Episode

79 entries

2026 Jul 2026 We Built a Demon That Won't Sell You a Curse Reporting on the occult is either credulous panic or bored dismissal, and both are useless if you actually want to understand a mystery school. So we built a reference desk: an expert system that will explain the material and refuse to operationalize it. You can learn what the thing is without becoming an adept in it — which is what a normal person actually wants.
2026 Jul 2026 The Chud Reconquista: Asmongold and the Gamer Restoration The most-watched gamer on the internet looks into a camera and declares that chuds are the indigenous people of video games, staging a Reconquista to take the medium back. It is a bit. It is also a market report. The only question left is how much he means it, and that question is the whole weapon.
1980s-present Jul 2026 Greetz: The Warez Scene and the Art of the Signed Crack The people who cracked your software in 1990 didn't do it for money. They did it to be first, to sign the work with a screenful of ASCII art, and to throw greetz at their friends and taunts at their rivals. It was a whole competitive folk-art built on bragging rights — and it forked into the demoscene, one of the few subcultures a government has formally called cultural heritage.
2009-present Jul 2026 Slender Man: Folklore by Committee A monster with a birthday. Slender Man was invented on a forum in 2009 and then written by a crowd into a genuine piece of modern folklore — a demonstration that the internet can still make myths. It is also the clearest case in this whole series of where collaborative fiction stops being harmless.
1993-present Jul 2026 The Best Griefing of All Time: A Field Guide to the PKer Before there was Twitter, there was the corpse camp. A tour of the greatest griefs ever committed inside a game — the first virtual assault, the trillion-ISK Ponzi, the funeral raid — and a working taxonomy of the creatures who commit them.
1920s-2010s Jul 2026 The Debunkers: When the Magician Trolls the Fraud A magician knows exactly how the trick works — which makes him the worst enemy a fake psychic can have. From Houdini crashing séances in disguise to Randi planting fake mind-readers in a laboratory, this is trolling pointed at the swindlers, with the con's own misdirection turned back on it.
1926-1992 Jul 2026 The Panic Broadcast: Who Really Panicked in 1938 Everyone knows Orson Welles's War of the Worlds broadcast sent America running into the streets. Almost none of it happened that way. The real hoax wasn't the Martians — it was the newspapers, who had a motive to make radio look dangerous, inventing a panic that mostly wasn't there.
1958-2006 Jul 2026 The Police Car on the Dome: The Art of the Unexplainable Hack One morning in 1994 there was a campus police car parked on top of MIT's Great Dome — lights flashing, a dummy officer inside, a box of donuts on the seat. Nobody signed it. Nobody has ever fully explained how it got there. That is not a gap in the story. That is the story.
1501-1830 Jul 2026 The Talking Statues of Rome: Anonymous Was Not Invented in 2003 Five hundred years before the imageboard, Romans had already built the perfect anonymous provocation machine: a broken statue you could stick a poem on overnight, mocking the Pope, with no name attached and nobody able to stop it. His name was Pasquino, and the Church spent centuries losing to him.
1970s-present Jul 2026 The Tube Bar Tapes: A Short History of the Prank Call Before Bart Simpson asked for Amanda Huggenkiss, two guys in New Jersey were calling a bar owner named Red until he threatened to kill them, and trading the tapes. The prank call is folk art — right up until the day it stops being a call and starts being a SWAT team at the wrong door.
1729 Jun 2026 A Modest Cooking Show TRANSCRIPT -- 'Farm to Table with Chef Jonathan,' Season 3, Episode 14: 'Sustainable Solutions.' [UNAIRED]
2004 Jun 2026 A Thread POST YOUR RIGS 2004 EDITION. A reconstructed forum thread from the golden age of hardware forums — when people argued about Athlon vs. Prescott, mocked each other's beige cases, and accidentally built the best technical knowledge base in history.
19 BC Jun 2026 Aeneid VI — The Parade of Souls 'Remember, Roman, to rule the peoples with authority.' Virgil wrote that in 19 BC. Replace 'Roman' with 'algorithm' and you have the mission statement of every AI company in 2026.
1959-2018 Jun 2026 Alan Abel (1924-2018): America's Professional Hoaxer For over fifty years, Alan Abel fooled CBS, NBC, and the New York Times -- repeatedly. He faked his own obituary in the Times. When he actually died in 2018, they had to triple-check.
