Dustings #74

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Vanishing Inc. sent out an email this week for a product on their site called the CMY Cube.

This isn’t a magic trick. It’s just kind of an attractive novelty that you might keep on your desk or something like that.

One of the lines in the ad caught my attention. It stated these CMY cubes can…

“keep kids and adults entertained for hours.”

Hours?

That seems like a stretch. There’s no doubt these cubes are eye-catching but I have to question the notion that they would keep someone entertained for hours.

On the low-end, that’s got to be at least 120 minutes in order to get the plural “hours.”

Keep in mind, Citizen Kane is only 119 minutes. So they’re saying, at the very least, these cubes can entertain you slightly longer than Citizen Kane.

I asked a behavioral scientist to calculate how long someone who is entertained by a colorful cube for “hours” might be entertained by some other objects.

Here are the results…

Paperclip: 8 minutes

Red Paperclip: 14 minutes

Wooly Willy: 3 days

Four Legos: 1 hour 42 minutes

Cheeto That Looks Like A Guy Masturbating: Two hours and 10 minutes

Joshua Jay’s Magic Atlas: 22 minutes.

Thomas H. writes:

I was thinking about a potential presentation for Alive that you featured on the blog.

Short and sweet, but I feel like it would be interesting to bring up the concept of the Mirror Gaze Test, and the phenomenon of looking at your own face in the mirror in low light. This effect can cause observers to see distortions of their own face, or hallucinations of relatives, deceased or monsters.

Perhaps the two of you, standing in the bathroom with a mirror in low light after some sort of automatic writing ritual could be a really fascinating presentation, allowing you to both actually perceive the actual effects of the mirror gaze test, while also perhaps being able to "capture" a vision from the the other side of the mirror. (The scribbles changing to a word.)

I like where you’re going, but there might be a few too many ideas fighting here: automatic writing, “capturing a vision,” the mirror gaze test. And I think the trick might be better if done backwards.

Here’s what I’m thinking (and this is going to plagiarize a bit on some of my other work). Imagine you describe the mirror gaze experiment to your friend and you decide to try it out with them. You tell them it helps to have an auditory mantra with a visual cue in order to focus the mind. You write down a simple word on the pad to use as the “mantra.”

You stand looking in the mirror with your friend. You hold up the notebook behind them and over their shoulder so it’s reflected as well. You instruct them to look into their eyes in their reflection, look at the word, repeat the word, look back at their eyes, look at the word, repeat the word, and back into their eyes again. You hold this for as long as is comfortable. “Oh shit, it’s working on me. My face is going crazy. Wait… look at the notepad.” When they do they see the word they were repeating earlier disassembling in its reflection. So the word is now distorting just as their facial feature theoretically would in the mirror gaze experiment.

The kicker is that when they turn to look at the notepad itself, the word is normal.

Okay, this would require that the Alive trick could work backwards, going from word to random lines (which I don’t know if it can) and that it can change rapidly (again, I don’t know if that’s the case). But if so, that would be a cool presentation.

If your mantra word was live, when you look at it in the mirror it would be ɘvil. Which would be a nice touch.

Here’s a brief October Horror Movie update

When last I wrote, I was bemoaning the list I was working off of because I didn’t like most of the suggestions.

I have since changed where I’m getting my movie recommendations. I’m now using the site Letterboxd to find horror movies from 2021 that were popular and relatively highly rated.

The movies I watched this week were much more entertaining. The only issue is that none of them were particularly scary.

Here are some quick thoughts for anyone following along.

The worst one I watched was Candyman. The 2021 version. It was okay, but I don’t think the story really came together like the filmmakers intended.

Titane is a well-made but legitimately insane body horror movie. Not scary, but really fucked up.

Last Night in Soho is a beautiful dark-fantasy thriller by Edgar Wright. Enjoyable (but not scary).

All My Friends Hate Me is a black-comedy, psychological thriller. I enjoyed it. I didn’t think it was scary. Apparently, however, if you have social anxiety, it may be one of the scariest movies you ever see.

The Beta Test is another thriller with strong comedic elements. Fun to watch. Not at all scary.

Censor is set in 1985 and revolves around a woman who works for the British Board of Film Classification during the era of Video Nasties (something I had never heard of). It’s a very interesting concept for a film, but it goes off the rails a little at the end. Although still a good watch.

The best film I saw this past week was The Black Phone. Again, not overly scary, but really well made and a cleverly constructed story. It’s based on a book by Joe Hill, Stephen King’s son, and it will likely appeal to people who like King’s style of horror and nostalgia