David Tennant pissing off the Prime Minister bc he told government officials to stfu over their anti-trans bigotry and Michael Sheen literally poisoning himself investigating corporations dumping toxic chemicals in underprivileged areas is NOT the energy I expected from 2024 but oh man am I here for it.
Today, I would like to commemorate an event which has laid a very profound impact on the internet.
Ten years ago on this day (06/08/09), a forum website called SomethingAwful held a photoshop contest titled “create paranormal images”. The contest would require participants to edit ordinary photographs into creepy-looking images, and then try to pass them off as authentic photos on other paranormal forums.
Two days later, on June 10th, a user by the name Victor Surge would find this thread, and become inspired. He submitted the two pictures above, featuring a tall, faceless monster which would stalk children, who would then disappear. He called his monster “the Slender Man”. After this initial post, Surge and others would expand on the character and the story, creating one of the internet’s most famous monsters. The Slender Man proved to be popular enough to spread to other websites, with 4chan, Deviantart, and TV Tropes all having their own Slender-Mania. On June 20th of that same year, another user on the SomethingAwful forums found the Slender Man, and also wanted to contribute. Noticing nobody had made any videos yet of the monster, he sat down with some of his friends and planned out a video webseries involving a former college film student discovering and unravelling the mysteries surrounding Slender Man; this would become Marble Hornets, one of the first horror-themed ARG’s of the internet.
That all happened ten years ago. Ten years of haunting the darkest corners of the internet, and Slender Man has built up a surprisingly dense resume, for a fictional monster. Several popular webseries, a couple hit games, at least two movies, even inspiring other characters in seperate series like the Silence in Dr Who and the Enderman in Minecraft. And all this within a ten-year period.
I think this just attests to how much humans can be inspired by an idea. From a small handful of edited photographs, we collectively constructed a new monster which lurks in our nightmares, and now it almost seems as natural as the horror mythos he was based on. For better or worse, the Slender Man seems to be here to stay.
Happy Birthday, Slendy! Here’s to hoping you continue to be both terrifying and terrific!
You ever just wake up from an incredibly graphic and realistic nightmare that was a pure psychological horror based on your own personal phobias and trauma and just roll over like “aw shit I got too hot last night I guess.” And then make toast like you didn’t just experience the nine circles of hell before 9 am
Every few months twitterinas bring back the “carnivores are a problematic element of nature and we should feed them synthetic meat and make it so they don’t eat herbivores. this is completely normal, feasible and won’t have any kind of repercussion on the ecosystem” discourse
First time I saw that was a guy who had as proposition to create fake prey animals with a robotic exoskeleton and covered in synthetic meat that predators would hunt, eat and then the exoskeleton would get up and go to the lab to get re meated. That was funny as hell
Tiger watching skinless carcass it just ate get up and walk away
Actually we should totally do this but not for like ideological veganism reasons just cuz itd be funny as like an animal social experiment.
doing this with real meat so there’s not even a hypothetical animal rights angle, just completely unwarranted and unmitigated freak behavior
ALT
