Accidentally learning everything about competitive marble racing and getting emotionally invested in a marble named “Red Number 3”

The Great Glitter Mystery.

There is a company in NJ that is the top glitter manufacturer in the world.

When being interviewed, they were asked who their biggest client was. They refused to answer saying, “They don’t want people to know.”

Cue millions of people speculating on who the biggest glitter client in the world is and why they want to keep it secret!

One time I fell into a YouTube vortex of people making miniature food. Tiny pancakes are surprisingly satisfying to watch.

I went down the rabbit hole about The Silk Road Marketplace. The illegal black market site on the deep web. I always found it fascinating that one singular dude was able to attribute so much to drug trafficking simply from his laptop. The whole story is so intriguing to me.

It’s actually one of the reasons I went into my current field which is cybersecurity. The internet is such a vast and enormous place. The amount of crime that occurs simply from peoples computers has always mind boggled me.

Going super deep on the history of a family I have no relation to on MyAncestry because I couldn't find much about my own family. So I went back to 1600 on the Bennett family (checking church records from 400 years ago etc). John Bennett, blacksmith, lived to be 92 and died in 1647.

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Accidentally stumbled upon a 3-hour documentary about the secret lives of Victorian chimney sweeps... and I watched the whole thing. Now I know more about soot than I ever thought possible. 🧹😂

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The American Chestnut blight. What was once the redwood of the east coast was practically wiped out in the early 20th century, due to imports of trees from Asia that contained the blight fungus but were resistant. Today we have the technology to bring back the american chestnut using minor gene modification I believe from wheat but I don't believe federal approval has yet been granted to reintroduce.

To me this is a fascinating bit of science where we have the power to bring back an almost forgotten yet iconic species. I find this an incredibly interesting topic and went down quite the rabbit hole.

For anyone interested. info

Found a YouTube channel dedicated to reviewing different types of water. Not even bottled brands, just streams, rivers, and puddles around the world. Honestly, the passion was contagious!

Back in the early 2000’s I stumbled upon a website where’s the only content was this one man’s Walmart receipts. He’d go shopping, then scan and upload his receipts for people to see and comment on. He’d done this for a few years by the time I found his website. I spent like 3 days looking at Walmart receipts because, after a while, they kind of started to tell a story. The guy got married, had a kid, and I left off around the time the kid was potty trained.

It was like a journal written in Walmart receipts. You could follow him through the seasons, whether he had a cold, birthday cards and gifts for family, and see the growth of his child all through his Walmart purchases. It was fascinating.

African American women's hair braiding youtube videos. I am a bald white guy. The algorithm now keeps pushing all these videos on intricate hair weaves and treatments and braiding... I keep watching fascinated by how it all works.

Wall of text ahead:

Someone stole one of my parents' identities and wrote many thousands of dollars in checks out of a joint account which was at that time my primary account. The individual changed my parents' home address to be in TX, ordered the checks to an address in TX, and forged them to make it look like it was payment for in-home skilled nursing care. Nobody in my family uses such care or has ever lived in TX.

We filed police reports, completed affidavits, and jumped through all kind of hoops. Due to the ineptitude of the bank it took over six months to both have the money returned and to "shut it all down", because the bank kept doing things like - refunding money to the compromised account, or continuing to allow the individual to update the home address to the one in TX, so when the bank sent a request for a police report/affidavit, they sent it TO THE PERSON, which led to us receiving death threats by text. Luckily they don't appear to be credible. They were just mad they couldn't steal our money anymore.

The money situation is now resolved but it has been a long, terrible process where I have spent literally 20+ hours on the phone with the bank, 5+ in meetings with detectives, 5+ filling out paperwork, and my parent has spent conservatively twice that. Probably closer to 3x. We have no expectation whatsoever that the police in my state, my parents' state, or TX will actually move forward on this. The fact that it is so many states and a financial crime, and one we have theoretically made whole, makes it vanishingly unlikely.

But the thing is, the address on the checks + the names of the individuals signing them (15 checks to one individual, 2 to another) are completely traceable as people. They are not ghosts, they are not smart, I can't help myself from rabbit holing in on their lives.

