until the end that the clues and build up is all a sham.

Margot, the call girl protagonist doomed for death date in The Menu gets the chance to match up against a high quality Mirror Villain.  The deaths of the characters he kills we revel in, yes they absolutely deserved to die.  But in a sense, Chef Slowik’s plans are ruined by her mere presence.  His intent is to hold a mirror up to his individual guests, showing them a final mirror to their souls before their demise.  It was supposed to be Evan’s girlfriend (not literally) from FD2.  Easy to assume a vapid and shallow bimbo.  Only caring about her date because of his status instead of his actual quality as a human being.  Margot, despite a less than noble occupation, does not deserve to die.  Not from some master plan where her faults are mirrored as no preparation was made on The Menu for her.  And certainly not in some low quality gematria narrative style, “RIP Margot.  MURDER=38 MARGOT= 38” (yes, they really do in reverse reduction).  Yet, the low level villains that are doomed and Slowik’s interactions with them and her yield vital clues.  In turn, she holds the mirror to Slowik’s face in the classic cheeseburger finale and wins her freedom.  There’s also a side dish of her looking back at the doomed restaurant guests and seeing the fight is gone from them.  They will meekly accept their fate, realizing they are actually terrible people.  All in one feature length film.

You will never get a Menu quality story from a gematria decode.  They superficially appear to be mirror quality villains, claiming to expose hidden truths about your government and society.  Yet, their actions ultimately betray them.  Give me your money because look how I let you know what you already knew.  The world is actually a shitty place.  Even at the end, Margot’s survival doesn’t magically return her to a utopia.  After her dinner and a show, a cheeseburger and a restaurant in flames, the world isn’t suddenly transformed to a better place.  But she is a better person, which ought to count for something.

Now try explaining all this to someone that thinks the number 9 is going to make them gambling winnings.

Subscription Scam Spring Cleaning

Did you know that if you stopped paying on a Patreon subscription you still get notifications unless you take extra steps to stop the notifications?  “Listen to me”, says the soft insinuating voice of the mighty Subscription Demon, “You will regret all the great content you are missing out on.  Won’t you reconsider?”

There’s too many dirty tricks in the subscription scam industry to cover.  If you want a good start you can simply search SUBSCRIPTION SCAMS in YouTube and a wide range of videos will pop up.  Before the internet advertising had already figured out that people are idiots and the scams pervaded magazines and music and anything else people could get hooked into thinking that it’s a good idea to have even after you long outgrew the entertainment value you received.  Socially, identifying yourself as a part of a tribe became a self fulfilling feedback loop.  If you bought a subscription to Super Awesome Nintendo Gaming you are now open to assault by Fabulous Nintendo Monthly and Great Nintendo Tips.  All requiring a subscription that takes far more effort to cancel than it does to sign up.

Just in 2019 alone Facebook proudly announced they deleted 5.4 billion fake accounts. 

https://people.com/human-interest/facebook-shut-down-over-5-billion-fake-accounts/

I’m sure there were many who marveled at how generous FB was looking out for their users to take the time and energy to do that for user safety.  Never realizing that the proper reaction was, “Holy shit!  That’s 69% of the world population!!  Maybe there’s something wrong with FB if it got that way in the first place.”

Creating a real Facebook account is a form of a social subscription.  You’re putting yourself out there, your image and obvious physical identifiers as simple as male or female and a rough idea of your age.  Then your profile will set you up as a target for social subscriptions.  Gardening, dog or cat lover, Kim Kardashian fan, hiking, whatever you want.  You may relocate some old friends, you may make some new ones especially if you join a group, you may not use FB much at all.  But you’ve also made a social subscription.  And depending on how overboard you go with self profiling you will be invaded by the subset of that 69% of friend suggestions that were purposefully made to lure you away from your hard earned cash.  That subset, literally billions of fake Facebook accounts over just a few years, wants you to prove your worth of being part of the in group by sending someone money that you will get little or nothing in return.

The main targets end up being the same as email, text message and good old fashioned phone scams.  Youngsters without enough life experience to realize what they are getting into.  The elderly.  Not every old person in cognitive decline can become president of a big country.  But they can donate monthly to rescue shelter that doesn’t really exist because it’s a really a fake account generated in Ghana instead of Newark, New Jersey.

