Extropia's Children 2025 Feb 2
Linked is a seven-part series by Silicon Valley veteran Jon Evans dissecting the weird underbelly of the rationalist/effective altruism communities, written in 2022 but surfacing again now due to the downright bizarre (and murderous) ZIzian death cult that's splintered away from ... mainstream rationalism? What in the five fucks is going on inside the rationalism movement that death cults can even exist within its sphere? What business do cults have with rationalism, effective altruism, cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence, Scott Alexander, and the technological singularity? Evans makes it clear that rationalist thought isn't a cult, but the movement sure is left smelling a lot like the techbro version of Scientology.

In light of this newest rationalist-cult mess spilling out into the larger world, Evans has written a piece updating us about the ZIzians and how their leader faked her own death before spurring several highly-educated data scientists to go about attacking people with swords among other implements of murder.

Ah yes, peak rationality.

Wordpress Leadership Explosion 2024 Dec 20
Slowly exploding in front of the world since September is WordPress's leadership. WordPress, for anyone who doesn't know, is software used to make and run websites. A lot of websites. Something like 43.3% of the websites on the internet. Everyone from your neighborhood cafe to the State of California to Sony Music. (the brandensite does not use WordPress – I find it bloated and burdensome.) And while WordPress is an Open Source project, it's de facto controlled by its creator, Matt Mullenweg. This hasn't mattered outside of project leadership – Matt's direction has rarely courted controversy – until recently.

Because recently, Matt decided that one of the big for-profit WordPress hosting companies, WP Engine, even though they were obeying their contracts and agreements, still wasn't contributing to the WordPress project enough money, wasn't giving back enough to the community. So he used his control over the WordPress project to throw a public tantrum and shut down their link to WordPress, stranding all their customers' websites. WP Engine responded like the adults in the room, with a PR-crafted letter and lawyer-crafted lawsuit, and the courts have since forced WordPress to play fair. So Matt, who is worth somewhere around $400m, in turn threw another public tantrum and shut down all WordPress.org account registrations.

Which is what spurred Joost de Valk, probably the second-biggest name at WordPress, to write the linked blog post, where he basically says (in polite words) that it's time for WordPress to get rid of Matt Mullenweg and move to proper board-of-directors-style leadership, and oh yes also that he's actually already taking the steps to do so. Matt commented on Joost's post:

I think this is a great idea for you to lead and do under a name other than WordPress. There’s really no way to accomplish everything you want without starting with a fresh slate from a trademark, branding, and people point of view.

Which I read as a very polite "fuck off."

Of course, if you check on Matt Mullenweg's website yourself, this is all a smear campaign and Matt's of course being a completely reasonable dictator and all his dictatorial actions are justified. Naturally.

Yet still, you can't tell me it's better for this software that's so massively important to the web to be under the control of one person, especially one person who acts like a spurned child on a playground lashing out against the people who are playing with the toys in a way he doesn't like.

The Cosmos... Reconsidered? 2024 Dec 3
Advanced concepts in physics are notoriously hard to understand, taking smart people years to achieve mastery in even narrow fields.

But what if that was because all that years of accumulated physics knowledge and theory and experimentation and observation was wrong? What if, instead of the world of physicists such as Albert Einstein and Erwin Schrödinger and Paul Dirac and Max Planck being the foremost authority on the topics to which they've dedicated their lives, it was this retired electronics tinkerer slash photographer who was the true master? After all, if the so-called "physicists" were really experts on the topic, they'd have a website as awesome as this, which explains literally everything without even resorting to any of those pesky mathematical equations.

Tulpas 2024 Nov 23
Tulpas are imaginary friends that these people believe are sentient. No, really. They have their own subreddit, which goes without saying.

Tulpas are people just like you or me, and if you forget about them or get cold feet and stop, it will essentially kill them.

Yikes.

Holy City 2024 Nov 11
San Jose's very own utopia-slash-cult, taking a spot in 1919 just south of Los Gatos. Founded in San Francisco by a white supremacist misogynistic bigamist, the cult made money by masquerading as a roadside tourist trap on the route between San Jose and Santa Cruz, complete with carbonated liquor and peep shows. It was granted California's second ever radio station license, somehow getting the callsign KFQU, which became known for drifting away from its assigned frequency. By the time Highway 17's completion bypassed Holy City in 1940, their reputation for supporting Hitler's Nazi Germany had already set the place on the path towards destitution.

The land has since changed owners several times, but game respects game, and it is now owned by the Church of Scientology.