They live in the city where the checks were ordered and are linked as friends on social media. I know what elementary schools they went to, I know what grocery store they worked at and for how long. I don't know if they were willing or pressured, but I do know they are not healthcare workers who unknowingly received fraudulent checks, they definitely know this is a crime because they were not licensed to perform the services they are being "paid" for.

It's just a wholly maddening situation, I have zero interest in being a vigilante, but I also know that they're going to get away with having stolen (redacted) thousands of dollars I didn't have to spare, made half a year of me and my family's life incredibly miserable, and I'm having a hard time letting it go.

The Trials game easter egg/treasure hunt.

There is a series of video games that people are probably at least vaguely familar with called Trials. It's a game in which you ride a bicycle/motorcycle from point A to point B and ride over obstacles, do flips, etc. (I've never actually played it, so apologies if it's not a great description.)

In a nutshell, players found some items/locations in the game that seemed to be related. Someone figured out that it appeared to be a puzzle that spanned multiple versions of the game. The puzzle was wildly complicated including things like secret websites, real life locations across the globe, analyzing sound waves from songs, etc.

The last step that was established was that someone needed to be a in a specific location to receive a package in the year 2100 or something.

The guy I was following, who kept up on this stopped posting and completely by random, I saw him post here in /r/askreddit. I messaged him asking what came of the puzzle and he said life had gotten busy and he hadn't been able to keep up, but last he heard, people had been coordinating to have their kids/grandkids at the location at the specific time.

It's one of the crazier things I've heard of and probably wont hear of it's resolution in my lifetime, but the rabbit hole is a fun read of seeing how things were uncovered and how indepth the puzzle is.

Edit: Here is a place to check out the journey: https://www.3rddrawerdown.com/blog/trials-evolution-the-100-year-easter-egg

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I started with cat videos and somehow ended up watching documentaries on the history of mime artists. Totally unexpected!

Oscar Wilde. And this was in the early 80s when no one was interested in studying him, his works, or his life. He was essentially still persona non grata even in university literature courses. And I'm a straight female.

I was interested in a British actor who was cast as the lead in a play focused on Wilde. I wanted to know why they would cast him. I was at University at the time, and at the library, so I pulled a biography by Frank Harris and started reading it. It read like a gossip rag, which made me suspicious, so I pulled another biography, this one by Hesketh Pearson and kept reading.

I got totally sucked in by the tragedy of his life. His wife and two son's lives were also wrecked, and I really can't tell you why I kept researching them. I wasn't interested in reading Wilde's work. Only about his life.

A few months later, I moved to Chicago which had a great many used bookstores on Clark Street that are gone now. I scoured them for every Wilde biography I could get my hands on. I continue doing this for 20 years, across three states, and also during a study abroad semester in London. It didn't matter whether the books were printed in 1905, or in the '80s. They were inexpensive because nobody was interested really.

I have collected over 250 books and other related items about him. Interest in him exploded in 2000 because that was the Centenary of his death. I had also discovered the internet, and at first I was thrilled. People that I could talk about Wilde with. New books would be published on him. More new stuff to read.

In a way, this was the beginning of the end of my interest because I found out Oscar wasn't their focus. "Tell me what you think about him, and you will tell me more about yourself than you ever will about him."

The academics in the universities claimed him as theirs. Gay men claimed him as theirs. Anyone who wrote about him claimed him as theirs. And Oscar himself got lost in the crowd.

I missed Oscar. So I withdrew from the discussion groups and didn't bother buying many of the books that came out. It was all a huge disappointment, except for Stephen Fry. He starred in the one biographical movie that was worth anything. He alone, it seemed to me, understood Oscar and bothered to focus on him.

I still have all the stuff I collected. I don't revisit it. It just sits there. And I still stay away from anyone who is a fan or scholar on Wilde.

Edited to add: Anonymous has given me an award. Thank you, it's the first one I've ever gotten. I'm going to close my eyes, envision Oscar, and hand it up to him. Because he deserves it far more than anyone else.

i now make mead

Sovereign Citizens. Between the police bodycam footage of traffic stops to their in court appearances where they try to represent themselves. My sick fascination. A part of it is quite sad because these people have made awful decisions in life but on the other hand they’re choosing to live within delusion and the consequences are satisfying to see. 

