I read the first one. It was a very interesting read.
The guy who wrote those is very insightful. I also like his writing style. Thanks for sharing!
Huh, these are really good! I admit I definitely didn't see people born into rural poverty the same way I saw people born into urban poverty. That gives me a lot to think about!
Like 75% of my basic training division was either inner city poverty escapism or rural poverty escapism.
Ironically that became the uniting force of those people, something they could understand when everything else about the person is different.
Wow excellent picks. Read both of these and enjoyed the perspective. Thanks for sharing!
It’s too bad they laid off all their good writers about five years ago. At least we got Behind the Bastards out of it!
To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand Blue's Clues. The humour is extremely subtle, and without a solid grasp of theoretical physics most of the jokes will go over a typical viewer's head. There's also Blue's nihilistic outlook, which is deftly woven into his characterisation- his personal philosophy draws heavily from Narodnaya Volya literature, for instance. The fans understand this stuff; they have the intellectual capacity to truly appreciate the depths of these jokes, to realise that they're not just funny- they say something deep about LIFE. As a consequence people who dislike Blue's Clues truly ARE idiots- of course they wouldn't appreciate, for instance, the humour in Blue's existential catchphrase "a clue a clue," which itself is a cryptic reference to Turgenev's Russian epic Fathers and Sons. I'm smirking right now just imagining one of those addlepated simpletons scratching their heads in confusion as Traci Paige Johnson's genius wit unfolds itself on their television screens. What fools.. how I pity them. 😂
And yes, by the way, i DO have a Blue's Clues tattoo. And no, you cannot see it. It's for the ladies' eyes only- and even then they have to demonstrate that they're within 5 IQ points of my own (preferably lower) beforehand. Nothin personnel kid 😎
☝️ This comment changed my life 🙏🙏🙌
Can this comment become a legendary copy pasta of lemmy?
Blues Clues and "Scott's Tots". High IQ required or don't even bother
Why can't they be of higher IQ than you?
And why 5 points, doesn't communication gap theory push for 15?
I dislike 3 digit numbers
You fooled me, well played sir.
Thank you, glad this joke landed.
I like no-digit numbers best
Typing out the phrase “ninety-four IQ ladies only” in order to satisfy both conditions
Nice Rick&Morty copypasta you got there.
Bold of such a casual watcher to opine on her motivations.
If you had actually been paying attention, each clue represents one of the 12 arcana given context by the way it is revealed, each episode being a tarot reading that gives depth and context to her character.
A true fan would watch in order, and would discover each season clearly describes the fools journey with a reading for each step - at that point it just. It then repeats, revealing more of her backstory each season
I'll give the broad strokes, since I'm sure that's all a casual viewer like you is interested in.
Blue was born as the deity of a small tribe on the coast of modern day France. She loved her people and worked for them tirelessly, and they loved her as she lavished them with bountiful harvests and artistic inspiration. Her people were kind and righteous, creating beautiful sculptures and cloth that they traded generously. Then the sea people attacked.
It's unclear who they were, but her people were slaughtered and enslaved, her power slipping away, for she had given back all her people gave her, not considering her own needs. Slowly they died out, and knowledge of her name slowly died out.
Fading and in desperation she bound herself to a place, a cave in modern day Paris. Her heart broken by loss, she changed in those dark centuries. Her presence still brought fortune and so her former people's land was taken by others, but she no longer had love in her heart. She compelled them to bury their dead in the caverns under the city, where she feasted upon souls of the dead for generation after generation. But none knew her name, and so she barely was able to sustain her existence.
At the advent of WWII, knowledge of the occult reached a peak. The Nazi leadership heard of the abnormal luck of the city, and so made a deal with the French - they only wanted access to the city without revealing their goal.
The Nazis took the city, and drove the resistance down into the catacombs, giving them an excuse to seek her out.
They succeeded, and they found her. She was almost feral at this point, but after heavy losses they managed to imprison her in a relic, an urn containing scraps of bones of her people. On this urn, they engraved an inscription, a binding to a single person. That person would gain eternal youth and funnel power to her, but they misunderstood what she was - in effect, those bound to her died quickly.
The relic was captured at the end of the war, and ended up in Hollywood along with many other odds and ends. After several high profile deaths, they discovered that attention from children could sustain the needs of this unnamed being. By destroying their potential, a little at a time, the host would not age or be drained by the relic.
What no one expected was how well this would scale. The fallen deity known as "Blue" has swiftly recovered, and there's many fan theories about what this means.
And just to spell it out for the slower among you, this is a clear metaphor for capitalism, the effects of the industrial revolution, and the how in an effort to make children subservient , we reduce the future prospects of everyone, including those at the top
Unironically Deus Ex, it's full of cookie-cutter crazy conspiracy theories and references, but it introduced me to the literary genre of Cyberpunk and it's surrounding culture back in the day. If it wasn't for it, I probably wouldn't be so critical of modern consumerism and corporate culture. It helps that a lot of the game's social commentary remains very topical twenty years later, they simply don't make games like this anymore.
Just started the Fallout series a few months ago(3, now into 4) less neon but definitely highly critical of corporations' soullessness, consumerism, vanity and all other things that will disappear when important things happen. Incredible consistent aesthetic and feel.
If you're already liking 3 and 4, then your head will explode whenever you decide to give New Vegas a try.
I've heard that consistently. Love going into games blind, never even saw as much as a trailer for fallout before jumping in. Heard Vegas was the bomb, enjoying 4 for what it is now.
The Truman Show fucked me up as a child
Yeah, we all saw. Hope you're doing better now though, Mr. Burbank.
One of Jim Carrey's best movies
What’s so fucked up is how well that simulated world thing matches the ideas coming out of my own head
I read Asimov's Foundation series of books when I was 14 or so, and it made me a lifelong science fiction fan.
"The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins
Daft Punk's 1997 "Homework" album
"The Atomic Cafe" 1982 documentary film
Edit: Vonnegut, the far side and Calvin and Hobbes for making me feel like I'm not crazy and most people are peddling a tremendous amount of bullshit.
The Selfish Gene changed the way I see life itself. That and The Blind Watchmaker. I also love Unweaving the Rainbow.
Agreed on the Selfish Gene.
I started on Unweaving the Rainbow but didn't make much progress.
Dawkins can be a proper tool, but at least that book was quite interesting.
