You might have noticed that online discourse isn’t exactly… friendly any more. It’s not that there weren’t heated discussions, fights, or name calling back in the Old Days™, but something has changed over the last few years.

Five years ago was one of the turning points, when Zoë Quinn’s ex-boyfriend posted his hate-screed about their breakup. She happened to be a video game designer, and the trolls quickly zeroed in on her relationship with a video game journalist for Kotaku as the cause. Thus began “GamerGate”, the first great online culture war.

And the trolls weren’t interested in a fair or clean fight. On the surface, as they kept parroting, it was supposed to be about ethics in video game journalism and political correctness. In truth, it was about white males who wanted to keep the internet the way they knew it: for themselves, and nobody else.

They deployed a playbook that had been developed and used on sites like 4chan and Reddit, but never on this scale. Memes flooded social media, hoaxes, impersonations, and actual fake news were disseminated to a mainstream media more interested in quick ratings boosts than thorough journalism, doxing¹, along with an army of bots so the trolls could appear to be larger than they really were. All this to generate outrage and turn the public opinion against the enemies of white men online: Everyone else, but especially feminists.

Today, they might not have won, but they haven’t exactly lost either. What’s left is a poisoned social media landscape where you can’t really trust anything anyone posts. Anger has been weaponized to keep your mind occupied and not reflecting on what’s going on. Algorithms that were supposed to keep surfacing great new content for us are regularly gamed to push content designed to keep you off-balance, or even throw you into a conspiracy-sized rabbit hole, with the companies running them disinterested in doing anything so long the ad dollars are flowing.

Many Sci Fi movies from before the year 2000 have imagined the Earth of the future as a wasteland, following a devastating war or something. And that future has come to pass, it just happened to be on the Internet.

Brain Bias

Our brains are truly marvelous organs, allowing us to accomplish feats that no other animal can. But along the way out of the stone age and into our modern lives, we never shed some behaviors and biases that used to be quite useful. And today, those are starting to bite us more and more, and it’s our own fault: Does the news reflect what we die from?

Nerd on Request

Nerds used to see themselves at the bottom of the totem pole. But times have never been better for them. Nerd culture has invaded everything, giving everyone else a window into nerdery. And so they’re not left out, non-nerds can now hire a professional Dungeons & Dragons Master to host their games.

Interplanetary Birthdays

Ever wondered how old you would be had you been born on another planet in our solar system? Wonder no more: Space Birthdays!

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In 1999, nerds, geeks, and the public was abuzz ahead of the hottest Sci Fi movie release of the year: The Phantom Menance. But as it turned out, 1999 would be the year of another Sci Fi movie: How ‘The Matrix’ Built a Bullet-Proof Legacy.

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“This single, 251-second long exposure follows the early flight of an Atlas V rocket on August 8, streaking eastward toward the dawn from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, planet Earth”: Atlas at Dawn