Digital Adventures

Point 1: Fredrik Kundsen

Ironically enough on a task about going down internet rabbit holes, I have found a youtube channel dedicated to… rabbit holes.

Exploring a range of topics, Knudsen explores odd internet events and phenomenons such as the Final Fantasy House (a fan is invited to live with a few other fans of the games, but they turn out to be house-mates from hell), Purr Cat Cafe (a woman tries to open a cat cafe but she’s a horrible pet owner, horrible boss, horrible business runner and frequently freaked out on facebook). Frederick Knudsen however doesn’t just restrict themselves to strictly internet-only topics, exploring the mouse utopia experiments conducted by John B Calhoun (dude trapped a bunch of rats in an enclosed space, let them mentally suffer, then published his work with ThIs iS hOW sOCiEty iS gOiNG tO eVolVE) and the Coller Brothers (two hoarding brothers that lived in a new york townhouse in the mid 1900’s.) among an odd range of topics.

Point 2: Horror Stories

With 159 videos and 813k subscribers, Horror Stories is a shock channel reminiscent of earlier internet trends that has managed to scrape by into the modern internet consciousness, despite Youtube and its content crackdown on less than family friendly videos.

This person's videos are short and to the point, normally containing either video, photographic or audio of disturbing events such as car accidents, animal attacks, stunts gone wrong and murders. While the content is disturbing, it is an interesting journey to peek back into what the internet was partially famous for only a decade ago. Sites like rotten.com and worldstarhiphop were built on the premise of promoting horrific and graphic content to any and all who could access it, age be damned.

Point 3: r/Bossfight

r/Bossfight is… an odd little community to say the least. It popped up in my feed whilst doom scrolling and I admit, I spent a good half hour just going through this glorious treasure trove. The entire basis of the community is to 1. take existing imagery, typically informative or not intentionally funny posts (quite a lot of the bossfight images do use images that have humorous captions attached to them already though) and then 2. create a new title for the subject depicted, typically in the style that you will see in gaming boss fights. Quite a sweet little community just having fun and being a little bit creative.

Point 4: r/BotchedSurgeries

This community on Reddit is supposedly dedicated to discussing plastic surgery and its effects, however, the reality of the community and their attitudes are much less… pleasant. Titles of the posts openly mock and ridicule those who have noticeably gotten cosmetic surgery that hasn’t turned out ‘favourably’ according to the community's beauty standards. The comment threads are infinitely worse, with people lamenting over the changes that these consenting adults have chosen to have, the long list of rules attached to the top of each comment section a hint into the witch-hunting, bullying and general toxicity that the community thrives on. It’s an interesting look into a rather mild example of when some people with echoing opinions think that they are right, what they will say in the company of like minded people.

Point 5: The Transformers Fan Wiki

Whoever the hell is running this wiki site is having a fucking blast, and when i tell you that this is peak zoomer comedy, i mean it, my sister and i spent a full hour just going through random pages laughing our asses off.

Despite the extremely relaxed tone that this independant wiki site takes to explaining the lore, history and story of the various transformers adaptations, it is actually, quite informative. Each article/post goes into great detail on whatever it is detailing, with religious referencing and sourcing, it’s clearly a passion project for a few people. The comedic tone of most of the image cations also fits in quite well, seeing as the absurdity of the Transformers as a concept, as well as the fact that many people grew up with it and it is a piece of media that quite a lot of people have in common.

This is probably the most rabbit-holey rabbit hole i've been on in a while, and i FULLY recommend anybody with this kind of humour going onto the tfwiki.net and clicking on the random page button, it is pure hilarity.

Point 6: Mystery Flesh Pit National Park

Mystery Flesh Pit National Park was created by Trevor Roberts, and initially posted to the r/worldbuilding subreddit back in 2019 after being inspired by his surroundings in West Texas. From there it exploded in popularity on it’s own little corner of the internet, with Roberts creating pages of illustrations, advertisements, diary entries, letters and incident reports for this fictional story, that while now completed, still has small side projects related to it that are still being worked on to this day. Depicting what it would be like for an american national park to be a… flesh pit, and all of the surrounding politics, capitalisic greed and tourism that might of arisen from such an odd ‘national wonder’.

Getting Lost

Task 1

Task 2

Visiting Shepton Mallet Market! So uh, turns out it’s kinda hard to get lost in a very structured environment that is designed to put you on a specific path and add my anxiety into the mix and the movement system went out the window. I ended up holding my phone and recording my viewpoint through videos to look back at later.