> John Titor is a name used on several bulletin boards during 2000 and 2001 by a poster claiming to be an American military time traveler from 2036. Titor made numerous vague and specific predictions regarding calamitous events in 2004 and beyond, including a nuclear war. Inconsistencies in his explanations, the uniform inaccuracy of his predictions, and a private investigator's findings all led to the general impression that the entire episode was an elaborate hoax.
And of course, the anime based off of John Titor's legend: Steins;Gate (and other urban legends: such as miniature black holes are being created by "SERN" in the LHC: the obvious play on CERN in the real world).
A pretty funny (and horrific!!) "what if" scenario if a lot of those legends happened to be true. I have my doubts if it has aged very well: a lot of the pull of that anime was that it felt very "in the now"... where "now" was ~2010 when it was released. Those urban legends / online conspiracy theories have a short lifespan, and I doubt that many people today would pick up on all of the stuff integrated into that story.
I imagine it also had a measurable impact on the sales of Dr Pepper. It took me a year to kick the habit of drinking it, which started after binge-watching Steins;Gate.
I don't know if you've seen Steins;Gate 0 (the sequel?) to Steins;Gate (technically it happens in between the last and second to last episodes) but I say the series holds up about as well as it could have.
There are some rough parts but it's a pretty solid series overall. Arguably the VN is a better portrayal but that gets into a whole other discussion.
EDIT: speaking of SilvaGunner, I've never heard this name before, I found two mentions of it on two unrelated YouTube videos in the past 3 hours. Incredible. Baader–Meinhof strikes again.
This book is nothing like anything you've ever read before. The author himself doesn't read at all, so the book basically reinvents the concept of the book, built on a background of video games and a serious obsession with numbers. If you are a very 'literate' reader and unable to read anything without seeing it against the conventions of a thousand years of literary tradition, you'll have trouble enjoying this book. If you can keep a very open mind, you'll get a rare glimpse to a world seen by a mind that doesn't work like most of ours. I would like to call this a gem of outsider literature, but the term suffers from association with lunacy and incompetence. Nick Smith is neither. He is very conscious of the peculiar workings of his mind, and follows confidently the path laid out by those peculiarities, and the result is something wonderful. Highly recommended!
Review by Heikki Malkki
* SilvaGunner (also: Unregistered HyperCam 2): https://siivagunner.fandom.com/wiki/SiIvaGunner_Wiki
* Pronounciation Book / horse_ebooks: https://77days.fandom.com/wiki/Pronunciation_Book_Conspiracy...
* Cicada 3301: http://www.cicada3301.org
I'm cataloguing some of these here: https://href.cool/Stories/Folkmeme
Interested to hear about other favorites of yours!