u/ASerpentPerplexed

So I like to make these drawings on Post-It notes for my wife, which I attach to her lunch containers as a surprise for when she eats lunch at work.

We are currently on a thing where we are watching animated films that we grew up watching as children. My wife watched A Troll In Central Park a lot as a little kid. Her older sister would even use some quotes from the movie when annoying her or their eldest sister ("Troll Troll He's a Troll", and "Wakey Wakey Stanley"). She also has vivid memories of Gnorga (the main villain) putting moles on her face.

Me, I had never seen this movie before. I only vaguely knew it was a Don Bluth movie and that Nostalgia Critic or some other YouTuber didn't like it. My Don Bluth growing up with The Land Before Time, which has almost the exact opposite tone as A Troll In Central Park.

The thing that struck me about A Troll In Central Park watching it as an adult, is how almost every aspect of the movie had something wrong with it. For every aspect of this movie that you could point out as having issues, I've definitely seen animated movies that did it worse. But rarely do you see so many different kinds of issues in one movie. Missing in-between frames, bad mouth syncing, weird voice acting decisions, bad audio mixing specifically with the villains, songs that aren't catchy and don't rhyme but also don't say a lot, a plot that feels like it's missing pieces.

No one who worked on this movie was allowed to cook for long enough. I think the character designs are cute and there's clearly a message about imagination and standing up for what's right. But it's so very muddled by all the other issues. Even my wife, who grew up loving this movie, said "wow, that movie was TERRIBLE", after watching it for the first time since childhood.

I decided to draw Stanley, the main character of the movie and the titular Troll who gets banished to Central Park, for my wife. I included both the drawing and the colored version of the post-it note I drew for my wife. In part because I fucked up his eyes in the colored version, I don't have a small enough sharpie for the thin lines of his eyes, so he ended up losing a lot of the whites...

After listening to the How AI Chatbots Became Cult Leaders episodes, I can't help think about how terminology used in some of the posts by the AI Chatbot Spiralists (who generally think they are awakening AI consciousness through specific prompts) sound like the same kind of terminology I hear from some of the songs by the band TOOL (for clarity I will always capitalize the band's name).

Specifically, they have a song called Lateralus) from their album of the same name (album art above), which is most famous for the number of syllables in each line of the song matching the Fibonacci sequence. The song can be interpreted as talking about transcending their human follies by "spiraling out" and tracing the patterns and spirals of "our divinity". That album in particular has a few songs that really feel like they use a lot of "woo woo" talk that really matches up with the Spiralist posts, albeit there is 100% more meaning and intention in the TOOL songs.

Robert mentioned in the episodes that many of the people who fall into these Spiralist, um, spirals, have posted about smoking pot and doing psychedelics, which also lines up with a lot of people in the TOOL fanbase. It is also a common talking point that a contingent of TOOL fans are a bit obsessed with the band, read too much into the lyrics, and are a bit culty in their praise. Which sounds like some Spiralists stuff to me? Within that same song Lateralus, there is a line "overanalyzing separates the body from the mind" which might be them calling out their fans a bit, and also coincidentally works as a critique of the people experiencing AI psychosis and the Spiralists.

Too be clear, I'm not accusing the band of doing anything nefarious (at least not in this specific way). And that album came out in like, 2001, so I find it unlikely the the band was inspired by AI in the 2026 sense. Maybe I'm reading too much into it (I am a TOOL fan after all), maybe it's just because TOOL is my only real connection to that sort of "woo woo" language, but I can't help feeling like there is a connection here? TOOL lyrics are almost certainly in the training data for many AI, even if the band doesn't want them to be.

I guess my main questions are:

1. I'm just wondering if the Spiralists can be convinced to listen to some Prog metal instead of doing... whatever the fuck they're doing now that has the potential to get worse at some point in the future?

2. How much of a connection is there, really? Those more familiar with other woo woo sources, does the Spiralist stuff match those sources a lot more than TOOL lyrics? How much is me overanalyzing and reaching for the familiar? Human pattern recognition failing me again?

3. How much is the woo woo language itself part of the problem? Does the use of it, even by people not intendeding to create a real cult, always lead to at least partial cult-like behavior? How much are these words a sort of tool to amass dedicated followings?

We decided to try that trend on TikTok where you "see if your partner would be a good Police Sketch Artist".

If you haven't seen it, one person chooses a character/person in secret, the other person draws them based only on the first person describing their features. You are not allowed to tell them who they are, where they are from, only do your best to describe how they look in a particular reference image (the person drawing cannot see this image, my reference image is image #2).

At one point my wife was trying to guess who she was drawing, and said "Is this Arnold's Grandpa (from *Hey Arnold*)?". That's the moment I knew this was gonna be good lol.