Part of the assault on intellectualism and science is to seed distrust in those who are more capable of recognizing scams for what they are.  Now, more than even just five years ago, is a perfect time to find the smartest and most trustworthy person you know and let them go through your phone or laptop and look for old shady stuff that might not be what it claims.  And that’s not part of your political echo chamber trust, genuinely someone who knows their way around a computer and actually generates displays of empathy in real life.  If you don’t have such a person in your life, congratulations.  You maybe signed the social contract that you’re a gullible rube a long time ago.  Of course, part of the problem is that there will be fake subscription services to remove questionable information from your phone.  No niche is left uncovered by the billions making up part of that 69%.

Take gematria Patreon subscriptions as an example.  Do you really need someone to tell you that there are things wrong with the world?  I can tell you that for free every day.  And I don’t want your money.  Do you need to have more than one subscription?  Hell no.  That one sports gematria guru is often going to make a narrative for both teams himself.  At least limit the damage of gambling losses to a single source.  Patreon isn’t going to give you any hints that you are overdoing the number of sports prediction scammers you are using.  Even the ads on the Gematrinator site are a source of questionable social contracts.  

Did you get distracted by the pretty girl in the skimpy outfit and check out Plato’s Closet?  Not interested?  Because it’s a double whammy.  Click the Closet and get similar targeted ads or become a member to get ad free meaningless tiny little numbers.  Or both, you can check out the closet before going ad free.  Personally I’m holding out for Descartes’ Cedar Chest because I really like chests.

Do yourself a favor and do a cleanup.  A personalized actually time and effort put into it cleanup.  Your chest will be a lot better off.

Know Your Annoying Weirdo Tactics - Choice of Talking Points

It might be the table at the family gathering.  It might be a small group or even just you and one other person at a bar.  It might be an angry and outspoken person that talks too loudly at the restaurant with someone else at their table and doesn’t care that you think the only thing possibly worse is a crying baby or fussy toddler.  It might be someone wearing apparel at a vacation spot that is screaming out that they would love nothing more than to start a fight with even random strangers because…reasons.  

Some people enjoy monopolizing the conversation.  And although not directly seeking to grift you, there’s an uneasy feeling you are going to be thinking, “Oh God, here we go again.”  These are the people that are the attention whores who simply refuse to admit they might be wrong about anything.  They are the ones that try to antagonize someone they’ve pegged as the smartest person in the room.  And they feel it’s time to play the outsmart the smart person.  Take them down a notch.  And lots of smart people know the game and deliberately make a habit of not engaging because it’s a no win proposition.  Their arguments will be loaded with logical fallacies and dirty DEBATE ME, BRO!! tactics.

But during that nurturing phase while they are building up to the point where they have become the Joe Rogan of their social circles, what do these people talk about?  What are the confidence builders in their echo chambers that made them become the kind of person you want to avoid for the next four years? 

 Weird shit

Like gematria.  Or 9/11 conspiracies or JFK assassination.  Anything that gives you a chance to make up evidence or recite fake evidence someone else made up, like Haitian immigrants are eating cats or elementary schools have litter boxes.  The average other person in the conversation will not know the immediate debunk.

 Their job

Normal social interaction requires the politeness to tolerate an update on what someone else is going through at their place of employment.  You may even get a brief query about your job, but it’s a fake out to give them an excuse to go full bore attention whore weirdo mode and talk about their job.  If their job is completely different it’s a golden opportunity to keep it focused.  You as a bank teller don’t know about computer coding with Java and Python.  Every chance they get to talk about a topic the other person isn’t comfortable with - they aren’t objectively wrong.  What’s wrong is the expectation that you have to live with the one sided nature.  You are the punching bag that has to put up with the condescending insinuation of not actually knowing everything.  The smarter the target audience is, the more satisfaction gained in outsmarting the smart person.

