A Disturbing Little Tour Of Rogue Taxidermy

Rogue Taxidermy is a folk-art form where you use dead animal parts to create some new, unique creature that never could have existed... but should have! So appropriate for Halloween.

The folk art form of rogue taxidermy seems to be rooted in the midwestern United States, and can be considered a hallmark of Midwest Gothic. The most famous group is the Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists. One typical truckstop chimera is the jackalope:

Rogue taxidermists got so carried away with the jackalope thing that they managed to infuse the critter into the North American culture at large, and now no roadside truckstop is complete without a mounted jackalope head on the wall. There's jackalope tattoos and faux nature documentaries and hundreds of photo manipulations. Jackalopes are world famous, a triumph of rogue taxidermy! Future popularity to a similar degree may be won for the hodag:

Or the fur-bearing trout:

As you can imagine, there's a huge crossover between the rogue taxidermy and cryptozoology worlds. Whether through intentional attempts to hoax the public, or tongue-in-cheek attempts to hoax the hoaxers by going "Look, I found one!"

A second gallery of mathematical cranks, wanks, and wonks

Continued from part one, this will be a second look at the many purveyors of woo in the math world. Fascinating though they are...

Radiant Primes

OK, we'll start with a gentle example. This guy... might be right, it seems to check out. But his idea of taking prime numbers, converting them to another base, reversing the digits, converting that number back, and then checking if it's composite or prime and then (are you still following?) plotting the result in dots on a graph produces a picture that's pretty much the random static noise you'd expect to get with some radial lines raining down. He explains the process lucidly here. It makes a pretty cellular automata, but I don't see what he's so excited about. This isn't crank math so much as it's a fundamental failure to understand how math research works.

"God Almighty's Grand Unified Theorem" (GAGUT)

Oooooh, we have a live one! It's hard to tell if this is math though, or if the passion of this person's vision transcends the simple arts of calculus altogether. Anyway, any page written in ALLCAPS that yells "GOD!!!" this many times is a guaranteed winner. Diving deeper into the site, however, reveals a lot more ALLCAPS raving and not a hell of a lot of math. But I noticed an awful lot of focus on race (pro-black) including one link that insists God elected Obama. Then you find this:

...clicky to biggy, and you'll find the biggest equation to nutting ratio on the site, and that's just one unexplained line. Yes, I see, the capital G is God. Now what?

Truth Evolutionism

Now this guy sounds like the Time Cube guy on Prozac.

"So sciences about largest negative action pursuit, largest happiness pursuit, largest profit pursuit and largest knowledge pursuit are unified into one: Science of Pursuit"

 Right, but how does that help us get laid? I confess that this guy loses me every other sentence, so I can't so much trace reasoning flaws because I can't follow the reasoning. The guy just won't slow down and let the rest of us catch up to the monologue in his head.

"In Truth Evolutionism, every existence origins from perturbation in nihility. So its ultimate goal is to find the evolution process from perturbation to existence and the best methods for expansion."

 um?

 "Physicists have discovered least action principle, so basic natural laws are best methodology to pursue negative action. So for systems with the same mathematical expression as negative action, basic natural laws will be their best methodology."

ah...

"This is an objective truth standard. Larger system won more attention, respect and even worship from human beings. You can imagine, if there were a system larger than universe, its laws will be worshiped better than "natural laws", and treated as more important truth than natural laws. With the objective truth standard, the system with the largest possibility to be observed contains ultimate truth."

Dammit man, slow the hell DOWN! This sounds like you could cook up a philosophy here, if only you'd quit nouning verbs and dropping 'the's!

Return to Socrates


Right at the top, we start out with "Ideas, Philosophy, Science, Software, God, Universe, Randomness" - Which leads me to my own first theory of math cranks: If you're trying to tackle more than two big ideas in one paper, you're probably a crank. This guy has also been in business a long time, and makes reference to readers and even a message board for open discussion at one time. But, weird for an admirer of Socrates, his primary mathematical fixation seems to be on gambling. We're in luck, probability math happens to be one of my favorite fields. Anyway, he starts out attacking the lottery for not paying true odds. Correct so far; I think all lotteries should be burned to the ground. As soon as he starts rattling about betting systems, I set my Ctrl-F for "Martingale" and bingo!