The Hubble Deep Field image struck the first major blow against my childhood indoctrination in young earth creationism.
I had a similar experience but with a book about Dinosaurs that contained scientifically accurate eons, etc.
I started to piece together that while we might not be 100% correct all the time, YEC doesn't even have an alternative. They just try and debunk evolution but have no scientific method/knowledge that proves they're correct.
Where's all the geological science that shows a 6000 year old earth? None. There should be competing theories, but instead it's just "you're wrong, trust me bro."
Midnight Gospel
The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury, it's a collection of short stories with a light meta story connecting them. The man feared technology, thought it would ruin society. It was written in 1951 and some of his thoughts on how technology could ruin people are eerily spot on.
The "smart home" story in particular is oddly prescient.
They Thought They Were Free. Book caused me to reevaluate exactly how politics at individual and social levels happened and how fascism works without any individual being inherently "evil." Class politics and interests followed closely behind to explain how evil can arise among populations that all consider themselves "good people"
"This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.
Honestly, I see this text often quoted form the book but I don't find it super useful as a way to understand fascism. The steps and reforms were all taken for a reason and people agreed with that reason, even the apprehensive agreed enough to stay seated. I think this "separation" isn't the best thesis out of this book, because the Nazi Party didn't shift too much in terms of popularity throughout these shifts, except to grow more popular during wartime. The government promised something and many accepted those conditions or at least lent moral license to the achieving the goal and were unwilling to oppose the conditions.
Fascism is Liberalism when and where Liberalism fails to accomplish it's promises and must consume the people and stuff at the periphery to achieve its goals. A government is just as "far" from its people when it is doing good things that it's people desire as when it does bad things.
I love the book but have major issues with the ideological assumptions, mostly surrounding fascism's relationship to its people and to other ideologies
Heinlein's "The Door Into Summer". Both beacuse it reminds me that I might never find what I'm looking for; and because it taught me to never give up on looking, anyway.
It'd been 25 years since my mom read the story to me so I can't tell you how accurate the adaptation is but it hit the parts I remembered.
There have been several. I'll pick Eric Berne's book Games People Play.
I immediately recognised a few that I had played and, having been 'called out' on them by the book, it did lead me to stop and behave more constructively.
Can you give an example? Sounds interesting.
The 'original' game: Why Don't You - Yes But was the one that I first recognised in myself. There are plenty of other examples on that website, but as the page says, it doesn't have the full explanation and context.
Drowning in a world of marketing and political slogans, this books helps me them how they attempt to persuade me. It also opened up a whole new interest in rhetoric.
The Selfish Gene, 1976, by Richard Dawkins.
Morrowind because I'm one of those people. But for real, that game in part defined large parts of my life. I got frustrated with the limits of the game so I started making mods, then got frustrated with the limits of the engine so I learned how to make my own. Now I work adjacent to the game industry with plans to get back into the industry proper in a couple years. Making games is all I've ever wanted to do and I owe a big part of that to Morrowind and the construction kit.
Were you involved in making OpenMW? That's so cool
No surprisingly, I haven't managed to contribute to the project. Reminds me I should definitely look into that though
It's a bit early to say if it's life changing, but Hi Ren made me reassess my thought patterns and negative self talk in ways therapy never could, which is pretty damn powerful for a musical performance.
How did it pull that off?
No health care professional ever told me that depression can be something that's just a part of who I am, and that maybe there is no getting rid of it. Rens message in the video feels so genuine and real that instead of passing it over as just another piece of pop culture, I stopped to really listen and think about what he's saying about managing your darker tendencies and learning to live with them. The song has maybe helped me accept myself a bit better, but as I said, it's still a bit too early to call if it's an actually permanent and useful effect.
Hi Ren is one of the only songs I will ever acknowledge as brave.
Mildy related, have you seen Sucker Punch? You may appreciate it more than the average movie goer (but it could also be off putting)
Haven't seen, will add to the shortlist. Thanks for the recommendation!
Whats your home life like? Hows your sleep?
I myself dont associate with any of the personal struggles discussed in 'Chalk Outlines' but dammit if it doesnt make me feel something, almost tears every time.
Thus spoke Zarathustra. I've been thinking about this book pretty much everyday for the past 20 years. It made me want to enjoy life and create great things.
There's only one reason to make a device to give people an invisible lobotomy with that contraption. Transplant tourism is a real thing, if you need a kidney, they'll find some poor Chinese citizen who's broken some menial law or just pull some poor Uyghur, labotomize them, poof there's your kidney match in short order.
It changed my life because after seeing this, for all practical purposes, I try my very best to avoid things from China because I don't want one penny of my money going to support this barbaric inhumanity.
If I see "made in China" I will try my best to find an alternative. For example, I returned to razor mice because they were made in China and got one of the same model instead that was made in Taiwan. It was sort of a luck of the draw, I had to buy two of the same model before I got one from the country that I wanted it from and I returned the one that was made in China. It was about an extra hours worth of annoyance, but it's important to me to keep doing things like that, because of this video. Fuck the Chinese Communist Party and their treating other human beings like animals.
I think it's important to keep in mind that this happens everywhere in one form or another. For example Frontex, ICE, Solitary confinement and so on. I'm sure you're aware of more examples.
I believe it can be quantified in some way. I live in a country that has no problem with solitary confinement of minors at an early age for decades at a time.
I think that's deplorable and monstrous also. But something about government endorsed (don't tell me the CCP doesn't know about it) organ theft where they kill the donor and keep them alive through controlled brain damage so they can harvest more organs from them. Something about that seems worse to me than solitary confinement, enough that I changed my behavior.
Yes keep it in context, but whataboutism isn't an excuse for objectively dehumanizing behavior from anyone.
(Note: I'm aware of companies and name brands that invest in private prisons, I do my best to avoid those brands, really I try to live my life but do what I can within reason)
Yes I agree it isn't an excuse. Am I right to be worried about people's frustrations and their resulting anger? Change in China and other places must come from within.
Guitar Hero exposed me to the idea that there was great music that wasn't on the radio and inspired me to pick up an instrument
The ones that affected my life the most are probably Chuck Palahniuk's books. I read them as a teenager.
