Welcome back to Geek Time, advanced. This is Brad. How's it going? Lulu?

Hi, Brad. It's going.

All right. So I thought we'd get back into talking about liminal spaces.

Woo, spooky.

Yeah. Now what really started liminal spaces as being part of today's like vernacular things people talk about, it’s something that happened on Reddit. There's whole discussion boards for people to post pictures that evoke this feeling of liminality.

Hang on a minute.

Yeah.

This for those of you who don't really know Reddit. Reddit有点像国内比如说百度贴吧这样的一个存在, 或者更早, 还有什么天涯, 基本上这样的一个存在.

It's basically discussion boards, right? Reddit.

Right.

Community discussions. Yeah. So you mean people are posting pictures that trigger or evoke this liminality feeling, so these eerie pictures?

Yeah, but at first people were just posting interesting pictures that they would see. And then people started talking about, oh I think I've been there before that I kind of have Deja Vu. And so the whole feeling of liminality started like showing up.

And then people started thinking “I think I was there when I was a kid” that's possible because when buildings are created, they're often built with similar techniques or similar paints and things like that.

So you see one building from your childhood, then you see another one maybe from across the country. It could possibly be very similar “oh, I think I've been there, but I've never been to that city before”.

So it started off as being quite nice. It started off as some sort of nostalgia, but then it just turned eerie.

Like some people started seeing pictures and they just see it and they can't really place it and they don't really understand where it came from. And so people just start getting really weird feelings and it's, it can be something similar to like that whole idea of the uncanny valley. When you see something just like really makes me uncomfortable when I see this. I don't know why.

Yeah. Uncanny valley, I think we have talked about this before就是恐怖谷效应. It's like when a doll or like a machine looks really...or a robot looks really, very very similar to a human, but you know it's not a human. Then that gives you that uncanny valley sensations, same as places, I think, with liminal spaces. It looks like the place that you have been, it gives you the sense of Deja Vu, but you know it's not.

For sure, it's like sometimes when people see pictures, it gives you that nostalgia feeling. But when you see a photo and you think I've been there but I can't place it. I don't know why I have this feeling like I've been there. Something in your brain gets triggered and it gives you not a good feeling, gives you a bad feeling.

Yeah. If we talk about that, we cannot not talk about the Back Rooms.

Yeah. One of the first pictures that the kind of like sparked off the whole liminality debate or discussion was the Back Rooms.

Back Rooms是叫后室, 就是办公室的那个室, 后室Back Rooms. It's a game, isn't it?

Originally, it just started off as a picture and then became a video. Someone posted a video connected to this whole idea of the back rooms. And then it turned into a game.

But, yeah, so first it was just a picture and someone you start to say, I think I've been there, and then like I had a dream about this place, and in the dream, it was just a place that would go on forever and ever, no matter what they did, they couldn't find an exit and things were following them.

And then there was a video posted on line. This is a very strange word, but it's called a no clip.

A no clip?

A no clip is when you hit something in the world and merging with that makes you go into another dimension or into another place. The whole idea came from video games when your figure in the game went through a wall where it shouldn't actually go through the wall, and then it ends up in a place where it's not supposed to be. (no clip无碰撞模式：一种在计算机游戏中的“作弊模式”，允许玩家穿过墙壁、地形和其他物体，不受碰撞检测的限制。)

就不可能的空间. And that's back rooms.

Yeah. When you go out of this reality, you go to the back rooms.

And the original concept of back rooms is not that, it always filled with monsters and ghosts and killers. It's just a series of yellow rooms that goes on forever and ever and ever. It is almost like you always feel like something is about to happen, is really eerie, but nothing really happens that idea?

Mhm. Yeah. At first that's what it was. It was just this series of rooms, no matter where you went, you were just stuck in this back area.

But as the mythos kind of evolved.

They put in monsters.

The creatures.

They put in creatures. Yes.

Yeah. The monster started coming out and that's when things started to change and evolved into the back rooms as it is in today's folklore.

Exactly.

Yeah.

That is the ultimate nightmare, it’s the liminal space that goes on forever. It's a nightmare you can't escape.

Yeah. Or can you, they think you can, some people have escaped.

Wow. They escaped to tell the tales of the Back Rooms.

Exactly.

But I think some people actually use that in reality, you know, it's like a similar or related concept.

