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Edit2: I'll categorize this list by activity and create sub-categories later today and probably add to it over time. I put it together so it'd be easier for people to find fun fringe drama or otherwise be entertained. Enjoy!
Please comment if you have others to add to the list. I bit off more than I can chew because apparently there's thousands of these, so I omitted ones that were boring, inactive, and/or redundant.
General or Misc Fringe
New Age
Paranoid/Classic
Religion, Politics, & Conspiracy (aka BORING)
Occult
Scientific & Historical
Lifestyle
Lite
Edit: Oops, pressed enter too soon
- forgotpw : Enabling piracy and IP infringement
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so with all the posts about Yuzu and seeing a few people confused how to get it setup (@Bussy-boy) I thought I'd just make it's own post
If you feel confident in following directions you can just directly use the guide I used here. I will be assuming you're on Windows 10/11 64 bit
For those of you who don't know, Yuzu is a Nintendo Switch emulator that recently got taken down. Someone has forked their source code luckily tho so you can still use it. There are other ways to play cracked Switch games but this seemed the easiest to me. Lets get started
Download Yuzu
You can download the Early Access build here. Just click the "Windows-Yuzu-EA-####.zip" link and it will download a zip file. Extract the folder to wherever you feel like. Then open the extracted folder and run the yuzu.exe file. This should install the program and run itself, but you'll get a prompt about missing encryption keys
Encryption Keys
You will need an encryption key file to get the program working. You can download it here or DM me and I can send you the source since it's just text. Once it's downloaded, open Yuzu and go to File->Open Yuzu Folder. This will open the working directory for the program. What you need to do is put the prod.keys file in the keys folder (make sure if you opened it in notepad it didn't rename it to prod.keys.txt). Now restart Yuzu and there should no longer be a warning message.
(Optional) Firmware
You don't need to do this step but it says that some games will crash if you don't. You can download firmware from here, just use the latest one. Unzip the folder, and open the Yuzu folder again. This time navigate to "nand\system\Contents\registered" and paste all of the NCA files from the firmware folder into there
okay now Yuzu is setup, we need some games
Installing Games
Here are a few websites you can download Switch games from:
https://nxbrew.com/
https://nsw2u.xyz/ (https://nsw2u.com/)
https://nswgame.com/category/switch/
https://www.ziperto.com/nintendo-switch-nsp/
https://switchedtwo.to/
I'm going to use Zelda Breath of the Wild as an example because it has an update and some DLC. Note that you can only use NSP and XCI files on Yuzu. NSP files will typically be separated into the base game, updates, and DLC; which can also sometimes be split into 5GB chunks. XCI has everything together, but I haven't really seen any of those. So I'm going to download all the files from this page using MegaUp which is estimated about 30 minutes. Torrenting would also probably be a bit faster but that's up to you, I don't really use it.
Okay so now we have 3 base game, 2 DLC, and 1 update NSP files. First it's recommended we create a folder to put our Switch games. Then we will need to merge the 3 base game files. I was having massive problems with the built in Windows zip utility so I recommend getting 7zip and using that. Just select the part 1,2,and 3 zips together, right click and extract files to your Switch games location; this should merge all of them into a 14.1GB NSP file. Do the same if your game's DLC or update files are split
Before we run the game we should install the update and DLC files. To do this, simply go to File->Install Files to NAND and then select what you want. These are copied to the Yuzu folder so you don't need to keep a copy
I recommend adding your Switch game directory to the main window in Yuzu by clicking "Add New Game Directory", selecting your folder, and then when it's added right click the folder and check the "Scan Subfolders" option. You can also tell from here if your game is being read properly and the Add-ons column will show if the extras were installed correctly. Now just double click the game and you're good to go
Linux Stuff - from 
@TriHard
Yes. There are only a couple of small things to note:
- On Linux, you want the AppImage release. Most Linux distros support AppImages.
- Once you download the AppImage, try running it. If it doesn't work, it's probably because you're missing FUSE 2. Install it with your package manager (I use
Artix btw so mine is Pacman):> sudo pacman -S fuse2 - Keys can be installed directly in Yuzu by going to Tools > Install Decryption Keys, and selecting prod.keys.
- Firmware can be installed by going to Tools > Install Firmware, and selecting the folder containing the extracted firmware files.
- By default, all Yuzu-related files are located in
~/.local/share/yuzu.
End
I don't have all that much experience actually using the emulator so I'm going to skip this part and say just refer to the linked guide. This will help with optimizing Yuzu for your system, show you how to make save states, load mods, etc
If you have any question or if I did something wrong/inefficiently let me know. Otherwise have fun crackers!
