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Lyle Zapato

Noon: 22nd Century - "Pilgrims and Wayfarers"

Lyle Zapato | 2020-08-27.8300 LMT | Cephalopods | Paraterrestrials | Retro

'Noon: 22nd Century'/'Mittag, 22. Jahrhundert' German edition cover
Septipods depicted by Carl Hoffmann from the dust cover of the German hardback edition.

Noon: 22nd Century (Полдень. XXII век; 1961) is an anthology of Russian sci-fi vignettes set in what later became known as the Noon Universe. It tells an optimistic history of humanity's progress from colonizing the planets of our star system to reaching other systems, and our first encounters with alien intelligences, or the remnants thereof.

It was written by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, who are best known in the English speaking world as the writers of Roadside Picnic, which was adapted into the movie Stalker and has greatly influenced Russian post-apocalyptic aesthetics.

I'm blogging about Noon because it was recently brought to my attention that one of the stories, "Pilgrims and Wayfarers", includes a species of octopus starting to make its way onto land and into the trees (and beyond?)

Since the book doesn't have a plot as such, other than world-building humanity's progress and following the comings and goings of various recurring characters (such as Gorbovsky, below), I'll cover "Pilgrims" on it's own and how it relates to tree octopuses, then follow up with some things I found interesting in the other stories, as well as some meta information.

I don't intend this to be a complete review of the world and themes of the book, as I am writing this only shortly after having first read it. I also have not read any of the other books in Strugatskys' Noon Universe, so if I misconstrue or miss something that was later explained, let me know.

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Lyle Zapato

Apex Legends: The Latest Belgian Scheme

Lyle Zapato | 2019-03-20.5790 LMT | Belgian Conspiracy | Simulacra

Is Apex Legends, the popular new battle royale shooter game, actually part of a scheme by the Belgian Conspiracy for world domination? New developments suggest it is.

A brief overview for non-gamers: A while back, video game developers came up with the idea of a "loot box", a virtual prize box that when "opened" would have a random chance of giving the player various in-game items. Since the games that employ loot boxes tend to be multiplayer ones, these items usually involve some means to customize a player's appearance or behavior (skins, emotes, voice lines, etc.), allowing players to differentiate themselves from and show off to other players -- a desirable thing in games built around social interactions.

While often these boxes can be earned in game, that usually involves "grinding", i.e. playing the game over time to slowly earn points toward a loot box. The developers, ostensibly out of benevolence, offer players the "freedom" to bypass this grinding by paying for loot boxes with real money. At the same time, developers made their games more "grindy" by intentionally making the loot-box-earning gameplay tedious or by adding lots of unwanted in-game items that lower the chance of players winning desirable ones. All of this not only encourages impatient wealthy players ("whales" in game developer speak) to pay money to skip the grind, but triggers those susceptible to addictive gambling behavior into paying more than they can afford.

That last point has caused controversy outside of the gaming community. Governments have started to look into whether loot boxes are a form of illegal gambling (you pay real money for the chance to win a virtual profit). Some have declared that they are, and have forced game publishers to remove or alter those gambling elements in order to legally sell games in their respective jurisdictions.

At the forefront of this declaration of loot-boxes-as-gambling is Belgium, whose Gaming Commission last year determined that three popular loot-boxed games were "games of chance" and that "publishers could therefore be subject to fines and prison sentences under the country's gaming legislation".

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Lyle Zapato

"Drom Lunarius": Tree Octopi, Pyramid Eye, & Camels

Lyle Zapato | 2019-02-23.0700 LMT | Cephalopods | Retro | NWO

"Drom Lunarius" is a short sci-fi/fantasy story by Richard A. Lupoff printed in the Feb. 1979 issue of KPFA Folio, a publication of the eponymous Berkeley, CA radio station.