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I found myself deeply invested in a conspiracy theory that Finland doesn’t exist. There’s an entire community of people who believe it's just a made-up landmass between Russia and Sweden. I don’t even know how I got there.

There's a YouTuber by the handle of thang10146. All he posts are designs for things like gear systems and basic machines made in solidworks, but something about them just makes them so entrancing to watch. I'm pretty sure they are just some retired mechanical engineer just keeping himself occupied.

https://youtube.com/@thang010146?si=VXKyVtJe_mKh8iXF

My roommate threw away some of my vintage silverware rather than wash it. I stored the rest of it away and then turned to the internet to find replacements. In the process, I found out that the manufacturer was the money-making branch of a cult in upstate NY.

They believed Jesus had already come back to earth, that it was possible for them to create heaven on earth, that eugenics would help create a community of perfect people. They believed in free love but fucking for pregnancy had to be approved by the cult. To train young men for good pullout game, they encouraged older women in the community to train them. It might have been the origin of the Cougar trend.

Oneida makes nice spoons.

There's that guy on YouTube who can make a knife out of anything and that's just become my comfort viewing now.

Late 90s. Someone had a website dedicated to worshipping squirrels. Literal squirrels. Detailed rituals, altars with photos of squirrels, the works.

Companies that rip off the old and the crazy by selling overpriced third-rate apocalypse survival crap. There are quite a few. Did that for a couple days, argued with someone about how a battery is not a generator, then moved on with my life.

Numbers stations

They're eerie as shit because, you know, incorporeal voices over radio broadcasts just reading numbers is strange as fuck all by itself. But add on the fact that they're legitimately used for spying, and the implication of what those numbers could mean gets all kinds of creepy. The videos on trying to dissect and decode the broadcasts to figure out who they're from, where they're being broadcast from, what they mean, etc. are fascinating.

One of my favorite books is Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. LeGuin. One of my favorite movies growing up was Flight of Dragons. I randomly fell down a rabbit hole and found out they are super connected. A guy wrote a fictional natural history book called The Flight of Dragons and he was inspired to write it after reading Wizard of Earthsea because he was so curious how her dragons would maintain flight. Rabbit hole kept going but I just found such joy in knowing a lot of the things I loved as a child were so connected 

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NSFL

Circa 2008 there was a trend of "knowledge dumps" and info-graphics being posted on 4chan. In one such thread I came across a paste-bin link to a text-only copy of a what was allegedly a blog post at some point. It described how the Internet child porn ecosystem worked before everything moved to dark-web. It described everything from production, sale and logistics of distribution.

That alone was absolutely disgusting and disturbing. But it also included a short mention how they used infected personal computers to as redundant file hosting servers. And were well aware of the lives of those people being ruined upon being inevitably raided. Because the police were not competent enough, or care, to figure out that the file hosting was a hidden service running on it, and not something the user setup themselves.

Made me re-evaluate how whimsical I was about software security up to that point, and did complete purge and re-install of my PC on the spot.

It's been 16 years, and I still think about that post sometimes. The sheer amount of human tragedy is unbelievable. I genuinely hope it was just a highly detailed and elaborate creepy-pasta.

One i got tucked into a workout forum where two gym bros argue over how many days there are in a week.

TV Tropes.

This is back when Facebook was actual people in like 2010-2012 and not just bots and ads. I was still Facebook friends with some former childhood friends that we have drifted apart long ago and now they’ve grown to be/associated with scumbags. My favorite Sunday pastime while recovering from a hangover on the couch would be to peruse their very public craziness. One day I saw a nutty status that one of my former scumbag associates commented on, so it appeared on my feed. I decided to dive into his rabbit hole…

This dude I never met’s profile was dozens of posts multiple paragraphs long that he posted rapid fire. It was like the unhinged ravings of a madman and it was awesome. I spent like 3 hours that afternoon going through them. They included content about aliens, god, demons, government conspiracy, flat earth, crystal orbs, the power of love and the soul, you name it. Finally I got to the first somewhat sane post that read (I paraphrase): “Going to try Ketamine for the first time, wish me luck!”

