Short Suck #37 - The Very Avoidable Oceangate Disaster

Viktor Frankl and his logotherapy. This is the topic we examine this week to carry on the Timesuck tradition of ending the year on a little inspirational note. Frankl had everything taken from him - his parents, his wife, his career, his home, and more - all taken by the Nazis after they stormed into Vienna during WW2. Shortly before the Nazis arrived, Frankl had just opened his own psychoanalytic private practice and was developing his own school of psychological thought - logotherapy, based around one's mental health and happiness being rooted primarily in meaning. Do you feel that your life has meaning? A sense of purpose? Why do you get out of bed each morning? Like Nietzsche, Frankl believed that if you could answer the why, you could endure any how. And then this mindset was put to the ultimate test when Frankl found himself spending years in Nazi ghettos and concentration camps - he and his family brutalized for being Jewish. And there, surrounded by death and despair, in his darkest days, Frankl still found meaning in his life. A purpose. And because of that, I find his life and therapeutic outlook incredibly inspiring. He didn't just talk the talk, he walked the walk. I hope you enjoy how I lay out his story and his beliefs. And then I end today's episode with a look back at most of what we've done here on Timesuck in 2020, and I peek into 2021 and share a bit about what we hope to accomplish. Happy New Year and Hail Nimrod, Meatsacks! Thanks for coming along for this wild and wonderful ride. For our donation this month, we raised/donated over $41,000 for the Bad Magic Productions Giving Tree, and have bought eighty Cult of the Curious families presents for Christmas. Hail Nimrod and thank you! Watch the Suck on YouTube: https://youtu.be/4NzinIQ2RMY Merch - https://badmagicmerch.com/ Discord! https://discord.gg/tqzH89v Want to join the Cult of the Curious private Facebook Group? Go directly to Facebook and search for "Cult of the Curious" in order to locate whatever current page hasn't been put in FB Jail :) For all merch related questions/problems: store@badmagicproductions.com (copy and paste) Please rate and subscribe on iTunes and elsewhere and follow the suck on social media!! @timesuckpodcast on IG and http://www.facebook.com/timesuckpodcast Wanna become a Space Lizard? We're over 10,000 strong! Click here: https://www.patreon.com/timesuckpodcast Sign up through Patreon and for $5 a month you get to listen to the Secret Suck, which will drop Thursdays at Noon, PST. You'll also get 20% off of all regular Timesuck merch PLUS access to exclusive Space Lizard merch. You get to vote on two Monday topics each month via the app. And you get the download link for my new comedy album, Feel the Heat. Check the Patreon posts to find out how to download the new album and take advantage of other benefits.

28 Dec 20202h 17min

Phillip Markoff. AKA, the Craigslist Killer. On the surface, Markoff seemed like a normal guy. A guy on the path to a lot of success. He was a six-foot-three, athletic-framed, blonde hair and blue-eyed, soon-to-be doctor. A studious kid in his second year of med school in Boston. He was ambitious. He finished his undergraduate degree in just three years. He seemed like he had a good head on his shoulders. He didn't. Towards the end of his short life, Phillip was hiding a secret life from his family and his fiancée, Megan, whom he lived with. And none of them would know about it until his arrest. They had no idea he was trolling around on Craigslist looking for victims, or that he’d created some BDSM hookup profiles behind his fiancé’s back. They knew he gambled, but they didn’t know how much and how often - or what he was willing to do to get some extra poker money. They didn’t know he had random women’s panties hidden under he and his fiancé’s bed. Today, we look into both Phillip’s secret and his public life, and we dig deep into how the internet became a new tool for killers to find their victims. And how Craigslist in particular seemed to become the most popular tool to find a stranger to hurt, on another true crime edition, of Timesuck. For our donation this month, we raised/donated over $41,000 for the Bad Magic Productions Giving Tree, and have bought eighty Cult of the Curious families presents for Christmas. Hail Nimrod and thank you! Watch the Suck on YouTube: https://youtu.be/WzGbMbVyIbc Merch - https://badmagicmerch.com/ Discord! https://discord.gg/tqzH89v Want to join the Cult of the Curious private Facebook Group? Go directly to Facebook and search for "Cult of the Curious" in order to locate whatever current page hasn't been put in FB Jail :) For all merch related questions/problems: store@badmagicproductions.com (copy and paste) Please rate and subscribe on iTunes and elsewhere and follow the suck on social media!! @timesuckpodcast on IG and http://www.facebook.com/timesuckpodcast Wanna become a Space Lizard? We're over 10,000 strong! Click here: https://www.patreon.com/timesuckpodcast Sign up through Patreon and for $5 a month you get to listen to the Secret Suck, which will drop Thursdays at Noon, PST. You'll also get 20% off of all regular Timesuck merch PLUS access to exclusive Space Lizard merch. You get to vote on two Monday topics each month via the app. And you get the download link for my new comedy album, Feel the Heat. Check the Patreon posts to find out how to download the new album and take advantage of other benefits.

