The Nuclear Age

Most of you will have a hard time believing this, but back in the 50's, nuclear energy was the Next Big Thing. Despite having bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki not a decade earlier with this same kind of power, Americans saw the potential of all things nuclear. Hell, you could even buy a nuclear start kit from a comic book ad (you know, the ones that guarantee no money will have to be sent until you are fully satisfied with the product, but usually end up being scams). So when did all this perspective change? If the complete annhilation of two japanese cities did not scare them off, what did?

The first reason: Three Mile Island. A nuclear reactor off the coast of Pennsylvania, Three Mile Island was a disaster of a clusterfuck (yes, I like that word, move along now). To put things simply, a reactor suffered a meltdown, and some radiation leaked. The place was evacuated and quarantined. However, health investigations showed that only 8 millirem of radiation hit individuals in the 10 mile radius, which is the equivalent radiation of a chest x-ray. Nobody died, nobody even reported in sick, and the worst tragedy was a predicted two deaths of long term cancer, which never happened. However, the American public was pretty scared by the accident.

The second: Chernobyl. You've probably heard of this one, or at least played the level in Modern Warfare. A nuclear power plant in Ukraine under Soviet control, an explosion sent radiation scattering all over the USSR and western Europe, comparable in magnitude with the Fukushima Daiichi disaster seen earlier this year. This accident was actually more of a cause for concern, as the whole town of Prypiat had to be evacuated, and many people died of radiation poisoning, and pregnant mothers gave birth to malformed children, affected by the fallout in vitro. This served to destroy any good face nuclear power had saved, and made it the unpopular, dangerous energy it is wrongfully considered today.

A little mix-up

So Max is going to be very busy this next couple of weeks, so he asked me, Ryan, to fill in for him. I had one look at the blog and I now know why it has so little followers. Frankly, it sucks. So I'll be taking over for a while and hopefully make this a wee bit more bearable. The topic? Nuclear energy. Subliminal messages are pretty outdated, chaps, but this here is rather important and world changing.
Now go back a couple of lines and read the topic again. What are your feelings on nuclear energy? Chances are, you picture a reactor like the one in which Homer from The Simpsons works in, with staff just as incompetent as Mr. Simpson. A button press away from blowing Springfield to kingdom come. You might instead recall the unfortunate incident the japanese had earlier in the year. Most unlucky, I must say. However, barring the occasional fumble or, as americans say, clusterfuck of an incident, nuclear energy is not as dangerous as the media would have you believe. It is actually one of the most reliable, effective and moreover safe energies out there, and a great alternative to petroleum or oil as our primary source of juice.
So, looking at the facts, we can see that coal mining, for example, kills a lot more people yearly then nuclear power plants, averaging at 30 deaths per 100,000 coal miners in the US. Underground coal miners take a risk of 6.5% chances of a serious injury a year. That's one of the most dangerous jobs in the world. That's not counting the long term effects of coal mining like black lung, and all the pollution it causes (that in turn leads to global warming). OK, you say, so coal mining is not the choice, but still, how about eolic energy, or hydroelectric? Wrong again, as wind farmers are constantly in danger of a turbine failure which sends a blade which is supposed to spin really fast careening into the air. As for hydroelectric, flooding and drought are not only dangerous for humans, but for the environment and animals as well. So yeah, that's what I'll be addressing this time around. I'm out.

