what is the most honest-to-god anomalous thing you've ever encountered/experienced? an unexplainable thing that still haunts you to this day?
it's still so weird to me bc like, did someone hack my account for just that purpose? why?? was it a youtube video's ID getting reused? I thought that never happens. I was living with ppl at the time, did someone use my computer while I wasn't looking???
I also only watched like, the first 10 seconds because it freaked me out. it was like, cell phone video quality with fucking, paragraphs of ranty text spinning overtop like a powerpoint transition
another occurrence, more light hearted.
one time I was on an inter-city bus and at about 50% through the ride I became convinced that the person sitting next to me would:
1. get off at the first major stop
2. forget one of their bags
I actually got quite annoyed that I would have to wait for so long before I had to stand up, tap them on the shoulder as they were leaving, and tell them that they forgot their bag
I was correct on both counts. the first major stop came and they started getting up, forgetting their bag in the overhead compartment. I stood up and tapped them. "you're forgetting you're bag." they thanked me and took it. felt like a mom
before you think I was overzealous in tapping them, they were already a few feet down the aisle. they straight up would've forgotten it
I just noticed my "you're" typo and now it sounds like I reminded a person that they, physically, were a bag
@SuricrasiaOnline@cybre.space that time my computer did something i asked it to and i didn't have to debug it for hours
@SuricrasiaOnline i have a lot of unpleasant "anomalous" experiences but they're pretty straightforwardly attributed to Brain Issues
@SuricrasiaOnline on 2 occasions in my life I’ve told someone something somewhat significant things then after a few seconds i asked them about it and they just stared at me like nothing happened
There are other similar things but essentially it’s just like, the consequences of some stuff just seemed to have disappeared lol
@SuricrasiaOnline i don't know if it was even the most anomalous thing i've encountered, but a dramatically overt and fairly recent one that has really stuck in my mind, was just a face in the clouds... just, complement the sculptor on the lifelike likeness of the subject, detailed and expressive, had to stop and do a reality check and perception tests and then look back still dumbfounded at the perfection, kind of face, serenely smiling at me, framed in wavy hair blending into cloud textures
@SuricrasiaOnline When I was 14, I was sitting on the foot of my bed, watching MTV's FEAR (a pulpy and very 1999-flavored ghost hunting show). As it broke for commercial, the TV stayed dark for a bit too long, and then something started to gradually appear in the TV screen. I realized it was accompanied by a quiet but distinct sound of a man screaming, as if it was very distant, but not distorted by distance. I was some combination of too terrified to move my body and *unable* to move my body, and so I stared for about a minute as the face became more distinct and the scream became louder (but still quieter than you'd expect from a scream).
For size reference: The face was about the size of my fist. I have big hands.
Eventually I managed to break eye-contact and look down at the floor because I was too freaked out to keep staring at it. Then I looked back and the face had mostly disappeared already, and over the next second or two it dissipated completely, along with the screaming.
Nobody else has ever reported having a ghost-sighting like this, and MTV has never run anything even resembling it. And yes, I was wide awake for the duration. And it was daytime, and sunny. And I hadn't done any drugs. So what the fuck
@argr I saw you post about this before. even I'm freaked out because I can imagine the fear paralysis (I have experienced it a couple of times before)
@argr mind if I boost? it's also fascinating
@SuricrasiaOnline Oh yeah feel free to boost, it was an extremely strange experience
@SuricrasiaOnline Other details:
* This was in a big CRT TV. In our previous house it had been our living-room TV, and it had replaced the older TV, also large, that fell on me when I was 3.
* Later in my teens, I became inexplicably expertly good at spinning, flipping, and contact-juggling the TV's broken remote-control as a fidget habit, but only that specific remote-control.
* The face looked distorted, humanlike but exaggerated into a grimacing caricature. It was corpse-white.
@SuricrasiaOnline We were at a party with several people we know well, but don't see regularly. One was telling us a story that happened a few days prior. I hadn't spoken to her in months, yet I swore she'd already told us this years ago. I recounted the entire story about her partner finding ground hornets in their garden as if I'd heard the entire thing already, except that wasn't possible because it'd just happened and there was no way I could have known. I told her details only the two of them could have known. It wasn't another person with a similar story, even though I have no idea why I have a perfectly clear memory of it.
@SuricrasiaOnline Honest-to-math. I've many times seen "ghosts", things or people where I know they can't be.
And precognitive dreams, not much anymore but as a kid that was all the time. It's why I started dream journalling.
I'm sure it's just my lunatic, horror-movie-watching brain filling in things, and making educated guesses about where I'll be and what people will say. But it's annoying and creeps me out.