20 Dec 20202h 19min

General Butt Naked aka Joshua Blahyi is a complicated figure. He is now a Liberian Christian missionary helping victims or Liberia's first civil war rebuild their lives. In the early 90s, he was one of Liberia's most brutal warlords. While literally naked, and often while wielding a machete, he led an army of coked-up, brainwashed child soldiers into committing almost unimaginable atrocities. He committed child sacrifices and regularly engaged in cannibalism. And there were others nearly as brutal as he was. Liberia in the 90s was basically hell on earth. It was a nation of sexual abuse and murder and corruption and chaos. How did things get so bad? Today we learn how Liberia was formed and how decades of oppression led to two incredible bloody civil wars. For our donation this month, we raised/donated over $41,000 for the Bad Magic Productions Giving Tree, and have bought eighty Cult of the Curious families presents for Christmas. Hail Nimrod and thank you! Watch the Suck on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Y0F2maI7-nQ Merch - https://badmagicmerch.com/ Discord! https://discord.gg/tqzH89v Want to join the Cult of the Curious private Facebook Group? Go directly to Facebook and search for "Cult of the Curious" in order to locate whatever current page hasn't been put in FB Jail :) For all merch related questions/problems: store@badmagicproductions.com (copy and paste) Please rate and subscribe on iTunes and elsewhere and follow the suck on social media!! @timesuckpodcast on IG and http://www.facebook.com/timesuckpodcast Wanna become a Space Lizard? We're over 10,000 strong! Click here: https://www.patreon.com/timesuckpodcast Sign up through Patreon and for $5 a month you get to listen to the Secret Suck, which will drop Thursdays at Noon, PST. You'll also get 20% off of all regular Timesuck merch PLUS access to exclusive Space Lizard merch. You get to vote on two Monday topics each month via the app. And you get the download link for my new comedy album, Feel the Heat. Check the Patreon posts to find out how to download the new album and take advantage of other benefits.

