VAST's first self titled album

Probably The Prince, followed by Debt. For whatever reason, it broke my brain, and I stopped being intensely angry at rules breaking (by others or by myself). Growing up, I had this fairly common internal experience of viewing rules (often social rules, often implied) as being immutable moral truths. I would be furious if I had been taught a rule "Don't do X when Y". I would be both furious and distraught if someone did Y and was either not punished for it or even rewarded. Now it's very much tied to context and power. It's still frustrating when people are treated differently, but it doesn't keep me up at night in the same way.

I think this was also around the time I started watching Adam Curtis documentaries. Whatever else I think about him now, he does talk about power and society a lot, and the liberal confusion that occurs when they try to ignore power in their explanations of society.

This is social media but I suppose that counts, Livejournal. Made friends there I still have 25 years later I am closer to than anyone else.

Podcasts count? Huberman Lab has been such a life-changing listen! Lots of great information about sleep and how our body functions

Bridgerton introduced me to the world of romance novels. What a crazy rabbit hole!

"In Search of Schrödinger's Cat" - John Gibbon (1984)
Crash course in quantum physics and reality. Changed my perception of the world in a way that "things could be worse" could never accomplish on its own.

Homestuck.

Not in the reading of it, which I did out of the momentum of Bard quest and Problem Sleuth, but in the way that it rippled through the online media landscape and affected discourse and things like Undertale, webcomics, and crowd funding.

Not in any "profound" way, but in a measurably gigantic one.

Steven Universe defined my high school years and made me who I am.

A friend once gave me an ipod mini with Tony Robbins’s Personal Power series on it, and it was one of the best gifts I’ve ever received.

In fact, I’m gonna get in touch with that guy.

The Gospel of Thomas. Before going down that rabbit hole I had no idea that Lucretius had laid out evolution in 50 BCE and would have never thought there was a sect and text claiming Jesus was talking about quantized matter, evolution, and pre-computer simulation theory in an agreement with the Epicurean rejection of intelligent design while rebutting their conclusion that there must not be an afterlife.

Not only did the study of the work itself lead to mind blowing realizations about history and philosophy, but the sheer absurdity of its existence has (for me) led to heavily complementing the physical arguments for simulation theory and pushed it over the edge from something just "interesting to entertain" to something I'm fairly confident in.

If you'd told me 6 years ago a 2,000 year old document would change my perspective of metaphysics and core beliefs, I'd have laughed you out of the room. And yet it today stands as by far the most interesting thing I've ever researched and likely the most influential to date.

Vagabond manga.

The Illuminatus Trilogy did a lot of heavy lifting in inspiring a sense of meta-skeptical relativism, though largely by offering a central hub for many other rabbit holes.

Gurren Lagann instilled me with a sense of inextinguishable optimistic determination, for myself individually and as a part of the human race

There are plenty of others, but these two had the most profound effects.

Edit: I almost forgot about this webcomic that lived in the back of my brain until I got a bidet.

Reading the parahumans story, "Worm", has changed how I look at people. It is my personal-favorite character study. There are dozens of characters who all have unique world views to explore.

HTML 4 for Dummies

I can see Craig of the Creek being changing for little kids

This: https://youtu.be/A-Rm1DsV7GM?si=jSkPqYnhMy8NXz7q

Red Dwarf anyone?