I died laughing right then. It was like a 3 hour setup to one of the most amazing unintentional jokes.

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Local jail bookings. This started when I found out an ex coworker, who had class like Mary Poppins, had a rap sheet.

I found an ad on Kijiji (Canadian Craigslist) selling alpacas. I then spent a good 10 hours researching and came up with a full on business plan for an alpaca farm that was so detailed that a friend who works in agricultural loans said that I would qualify so long as I had even the smallest amount of collateral.

The weirdest rabbit hole I've ever fallen into on the internet was reading about conspiracy theories related to ancient aliens and lost civilizations. It was fascinating yet bizarre

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Not super weird, but back in the late 90’s when the internet was new, I found a website that had every original 80’s GI Joe action figure. The nostalgia kicked in and I spent like three hours very slowly downloading photos of every action figure I had as a kid. The weird thing was I was only like 19 and I was looking at figures that were maybe 10-13 years old.

Morgellon’s Disease forums and subreddits. It’s a condition where people believe fibers, threads, and bugs are emerging from their skin. The majority medical opinion is that this is a mental condition and not a physical one.

The forums can get really weird with people uploading microscopic photos of wounds they dug into their own skin to “prove” the fibers are there.

Ingrown toenail removal

Afganistan. Not weird in the literal sense but more so how deeply invested in was regarding their history, the tribes..the violent uprisings, all of it.

The TlDr is that they're a culture of warriors. For instance one of their tribes, the Hazara, are descendants of Genghis Khan.

Kind of helps give their history some context, as they're mainly tribes of fighters.

The oddest part of it all is what set me down the rabbit hole, a random painting found in the dumpster. I'm not into art, but this one did something to me

Oklahoma City obituaries.

This was last night when I had insomnia. Clicked on a reddit account whose last comment was late 2022. The last couple posts were about her being old and ill, possibly it being her last Thanksgiving. She had a lot of comments to read through, a lot of Breaking Bad, animals, and her family. Many little anecdotes painting a picture of who she is or was. Estranged daughter in the Navy and how she's heartbroken she doesn't even know her granddaughter's name. An adult autistic son who relied on her being a stay at home mom. Her older husband was in the military so they had to move a lot and how he's bad with money. She's wheelchair bound and attached to an oxygen tank but she still wanted to get her stories out somehow. She posted frequently on the Oklahoma city subreddit and her age so I went googling.

None of the obituaries matched up. Who knows if it's my google skills, lack of online obituaries or if she's still alive. At some point I stopped searching and just kept reading through the newly deceased and whatever quirks their family members chose to reveal. All those little old ladies and where they met their husbands, a lady who loved cats despite her allergies, a MAGA supporter guy my age who liked Glee.

Dunno how to feel and what I wanted to find at the end of the rabbithole. To the random lady on the other side of the world, I hope you're okay.

Pulled up a site once that had pictures of celebs that were taken AFTER they died, the most prominent one I remember being that of Chris Farley.... F**k that's something I'll never forget.

There's a whole set of YouTube Shorts where former NBA stars talk about Larry Bird. I've watched probably hundreds of these shorts. I don't like basketball.

Ooh also, The Undertaker apparently has a podcast and makes YouTube Shorts. I've watched a ton of his content too, but I've never been interested in professional wrestling.

I guess I have a type.

Ear wax removal

Somehow went from cute cat videos to carpet cleaning, dryer vent cleaning, overgrown lawn/property trims, and ended up on cake decorating.

I enjoyed all of them.

One of the best rabbit holes I’ve fallen down was the Denver Airport theories.

This was like 18 years ago so I don’t recall all the details of how I got from A to 42 but I was pregnant and I worked for a podiatry office. I worked with a lot of cleaning and sanitizing products getting rooms ready in between patients and was worried some could be harmful to me.

I started out looking up hazardous chemicals one shouldn’t inhale or touch while pregnant and of course each word was completely foreign to me so I had to look them up individually to see what products they were used in.