14 Dec 20202h 27min

The Dark Ages. We attempt to suck a MASSIVE topic today. A thousand year's worth of European history. And actually, since we compare life in the Dark Ages to life in the Roman Empire, we end up covering two thousand years. The period between the fall of Rome in the fifth century and the beginning of the Modern Age that began sometime in the 14th century was an especially terrible time to be a European peasant. During the Dark Ages, you were bound to spend almost your entire life toiling over a small plot of land before you died around the age of thirty - if you were really lucky. If you tried to upend the social order at all - if you tried not to pay the insane taxes that your church or lord levied upon you - you would very quickly find yourself at the business end of a breast ripper or some other horrific, medieval torture contraption. It was a crazy time to be alive, and we look into how crazy it was, and how much better we have it today, on this medieval edition, of Timesuck. For our donation this month, we raised/donated over $41,000 for the Bad Magic Productions Giving Tree, and have bought eighty Cult of the Curious families presents for Christmas. Hail Nimrod and thank you! Watch the Suck on YouTube: https://youtu.be/upE_rSQhR2Q Merch - https://badmagicmerch.com/ Discord! https://discord.gg/tqzH89v Want to join the Cult of the Curious private Facebook Group? Go directly to Facebook and search for "Cult of the Curious" in order to locate whatever current page hasn't been put in FB Jail :) For all merch related questions: https://badmagicmerch.com/pages/contact Please rate and subscribe on iTunes and elsewhere and follow the suck on social media!! @timesuckpodcast on IG and http://www.facebook.com/timesuckpodcast Wanna become a Space Lizard? We're over 10,000 strong! Click here: https://www.patreon.com/timesuckpodcast Sign up through Patreon and for $5 a month you get to listen to the Secret Suck, which will drop Thursdays at Noon, PST. You'll also get 20% off of all regular Timesuck merch PLUS access to exclusive Space Lizard merch. You get to vote on two Monday topics each month via the app. And you get the download link for my new comedy album, Feel the Heat. Check the Patreon posts to find out how to download the new album and take advantage of other benefits.

7 Dec 20202h 27min

Robert Ben Rhoades, born in 1945, started driving big rigs across America’s interstates and major highways in the mid-1970s, and he seemed to most like an unassuming and harmless trucker for the next fifteen-ish years. He wasn't. He was a monster. The Iowa native’s childhood had ended abruptly when his dad was arrested for an alarming crime and, after the way his father responded to this arrest, life seemed to spiral out of control for the man who would soon introduce himself to others as either “Dusty”, or, via is CB radio - “Whips and Chains.” Bob became a sexual sadist, obsessed with the fetish world of BDSM. Soon, he began to completely ignore the “fun and consensual” part of bondage and submission, pivoting from pleasure through pain to pleasure through rape, torture, and murder. The “Truck Stop Killer” killed an estimated fifty-plus people between roughly 1975 and 1990, most of them young women and the occasional men they were traveling with. Bob overpowered young hitchhikers and sex workers in the sleeper cab of his truck, tying them up with BDSM chains and restraints, and then raping and torturing them for days, sometimes longer, in a mobile dungeon with nipple clamps, belts, chains, handcuffs, fish hooks and more. We explore Bob's crimes, the world of BDSM he was obsessed with, and more in today's true crime edition of Timesuck. In honor of Veteran’s Day, we made a Bad Magic Productions donation of $10,000 to https://veteransfoodpantry.org/. Watch the Suck on YouTube: https://youtu.be/ydt4VBd_NSY Merch - https://badmagicmerch.com/ Discord! https://discord.gg/tqzH89v Want to join the Cult of the Curious private Facebook Group? Go directly to Facebook and search for "Cult of the Curious" in order to locate whatever current page hasn't been put in FB Jail :) For all merch related questions: https://badmagicmerch.com/pages/contact Please rate and subscribe on iTunes and elsewhere and follow the suck on social media!! @timesuckpodcast on IG and http://www.facebook.com/timesuckpodcast Wanna become a Space Lizard? We're over 10,000 strong! Click here: https://www.patreon.com/timesuckpodcast Sign up through Patreon and for $5 a month you get to listen to the Secret Suck, which will drop Thursdays at Noon, PST. You'll also get 20% off of all regular Timesuck merch PLUS access to exclusive Space Lizard merch. You get to vote on two Monday topics each month via the app. And you get the download link for my new comedy album, Feel the Heat. Check the Patreon posts to find out how to download the new album and take advantage of other benefits.

