A while ago I discovered that my home town newspaper made their entire archive searchable online. For fun I decided to search for my family to see if anyone had been in the papers.
The only one I found was my dad in a city council meeting public comment session arguing against fluoridation of the water supply and saying it was a communist plot.
Yep. That's my dad. I once found a box of John Birch society leaflets in our attic. If it wasn't for the fact that operating anything more complex than a light switch is effectively beyond him, he'd be up to his scalp in q-anon bullshit.
Tor. A serious study of as many .onion sites as I could find. There are many reasons why people want to be anonymous. I don't know why, I just felt compelled to look at the edges of humanity.
Back in the early 2000s, I heard tell of Freenet, thought it sounded like a cool project, and started poking around there. I soon determined that a lot of the material being exchanged there was not anything I wanted anywhere near my disk, even encrypted. Deleted it pretty darn quick.
Drug dealers, arms dealers, hit men, conspiracy theorists with apparent mental health issues, child porn. I was at least somewhat amused until the last, then it was like, "Yeah no, I'm done with this"
All you need is a copy of TAILS.
One time I had a weird skin thing and was trying to look up whether I should be worried about it, and stumbled onto a bunch of shit about Morgellons Disease, in which people think they have fibers or parasites growing out of their skin.
Sorry this was a long time ago. The guy has definitely mellowed some since though he did have a brief Stephen Crowder stint during the pandemic. Old habits die hard.
Eugenia Cooney, YouTuber and streamer who seems to be dying of anorexia. There's more disturbing shit such as her weird relationship with her mom and the way she seems to pander to anorexia fetishists.