GEB by Douglas Hofstadter
Oh this seems to be forever on my to read list. At some point I need to actually pick it up! But I feel like I might be unable to finish it and... I don't know why I'm hesitant to actually start reading it
It's an incredibly hard read. It's legitimately a graduate school philosophy class reading level. I would love to take that theoretical class and read along/discuss with a group but it's hard to go through alone.
It took me a long time. As a kid just read the funny stories that started each chapter, but then got stuck into it while I was in high school. It’s so dense that you can read a chapter and then take weeks to digest it all.
I read about 10% in college and it’s served me well. That 10% has been valuable on its own.
Maybe instead of trying to determine why you’re avoiding it (a task that suffers from the halting problem), you could just read a few pages and see what happens.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Dune trilogy when I was in something like 6th or 7th degree. It was just such a great piece of fiction to introduce quite a few philosophical thoughts at the time. I still enjoy the books. (and the old film with Sting in it)
I'm not really a fan of the 1984 Dune, but David Lynch is a cinematic genius, and a madman.
Nineteen eighty four
Movie: Interstellar and Inception. Great mind-changing works, and they really influenced (especially Interstellar) how I perceive the world. Very deep, but also very "on-point".
Book: The Cloud ("Die Wolke") is a book about the consequences of a radioactive catastrophe. It is written in German and is a young adults novel, and when I read it it really stuck with me.
Game: Morrowind - great game, very open to interpretation. It has a lot of very deep sub-tones, but also doesn't go overboard and stays a game. Big recommendation :) Also Locks Quest as a video game - it is kind of a tower defense game, but also with a character ark. I really like it.
Music: The OST from Locks Quest. I always listen to it when I'm stressed, and it is really nostalgic to me.
Hackers as a kid, got me into IT security.
Daemon and Darknet by Daniel Suarez, gave me a new perspective on society.
Daemon is a fantastic book. I remember reading it in middle school and a classmate was like oh yeah my dad's friends with him
The American-Australian science fiction TV series "Farscape." The themes and characters were all so beautiful, the cast was talented, the writing was great, the season/series long plots were all tight with great pay offs. The story is kind of "Lost in Space" if it was set in a galaxy built out of the cantina scene from "Star Wars: A New Hope." The Jim Henson Workshop built all the creatures for it and the CG effects actually hold up pretty well.
One character, a priestess named Pa'u Zotoh Zhaan (played by Virginia Hey), was the emotional heart of many an episode. One episode in particular, she's literally debating a god who has come to collect the soul of another character. She chides the deity saying something to the effect of "as a priestess I have long ago come to terms with different peoples, different beliefs. But all must recognize that life values life." As a teenager, that really stuck with me. Really shaped how I see the world.
(not an ad, but the whole series is on YouTube, "free with ads" if anyone wants to check it out.)
Books.
Steven Universe defined my high school years and made me who I am.
Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter
Its quite the yarn: hard to believe it was hidden inside my string
Max Payne 2 had a huge influence on my interest in narratives in general and also ingrained noir into my skull permanently.
Terminator 2 made me want to get into movies and cameras. Along with The Thing
Dead Labor: Toward a Political Economy of Premature death does an excellent job at breaking down how capitalism literally profits off of your death.
Books:
Plato's Republic (mostly interesting for a deep dive in the Socratic method, but also interesting to see where some modern ethics and philosophy is derived from in western traditions)
Go ask Alice (first real experience with experiencing what it's like to be truly a victim of abuse and addiction)
Flatland (great book about challenging fundamental assumptions!)
Think like a Freak (Really got me wanting to better analyse and thing about the world around me)
Harry Potter and the methods of rationality (great fanfic overall, but what really stuck with me was challenging my own conclusions after new evidence comes in, I really had to take a break and just think about that for a bit while reading this one)
Movies:
The Trotsky (sleep on film that really explored being weird and asking the why not give people more control over their lives)
Game:
Morrowind (First game that let me just ruin the plot and keep going, as a kid it probably one the most formative moments of really feeling like I had autonomy)
Edit: Spelled the movie wrong!
Second Morrowind. Great game, nothing else came after this. I think not everyone will like it, but the art style is really unique.
Tbh it's like the original Witcher for me. I put so many hours into them as a kid, but I tried replaying them and hated the gameplay.
Oh, I've never played it - would you rrecommend it?
Idk I loved it, it's an interesting story to me too, but the gameplay leaves some to be desired.
I can not find that movie. Did you spell it correctly?
"In Search of Schrödinger's Cat" - John Gibbon (1984)
Crash course in quantum physics and reality. Changed my perception of the world in a way that "things could be worse" could never accomplish on its own.
Bridgerton introduced me to the world of romance novels. What a crazy rabbit hole!
Andor baybee, Star Wars is at it's best when it's at it's most
Homestuck.
Not in the reading of it, which I did out of the momentum of Bard quest and Problem Sleuth, but in the way that it rippled through the online media landscape and affected discourse and things like Undertale, webcomics, and crowd funding.
Not in any "profound" way, but in a measurably gigantic one.
This is social media but I suppose that counts, Livejournal. Made friends there I still have 25 years later I am closer to than anyone else.
Podcasts count? Huberman Lab has been such a life-changing listen! Lots of great information about sleep and how our body functions
saw him with orgy, linkin park, and disturbed at lupos heartbreak hotel wbru birthday bash and he was honestly the best part <3
Probably The Prince, followed by Debt. For whatever reason, it broke my brain, and I stopped being intensely angry at rules breaking (by others or by myself). Growing up, I had this fairly common internal experience of viewing rules (often social rules, often implied) as being immutable moral truths. I would be furious if I had been taught a rule "Don't do X when Y". I would be both furious and distraught if someone did Y and was either not punished for it or even rewarded. Now it's very much tied to context and power. It's still frustrating when people are treated differently, but it doesn't keep me up at night in the same way.
I think this was also around the time I started watching Adam Curtis documentaries. Whatever else I think about him now, he does talk about power and society a lot, and the liberal confusion that occurs when they try to ignore power in their explanations of society.
Vagabond manga.
The Gospel of Thomas. Before going down that rabbit hole I had no idea that Lucretius had laid out evolution in 50 BCE and would have never thought there was a sect and text claiming Jesus was talking about quantized matter, evolution, and pre-computer simulation theory in an agreement with the Epicurean rejection of intelligent design while rebutting their conclusion that there must not be an afterlife.