Politics/Economics/Religion

These are the familiar ruiners of group gatherings.  You, as the annoying weirdo, get to introduce completely subjective material with a mix of a far too small amount of actual facts and spin it into a yarn that’s difficult to entangle.  Well practiced and the chance to be perceived as an expert in something you don’t really have any clue about.  A lot of the fallacies relate to short term versus long term thinking.  Why not take up Pascal’s Wager and think about your eternal soul today?  Oh my, look at the price of eggs and gas!!  Better put a dictator in office now!!  (As the target, try to go easy on the religious ones, a lot of them are really well intentioned.  But if they get to the Westboro kill the **** stage, yeah duck out of those conversations.)

Shitty Heroes

A subset of the previous.  It’s what you get when you admire a Musk or Rogan because you don’t understand that you admire the superficial “winning” over quality of arguments.  You enjoy winning your little debates, and these influencers appear to be intelligent despite an overwhelming amount of actual evidence they aren’t.  The easiest debunk of the wealthy = intelligent myth is how often the shitty hero contradicts themselves.  The shitty hero is all over the place.  When you play both sides and your gullible target audience doesn’t call you out on it, you’re golden shit.

You Repeat Yourself

A lot.  And you don’t realize that you repeat yourself a lot.  You have a stockpile of jokes, memes, and personal anecdotes that got you a gotcha moment in the past.  Overall, you are so annoying people don’t want to hang around you unless they are part of your weirdo clique.  And you’ve got that stockpile that got a genuine positive response that you fall back on in trying times.  And it doesn’t matter which group from above the conversation revolves around.  As soon as you hear a reference you recognize, even outside the basic conversation, you choke in with, “A duck walks into a bar…”. Uggh.  I hate having a good memory.  Hearing the old Kobe Bryant gematria again didn’t change my mind the first time, nothing has altered that now.

Mark Rober and Tesla

 https://youtu.be/IQJL3htsDyQ?si=CoODlivC2phsrmhR

I like Mark Rober.  I like him a lot.  He knows his stuff as an engineer (former NASA guy) and anyone dedicated enough to make multiple squirrel obstacle courses has a quirky sense of humor I can appreciate.

But that video may have gone too far.  It may not be totally on the up and up.  A bunch of counter arguments have chimed in during the week that video was posted.  A couple give nods to some of the results while claiming overall that some of his tests are biased or just wrong.  In a comparing apples to oranges sense of wrong.  Some have instantly attributed the video as trash.  Naturally from account names indicating their Tesla fans is a common theme in many.  

But in this age of conspiracy fueled age of baseless accusations, irrational fan boy defense and people with large followings not concerned about accuracy over views can we trust any of it?  Can’t we instead trust almighty capitalism for what’s going on with Tesla?  And it turns out you don’t just need to look at the cliff the stock price dropping off the cliff like the coyote inside was holding an anvil.

Resale values of Tesla have plummeted.  And they haven’t been good for a long time.

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2025/03/20/business/even-used-teslas-are-falling-out-of-favor

https://www.sacurrent.com/news/resale-value-of-tesla-cars-sliding-into-toilet-both-in-san-antonio-and-nationwide-37037216

https://www.newsweek.com/tesla-resale-price-going-down-2046464

That’s right.  Declining since early 2024.  And no signs of improvement or any talk of what is being done to get it back.

Resale value of cars is a personal peeve for me.  Being a product of parents who bought quality (American made!) vehicles and drove them to death while simultaneously having their siblings think that a trade in “before it loses its resale value” and absorbing the interest rates of a brand new loan.  I’m sticking with my personal philosophy of debt being a terrible thing and that US consumers unhealthy love affair with overspending is ludicrous.  Especially now and what the next four years holds.

The gematria crowd doesn’t give you much to work with here.  Sure some of the terrorism stuff like vandalizing Tesla dealerships and painting swastikas on cars is there.  Outrage porn is better for engagement than talk of actual financial matters that may have some benefit.  It’s also low key because the majority of the gematria and really odd stuff tends to admire the biggest douchebags instead of being interested in real science.  Maybe if we had, oh government regulations that worked we would have some independent tests on Teslas looking at the more outrageous safety claims and give us help towards a real answer.

And maybe the roadrunners will actually run through a cliff like in cartoons.

