Help support this page.
0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.
We have threads for UFOs, serial killers, and crypto shit, but I felt the sphincter clenching nature of this one deserved its own new thread.Just click the link, read the article, and watch the video. Make sure the lights are on.http://vigilantcitizen.com/vigilantreport/mysterious-case-elisa-lam/
Put this list here instead of crazy links because *shudder*...http://diply.com/i-love/10-eerie-mysteries-that-this-day-remain-unsolved/31000
Quote from: RottingCorpse on March 22, 2014, 08:06:47 PMPut this list here instead of crazy links because *shudder*...http://diply.com/i-love/10-eerie-mysteries-that-this-day-remain-unsolved/31000Missus RC fell down an internet hole rafter reading about the Ourang Medean, which disappeared in the Strait of Malacca off the western shore of Malaysia. Sound familiar?http://mysteriousuniverse.org/2011/11/death-ship-the-ourang-medan-mystery/We now have every light in the house on.
Urban Legends Told Online‘Slender Man’ Story and the New Urban LegendsIn early June, two 12-year-old girls in Waukesha, Wis., were charged with attempted murder in the attack on a third girl, a classmate whom they had invited for a sleepover. Prosecutors say the girls lured their victim into playing a game of hide-and-seek in the woods. When in the woods, the prosecutors say, they attacked her with a knife, stabbing her 19 times. The victim was discovered by a bicyclist and rushed to the hospital; she is said to be recovering from her injuries.The story made national headlines both for the brutality of the crime and for the unusual motive cited by prosecutors. According to a criminal complaint, the two girls told the police that they had been planning the attack for months. They bore no animus toward their victim. Instead, the girls said, they had tried to kill their classmate to impress a shadowy villain who haunted the woods. They called him Slender Man — or Slender, for short.Slender Man is a horror figure for the selfie age. You can think of him as a web-based, crowdsourced urban legend. He was born in 2009 as part of a Photoshop contest on the web forum Something Awful. From there, Slender Man stories, videos, and pictures — all fictional — began to spread online. In many of them, he’s pictured as a disproportionately tall, skinny man dressed in a dark suit who often stands in the background, silently stalking his victims.Today, you can find shards of the Slender Man myth across the web. But one of his primary haunts is the Creepypasta Wiki, a popular forum where people work together to create spooky stories. According to prosecutors, the girls first discovered Slender Man on the Creepypasta Wiki, and what they saw there convinced them that he was real.The terribly sad case has drawn Creepypasta into the familiar controversy over what is and isn’t appropriate for children to see online. There have been calls for the forum to be taken down or blocked, and for parents to prohibit their children from looking at it, although the site itself has long urged parents to monitor how their children use the site.But for many people, the attack and the coverage surrounding it also provide an introduction to a rising genre in fiction, one that illustrates the power of the Internet as a literary tool. As an administrator on the Creepypasta Wiki who on the site goes by the name Sloshedtrain, wrote shortly after the stabbing: “We are a literature site, not a crazy satanic cult.”Online crowdsourced fiction like the stories on the Creepypasta Wiki is the subject of increasing study in literature and mass media academic circles, where the form is seen as a novel take on an ancient human pastime. Shira Chess, an assistant professor of mass media arts at the University of Georgia who has studied the Slender Man phenomenon, says that crowdsourced fiction bears similarities to the folklore that was once passed down orally, through generations — only now, the myths are minted online, in a matter of hours or days. Examining Creepypasta reveals something much deeper than any sort of cultish community, she says. It is home to a thrilling new form of immersive, interactive human storytelling.And Creepypasta isn’t alone. Multimedia, crowdsourced fiction is finding root across the Internet, from social-fiction apps like Wattpad to call-and-response videos on YouTube to stories told in serialized Tumblr posts, one picture or snippet of text each day. Some of these stories take the form of fan fiction — readers working together to puzzle out and add to the story lines of established fictional characters. (For instance, if you miss the HBO show “True Detective,” why not read more stories about Marty and Rust?) But there are also troves of sites like Creepypasta, where wholly new stories are constantly being invented by the crowd.“A lot of people are now saying, ‘How do we stop kids from reading this online?’ ” Dr. Chess said. “Well, that’s not really the right question. This story is no more threatening than vampire stories or zombie stories. Like those, it’s just articulating specific cultural fears in online spaces.”She added: “Places where adults and children are creating fiction are important. They’re important for writers — it gives them a space to experiment with their voice and become good writers. And it gives readers a chance to understand a lot of different kinds of stories that we need to tell ourselves about the world.”The Slender Man myth, one of dozens on Creepypasta, illustrates this utility. He is often seen on the periphery in photographs and videos captured by people who are obsessed with documenting their lives. When he appears, Slender Man seems to come out of nowhere; after causing vague, unknown terror, he vanishes. One other thing: Slender Man has no face. When you get a look at him, his visage is horrifically blank.“There’s something to this story that’s tied up in the self-sharing generation,” said Eric T. Newsom, a professor of media studies at the University of Central Missouri who researched the spread of the Slender Man myth as part of his Ph.D. thesis. “We only see him because we’re self-surveilling. We have pointed the camera at ourselves, and only in pointing the camera at ourselves do we see the horror character behind us.”If this sounds like too pat an explanation, it’s important to remember that Slender Man isn’t one story — he is a character who is freely appropriated by many storytellers, and his depth emerges from the collection. One of the defining features of interactive fiction is something scholars call the “rabbit hole”: the initial site, picture, story or video that leads a viewer into the puzzle. Once you fall in and begin to explore, you’re hooked.“The story comes to you in fragments, and your reward for piecing all the fragments together is a richer story,” Dr. Newsom said. “There’s a lot of active reading involved. A lot of these storytellers are leaving it up to the audience to figure what’s going on, and a lot of the audience is having to talk to each other to come to terms with the story. ‘What do we think about this? What does this revelation mean?’ ”Of course, the rabbit hole can be dangerous in addition to thrilling; what if our children fall too far?There are reasons to temper our fear. Jacqueline D. Woolley, director of the Children’s Research Lab at the University of Texas at Austin, has found that children are far more capable at distinguishing reality from fiction than previously thought. “By the time they’re 9, they’re at adult levels,” she said.That doesn’t mean that children can always tell the difference between fact and fiction on the web. But to the extent that Creepypasta raises worries about people’s capacity to spot that difference, those fears are best seen as universal: The Internet is teeming with stuff that blurs the line between truth and untruth, and both children and adults can get trapped up by those differences.Sloshedtrain, the Creepypasta administrator, declined to be interviewed, but in an email, he said, “I would like to say that parents need to discuss to their children the powerful influence the Internet could have on them, and help them understand and differentiate fantasy and reality.”That seems like wise counsel. Slender Man is a scary fellow; scarier still, though, is the idea that we’d bar our children from a whole form of literature for fear that they just can’t handle what they’re reading.
Russian geologists are on their way to a remote region of Siberia's Yamal Peninsula to investigate the mysterious appearance of what looks like a gigantic Sarlac Pit. Opinions are divided as to what caused the apparent crater.As the Siberian Times is reporting, the unexplained hole was spotted by a helicopter flying over the gas-rich region of the Yamal peninsula, a location that translates to the "end of the world." Initial estimates place the width of the puncture at about 80 meters, but its depth is not known. A debris field around the perimeter suggests that the material was somehow thrown out of the crater.