Atlas Fredonyer 2024 Oct 5
"Doctor" Atlas Fredonyer was a California pioneer who was the first to "discover" what is now known to be the northern limit of the Sierra Nevada mountains. It has unfortunately since been named after him: Fredonyer Pass, and recent attempts to change the name have failed. Because Fredonyer certainly does not deserve the respect such a naming would imply: he was most well known for raping his 15-year-old stepdaughter, although he plead that she was a whore and somehow got himself pardoned by Governor Leland Stanford.

While nobody is quite sure what Fredonyer was a "doctor" of, it is known that the citizens of Rooptown found their town's land claim had never been filed at the state office when they woke up to suddenly find themselves living in "Fredonyer City." This hornswaggling was corrected within a year, thankfully, when the town was officially renamed Susanville after Susan Roop, daughter of founder and first governor of Nevada Territory Isaac Roop, who mistakenly believed his town to be in Nevada (and staged a minor war over this belief).

The heavy-set Fredonyer would proceed to thankfully rid ourselves of his presence when he died around 48 years old from a failed surgery to remove a bottle he shoved up his ass.

The State Home at Eldridge 2024 Aug 30
On the topic of insane asylums, I don't believe in haunted buildings except here, at the home founded as "California Home for the Care and Training of Feeble Minded Children." They even called the town its in "Eldridge" – and you though Lovecraft was making this shit up. Buried in the woods, the place is positively eerie. Don't believe the lies on this historical society page, the real history of the facility is as full of abuse and horror as it looks, although it took until 2012 for the state to finally shut the place down. Jack London even wrote an escape story about inmates of this place.

Agnews East 2024 Aug 30
Santa Clara Valley famously was host to the "Agnews Development Center" – a euphemism for what they used to call insane asylums. The main "west" campus still stands, once a Sun Microsystems and now an Oracle campus. But less famous is the secondary "East" campus, which kept operating until 2011 and still exists, although only in ruin. It's abandoned and covered with graffiti, the last great palace of urban exploration in the South Bay.

Moron lies his way into full scholarship and then brags about it online 2024 Jul 26
Here's a reddit thread from someone who frauded and scammed their way through high school in India and into Lehigh University in Philadelphia and actually pulled all this off. Until they decided to brag about the entire thing on a reddit post... which was promptly turned over to Lehigh's fraud team, who then had the student arrested and deported. Brilliant.

How did a hiker get lost for 10 days on a 1-mile creek surrounded by civilization? 2024 Jul 26

For a short moment this summer my home of Santa Cruz County was in the global spotlight. The reason: A man was miraculously rescued after being lost for 10 days in the forest, found alive and well. Big outlets like the New York Times, CNN, and the BBC jumped on the story, posting photos of the hiker covered in mud, overcome with emotion as he was reunited with his family.

And while I was relieved that he’d been found safe, in my opinion, all the media outlets were missing a key point. The story wasn’t adding up. ... Someone who doesn’t know the Santa Cruz Mountains well might read that story during their morning coffee, crack a small smile at the heart-warming news, and never think about it again. But, having grown up in the area, I was left scratching my head. How on Earth does a local who is, according to the NYT, 'an experienced backpacker who has traversed other rugged regions of the United States,' get lost for 10 days?

Joe vs Elan School 2024 Jun 21
A long and autobiographic webcomic-ish tale about what it's like to be ripped out of your adolescence and shoved into an abusive prison that presents to the world as a Center for Troubled Teens, this author was instrumental (according to himself) in bringing down the institution which traumatized him. Chapters 1 to 50 are about life in the program, the remaining 50 (which get progressively longer with each chapter) are about his life afterwards and get a little bit meandering.

The world of estranged parents' forums 2024 Apr 9
I am blessed to have no estrangements in my family but boy do I love reading about them in other families via the joy that is internet gossip. Used to be just us dorks online back in the old days, but now that literally everyone is online, so with it comes those narcissistic parents who claim they don't understand why their children have stopped speaking to them. And apparently there's forums full of them, reassuring each other that their children are indeed selfish and that surely they themselves are not the problem. The trick is to remember that when they say "I just don't understand" it's codeword for "I refuse to understand" – the rhetorical refuge of assholes.

Spellcraft as a Service 2024 Mar 8
"Spellcaster Talia Felix has been providing genuine magick spells since 2009." So you can just go on this website and place an order and magick will be done without you having to lift a finger... what a time to be alive.