Not only did the study of the work itself lead to mind blowing realizations about history and philosophy, but the sheer absurdity of its existence has (for me) led to heavily complementing the physical arguments for simulation theory and pushed it over the edge from something just "interesting to entertain" to something I'm fairly confident in.
If you'd told me 6 years ago a 2,000 year old document would change my perspective of metaphysics and core beliefs, I'd have laughed you out of the room. And yet it today stands as by far the most interesting thing I've ever researched and likely the most influential to date.
there was a sect and text claiming Jesus was talking about quantized matter, evolution, and pre-computer simulation theory
Wut
Yeah, really.
The Naassenes claimed his sower and mustard seed parables were about "indivisible seeds like a point as if from nothing" which "made up all things and were the originating cause of the universe" - language identical to Lucretius who writing in Latin used the term 'seed' in place of the Greek atomos ('indivisible').
The Gospel of Thomas, which they followed, further described concepts from Lucretius, like describing the notion the spirit arose from flesh (i.e. proto-evolutionary thought) as the greater wonder over the flesh arising from spirit (i.e. intelligent design). It describes the human being as an inevitable result and likened it to a large fish selected from many small fish, right before discussing how only what survived to reproduce multipled using specific language found in Lucretius which described failed biological reproduction as "seed falling by the wayside of a path."
Lucretius's view was that the world evolved from randomly scattered seeds which gave rise to humans whose souls depend on bodies and thus there's nothing after death.
The Thomasine tradition claims instead that while there was an original spontaneously existing (i.e. evolved) man, that this man brought forth a new being of light that recreated the universe within itself as a non-physical copy. And that even though the original man died off that this creator of light is still alive and we are the copies in the images of the original man within its copy of the cosmos. And that it's better to be a copy, because the originals really did have souls which depended on bodies and would die, but the copies do not actually have physical bodies.
The idea of a physical spontaneous original man preceding and bringing about a light-based creator which makes a copy of the universe and mankind within itself in order to escape the finality of death for physically based humans is remarkably similar to modern concepts of simulation theory, particularly as we now have trillion dollar companies having patented resurrecting the dead using AI and the data they leave behind, are putting AI agents into virtual worlds, are creating digital twins of the world around us, and are moving towards computing (especially for AI workloads) in light directly.
So yes, there really is a sect of Christianity in the first few centuries talking about quantized matter and evolution (both discussed in length by Lucretius 50 years before a Jesus was even born), and combining those ideas into what is effectively simulation theory millennia before the computer.
In fact, the "Gospel of Thomas" is more literally translated as "the good news of the twin" - which is fitting given its perspective that if one understands its claims about being a non-physical copy/twin of a physical original the reader will not fear death.
Well, there are many interesting things in antique literature in general. This particular text is, I agree, amazing, but it's a piece of religious writing.
Centuries I-IV AD were a more pluralistic time for the Mediterranean.
For me personally reading Lucian of Samosata was such a change.
Lucian saw a ship of men flying up to the moon as beyond possibility.
This tradition thought that mankind would literally create God, and saw some of the specifics of this with uncanny foresight to what's playing out in the present day.
I can think of few futurists more prescient than whoever was behind Thomas and details in the surrounding tradition.
Disco Elysium: I played Disco Elysium at a dark time in my life and seeing the protagonist hit absolute rock bottom and begin to cope with his myriad problems throughout the story amidst how fucked his situation (and the world's) was resonated with me a lot. I could go on a lot longer about this game, but it definitely changed my perspective on life and the world.
Mr. Robot: What starts out as a story about a hacker and the ethics of technology ends up as a look at personal trauma and coping mechanisms. As someone in tech who's dealt with a lot of mental health issues throughout my life, I (and my sister) saw a lot of me reflected in Elliot as well.
A lot of similarities between those two pieces of media, lol
Story time. I was taking about Christian Slater and how badass an actor he is and we both agreed on that point. Immediately to back up outlr claims I say, "Yeah Mr Robot is one best peices of media because he's in that."
Andy friend looks at me and just says he thought it was so dumb. I was appalled. I should have called him a fucking idiot but im not that type guy. Anyway he lost points in my book.
I agree with everything you just said about Mr Robot.
Disco Elysium:
Ah. I had KotORII:TSL in the same role. While the game you're talking about was apparently that for one girl with which we didn't understand each other. But the game is good and I think it did help me get to the better condition I'm in now.
Reading the parahumans story, "Worm", has changed how I look at people. It is my personal-favorite character study. There are dozens of characters who all have unique world views to explore.
A friend once gave me an ipod mini with Tony Robbins’s Personal Power series on it, and it was one of the best gifts I’ve ever received.
In fact, I’m gonna get in touch with that guy.
The Illuminatus Trilogy did a lot of heavy lifting in inspiring a sense of meta-skeptical relativism, though largely by offering a central hub for many other rabbit holes.
Gurren Lagann instilled me with a sense of inextinguishable optimistic determination, for myself individually and as a part of the human race
There are plenty of others, but these two had the most profound effects.
Edit: I almost forgot about this webcomic that lived in the back of my brain until I got a bidet.
I can see Craig of the Creek being changing for little kids
Cosmic Trigger or any other RAW books. I read so many of his books in my formative years and they dismantled or completely destroyed some of my previously held superstitions, biases, and beliefs about the world.
Pinkerton by Weezer. Its my favorite album of all time. It also introduced to a while bunch of other great albums, namely American Football's first album and Kid A by Radiohead. And El Scorcho is an absolute banger.
Yeah, it's Cracked.com, but humor me and give these two a read. I think on these quite a bit, even after many years.
Explains much as to how we humans act towards one another:
https://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html
How the hell Trump supporters even exist:
https://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-trumps-rise-that-no-one-talks-about
I read the first one. It was a very interesting read.
The guy who wrote those is very insightful. I also like his writing style. Thanks for sharing!
Huh, these are really good! I admit I definitely didn't see people born into rural poverty the same way I saw people born into urban poverty. That gives me a lot to think about!
Like 75% of my basic training division was either inner city poverty escapism or rural poverty escapism.
Ironically that became the uniting force of those people, something they could understand when everything else about the person is different.
Wow excellent picks. Read both of these and enjoyed the perspective. Thanks for sharing!
It’s too bad they laid off all their good writers about five years ago. At least we got Behind the Bastards out of it!
