A Strange Video I Found

Guys, I’m kind of freaking out a little. I found this weird thing online last night and it really has me unsettled. I was just doing some mindless clicking around, looking at some old defunct magic sites. Thinking maybe I would find something dumb to post on here. I was watching tv at the same time, so I wasn’t paying too much attention. I was clicking random ads on some old magic blogs and I found myself at this site that looked like it was from the early 2000s.

I couldn’t figure out what language the site was in. It didn’t use normal letters. It looked maybe… runic or something? If that’s even possible.

I didn’t give it too much thought. I recognized a bunch of old products from about 15-20 years ago. So it just seemed like a strange old magic website. But it’s hard to get too creeped out when you’re seeing ads for sponge fruit or pictures of David Regal. That’s about as unthreatening as a thing can get.

Then I saw an ad for something and the thumbnail for the video said, “Social Distancing Mask.” I was like, Huh? The site was clearly old. And I was wondering if somehow this was a targeted ad that was being populated from somewhere else. Or maybe that’s a term that had some other meaning 15 years ago, and it was just a coincidence that I was seeing it in the middle of all of this.

So I took the ad copy and put it through Google Translate. It said: Language: Unknown. But it also gave me a translation. How is that possible?

The translation for the ad was this:

“2020 may seem like a long time from now. But as sure as the peacock strums the guitar [What?], that year will come. And when it does, you will wish you had bought this mask to help you deal with our virus [Our?]. This mask is guaranteed to keep people 15 feet from you at all time. It will repel people as sure as the peacock strums the guitar. “ [Again with the peacock thing?]

And here is the video that was in the ad. Don’t watch it if you’re alone. I had to turn all the lights on in my house and couldn’t get to sleep all night.

Now, that’s definitely mid-2000s era Penguin music and graphics, but then it says “Available at Vanishing Inc,” which didn’t even exist at that time.

And that mask is of modern-day Joshua Jay, right? I’m not going crazy here, am I?

I downloaded the video and I wanted to link to the site, but when I went back today I got an error message that said, “This site does not exist. In fact, it has never existed. Quit looking into it.” That seems super sketchy.

I’m not sure what’s happening. This is a weird time and things just seem to be getting weirder.