How the hell did I get here?

February 28, 2013 10:10 PM

The Incunabula Papers or Ong’s Hat "were the abbreviated titles of documents that someone—probably a group of four provocateurs—posted on The Well, a pioneering Internet social site in the late 1980s...After sitting largely dormant on the social Web site for a decade, the documents provoked a widespread 'immersive legend-trip' in the late 1990s."

INCUNABULA: A Catalog of Rare Books, Manuscripts & Curiosa Conspiracy Theory, Frontier Science & Alternative Worlds

Ong's Hat: Gateway to the Dimensions!

incunabula.org

posted by Ouisch (5 comments total)

Dating from centuries before an Internet became available, the “legend trip” is a ritualized quest in which participants explore legends of supernatural events and test their truth by trying to make them come alive in the here and now.

This reminds me of the Hero Quests from the Glorantah RPG, where you can gain power by ritually reenacting ancient myths.
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 10:14 PM on February 28 [2 favorites]

Is Kinsella’s Legend-Tripping Online not only that book, but also, unwittingly, another phase in the whole, crazy Incunabula Papers caper?

Or, perhaps, wittingly.
posted by b1tr0t at 12:09 AM on March 1

Oh, man, I had Ong's Hat: the Beginning, which was an expanded book version. My favorite part was the (tenuous?) involvement of physicist Nick Herbert, whose book Quantum Reality finally made me really understand the double slit experiment, which I thought I had understood before (I was wrong). I never did figure out if Matheny's book Game Over? was even real.
posted by adamdschneider at 4:48 AM on March 1

Am I correct in my guess that "Ong's Hat" is named for Walter J. Ong? I don't know his work very well (he was a dear friend and mentor to my mother while I was growing up, so my mind went right to him when I saw this post) but this project seems to fit right in with his theory about the electronic media culture and secondary orality.
posted by dlugoczaj at 6:38 AM on March 1

Immediately, the name is just because of Ong's Hat, NJ, where the "stuff" is supposed to have happened. Whether the choice of that locale was because of Walter J. Ong, I suppose only Matheny could say.
posted by adamdschneider at 6:44 AM on March 1