If At First You Don’t Succeed, Fail Again

Conspiracy gematria is as almost far away from innovative as you can get.  There’s nothing new and exciting on the horizon.  No new ciphers will ever produce some missing “Holy Grail” of decodes.  No recruitment tactics are used that haven’t been done a million times before.  As conspiracy theory light, it’s stuck at the bottom of the stochastic terrorism pyramid.

Under the disguise of pretending you can make money from predicting football games you are exposed to the attitudes and beliefs of antisocial activity.  Starting your own YouTube channel is actively encouraged.  Sure it may start off innocently enough with just sports gambling content, but just by math alone some number will graduate to bigger and worse things.  Even something like “you are a sovereign citizen that doesn’t have to pay taxes” is a more lucid argument than the Jesuits have nothing better to do than rig football games with tiny numbers.

The U.S. has rapidly burned through some of the remaining safeguards that have kept the government running.  Federal agencies are being gutted by employee dismissals and funding cuts.  Although the official narrative has been decades long preaching of limited government, more and more a completely unregulated capitalist environment is taking hold.  Profits are increased not by quality of product earning market share, but by image alone and cutting costs to the bone.  Why should you make your airplane safe when there’s no government agency to hold you accountable, and it’s much easier to use flat earth generated hype to get the gullible to distrust the government?

At one time there was this quaint period in history where a couple global conflicts called World Wars were fought.  Rapid industrialization created the ability to modernize weapons to not just dramatically increase our capability of killing from afar, but to rapidly turn a modest military into a large force capable of making a significant impact.  So I’m going to share an example of something you maybe didn’t know.  An example of a failure with no lessons learned and repeating the same mistakes.  Mistakes made more for national image and bragging rights than based on sound science and actual practical benefits.

Quick, name a hydrogen filled airship that caught fire and burned to a crisp?  The Hindenburg right?  Admit it, The Hindenburg was your first choice, not just because it’s the first choice, but the only choice.  Not true.  The United Kingdom had a program to build airships with two competing teams.  One by the military and one by private companies.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/R101

At the time the largest aircraft in the world.  Rushed through for its launch, complete with cutting corners and making some unwise decisions.  A large part of the accident can be attributed to the rush, born of a state of mind of national pride.  Not convinced that failing once was enough the R101 came after a French military airship accident and no lesson of “maybe this isn’t a great idea for civilian transport” was learned.  The USS Akron crash later proved that failing again and again is not enough.

Finally, the well known Hindenburg disaster sealed the fate of airship civilian transportation permanently.  The British had given up on it after R101.  But the national pride of Germany thought it was worth a go.  And ironically, a bit of information I wasn’t aware of until recently, scrap metal from the R101 was allegedly sold to Germany and used in the frame of the Hindenburg.  Talk about gluttons for punishment.

There has been a big stink in the U.S. about air travel safety with several notable plane crashes in early 2025.  These are a classic example of dubious attitudes towards safety standards that have not lead to increased scrutiny but a, “meh, it’s just bad luck.”  Instead of increased standards the response has been to lose staff of already overworked overseeing personnel.  The real test of government response to disaster will likely be the upcoming climate change supercharged hurricane seasons, where precious business GDP growth will be partially negated by cleaning up after the mess.  We’ve already failed on hurricane relief before.  Time to fail, fail again.

Poisoning AI

Finally something I found to be quite entertaining, and maybe some practical value as well although I’m not sure it can be done to a scale that it will matter.

For background, artists have found digital cloaking tools that help fuck up AI models training, as explained in this approximately one year old article:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/art-anti-ai-poison-heres-how-it-works/

Lately what are called “AI Slop Channels” have infested YouTube.  AI searches for content, pulls what it needs from the captions, and tweaks it a little bit or maybe summarizes it based on other people’s work.  Then slap on an AI generated voice and present the work as new and you have a quick and dirty clickbait video.

The AI Poison Pill I found uses the caption search as a weapon against AI.  Amusingly,

https://youtu.be/krWAxyMeipw?si=x8JkxQoQxMB6wjK3

https://youtu.be/NEDFUjqA1s8?si=IKwvafcyRQE19rb-

there are two videos from about a month ago with different YouTubers claiming to have created the process.  Quite ironic that complaining about theft of original content by stealing other content regarding theft of content.  Well, let them fight it out.