@SuricrasiaOnline back in primary school i was helping out backstage with a theatre production rehearsal and i remember fiddling with a blue plastic floppy disc holder i kept in my bag. i put it back with the rest of my stuff and then a few minutes later i walked across to the other side of school to my classroom to get something from my desk. the floppy disc holder was in there inexplicably
@SuricrasiaOnline oh! a few years ago i dug out one of my old mobile phones i had in high school to poke around on it for nostalgia purposes. i was checking out what music i had put on it and then saw there was single file in the recorded audio folder. kinda weird, i thought, because i had never used the audio recorder. i hit play and it was a loud, low quality, feminine voice exclaiming something in Chinese(?). no date info on the file either. that phone had sat turned off in a drawer for years
@SuricrasiaOnline Mostly a few precognitive dreams. Most of them are from when I was younger. One particular image from the dream would stick in my mind, to the point that I'd recognize it years later. One was a memory of my cousin rolling a wooden die that perfectly matched a moment I'd experience years later, playing Takenoko with him.
@SuricrasiaOnline i had the dream well before the game came out in 2011, so what the fuck
@SuricrasiaOnline A couple years back me and my flatmate were the only people in the house, both in our own rooms probably playing video games or something. Anyway, I hear a knock at my door. Definitely at my door. I know what that sounds like. I yell to come in but no one does so I get up, assuming its them and open the door. No one there. My flatmate then opens their door and looks at me and asks "Did you knock on my door?" That house was haunted as shit so it was probably ghosts.
@SuricrasiaOnline That ghost did so much weird shit
@SuricrasiaOnline I had a dream while sleeping off a hangover at my friends place where a fairy revealed to me that I have the ability to draw sketches that predict the future, but that the ability only works when I'm drunk. To this day ive never tested it cus it turns out that when I'm drunk, I forget that I have this ability.
@SuricrasiaOnline (cw: alc)
me, looking back at the past 32 years of my life:
@SuricrasiaOnline on a serious note, im tired and there are too many for me to think of
...although the white rabbits are hard to forgot or ignore...
@SuricrasiaOnline besides the fact that I constantly have deja vu, to the point where it's a weekly occurrence, there was this one time where I (12) wrote a letter to myself in the future (18) which when I found a couple years ago laughed at how wrong it was, until I basically just now realized it's come true - I predicted an "obsession with dragons", a large circle of friends online who are camera shy ("friends you don't know how they look but share a laugh with"), it even predicted my plurality ("a friend who can't leave")
so basically, it seems I'm the worst oracle ever, because either I can't remember a prediction until it happens, or it's off by 5 years
@SuricrasiaOnline i'm reposting here because i like this thread better: when I was 10 i dreamt a list of cheats to Jazz Jackrabbit 2. they were presented in the dream on a scroll against purple smoke in the background, with names and descriptions of what they did. the scroll looked sort of like the scroll on the old Akinator website - it was not actual old parchment but it was tasteful. it was unclear how to enter these cheats there was no cheat menu.
eventually i tried typing the names in on the keyboard while playing and they worked and did what the descriptions said they would (to the extent I could remember the descriptions). i would later find out my dream list had maybe half of all the available cheats you could do this way. it's of course more plausible i saw these cheats somewhere and forgot but that's unusually focused information for a dream.
@spacefinner you were the only response on twitter. twitter is dead and/or dying
@spacefinner @SuricrasiaOnline shout-out to jazz jackrabbit 2 btw, that game has such a vibe.
@conatus @SuricrasiaOnline Hippie Heaven is the track https://youtu.be/C7DQeHHCbdg
@spacefinner @SuricrasiaOnline fun fact, the composer also worked on deus ex and voiced an npc in Oblivion
@spacefinner @SuricrasiaOnline when we were both little, my younger brother thought the phrase 'push a wee', as in straining to take a piss, was hilarious. he kept repeating it as i played the game 'Frenzy' for PS1. it was a bad and frustrating game, and i soon found myself at a code entry screen in the options. he said to enter 'PUSHAWEE', and i was taken to a level select with all levels in the game available.
i later looked up the cheats for the game, and while there was a code for a level select, the known code was totally different.
@SuricrasiaOnline When I was a kid, we had a pet cockatiel that escaped when the door was open. We thought it was gone forever. Days later, my mom thought she saw it in a tree in our back yard. It was pretty high up, so we could barely see it, but we could just make out that it was a cockatiel, so we went outside and started calling for it and whistling to it and trying to coax it to fly back to us. It did, and we were able to get it inside, but it was a *different cockatiel*, one we had never seen before.
It's not a super common pet where I live, so I can't imagine how unlikely it is that someone nearby just happened to lose a cockatiel around the same time we did, and it just happened to end up in our tree when we were motivated to go out and try calling it home instead of assuming it was just a random bird. We named it Lucky.