2019 Jun 2026 Alec Holowka — Four Days On August 26, 2019, Zoe Quinn publicly accused Night in the Woods co-creator Alec Holowka of abuse. His studio cut ties the next day. He never faced an investigation, never had the opportunity to respond publicly. Four days later, he was dead. The mob moved on. The timeline didn't.
1996-present Jun 2026 Alex Jones — The Conspiracy Engine Alex Jones built a media empire on provocation, sold it dietary supplements, and lost it to a $1.5 billion defamation verdict. Same mechanics as every troll in history — minus the one thing that makes trolling work.
2017 Jun 2026 August Ames — Bodily Autonomy An adult film performer declined a scene with a male co-star who had done gay porn, citing safety concerns about different testing protocols. Twitter called her a bigot and told her to eat cyanide. Two days later she was dead. She was 23.
2009 Jun 2026 Balloon Boy / Heene Family Hoax (2009) In 2009, the Heene family called 911 claiming their son was in a runaway balloon. Cable news covered it live for hours. The six-year-old blew the whole operation on CNN that night.
1983-1997 Jun 2026 BBS Door Games: The First Online Gaming Was a Local Call Legend of the Red Dragon, TradeWars 2002, Barren Realms Elite — the first multiplayer online games ran on personal computers connected to phone lines, one caller at a time. The outsider histories start with Ultima Online. The actual history starts with a teenager writing a text RPG to attract callers to his BBS.
1770-1827 Jun 2026 Beethoven — The Deaf Troll Before Beethoven, composers were servants. They wore livery. They bowed. After Beethoven, the artist served the work, not the patron. One man's rudeness became every artist's rights.
2010-2014 Jun 2026 Brad Wardell — Vindicated and Damned Brad Wardell won his case. His accuser formally apologized. The lawsuits were dismissed. None of it mattered, because the articles are still indexed and the apology is not. Full vindication in court. Permanent conviction on Google.
2017 Jun 2026 Capture the Flag: The HWNDU Saga Shia LaBeouf hid a flag in a field with nothing visible but sky. The internet found it in 38 hours using airplane contrails, star positions, and a honking car horn. This is the funniest thing that has ever happened.
2012-present Jun 2026 Cards Against Humanity: A Decade of Trolling as Business Model (2012-Present) Cards Against Humanity sold literal bullshit, charged people $5 for nothing, dug a pointless hole for $100K, bought border land to block Trump's wall, then sued SpaceX when Elon Musk trespassed on it. People paid to be trolled every time.
2012-2014 Jun 2026 Cicada 3301 On January 4, 2012, an image appeared on 4chan: 'We are looking for highly intelligent individuals. To find them, we have devised a test.' What followed was the most elaborate cryptographic puzzle in internet history — three rounds spanning steganography, classical literature, music theory, and physical locations on five continents. Nobody credibly knows who created it. The Liber Primus, a runic manuscript released in 2014, remains only partially decoded.
2015-present Jun 2026 Deus Vult: Crusader Symbolism as Trolling Every Abrahamic tradition has a doctrine that can be misrepresented as sanctioned deception. Taqiyya, Kol Nidre, mental reservation — the accusation is always selective, and the selectivity is the tell. 'Deus Vult' started as a meme. Then Christchurch happened.
1860s Jun 2026 Dickinson as Tweets Emily Dickinson posts her best work. Walt Whitman shows up uninvited in the replies. It goes about as well as you'd expect.
~412-323 BC Jun 2026 Diogenes — The Original Troll Diogenes lived in a ceramic jar, masturbated in public, and told Alexander the Great to move out of his sunlight. He founded an entire school of philosophy. We just call it trolling now.
1966-1993 Jun 2026 From Satan to Shelter Dogs — The Process Church A Satanic cult that worshipped four gods, operated from a Mayfair townhouse, was accused of ties to Charles Manson, and is now America's largest no-kill animal rescue. Every word of that sentence is true.
2014 Jun 2026 GameJournoPros — The Mailing List On September 17, 2014, Milo Yiannopoulos published leaked emails from GameJournoPros — a private Google Group of 150 games journalists from competing outlets. They were coordinating coverage, pressuring editors, and mocking their audience. The conspiracy theory was real. It just had a Google Group.
2015 Jun 2026 Genetic Access Control In 2015, a working Python app used the 23andMe API to restrict website access by DNA ancestry, triggering 256 Slashdot comments and proving that a few hundred lines of code could detonate a philosophical war.