An Extremely Thorough Guide to ‘Who TF Did I Marry’ 2024 Feb 28
When I was a kid, my best friend's stories never added up. As I grew up and my penchant for believing fantasy withered, I came to realize that he wasn't living a spectacular life, but was just a pathological liar. That part of my life is now over, and has left me vigilant for bullshit. And so I'm fascinated by others' tales of encounters with these liars, such as this woman in the linked post who apparently married a habitual liar. Why do these liars spin their lies? Is it just wish fulfillment, attempting to be the person they wish they were? No, I believe it's something deeper, some compulsion to manipulate the people around them, to push the limits of their gullibility.

Rajneeshee Bioterror Attack 2024 Feb 12
In September 1984, there was an outbreak of salmonella food poisoning in The Dalles, Oregon, where at least 751 cases were confirmed. This, in a community numbering only in the 10s of thousands, was massive in scale. The CDC blamed poor food handling practices. It was only a year later, when the FBI was investigating the nearby cult Rajneeshee that they discovered, in a lab on the cult's compound, vials carrying organisms identical to the outbreak strain that authorities understood the salmonella outbreak to in fact be bioterrorism, the first and most successful major such attack in our country's history. That this incident is so little-known baffles me.

First Spectrum of Ball Lightning 2024 Jan 12
This article is just shy of ten years old, but it's still new to me. Ball lightning was caught on a fancy physicist's spectrograph! They were recording regular lightning strikes and caught the incredibly-rare ball lightning purely by luck. This doesn't preclude that there's other types of ball lightning out there from different sources, but this ball lightning in particular was made, turns out, from dirt. Why dirt? I'll let the physicists explain:

One popular theory is that ball lightning is caused when lightning striking the ground vaporizes some of the silicate minerals in soil. Carbon in the soil strips the silicates of oxygen through chemical reactions, creating a gas of energetic silicon atoms. These then recombine to form nanoparticles or filaments which, while still floating in air, react with oxygen, releasing heat and emitting the glow.

Axonometric Realism: “Hortus Conclusus” by Beate Gütschow (2019) 2023 Dec 31
The mundane given new perspective by tearing the image apart and putting it back together in a rigid, psychopathic geometry. This may be how the world is rendered in the eyes of crazy people.

Agents of the Superspectral Order 2023 Dec 6
Likely the weirdest blog I follow is the one behind this linked post, written by the mysterious "Schwab" who weaves a thread through everything, treating reports of the paranormal not as gibberish, but as symptoms the cause of which humanity still does not understand. This post, unlike most, is unlocked and free to all visitors.

Saudia Arabia is spending $1T to create an arcology 2023 Nov 20
And nobody told me??? How rude!

Denver Airport's website has a page listing the conspiracy theories about it 2023 Oct 26
The reptilian overlord's tail is in its mouth tonight. This is obviously a counter-informational campaign designed to make those who know the truth look like fools. How deep does the rabbit hole go?

The Law of One 2023 Oct 16
Did professor Don Elkins have a series of 106 taped conversations between himself and "a sixth-density social memory complex that formed on Venus about 2.6 billion years ago" named Ra, channeled through the person of Carla Rueckert? These people seem to think so. Strange, though, that Uriel in her many extra-terrestrial communications never spoke to (or of) Ra.

Devo covering Neil Young's "Ohio" 2023 Oct 15
Here's a 2002 cover of Devo playing the song "Ohio," written by Neil Young about the Kent State shootings. But why would this goofy band play such a serious song? Quoth songfacts:

Mark Mothersbaugh and Jerry Casale were on campus, and after the shootings, they developed the band Devo based on the concept of 'De-Evolution,' meaning the human race was regressing. Said Casale, 'It refocused me entirely. I don't think I would have done Devo without it. It was the deciding factor that made me live and breathe this idea and make it happen.'

Uriel and the Interplanetary Confederation 2023 Sep 28
We're all looking for answers about to the big questions of the cosmos. (Well, most of us.) Why are we here? Is there life out there? What does it mean? Good news, these people have answers!

The Secret History And Strange Future Of Charisma 2023 Jun 29
Grifters, conmen, and cult leaders are fascinating in how they are able to bring people into their orbit and convince them to do things against their own best interests. This long article talks about the nearly-undefinable term "charisma" and how it is, and has been, understood throughout time.

From A-List Celebrity to Degenerate YouTube Streamer 2023 May 16
I'm not usually one for keeping to celebrity gossip, but Andy Dick's (rightful) fall from grace has been so brutal, it's to the point where you actually might feel a glimmer of pity for him. He has live-streamed not just his own surrender to addiction and abandonment by his one-time friends, but also his kidnapping, repeatedly being assaulted and assaulting others, exploitation, and absolute failure. This is a 45 minute summary of the low-lights.