It works like this.  You can insert blank lines between each actual caption line.  Then, you add your own caption text in those lines, using coding to move the margin so it’s not visible and just shows briefly as a split second of flashed text at most.  Your added content is the poison, inserting gibberish into the story.  AI is not smart enough, not yet at least, to understand that the gibberish is not part of the intended story, and when it does its search and recaps the gibberish becomes part of the AI summary which in turn gets inserted into any fake copy.

Gematria might be a bad example for this since by its nature it’s already meaningless gibberish.  But for sake of the argument let’s use the old example of 113, the alleged number of dishonesty.  A person dedicated enough could make a copy of every video referencing 113 being dishonest.  Go through the poison pill process and add the numerous things that are antonyms of dishonest (VERACIOUS = 113) and screw up any summary from AI trying to train a video thief to make 113 always seem dishonest.  But like I said, Gematria is already in the camp of deliberately being wrong as clickbait so there isn’t much practical value.  Although for the fun of trolling value alone it would be worth it.

The future of AI appears to be quite a mess.  There’s been a build up of bad information on the internet.  Fact checking is under constant attack, theft and fraud are the norm in politics and big business.  You might as well have an AI gibberish spouting leader for all the quality you get.

The Robbers Cave Experiment - Time for A Revised Test

 https://www.simplypsychology.org/robbers-cave.html

https://www.simplypsychology.org/robbers-cave.html

How I yearn for the good old days when it was edgy and cool to perform (slightly?) unethical experiments on impressionable youngsters.  You can also search for Robbers Cave on YouTube and find video recaps.  For you gematria experts that don’t like to read about history and suffer the indignity of reading.  The story sounds like gematria “truther” cliques.  People angry at the world that can never agree on the proper decode and figure out exactly who they hate today.  It’s better to hate everyone because Alex Jones said so than put an effort into thinking for yourself and talking to experts.  Their in groups are formed.  Sports, crypto, end of the world, synchronicity.  Yet since the resolution of the conflict phase of the experiment is a never ending always unfulfilled grift you never know who or how long a peaceable phase will last.  Usually it’s a matter of how much the grift dollars are dwindling and the need to drum up business.

It was one of those videos that is the reason I mention the questionable ethics.  After recapping the in group formation phase the video’s author mentioned how the conflict was achieved.  Campground games, nothing wrong with that.  Prizes, something to work for to encourage an effort for victory.  Cool.  But the prizes included actual…knives?!?  Holy shit, the kids were trashing each other’s cabins and getting into physical alterations.  A headline about ROBBERS CAVE PSYCHOLOGY EXPERIMENT - 7 YOUTHS DEAD would have made Zimbardo proud.

If gematria wants a chance to do some good in the world, here’s that opportunity.  Find a group of kids who aren’t familiar with gematria and separate into two groups.  One group is funneled into “positive” gematria.  Harmless stuff like reading parables with a positive moral message.  And decodes of puppies, cute baby bunnies, butterflies, Little Debbie snack cakes, bagpipe music, volunteering at the library, bake sales for charity, etc….  The second group, the nasty stuff that already exists on the internet.  So and so is the Antichrist, sports are rigged and all the political propaganda.

The group conflict is achieved just by the differing gematria topics.  Let’s skip the part of the prizes for winning the competition because we’d probably have to upgrade to AR-15s and porn or something else nasty.

Now how exactly do you resolve the conflict?  How do you make them team up to work together towards a common goal?  The solution is in the early experiment that was considered a failure and why Robbers Cave was a second attempt.  A reset button because they didn’t like the outcome.  The kids figured out they were being manipulated and teamed up against the manipulators.

The sooner people give up on the lack of real answers from gematria the better for everyone.  The manipulators are the ones that are the weather vanes with no consistent message other than constant requests for money.  The conspiracy grifters who change sides on a regular basis that read the room to guess at who you should hate today is more likely to produce a money transfer from ordinary people to them.

Know Your Grifter Tactics - Overuse of Hashtags

 

Sure, we get it.  You’re into occult stuff like astrology and gematria and the ether.  But gosh is this overkill or what.  If you’ve already mentioned #astrology you don’t really need to throw in #aquarius and #pisces and what have you got against the other ten signs?!??