2000 Jun 2026 God's Hands For two decades, Japanese amateur archaeologist Shinichi Fujimura was called 'God's Hands' for his uncanny ability to discover Paleolithic artifacts. He planted artifacts at over 180 sites, pushed Japanese prehistory back 700,000 years, rewrote school textbooks, and was national front-page news. In November 2000, the Mainichi Shimbun caught him on hidden camera digging holes and burying his own 'discoveries.'
2008 Jun 2026 IRC — AnonOps: The Night They Planned Chanology A reconstructed IRC log from the planning sessions of Project Chanology. The moment Anonymous stopped being trolls and started being something else. Nobody voted. It worked excellently.
1966-present Jun 2026 Joey Skaggs: America's Longest-Running Media Hoaxer For sixty years, Joey Skaggs has been fooling the American media with hoaxes so absurd they should be obviously fake. A dog brothel got an Emmy nomination. Cockroach pills went on the UPI wire. The media never learns.
2013 Jun 2026 Justine Sacco — Eleven Hours A PR executive with 170 followers tweeted a bad AIDS joke before an 11-hour flight to Cape Town. By the time she landed, she was the number one trending topic worldwide, fired, and unhireable. She outlasted the publication that destroyed her.
2011-present Jun 2026 Ken M: The Internet's Most Beloved Troll (2011-present) A Comedy Central copywriter named Kenneth McCarthy spent years posting deliberately absurd comments on Yahoo News as 'Ken M' — proving that the best way to defuse toxic comment sections is not moderation but absurdity.
2012 Jun 2026 KONY 2012: Trolled by His Own Success KONY 2012 hit 100 million views in six days. Ten days later the filmmaker had a naked breakdown on a San Diego street. The big event drew 17 people. The warlord was never caught. The charity shut down.
1990s-present Jun 2026 l0de Radio Hour: The Longest Troll A pirate radio show that started broadcasting pornographic audio from an illegal transmitter in New Orleans in the 1990s is still on the air. 600+ episodes. Zero mainstream coverage. When people tried to shut it down by posting the call-in number on Craigslist, it became the show's signature format.
2014 Jun 2026 Leigh Alexander — Gamers Are Over On August 28, 2014, twelve outlets published the same article in twenty-four hours. The one that ended a career was the one in the trade publication with the advertisers.
2012 Jun 2026 Lindsey Stone — The Photo A woman took a joke photo next to a 'Silence and Respect' sign at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. It was a running gag between friends. Within days she was fired, agoraphobic, and afraid to leave her house for a year.
1814 Jun 2026 Lord Cochrane's Dead Napoleon On February 21, 1814, a man in military uniform arrived in Dover claiming Napoleon was dead. Lord Cochrane — war hero, Member of Parliament, and future liberator of Chile, Brazil, and Greece — had stockpiled government bonds. Markets spiked. He sold at the top. The hoax was discovered. Cochrane went to prison, was stripped of his rank, expelled from Parliament, and pilloried in effigy. Then he went abroad and became a national hero on three continents.
2014 Jun 2026 Nathan Grayson — The Man at the Center Nathan Grayson was the Kotaku journalist with the undisclosed relationship that launched GamerGate. He was the actual ethics complaint. He was never the main target. He landed at the Washington Post and then co-founded his own outlet.
2019 Jun 2026 Nick Sandmann — Standing Still A 16-year-old stood still while an adult walked up to him. A short video clip made him the most hated person in America for 48 hours. The full video was available the entire time. Three outlets settled lawsuits. Five beat them.
1943 Jun 2026 Operation Mincemeat In 1943, British Intelligence dressed a homeless man's corpse as a Royal Marines officer, planted fake invasion plans on it, and dropped it off the coast of Spain. Germany swallowed the bait, reinforced Greece instead of Sicily, and the Allies walked into the real target with reduced opposition.
2012-2014 Jun 2026 Phil Fish — The Canary Phil Fish was the internet's punching bag before GamerGate had a name. The Fez creator's public meltdowns, Twitter feuds, and doxxing proved the harassment playbook worked. He was the proof of concept for everything that came after.
2005 Jun 2026 SCIgen and the Machines In 2005, three MIT students built a program that generates fake computer science papers — grammatically correct, technically jargon-filled, entirely meaningless. They submitted one to an academic conference. It was accepted. By 2013, over 120 SCIgen papers had been found in IEEE and Springer publications. Then someone submitted a paper consisting entirely of the sentence 'Get Me Off Your Fucking Mailing List' repeated hundreds of times, with graphs. It was accepted with a score of 'excellent.'
