Look at some historical examples of mass psychogenic illnesses: dancing plagues, laughing plagues, meowing nuns,
Basically: mass psychogenic illness, and presentation of various mental illnesses, do not occur in a vacuum. Cultures shape them.
There have been several mass outbreaks of men completely convinced their penises are shrinking, anchoring them with string at night so they don't get sucked back inside.
Almost all in Southeast Asia.
https://t.co/fr9X1E1ayx
In which people compulsively dance until exhaustion, dehydration, and death.
It is not real. Arctic explorers invented it to justify sexually assaulting women.
Like drapetomania, it was colonizers pathologizing self preservation
https://t.co/cmq6zg9ZJ1
You should expect there to be different presentations of various mental illnesses in different places.
150 years ago, if you had night terrors, you hallucinated monsters and fair folk trying to eat you.
After the Wright brothers, you probably hallucinated aliens abducting you.
The US has had modern zombies permeate public consciousness for 52 years. Everyone knows what zombies are. They are as ingrained into culture as any folkloric demon or monster anywhere else.
No rage virus or space radiation or 2-4-5 trioxin needed. Just stress, applied at the right points.
Stress, in the right conditions, does interesting things.
Schools and convents have historically been perfect breeding grounds for this.
Get them to have zombies on their mind. Have em do zombie-related art, or marathons of zombie movies, or do papers on the ethnology of zombies.
Let that percolate.

Somehow frustrate the everloving fuck out of them. Constrain their freedom, clamp down with your adult authority, annoy them even more than teenagers usually are annoyed.
Have one kid pretend to bite another. Use squibs for realism, call in a favor from Tom Savini or something.
People have, multiple times, danced so violently for so long that they wore away the skin on their feet revealing bone before dying of dehydration.
And in American culture, the zombie is standing right there as a perfect outlet.
You could call it Quisling Syndrome, after the similar condition in the book World War Z.
Well, look again at the 2016 evil clowns, and how one of the forgotten plotlines in 2020 was that they'd returned.
Speaking of which: notice how readily and hungrily people ate that up? How excited they were to see it?
If you do it, buy me some rice to thank me: https://t.co/TRTsg6UUwh
More from Anosognosiogenesis
An interesting thing about carp is that they can go into anoxic hibernation and switch to an anaerobic metabolism based on converting glycogen to ethanol.
The waste ethanol is diffused out the gills
https://t.co/V3D1umHf04
Carp can switch over to an anaerobic metabolism and quietly exhale booze until the situation gets better.
They basically evolved the same metabolic pathway as yeast, independently.
In theory, if you spent a few thousand years breeding carp for it, you could use them to make booze.
They'd be enormous, almost entirely glycogen deposits with a fish added as an afterthought.
The really interesting thing about anaerobic carp, is that they can go 4-5 months without oxygen by relying on liver glycogen.
You, a human, have only about 100 grams of glycogen in your liver, about 400 more grams in your skeletal muscles. Call it 500 grams total.
In humans, glycogen is also burned for energy. This is where the marathon runner's bonk comes from: you only have about 2,000 calories worth, and running a marathon burns those 2,000 calories.
The waste ethanol is diffused out the gills
https://t.co/V3D1umHf04
Carp can switch over to an anaerobic metabolism and quietly exhale booze until the situation gets better.
They basically evolved the same metabolic pathway as yeast, independently.
In theory, if you spent a few thousand years breeding carp for it, you could use them to make booze.
They'd be enormous, almost entirely glycogen deposits with a fish added as an afterthought.
The really interesting thing about anaerobic carp, is that they can go 4-5 months without oxygen by relying on liver glycogen.
You, a human, have only about 100 grams of glycogen in your liver, about 400 more grams in your skeletal muscles. Call it 500 grams total.
In humans, glycogen is also burned for energy. This is where the marathon runner's bonk comes from: you only have about 2,000 calories worth, and running a marathon burns those 2,000 calories.
So you want to generate interesting melodies.
1. Make a file called 1235.txt containing, one per line, all 24 unique permutations of the elements 1 2 3 5.
2. Cp 1235.txt to D.txt
3. Use sed to convert the numbers in D.txt to notes. Now you have 24 permutations of the major tetrachord in D.
4. Play them each. If it sounds like it increases tension, mark the beginning of that cell in 1235.txt with a +. If it sounds like it decreases tension, mark with a -.
Now those 24 melodic cells are divided into two groups: tension increasers and resolvers.
5. Rinse and repeat for all 12 keys.
You now have 13 plaintext files, filled with stuff like + 1 2 5 3 and - D E F# A
6. Figuratively roll dice to decide, given a +/- cell, what the next cell should be.
33% chance a + follows a +, etc.
Now you're outputting a stream of dynamic tensions: ++-+++-+-+---+ etc
1. Make a file called 1235.txt containing, one per line, all 24 unique permutations of the elements 1 2 3 5.
Claude Shannon made this machine to play the hex board game.
— Anosognosiogenesis (@pookleblinky) January 21, 2021
It is literally just a mesh of resistors and some light bulbs. No logic gates, no programming, nothing at all resembling AI.
Check it out: https://t.co/Zoyc9TmBcN pic.twitter.com/EANeMosPhT
2. Cp 1235.txt to D.txt
3. Use sed to convert the numbers in D.txt to notes. Now you have 24 permutations of the major tetrachord in D.
4. Play them each. If it sounds like it increases tension, mark the beginning of that cell in 1235.txt with a +. If it sounds like it decreases tension, mark with a -.
Now those 24 melodic cells are divided into two groups: tension increasers and resolvers.
5. Rinse and repeat for all 12 keys.
You now have 13 plaintext files, filled with stuff like + 1 2 5 3 and - D E F# A
6. Figuratively roll dice to decide, given a +/- cell, what the next cell should be.
33% chance a + follows a +, etc.
Now you're outputting a stream of dynamic tensions: ++-+++-+-+---+ etc