August 2024
1856 French Pterodactyle
Level 1 – Surface Web
CRYPTID
LINKS
https://obscurbanlegend.fandom.com/wiki/1856_French_Pterodactyl
Smokey God
Level 0 – Common Web
CONSPIRACY
The Smoky God, or A Voyage Journey to the Inner Earth is a book presented as a true account written by Willis George Emerson in 1908, which describes the adventures of Olaf Jansen, a Norwegian sailor who sailed with his father through an entrance to the Earth’s interior at the North Pole.
LINKS
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Smoky_God
XBox Functionality
Level 3 – Deep Web
MEMORY HOLE
Was anybody else following “gamer” news and such back when the Xbox One was announced? It was extremely poorly received due to the no used games policy and always-on Kinect and internet connection. Despite their initial arrogance and dismissal of the community response, Microsoft fired some people and gradually walked back some of these features. I know this seems trivial, but this whole saga still stands out in my mind for a couple of reasons, and the parallels with more “serious” subject are obvious.
First, every controversial feature they walked back, they initially claimed to be baked into the cake and impossible to change… before walking it back. This blatant and repeated dishonesty was transparent, yet still they had defenders. In fact, many of these defenders would flagrantly lie about the console’s functionality, saying it couldn’t and wouldn’t do X and if you think it can you’re a tinfoil hat Alex Jones listener etc, even though anybody who owned one could disprove their copes in mere minutes. Yet once again, they continued to lie. For what it’s worth, I think this controversy was the first time I was introduced to the term “shill.”
In retrospect, I think it’s very interesting that there was a public outcry back then. Nowadays, a lot of the “tinfoil hat conspiracy theories” are just accepted as the new normal, and a similar outcry today would just be quietly deplatformed, if it happened at all.