@SuricrasiaOnline one time, when i was a kid, my grandma gave me a lift to her place, and when we got there, the whole house was full of smoke. after running round trying to find the source, we found a small potted plant upstairs in the guest bedroom which was burned, and the plastic pot was completely melted basically to a liquid. there were no electronics switched on in the room, there was no mirror or glass object that could have focused sunlight to cause this, and it was a cloudy day
@SuricrasiaOnline literally the only thing i can think of is that maybe it had been sunny earlier in the day before i got there??? maybe the neighbors had a greenhouse with windows at the right angle? a linseed oil rag?? somebody broke in to the house and put their cigarette in the plant pot????
@jk @SuricrasiaOnline
Plastic digesting bacteria in the potted plant soil? Grandma needed to get rid of some weird chemicals (not a sex thing) and thought the pot would be the right place? Modern telling of the bible's burning bush story? (Was the plant talking? Maybe you just missed it?) Bird carrying a lit cigarette dropped it through a window into the plant? Elaborate prank by your elders to make you start doubting the fabric of reality?
@SuricrasiaOnline one time, as a child, I was at my grandma’s house like usual. it was the afternoon, and there was a particularly quiet moment — she was off in another room, so I was alone — when time went soft. the light became particularly golden, and my sense of north and south swapped. not rotated, but mirror-flipped to an impossible arrangement, and the overall effect felt like an entirely separate universe. it stayed like that until I left in the evening, which might have been five minutes or two hours.
@SuricrasiaOnline not *strictly* anomalous, because some part of my brain dealing with spacetime perception probably just turned off for a bit, but that’s honestly the *most* anomalous-feeling experience I’ve ever had.
@SuricrasiaOnline one time several years ago i had a random photo that is not mine and does not look like it’s was taken anywhere near where i was show up in the camera roll of my old iphone. still no idea what kind of fuckery caused that. when i get back home i can post it, i still have it on my computer.
@xyzzy omg I must know
@xyzzy very very very strange...
@SuricrasiaOnline the reason i say it doesn't seem like it was taken near me is because i live in the northeast USA and this photo is from what would be the dead of winter for me (january 26th). for me, the ground had snow on it, and the grass was dead underneath it. it would not have been green like this.
@SuricrasiaOnline also, i checked to make sure my icloud wasn't hacked or anything like that. i don't believe it was.
@charlotte @xyzzy oh yeah. the filename may also give some clues
@SuricrasiaOnline @charlotte i’ve checked for location exif data on this and unfortunately haven’t found any
@SuricrasiaOnline @charlotte unfortunately i’m not sure if the file name it has now was the original.
@SuricrasiaOnline @xyzzy once i found a video of a person i don't know, in a place i'm very familiar with, on the root of an old phone i'd never let anyone borrow
@SuricrasiaOnline in 1994 me and friends went to set up a pirate radio transmitter on site of former NHS mental hospital which had bad reputation and was considered cursed (mostly abandoned with a few former patients squatting it). We found a working 230V socket, but the TX didn't work, our CB radio didn't work either and nor did our mobile phone - entire radio spectrum from 27-900 MHz wiped out by /something/ unknown. Been working with RF 30+ years, never encountered anything similar since.
@SuricrasiaOnline abandoned floor of a hotel (now closed) that included a bonus abandoned dance studio
@SuricrasiaOnline it smelled of old dust and older sweat. peach wall-to-wall went halfway up the walls some places, big late 70s early 80s energy. some of the stains looked to go all the way to the cement. obligatory mold, mostly quiescent, and some drop ceilings falling in but some of the lights still worked and i had the one in my phone for the parts where they didn't. one can sometimes give insult by trusting too promiscuously
no one had done anything with it since the business failed so there were just abandoned bits here and there, one of those little sock-shoe things you wear for ballet, half a sheet of paper with dot matrix columns, nameplates corroded half illegible or fallen off long dried out mucilage. sheets of plastic hung in occasional doorways but the place was a maze and a warren so you just went around, counting the right angle turns. a closet in every wall that fit one, some closed. the windows were open and you could hear the city but in a building heaving with people it was very quiet. i was glad of my heavy boots and that i knew how to walk lightly in them
there were at least as many mirrors as you'd expect in a dance studio. i didn't look at them much. when i found my way back through echoey whitewash fluorescent buzz and flicker to the living parts of the hotel, the bartender looked at me a little funny and went right back to pouring free drinks down me. it would be a couple years yet before i understood what that was probably about. i never made the time to go back but i also suspect it would not have been there if i had. i don't think it would have been there if i went back the next morning. now i come to think on it i never saw that bartender again either
brb, one ear just started ringing
@SuricrasiaOnline once when i was in second grade i woke up in the middle of the night and there were a bunch of little black things with red eyes floating next to my bed. i poked one and it hurt. i went to the kitchen to get a bag to see if i could capture one but when i got back they had all disappeared. never seen them since. and i always know when im dreaming and i decidedly was not
for me it's the time that exactly one youtube video on my tumblr music blog got replaced with an extremely creepy video where some dude tries to seduce lesbians. I have no idea why this happened and I deleted it almost immediately