It's about an intelligent camel named Sopwith, a carefully-bred, nearly albino racing camel who one night looks up at the moon from some dunes near the Mediterranean. Because of the "aeroplanar half of his ancestry", Sopwith also has great snowy wings, and so he flies up into sky to escape to the moon, which is not quite as NASA would have us believe:

The camel strolled across the pale plain, sniffing the fragrant lunar atmosphere. Soon he found himself in a garden. Tall trees grew on all sides, their trunks rising toward the ball of earth far above. Bushes grew with flowers in dazzling colors. Bunches of berries hung temptingly. High overhead in the vines the camel could hear the songs of tree octopi and the scuttle of feathered airworms.

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Lyle Zapato

Gerald Heard & Plan 9 From Outer Space

Lyle Zapato | 2018-09-23.8000 LMT | Paraterrestrials | Retro

Did Gerald Heard's The Riddle Of The Flying Saucers influence Ed Wood's infamous 1959 movie Plan 9 From Outer Space?

In Plan 9 (viewable on YouTube), after watching stupid, stupid humanity progress from firecrackers to hydrogen bombs, aliens come to Earth to stop our inevitable discovery and use of "solaronite", a substance that would cause a chain-reaction, detonating the Sun and hence the entire universe. (Wood was a bit mistaken about the scale of the universe, but never mind.)

This is, more or less, one of the theories Heard puts forward in his book for the earthly visitation of flying saucers. In Heard's theory, our dalliances with atomic weapons -- which he argues affect sunspot activity -- could be a trigger action, causing the sun to irradiate all life in the solar system. The inhabitants of Mars, who have been observing us, are trying to either stop us -- by messing with missile tests -- or at least warn us of the danger we pose to both them and ourselves.

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Lyle Zapato

The Dactyl Fractal And Dr. Strange

Lyle Zapato | 2017-11-11.0340 LMT | Polydactylism


The above images of Benedict Cumberbatch seemingly achieving Dactyl Fractal Consciousness are from the "Open Your Eye" scene in 2016's Dr. Strange (which I only recently watched, so please excuse the belated blogging and chunky stream-grabbed screenshots).

Now that the mass audience of superhero-movie fans has been exposed to knowledge of the Handlebrot, will the hundredth monkey effect kick in, causing a morphic field to envelop the globe, producing spontaneous dactyl fractal manifestations -- or, should I say, manofestations -- throughout humanity, thus hastening the coming evolutionary epoch of Homo teradactylus?

Well, it's been a year and so far it doesn't seem to be happening.

One potential explanation for this lack of morphogenetic effect could be the source of the movie. Dr. Strange was of course produced by Disney, which observant ZPi readers will know both developed audioanimatronic human-replacement technology (Simulacra androids) and hosts "Belgium" in the increasingly-black-mold-infested vaults under their Euro-Disneyland park; so an extra degree of paranoid suspicion is obviously warranted.

Could Disney have ulterior motives for this mass exposure to dactyl fractal imagery? Might this scene be psyoptically designed not to excite, but to inure the public to Dactyl Fractal Consciousness; not to release, but immure it in a prison of counter-resonant imagery -- a sort of memetic "mirror dimension" where its magic can have no effect on the real world?

Note the Mandelbulbesque environment that Dr. Strange floats in while witnessing his digital transcendence. What formula did the CGI artists use to render this? Was it calculated to negate DFC -- like noise-cancelation, but for finger-fingers? Are all those baroque, undulating indentations actually anti-fingers and Dr. Strange is really in negative handspace? The symbolism of him being pushed there by hand is certainly compelling -- as is the movie's much more overt message that Dr. Strange needs to give up on trying to improve his hands and accept that they will be forever hobbled.

Until more exhaustive psychofractal research can be performed on this scene, I would advise all dactyl fractal aspirants to avoid watching Dr. Strange lest they lose the ability to manofest, or worse, lose fingers.

Lyle Zapato

Weaponized Bees: A Taste For Honey & Black Mirror

Lyle Zapato | 2016-10-26.4120 LMT | Nature | Technology | Simulacra | General Paranoia


(Click to enlarge.)