Das Tuub | Titanic R-sluration
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I just found out about this submarine like an hour ago. I feel really bad for the people trapped inside, especially the kid, but they kinda deserve it for even getting on this thing. Everyone's laughing at the CEO for his dumbass DEI policies, but this is just surface level stuff (lol). No one's actually explained the depths of how r-slurred this guy and his company are, so I thought I'd take some time out of my actual engineering job while I'm sitting in a boring butt zoom meeting to properly call this guy a fricking r-slur, so you can all find this just as funny as I do. I thought you all might appreciate it a little more than just some sporadic tweets about the DEI shit he did. This is going to be like a Challenger-style breakdown and what exactly went wrong so you can appreciate this frick-up.
There's gonna be a lot of naval puns in this so bear with me here. A lot of this is coming from my friend, also an engineer, who's done more research into this than I have.
In the Boatginning
Dramatards, I'd like to introduce you to Stockton Rush. Owner of the the most startup founder-ish name in history, this guy has been making janky submarines his entire life. He got his start in the aerospace industry, as a test engineer on the F-15 with McDonnell-Douglass. Anyone familiar with the industry will note that experience with McDonnell-Douglass is not necessarily a good thing on your resume.
He's made a career out of building submarines that are cheaper and more accessible to the general population, and his company, OceanGate, has had a few successful designs. What's notable about his history, however, is that he's made them cheaper largely by bypassing safety standards. His first submarine that they operated was called Antipodes, was a refit sub built by a different company. Originally intended for research purposes, they used it instead for tourist dives.
The first actual submarine they built was the Cyclops 1, a carbon-fiber (we'll come back to this part) submarine controlled using a PlayStation controller, with an operational depth of 500m. The submarine is deployed/recovered from some weird floating drydock concept, which crucially allows them to not use human rated cranes to recover the submarine.
After seeing some moderate success, he's gone and built the submarine in question, the Titan, which is built from a composite carbon-fiber and titanium. They bought the hull from a company called Spencer Composites, who intended it to be SINGLE USE. The submarine was built to a factor-of-safety (multiple of how much of the expected load you can withstand before it breaks) of 2.25 (which is frick-all, especially for a submarine - should be at least 6, probably more like 10). . A lot of journ*lists who went on board the thing noted that most of the parts on the interior were sourced from local hardware stores, as were the ballast tanks. They were not, as you could imagine, comfortable about being on board once they realized this.
DEI-ing At Sea
https://twitter.com/CatchUpFeed/status/1671372796876984320?s=20
This guy's team is a bunch of young, impressionable diversity hires. He's explicitly avoided anyone with experience because they are old and white and men. They're not very inspirational, and so they don't have a place on Rush's team.
Anyone who has worked on an engineering project before knows that any engineer with less than 2 years of practical experience is a massive drain on the project and need to be babysat constantly, ESPECIALLY if they might kill someone. They're usually worth investing in because they'll give you a great return in the long run, but boy are those first couple of years hard.
I didnβt hire experienced people because Iβm a racist
oh no my boat sank, how could this have possibly happened
This is going to go a long way to explain why what happened did happen, so buckle up.
Frick-up #1: Carboat-Fiber
Let's talk materials for a second. Carbon-fiber is what's called a composite material, because it's made from a couple of different types of material. You have the carbon fibers themselves, which are really resistant to being stretched in-plane (like pulling apart a sheet of paper), but have very little strength out of plane (like poking a hole in paper) or off-axis (they're woven into almost a cloth, if you pull at a 60 degree angle to that weave, they lose 80% of their strength).
Carbon fibers are usually set in place with solidified plastics, like epoxy. It solves a lot of problems as far as directional strength goes, but you still need to be careful with it. In a specific configuration, it has similar material properties to a common aerospace aluminium alloy (T-6061), while being a fraction of the weight. Great for airplanes and race cars, where mass is a factor.
Steel is the best material, and the only reason you use anything else is either because you don't want it to rust, or because you can't use steel. It's cheap, strong, and (crucially) it can be stressed over and over again without building up stress fractures. If you keep it under a certain limit, it will never break. NO OTHER MATERIAL DOES THIS.
This makes ideal for something that you're going to put under pressure, and then remove it from that pressure, over and over and over again, in a scenario where weight isn't a factor. Like, say, a submarine.
Stockton Rush, however, is way too cool for steel 
. He has instead decided to build his submarine out of the super cool airplane material, without understanding why its there in the first place. Composite materials are generally vulnerable to snapping if they're loaded repeatedly, which is why the company that built this refused to endorse it after finding out it was going to be used like it was.