#up #down #left #right #center  - seems like you lack a clear…direction.  On what your post is supposed to represent and mean.  #viral and #hot.  Because sure, hot makes sense along with all that other stuff…not.  Just because you use #viral doesn’t mean your post is or should be going viral.

You actually just need #gematria alone to do the job.  As soon as you mention gematria we know you have no clue what you’re talking about. #And#breaking#up#your#post#with#a#billion#different#hashtags#makes#you#look#like#a#fucking#idiot.  You don’t need to do it, the word gematria alone does that.  It’s a low level influencer wannabe engagement trick.  Instead of taking the time to become Joe Rogan and contradict yourself weeks or months apart you just throw maximum shit against the wall in one post and see what sticks.  Maybe someone was looking for a nice horoscope and never heard of ether before.  Whoa, look at all these #s this weirdo put up.  Teach me more.  Teach me how to not research and look into your posting history and see that despite the occasional gematria reference you don’t really actually put up gematria and gematriots.  Just the word.  And that’s all it is, hollow words with no true intellect or thought behind them.  No deep analysis of how Pisces = 71 and what that means on the day you put this up.  No effort.  Just a lazy headline with no article to read and review.

We’ve seen this account before, but there’s been a couple others on Bluesky lately.  Throwing in a #gematria along with not really doing a whole lot of gematria.  It comes off as a lazy pick up artist at a seedy bar.  Tell me more about yourself and your cybertruck!  Well, I’m also into gematria.  You know, uh, umm…11!  Yeah 11 is really cool.  Oh you stud!  Ravage me now or I may do grievous bodily harm to myself!

Just watch out that cybertruck doesn’t explode.  People who use a billion different hashtags don’t care about quality, just quantity.

Mental Hoarding

Just like the early days of the conspiracy gematria boom there are still people who need to clean the mental fridge or maybe even buy a brand new one.

One of the fundamental aspects of changing from nomadic hunter-gatherer to tribes was the recognition that food with a longer, well, shelf life, could be saved for later.  Pile up rocks over those extra berries you picked you couldn’t eat.  Save them for later, as long as you knew the hiding spot and marked it carefully and - nobody else stole it before your return.  Then when advanced to the point extra crops were produced on purpose, your hiding place was no longer a secret.  The Mongols knew where your city was.  It was just a matter of being better at taking stuff than the hoarders were at defending it.

There’s a gradient on what it is saving something for later and what is useless hoarding.  A person getting paid once a year would pretty much need to save some for later instead of buying a year’s supply up front.  Parents who expect to send their kid to college could create a per paycheck deposit into a college fund, tucking away a bit each paycheck.  Someone who listens to a storm warning and flocks to the store to stock up, that might be ok but people are idiots and tend to go overboard, buying perishables they won’t get to before they spoil.  And the extreme other end is the multi billionaire who hoards wealth just because they think it’s fun and in reality it doesn’t do any good to society as a whole.

You can find the mental hoarder through the truther tactic of the shill game.  That’s where a clique leader will put out content about how they, Truther A, are the real deal while Truther B is a shill and not to be trusted.  Truther A’s flock travels to Truther B’s domain armed with instructions to antagonize and maybe convert some of the Truther B flock over to the right side.  And their mental fridge is stocked with the same cognitive biases that both Truthers use to extract money from them.

I see it all the time.  Someone who swears they are intelligent and unbiased will talk about how they aren’t racist.  Then they will get triggered to shut off critical thinking as soon as the political buzzwords are present.  Damn it I hate those (commie liberals/fascist conservatives).  Someone who swears that betting on sports with gematria will pop into comments on a video that is discussing apophenia in religious interpretation and swear they understand the apophenia message but obviously show they are sold on the legitimacy of sports gematria.  The alumni association is perfectly fine with you slandering the wrong team by adding in hostile disinformation in addition to your donation to the annual fund.  Both sides know where the other city’s fridges are.

One of the best ways to avoid identity theft is to have an identity not worth stealing.  If you clean out your fridge regularly your cousin won’t steal that fried chicken you were saving for tomorrow.  If you don’t overdo purchases you won’t throw out thousands of dollars a year of unused and spoiled lunch meat, milk and unfinished Chinese takeout.