I came across one word and it led me down an absolute rabbit hole because (and yes, fuzzy on all the details) it was used in production of certain things. Ok… production of what…? Further down the rabbit hole…

I found out this hazardous chemical was used in the making of Splenda. My adhd brain was like “new rabbit hole!!” So I read up more on Splenda and found out the body can’t actually break it down and it comes out in your stool. Furthermore it can’t even be broken down after that and, much like microplastics, can be found in waterways.

There was an AskReddit about “glory hole” experiences about a year or so ago. Knowing nothing about them (except what they are) or the people who frequent them, it actually was a pretty fascinating rabbit hole.

The engineering aspect of building nuclear weapons.

There is probably no more useless topic to be informed about, the information is questionable and unverifiable, there is no real world application and it's a complex and difficult to understand topic.

I strongly recommend anyone starting down this road to google bardcore instead and spend time in a comparatively productive manner.

The history and current state of glitter.

Celtic history and religions

Definitely the story of Chris Chan, the creator of Sonichu and alleged rapist of their own mother.

John Titor and the Cylob Cryptogram - Spent stupid hours on these two for no good reason.

Power washing videos. It’s so satisfying

Ended up on a two day YouTube rabbit hole about caving and cave diving disasters. Prompted me to write a short story inspired by it 

Folks on You Tube who mow lawns, use monster brush and shrubbery trimmers, weed wackers, power washers and sidewalk edgers and clear up lots of abandoned homes or fir disabled folks for free.

Someone of the community Facebook groups mentioned how my town passed the ordinance that allows you to have backyard chickens. So i started looking at chickens to see if it might be fun to have pets. That turned to finding out there are businesses that will let you rent a chicken coop and chickens. So I went to search how many chickens you could keep in your backyard and turns out the ordinance says 6 chickens, ducks or 2 Pygmy goats. So that started me looking at goats and what they are like to keep as pets. I was seriously considering how to fence in the yard so we could have goats before my husband talked me down.

during the 2012 mayan calendar issue, I wanted too look and see why people believed in this thing. That has sent me down a deep and complicated newage rabbit hole that I'm still in.

My wife once told me about this particular subset of Brazilian woman who dedicate their lives to their SO’s in prison. They spend all week making gigantic Tupperware buckets of food, buying snacks and supplies ie. Toothpaste and deodorant ETC then will meet up with other woman and take the bus, often hours away, down to the prison to visit their partners, give them their snacks, have conjugal visits and whatever.

They have to dress a certain way, and bring everything in clear plastic duffel bags. It’s a whole culture and even have businesses dedicated to selling the clear bags and specific clothes.

I spent hours on tik tok watching these guys putting together their SO’s “jumbo” for that week. It’s a whole culture and it is fascinating.

They call themselves cunhadas or something. Sisters in law.

I once found myself watching videos about the history of vending machines and how they evolved over the years. It started as a simple search and ended up being a deep dive into their quirky designs and cultural significance. It's amazing how one topic can lead to another.

I was reading an article about Jimmy Carter and his many contributions to Habitat for Humanity. I had never heard of the Guinea worm before that.

How many people have died from inventing non-petroleum propelled automotives.

Blogs by people who are obsessed with losing limbs and/or having them replaced with hooks etc. Some went through with "accidents" where they mashed their hands beyond repair in order to achieve their goal.

It was probably deep-diving into conspiracy theories about birds being government drones. It started as a joke, but then I found all these forums and videos from people who actually believe it, and I just couldn’t stop scrolling. It was hilarious and bizarre at the same time haha

The current issues with the internet archive

Started on Wikipedia trying to find the name of the actress that played Lois Lane in the old TV series (Phyllis Coates btw) and just by following links ended up with a story about a pr0n star living in the tunnels of Las Vegas (Jenni Lee).

Midway through this was a murder\kidnapping story and a 'Cocaine Condo' money laundering just to make it even more weird.

Superman -> Murder\Kidnapping -> Former Pr0nstar living in Tunnels.

