It's October! The month of Halloween, pumpkin spice everything and me failing at Inktober.

​This year I'm going to go in a different direction:
​starsirrah's Ayreontasia Inktober list.

The hashtag for this event is #sirrahsinktober.

I like walking. I like walking a lot. One could say walking is one of my hobbies. When I lived in Timisoara I would walk over 10km a day just because I would see something in the distance and be like "oohh shiny" and deviate from my route, especially at the end of the day when I was supposed to be walking home.

But that city is a sprawling maze and exploring it came naturally. Now I'm back in my home town where things are a little bit different. First of all it's a much smaller town, not only that but it's narrow and linear following the valley of the Barzava River. Secondly, I know it quite well since walking was always a thing I did for fun. Lately I found that my walks got sorta boring and predictable. Instead of exploring I just take the same routes with minor deviations. I also want to get more into urban sketching but I don't just want to draw large institutions and such, I want some random street scenes and maybe things that wouldn't come to mind.

So I figured I needed something to spice up my walks and help me discover new places in my town. I looked into Pokemon Go type games but I just can't get into them. I installed Geochaching but that only has 4 spots marked in my town and one of them is a paid membership spot and that's not something I want to do right now. That being said, I do plan of doing some Geochaching in the near future.

And then I found Randonautica. The app description talks about quantum physics and intent and what not and to be fair I don't really understand it and I'm not sure how scientific the whole thing is. What I do understand is that it's a bit like throwing darts at a map with no maps, walls and passing pets being harmed in the process. The intent part for me looks like setting a goal or theme that then makes you hyper aware about it and maybe even a little bit creative in tying it to the place you're being sent to. All in all it sounds like the type of thing I'm looking for. 

And then I decided to google it. I found the same copy-pasted article on many websites talking about the odd coincidences that happen, front and centre being that one story where a group of people found human remains; a bunch of hysterical panicky blogposts urging people to get the whole thing shut down cause it's dangerous to the youth and probably tied to some malevolent intent - they had the same vibe to the "Harry Potter teaches Satanism to kids" blogs; and a whole slew of video thumbnails featuring either creepy imagery or shocked faces. I did not click on those cause I'm cringe intolerant and my super duper deduction skills told me they were full of that. 

Having decided that I did enough research (probably not but I'm lazy) I figured I could try it. But I could not do my first Randonautica experience without testing the whole coincidence thing. I didn't want to set a vague intent but neither did I want to ask the impossible out of it. I was also prepared to do some mental gymnastics as long as it's not stretching it too far. So here's how that went:

My intent was to find a job. I am actively looking for one so why not. It's a specific intent yet I figured coincidences can manifest in many different ways, from seeing job adverts on walls, meeting someone who has a business, landing me on streets where shops and businesses exist where I might enquire about it, stuff like that. 

First stop
The first attempts set my destination on the hills around town so I had to keep searching. The first real in town destination was the parking lot of a nearby office building. 
Coincidences: Yes, kinda. The building used to host one of the businesses I applied to work for and is presently hosting a different but very similar business (furniture showroom). So there's that. 

Second stop
From that parking lot I tried again to set a destinations. As expected in my narrow town I had to click a few times till it landed somewhere in town and not in the forest. This time it was a street corner. 
Coincidences: Only with mental gymnastics. The street corner itself put me in very close proximity to a hospital and a school, both things I do not have any qualifications to try and get jobs at. However, to get there I had to go past an old workplace of mine. That's about the only job related thing I could squeeze from that one.

Third stop
This one was interesting. It took me into a parking lot that's next to the new location of that furniture showroom I applied to. It didn't take me to it, but close enough to consider this a coincidence: yes, without the need of mental gymnastics.

Fourth stop
This one landed in another parking lot on the other side of the same furniture showroom place.
Coincidence: Yes.

Fifth stop
I followed the quantum will-of-the-wisp though a residential area climbing up the hill....oh man the stairs...so many stairs. It brought me to a random building with no possible workplaces in it.
Coincidence: no. Even with mental gymnastics I can't figure out anything.

Sixth stop
Now I was going down the street I was on until I reached a big kindergarten that is still under construction. 
Coincidence: not really. Only with mental gymnastics that go something like: kindergartens usually have cute cartoony drawings on their inside walls and I'm a painter so maybe I can get a gig doing that when the building is finished. But that's pretty much it and it is kind of a stretch.

By this time I had had used my daily allotted owl currency that you use for the fancy randomising so I was stuck with the free version. I had walked about the usual distance I aim for in my walks and lunch time was coming so I decided to ask the quantum pigeon (In my mind there's a quantum owl entity that does the fancy ones and a intern quantum pigeon that does the free stuff) to take me home. I click aaaan...

Bonus stop
The destination lands on the doorstep of the other showroom this one furniture business has. 
Coincidence: I'd say so, yes.
​
Thoughts on Randonautica
It does what I want it to do, that being sending me to random locations in my town. As much as I want to think that the intent and coincidences part is just your mind being primed to notice things and patterns I can't deny that the coincidences were rather specific in nature. I'm not 100% sold on that but hey, if I end up getting that job at that particular place I'll look more into this phenomenon.

Moving forward
I am definitely going to use it in my walks and I will document it here. 

Met this little guy on my way home.