Boundaries

What makes you afraid?

     What gives you the jumps? The shakes? The heebie-jeebies? Really think about it and be honest. Pick the one thing that frightens you the most. Hold it in your mind and then think about whether you've run toward or away from that thing in your life. Have you looked into it? Have you researched the phenomena/animal/serial killer psychology that frightens you so? Have you tried to recreate experiences that terrified you in order to deal with them? The answer determines the way that you deal with fear.

     I have Selachophobia. It developed over years and years and I don't know how it got to be so bad that I consider it a real phobia. If I am in any body of water (lake, ocean, even backyard pool) and I am alone I start to panic. I start to vividly imagine sea creatures emerging from the blue around me and eating or attacking me. I've woken up screaming from dreams where I'm being attacked by sharks. It is completely irrational and I am an otherwise mentally healthy person.

     I've loved sharks my entire life. I think, given the chance, I would swim with them. So what frightens me? It's not the animals themselves but being alone in water. Something about having no one else there gives me panic attacks. Which, in water, is actually quite dangerous. There is no name for this so I've settled on Selachophobia to make things easy.

So how do I deal with this bizarre and often crippling fear?

Videogame Deaths

Sorry again for my absence. Today I bring you a few video-game related deaths. To my knowledge, no one has ever died from playing a video game other than from exhaustion or murder. Still, it brings us to one of the more animalistic aspects of humanity that we will literally murder each other over fictional items.

Links to the news stories after the break.

4chan Murderer?

I have to admit that I have been lurking on 4chan for about seven years. I am also a big fan of /x/, the paranormal board, if that couldn't be deduced from my predilections. My hunger for the bizarre has only been exacerbated by the hundreds of creepypastas (slang for short stories that get posted [pasta'd] often) I've read, the gory photos I've seen, and the real stories of mysterious disappearances I've looked into. As is often the case on 4chan, the board is not reliably fun to browse. Much of the time the pages are filled with UFO conspiracy theorists, people asking about summoning demons, and people claiming to be psychic.

All that being said, I am ashamed to admit that after the break is a link to an archived thread that was on 4chan about five years ago. If you don't feel like gambling on whether or not you'll like what you'll see if you click the link, I will summarize it here for you: An anonymous poster uploaded several pictures of what appear to be human bodies that have been stuffed into garbage bags in a freezer.

There are a few possibilities as I see it:
1. The poster is a mortician and either stole the parts or has parts in a bag for no good reason.
2. The poster is a crime scene photographer and he took the photos before the parts were removed.
3. The poster is an astoundingly skilled prop maker and make-up artist.
4. The poster is a serial grave robber.
5. OP is a straight up murderer.

I would like to say that number three is the most likely, but none of the photographs show obvious signs of having been run through Photoshop. All of the parts seem to be legs that have been severed at the hip and collected in one bag together. They show signs of freezer burn and other wear and tear that you would expect from meat that has been kept in a freezer for a while. Some of them look slightly decayed, which gives credence to theory number four.

I genuinely doubt number five, but you never know...

The link is after the break (click "Read more")