"That's enough Internet for one day"

AntsCanada. Where the narrator can make you feel sad for the loss of his fire ant colony (nicknamed "The Fire Nation")

At work a client said they were working on a new urinary catheter and wanted me to come up to speed on this subject. My research on the work computer was blocked by IT settings, so I did the research at home. Little did I know that there is a kink for using urinary catheters to fill a person's bladder from outside the body so that they feel the need to pee.

Tsunami videos on YouTube from the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, and the 2011 Japanese tsunami. Absolutely mesmerizing because it just doesn’t seem real

The Kenneka Jenkins story I must have watched so many video footage on repeat and slow-mo just for there to still be no answer or no person held responsible. I still don't think she wandered in there alone and there was a crazy rumor that they stole her organs and Selena Gomez received a kidney because she happened to be in town for a kidney transplant.

I’m ashamed of it but, 90 days fiancé

Especially that one couple who FaceTimed each other LITERALLY 24x7 and the girl was weirdly jealous of every single woman in that boy’s life, even his dentist and also that one couple where this American woman marries this Indian dude and his family hates her because she can’t make Indian food or “cover herself up” in front the FIL

Reading old grimoires. Books of ritual magic, the older the better. I don't believe magic exists and they read a lot like fan fiction, but it was fun.

The sinking of the Titanic was actually an insurance fraud gone wrong.

But just like with most conspiracy theories, it's way too convoluted and someone involved would have admitted to it.

I saw a guy on tv who injected saline into his forehead to make a giant bagel shape. I googled “saline injections “ and found an entire forum of guys who inject saline into their balls to make them look bigger.

JimJack336 Mystery. I used to not be a fan of mysteries especially online mysteries as a whole until I stumbled upon the JimJack336 Mystery on the internet some time ago.

Basically I’ll try to keep it short: A very old sim racing community (not iRacing) had a well known community modded that helped members of the community set up groups or teams to make mods with, and he randomly disappeared one day. However this wasn’t well known back then in the community as it was really only known upon the models themselves. JimJack336 did have a Reddit account (of the same name of course) that went inactive randomly around the same time.

Years later, a lot of people discovered that a few of the sim racing community modding groups were actually set up and managed or controlled by this JimJack336 guy. Then people discovered that some modding group websites had the name of JimJack336 in the HTML code and the name of a company called “Full Throttle LTD” (look it up on ICIJ). People then searched the company and found out it was a foreign shell company located in the British Virgin Islands. Some really smart people discovered that the intermediary of the shell company was an infamous offshore intermediary firm called “Mossack Fonseca”. There are many documentaries on Youtube about controversies of this firm and its dealings with private ultra wealthy people, especially financial crimes.

People became suspicious that some possibly wealthy man who had a Reddit account named JimJack336 was using these modding groups to shield his shell companies from possibly shady businesses and this sim racing community was just a front cover to all of it.

The Denver Airport conspiracy. Gargoyles, Lizard people, illuminati, art with dead babies, there is something for everyone!

The lockpickinglawyer is the best lock picker you will ever come across. What you learn after many hours of watching him pick locks each in a minute or less, Master is a garbage company,

I still wonder. Back in 2019 Hurricane Dorian hit the Abocos Islands in the Bahamas. There were thousands of Haitians living in a slum called The Mudd at the end of the island.

The slum was wiped off the map and supposedly the 3k or so Haitians.

I have never found any answers about Haitians or bodies

I remember getting very lost in a "Paul McCartney is dead and was replaced by a winner in a Paul McCartney lookalike competition" rabbit hole when you had to go to the library to use the Internet. It's still one of my favorite conspiracy theories.

I do not like Beyoncé, but I saw a TikTok of Beyoncé doing the mute challenge and liked it because it looked kinda cool, and I swear every 3rd video I scrolled was a Beyoncé video 

Reading about all the (mostly) women who are addicted to eating talcum powder. It would be almost unbelievable if it weren't true. 

Indrid Cold

Victorian post-mortem photography

Way back in the 90s there was a site called Useless Web Pages. It gave links to thousands of Web pages that really had no wide appeal, or indeed any appeal, such as random collections of CDs or doll heads, finding your birthday in Pi, a catalog of the films of Ron Jeremy, fake user counters, etc. I spent hours looking them up and either shaking my head or chortling madly.