The Weirdest Thing I Ever Purposefully Did on the Internet

Ghost

Okay, first of all...

NO, THIS TOPIC ISN'T ABOUT THE KINKIEST THING OR THAT HOOKER YOU ORDERED OR ABOUT THE TIME YOU WENT ON TOR TO CHECK OUT RED ROOMS AND BROWSE PERSONAL HITMAN FEES USING BITCOIN.

No. This is about those moments where you actually Google'd something, YouTube'd something, or actually used Bing and then realized it was either for something really stupid or somewhat bizarre. I'm talking stuff you actually looked for that would be worthy of Tosh.O

I'll give examples of my own:

YouTube deep dive resulted in searching for videos of Venus Flytrap from WKRP teaching a gang member about the Atom
The Heinz Automato
Glenn Danzig IMPERSONATOR crooning a shopping list
What ever happened to Paul Pfeiffer from The Wonder Years?
Researching Atreyu from The Neverending Story's MMA record
Deep Dive into the cast of 21 Jump Street to later learn that Dustin Nguyen was married to the lady disabled in a car accident by the actress who played the yellow Power Ranger
Former member of Menudo is a seriously out muscleman now who recorded a He-Man cosplay video

Auspice

The only thing I can think of is extensive research into Indiana tax records as research for a novel I never finished.

Tinuviel

@Auspice The number of times I've had to self-explain my search history as "I'm a writer" or "I'm a teacher" astounds me.

Auspice

@Tinuviel said in The Weirdest Thing I Ever Purposefully Did on the Internet:

@Auspice The number of times I've had to self-explain my search history as "I'm a writer" or "I'm a teacher" astounds me.

Right? Like, 'weird' to me isn't 'I researched what a shotgun wound looks like' because whatever I do that sort of thing all the time because writer.

But in-depth research into a state's tax records is a little weird even by my standards because it's not my usual type of writing.

Derp

@Tinuviel said in The Weirdest Thing I Ever Purposefully Did on the Internet:

@Auspice The number of times I've had to self-explain my search history as "I'm a writer" or "I'm a teacher" astounds me.

I'll see both of those and raise you "I'm a lawyer" or "I'm a paralegal" or some other form of "I work for the government."

Tinuviel

@Auspice Yeah, it's not even innately "weird" stuff that I generally look for. But it's the minutiae that nobody but me and some researcher from Harvard even care about.

Killer Klown

I dunno. I have this habit of, when I get bored, plugging in random words that probably shouldn't go together and seeing if Google comes back with anything. Like 'sexy numismatist'.

Ghost

I forever stand by concept of typing the following into YouTube's search engine. Just fill in the blank with anything that comes to mind.

THE ____________ THING ON YOUTUBE

Funniest. Dumbest. Scariest. Meanest. Coolest. Whitest. Blackest. Gayest. Weirdest. Craziest. Sweetest. Hottest. Etc etc etc

Never fails to entertain.

Lotherio

@Derp said in The Weirdest Thing I Ever Purposefully Did on the Internet:

some other form of "I work for the government."

National Security contacted a friend after a certain number of searches, he explained he was USMC Staff Sergeant and it was job relevant. They advised him they would add him to their okay list so he wouldn't be contacted again once they had verified his credentials. So no matter what weird I've searched, I've never been contacted by enforcement agencies calling to enforce something.

Ghost

@Lotherio Psssh.

Just add "Asking for a friend" to every search.

What is the best way to dispose of a body? Asking for a friend.

Ooo. Or prefix every search with On friend's computer...

JinShei

@Derp said in The Weirdest Thing I Ever Purposefully Did on the Internet:

@Tinuviel said in The Weirdest Thing I Ever Purposefully Did on the Internet:

@Auspice The number of times I've had to self-explain my search history as "I'm a writer" or "I'm a teacher" astounds me.

I'll see both of those and raise you "I'm a lawyer" or "I'm a paralegal" or some other form of "I work for the government."

I offer you "nurse lecturer". Yes I do need those images...

gryphter

I've found myself researching some pretty wild shit for characters. I have entered into a search bar the words 'Hey there federal agent reading my search history, you should know that this is character research for fictional writing, so please don't raid my house'.

So far, so good.

Pyrephox

I spent a few weeks looking at homonuculus videos on YouTube. As in, people who are attempting to or claim to have created an alchemical homonuculus in real life. Using the 'traditional' methods, and variations thereof. I.e. injecting their sperm and/or blood into a chicken egg and trying to hatch it.

The hoax videos range from hilarious to 'surprisingly good production values for something that is completely ridiculous', but I think I found the earnest ones more fascinating. Like, people who had hours and hours of videos of meticulous experiments on whether any combination of treatments or circumstances could make a human-sperm-injected chicken egg hatch into an alchemical creature. (Spoiler: It can't.) And the failure of each experiment is cataloged and discussed, and refinements proposed, carried out, and dissected.

SO MUCH EFFORT invested into something that is just absolutely impossible AND has a physical outcome expected. (Unlike the various magic videos, where no one can really argue with spiritual results, I mean. These poor guys just crack every one of these eggs, and see that they are, indeed, still unfertilized chicken eggs, or rotten chicken eggs, and then just...do it again. And again.)

silverfox

This was literally last night.

I googled bear fur underwear.

For reasons.

RightMeow

What about other people's computers? I took my sister's phone and looked up:

How to murder your sister and get away with it.

Then I slid it back to her and said, "Insurance."

mietze

For awhile, my husband worked for a UK based software company that developed real time strategy games that were used to train USMC and NATO people. Because they wanted the stats and proper names for all of their units included in this game, hubby had to do a ton of interlibrary loans and internet research around current (at that time) US military equipment and munitions being used in Afghanistan and Iraq. Also, we got regular international wires from out of the country on a month basis that was the household's only income (payment from the software company).

For about a week there was suddenly a large opaque window van with the words Crapo Plumbing services parked on our little easement/side row that we share with some neighbors. Many people commented trying to figure out who was getting work done. It was there during daylight hours for a few days, and then disappeared. That same day, suddenly our phone line went dead. We called up the telephone company, and they sent a repair person out to try and figure out what was up--and he then asked us why we had switched our telephone wiring to a different wiring setup in the house. (We bought a flipped house, where the interior had been gutted and rather shoddily as we later found out and hastily redone--so we have duplicate electrical wiring, some plumbing, AND two phone landlines to the house, but one is old and we've never used it). But something had happened to switch the landline phone from the existing wiring to the never-used one. THis is in the days when there weren't really smartphones in wide use if at all, so most people still used their landline. We asked him if it was just like a weird switch flip and he said no, it had been connected to the old hookup in the exterior box, rather than the one we had been using. Once he switched it back, we immediately got phone service back. He was really super confused about it.

We have lived in this house for 21 years now. Never had a problem before or since with the landline, and never before or since have seen that Crapo plumbing van. So I love to tease my husband now that for awhile in the early 00s some poor NSA grunt had to sit and listen to his boring ass work conference calls and emails.