An Experiment, Updated

[ecosophia]

Earlier this month I posted a few words here about a curious effect I'd discovered -- that sharp points of iron or steel seem to have the same power to dispel addiction to television, the internet, and cell phones that they traditionally had on faery glamour.  I wasn't expecting anything like the passionate response I got -- that entry got more comments than anything else I've posted here, including the very lengthy debate over the inept attempt at anti-Trump sorcery I critiqued a month ago, and a great many people agreed to give it a try. 

At this point some of the results are in, and I've been able to draw some tentative conclusions and draft a hypothesis on which further experimentation can be based: 

1) The effect seems to be real, and not just a matter of the placebo effect. Quite a few readers have reported immediate effects, not only on themselves, but on people who had no idea that the experiment was being tried, and who suddenly lost interest in television. 

2) The effect isn't guaranteed. Not everyone noted effects. In particular, when someone else in the household was using television, the internet, or their phone as a drug to avoid dealing with personal problems, that person's addiction was pretty reliably not affected by the presence of sharp iron. 

3) The effect can generate opposition. In a significant minority of cases, people who weren't in on the experiment found the sharp iron objects and removed them, even when there was no obvious reason to do so. 

My hypothesis is as follows: we're dealing with a genuine effect here, but the glamour it appears to counter is only one of the factors in the phenomenon of television addiction. Some people watch television or use other electronic media obsessively for personal reasons unrelated to the glamour. There may also be other variables that influence whether a sharp iron point will decrease the hold electronic media has on people.

At this point, I'm going to propose a few changes to the experimental protocol. First, if you have housemates who aren't in on the experiment, use an X-acto knife blade or a steel pin taped to the underside of the television, internet router, or other object, rather than a knife -- the knives are too visible, and can get noticed and removed. Second, try to assess whether your housemates' addiction to electronic media may be a way they use to avoid major issues, and keep that in mind when assessing your options. Other than that, if you feel inspired to join the experiment, give it a shot and see what results you get. 

Comments

Re: Glamour

[packshaud]

I think giving this a reply to this particular post will avoid it being excessively off-topic. I posted a reply here, commenting that I am using two needles inside the cover of my cellphone and a bowl of vinegar in my sleeping room.

I noticed good effects in my mood from the vinegar, but I am not too sure about the etheric effects. Maybe I read Monsters and the books in the Annotated Bibliography too much. But I went to sleep at midnight on May 19th and I woke up a couple of hours later, after I had a very long dream where I was tricked into a vehicle that took me to Fairyland.

There were lots and more lots of death flags and things in the dream that I was failing to get scared of or notice, to an absurd degree that I can only explain by glamour. Small things like not caring about a woman half my height, with a fuzzy, somewhat featureless face, and it seems that she has no legs or hands, but that's not strange. Nor arriving to a hall with more humanoid versions of the thing that attacked me in the "bus" that took me to the tunnel that gave access to the hall, etc etc, I don't want to make this more of a litany, I should just report this to the Fairy Census.