It's never been used on submarines before, and with really good reason. It's not just not an optimal choice, it's literally the worst one possible. From the Business Insider article:
The Titan sub was never checked to see if it was up to standard because of its "innovation," OceanGate said in 2019. The sub features a carbon fiber hull that had never been used on submersibles before, according to the "Unsung Science" podcast.
Rush managed to bypass safety standards yet again by using completely different materials and then claiming that the standards aren't relevant. They make you sign a massive waiver when you sign up. No one has actually checked if this thing is safe. There's no standard it's being held to, there's no regulation, no third-party review. No matter how good you are, you can always frick up. Their cavalier attitude towards safety has now probably killed the CEO and four other people.
From their blog:
But it's ok, because they have a corporate culture of safety.
Frick-up #2: Electronixed
So this is an interesting note that I found is that the submarine has no onboard navigational system,. Yes, you read that correctly. They operate it by having a different ship monitor its position, and then send it text messages telling it where it is.
These people are all going to die
That's part of the reason they can't find it, is because the submarine doesn't know where it is, and can't tell anyone even if it did. It even failed before, and they still didn't fix it. That's not just stupid, it's criminally negligent.
The controls of this thing consist of a single button, and is piloted by a PlayStation controller. I'll point out that the idea of using a gamepad as a submarine helm control is not necessarily a bad one, and was actually implemented by USN submariners to great success. It's intuitive to zoomer helmsmen, really easy to teach, and was actually a way better control scheme than what they were using before. That being said, USN submarines are extremely well designed, very redundant, and extremely well-built. This stupid thing has none of that.
Because of the lack of navigation and emergency beacon, these people are very likely going to die, and it's going to be very unpleasant. It's really hard to find submarines even when they want to be found, and there's still no means of even rescuing these people even if they're found. They've got anti-submarine-warfare aircraft searching and everything, but still nothing.
Frick-up #3: Oxy-Constants
I can't think of a good pun for this. There's no real good source on this that I've seen because it's kind of an obscure problem, but they also fricked up the gas lines on the ship.
When maintaining an atmosphere for people to breathe, you have to be pretty careful with the gas composition. You need gas cyclers to remove CO2 buildup, and replace it with oxygen. Nitrogen doesn't need to be replaced because it's not consumed. This is standard on airplanes, submarines, spacecraft, anything sealed. Failure to do this was infamously the cause of the Apollo 1 disaster, where a pure, high-pressure oxygen atmosphere caused a dramatic fire when some nylon started to overheat.
Can you guess what OceanGate have done?
That's right, they've been injecting pure oxygen into the cabin, with untested electronics on board.
Jesus Christ, guys. You get so many startup CEOs bitching about safety standards, and every now and then when they push the limits, we all get a very public reminder of why they're there in the first place. And it usually costs the lives of people who were tricked into getting onto that stupid butt vehicle in the first place.
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I did a poll a while back asking what I should write about. Surprisingly "my old boomer times" won by a large margin. So I present you with a history of MUDs, the thinking man's multiplayer game.
Telnet
Back in the 1800s (yes, that's how far back I'm going) Americans invented all kinds of awesome things: telephones, machine guns, movie cameras, record players. Two of these devices, the typewriter and the telegraph, were combined into something even more powerful. The keyboard of one typewriter sent electrical signals to control a typewriter at a distant location. This was known as teletype. It's how big organizations like militaries and multinational corporations sent data for about a century.
Teletype Model 33.
Eventually Americans invented even more cool stuff like mainframe computers capable of doing time sharing. This meant they could respond almost instantly. You could connect a teletype to the computer but that was suboptimal as the teletype couldn't print as fast as the computer could think. So the printer was replaced with a video screen, and now you had a dumb terminal. It could show text on a screen and accept text input but that was about it. These came into use in the 1970s among big organizations that could afford to pay for the luxury.
A DEC VT100 terminal. This is the standard terminal that's emulated in software.
Another revolution quickly followed in the 1980s with microcomputers, little computers so cheap that an individual person could own one. These were not very powerful at first but they were smart enough to pretend they were a dumb terminal and connect to mainframe. It's a computer emulating a terminal emulating a teletype.
Telnet being used for something more serious.
Why waste your time with this history lesson? It's important to understand the environment we're dealing with here. The Telnet protocol that you use to connect to a MUD is all about text. The technical details of how it gets from one place to another are more advanced, but in the end it's just alphanumeric characters going in and out like a machine from the 1800s.