Yep, crank. For those of you wondering, a Martingale system is one where you try to recover previous losses by doubling your bet or using some other complex betting pattern. The problem where all Martingales fail is that they fall against the casino concept of a "table limit":

That limit stops you from doubling your bet infinitely; eventually you'll lose big, and then you'll never get it back. And then right after Martingale you get the famous gambler's fallacy, stated so well by our "expert" here:

"What you need is a notebook and a pencil. Write down the last roulette spins, from the oldest one available to the most recent spin. Do not start playing until you have at least 42 spins on your piece of paper. I prefer a small notebook with 20 rule lines. Multiples of 10 or 20 make it easy to count quickly the number of roulette spins. Use the roulette report that follows as the template (rows and columns). "

...the gambler's fallacy, explained in Wikipedia, is the fallacy of believing that past trials dictate future trials; in other words, if the wheel comes up red six spins in a row, then the gambler's fallacy would have it that black is a good bet right now because "the law of averages" say that red has less of a chance coming up now. The problem here is that the roulette wheel has no memory! Neither does any other random device - the dice don't know which number's "turn" it is to come up, your coin does not know that it's "supposed to" come up heads next toss because it just tossed five tails in a row.

Still, this guy's a real card. He's got books he's sold, casinos he's gotten into fights with... He's got his racket, he's happy.

Well, that runs my bookmark list dry. Til next time, True Believers!
 

Zombie Transformation

The curious case of James R. Todino, the stranded time traveler

Time travel hoaxes are popular surreal pranks. I've mentioned John Titor before as being one of the greatest Internet pranksters of the time-traveller genre. But what can you do about a guy who's really convinced that he's a time traveller?

Such was the conundrum facing the maintainers over at the Museum of Hoaxes, who was one of many at the beginning of the century to receive spam emails asking for someone to sell the subject a "dimensional warp generator." The email went into great detail about specs for this device, which would include 512GB of RAM and a menu-driven GUI.

It turned out that the emails were being sent out by a known professional spammer who also happened to be delusionally insane. Wired breaks the straight story. Far from being a time traveller, Todino was a perfectly ordinary 22-year-old with a father in this present day who was worried about his son's mental illnesses being exploited by scammers online.

Make no mistake about it, this is actually a common problem with spammers. If you've ever received spam and wondered "who would ever fall for this?", the answer is, "nobody, actually, but authors of spam software and systems prey on gullible people who think they can make millions sending out spam. Big fleas got little fleas on their backs to bite 'em!

Todino (like the mythical John Titor, whom, remember, has never been positively identified) gained widespread Internet fame and cultural tribute, making this list of time travel claims, and being famous enough that there's dozens of accounts claiming to be him on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and so forth.

Sadly, no verifiable interviews with Todino exist on YouTube. So for second prize, here's a different kook who raves about time travel conspiracy theories:

Horned-head

Just found it startling, that's all. Wikimedia commons images can surprise you sometimes.

What was up with the green children of Woolpit?

Of all the feral children stories, the green children of Woolpit seem the most curious. They were two Flemish children who walked up to farmers in Suffolk, England, in the 12th century. The children, a boy and a girl, both had green skin. After dumping a fanciful story of a distant twilight land called "Saint Martin", which may or may not have been true, the children were adopted into the community and eventually went on to live normal lives and regain normal skin color.

It turns out that the skin pigment could have been a symptom of a nutritional deficiency, called 'hypochromic anemia.' Similar to how leaves turn color in the fall, the lack of red blood cell pigmentation simply leaves other elements of the body to lend a skin color instead.

Whatever you do, do not search Google images for 'hypochromic anemia'. They're not nearly as pretty as you're picturing it.

But perhaps encounters with people afflicted with this condition accounts for widespread folklore tales of little green elves, gnomes, leprechauns, and other mythical humanoids - maybe they were just malnourished, and so short, and anemic.