Aha. So at the time of the recording, this is just the beginning of 2024. However, did you know that there was a man who woke up in a hospital and it was 2027?

Okay. So 3 years in the future, okay.

Yeah, this was a few years ago, but he was in a city in Valencia. And the city should have 800,000 people. But whenever he went anywhere, there was no one and he started posting videos on TikTok. But when he would post videos on TikTok, he would get responses from people in today's world.

Hang on a minute. Let me get this right. So it's a man who's supposedly waking up in 2027 in a hospital and finds no one.

Yes.

And he's posting pictures of the empty city of Valencia. But then we as of now in 2024 or back in 2023, we could see him posting things from the future.

Yes.

Okay.

And people would tell him go to this place, go to do this, go see if you can drive a police car.

Okay.

And he would do all these things when he would go to get a police car, there would be no one around. He would get into the police car and he would drive it around. He went... they said “OK. let's set up the game, go to the military barracks”, and he went to the military barracks and he just went on and he got into the vehicles there.

So like it was crazy like he was... and they said as well “maybe you're just going in during the morning when there's no people”. And he went to one of the city squares in the center of the city and showed them the time, right? On the city squares dial, and on time, then this is all in TikTok for people to watch.

How did he do that?

Well. Here's the thing, the news wanted to know the same. And so they said, okay, so if he can do things, they asked him if you do something, does it have an impact on today's world? And so they said we're going to put a book on our stage and then we want you to try to do something to the book and the book moved.

How does that happen?

Hahahaha. Well. The whole thing was actually staged. It was staged by the city of Valencia, and so like everyone in the city was in on it. They like cordon off parts of the city.

Please don't tell me it’s like tourism campaign. Is it a tourism?

Yeah. It was a tourism campaign.

Wow.

But they took this idea of liminal spaces that was really popular and they said, let's do something with this.

Yeah. That does sound like a viral campaign. So they got the idea from the Back Rooms, I guess just one person in a seemingly endless liminal space where it's just really eerie. Smart, but I still don't get how a city of 800,000 people would collaborate to that extent.

I think basically what it was is just the police recording enough areas and saying you can't enter here for this time.

They put a lot of efforts into this then.

Yeah, I have to wonder if they made the money back that they probably didn't have to spend a lot of money to do it. But all in all it's just that whole the fact that they did that big of a thing just to try to get people to pay attention to their city.

Yeah, that's pretty cool, and you won't be able to do that with major cities in China.

No. It definitely not.

That way is too costly.

Yeah.

Okay, so before we wrap up this advanced episode, let us explore a little bit more about the psychology of liminal spaces. Why do we find liminal spaces so creepy?

Some people say it has to do with the evolution from kind of like our caveman brain. And so when we're in a place that's empty, when there should be people there, it can make it can be intense, right? And so it may not be something that's actually all that bad, but for us in the past, that was a dangerous situation, whenever everything goes silent, whenever there's no animals around.

That's typically because there is a predator around, and so whatever is causing all the animals to be quiet, or whatever is causing everyone else to be gone, could be something that's hunting you.

Because of this very primitive part of our brain. We don't like these kind of unknown. We don't like the idea of uncertainty. Everything's seemingly quiet. We always expect something to pop out, jump out, hunt us down, I supposed so.

And also like you early on, you said when we're in a place that is abandoned, we couldn't help wondering why, why was it abandoned what happened to it. Woo, I found another liminal space is abandoned amusement park.

Oh, yeah, yeah. Amusement parks in the 80s and 90s everyone went there, but in the last like 10, 20 years or so, people have stopped going to them if they do go to one, it's the Disney, right?

Yeah.

But the really small ones people stop going to, and so occasionally people will break into one and take photos of the stuff there. And if they're lucky, they can get one of the machines to work.

Yeah. Abandoned amusement parks就是那种废弃的游乐园. It's got a real liminal space feeling to it.

Okay.

Yeah.

And I think on that note, we're gonna wrap up this episode again, leave us a comment in the comment section, share with us your idea of really spooky, eerie liminal spaces.

You know my one and also the one for Brad, which is a spiral staircase. All right. You can also put in a request for any of the other topics that you want us to talk about in this segment. Thank you Brad for coming to the show.

No problem. Thanks, Lulu. Have a great afternoon.

We'll see you next time. Bye.

See you next time, everyone.