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Year View| Summary| Highlights| Month View| Wednesday 22 December 2004 (Day View)

Sat 18 Dec | Sun 19 Dec | Mon 20 Dec | Tue 21 Dec |   Wed 22 Dec   Thu 23 Dec | Fri 24 Dec | Sat 25 Dec | Sun 26 Dec |

22.12.2004 – Wednesday 22 December – Who is Robert Henley?

Morning

• I slept, of course, having stayed up far too late last night, of course. I am on holidays, after all.

Afternoon

• I took some photos of the track down to the creek, and the creek itself. I haven’t looked at them yet, but if they’re any good, I’ll try to put them up on my site tonight. Maz went and picked up my new hard drive, and will probably copy the data across tonight, hopefully posting it tomorrow. I wonder why Word says, “Use of ‘hopefully’” whenever I use “hopefully” – obviously I’m using it. I also like the way Word recommends replacing “night time” with “nighttime” and then says “nighttime” isn’t a word, recommending it be replaced with “night-time”, which it then recommends be replaced with “nighttime”, which it will then say isn’t a word – it’s lucky I’m just a lazy perfectionist and not suffering from obsessive-compulsive personality disorder or that could be fatal.

Evening

• Someone has camped at the halfway spot, where I usually stop on my evening walk. I didn’t want to disturb them, so kept going further, ending up late and hot, but exercised.

10:41pm

• Bronwen phoned. It has also begun to sprinkle lightly.

12:50am

• Bronwen had to go to bed and I made the mistake of going back online. I had planned to look at some photos I took today, with a view to putting some of them up on my site, but somehow I was sidetracked and that didn’t happen. The sprinkle has turned into what I’d nearly call rain.

5:58am

• It’s now raining, it’s nearly six o’clock tomorrow morning, and I’m still up – why? Well, it all began several hours ago when Clint came online and said, “What is this neurocam stuff?” Having never heard of Neurocam, I made my first mistake – asking what it was, a sort of stupid question given what he’d just said, but he gave me their URL (www.neurocam.com, hardly surprisingly, although it appears it used to be www.neurocam.co.nz, a company specialising in brain signal analysis) and a link to an article about them in The Age. I then made my second mistake – reading the article, and becoming interested, despite it seeming to be just another hyped non-news article designed to interest silly people who stay up too late. Nevertheless, I figured I’d do a little digging around to see if I could figure out what kind of joke this place was, and, several hours later, I’m more confused. I’ve discovered an interconnected web of sites and comments with connections intricate and tenuous enough to seem implausible to fake. What originally seemed like an elaborate façade now seems just too elaborate, but the alternative is unreasonable – I found cross-references across numerous sites, and many more cross-referencing seemingly unrelated information from those sites with yet others, lending a scary credibility to an otherwise incredible story. Parts of the twisted tale seem incredulous and ridiculous, with mention of strange neurological drugs and memory experiments, and other parts seem almost believable – I’m definitely interested now. On the other hand, it’s just getting light outside, so I may not be at my logical and cynical (and, I modestly mention, intelligent) best. Either someone has gone to incredible lengths to create this whole façade as some type of strange art experiment, or there’s truth lurking somewhere in there – obscured by a lot of crud and internet hysteria. Lies are easy to detect, but lies with a basis in truth are much harder to weed out, and everything is harder when your browser can’t open more than thirty pages at a time because your computer only has 256 MB of RAM and it takes more than that to load stupid QuickTime plug-ins. In other less geeky news, the rain has intensified and, if it continues at this pace for the next week, might actually do something useful like flood.

Comment by Maz – Friday 24 December 2004, 12:27 AM

  Oh no! Now I'm sucked in. It's so weird. http://maz.dnsalias.org/journal/vcomment.php?post=1103800946

Comment by Ned – Friday 24 December 2004, 2:45 PM

  It is weird. They’ve done a good job keeping up the mystery, and have managed to create a shroud of confusion – apparently by accident, as much as anything else. I had a chat to one of their long-time operatives, which cleared up a lot of the confusion but not the main question – is it a strange art experiment or way to create some peculiar film (which seems most likely) or is it something entirely different? Unfortunately, I’m not currently in Melbourne, so I can’t easily find out.

Comment by DM – Friday 24 December 2004, 9:51 PM

  I figure that if we wait long enough, Dan Brown will write a book about it.