30 Nov 20201h 54min

At the height of her career, sharpshootin' Annie Oakley the talented sharpshooter was the most famous woman in America, if not the world - dazzling audiences and setting records as she fired at clay pigeons, birds, glass balls and performing a wide array of "How in the Hell is that possible?" trick shots. Annie's love of guns began in her childhood, when she didn’t use them to entertain, but to survive. Literally. Born Phoebe Ann Mosey, Annie picked up her father’s gun when he died, and she hunted to help feed her incredibly impoverished family. As a teen, she’d use her skills to pay off her mother’s mortgage. And it was during one of these shooting competitions where she would meet and beat her future husband, an Irish immigrant named Frank Butler. Their love story is pretty damn special and incredible. In a time when a female breadwinner was almost unheard of, Annie went on to become one of the highest paid entertainers in the world. And we Suck her life and times in today's gun-slinging, wild west, record-breaking edition, of Timesuck. In honor of Veteran’s Day, we made a Bad Magic Productions donation of $10,000 to https://veteransfoodpantry.org/. Thank you Space Lizards! Also, through November 23rd, we are accepting Giving Tree applications to help give numerous Cult of the Curious families a holiday Bojangles would be proud of. If you have children, and due to financial hardships, are worried there will no gifts to open this holiday season, we want to help! Please - copy and paste the following email: (copy & paste address) givingtree@badmagicproductions.com You can remain anonymous if you wish. You can also email us here to donate yourself. We will match! Watch the Suck on YouTube: https://youtu.be/H_SwFHRKJZg Merch - https://badmagicmerch.com/ Discord! https://discord.gg/tqzH89v Want to join the Cult of the Curious private Facebook Group? Go directly to Facebook and search for "Cult of the Curious" in order to locate whatever current page hasn't been put in FB Jail :) For all merch related questions: https://badmagicmerch.com/pages/contact Please rate and subscribe on iTunes and elsewhere and follow the suck on social media!! @timesuckpodcast on IG and http://www.facebook.com/timesuckpodcast Wanna become a Space Lizard? We're over 10,000 strong! Click here: https://www.patreon.com/timesuckpodcast Sign up through Patreon and for $5 a month you get to listen to the Secret Suck, which will drop Thursdays at Noon, PST. You'll also get 20% off of all regular Timesuck merch PLUS access to exclusive Space Lizard merch. You get to vote on two Monday topics each month via the app. And you get the download link for my new comedy album, Feel the Heat. Check the Patreon posts to find out how to download the new album and take advantage of other benefits.

23 Nov 20202h 17min

Life was NOT easy on the American frontier for European and American settlers in the 19th century. You lived off the land or you died trying. You were always one wrong move from freezing or starving to death. You had to defend your property from horse thieves, bandits, and American Indian tribes understandably pissed off that you’d just settled on land they still felt belonged to them. And if you lived in or traveled around Cherryvale or the Osage Township in rural southeastern Kansas, you had another thing to worry about: being literally hammered to death by the Bloody Benders - a family of four killers. The Benders, sometimes called “America’s first serial killer family,” killed travelers that were unlucky enough to stop for the night at their tiny inn. As settlers swung through on their way to make a new life for themselves in the wild west, maybe carve out a small fortune, they were seated at a table, and the head of the murderous family, ol’ Pa Bender would beat their skulls in. Then daughter Kate would slit their throats, and then either Ma or John Junior would drop their body into the cellar via a trap door. And later, one of the members of the Bender brood would bury the body in the orchard or vegetable garden out back.This tale is a straight up real life horror movie in this week's, is this a new Rob Zombie movie? or an actual historical examination? episode, of Timesuck. In honor of Veteran’s Day, we made a Bad Magic Productions donation of $10,000 to https://veteransfoodpantry.org/. Thank you Space Lizards! Also, through November 23rd, we are accepting Giving Tree applications to help give numerous Cult of the Curious families a holiday Bojangles would be proud of. If you have children, and due to financial hardships, are worried there will no gifts to open this holiday season, we want to help! Please - copy and paste the following email: (copy & paste address) givingtree@badmagicproductions.com You can remain anonymous if you wish. You can also email us here to donate yourself. We will match! Watch the Suck on YouTube: https://youtu.be/4ecBOw2rZdU Merch - https://badmagicmerch.com/ Discord! https://discord.gg/tqzH89v Want to join the Cult of the Curious private Facebook Group? Go directly to Facebook and search for "Cult of the Curious" in order to locate whatever current page hasn't been put in FB Jail :) For all merch related questions: https://badmagicmerch.com/pages/contact Please rate and subscribe on iTunes and elsewhere and follow the suck on social media!! @timesuckpodcast on IG and http://www.facebook.com/timesuckpodcast Wanna become a Space Lizard? We're over 9500 strong! Click here: https://www.patreon.com/timesuckpodcast Sign up through Patreon and for $5 a month you get to listen to the Secret Suck, which will drop Thursdays at Noon, PST. You'll also get 20% off of all regular Timesuck merch PLUS access to exclusive Space Lizard merch. You get to vote on two Monday topics each month via the app. And you get the download link for my new comedy album, Feel the Heat. Check the Patreon posts to find out how to download the new album and take advantage of other benefits.Royalty free Music by Giorgio Di Campo for @FreeSound Musichttp://freesoundmusic.euhttps://www.facebook.com/freemusicfor...https://youtube.com/freesoundmusicoriginal video: (link to original clip in our channel)

