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I dressed up as a fortune-teller at a Halloween party in a house I shared with a few people. It was a fairly big party, 40-50 people. As a joke, I set up a litt
by gerbler 7y ago
I dressed up as a fortune-teller at a Halloween party in a house I shared with a few people. It was a fairly big party, 40-50 people. As a joke, I set up a little booth under a sheet and started telling fortunes.
People went wild for it. Many of them knew it was me (slightly drunk) and they still sort of believed me. People waited in line for 15-20 minutes. I told people mostly jokey things that were positive. I started getting adventurous and told people random things - if they didn't like what I said they were genuinely sad. What surprised me the most was that people would take anything seriously from a tipsy fortune-teller beneath a sheet.
- tedajax 7y agoIt seems like Terry Pratchett was on to something with "headology"
- YeGoblynQueenne 7y agoPratchett was on to something with the entire Discworld and other stuff besides. Every time I hear of a new, promising cure for Alzheimer's I go a little happy and a little sad, because I think that, if he had held a bit longer, maybe... But then, none of those cures ever work out in the end so I'm just left with the sad. Sad that I never got the chance to see him up close and shake him by the hand.
- advaita 7y agoThanks for introducing me to Terry Pratchett!
- Pete_D 7y agoI saw the same sort of effect a few years ago when I was running some IRC bots. In addition to the usual dice, 8ball, etc. one of them would respond to queries with a random aphorism from a list I put together from Googling "wise quotes" and such. It was a big hit, and kind of spooky to watch when people got responses that sounded relevant to their question. People joked that my perl script was being influenced by the spirits. In the end I concluded that you can read deep meaning into almost anything if you work hard enough.