Through no fault of my own, I’ve accidentally stumbled into a themed reading list. It wasn’t on purpose, but definitely my last three books have explored themes of memory, belief, and hazardous information.

thanks to Dan Olson I got kinda in to passively watching GME cultists on reddit predict the second coming of financial Jesus every week, which, despite stubbornly refusing to happen for the past 4 years, is still going to happen any minute now

sometimes I wonder how long they can wait but then I remember that the Christians are still at it two thousand years later so I don’t think their pile of imaginary shorts are going anywhere fast

i wonder to what extent random redditors own a failing brick and mortar chain that sells video games in malls

which, thanks to its second-hand game sales, is widely hated by the video game industry itself, who moved aggressively to cut them almost entirely out of the loop

largely reducing it to, at this point, mostly just selling funko pops and minecraft socks to survive

like most people, I’m kinda low-key fascinated with insane conspiracy theories and insidious cults, even if a lot of the time it turns out that the true believers are just afflicted with the potent combination of “terminally online” and “mentally ill”

it turns out, convincing a paranoid schizophrenic that the government is hiding tens of thousands of their clones in the centre of the hollow toroid earth is not terribly difficult, and the democratization of media has made it possible for these folk to use one another to create impressive self-reinforcing communal structures of impossible and insane lore

did you know that the earth is flat, that you can opt out of all laws by simply not agreeing to be bound by them, that hollywood and washington elites (despite looking older every year at seemingly exactly the same rate as everyone else) harvest children’s adrenaline glands to perform secret satanic rituals in order to stay eternally young? did you know that Earth has 4 corner simultaneous 4-day TIME CUBE?

there’s no such thing as atoms

have YOU ever seen an atom?

science wants you to believe that if you heat a liquid, it turns into a gas but I tried heating an egg and it turned into a solid egg

my theory is that all of chemistry is a conspiracy concocted and coordinated by hundreds of thousands of scientists in order to disprove my superior, atomless theory of chemistry

foolish “atom believers” will say stupid things like “your theory of chemistry produces no testable theories” and also “your theory of chemistry doesn’t explain any observable natural phenomena”, because they are paid to say these things, by Satan the devil, in order to disprove my theory

plus, their “atom” theory is stupid and debunkable

like, take some water and try to breathe it

it’s H20, there’s oxygen in there

but try it, and you’ll choke and drown

that’s because atoms is not real

Big Chemistry wants you to believe that there’s CHLORINE in your salt. Do you really believe that you’re just wolfing down a deadly chemical all the time?

Atom truthers like me, we know that this is total bunkus. Every ancient society knew that all matter was made out of earth, water, fire, and air, and I think they had the right of it.

And long ago, the four nations lived together in harmony.

perhaps at some point you have concocted a baking soda and vinegar volcano, as a child,

but that’s just part of the indoctrination

they say it’s because of ions? moving from an acid to a base? but ions are a star trek word. “fire the ion cannon!”. Is there an ion cannon in vinegar? I think not.

everybody knows that vinegar is a fire-water element and baking soda is an earth-air powder and when you combine them, you get an air reaction, thus the bubbles. it couldn’t be simpler.

EMPEDOCLES GOT ROBBED

have you ever heard the song “September” by EARTH, WIND, and FIRE? they knew the horrible truth

Ted Turner was in on it, too, trying to get the world out on the DL with his show about the elements

clues are hidden everywhere

scientists: all matter is solid, liquid, or gas

cereal: exists

scientists: 😮

chemistry claims that there’s a fourth form of matter, plasma, and that water turns at plasma at over 10,000 degrees Celsius

but if you ask a doctor if there’s plasma in your body RIGHT NOW they will say “yes”

can humans suddenly survive 10,000 degree heat, DOCTORS? I think not.

CHECKMATE ATOM BELIEVERS

atoms were thoroughly debunked in my experiment ( youtue.b/98ddxx ) where I showed that the 100 degree boiling point is a LIE

and oh, did the quote-unquote “scientists” come for me with excuses

“you set your thermometer to Fahrenheit”

“that water is clearly sitting just above room temperature”

exactly what an illuminati would say

watching flat-earth debunking content (it’s fun, even if I think they’re unnecessarily smug about it, as if they’re actually going to succeed at changing unchangeable minds) has actually forced me to develop a mental model for both seasons and tides which I didn’t really have before

before judging me: can you describe why it’s cold in winter and hot in summer without googling it?

if you said “because the earth is… further from the sun… in winter” then… how is it possible that winter in one hemisphere happens while summer happens in the other? If it was a distance from the sun thing, the whole world would go into winter at the same time, wouldn’t it?

Yeah, it’s a tilt thing! When the top half of the Earth tilts closer to the sun, the whole “top” half of the planet gets more sun, and also there are bits on the very tip top that just stay lit all the time, and the whole “bottom” half of the planet gets less sun, and also there are bits on the very end that get no sun all the time, and then it swaps.

Why does tides? “Uh, gravitational pull from the moon, right?”

Okay, why does… TWO TIDES A DAY?

thinks about it

oh shit , there’s a tide on the side opposite from the moon, and it’s not as strong as the tide on the side directly facing the moon, that’s bananas

How is this not way more fun than insane theories about giant ice walls?

Did you know that (at least where I live, in Canada) Subway briefly stopped carrying MUSTARD?

that is a CORE SANDWICH CONDIMENT

conspiracy theory: it’s part of an ongoing raft of changes intended to make Subway higher-calorie and more expensive, like gradually hiding the “ham sandwich” ($8) behind the “kia sorrento steak supremo megasubwich” ($14)

I’m glad that before long they caved and brought basic ballpark mustard back

2025 Editor’s Note: Honestly, for all I know this one Subway just ran out of mustard one time, going straight to conspiratorial thinking may not have been the right move.

Dan Olson on Twitter, discovering the frequently-frontpaged-on-reddit superstonk cult.

I … hope he makes a video about it, but I’m guessing it won’t happen, because I imagine it would end up re-treading a bunch of ground he already covered in his flat earth/qanon and contrepreneurs videos.

Editor’s Note: 2 years later, it happened: