White Rabbit: A Lovecraftian Tale of Tech Noir

Part One: TV Head

My name is Jacob Nowitzki, welcome to my blog The Weird Watchman. If you're reading this then you too are interested in hidden truths, conspiracy theories and things that go bump in the night.

I initially set up this blog as a project for university. A kind of creative outlet that counts towards my degree, but it's become something more. There's a certain objective distance to be maintained when writing on things like Bigfoot, the infamous Men in Black or the actual number of missing nuclear warheads in the US, (it's higher than they say it is). It is quite a different story when you believe that the strange goings-on out there begin to invade your very life, in a deeply personal manner.

With that in mind, I'm going to do something different from my very factually based entries and recount my investigations into something weird in my own life. A kind of cult of personality I've noticed amongst my so-called friends and peers here at the university. A fascination with an internet meme that borders on religious worship. This thing called TV Head. Welcome to the first part of this investigation and my recount of what I discovered about Rabbit Ears.

Part One: TV Head.

These past few years have been hard on us all and, without sounding like I'm competing or complaining, as a university freshman I'd like to think that it's all been a little extra difficult on myself and my fellow students. Lockdowns and social distancing have meant that instead of being taught in prestigious lectures halls, classes have been pre-recorded and available online. Seminars, which are supposed to be a round-table exchange of ideas, have been reduced to Zoom calls which invite technical difficulties which include dropping Wi-Fi, broken microphones or cameras and external interruptions. My 9 grand a year university experience has then become a kind of education version of Netflix, which has robbed myself and my fellow students of much of the university life we had been promised and what we signed up for. Mygraduation ceremony is likely to consist of self-printing out my own certificate at this point. "Congratulations, you've achieved a bachelor's degree from the university of ones and zeroes."

Nevertheless, we persist. As Benjamin Franklin said, "An investment in knowledge pays the best interest".

Shortly into the first semester, I noticed a particular trend in one of the social media chat groups that I am part of. I've always been a little of an outsider, what with my counterculture interests, so I have never truly gotten memes and such. I do think some of them are funny, much in the same way that one in one hundred fart jokes would make the grimmest of us smile. I even find some to be quite clever, in a puerile way. It's the stuff like a moth saying the word "lamp" that I do not get; to me, it is either stating the obvious or so downright moronic that I'd need a good night of recreational drugs to find any sort of humour hidden within. Regardless, a pattern emerged in the chat group with fascination of an internet prank phenomenon known as TV Head. It seems that on August 11th, 2019, a person with a TV over their head placed old, large back TVs on the front porches of over 50 houses in Henrico County, Virginia. Their motivation and identity remain a mystery to this day, and they have become a cult of personality, or modern-day myth the equivalent of the Slender Man, elevating the idea of wearing a TV on one's head to popularity. This prank, for want of a better word, has since inspired copycats. If they so can be called. As said, the identity of the original was never uncovered so we cannot assume that these copycats are as such, they may simply be the original expanding their territory. One of the most comprehensive articles I can find on the original can be found here: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/tv-head