A Taste For Honey (1941) is a murder mystery novel by H. F. Heard, also known as Gerald Heard, whose works I've covered a number of times now.

[Spoiler Alert] Sidney Silchester, a man with a taste for honey, moves to the rural English village of Ashton Clearwater for some peace and quiet. Mysteriously, no one in the district is able to raise bees except for one secretive man, Mr. Heregrove.

A true honey fancier, Silchester won't buy the stuff sold in shops, so he makes arrange­ments with Here­grove's wife to secure a regular supply of real honey, until one day she turns up dead, stung to death by her husband's bees.

With his honey reserves dwindling and hearing that the coroner had ordered Heregrove to destroy his hives, Silchester is forced by his mellivorous appetite to go inquiring about an alternate honey source. He is drawn by a curious sign to the home of a new arrival in Ashton Clearwater, one Mr. Mycroft, who is interested in beekeeping, but only for studying bee psychology, not producing honey.

Mycroft tells Silchester that he was recently attacked by a particularly venomous breed of bees and that Heregrove is responsible. Mycroft has deduced that Heregrove has bred his bees to attack other hives to eliminate the competition. Little did Silchester realize he's embroiled himself in a deadly plot to corner the honey market of Ashton Clearwater!

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Lyle Zapato

Les Pieuvres de Paris

Lyle Zapato | 2015-08-10.6821 LMT | Cephalopods | Retro

Decadent Parisian women partying on the back of an octopus.
Cliquez pour agrandir.

Les Pieuvres de Paris ("The Octopuses of Paris") is a French novel by Pierre Zaccone. Sadly, it's not about giant octopuses hosting drunken parties on their backs as they float down the Seine. Much like the equally misleading Trail of the Octopus, these octopuses are only metaphoric.

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Lyle Zapato

Julian Huxley's "The Tissue-Culture King"

Lyle Zapato | 2015-06-13.0810 LMT | Mind Control | Aluminum | Fashion | Retro


Hascombe shows off his incredible animal monstrosities.

"The Tissue-Culture King" is a short story by Julian Huxley first published in The Yale Review in Apr. 1926, and later in Amazing Stories, Aug. 1927. It's notable for containing reputedly the earliest use in fiction of an anti-mind-control foil deflector beanie -- colloquially known among orthonoids as a "tinfoil hat".

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Lyle Zapato

Ajooba Kudrat Kaa: Yeti I Love You!

Lyle Zapato | 2015-01-02.9580 LMT | Sasquatch Issues | Retro

Happy New Year again! Here's a 1991 Bollywood film called Ajooba Kudrat Kaa (English: The Magnificent Guardian) about a young girl, Sasha, who befriends a Yeti and helps save him from yetinappers. Skip ahead to 1:06 in the clip above for the song and dance number, "Yeti I Love You!"

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Lyle Zapato

"Sword of Fire": Mind-Controlling Alien Jungle Octopods

Lyle Zapato | 2014-12-14.9600 LMT | Cephalopods | Mind Control | Paraterrestrials | Weyerhaeuser Conspiracy | Retro

Illustration from the novella "Sword of Fire" by Emmett McDowell, published in the Winter 1949 issue of Planet Stories (full scan here, mangled text version here). Spoilery synopsis follows:

Jupiter Jones, advanced explorer for the Galactic Colonization Board and misanthropic loner, is forced by low fuel to land his ship, the Mizar, on the distant jungle planet Yogol after he was accidentally space-warped beyond Alpha Centaurus. There he discovers that the native humanoids are ruled by purple-shelled octopods called the Anolyn, who ages ago shambled from the inland sea of Dra Dur and mind-controlled the humans by attaching their snail-like young to the back of the humans' necks, forcing the humans to carry the octopods around the jungle on litters, engage in blood-sports and inhuman orgies, and service their nameless cities from which the Anolyn lord over the world.

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