Politically the idea of us versus them boils down to how much change you are willing to accept and want.  Do you want to conserve the old traditions, embrace moving forward or fall somewhere between the two poles?  Do you want to embrace the old traditions which have some useful social value (thou shalt not steal the fried chicken from your cousin’s fridge) or do you want to admit that maybe you need to understand that there’s some benefit to vaccines and give up on the idea that the Earth is only thousands of years old?  In the meantime, there are bad actors who are pressuring you to embrace that only one side is 100% right about everything.  And if your fridge isn’t stocked up with their stuff you are less than human.

Social media algorithms have a good idea of what your fridge looks like on the inside and wants you to hoard more.  A good exercise would be to take the time to end some channel subscriptions of someone who hasn’t put out a new video in years.  Stop watching videos from someone who begs for money on a weekly basis.  Start hoarding videos that have actual entertainment value and support the content you truly enjoy and not because you are stuck hoarding more of what you learned about, and at the time loved, five years ago.  One thing that never goes out of fashion in hoarding is finding people who are terrible at hoarding and doing it better than they do.  They know your fridge is stocked with outdated products, cognitive biases and lack of long term planning.  And being as disrespectful as possible for your own need for attention.

The Annual Decode Event

 (Even more fictional than normal for gematria.)

Lydia was late.  Rushing through putting on a fresh set of clothes she left the house headed for the town square, anxious for the big event.  The Annual Decode winner would be announced within a few hours.

Everyone, literally everyone from the smallest and youngest child to the oldest and most feeble adult would be present.  Most of the town would have a decode ready, but if you didn’t or couldn’t you would be assigned a default decode.  Something basic like a Pi reference from the old days, from a list in a dusty old tome.  Something picked by Gregory, the town mayor.

Lydia was truly excited for this particular event.  She had prepared a lengthy decode, complete with her own personal synchronicities.  Her town, Raiders, normally did football decodes, and her decode was heavily skewed toward their previous season where they nearly won the league championship.  And as she was runner up for the privilege of The Dunking last year it just seemed, well, just …right…fitting that she would be tied in with that with her own personal runner up status.  The nearest neighboring town, Newcoin didn’t have any bragging rights as their personal cryptocurrency did a nosedive last year, throwing the whole town into what’s sure to be a decades long recession.

She arrived just slightly late, only having missed the preliminary festivities where the townspeople shared their excitement, decodes held in hand.  Consuming alcoholic beverages and eating rich food.  The party before The Dunking was great fun.  Some even seemed to enjoy the party more than The Dunking.

All the maintenance for the Dunk Tank was carefully and thoroughly completed during the week, Raiders never having had any problems in their history with the actual Dunk.   Lydia had heard of the village of Eclipse from three years ago and how the Dunk there had gone wrong and federal funding had been pulled for the following year.  Lydia and the town could be sure no such indignity would happen to Raiders this year.

The town clock chimed 2:02 pm.  (2:02 being close enough to the approved time of 2:00 pm and well within federal guidelines of 2:00 plus or minus six minutes).  It was time to start the selection process and the crowd noise quickly quieted as Gregory prepared the annual speech.

During the next two hours all the decodes were put in The Box.  A large and quite unassuming box painted in a flat green color.  No one knows why that shade of green was chosen, it just…was what was appropriate for the Box.  Our Box.  The Raiders Box.  A sort of holy relic and part of the Annual Decode event.

With the last decode safely tucked away Gregory began his carefully prepared speech.  That is carefully prepared from his first year as mayor decades ago.  The speech never changed.  Every syllable carefully recited.  As he finished Gregory stepped close to the box and prepared to draw at random this year’s winner.  Who would be getting dunked this year?  One by one, following the checklist prepared by Gregory, the townsfolk would be called to draw a gematria decode from the box.  The last decode left would be dunked.  The person who authored the first decode drawn would be the first to push The Button on The Dunk Tank.  The first to get the chance to set the computerized random number generator in motion for when the floor of Tue Dunk Tank would drop into the cold water filling the bottom portion of the tank.

