(“Still a little pissed I can’t fly or set things on fire with my mind!”) These need to look normal - with regular updates of, say, a good New Yorker cartoon or a gif of Will Ferrell dancing, along with vintage Polaroid pics or posts expressing sly life sentiments. At this stage, on this Skype call, the group’s only task is to create and maintain these fake Facebook profiles. In fact, the details aren’t true about anyone, because they will be entirely fabricated by people like Michelle of Humpty Doo. These Guerrilla Skeptics are hoping to catch Fraser on tape spewing intimate Facebook details that are totally false about the person the psychic is addressing. He has been on the circuit for years, has a book under his belt and works some Doubletree or Crowne Plaza back room every two or three days. Matthew Fraser, the target, is a young Long Island psychic who resembles Tom Cruise in the role of an oversharing altar boy. On my computer screen, we resembled the opening credits of “The Brady Bunch,” a tick-tack-toe board of men and women ranging from Daniel in New Zealand, Ruth in London, Kimon in Alabama, Robert in Maine and Michelle near Humpty Doo, Australia. The crew invited to last winter’s Skype meeting had been vetted by Gerbic to participate in a mission called “Operation Peach Pit” (and I was invited to observe). If anything, “the psychics have just gotten lazier,” a team member told me. One new source of psychic intel is Facebook, which has become a clearinghouse for the kind of insider, personal detail that psychics used to have to really sweat for. But the internet has popularized a new kind of “hot reading,” in which the psychics come to their shows prepped with specific details about various members of the audience. ]įor instance, many psychics still rely on “cold readings,” in which the psychic uses clues, like your clothes or subtle body signals, to make educated, but generally vague, guesses about your life and family. Lately, technology has changed the business of talking to the dead and created new kinds of openings for psychics to lure customers but also new ways for skeptics to flip that technology right back at them. According to one market analysis, there are nearly 95,000 psychic “businesses” in America, generating some $2 billion in revenue in 2018. These are good, extremely profitable days for the ectoplasm-related industry. For instance, they straightened out a lot of grim hooey about the teen-suicide myth “blue whale game,” and they have provided facts about the Burzynski Clinic, a theoretical treatment for cancer operating out of Houston. Sure, they take on the classics, like debunking “spontaneous human combustion,” but many of their other pages have real-world impact. “I ran a JCPenney portrait studio for 34 years.”Ĭollectively, the group, which has swelled to 144 members, has researched, written or revised almost 900 Wikipedia pages. “I was a baby photographer,” she explained. This usually consists of editing and monitoring Wikipedia pages - a cat-herding task she says she’s uniquely qualified for. She spends most of her days wrangling her far-flung group of Guerrilla Skeptics into common cause, defending empirical truth online. Gerbic lives in Salinas, Calif., and while she is retired from the routine world of work, she has taken on a new job, as self-appointed guardian of Enlightenment Reason. “American spellings everyone!” she commanded her half-dozen international colleagues through the Skype crackle. It all started with maintaining their Facebook sock puppets - those fake online profiles. On a group computer call last winter, Susan Gerbic was going through her checklist of tips for her team’s latest sting operation - this one focused on infiltrating the audience of a psychic. Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief, Rick's first novel featuring the heroic young demigod, was the overall winner of the Red House Children's Book Award in 2006.When you’re setting up fake Facebook pages, it’s the little details that can mess things up. He lives in San Antonio, Texas, with his wife and two sons.
Rick Riordan is an award-winning mystery writer.
The Greek Gods are alive and kicking - go to and see for yourself Rick Riordan has now sold an incredible 55 million copies of his books worldwide She couldn't shake the feeling that something was about to go terribly wrong. Its massive bronze hull glittered in the sunlight.Part of her wanted to kidnap Percy right now, get on board and get out of here while they still could. She heard that whispering laughter again, as if the presence had followed her from the ship.
THE MARK OF ATHENA READ ONLINE FULL BOOK SERIES
The Mark of Athena is the explosive third part in Rick Riordan's number one series - Heroes of Olympus.Ī QUEST TO FIND - AND CLOSE - THE DOORS OF DEATH.Īnnabeth felt as if someone had draped a cold washcloth across her neck.
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