Bridgerton introduced me to the world of romance novels. What a crazy rabbit hole!
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.
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.
"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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Vagabond manga.
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.
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.
I can see Craig of the Creek being changing for little kids
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