Tag Archives: technology

Haunted Valley in Los Angeles

AGE: 18
Date_of_performance: November 18,2024
Informant Name: Henry Dearborn
Language: English
Collector’s name: Sunghun Park
Nationality: American
Occupation: Student
Primary Language: English
Residence: USC

Main description:

HD: So my parents like to tell me that our house is haunted. um I grew up in a house built in the 1940s in the foothills of Los Angeles and it’s funny because they’ll bring it up at random times. You know, we’ll just be at dinner and they’ll be like, oh yeah, and the ghost at our house and I’m like, what? But one of the stories they’d told was um about how they would be getting ready for bed and uh they’d go to sleep, you know, on any given weekday, you know, and in the middle of the night, they’d hear a knocking. It’s loud as could be from the front door, and they’d get up, they’d be startled, they get up, they go check the door, they open it. Nothing, no one there. And they said this happens to them like every week. And I’m like, what? Because I didn’t I had never experienced anything like that. I mean, there was always the odd, you know, hairs on the back of my neck when I was alone in the room sort of thing. And my door slammed shut randomly, which is really freaky. But, you know, that that sounded very serious. And so they were like, let’s get a ring doorbell camera. And I was like, oh, okay, yeah, that’ll that’ll solve it. And we got a ring doorbell camera and we put it because they were they thought it was something somebody real. And the ring doorbell that we set it up and one night, the knocking came and it went, and in the morning they checked the ring door bell, and the tape froze. at like one in the morning, just before the knocking. Like it wouldn’t play anything past that. So that was freaky. um I should ask them if if they still hear the knocking, because that’s really creepy. And yeah, I don’t know. That’s my ghost story.

INFORMANT’S OPINION:

MP: So do you think the knocking sound and the camera stopping are due to something supernatural or just a coincidence?

HD: Honestly, I still have no idea what it was. I mean it still gives me goosebumps, especially when I think about it freezing. It could be a technical glitch or a real ghost. My parents always bring it up at family gatherings. However, given that nothing much has happened since then, I think it is a little far from a supernatural phenomenon. 

PERSONAL INTERPRETATION: 

I think HD’s story is more of a paranormal thing than a coincidence, as physical things like door slams and sudden doorbell camera freeze happening together. A weekly knock suggests a pattern, especially when you might see the doorbell camera frozen because ghosts might’ve been interrupting something. This fits the common ghost theme of the soul interacting with its surroundings. HD seems skeptical, but I think the recurring pattern of events really shows that it may be related to home and other paranormal beings.

99 little bugs in the code

Nationality: American
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: February 2023
Primary Language: English

“99 little bugs in the code, 

99 little bugs… 

Take one down, 

patch it around, 127 bugs in the code!”

Genre: joke/song

Source: 20 year old USC student majoring in computer science

Context: The student doesn’t remember exactly when she learned this tune, but says it is the coders’ take on the classic “99 bottles of beer” song. 

Analysis: In this adapted version, the number of bugs increases many instead of going down by one classically. The student explains this is the focus of the joke, because the patching of an error frequently leads to the creation of more “bugs” in the code. Where the traditional version of this song is normally heard during monotonous tasks, or when killing excess time. In this 21st century rendition, the song achieves the same purposes, as fixing code is often a seemingly endless and time intensive process. 

Alexa Tells A Joke

BACKGROUND:

In recent years, Amazon has launched a produce called the Amazon Echo. The AI “personality” that the Echo conveys is even given a familial name, Alexa. The device is used to serve as a home assistive device, with the capabilities of setting timers, controlling lights, and even convey bits of folklore. Because Alexa has access to a massive database of different bits of information, the device can retell a joke it “heard” from someone else. I decided to test this and ask a device to tell me a joke. In return, I was told a joke that started out sounding like a historical fact (a function the Echo is often used for) and flipped my expectations by ending it with a pun.

“INTERVIEW”:

My “interview” with my source and artificial storyteller, Alexa, went as follows:

Me: Alexa, tell me a joke.

Alexa: As the old story goes, someone sees a reflection of the moon and mistakes it for cheese… un-brie-lievable!

MY THOUGHTS:

Due to the fact that this is a machine with no actual purpose other than to serve its users, I concluded that this source’s identity did not need to be kept anonymous. There is no legal obligations that a user needs to serve Alexa given that its personality is based off 1’s and 0’s, not actual emotions. I still find it extremely fascinating that this device is able to convey bits of folklore, just like a human can. I wanted to explore this concept and see what would happen. I felt like a joke was a good place to start. I’ve heard a version of this joke before but never told like this. I love the way it plays off the fact that it is a machine, in that it starts to convey the joke as a fact, much like it normally conveys facts, and then turns it around and ends with a punchline. This variation of the joke is a fun way in which modern technology can influence the world of folklore.

Dongle

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Residence: Los Angeles, California
Performance Date: April 6, 2018
Primary Language: English

The folk term “dongle” requires a bit of history. When the iPhone 7 came out, Apple announced that they had removed the headphone jack from the bottom of the phone. To work around this, they sold adapters that would allow people to plug headphones into their new iPhones. The folkspeech that refers to these adapters was described to me by a friend outside of a party.

“A dongle now is, is referring to the dongle that allows you to listen to music with your regular, like, three, like your regular eighth inch adapter, your aux adapter into your iPhone, which doesn’t have that port anymore. And if it were called adapter, people would just, it would, it would sort of be a normal thing. But because it’s like, ‘Aw, man, I don’t have the dongle with me,’ or something, like, ‘I can’t listen to music now.’ It’s just like, I think it really is a derogatory – or at least it has a bad connotation to it.”

“The word ‘dongle’ to me has always been adapter. I don’t know when it started. Uh, I’d say that the connotation of dongle, as opposed to adapter, is negative, right? Like a dongle is sort of like something that is like unwieldy, that you don’t wanna be carrying around.”