Goose Chase Podcast

This week we're joined by our guest Matt to talk about the legendary SCP Foundation. A group writing exercise that started on the internet in 2007, the SCP foundation is a work of science fiction that documents the presence, threat, and containment procedures for objects, entities, artifacts, and even mere concepts that threaten humanity. It's a wonderfully dense and structured world of fiction created by writers the world over, and Matt helps walk us through the history, the elements, the community, and even the mysterious lore around the origins of the foundation. 

This week we're talking about Marion Stokes. Ever heard of her? If you have, 10 points for you, you were paying more attention than we were. Marion was an activist, a television presenter, an intellectual, and a collector and archivist of lots of things. We don't want to spoil this one, but her greatest accomplishment would span 33 years and produced a prolific collection you won't believe. 

This week we're talking about someone who you've probably heard a bit about: Grigory Rasputin. Known as the Mad Monk, and major influencer to the Romanov family, Rasputin will forever be enshrined in a certain amount of mystery. That's by design, too: He certainly made deliberate attempts to generate a certain amount of mystique, and lots of stories persist about him to this day. We sort over the many legends of Rasputin to try to get to the most likely truths about this mysterious man from the reaches of faraway Siberia. 

This week we're talking about number stations. If you watched LOST while it was on the air, you might recognize the idea: radio stations around the world which seem to do little more than spit out a series of numbers every now and then, read by a human voice or sometimes just tones. People have speculated lots about what they're for and what they do. We talk about the stations, as well as some concepts of cryptography that make this old school tech very appealing for information secrecy. 

If you're looking at this message, you owe a chunk of your experience with computers to Ada Lovelace, the mother of modern computing. All the way back in the 1830s, she saw the beginning of where computers might be headed, and yet it would take almost 120 years for anyone to notice her genius. Tonight, a love letter to the history of the computer decades before the big mainframe computation computers we know today. 

In our last episode, we talked about Duane the Great Writer, the purveyor of a series of online books and a philosophy that may well have been outright lifted from Eckankar and Paul Twitchell. We left off on the discovery that there is a massive other side to Duane's materials, and that's on YouTube. But it's not published by him. It's the channel of Kelsey Lynne Brown, a writer in her own right and the host of lots and lots of material on Duane. This week we explore the extended Duaneverse, other people in his orbit, and the only whiff of scandal that Dave can trace to them (but a significant one)

In this episode, we're talking about something with a weirdly small and specific Google footprint. DuanetheGreatWriter.info is the home of something called the Worldwide Educators, or the NuPresentation foundation, and it is a treat for the eyes. The website contains a lot of information on what they represent, and maybe not in any particular order either. It's interesting; something definitely emerges, themes and concepts and values that repeat, but the author, his works, his foundation, and himself as a person are actually kind of elusive. This one felt like a Goose Chase scoop. The more threads we pulled, the more questions we had. In tonight's part 1: Who the heck is Duane? 

This week, we're talking about a park with a historically bad reputation, but don't hold that against it. Baltimore's Leakin Park has been the home of so many body dumps that it's been referred to as an unofficial/unregistered graveyard. We talk a bit about the history of the park, its years of activity, and some reasonable explanations for why things got so bad there. Or were they really so bad? These days they'd like you to know it's been heavily rehabbed, but there's still a lot of stories to tell.