2013 Jun 2026 Sunil Tripathi — The Wrong Man After the Boston Marathon bombing, Reddit crowdsourced a manhunt and identified a Brown University student as the suspect. He'd been dead for a month. His family received 58 phone calls between 3 and 4 AM calling their missing son a terrorist.
1957 Jun 2026 The BBC Spaghetti Tree On April 1, 1957, the BBC's flagship current affairs programme Panorama aired a three-minute segment showing Swiss farmers harvesting spaghetti from trees. Narrated by Richard Dimbleby — the most trusted voice in British broadcasting — it fooled millions. Hundreds called the BBC asking how to grow their own. The BBC's response: 'Place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best.'
2006-2016 Jun 2026 The Coordinated Operations From the TIME poll acrostic to Boaty McBoatface to Twitch Plays Pokemon -- every time an institution opens a public input mechanism, the internet treats it as a game. The institutions keep being surprised. The internet keeps winning.
1917 Jun 2026 The Cottingley Fairies In 1917, two girls in Yorkshire photographed cardboard cutout fairies propped up with hatpins. Arthur Conan Doyle — the creator of Sherlock Holmes — championed the photographs as proof of the supernatural. The hoax lasted 66 years.
2026 Jun 2026 The Dedications: Who the Fire Is For Three books, three dedications, one escalating thesis. The trolls who became saints. The heretics who trolled the divine. The internet's honored dead. The dedications tell you everything before you open the first page.
1910 Jun 2026 The Dreadnought Hoax In 1910, Virginia Woolf and five friends disguised themselves as Abyssinian royalty, boarded the most powerful warship on earth, and the Royal Navy gave them a tour -- nobody checked.
1944 Jun 2026 The Ern Malley Affair In 1944, two Australian poets wrote 16 deliberately terrible modernist poems in one afternoon, using random dictionary words and newspaper clippings. They submitted them as the work of a fictional dead poet named Ern Malley. Max Harris published them as a major literary discovery. Harris was tried for obscenity. The twist: literary critics later argued the hoax poems were genuinely good. The hoaxers accidentally wrote better poetry drunk on spite than they ever managed sober.
399 BC Jun 2026 The Euthyphro Thread The Euthyphro dialogue as a Reddit thread. OP is certain he knows what piety is. He is about to have a very bad hour.
1884-present Jun 2026 The Fabian Wolf: How a Delay Strategy and a Stained-Glass Window Remade a Civilisation George Bernard Shaw helped design a stained-glass window in 1910 showing Fabians hammering the globe on an anvil. The inscription was Khayyám. The crest was a wolf in sheep's clothing. The Fabians were not subtle. The British public just was not reading the windows.
1943-1945 Jun 2026 The Ghost Army — Inflatable Tanks Win a War In 1944, the US Army deployed a unit whose weapons were rubber tanks, loudspeakers, and fake radio traffic. The 23rd Headquarters Special Troops won battles with theater. The enemy shot at things that did not exist.
2018 Jun 2026 The Grievance Studies Affair In 2018, three academics revealed they had spent a year submitting twenty hoax papers to peer-reviewed journals. Seven were accepted. One was a feminist rewrite of Mein Kampf. The dog park paper won an award.
1718-1766 Jun 2026 The Hellfire Club — When the Chancellor Worshipped the Devil The Chancellor of the Exchequer, the head of the Royal Navy, an heir to the throne, and Benjamin Franklin walked into a rebuilt abbey on the Thames. This is not a joke setup. It is documented British history.
2000-2013 Jun 2026 The Hoaxes Six internet hoaxes -- from Kaycee Nicole to Horse_ebooks -- that each exploited a different epistemic vulnerability. The internet's immune system developed after every infection, and the antibodies made the next real story harder to believe.
2019-2024 Jun 2026 The Infrastructure: Who Decides What Stays Up The Election Integrity Partnership submitted 4,800 flagged URLs to platforms. The Virality Project flagged true vaccine side effects. The Twitter Files documented the machinery. Murthy v. Missouri reached the Supreme Court. This is how content moderation became institutional gatekeeping.
1963-present Jun 2026 The Joke-Religion Lineage In 1963, two guys in a bowling alley invented a religion to worship the Greek goddess of chaos. Sixty years later, the lineage they started is filing federal lawsuits. The joke became the argument.
2004-2016 Jun 2026 The Last Post A forum thread runs for eleven years. 847 replies. Then a 404. The hosting bill was eighty dollars a month. This is what was lost when forums died.