To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand Blue's Clues. The humour is extremely subtle, and without a solid grasp of theoretical physics most of the jokes will go over a typical viewer's head. There's also Blue's nihilistic outlook, which is deftly woven into his characterisation- his personal philosophy draws heavily from Narodnaya Volya literature, for instance. The fans understand this stuff; they have the intellectual capacity to truly appreciate the depths of these jokes, to realise that they're not just funny- they say something deep about LIFE. As a consequence people who dislike Blue's Clues truly ARE idiots- of course they wouldn't appreciate, for instance, the humour in Blue's existential catchphrase "a clue a clue," which itself is a cryptic reference to Turgenev's Russian epic Fathers and Sons. I'm smirking right now just imagining one of those addlepated simpletons scratching their heads in confusion as Traci Paige Johnson's genius wit unfolds itself on their television screens. What fools.. how I pity them. 😂
And yes, by the way, i DO have a Blue's Clues tattoo. And no, you cannot see it. It's for the ladies' eyes only- and even then they have to demonstrate that they're within 5 IQ points of my own (preferably lower) beforehand. Nothin personnel kid 😎
☝️ This comment changed my life 🙏🙏🙌
Can this comment become a legendary copy pasta of lemmy?
Blues Clues and "Scott's Tots". High IQ required or don't even bother
Why can't they be of higher IQ than you?
And why 5 points, doesn't communication gap theory push for 15?
I dislike 3 digit numbers
You fooled me, well played sir.
Thank you, glad this joke landed.
I like no-digit numbers best
Typing out the phrase “ninety-four IQ ladies only” in order to satisfy both conditions
Nice Rick&Morty copypasta you got there.
Bold of such a casual watcher to opine on her motivations.
If you had actually been paying attention, each clue represents one of the 12 arcana given context by the way it is revealed, each episode being a tarot reading that gives depth and context to her character.
A true fan would watch in order, and would discover each season clearly describes the fools journey with a reading for each step - at that point it just. It then repeats, revealing more of her backstory each season
I'll give the broad strokes, since I'm sure that's all a casual viewer like you is interested in.
Blue was born as the deity of a small tribe on the coast of modern day France. She loved her people and worked for them tirelessly, and they loved her as she lavished them with bountiful harvests and artistic inspiration. Her people were kind and righteous, creating beautiful sculptures and cloth that they traded generously. Then the sea people attacked.
It's unclear who they were, but her people were slaughtered and enslaved, her power slipping away, for she had given back all her people gave her, not considering her own needs. Slowly they died out, and knowledge of her name slowly died out.
Fading and in desperation she bound herself to a place, a cave in modern day Paris. Her heart broken by loss, she changed in those dark centuries. Her presence still brought fortune and so her former people's land was taken by others, but she no longer had love in her heart. She compelled them to bury their dead in the caverns under the city, where she feasted upon souls of the dead for generation after generation. But none knew her name, and so she barely was able to sustain her existence.
At the advent of WWII, knowledge of the occult reached a peak. The Nazi leadership heard of the abnormal luck of the city, and so made a deal with the French - they only wanted access to the city without revealing their goal.
The Nazis took the city, and drove the resistance down into the catacombs, giving them an excuse to seek her out.
They succeeded, and they found her. She was almost feral at this point, but after heavy losses they managed to imprison her in a relic, an urn containing scraps of bones of her people. On this urn, they engraved an inscription, a binding to a single person. That person would gain eternal youth and funnel power to her, but they misunderstood what she was - in effect, those bound to her died quickly.
The relic was captured at the end of the war, and ended up in Hollywood along with many other odds and ends. After several high profile deaths, they discovered that attention from children could sustain the needs of this unnamed being. By destroying their potential, a little at a time, the host would not age or be drained by the relic.
What no one expected was how well this would scale. The fallen deity known as "Blue" has swiftly recovered, and there's many fan theories about what this means.
And just to spell it out for the slower among you, this is a clear metaphor for capitalism, the effects of the industrial revolution, and the how in an effort to make children subservient , we reduce the future prospects of everyone, including those at the top
Unironically Deus Ex, it's full of cookie-cutter crazy conspiracy theories and references, but it introduced me to the literary genre of Cyberpunk and it's surrounding culture back in the day. If it wasn't for it, I probably wouldn't be so critical of modern consumerism and corporate culture. It helps that a lot of the game's social commentary remains very topical twenty years later, they simply don't make games like this anymore.
Just started the Fallout series a few months ago(3, now into 4) less neon but definitely highly critical of corporations' soullessness, consumerism, vanity and all other things that will disappear when important things happen. Incredible consistent aesthetic and feel.
If you're already liking 3 and 4, then your head will explode whenever you decide to give New Vegas a try.
I've heard that consistently. Love going into games blind, never even saw as much as a trailer for fallout before jumping in. Heard Vegas was the bomb, enjoying 4 for what it is now.
The Truman Show fucked me up as a child
Yeah, we all saw. Hope you're doing better now though, Mr. Burbank.
One of Jim Carrey's best movies
What’s so fucked up is how well that simulated world thing matches the ideas coming out of my own head
I read Asimov's Foundation series of books when I was 14 or so, and it made me a lifelong science fiction fan.
"The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins
Daft Punk's 1997 "Homework" album
"The Atomic Cafe" 1982 documentary film
Edit: Vonnegut, the far side and Calvin and Hobbes for making me feel like I'm not crazy and most people are peddling a tremendous amount of bullshit.
The Selfish Gene changed the way I see life itself. That and The Blind Watchmaker. I also love Unweaving the Rainbow.
Agreed on the Selfish Gene.
I started on Unweaving the Rainbow but didn't make much progress.
Dawkins can be a proper tool, but at least that book was quite interesting.
The Hubble Deep Field image struck the first major blow against my childhood indoctrination in young earth creationism.
I had a similar experience but with a book about Dinosaurs that contained scientifically accurate eons, etc.
I started to piece together that while we might not be 100% correct all the time, YEC doesn't even have an alternative. They just try and debunk evolution but have no scientific method/knowledge that proves they're correct.
Where's all the geological science that shows a 6000 year old earth? None. There should be competing theories, but instead it's just "you're wrong, trust me bro."
