Well, there’s at least two aspects here:

Fucking Thor, PirateSoftware.

Up untill Ross posted his ‘SKG is dead’ video… Thor had by far gotten the most views of anyone with a video discussing SKG.

And Thor… well, he was anti-SKG, and had been spreading a bunch of objectively false bullshit about it, actual FUDD.

So… about half of Ross’s video was dedicated to pointing out how Thor was wildly misunderstanding things, and fairly graciously and politely trying to correct these misconceptions.

So here’s the two sort of things at play I see, in terms of ‘why sudden surge now?’

1. Thor was just shown to be objectively, factually wrong. Thus, the immediate effect of this would be to reiterate and clarify and reinforce with more specificity what SKG actually is… and that could directly convince people to give a damn, to believe in Ross’s SKG over Thor’s misunderstandings and mischaracterizations.

But uh, almost certainly much, much more relevant:

2. Ross doing (1) created an absolute drama shit storm via the way youtube works now… which is very much just drama mongers and commentators reporting on e-drama. (1) kicked off an actual, organic, honest to god, truly viral explosion of many, many people who’d basically never heard of any of this before, mostly dogpiling on Thor for being such a disingenuous, egotistical asshole and liar, but also of course encouraging people to sign the SKG petition.

This kind of absurd, out of nowhere explosion of popularity of some topic, idea, meme, whatever, that spreads from person to person to person, from the ground up instead of top down… this is what something going ‘viral’ originally meant in the earlier days of the internet, 15 to 20 ish years ago.

You know, it spreads, from host to host, like a pandemic outbreak, shockingly rapidly.

These days we have everything hypermanaged by algorithms that silo you into your own content niche… and this was an exceptional enough of an event that it broke containment.

Videos like … this entire topic/event/story… used to be what the YouTube trending tab looked like… just totally random shit that for whatever reason, a bunch of people organically shared with each other, back when the algos were much, much more primitive.

…

Anyway… extremely ironically, a whole lot of the viral nature of this is due to Thor being just such an astoundingly massive piece of shit liar and manipulator.

He has a whole entire history of being astoundingly cocky, arrogant, dishonest, deceptive, intellectually inconsistent, rhetorically manipulative, etc, and it is genuienly… just astounding, i dont know what other word to use, to go through every single shitty thing Thor has done or said, not only in regards to SKG, but many, many other things Thor has done.

Basically, Thor is now a lolcow, a perfect person to milk by making content criticizing him, because he really is that much of an unbelievable, outrageuous idiot asshole.

I mean, its not technically completely impossible, but the vast majority of EU countries require a valid name, id, address, etc, its usually a pretty dumb idea to bot spam an official government web portal, and I’m sure there will be a review process after July 31.

Also… its not like it hits a million and then just no one else can sign up to it anymore.

It’ll stay open till the end of the month, could easily breach a million, maybe even two million if anything like this insane rate keeps up.

Ross is the dude with long hair and laser eyes.

On the right in the second pic.

That and broad, massive economic collapse in basically every other sector, at least in the US.

Can’t play vidya gaem if hev no food starve.

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/02/adp-jobs-report-june-2025.html

Oops.

Labor market (# of actual jobs) is now actually net contracting, shrinking.

Expected: +100k jobs

Reality: -33k jobs

Firings / Layoffs > Hiring.

Also the population grows, so uh, it actually has to be something like +200k to +250k to remain steady in terms of working age people vs jobs.

Sure, there are lots of ‘job openings’, but they’re all fake ghost job bullshit that never actually hire anyone.

And they don’t pay enough to bother doing them, and they have insane requirements that make no sense.

Great Depression 2.0 Gaming!

(The housing market is also collapsing if any readers haven’t been paying attention.

My semi-educated guess is about a 55% drop by 24 months from now, compared to roughly '23-'24 highs.

Hope your boomer parents didn’t buy in the last 5 years rofl!)

Well hey, I very much appreciate more info from someone who was actually there!

Yep.

There’s the whole… apparently when Thor was essentially high school to post high school age, he managed to cajole a younger SecondLife user, who was actually decently talented at creating like clothes and custom player models…

So in SecondLife, you can actually make real money that way, you can cash out the SecondLife currency for actual realworld money.

