TTHHHhEEeEeEEEeEeeeOOOOOOOO

Okay for real though can we also talk about internet historian and illuminaughtii?? Cause both those channels also suck and deserve at least a little of the vitriol Mr. Somerton is currently receiving. Illuminaughtii positioned herself as like an expert on bad businesses and exposing mlms and stuff, and internet historian makes dreck that appeals mostly to edgy teenage boys who think saying slurs is funny. The fact that both of them were also just ripping off other people’s work to make such desperately mid content is a little funny ngl. I hope this video tanks both their YouTube careers too.

EDIT: yes I am now aware that Blair’s channel has already tanked as a result of the dramas that unfolded a few months ago while Hbomb was working on this video (1 mil subscriber count but averaging 20k views a video nowadays. Brutal), but let’s still hope internet historian’s follows suit. Everyone has latched onto the James Somerton centerpiece, but internet historian has a Huge platform (and also sucks).

It would be extremely lame if the guy who got his audience by posting 4chan edgelord bait and anti-sjw cringe and is now pretending to be a respectable channel has the only career that survives this exposé.

What was it about internet basilisks/and or old creepypastas that inspired you to make chainmail chasers?

ChaCha actually started due to a conversation I had with a few friends back in '20 about old Slenderverse webseries. I expressed disappointment that so many just focused on Slendy, and if you were lucky they'd include the Rake as well but not really flesh him out or use him properly. There were exceptions obviously, but you get what I mean.

I've always been fascinated by Smile Dog specifically out of the pastas, and I felt a webseries about it could have a lot of potential. You don't need to do a lot of traveling for filming since it's a mostly digital and mental phenomenon, and the pasta as-is keeps an aura of mystery over just what the image is.

This wasn't enough to pursue a series- it was just a discussion, and at the time I was very very very unconfident in my artistic ability for a whole rabbit hole of reasons. But it got me thinking, and I tend to have a lot of eureka moment with connecting disconnected thematic bits.

There were three things that always fascinated me about the original pasta. One was the idea that it wasn't even a dog- it was said to originally be a photo of the devil, and that over time it changed. If you really dig back into my twitter, around late 2020 (I remember because I reposted it when Heaven Stairway blew up) I posted my own take on Smile Dog. It's the same one that's used in the ParanormalPrickheads page, and there I took the idea of that evolution but extrapolated it, reasoning that after over a decade since the original pasta, the image would've degraded almost to the point of illegibility due to JPEG loss.

That idea basically evolved into the whole "metamorphosis" idea.

The second thing was built up off of that- if the image changed so much, there was no telling if any remakes could be the real deal or not. Or how different they could be from what was described. As a kid I knew the main two images were fake, but I reasoned that they could just be fakes for the sake of safety- the real ones could still be out there. That keeps you on your toes, and definitely leads to a creep factor on finding an "older version" as lost media.

But these were, again, just factors that kept me interested in Smile Dog. Cognitohazards in general interested me, and you had my frequent consumption of YouTube horror analysis content that lead into the setup of ChaCha- a way to initially ground it, develop an audience of people who already like cheesy internet horror, and bait actual Youtubers into covering the channel after they find it during research.

No, none of this is what caused ChaCha directly to happen.

That moment where it all clicked, back in 2020, was an idea for an ending. I have no idea if I can even pull it off. But I need to make it.

But I can't tell you what that is. Not yet.

Spreading the word for a spoiler seems like something only a very pathetic demon would do.

As someone who has read Homestuck through its entirety and has friends who also did, I can confirm that if it wasn't for the fact that it accidentally became one of the biggest (if not THE biggest) fandoms out there in the early 2010s, it does NOT seem like the kind of thing that would be that profitable, at least not the original.

As someone indifferent to Homestuck I'm amused by the twitter discourse I keep seeing that "it turns out all hussie really cared about was making money" like okay some of what I'm hearing sounds like he was also a bad employer and that's something but they're still emphasizing him being profit driven as the BIG problem and like....did they really think Homestuck of all things was that much deeper, for that matter do they all assume every movie and video game and TV show they consume is baked with love by a little grandma

Guys.

Y’all.

I…

I just. I just… i have discovered something. And I have laughed too much. I have laughed every time I have tried to explain it to someone. I cannot get through this.

Look. Okay.

There are two things you need to know, here.

First: There’s a style of Greek pottery that was popular during the Hellenic period, for which most of the surviving examples are from southern Italy. We call them ‘fish plates’ because, well, they’re plates, and they’re decorated with fish (and other marine life).

Like this one, currently in the Met:

Or this one, currently in the Cleveland Museum of Art:

They’re very cool. We’re not 100% sure what they were for, because most of the surviving ones were found as grave goods, but that’s a different post.

The second thing you need to know is that when we (Classics/archaeology/whatever as a discipline) have a collection of artefacts, like vases, sculptures, paintings, etc. and we do not know the name of the artist, but we’re pretty sure one artist made X, Y and Z artefacts, we come up with a name for that artist. There are a whole bunch of things that could be the source for the name, e.g. where we found most of their work (The Dipylon Master) or the potter with whom they worked (the Amasis Painter), a favourite theme (The Athena Painter), the Museum that ended up with the most famous thing they did (The Berlin Painter) or a notable aspect of their style. Like, say, The Eyebrow Painter.

Guess what kind of pottery the Eyebrow Painter made?

THE TUMBLR LAYOUT CHANGED

CHANGE IT BACK THIS IS UNNATURAL

The whole damn state works for the feds

I know people on tumblr looove stories of underwater cave diving, but I haven't seen anyone talk about nitrogen narcosis aka "raptures of the deep"

basically when you want to get your advanced scuba certification (allowing you to go more than 60 feet deep) you have to undergo a very specific test: your instructor takes you down past the 60+ foot threshold, and she brings a little underwater white board with her.

she writes a very basic math problem on that board. 6 + 15. she shows it to you, and you have to solve it.

if you can solve it, you're good. that is the hardest part of the test.

because here's what happens: there is a subset of people, and we have no real idea why this happens only to them, who lose their minds at depth. they're not dying, they're not running out of oxygen, they just completely lose their sense of identity when deep in the sea.

a woman on a dive my instructor led once vanished during the course of the excursion. they were diving near this dropoff point, beyond which the depth exceeded 60 feet and he'd told them not to go down that way. the instructor made his way over to look for her and found a guy sitting at the edge of the dropoff (an underwater cliff situation) just staring down into the dark. the guy is okay, but he's at the threshold, spacing out, and mentally difficult to reach. they try to communicate, and finally the guy just points down into the dark, knowing he can't go down there, but he saw the woman go.

instructor is deep water certified and he goes down. he shines his light into the dark, down onto the seafloor which is at 90 feet below the surface. he sees the woman, her arms locked to her sides, moving like a fish, swimming furiously in circles in the pitch black.

she is hard to catch but he stops her and checks her remaining oxygen: she is almost out, on account of swimming a marathon for absolutely no reason. he is able to drag her back up, get her to a stable depth to decompress, and bring her to the surface safely.

when their masks are off and he finally asks her what happened, and why was she swimming like that, she says she fully, 100% believed she was a mermaid, had always been a mermaid, and something was hunting her in the dark 👍

Uh oh! Eternal Halloween

:) trick or treat!!! (its still halloween in my timezone)

ITS LITERALLY NOT.

hey guys sorry but is the wordpress guy in charge of tumblr literally at burning man right now shitting in buckets????

my timeline is full of tweets like this. i’m going to throw up