Gaymers Rise Up
As universities got mainframes capable of time sharing, computer games soon followed. Among the most revolutionary was 1976's Colossal Cave Adventure. The player explores a cave system made up of a network of rooms. Each room has a text description and it can have items in it for the player to pick up. The player gives commands by simply typing in what they want to do. Many more games following this formula followed and the text adventure genre was born.
Don't get eaten by a grue.
Zork was among the most popular of these new games. Some nerd at the University of Essex loved to play a version of it called Dungeon. In 1978 he decided to make a multiplayer game based on it, which he naturally called Multi User Dungeon, and the MUD was born. In 1980 the university was connected to the internet, exposing MUD to the whole world.
UNIX Nerds Emerge
The roots of the MUD genre were now firmly planted but it would be many years before it bloomed. There were a number of technical obstacles which made it prohibitively expensive for all but a lucky few to play MUDs. The internet was only available at a few dozen universities and major computer companies, most of which frowned on using it for monkey business like playing games. By the late 1980s there were several MUDs running on commercial networks like CompuServe and AOL but these charged obscene amounts for connection time. Microcomputers like the PC became available but were still far too expensive for an ordinary family to get just to play games. A modem had to be purchased separately and these were incredibly slow and expensive as well.
Remember how to calculate your THAC0.
Despite these challenges, the 1980s saw great progress. A new nerd monoculture was sprouting in America and Europe, one that would prove to be fertile ground for the emergence of MUDs. The UNIX operating system and C language were taking over university computer science programs replacing a hodgepodge of weird proprietary systems. This made it much easier to share code, which would be crucial in the golden age of MUDs. There was compatibility in culture as well. Every nerd liked The Lord of the Rings and Dungeons and Dragons.
Explosion
Ultimately MUDs would explode in popularity not because of some revolutionary idea from a creative genius but simply because computers got better and cheaper over the years. By 1995 you could get a Windows PC with a modem for a reasonable price. The fiber optic backbone of the internet was laid and in the early 1990s the government allowed it to be used for commercial purposes. University computers became powerful enough that running a MUD wasn't too big a drain on resources.
Around 1990 a few free (as in Richard Stallman eating something off his foot and calling it "GNU") MUDs appear. Most MUDs in the future are descendants of these, especially the enormously influential DikuMUD. However there are also all kinds of MUDs with their own unique codebase, some of them quite bizarre like one based on LISP. The most enduring are true labors of love, often based in a university computer science department and passed down from one class of students to the next.
A map of the city of Midgaard. DikuMUDs generally kept the same layout.
Some MUDs were for roleplaying. You were expected to stay in character pretending you were an elf or a Romulan or something. As shameful and embarrassing as it was to engage in this type of behavior, it had a charm. You were essentially cooperating with the other players to write a story in real time. If nothing else, you could learn how to write quickly under time pressure. Some of these artsy-fartsy type MUDs let you create your own areas and even program them. It was kind of like Second Life except without graphics or Bardfinn. With no graphics and such a simple user interface it was easy to add whatever gameplay mechanics you could think of.
But most were simple hack and slash affairs. You go out to an area appropriate for your level, preferably in a group, and hunt for mobs. When you find one you type something like "kill orc" and enter combat, taking turns attacking each other. Occasionally you "kick" or "cast magic missile" or whatever your class' special power is. When you kill it you get xp, gold, and maybe equipment. This should sound very familiar to you. MUDs were inspired by D&D and in turn became the basis of MMOs. EverQuest, the first MMO to achieve mainstream success, ripped off DikuMUD to a large extent.
Legacy
The golden age of MUDs lasted until around 2000. During this period they were really the only game in town. There were multiplayer FPSs and RTSs but nothing that gave you a similar experience. On a 56k modem it took a few seconds just to download a jpeg. Internet connections were much less stable, frequently cutting out for a second or two. So text still made sense as the medium for a multiplayer game.
Then MMOs arrived like Spanish conquistadors, bringing ruin for our civilization. Better PCs and better communications technology like DSL finally allowed the dream of a "graphical MUD" to come true. These were the shiny new thing. Why read walls of text written by some random 20 Finnish nerd boy when you could be looking at 3D graphics instead? If you had any normie friends they would be playing WoW, not words words words. Of course some MUDs have survived and are still thriving today, but the age when there were a thousand running at a time with all kinds of creative new ideas is over.
You can't compete with graphics like this.
So why do I lament the passing of this era? Is it just nostalgia for a time when ska ruled and action movies had real stunts? No. It's more. That was a time when we were free. Free to express yourself. Free to make your own world. Free to implement any crazy gameplay system you wanted. Free to be a Romulan. Jolan 'tru, dramanauts.
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