A gallery of mathematical cranks, wanks, and wonks

You wouldn't think that mathematics, as a field, would attract that many fringe-living crackpots - at least not as much as, say, medicine or space physics. In math, after all, either 2 plus 2 adds up to 4 or else it doesn't, and there's not much room for argument after that. But, oh, how wrong you'd be! Join me on this intellectual Tilt-A-Whirl as we explore the home pages of some extremely unhinged amateur mathematicians:

Zim Mathematics

The startling page layout is just the appetizer to Zim Olsen's theories. However, Zim doesn't really seem as out there as some, merely extremely eccentric. On the crank side, there's the ranting philosophy of how we should think of mathematics, which reads like a better-educated Time Cube manifesto. On the other hand, we have the following masterpiece:

The Lord’s Prayer in System(s) Mathematics

Our Father who art in heaven
hallowed be thy name;
(1) + - × ÷ = (0) + - × ÷ = (1+0) + - × ÷ = (1,0) + - × ÷

Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done
on earth as it is in heaven.
(1) +, -, ×, ÷ = (0) +, -,×, ÷ = (1+0) +, -, ×, ÷ = (1,0) +, -, ×, ÷

Give us this day our daily Bread.
Y(A,B) + - × ÷ => X(1,0,Y(A,B) +, -, ×, ÷)

Forgive us for our sins,
X(1,0,Y(A,B) +, -, ×, ÷) + - × ÷ => Y(1,0))

As we forgive those who sin against us.
W(A,B,Y(1,0) + - × ÷) => W(1,0)

Lead us not into temptation
X(1,0,Y(A,B)) + - × ÷

But deliver us from evil.
X(1,0,Y(A,B) +, -, ×, ÷) + - × ÷ => Y(1,0))

For thine is the Kingdom, the Power,
and the Glory, forever and ever.
F(1,0) = ___, ___, …___

OK, anybody who can engage in such whimsy has my benefit of the doubt.

Diamond Theory

Here again, I don't think Steven Cullinane is really unhinged per se. At the very least, his geometric study is fun to play with, particularly when you find this toy. And I'm not really sure that anything he says is wrong per se. But you might find yourself asking "So what?" or more to the point, "Why is this supposed to be the central theory to explaining life, the universe, and everything?"

The Correct Value for Pi

OK, here at last is somebody I can pin to the board. This Iranian scholar can't stand it that Pi is infinite, and insists that its true value is actually 3.125, so there! Wrong sir! Thank you for being up front and not burying it under 100 pages of dense "proof."

Impossible Correspondence

Ah, we love the argumentative ones! This colorful Mad Hatter uses amusing George-Clinton-type coinages like "supraconsciousness" to insist that everybody else is wrong, dammit, especially that Albert Einstein. Go on, pick a page, any page - the "Analysis of Maths by Theosophical Reduction" argues that we only need nine digits to define the universe and then wades into the I-Ching and something called the Mayan "Tzolk'in"... uh, this:

...guaranteeing that this refugee from Klingon astrology will lose the hell out of you before you can even suss out what he's rambling about. Oh, and there's a great bit of numerology about the Quran, and a piece on market cycles and Fibonacci done with no sense of irony for Darren Arinovsky's film. And hey, there's this:

"In his stand against the ether, Einstein had argued, "we should not speak of things that can't be measured." Probably the number one reason for saying that was to insure the job of measurements. Today, the Aether not only has been experimentally shown to "exist", but the reversed, subluminal group wave Aether and the superluminal phase wave Aether could also be measured once it was defined as the existent medium."

Treasures, treasures I tell you!

C.F. Russel - Cubed

This is impossible. I take back everything I ever said about the Time Cube guy; THIS is the craziest web person with a cube-centric theory! Oh, the pages start out tame enough,

but it gets crazier...

and crazier...

and CRAZIER!!!

God, thank you, man! I made it up to page 16 before I couldn't hang on any more and blew my load! And THEN I found this dingus. Take me! Take me away to your crazy, right-angled world forever.

Your Whacko Conspiracy Video of the Week

Meet Macon Carrington, who has his own YouTube channel and would like to have a word with you about the secret, horrific rituals that Scientologists and Freemasons inflict on hapless kids. With demonstrations on dolls and better special effects than most History Channel shows.

Oh, he's also nuttier than squirrel scat and hair-raisingly creepy besides.

DISCLAIMER: Which is not to say that Scientologists or Freemasons are exactly nice people, and in fact there is evidence that Scientologists have done mean stuff to people before.

Baby orc for dinner, perhaps?

Startling little bit of sculpture by Evan Campbell, detailed on Deviant Art.

The totally cosmic dolphin cult is alive and well

Just in case you were thinking that the New Age hippies had backed off from the dolphins, this LiveJournal observer has bad news:

"I hadn’t realized that among a certain segment of profitable 'eco'-tourism it is a commonly-held belief that dolphins not only have achieved higher consciousness and are intimate with the secrets of life, but also use telepathy to transmit their teachings.