Yeah SecondLife was actually quite a pioneer in a lot of ways, from a technical and just ‘what even is a video game’ standpoint, lets say uh ‘eccentric’ community and reputation aside.

And Thor basically convinced this other SL user, who was like 5 years younger than him… that he could make them both more money as a sort of salesman, promoter, of this other persons user made content… if they profit share.

I may have some details wrong here, but basically… Thor did basically nothing in terms of promotion, yet he made a significant chunk of change off of this other person.

Because … SL just has basically a universal market you can list things in.

Like uh, Escape from Tarkov, or FF14’s auction house or what not, fully built into the game… but even more so as it actually allows you to cash out to real world money.

its not like you’d have to do some kind of technical wizardry to enable sales, its not like Thor whipped up some kind of gray/black market system / payment processor way back when PayPal was still a fairly new idea.

Alongside that, there were allegations of basically ERP going waaay too far.

Now, this other person has I think entirely denied any kind of ERP abuse, sexual or just normal relationship abuse, says everything was fine…

But a good number of people seem to think that the essentially digital labor theft Thor did, basically amounts to its own kind of grooming, exploitation.

We investigated ourselves and everything looks peachy actually!

Yep, no need for any independent audit mr. auditor regulator man person!

=D

Wow, I hadn’t even heard of that particular story of Thor being an egotistical asshat.

I’d been looking into the WoW debacle, then stumbled into other stuff, but nope, that one’s new to me.

This is fucking bonkers.

I ran the math a few days ago, before this absolutely blew the fuck up, and I came to:

We’d need 11k sigs per day until July 31st.

… We’re now apparently at more than double that and climbing exponentially.

Ho Lee Shit.

God DAMN has it been a while since I’ve seen something go actually, truly, organically viral.

Wait untill people realize that Ross Scott has had a running show, ‘Freeman’s Mind’, going back to basically the fucking machinima days, where he just does a playthrough of all of Half Life and voices Gordon’s inner thoughts.

Its still on his youtube channel!

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6PNZBb6b9LvDWpI-5CPYUxG1Rnm-vr9V

We are going to need another petition to get Ross an honorary title, a goddamned bust of an upraised fist in an HEV suit, clenching a crowbar, with ‘For Exceptional Valor and Dutiful Service in the Defense of Video Gaming’ emblazoned on its base.

Let the memes flow!

therapy does not have to be expensive.

But it is though.

Your medicaid patients?

Poor. By definition.

Sure they might not pay a copay, but they pay for it in gas money to get to that visit, their barely running car now breaking down from visiting you, time off work they can’t really afford, time filling out reams and reams of fucking paperwork to be able to qualify for anything, likely when they’re already in a mentally comprimised condition to some extent… its all very stressful.

Which is very bad for mental health.

we have no reason to believe it would be any better than a paper journal and a CBT worksheet.

And the part you don’t want to admit (at least here) is that … that’s actually quite helpful in and of itself for a lot of people.

Have a few sessions with a live, in person therapist, to teach you CBT, give you the paperwork, walk you through it.

Not all, but many people can take it by themselves from there, and not need to keep wasting time and energy on continually requalifying for medicaid, getting to and from psych appointments, dealing with scheduling delays and unavailability, etc.

Yep, a lot of people are also helped by basically just having someone to be able to talk to and feel heard.

But… that’s often doable by just making either a friend or even casual acquaintance with someone who is capable of, and has the capacity for reflexive empathy.

Much less stress and paperwork involved there.

And also yes, some people with much more serious issues need much more serious help.

Unfortunately, the entire medical system in the US is utterly broken, and the only real solution is having a system that … isn’t broken, so that comprehensive screening and diagnosis is easily available without huge delays and costs… and more broadly, those people need to have the first two levels of maslow’s hierarchy of needs taken care of.

But currently our society basically just takes those people and throws them into the streets, evicts them, forecloses on them, incarcerates them.

There simply is no systemic way to help those people without major systemic changes… and those ain’t happening, they’re moving in the opposite direction.

…

The problem with LLMs as therapy is that they are wildly overconfident, agreeable to the point of encouraging delusions and dangerous behavior, they hallucinate facts that aren’t real… and they are not actually capable of legitimate critical thinking or reasoning.