16 Nov 20201h 55min

Breaking an unbreakable code to save, at the very least, millions and millions of lives. To possibly stop Hitler from taking over the world. That was the unimaginably stressful task assigned to a select group of codebreakers during WW2. And, the codebreaking all-stars were initially primarily composed of a group of POLISH mathematicians - I know, right? JK. And then later, British, French, and Americans helped them. They were all racing against the clock to deconstruct the most powerful encoding machine of their day - the Enigma machine. The Enigma machine allowed its operator to type in a message and then scramble it into a code that many deemed totally unbreakable. But Allied codebreakers, lead by genius Alan Turning, did break it. Over and over again. And every time they did, the Nazis created a new, advanced model. Back and forth it went for years. The Nazis used Enigma Machines for ALL their most important military communications: ambushes, bombing raids, U-boat attacks in the North Atlantic on Allied supply lines, and more. And if the codebreakers hadn't kept beating the Enigma, the war would've claimed an estimated 14 to 21 million additional lives. And Hitler might have won. THIS is our epic tale for today. Hail Nimrod! In honor of Veteran’s Day, November 11th, we are making a Bad Magic Productions donation of $10,000 to https://veteransfoodpantry.org/. Thank you Space Lizards! Allen and Linda Erickson founded the NW Montana Veterans Pantry & Stand Down over twenty years ago to serve the veteran community in the Flathead Valley and North West region of Montana. They have since expanded their operations to include a variety of other veteran services. To find out more, visit: https://veteransfoodpantry.org/ Also, through November 23rd, we are accepting Giving Tree applications to help give numerous Cult of the Curious families a holiday Bojangles would be proud of. If you have children, and due to financial hardships, are worried there will no gifts to open this holiday season, we want to help! Please - copy and paste the following email: givingtree@badmagicproductions.com you can remain anonymous if you wish. Watch the Suck on YouTube: https://youtu.be/4Sxi48qqMbo Merch - https://badmagicmerch.com/ Discord! https://discord.gg/tqzH89v Want to join the Cult of the Curious private Facebook Group? Go directly to Facebook and search for "Cult of the Curious" in order to locate whatever current page hasn't been put in FB Jail :) For all merch related questions: https://badmagicmerch.com/pages/contact Please rate and subscribe on iTunes and elsewhere and follow the suck on social media!! @timesuckpodcast on IG and http://www.facebook.com/timesuckpodcast Wanna become a Space Lizard? We're over 9500 strong! Click here: https://www.patreon.com/timesuckpodcast Sign up through Patreon and for $5 a month you get to listen to the Secret Suck, which will drop Thursdays at Noon, PST. You'll also get 20% off of all regular Timesuck merch PLUS access to exclusive Space Lizard merch. You get to vote on two Monday topics each month via the app. And you get the download link for my new comedy album, Feel the Heat. Check the Patreon posts to find out how to download the new album and take advantage of other benefits.

9 Nov 20202h 13min