Sub. Messages in other media

Now, we've mostly concentrated on music and movies as sources of subliminal messages. There are, however, a lot of other places we can find, if we look closely, messages hidden in the content.
First up, and a personal favorite, are comics. Like the disgruntled Disney animators I mentioned in a couple of posts before, some comic book artists can be underpaid, angry at other artists or their bosses, or just feeling particularly devilish and decide to hide something within their panels. Most of the times, it's a subtle reference, or "easter egg", which fans will find amusing and casual readers will not even notice. Sometimes, there actually is product placement, though in the case of comics, it's a much better idea to actually make the product placement very noticeable, as kids everywhere will pay attention to Superman's advice on eating twinkies and Spider Man's choice of Kool Aid. Occassionally, the message is a huge "fuck off" to a writer which insists on being a dick, as seen on the particular case of the Jedi Bates, part of the extended Star Wars universe. In case you are still wondering about that last one, consider that being a Jedi in Star Wars makes your title "Master".
Get it? No? One more time: Jedi Master Bates. Say it out loud. If you're still not getting it, you're probably not supposed to understand it yet. You'll see it when you're older, kid.
Moving on, there are occasional feuds between competing artists that subtly attack each other in their artwork. For instance, when a lazy artist lifts a panel from another comic and just redraws it to incorporate his own characters, it will mostly go unnoticed due to the ridiculous amout of comic books out there. However, in some cases the copied artist will notice, and retaliate via a subtle insult or a full blown, barely covered accusation. Comics. They're a bloody business.
Anyway I'm going to have to cut this short because the world needs me and stuff. To be continued.

The Birth of a Myth

Now, up until now, we've only covered some dubious at best, outright false at worst, instances of subliminal messaging. I know, I know, this is a big letdown. You probably hoped for a conspiracy blog about a subliminal campaign by the government to cover up the 9/11 conspiracy. But, see, there’s a reason you have these high expectations. Once upon a time, subliminal messages were a very scary issue, one that even had the United States government banning subliminal advertisement.

1957. Recall the fifties were a bad moment for scientific rigor and experimental procedure. Just open up an old comic book and look at the promises of ridiculous strength and intelligence, just by mailing 20 dollars to this address! So, this guy, a fellow named James Vicary, considered himself a scientist. He arrived, after some observations, to ground breaking conclusions like the fact women blinked a bit less when in supermarkets. Real genius, this dude. Anyway, he did have one breakthrough, when he mounted a tachistocope one a film projector in Fort Lee, New Jersey. Every 5 seconds, and for a brief 1/3000^th of a second, he would flash two different messages, both “HUNGRY? EAT POPCORN” and “DRINK COCA COLA”. He reported that Coca Cola sales increased in almost 20%, and popcorn in more than 50%. When he started publishing these results, you can see why advertisers jumped at this idea. I can almost picture the scene where one advertiser is reading the paper and tells his coworker about this technique, and both their eyes turn into dollar signs.

Now, as you might have been expecting if you’re an avid reader of my blog, or if you just have a knack for foreshadowing, this study was a sham. Faker than Pamela Anderson’s knockers. Later Vicary admitted to the complete unreliability of his results. He then probably broke down crying wondering why his dad left him or something. But the man still left a mark on this world. It might have been fake and all, but he is the person that kick-started the entire subliminal message scare, and gave me a topic for my blog.

That’s it for today. Peace out.

Reference: http://www.snopes.com/business/hidden/popcorn.asp

Sub. Messages as self-help tools

So, you see, it's not all bad and stuff. Some people are actually NOT trying to brainwash us into a state of mindless consumerism or force sexual ideas into our young impressionable minds.

After the great scare of subliminal messaging faded away as more and more evidence popped up showing they are not as effective as they were thought to be, a new market suddenly flourished: self-helping subliminal messaging tutorials. These consist of the typical techniques that have been discussed previously (like rapidly flashing images, or listening to a recording while asleep), which promote positive attitudes or behaviors, with everything from weight loss to proactive thinking and anything in between. I'll link a couple of sites that sell (and sometimes offer free trials, because let’s face it, we all love free stuff). There also is a counterpart which concentrates on eliminating your bad habits, like smoking or other, unimportant things like nail biting and stuff.

Anyway, there is also controversy about the usefulness of these tactics. They have yet to be scientifically proven to work, and although most sites claim that studies show that they do have an effect on customers, it’s usually biased or not properly done. For example, it might be true that people who listen to a 30-minute audio clip a night about weight loss actually shed some pounds, but it results of comparing a person who is willing to pay to do something about his weight against someone who is not. I’m not outright discrediting what these sites claim; I’m just suggesting, you take it with a grain of salt.