"My favorite interaction with a dolphin-oriented wingnut occurred at the dump. As we threw our trash in the big stinky dumpster, a woman pulled up in her SUV plastered with hippie/new age bumper stickers. Dressed in all white, she asked us, 'Have you seen the dolphins?'

"'Not today,' I answered.

"'They’re out there right now. Did you know that humans are the only animal that fears when it doesn’t need to? Dolphins only fear when they are in danger?'"

Penn 'n' Teller's Bullshit did a whole episode on dolphin New-Age-ism, BTW:

Website featuring "Gothic Babe of the Week" since 1996 to present

I've often defined "Industrial Gothic" as a genre I sort of thought of on my own, to mean "horrors specific to the industrial age" - ghost towns, malevolent corporations, conspiracy theories, man-made monsters, haunted factories, mole people living in the sewers, and whatnot. Imagine my surprise when I poked about to discover whether the domain was taken and stumbled upon this site. Of course, "industrial" and "gothic", separately, are both genres of music and styles / cultures as well.

Gothic Babe of the Week, if its archive directory on the left bears true witness, has been in continuous business since January of 1996, making it one of the oldest surviving private websites from the pre-web-bubble era, and being a great example of a Tumblr type blog decades before anybody thought of Tumblr.

Anyway, if you like Goth gals, this person is really, really into them:

A few quotes from the lexicon of Francis E. Dec, crank

Francis E. Dec was a New Yorker who had a relatively normal life as an Air Force radio operator, Bachelor of Arts graduate, and lawyer, until he was overtaken by paranoid schizophrenia and drew out the remainder of his years as a harmless crank who wrote a series of documents detailing a vast conspiracy-theory worldview which he mailed out and otherwise shared. We're talking racism, sexism, homophobia, religious conspiracies, mind-control rays, the works.

That bein' said so, his ravings make for a fun little theme park of kooky whimsy.

He's since achieved underground cult status, with tributes popping up everywhere from the Church of the Subgenius to Discordianism to popular music, including fictionalized versions of his works and a whole fan site, seen here.

So, a few terms to know if you want to study Francis' worldview:

The Brain-Bank Cities:

Cities existing on the far side of the moon we never see and which house your moon-brain (your real brain) of the Computer God. Primarily based on your lifelong Frankenstein Radio Controls, your moon-brain of the Computer God activates your Frankenstein threshold Brainwash Radio inculcating conformist propaganda. As such, these cities and the moon-brains housed in them are a vital part of the Gangster Computer God Worldwide Secret Containment Policy.

The Computer Brain Machines:

These secret machines are used by the Gangster Government for the purpose of filling out all of its paperwork, such as taxes, forms, bills, etc.  The speed of these machines is 2000 words a minute and they actually do the work which is supposedly done by Government Employees.

Infrared Crusader Priests:

These troops, created by the Computer God, were several hundred years ago responsible for the conquering and degeneration of the Slovene People, as well as for the savage butchery and experimentation upon thousands of innocents in order to perfect the process of implanting Frankenstein Controls inside the human skull. The Crusader Priests wore black robes and armor, with night-vision plastic lenses built into their helmets. They also used weapons smeared with Poison Nerve Jelly and conducted mass-exterminations by burning vast fields dusted with inflammable poison nerve gas powder Prussic Acid. Their headquarters were specially designated, fortified monasteries. Their modern-day successors include both black-robed judges and black-robed priests.

Frankenstein Slavery:

The process during which one’s own body is remote-controlled by the Worldwide Mad Deadly Gangster Computer God. Frankenstein slavery is usually most prevalent at night, when you are unwittingly operated upon by the Computer God Sealed Robot-arm Operating Cabinet. Sodomy and rape, performed upon you by your tormentors, is an added bonus.

Rumors abound of archival on Ubuweb, but I'll be hanged in Tarnation if I can find them.

Trolling paranoid-schizophrenics for fun and profit

Hey kids! You, too, can protect yourself from dangerous mind-control wavey-ray-thingies with your AFDB (Aluminum Foil Deflector Beanie).

And for identifying dangerous pockets of mind-control rays around town, there's the practice of psychalking. Learn and share this code, and the paranoid-schizophrenic community will be able to cooperate together to defeat mind--blowing psychotronic frequencies. Psychalking takes its methods from the similar practice of warchalking, the chalk marks around town identifying wifi hot spots.