Midnight Gospel
The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury, it's a collection of short stories with a light meta story connecting them. The man feared technology, thought it would ruin society. It was written in 1951 and some of his thoughts on how technology could ruin people are eerily spot on.
The "smart home" story in particular is oddly prescient.
They Thought They Were Free. Book caused me to reevaluate exactly how politics at individual and social levels happened and how fascism works without any individual being inherently "evil." Class politics and interests followed closely behind to explain how evil can arise among populations that all consider themselves "good people"
https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html
Honestly, I see this text often quoted form the book but I don't find it super useful as a way to understand fascism. The steps and reforms were all taken for a reason and people agreed with that reason, even the apprehensive agreed enough to stay seated. I think this "separation" isn't the best thesis out of this book, because the Nazi Party didn't shift too much in terms of popularity throughout these shifts, except to grow more popular during wartime. The government promised something and many accepted those conditions or at least lent moral license to the achieving the goal and were unwilling to oppose the conditions.
Fascism is Liberalism when and where Liberalism fails to accomplish it's promises and must consume the people and stuff at the periphery to achieve its goals. A government is just as "far" from its people when it is doing good things that it's people desire as when it does bad things.
I love the book but have major issues with the ideological assumptions, mostly surrounding fascism's relationship to its people and to other ideologies
Heinlein's "The Door Into Summer". Both beacuse it reminds me that I might never find what I'm looking for; and because it taught me to never give up on looking, anyway.
I was bored on an airplane a while back and discovered a Japanese movie adaptation of A Door Into Summer: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_door_into_summer
It'd been 25 years since my mom read the story to me so I can't tell you how accurate the adaptation is but it hit the parts I remembered.
There have been several. I'll pick Eric Berne's book Games People Play.
I immediately recognised a few that I had played and, having been 'called out' on them by the book, it did lead me to stop and behave more constructively.
Can you give an example? Sounds interesting.
The 'original' game: Why Don't You - Yes But was the one that I first recognised in myself. There are plenty of other examples on that website, but as the page says, it doesn't have the full explanation and context.
Thanks!
Thank You for Arguing, Fourth Edition (Revised and Updated): What Aristotle, Lincoln, and Homer Simpson Can Teach Us About the Art of Persuasion
Drowning in a world of marketing and political slogans, this books helps me them how they attempt to persuade me. It also opened up a whole new interest in rhetoric.
The Selfish Gene, 1976, by Richard Dawkins.
Morrowind because I'm one of those people. But for real, that game in part defined large parts of my life. I got frustrated with the limits of the game so I started making mods, then got frustrated with the limits of the engine so I learned how to make my own. Now I work adjacent to the game industry with plans to get back into the industry proper in a couple years. Making games is all I've ever wanted to do and I owe a big part of that to Morrowind and the construction kit.
Were you involved in making OpenMW? That's so cool
No surprisingly, I haven't managed to contribute to the project. Reminds me I should definitely look into that though
It's a bit early to say if it's life changing, but Hi Ren made me reassess my thought patterns and negative self talk in ways therapy never could, which is pretty damn powerful for a musical performance.
How did it pull that off?
No health care professional ever told me that depression can be something that's just a part of who I am, and that maybe there is no getting rid of it. Rens message in the video feels so genuine and real that instead of passing it over as just another piece of pop culture, I stopped to really listen and think about what he's saying about managing your darker tendencies and learning to live with them. The song has maybe helped me accept myself a bit better, but as I said, it's still a bit too early to call if it's an actually permanent and useful effect.
Hi Ren is one of the only songs I will ever acknowledge as brave.
Mildy related, have you seen Sucker Punch? You may appreciate it more than the average movie goer (but it could also be off putting)
Haven't seen, will add to the shortlist. Thanks for the recommendation!
Whats your home life like? Hows your sleep?
I myself dont associate with any of the personal struggles discussed in 'Chalk Outlines' but dammit if it doesnt make me feel something, almost tears every time.
Thus spoke Zarathustra. I've been thinking about this book pretty much everyday for the past 20 years. It made me want to enjoy life and create great things.
https://youtu.be/xUiuVjX2ubQ?feature=shared
Transplant tourism in China 🇨🇳
There's only one reason to make a device to give people an invisible lobotomy with that contraption. Transplant tourism is a real thing, if you need a kidney, they'll find some poor Chinese citizen who's broken some menial law or just pull some poor Uyghur, labotomize them, poof there's your kidney match in short order.
Here's a video of what these people are doing https://youtu.be/xUiuVjX2ubQ?feature=shared
It changed my life because after seeing this, for all practical purposes, I try my very best to avoid things from China because I don't want one penny of my money going to support this barbaric inhumanity.
If I see "made in China" I will try my best to find an alternative. For example, I returned to razor mice because they were made in China and got one of the same model instead that was made in Taiwan. It was sort of a luck of the draw, I had to buy two of the same model before I got one from the country that I wanted it from and I returned the one that was made in China. It was about an extra hours worth of annoyance, but it's important to me to keep doing things like that, because of this video. Fuck the Chinese Communist Party and their treating other human beings like animals.
I think it's important to keep in mind that this happens everywhere in one form or another. For example Frontex, ICE, Solitary confinement and so on. I'm sure you're aware of more examples.
I believe it can be quantified in some way. I live in a country that has no problem with solitary confinement of minors at an early age for decades at a time.
I think that's deplorable and monstrous also. But something about government endorsed (don't tell me the CCP doesn't know about it) organ theft where they kill the donor and keep them alive through controlled brain damage so they can harvest more organs from them. Something about that seems worse to me than solitary confinement, enough that I changed my behavior.
Yes keep it in context, but whataboutism isn't an excuse for objectively dehumanizing behavior from anyone.
(Note: I'm aware of companies and name brands that invest in private prisons, I do my best to avoid those brands, really I try to live my life but do what I can within reason)
Yes I agree it isn't an excuse. Am I right to be worried about people's frustrations and their resulting anger? Change in China and other places must come from within.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/xUiuVjX2ubQ?feature=shared
https://piped.video/xUiuVjX2ubQ?feature=shared
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/dec/21/israeli-pathologists-harvested-organs
Urgh - MONSTEROUS behavior
Ugliness
Don't laugh but Ariana Grande :)
That's ok u/TacoButtPlug
No shame on that, Taylor Swift for me :)
Oh yes. I too am also a Swiftie.
