Real-Life Weirdness

[Anaraxes]

In the local parks and recreation book of classes, I came across one for "SoulCollage".

Following the simple SoulCollage directions, your hands move fragments of cut-out magazine pictures around, fitting them together in a surprising new way and gluing them down on a card. Cards containing the images you select --- or the images that select you --- come straight through your Soul, bypassing the mind.

Taken to be literally true, this could fit into a conspiracy, horror, or urban fantasy game. In small towns all over the country, unwitting people are having bits of their souls torn loose in the latest New Age fad. What's the ulterior motive of these "faciliators"? Do they feed on the fragments of soul, or are they feeding power up through a pyramid to Seena B. Frost -- and what then is she really? What happens if you gain control of another's SoulCollage deck? What happens if you mix two decks; can you truly collage two different souls into one being? What happens as students progressively paste more and more of their souls onto cards, and they themselves become soulless, bit by bit? Can you recover from this condition?

Or is the process actually beneficial? What powers can you access with practice with your SoulCollage deck? Tarot, Gambit, M:tG come to life?

[mehrkat]

I always like real world strangeness to use as back drop here is the first of these I could remember off the top of my head.

"Austin, Texas, police officers found 40 to 60 dead birds, including grackles, pigeons and sparrows, on Congress Avenue in downtown Austin in the early morning hours of Monday, Jan. 8, 2007.

The high number of dead birds spurred police to alert the Texas Department of State Health Services, which was investigating the cause of the birds' death at the time this article was posted.

Congress Avenue, from Second Street to 11th Street, was closed as a precaution until the investigation and clean-up were complete. Officials expected to reopen the street at noon on Monday.

In a Monday morning press conference, a health department spokesman said that an on-site investigation had not produced any evidence of a health risk to Austin citizens. The spokesman said that a necropsy was being performed on one of the birds to determine the cause of death, and further viral and bacterial testing would be conducted. Officials do not believe the birds were victims of avian influenza; preliminary evidence suggests the birds were poisoned"

[mehrkat]

Giant Spider Web

August 31, 2007
By GRETEL C. KOVACH

WILLS POINT, Tex., Aug. 29 — Most spiders are solitary creatures. So the discovery of a vast web crawling with millions of spiders that is spreading across several acres of a North Texas park is causing a stir among scientists, and park visitors.

Sheets of web have encased several mature oak trees and are thick enough in places to block out the sun along a nature trail at Lake Tawakoni State Park, near this town about 50 miles east of Dallas.

The gossamer strands, slowly overtaking a lakefront peninsula, emit a fetid odor, perhaps from the dead insects entwined in the silk. The web whines with the sound of countless mosquitoes and flies trapped in its folds.

(This story was No.1 on the list of most emailed stories from that day's edition of the New York Times, and it was the lead story in the Nation section of the print edition...)

The link includes pictures and studies of the web.

http://texasento.net/Social_Spider.htm

Here's a direct link to a photo

http://media.star-telegram.com/Multi...tos/Bigweb.jpg

[mehrkat]

What is happening to the Bees?

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/n...0223-bees.html

In a nutshell Honey bees are disappearing worrying environmentalists and beekeepers because of a shortage of polinating services. They are leaving the queen bee and the young larva and leaving. With no bee corpses and they don't appear to be showing up elsewhere either.

Maybe this is what's happening

http://marvel.com/universe/Swarm

or this

http://www.treasuretables.org/2006/0...or-horror-rpgs

or this

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075620/

[mehrkat]

What do you do when you accidentally invade?

ZURICH, Switzerland - What began as a routine training exercise almost ended in an embarrassing diplomatic incident after a company of Swiss soldiers got lost at night and marched into neighboring Liechtenstein

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/...n2530066.shtml

[RevBob]

There's a really neat bit of RLW I've talked about before, but (a) it's rather controversial, (b) I'm using it as a campaign jump-off point, and (c) at least one person interested in the game reads the forums. :)

[quarkstomper]

Here's a plot device I've used a couple times in espionage games: Project ELF. It was started in the late 1960s as a system for mantaining radio communication with the US submarine fleet by using Extremely Low Frequency radio waves. The system was based in northern Wisconsin because the geology of the region was condusive to the ELF waves. The system went operational in the mid-'80s, but was subject to much contorversy. It was shut down in 2004.

[Þorkell]

From http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7359258.stm

Muslim scientists and clerics have called for the adoption of Mecca time to replace GMT, arguing that the Saudi city is the true centre of the Earth

I also saw a video of an interview with one of the people wanting to do this. According to him, it's better for your health to be in Mecca than anywhere else, living in the high north is bad for you health.

[Voidstar]

Originally Posted by Þorkell

From http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7359258.stm

I also saw a video of an interview with one of the people wanting to do this. According to him, it's better for your health to be in Mecca than anywhere else, living in the high north is bad for you health.

Living in the middle east is bad for your heath... I support these claims by watching the nightly news for the last 5000 years...

[Kromm]

I've always found things like Duga-3 and HAARP to be extremely weird.