They also will not introduce you to concepts you have never heard of before which you do not know are or could be very useful, unless you directly ask them to do that, and even then… they obviously are not experts themselves and may suggest dubious ideas.

But also, at the same time… people often do form what they will describe as meaningful relationships with an LLM. So… its not that ‘it doesn’t happen’, its that its a psuedorelationship, a fascimile of a relationship, lacks in person interaction, a real human modulating their intonation, having micro expressions, body language, etc etc.

Damn, didn’t know that.

I’m already planning on moving to MN for many other reasons, there’s another one.

Yeah, memes, common jokes, can be employed for unhelpful purposes, in unhelpful ways.

You are basically saying ‘its just a joke bro!’ when its clear that a lot of people, in general, and here in this thread, are tired of this joke, as it is dismissive and reductive.

You entirely derailed the topic by being dismissive of about 350 million people and just saying you don’t give a fuck about them.

Thats not relevant or productive to attempting to seriously discuss broad social dynamics, at all, whatsoever.

And now you’re just openly insulting me directly and personally, and you’re now acting as if you are an authority figure who can direct the flow of this conversation.

You seem to have a bit of an anti-American/anti-homeless chip on your shoulder, and I don’t much care for the sociopath vibes you’re giving me, so I’ll be blocking you now.

Uh, I am not intentionally trolling anyone.

To the best of my understanding… CBT has the largest amount of empirical data showing it actually helps a broad variety of people.

Yes, of course there are other forms of therapy that are more targetted and helpful for people with specific, identified conditions or diagnoses, or specific kinds of past trauma, etc.

This is why I phrased the sentence the way I did, with ‘basically’ as a qualifier, said ‘most’ people. I suppose I could have been a bit more clear and concise with that, my apologies.

There’s no need to catastrophize and read a boat load of ill intent into what I said; we can have a good faith conversation here if you want to.

What are other broadly empirically verified to be helpful therapy methods that help a broad range of people?

I would genuinely like to know, so I could look into them.

I’ve heard DBT is showing promise, but I’ve not heard it is as widely empirically evidenced and verified, yet.

I also freely admit that I could have some details and specifics wrong here… I am after all recovering from 2 years of homelessness, multiple concussions, contusions, etc.

This is like, how conversations work, right?

If someone says something you know is false… you don’t immediately assume they are an intentional badfaith disinfo agent, you instead say hey, you said this, I think that’s incorrect, and let me tell you why.

Though I do have to point out the irony of me saying that I often encounter many psych field people who needlessly read hostile intent into what I say… and then you are here literally exemplifying that, by having a very emotionally charged reaction, while identifying yourself as being in the psych field.

Now flip that around and anytime you see or a hear a woman saying her man isn’t emotionally available, just tell her he isn’t your therapist.

… Do you see how this kind of framing is wildly unproductive, when either side engages in it?

You are the one that made this all about what does and doesn’t apply to a specific area or country, into being a pro or anti whatever specific nationality discussion.

Like I don’t disagree that we should fix our own country, it is our responsibility… but you could have just said ‘Damn, is it really that bad in the States?’ or something like that, without being dismissive and hostile for… basically the only reason is you’re tired of hearing about America I guess?

???

Sorry I exist?

Yeah, that’s a massively inefficient layout, likely because what this actually is aimed at is 4 student roomates.

You don’t really need a seperate full bathroom for every single family member.

Private full bath for the parents, roughly one full bath for every two kids, and a half bath, or something like that.

Alternatively: Just make more student style housing, but for non students.

A whole floor shares a common, double kitchen, maybe two wash/dry units, then has basically a largeish studio with a sleeping nook, and a private full bath for each person.

You reply to an anecdote (well really more of a logical argument but w/e) with an anecdote.

Astounding level of intellectual discussion going on here.

Cool, I’m glad you’re so enlightened and open minded as to uh … not give a fuck about perspectives from places you aren’t from.

As for you telling me how to use an internet message board… what more do you want from me?

I told you where I am from and what I am talking about.

I’d love to be able to move to Europe and get away from this fucking imploding hell hole of morons.

But I am broke and physically disabled after being the victim of numerous physical assaults.

Are any of ya’ll accepting disabled American aslyum seekers, so we can easily enjoy your civilized world?

Didn’t think so.