Guitar Hero exposed me to the idea that there was great music that wasn't on the radio and inspired me to pick up an instrument
The ones that affected my life the most are probably Chuck Palahniuk's books. I read them as a teenager.
GEB by Douglas Hofstadter
Oh this seems to be forever on my to read list. At some point I need to actually pick it up! But I feel like I might be unable to finish it and... I don't know why I'm hesitant to actually start reading it
It's an incredibly hard read. It's legitimately a graduate school philosophy class reading level. I would love to take that theoretical class and read along/discuss with a group but it's hard to go through alone.
It took me a long time. As a kid just read the funny stories that started each chapter, but then got stuck into it while I was in high school. It’s so dense that you can read a chapter and then take weeks to digest it all.
I read about 10% in college and it’s served me well. That 10% has been valuable on its own.
Maybe instead of trying to determine why you’re avoiding it (a task that suffers from the halting problem), you could just read a few pages and see what happens.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Dune trilogy when I was in something like 6th or 7th degree. It was just such a great piece of fiction to introduce quite a few philosophical thoughts at the time. I still enjoy the books. (and the old film with Sting in it)
I'm not really a fan of the 1984 Dune, but David Lynch is a cinematic genius, and a madman.
Nineteen eighty four
Movie: Interstellar and Inception. Great mind-changing works, and they really influenced (especially Interstellar) how I perceive the world. Very deep, but also very "on-point". Book: The Cloud ("Die Wolke") is a book about the consequences of a radioactive catastrophe. It is written in German and is a young adults novel, and when I read it it really stuck with me. Game: Morrowind - great game, very open to interpretation. It has a lot of very deep sub-tones, but also doesn't go overboard and stays a game. Big recommendation :) Also Locks Quest as a video game - it is kind of a tower defense game, but also with a character ark. I really like it. Music: The OST from Locks Quest. I always listen to it when I'm stressed, and it is really nostalgic to me.
Hackers as a kid, got me into IT security. Daemon and Darknet by Daniel Suarez, gave me a new perspective on society.
Daemon is a fantastic book. I remember reading it in middle school and a classmate was like oh yeah my dad's friends with him
The American-Australian science fiction TV series "Farscape." The themes and characters were all so beautiful, the cast was talented, the writing was great, the season/series long plots were all tight with great pay offs. The story is kind of "Lost in Space" if it was set in a galaxy built out of the cantina scene from "Star Wars: A New Hope." The Jim Henson Workshop built all the creatures for it and the CG effects actually hold up pretty well.
One character, a priestess named Pa'u Zotoh Zhaan (played by Virginia Hey), was the emotional heart of many an episode. One episode in particular, she's literally debating a god who has come to collect the soul of another character. She chides the deity saying something to the effect of "as a priestess I have long ago come to terms with different peoples, different beliefs. But all must recognize that life values life." As a teenager, that really stuck with me. Really shaped how I see the world.
(not an ad, but the whole series is on YouTube, "free with ads" if anyone wants to check it out.)
Books.
Steven Universe defined my high school years and made me who I am.
Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter
Its quite the yarn: hard to believe it was hidden inside my string
Max Payne 2 had a huge influence on my interest in narratives in general and also ingrained noir into my skull permanently.
Terminator 2 made me want to get into movies and cameras. Along with The Thing
Dead Labor: Toward a Political Economy of Premature death does an excellent job at breaking down how capitalism literally profits off of your death.
Books: Plato's Republic (mostly interesting for a deep dive in the Socratic method, but also interesting to see where some modern ethics and philosophy is derived from in western traditions)
Go ask Alice (first real experience with experiencing what it's like to be truly a victim of abuse and addiction)
Flatland (great book about challenging fundamental assumptions!)
Think like a Freak (Really got me wanting to better analyse and thing about the world around me)
Harry Potter and the methods of rationality (great fanfic overall, but what really stuck with me was challenging my own conclusions after new evidence comes in, I really had to take a break and just think about that for a bit while reading this one)
Movies: The Trotsky (sleep on film that really explored being weird and asking the why not give people more control over their lives)
Game: Morrowind (First game that let me just ruin the plot and keep going, as a kid it probably one the most formative moments of really feeling like I had autonomy)
Edit: Spelled the movie wrong!
Second Morrowind. Great game, nothing else came after this. I think not everyone will like it, but the art style is really unique.
Tbh it's like the original Witcher for me. I put so many hours into them as a kid, but I tried replaying them and hated the gameplay.
Oh, I've never played it - would you rrecommend it?
Idk I loved it, it's an interesting story to me too, but the gameplay leaves some to be desired.
I can not find that movie. Did you spell it correctly?
Maybe https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1295072/ ?
No I didn't, good catch! Fixed now.
"In Search of Schrödinger's Cat" - John Gibbon (1984)
Crash course in quantum physics and reality. Changed my perception of the world in a way that "things could be worse" could never accomplish on its own.
Definitely make sure to stay up to date with the subject though. A lot has progressed in the past 40 years, such as the 2020 discovery that different observers of the cat can measure it as both alive and dead
Bridgerton introduced me to the world of romance novels. What a crazy rabbit hole!
Andor baybee, Star Wars is at it's best when it's at it's most
Homestuck.
Not in the reading of it, which I did out of the momentum of Bard quest and Problem Sleuth, but in the way that it rippled through the online media landscape and affected discourse and things like Undertale, webcomics, and crowd funding.
Not in any "profound" way, but in a measurably gigantic one.
This is social media but I suppose that counts, Livejournal. Made friends there I still have 25 years later I am closer to than anyone else.
Podcasts count? Huberman Lab has been such a life-changing listen! Lots of great information about sleep and how our body functions
VAST's first self titled album
YES!!!!!! So glad there are VAST fan out there
saw him with orgy, linkin park, and disturbed at lupos heartbreak hotel wbru birthday bash and he was honestly the best part <3
Probably The Prince, followed by Debt. For whatever reason, it broke my brain, and I stopped being intensely angry at rules breaking (by others or by myself). Growing up, I had this fairly common internal experience of viewing rules (often social rules, often implied) as being immutable moral truths. I would be furious if I had been taught a rule "Don't do X when Y". I would be both furious and distraught if someone did Y and was either not punished for it or even rewarded. Now it's very much tied to context and power. It's still frustrating when people are treated differently, but it doesn't keep me up at night in the same way.
