Bill fucking Cosby. That guy was a generational idol.

Back in the '00s, he used to give speeches down at college campuses around the country that supposedly promoted ethics and social values for young men. The most famous of these, the Pound Cake Speech, was given out during the 50th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision at an NAACP Legal Defense dinner, ffs.

He was this pinnacle of Respectibility Politics. This Model Minority. The quintessential American father figure. An intellectual. A charismatic icon. A pillar of the community.

Oops. Fuck. Oh well…

I used to love Joss Whedon from everything he made. I grew up watching Buffy, and loved Firefly, then Marvel got him for Avengers and I was excited for him to be getting such a big break. He later Agents of Shield which I also loved. But then it came out that he was an abuser. His whole persona of championing strong women was merely a facade to hide this.

Learning that Michelle Trachtenberg (RIP) had a clause in her contract while working in Buffy (2000-3) at age 15 that she was not to ever be in the same room as Whedon alone opened my eyes to just how bad things are. Not just how bad he was, but how well it was known that he was an abuser and no one did anything about it. That’s just how things were.

I have a hard time watching Buffy or any of his works anymore, just knowing now that he was behind these things.

My childhood heros were the cartoon heros of the 80’s. And they all turned out to be lieing to us the whole time. Saying things like “evil never wins”, “crime doesn’t pay”, and all that. They were really just trying to reduce the competition.

A big hero of mine is/was “Weird Al” Yankovic. I feel like out of all celebrities that exist, he’s the one that I probably don’t have to worry about turning out to be a horrible person.

I reserve ‘cunt’ and ‘dumb bitch’ as especially strong, disrespectful expletives to call a woman.

When I say “Fuck that dumb bitch TERF cunt JK Rowling” it carries the hurt and ire of a broken childhood love of Harry Potter. The series itself was incredibly important to me and provided a world I could escape to when the real world was overwhelming. The hate and bigotry that cunt has shown breaks my heart and sullies too many childhood memories to describe.

I was deeply inspired to pursue engineering after watching the first Falcon 9 boosters land themselves. I was enamored by the idea of using my little blip in humanity’s timeline to assist our expansion to another planet. I wanted to contribute to something important, something that turned many brilliant minds towards an achievement that would eventually benefit the entirety of mankind.

I even hopped on the Tesla train; I recognized the existential threat that carbon emissions bore as well as the damaging, restrictive nature of building a society that scorns public transportation and promotes individual car ownership.

I didn’t worship Elon so much as admired the causes he was advancing. That admiration withered over the years but my dream of contributing to the colonization of Mars helped me push through the ten years it took to earn my four year engineering degree. As details of his derangement came out, as he acquired twitter and more overtly spread his billionaire propaganda, that dream started to fade. The fascist salutes at Trump’s inauguration crushed those dreams and ground them into a dust too fine to even attempt a rebuild.

My jaded ass still wants to benefit humanity so I’ve set my eyes on climate science, even as the country I was born in denies the havoc and damage our relentless consumption has wrought. Not just denial, but outright derision and contempt for the future of our world. Thus I hope to take my dreams elsewhere, hoping to find a culture with a clearer view of the consequences we must face and the changes we must make to preserve our planet.

JK Rowling

I can’t think of any artist more divorced from their work than Orson Scott Card

Shit, like half of 'em. The other half just died, like decent folk.

Keanu Reeves, I used to really like the guy when the matrix trilogy came out but then he said and did all these super nice things like saying “I don’t want to be part of a world where kindness is perceived as weakness”.

Nah just fucking with you. The dude is solid!

Nobody mentioned God?

I was raised Christian. Never deeply religious, but had all the bible study stuff, religious school, etc. Religion was comforting.

Then I got older and started seeing the fanboys for who they were. Hypocrites of the highest order. Assholes that armored themselves with being “Christians”. Trying to game the system or to buy their way into heaven, making it transactional. Heaven also seems like a shitty place; an existence locked into worshipping a deity while in a drugged out euphoria and never being able to learn, grow, and experience things again. A “Matrix”-like place. A God that is psychotic, manipulative, and a classic narcissistic abuser. Jesus would probably be a cool guy, but nobody actually gives a fuck about him. A book full of contradictions and other awful things that are constantly rationalized and massaged to mean whatever the needs of the individual might be. Just generally how awful any religion is, how it’s used to control people, do shitty things, and consolidate power and money.

Yeah, if you’re formerly religious, you get it. I’m an scientific atheist now.

Ironically, thanks to modern “christians”, I’ve found myself citing scripture to shitty people who claim to be religious to point out their hypocrisy, idolatry or whatever, and occasionally listening to religious people who point out how awful and un-christian these people are.

Hulk Hogan. I was such a huge Hulkamaniac as a kid, brother.

Not so much a hero but I admired his work the projects he is associated with: Elon regarding Tesla & Space X.

I had heard that he was a bit of a nightmare to work with but I just chalked that up to the usual tech CEO being a bit of an arsehole but still delivering the vision. So admired the projects but wouldn’t personally work for him.

The first time I came across something that gave me the impression something was off with him was when he called one of the Thai cave divers a pedo after the diver rejected using an unproven single person extraction canister Elon proposed.

It was just so uncalled for. Then the more I read and saw stories about him my opinion of him wained further down to a spoilt nepo-baby cosplaying as a design engineer who’d do best to get out of the way of the actual engineers trying to do the work.

Now I think the world would be better off without him and I hope the talented engineers currently work for him leave to find fulfilling employment elsewhere in the space and electrification industries as soon as possible.

I used to think Musk was ok.

I didn’t know anything about him other than he was investing in EV’s which I felt the world desperately needed, at a time when it felt like big oil was squashing the uptake.

Kevin Sorbo as Hercules©®™.

And I used to listen to the lost profits as a teenager. ultra sigh

Bill Nye