1885-1897 Jun 2026 The Leo Taxil Hoax — The Greatest Anti-Masonic Troll A French journalist spent twelve years fabricating exposés of Masonic devil worship, earned a papal endorsement, then called a press conference and told everyone it was a hoax. The conspiracy theories he invented are still circulating today.
2008-present Jun 2026 The Lolcow Economy Lolcow culture started as observation, became exploitation, and ended with the lolcows selling tickets to their own humiliation. Boogie2988 tattooed 'LIAR' on his face to keep his podcast job. The industry is complete.
2024 Jun 2026 The Machine Reads the Room A content moderation AI processes a forum archive. The deferral rate climbs. The training data assumes a statement has one meaning. The forum disagrees. 'lol' means seven different things. The machine cannot lurk.
2005-present Jun 2026 The Meme Wars Memes are not jokes. They are the first genuinely new form of folk art since cinema -- with formal properties, canons, criticism, and lifecycles. The same image means different things to different audiences, and that is the content moderation nightmare.
2013 Jun 2026 The Mimetic Sacrifice: Martyred for the Lulz René Girard's scapegoat mechanism explains why internet communities destroy their own. From Aaron Swartz to Lowtax, the pattern is ancient: the sacrifice defines the tribe.
2007-present Jun 2026 The Most Documented Person on the Internet The internet spent fifteen years documenting, manipulating, and exploiting a mentally ill person for entertainment, then expressed surprise when it ended in a criminal case. The CWCki has thousands of articles about one human being. That's not a wiki. That's an autopsy.
c. 30 AD Jun 2026 The Parables of r/JerusalemLife Jesus' most famous parables as Reddit posts. The structure is identical: someone presents a situation, the comments split, and the argument that wins is never the one the original poster expected.
1996 Jun 2026 The Sokal Hoax In 1996, a physicist submitted a paper arguing that quantum gravity was a social construct to Social Text, a leading cultural studies journal. It was published. The same day, Sokal revealed it was a deliberate hoax.
1985-present Jun 2026 The Women Were Always There The narrative that internet culture was male-only is empirically false. Women were 40% of The WELL in 1985, 90% of AO3, and 30% of 4chan. Fandom invented tagging, content warnings, and collaborative worldbuilding before any platform. The erasure is methodological, not historical.
2016-2024 Jun 2026 Two Steps Ahead: The Nikocado Question A skinny vegan violinist gained 260 pounds on camera over seven years, spawned an industry of reaction channels, then revealed he'd secretly lost it all. Whether it was planned is the wrong question.
1938 Jun 2026 War of the Worlds (1938): The Troll That Trolled Itself In 1938, Orson Welles broadcast a fake alien invasion on CBS Radio -- and the real hoax was the newspaper industry manufacturing a mass panic narrative to discredit the new medium that was eating their ad revenue.
2024 Jun 2026 DignifAI — Trolling WITH the Machine DignifAI used AI to add clothes to women's photos. Progressives called it slut-shaming. Conservatives called it wholesome. AI ethicists couldn't classify it. The troll won.
1770-1854 Jun 2026 The Mechanical Turk An 18th-century chess-playing robot fooled the world for 84 years, beat Napoleon, inspired the first computer, and helped Edgar Allan Poe invent detective fiction -- and there was a guy inside the whole time.
1905-1916 Jun 2026 Rasputin — The Holy Troll A Siberian peasant showed up at the Russian imperial court unwashed, drunk, and speaking peasant dialect. He became the most powerful unofficial figure in the empire. The dynasty never recovered.
6th century BC-17th century Jun 2026 Senna — When Poetry Drew Blood In ancient Ireland, a poet's satire could raise blisters on a king's face. This was not a metaphor. It was law. The Brehon Laws regulated satirical poetry the way modern law regulates weapons.
2013-present Jun 2026 The Satanic Temple — Constitutional Performance Art The Satanic Temple doesn't worship Satan. It uses Satan as a constitutional argument. If the Ten Commandments get a monument on state property, so does an 8.5-foot bronze Baphomet.
2007-2016 Jun 2026 Peter Thiel — The Billionaire Who Destroyed Gawker In 2007, Gawker outed Peter Thiel as gay. He said nothing. Nine years later, Gawker was bankrupt. Here's what happened in between.
1835 Jun 2026 The Great Moon Hoax In 1835, the New York Sun published six articles claiming Sir John Herschel had discovered bat-winged humanoids on the Moon, became the best-selling newspaper in the world, and never formally retracted a word.

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