I think this was also around the time I started watching Adam Curtis documentaries. Whatever else I think about him now, he does talk about power and society a lot, and the liberal confusion that occurs when they try to ignore power in their explanations of society.
Vagabond manga.
The Gospel of Thomas. Before going down that rabbit hole I had no idea that Lucretius had laid out evolution in 50 BCE and would have never thought there was a sect and text claiming Jesus was talking about quantized matter, evolution, and pre-computer simulation theory in an agreement with the Epicurean rejection of intelligent design while rebutting their conclusion that there must not be an afterlife.
Not only did the study of the work itself lead to mind blowing realizations about history and philosophy, but the sheer absurdity of its existence has (for me) led to heavily complementing the physical arguments for simulation theory and pushed it over the edge from something just "interesting to entertain" to something I'm fairly confident in.
If you'd told me 6 years ago a 2,000 year old document would change my perspective of metaphysics and core beliefs, I'd have laughed you out of the room. And yet it today stands as by far the most interesting thing I've ever researched and likely the most influential to date.
Wut
Yeah, really.
The Naassenes claimed his sower and mustard seed parables were about "indivisible seeds like a point as if from nothing" which "made up all things and were the originating cause of the universe" - language identical to Lucretius who writing in Latin used the term 'seed' in place of the Greek atomos ('indivisible').
The Gospel of Thomas, which they followed, further described concepts from Lucretius, like describing the notion the spirit arose from flesh (i.e. proto-evolutionary thought) as the greater wonder over the flesh arising from spirit (i.e. intelligent design). It describes the human being as an inevitable result and likened it to a large fish selected from many small fish, right before discussing how only what survived to reproduce multipled using specific language found in Lucretius which described failed biological reproduction as "seed falling by the wayside of a path."
Lucretius's view was that the world evolved from randomly scattered seeds which gave rise to humans whose souls depend on bodies and thus there's nothing after death.
The Thomasine tradition claims instead that while there was an original spontaneously existing (i.e. evolved) man, that this man brought forth a new being of light that recreated the universe within itself as a non-physical copy. And that even though the original man died off that this creator of light is still alive and we are the copies in the images of the original man within its copy of the cosmos. And that it's better to be a copy, because the originals really did have souls which depended on bodies and would die, but the copies do not actually have physical bodies.
The idea of a physical spontaneous original man preceding and bringing about a light-based creator which makes a copy of the universe and mankind within itself in order to escape the finality of death for physically based humans is remarkably similar to modern concepts of simulation theory, particularly as we now have trillion dollar companies having patented resurrecting the dead using AI and the data they leave behind, are putting AI agents into virtual worlds, are creating digital twins of the world around us, and are moving towards computing (especially for AI workloads) in light directly.
So yes, there really is a sect of Christianity in the first few centuries talking about quantized matter and evolution (both discussed in length by Lucretius 50 years before a Jesus was even born), and combining those ideas into what is effectively simulation theory millennia before the computer.
In fact, the "Gospel of Thomas" is more literally translated as "the good news of the twin" - which is fitting given its perspective that if one understands its claims about being a non-physical copy/twin of a physical original the reader will not fear death.
Well, there are many interesting things in antique literature in general. This particular text is, I agree, amazing, but it's a piece of religious writing.
Centuries I-IV AD were a more pluralistic time for the Mediterranean.
For me personally reading Lucian of Samosata was such a change.
Lucian saw a ship of men flying up to the moon as beyond possibility.
This tradition thought that mankind would literally create God, and saw some of the specifics of this with uncanny foresight to what's playing out in the present day.
I can think of few futurists more prescient than whoever was behind Thomas and details in the surrounding tradition.
I have several!
Disco Elysium: I played Disco Elysium at a dark time in my life and seeing the protagonist hit absolute rock bottom and begin to cope with his myriad problems throughout the story amidst how fucked his situation (and the world's) was resonated with me a lot. I could go on a lot longer about this game, but it definitely changed my perspective on life and the world.
Mr. Robot: What starts out as a story about a hacker and the ethics of technology ends up as a look at personal trauma and coping mechanisms. As someone in tech who's dealt with a lot of mental health issues throughout my life, I (and my sister) saw a lot of me reflected in Elliot as well.
A lot of similarities between those two pieces of media, lol
Story time. I was taking about Christian Slater and how badass an actor he is and we both agreed on that point. Immediately to back up outlr claims I say, "Yeah Mr Robot is one best peices of media because he's in that."
Andy friend looks at me and just says he thought it was so dumb. I was appalled. I should have called him a fucking idiot but im not that type guy. Anyway he lost points in my book.
I agree with everything you just said about Mr Robot.
Ah. I had KotORII:TSL in the same role. While the game you're talking about was apparently that for one girl with which we didn't understand each other. But the game is good and I think it did help me get to the better condition I'm in now.
Reading the parahumans story, "Worm", has changed how I look at people. It is my personal-favorite character study. There are dozens of characters who all have unique world views to explore.
A friend once gave me an ipod mini with Tony Robbins’s Personal Power series on it, and it was one of the best gifts I’ve ever received.
In fact, I’m gonna get in touch with that guy.
The Illuminatus Trilogy did a lot of heavy lifting in inspiring a sense of meta-skeptical relativism, though largely by offering a central hub for many other rabbit holes.
Gurren Lagann instilled me with a sense of inextinguishable optimistic determination, for myself individually and as a part of the human race
There are plenty of others, but these two had the most profound effects.
Edit: I almost forgot about this webcomic that lived in the back of my brain until I got a bidet.
I can see Craig of the Creek being changing for little kids
This: https://youtu.be/A-Rm1DsV7GM?si=jSkPqYnhMy8NXz7q
nice
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/A-Rm1DsV7GM?si=jSkPqYnhMy8NXz7q
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
HTML 4 for Dummies
Cosmic Trigger or any other RAW books. I read so many of his books in my formative years and they dismantled or completely destroyed some of my previously held superstitions, biases, and beliefs about the world.
Pinkerton by Weezer. Its my favorite album of all time. It also introduced to a while bunch of other great albums, namely American Football's first album and Kid A by Radiohead. And El Scorcho is an absolute banger.
Red Dwarf anyone?
Lego Fortnite