I have been on Reddit Spacedicks a lot lately. I don’t know why. At first I thought it was morbid curiosity that drew me there. But morbid curiosity is what causes drivers to slow down to look at a deadly crash site. In my case, I find myself going back again and again to look at extremely graphic images that would have caused my stomach to knot up ten years ago. This is not the same as morbid curiosity. The site even shows up in my "recently closed tabs" page in my web browser, which is unfortunate.
I can’t quite put my finger on it, but the kind of sites I have been looking at are not porn and not strictly gore, but rather the weirdest, most unusual stuff I can find. I seem to seek out things that I have never seen anywhere else. Things that various authorities have sought to limit access to in libraries, classrooms, television, etc. Pure forbidden novelty, in other words.
Spacedicks, I ought to explain, is a section of the popular social media site Reddit where non-staff contributors post shocking images, videos, and discussion posts displaying mutilation, humiliation, feces play, gore, and other travesties of humanity that are preserved, replicated, distributed and exposed thanks to digital cameras and unlimited web access. People who twenty years ago would have simply been weird in private are now plastered across this site for weirdos like me to look at.
"Shocking," I say, because the images and videos I see there are meant to be shocking. But for me an image of a man "butterflying" his own penis is not very shocking because I have seen it before. Several times, in fact. Even road accidents courtesy of Brazil and Thailand seem pedestrian (pardon the pun) because there is so much footage of them around. I have even noticed certain trends. For instance, although a country like the Congo may have more outright brutality because of the conflicts there, it is middle-income countries that produce the greatest volume of graphic footage of road accidents, sexual disasters, etc. because they are the ones where the average bystander is more likely to have a camera-phone handy when a human being gets ground up into a paste.
But the thing that separates Spacedicks from the average gore site is that the posts there tend to have a twist. Instead of simply being extremely graphic or having a well-researched explanation from the person who posted the link, they often have a strangely human component. The individual pictured is often looking directly into the camera. Sometimes there is an extremely banal backdrop, with family portraits and flowery drapes and other recognizable household items that you might find at your great-aunt’s place. The impression is that people who like to be shat upon are just like you and me. The only difference is that they made the mistake of letting their misadventures be recorded digitally.
I’ll get over it eventually. But for now I am very attracted to the new, the unusual and the strange, as ever, no matter how weird or gory or poopy.
Attached: a graffiti artist drew a full-figured lady in marker at a bus stop on Central and Broadway in NE Minneapolis.
Also a small animal (who was an idiot) made a loop in its tracks down by Black Dog Lake on its way to its destination.
And finally some hackey-sack artists, photographed with permission, permission granted with a shrug, and hackey-sack artists look silly and purposeless in still shots. Just a thought.
pseudoisaac 