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
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 😎
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.
I read Asimov's Foundation series of books when I was 14 or so, and it made me a lifelong science fiction fan.
Midnight Gospel
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
The Selfish Gene, 1976, by Richard Dawkins.
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.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
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.
Nineteen eighty four
Books.
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: 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!
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.
Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter
Its quite the yarn: hard to believe it was hidden inside my string
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.
Andor baybee, Star Wars is at it's best when it's at it's most
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.
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.
Vagabond manga.
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.
Steven Universe defined my high school years and made me who I am.
Bridgerton introduced me to the world of romance novels. What a crazy rabbit hole!
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
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.
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.
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.
2 girls 1 cup.
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.
Red Dwarf anyone?
I can see Craig of the Creek being changing for little kids
Lego Fortnite
