TempleOS - a very gifted individual made his own OS from scratch by himself but was thwarted by his own schizophrenia and delusions of persecusion. He was also incredibly racist. Ultimately though it’s very sad story seeing him lose his grip on reality thinking government agencies were after him and he was a prophet doing God’s work. It’s a decade long saga, he ended up homeless for a long while and died a few years ago.
John McAffee - talking about delusional tech guys, this one takes it to the highest level. This guy travelled the world running from the u.s. govt for tax evasion, won a game of russian roulette through quantum immortality (debatable), killed his neighbor for poisoning his dog(allegedly), and was an avid crypto enthusiast. He was found dead in a spanish prison right before he could be brought back to his homeland. It was declared a suicide but many people don’t believe that.
it is terrifying how schizophrenia can just pop up whenever, completely unexpected. his came about at age 27 and completely derailed his life. i wouldnt wish schizophrenia on anyone
Terry’s story is equally fascinating and heart-breaking. It’s sweet how his story hasn’t been forgotten, in fact some people are currently modernizing TempleOS through a fork called Zeal OS. It’s even on github and all: https://github.com/Zeal-Operating-System/ZealOS
That’s so nice. I wish he could’ve seen that.
He wasn’t wrong about the glowies tho…
I went down the rabbit hole via the fittingly titled TempleOS - Down the Rabbit Hole and wow.
Every single one of his videos is top notch. Easily one of my favorites.
It was declared a suicide but many people don’t believe that.
Not saying he didn’t commit suicide, but he actually tweeted this:
Say what you will about him, the man revolutionized hammocks, for better or worse.
deleted by creator
Well this was a nice trip!
This is my new favorite thing
Simon Whistler’s Decoding the Unknown has a couple of great episodes about Unfavorable Semicircle and Cicada 3301.
Oh, I have so, so, so many.
HeatherWesthill/KorraFlir/00000p- Absolute tangled web of weird internet posting. Here’s a post covering, like, some of it. It was never clear whether it was an ARG, a troll, a crazy person… or all three.
Erratas/Exer Erb- an internet mystery known as “the search term that makes people disappear”, and a Youtuber covering it who… disappeared. More recently the guy behind Erratas came out and said it was him, but he claims to not know anything about who Exer Erb was or why he vanished.New chronology is an alternative history theory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_chronology_(Fomenko)
The new chronology is a pseudohistorical conspiracy theory proposed by Anatoly Fomenko who argues that events of antiquity generally attributed to the ancient civilizations of Rome, Greece and Egypt actually occurred during the Middle Ages, more than a thousand years later.
The conspiracy theory further proposes that world history prior to AD 1600 has been widely falsified to suit the interests of a number of different conspirators including the Vatican, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Russian House of Romanov, all working to obscure the “true” history of the world centered around a global empire called the “Russian Horde”.
Related to this, some keywords to search up: Tartary, Tartaria, Mud flood, stolenhistory.
This is a fun one. Some of the photos are half-convincing, but no doubt mischaracterized/pulled out of context. Still fun to read up on.
Just found this ActivityPub m/space post about largest structures in the Universe and I didn’t even start this awesome rabbit hole yet 🤯
https://kbin.social/m/space/t/122512/Largest-map-of-the-universe-I-could-find#comments
Ted the Caver
The Flashkit forums user who has been looking for help making a game… for the past twenty three years… in the long-outdated Flash 4. They first responded to the thread’s only commenter a whole seven years AFTER the thread’s original creation, and has since been irregularly posting in the thread seeking help as if they’re perpetually trapped in the year 2000.
I wonder whether ChatGPT could help them coding flash
https://icebergcharts.com/ . There’s a chart for almost everything, you could go for hours just browsing there.
Petscop
I’d say the Tsuki Project (Systemspace) and the Saturn black cube stuff are really interesting. Tsuki project was this sort of cyberpunk neo-religious cult that prompted some members to suicide. The Saturn black cube stuff is an alt look on occultism and modern symbolism relating to the worship of the roman deity saturn. Both are very interesting to dive into.
One of my all time wtf favorites is Ted the Caver.
Rentahitman.com is a website about renting a hitman that will call law enforcement on you, instead of dispatching a hitman, should you attempt to use their service.