Last year, Lydia was the person who pressed The Button just before Arnold who had the honor of being the winner.  Sending Raul to the bottom half of the tank to the raucous cheers and applause of the waiting crowd.  She momentarily thought about how much she missed Raul and his bright eyes and wide smile.  But the excitement of this festival soon overwhelmed and thoughts of past glory soon were swept away.

The first name drawn was Talia, a vapid and shallow woman who couldn’t decode worth shit (at least in Lydia’s opinion.  Talia would be first to push The Button.  The first to get the chance to dunk on this year’s tank occupant.  The first to dunk on their sloppy, contrived connections, their misspellings, their forced narratives, whatever the community could symbolically use The Dunk Tank water as explanation for their poor gematria decoding skills.

As the afternoon wore on Lydia realized, quite anxiously, that there were only 17 names left in The Box, and her decode still remained within.  Slowly, agonizingly (Gregory always dragged the ceremony out as the end neared to maximize the tension) there came the time with just two decodes left out of the hundreds that initially had been inserted.  Who would be getting dunked was either Robert or Lydia.

And breaking from tradition Lydia, gripped with a fear unlike she’d ever known before leapt forward to Gregory’s podium and shouted at the mob.  A mob that wasn’t used to this sort of display.

“STOP THIS FARCE NOW!!”  Lydia screamed.

“It must be Robert you dunk, my decode took weeks of painstaking research.  Everyone knows Robert is lazy.  He even copies from the rest of his friends!”

After a few moments a few giggles interrupted the stunned silence.  Lydia’s first plea for some kind of sensible guidelines was ignored in place of the standard arbitrary results.

“What is wrong with you people?  You are even prepared to dunk children!! Children with their whole lives ahead?!”

“Oh Lydia,”, said Paul, someone has to be dunked and the rules are the rules.  Live with that.”

“But they are stupid rules.  Philip showed me how he decoded that Gregory should be dunked despite the mayor being the only exemption.  Surely his death threat to our mayor means he should be dunked!!”

Silence.

“Annette does cryptocurrency decodes every year!! We’re a sports town!!”

Silence.

“My own mother was dunked just four years ago.  Surely the odds against me being this close to being dunked prove this is all a farce!”

Finally after letting Lydia blow off some steam Gregory established himself as master of the ceremony.

“Hush Lydia, it’s just some cold water and light hearted ridicule.  Let’s see if it’s you or Robert who has been standing silently and behaving like a grown up instead of the child you’ve proven to be.

Robert’s decode was picked from the box.  The last decode remaining WAS Lydia’s.  Lydia would be dunked.

Her previous outburst was nothing compared to the comments she spewed forth as she was forcibly placed in the dunk tank.  The ridicule started as her decode was read allowed, every townsperson taking their chance in turn to press The Button.  The mob making fun of all her painstaking research.  Her pleas of how unfair about how random and pointless the entire process is being met with more ridicule than the actual decode.

Until finally seven year old Timothy pressed the button, and the few seconds of the sound of gears grinding and machinery coming to life signaled Timothy was this year’s winner.  Lydia was dunked.

And as the icy water filled her lungs and she drowned her protests finally ceased.

——————————————————————

If I were a YouTube gematria decoder this is the point where I would beg you to subscribe to my Patreon.  Which I won’t do.  Instead I’m giving credit to the real author.

https://americanliterature.com/author/shirley-jackson/short-story/the-lottery/

Shirley Jackson wrote The Lottery quite some time ago, a tale of “conformity gone mad”.  A tale that plays out like a Twilight Zone episode focusing on mankind’s often stupid beliefs of how to act as a social group.  Gematria is a fitting modernization. Everything is so completely arbitrary in a confirmation bias based scam.  One day people who are allied turn into bitter enemies.  One day Joe Biden has the same gematriot that was used for Trump years ago.  One day you drop zeroes, the next day you don’t.  The only consistency is the lack of critical thinking just for the sake of a little attention thrown your way by the cult leader.

Globally morale is epically low.  When the internet came to life all the people who wished to spread their grift and propaganda learned all the old tricks at the same time.  Gematria may have roots in sports betting scams but spent an extensive period as a dissemination of right wing propaganda during the Qanon heyday.  People who have purposefully not been educated have a difficult time dealing with contradictory information.