anything qanon related will make your brain implode faster than a carbon fiber pressure hull at 12k feet.
edit: this is not a good thing
A while ago I discovered that my home town newspaper made their entire archive searchable online. For fun I decided to search for my family to see if anyone had been in the papers.
The only one I found was my dad in a city council meeting public comment session arguing against fluoridation of the water supply and saying it was a communist plot.
Yep. That's my dad. I once found a box of John Birch society leaflets in our attic. If it wasn't for the fact that operating anything more complex than a light switch is effectively beyond him, he'd be up to his scalp in q-anon bullshit.
As it is, the tv never changes from fox news.
Tor. A serious study of as many .onion sites as I could find. There are many reasons why people want to be anonymous. I don't know why, I just felt compelled to look at the edges of humanity.
Back in the early 2000s, I heard tell of Freenet, thought it sounded like a cool project, and started poking around there. I soon determined that a lot of the material being exchanged there was not anything I wanted anywhere near my disk, even encrypted. Deleted it pretty darn quick.
I've used Freenet multiple times in the early 2000s. I don't remember anything crazy, I wasn't looking for it either. Just conspiracy theory, and photos smuggled from North Korea.
Sounds like when I was a kid in middle school around that era and just discovering the wild world of internet porn. Saw girls my age in some of the darker corners of the net back then, and somehow something clicked that I probably shouldn't be seeing what I was seeing.
I'm almost afraid to ask, but what did you find?🫣
In trying to prove to a friend that fluoride in the water wasn't bad, I had to dig into the conspiracy to refute each point.
Did your research end up changing your friend's mind?
Not OP, but take a wild guess
He did conceded on some the absolutely bat shit claims but couldn't bring himself to fully believe the fluoride shouldn't be in the water.
I still prefer OG T-Dazzle
Can you post your points?
Sorry this was a long time ago. The guy has definitely mellowed some since though he did have a brief Stephen Crowder stint during the pandemic. Old habits die hard.
One time I had a weird skin thing and was trying to look up whether I should be worried about it, and stumbled onto a bunch of shit about Morgellons Disease, in which people think they have fibers or parasites growing out of their skin.
I just had a weird ingrown hair.
Yeah I also learned the hard way not to look up skin diseases on the internet. And if you must, disable images first.
Wikipedia still catches me off guard every so often.
Ok, this was years ago, so the details are a little vague. Maybe that's not such a bad thing, but it might make the story a little less interesting. But it was very creepy/disturbing.
I was looking at an open source software project for something (don't remember what) and was exploring the home site for the project. It all seemed very techy and geeky and, while I don't remember what the project was, I remember it looked very useful.
I continued to poke around among the documentation and, after I'd found everything I wanted about the project itself, began looking around the site more generally. As well as being the home page for the project, it was also the home page for the developer himself.
I read through his "about" page and it all seemed perfectly normal for us geeky types and then I clicked on a link that said something like "pictures".
What I then encountered was a warning page. It said that what followed was several pictures of dead bodies in various states of decomposition. It said that the site owner enjoyed looking as these pictures. It didn't say explicitly, but it was strongly implied that it was sexual pleasure he experienced.
I'm grateful that he put that warning page there because I did not want to see those pictures. I quickly closed the browser completely and sat in a state of shock for a few minutes.
The idea of those pictures was bad enough, but to come across them (or the idea of them) so out of the blue and in a completely different context was extremely disturbing.
Eugenia Cooney, YouTuber and streamer who seems to be dying of anorexia. There's more disturbing shit such as her weird relationship with her mom and the way she seems to pander to anorexia fetishists.
I can't recall the creepiest, so here's a kinda eerie website I found called Terminal 00:
https://www(dot)angusnicneven(dot)com
It's not necessarily super disturbing, but it has a design that is a bit eerie and trippy, to me at least.
Not a rabbit hole per-se, but I've found at least three accounts of different people suffering some kind of dementia. One of them in particular was actively deteriorating and was paranoid that she was suffering Lyme disease. She wasn't; she was losing her mind and it was obvious from her post history. So sad.
Anytime you feel sick and google the symptoms...
Start to program.
