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!

My problem is that I like collecting things and putting them on a little shelf

One of the niche hobbies I have is insulator collecting. Insulators are the glass/ceramic parts that keep electrical lines from shorting out:

They come in all sorts of colors and shapes, some rare, some common:

They can be the size of a fist, or long chains:

The hobby is dominated by retired lineworkers. But it deserves so much more attention! They are often referred to as "crown jewels of the wire". Anyway, this is my niche infodump. Thanks for reading!

The CDC 3300 mainframe console. This machine was introduced in 1964, it had a 24-bit word size and the equivalent of 96kb of memory. These systems were able to run up to a million instructions a second (1 MIPS), making them along the world's fastest at the time.

sdxfcgvzdxfcgvhzdxfcgvhbjnkmlcgvhbjnk science

fantasy characters: “Geez”

me: who the fuck spread Christianity there

One of the main reasons I don't own a gun, despite being from the south, is that a large part of my brain* genuinely believes it is Legal and Right to shoot anything making too much noise.

You might say "but foone, guns are loud!". True, but you need to think of the long term. If I let my neighbour mow the lawn every Friday, then they will be loud forever. If I shoot their stupid fucking tractor with an anti-materiel rifle, then there will be a very loud noise... Once.

Plus it'll send an important message to all other loud noise producers. Maybe that guy with the fucking hair-trigger car alarm will reconsider once stuff starts ending up with fresh .50 BMG piercings.

Anyway, yeah. That's why I don't own any guns. Because rationally I know it's wrong and illegal to start firing them all willy-nilly at stuff that makes loud noises, but for a few seconds when I'm afflicted with MISOPHONIC RAGE I am not thinking remotely rationally.

It's like how you're nit supposed to sneak up on and poke someone with martial arts training, because their training might kick in and knock you to the floor.

For my continued well-being and the safety of others, I need to not have guns because my instinctual reflex reaction to loud noises is to destroy it until it shuts up permanently.

And a message is left for the next 10 generations that some things are too loud a noise. Their heads will be put on a pike and I'll look up and silently wave, just like this!

I am Foone Turing, the right hand of sensory sensitivity and the boot that is going to kick your sorry ass all the way back to Earth, sweetheart! I am silence incarnate, and the last living thing that you will ever see. God sent me. *I am hauled off by Babylon 5 security*

*it's the misophonia part of my brain, obviously.