Ask Lemmy

Subcultures among subcultures have existed for as long as humans in their infinite creativity existed.

• Babyfurs and Diaper Lover Furries-They focus on regression. And they really love diapers.

• Densha Otaku - They love photographing trains. They also get extremely violent when you ruin their shot of trains.

• Cyberdeck Builders- They build retro computers with 80s SciFi aesthetic and take things too far.. Using or even building hardware to mimic timigs exactly like they behaved in 70s.

• Grandmacore - People obsessed with grandma aesthetics. Very. Very. Obsessed.

• Swedish Raggare - American 1950s greaser culture filtered through rural Sweden and dialled to 11.

• Sapeurs - Rural Kinshasa men spend 1000s of dollars, sometimes sacrificing rent and food, to buy high end designer shit from Europe. They walk through dirt roads dressed like 19th century French dandies.

• Otherkin & Therians - They think they aren't humans or at least partially non humans.

• **Birds aren't real **- They think birds aren't real. And that they are all robots, drones sent by CIA or other secretive gangs.

• Chronological Revisionists - Popularised by a German historian named Heribert Illig, followers of the Phantom Time Hypothesis believe that the Early Middle Ages (specifically 614–911 AD) never actually happened. They claim that Holy Roman Emperor Otto III and Pope Sylvester II completely fabricated three centuries of history, including the entire existence of Emperor Charlemagne, just so Otto could rule during the monumental year 1000 AD. According to them, we are actually living in the early 1700s.

• The Tartaria - They believe that a technologically advanced, global utopian empire called Tartaria existed until the late 1800s. This empire supposedly used the domes and spires on old buildings (like world's fair pavilions or old European castles) to pull free, wireless electromagnetic energy straight from the ether. They believe a massive, worldwide "Mud Flood" wiped them out, and modern history was rewritten to hide the existence of free energy.

• Deros Believers - Shaver claimed that humanity used to share Earth with an ancient, advanced race. When the sun started emitting toxic radiation, the advanced race fled the planet, leaving behind their underground cities. According to Shaver, these caves are now inhabited by Deros (Detrimental Robots)—degenerate, sadistic humanoids who use the abandoned ancient "ray technology" to project voices into the minds of surface-dwellers, cause freak accidents, and steal our thoughts.

There are a few more.. But I'm too bored to type them here.

Juggalos are pretty out there. Huffing nitrous, and drinking shitty beer and root beer? And they are super proud of it. I'm pretty sure there's meth involved. I don't think they do much harm to anybody but themselves, and maybe anybody they influence into becoming a juggalo. But man, what a weird group of people.

I've always found puritanical groups quite interesting. They seem to evolve out of any subculture be it religious or not. Take the 'straight edge' culture, a group of hardcore punk kids who rebelled against the excesses of the punk underground and swear an oath against drinking, drugs and casual sex.

On the religious front you have groups like the shakers. An offshoot of the quakers whose utopian vision prohibited all sex. As a consequence the movement all but died out as they couldn't reproduce to create new members!

Space deniers.

They are a sub-set of flat earthers. Not all flat earthers are space deniers, but every space denier I've seen is a flat earther.

Some of the more prominent ones like Level Earth Observer spend innumerable hours picking apart International Space Station live footage as "fake". Things like space rocket launches need to be picked apart to absurd degrees as well. Every camera glitch, every stutter, every little movement is hyper-analyzed and declared to be a fraud.

I find it all fascinating. Some of these deniers put forth their own lay theories, which are usually very Biblical in bent, but many of them like LEO will twist themselves into incoherent knots refusing to admit they have a viewpoint and that they are "just asking questions" despite pushing back in a very particular way to all the answers they get.

Some of them like "CC from New York, Westchester County" are just totally off the deep end, not even playing word games, just conspiratorially ranting without even internal consistency.

I've only ever interacted with a space denier directly once and it was as equally interesting as it was frustrating.

There's a big flat earth/space denier overlap with other fringe ideas like young earth creationism which gets you into Kent Hovind territory. That's interesting in its own way but also full of slime.

The Luddites were a labour movement with really admirable goals. They were only anti technology because it was being used to screw over textile workers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite

antiracist skinheads

I've read about these guys. Their take on it is that the skins started as a working class solidarity movement (the short hair is for safety while working on factory machinery) that got corrupted by nationalism and they have more in common with immigrant workers than with their own country's capitalists.

Rojava, an socialist autonomous region in northern Syria: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rojava_Revolution

And the Zapatistas, another successful socialist insurgency in mexico: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zapatista_Army_of_National_Liberation

The Weather Underground were a leftist militant group in the US who did a bunch of bombings and riots in the 1970: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_Underground

There's a decent documentary about them: https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0343168/

I found Urban eXperiment to be kind of an interesting group. They're the folks who built a hidden cinema in the Paris Catacombs.

Boyfriend took me to see The Seventh Seal over the weekend, and in that I learned that Flagellantism rose out of the Black Death. As in, they couldn't psychologically handle the Black Death so much that they turned to whipping themselves to pray for the plague to end. They would travel through towns, performatively whip themselves, and scream at people to repent.

My dad was part of a masonic lodge later on in life and, what I got from meeting a couple of his colleagues and talking to him about it, it really wasn't that interesting. It's basically a social space for older men with some connections/money and a lot of rituals (which my dad described very giddily, lol, the superficial fool). Most likely influential in some way (as any group of uhh "funny" old men with reach can be) but kinda meh... it didn't seem like he learned anything transcendental or important from his time there.

Spiritualists conducting scam stances in 1850s Boston, the Fox sisters. Their scam was done by "knocking noises" that were generated by the sisters cracking joints or even just tapping on the table or floor.

The circles they traveled in included Quakers, suffragettes, high society, and financiers. (Some of their early seances centered on stock market predictions, and made them a good deal of money.)

I just love that intersection of societies coming together to be scammed by some pretty bright women, in a really interesting time in our national history. Strict religious beliefs in a marriage with new age free thought.

I have kind of wanted to write a book centered on that time but never found a good hook.

My grandmother was an eventual product of that generation in Boston. Very equal rights for women while in a weird religious sect, Christian Science, founded by feminist Mary Baker Eddy.

The Irish Travelers