While you're at it, you might want to download and install Mindguard - the software designed for remote mind-control detection and eradication. Available for Amiga and Linux (run Linux because THEY don't want you to!)

You'll find the Mindguard link to be especially, uh, enlightening.

Talking To Yourself

Gene Ray's Twitter

It may be the real McCoy or it may be a clever parody (it's really, really hard to tell) but there is a Twitter account under the name of Gene Ray, "wisest human", creator of the website most famous throughout the web for being the most prolific raving of paranoid schizophrenia.

Also something I made tribute to in one of my more impish plot devices in my own webcomic.

So give him some... distant... respect. Especially since he was kind enough to come speak at MIT.

And now, the obligatory Gene Ray parody paragraph (without even looking):

"Time Cube is PERfeCT 4-dimensional pureness!!! Only stupid evil DENY. Harmonic nature is four-sided perfection in the Earth and Heaven. School educates stupid to DENY PERFECT COSMIC Harmony. Educators cannot teach GODPERFECT harmony. in cubic TIME!!!!!!! dimensions are four - COUNT THEM! God in harmony with WHITE MAN SCHOOL. The stupid can't understand cosmic brilliance of balance cube in four--earth backwards against math - YOU are EVIL stupid ANTI-cube!! Yadda yadda turkeys in my nose blah blahblah blah..."

Oh, alright, here's a video interview:

You know, the mind--blowing thing about this is that he actually comes off as less crazy in person than on his web page. I've wondered about that four-sided thing myself for years, and bam, he clears it up just like that!

The Hebrew psychologist who thinks Moses was stoned out of his melon

Hallucinogenic drugs have often been supposed to be responsible for many fantastic accounts of miracles and general religious phenomenon, from the Salem witch trials and panic to various sightings of the Virgin Mary. However, not many dare to apply such a theory to one of the head honchos of half the religions in the world, indeed, the man who could be said to be the basis for all modern law.

But Professor Shanon has had enough of this reverence for miracles. In his paper Biblical Entheogens: a Speculative Hypothesis, he details numerous parallels between visions and experiences of Moses and hallucinations experienced under various psychedelics.

Pause and consider that this is not at all a far-fetched theory. Early humans had no concept of mind-altering substances beyond alcohol - to them, if you ate something, it either killed you or it didn't. When some attachment between altered states of consciousness and a previously consumed food did eventually dawn on people, they immediately took it for a connection to spiritualism. Marijuana, ayahuasca, peyote, and the famed "magic mushrooms" have all been connected to spirituality in beliefs such as Shamanism and Rastafari.

In the event depicted as the "theophany", Moses' experience includes thunder and lightning, a pillar of fire, trumpet calls when no instruments are present, the whole mountain smoking and quaking, and a voice booming out of the sky. Anybody who's experimented with doses of LSD or other psychedelics can relate. Note that it's not merely a matter of seeing and hearing hallucinations; one's thoughts and emotions become very confused during such experiences and one's own ideas may become the strangest experiences of all. Feelings of religious awe and emotional epiphanies are frequent and common in the psychedelic experience, even in doses not sufficient to trigger visual and aural hallucinations.

The problem is that the exact drug available in the Jerusalem area at the time that could have caused such an experience is not known. However, even plain old rye bread can become infected with the fungus known as ergot, and there is evidence of cases of ergot poisoning present in nearby Europe. Shanon's theory merely points out similarities between Moses' reports of miracles and the effects of drinking Ayahuasca, and leaves it at that. This drink is prepared from plants of the psychotria genus, which only grow in tropical regions.

This is not to say that such a drug would have to have been imported. There may have been species of another plant with psychedelic effects growing in the Mediterranean region around the 1500s B.C., and simply become extinct by now. One such example that we know of was silphium, a plant used to produce a drug widely thought to have been used for birth control - among many other uses.

A month of Fridays brings bad luck

In a tense image only a conspiracy theorist (or Nicholas Cage fan - as if there were a difference) could love, artist George Widener captures 30 Fridays, with corresponding dates, when disasters hit. And one free day!

More outsider art at the edge of sanity here.

The Bizarre Images of the temple of Seti I, Abydos

Seti I was a pharaoh in the 19th dynasty of Egypt, the son of Ramesses I and father of Ramesses II. His temple is located in what is known today as the sacred city of Abydos, Egypt, which is considered one of the most important archaeological sites in Egypt. The walls are decorated with a host of inscrutable hieroglyphics, including a catalog list of the cartouches (symbols or seals) of every Egyptian pharaoh before him.