If you by chance decide to see for yourself if these messages work or not, might I suggest that you be very careful around the internet. We all know it can be a dangerous place, but in my search for websites that sell these products, I ran into a lot of suspicious looking ones. Rule of thumb: this stuff ain’t free. Unless it’s a free trial, with a limited time window or only a small section of the program, do not expect to get it for free. If you see an offer for a free program, it is very probably a spyware or malware bot, if not a full blown, hard hitting, disk wiping, porn downloading virus.

Links below!

http://www.wordofmouthexperiment.com/

http://www.thoughtinspire.com/

I don’t usually end my posts abruptly, but when I do, I--

The Disney One

Yup, due to popular demand, we are going to look at Disney this time.

These guys are perhaps the most famous subliminal messengers of all time. You will find YouTube and the rest of the web literally strewn with content of either sexual or deviant nature hidden cleverly inside movies from the Walt Disney Empire. Everything from erections in the priest from the Little Mermaid, to penises (penii?) in the Walt Disney logo, to the word sex written with stars in the Lion King, nudity in Who framed Roger Rabbit and many, many other instances of inapropiate images in the movie. Think of the children, for Christ's sake!
However, a very logical conclusion to this odd streak of adding this to movies is animators. Usually, animators in studios have shitty jobs. They have to do most of the hard work (drawing and actually animating the movie), and yet nobody gives them any credit and they aren't very well paid. So a sensible explanation is that the unrecognized arstists and animators like to hide words and stuff that only keen, usually adult eyes will notice just to relieve the daily grind and have some fun. It would not make sense for Disney to actually want to pervert children, since the only thing they want is money, and perverts are not a good money source. Another thing is that these subtle references probably don't work on little children, and the only people who actually notice are those that watch the movie fram by fram trying to find something.
Free time, huh.

On a closing note, here are a couple of videos that show messages. Some are pretty impressive, others require the consumption of hallucigens to understand, but we can all agree, there are a lot of these videos.
http://www.subliminal-video.com/lion-king-subliminal-messages/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73fCLx-mFLg

Seriously, damn. These dudes need to get laid more.

Third time's a charm

It literally is. This one is supposed to be special, yo. It's gonna have fancy fireworks and those crazy spinning things and shit. Word, dude.

Anyway, I was researching like a responsible student on my subject and came across a pretty good article from the guys at wiseGEEK. It was short, clear and to the point, talking about the different amount of subliminal messages. Besides talking about backmasking (covered in my second post) they also mentioned a couple more, of which one stood out, related to subliminal advertising. More specifically, the idea of hiding things in plain sight. The article states that in the movie Spider-Man, for example, great many scenes have advertisements in the background, which are not usually noticed, since the audience is looking at Spidey. It’s actually common practice to do this, as the law does not state that this kind of advertising is illegal. However, the effect this might have over viewers is doubtful at best. Most people don’t even notice it showed up, and while that might be a good thing if you’re going for the subconscious mind, it generally means it was ignored. The strategy that might be more effective (again, no promises for actual effectiveness, as it is really hard to test this at a lab) is to see the product associated with something positive, like a bystander having a refreshing soft drink and looking very pleased about himself, or a person wearing a specific brand of clothes surrounded by beautiful women. However, with this technique the advertising experts walk a fine line between the unnoticeable (and thus, ineffective), and the too noticeable, which in most cases looks too obvious and ends up backfiring for the company. However, when the main characters purposefully interact with or consume some product or another, and the brand is mentioned or clearly visible, it is called product placement, and usually involves the company paying the writers of a movie or comic book to include their companies’ product and make a positive association with it. There are some pretty ridiculous cases of extreme product placement out there, like Twinkies being used by superheroes to defeat villains or some other implausible scenario.

That was my weekly rant on subliminal messaging. I recently acquired a book (a real, paper, honest-to-God book) with a chapter on subliminals that will lend some credibility to my research.

Peace out, homies.

Ellis-Christensen, Tricia. "What Are Subliminal Messages?" WiseGEEK: Clear Answers for Common Questions. 26 June 2011. Web. 02 Sept. 2011. <http://www.wisegeek.com/what-are-subliminal-messages.htm>.