What grabs the attention of modern onlookers, however, is the uncanny resemblance between some of the symbols on the walls and modern inventions, including helicopters, submarines, and zeppelins:

This oddity has fed rumors of ancient aliens or time-travelers on the usual sites. However, there are perfectly mundane explanations for these figures, in that they aren't really detailed to begin with, have decayed several centuries, and could be depicting perfectly ordinary everyday objects of the time, or perhaps, like the sketchbooks of Leonardo da Vinci, been a particularly bright attempt at imaging the future. After all, our modern flying machines do indeed resemble natural flying creatures, and if any preindustrial artist would have been asked to imagine a man-built flying machine in the future, very few could argue against designing something that looks fairly like what devices we have today. You wouldn't imagine that an airplane shaped like a fish or turtle could fly, could you?

The complete diagram of the temple:

 Abydos became a popular necropolis in ancient Egypt, containing many temples and burial sites devoted to Egyptian royalty. This has also led to the general area becoming a focus for all sorts of cult and superstitious activity throughout the decades. More research into this intriguing historical area here.

For those of you wondering what a demonic exorcism is like...

No comment.

John Titor, the greatest Internet prankster of all time

In November of 2000, someone created an account on several bulletin boards claiming to be "John Titor". But soon his claims grew much more fantastic than just an unusual name. He claimed to be a time traveler from the future. Over time, he responded to many forum member's questions, weaving a detailed, intricate story. He vanished after 2001.

During his "visit", he made predictions about the future (all of them in the immediate decade, all of which have proven untrue), spun a story about his mission being to recover computer technology for the future preservation of data, posted detailed explanations of how a time machine works, and supplemented his claims with many images, including diagrams of supposed future technology and his military insignia, shown above.

From all of this, Internet culture has built a Byzantine mythology. A book was published, John Titor A Time Traveler's Tale. A play was also produced, called Time Traveler Zero Zero. He became a regular topic of discussion on the radio show Coast To Coast AM, a wonderful program full of midnight wackiness and conspiracy theories. While his story has been shot full of holes, there are nevertheless people who *want* to believe and will never be unconvinced.

We are left with a few mysteries: The supposed original "john Titor" has never been identified. We also cannot pierce his motives; either he was a desperately delusional schizophrenic who believed his own story, a very dedicated surreal practical joker, or (my favorite theory) a budding (or perhaps even already made) science fiction author using the Internet as a test audience for some ideas he was kicking around.

There is even the remote possibility that it was all an attempt at a viral marketing campaign for some summer blockbuster that never got made (remember that the dreadful Blair Witch project was made with similar marketing right around this time). Or perhaps it was a psychologist researching people's threshold of disbelief. Maybe it was a test program by the US government to gauge whether they could invent an urban legend. Perhaps, because it singled out a potential problem with Unix-based systems, it was anti-Linux astroturf by Microsoft.

Why is the test-audience idea my favorite? Because I use this method all the time. In my creative work, be it my home blog, my webcomic, my funny pictures blog, my paid online freelancing work, or this very blog before you, any joke or theory or rant probably started out as some discussion I ignited on a web forum. I may even "troll" by pretending to take an opinion, while actually reading through the responses to see how people react to it. Later the idea might be fleshed out into a story, a joke, or an article for a client.

Now, I hasten to add, I don't get one-tenth as carried away as our "John Titor" example. When I test an idea, it's a couple of paragraphs maximum. So even the "testing ideas" theory doesn't hold water when someone keeps at it for a year and a half. 

There is also a great deal more analysis and exploration of the ideas provoked by Titor at this site, including extended chat room logs and excerpts from his messages and those of others. Note, in studying the transcripts, that he might have been an elaborate liar, but not a very good one. For instance, in one chat he says "But Im a little pissed right now.", then follows with "Is that still the right word?" Now, he had detailed future knowledge of our culture if he's telling the truth, so why should he have to ask? He only claimed to be from a few decades from now, so why assume that language changes so fast? The word "groovy" might have fallen out of vogue in our time, but you can still use it without raising more than an amused smirk.

Who is John Titor? The world will never know, because conditions are such that even the original person would not be believed. What were his motives? Whatever they were, if it was all just for a laugh, he must still be rolling around in stitches after all this time. Because it was the most successful joke in history.