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david_a posted:Sea monsters are the best because it’s much easier to suspend disbelief about mysterious creatures hanging around down there then out in the woods. Quick and dirty: 
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Mar 26, 2021 17:35
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david_a posted:Sea monsters are the best because it’s much easier to suspend disbelief about mysterious creatures hanging around down there then out in the woods. Let's talk about vaguely plausible sea monsters, then! My personal favorite is the Lusca, a giant octopus said to live in the "blue hole" in the Bahamas, which are huge, flooded vertical caves that connect with each other and the ocean. The inland holes are typically freshwater on top and salt water on the bottom. People that go missing in blue holes are often attributed to the Lusca, and supposedly even strong swimmers vanish without blood or gore, ruling out drownings and shark attacks (if, of course, you believe the accounts claims about swimming prowess.) Sharks and other marine predators are also ruled out because many of these supposed attacks occur in the inland holes, which connect to the ocean only through caves far too narrow to admit anything - except, perhaps, a soft bodied octopus. As with pretty much every cryptid, there are eyewitness accounts of varying believability, and even a reported body: https://web.archive.org/web/20110122221133/http://freeport.nassauguardian.net/national_local/76226686916908.php There was also a River Monsters episode on the cryptid, though I haven't seen it. Jeremy Wade was always more fun when he was tracking down some obscure species of arapaima, anyway, though I do appreciate the mix of skepticism and willingness to play along that he brought to the more out there episodes. If that's not to your taste, consider McCleary's sea monster: https://www.reddit.com/r/UnresolvedMysteries/comments/glp1n1/edward_brian_mcclearys_escape_from_a_sea_monster/ (Apologies for the reddit link, but it's a genuinely good writeup. There's one for the Lusca too, which is also well done.) The short version of the story is as follows: In March 1962, five boys set out in a raft to visit the wreck of the USS Massachusetts. The weather, originally gorgeous, turns poor and begins to pull the boys out to sea. They struggle for a while to get the raft home, but fail - only for things to get worse. Suddenly the sea goes silent, as described by McCleary: “not a wave rippled, not a fish broke water, not a seagull called.” Through the fog, the boys see "an object that looked like a telephone pole with a bulb on top." They panic and attempt to swim from their swamped raft, only for the serpent to track them down one by one. Only McCleary made it back to shore. I recommend the full link, as the story is both eerie and tragic. The top comment also has what I consider to be an extremely plausible explanation: What the boys saw was the head of the the head of a North Atlantic right whale, surfacing to filter feed. They drowned due to panic and exhaustion, not attacks by a sea monster. There's a video in the link that looks exactly like their description, and frankly I don't blame them. I'd panic too if I didn't know what that was and it was coming straight for me in an already stressful situation.
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Mar 26, 2021 17:39
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Clyde Radcliffe posted:Similar to Slenderman, there was a guy on Reddit a few years back (around the time Firewatch was released) who posted a bunch of tales from his time as a Search/Rescue Officer for the Forest Service in the US. They didn't go quite as viral, but loads of kook sites picked up on his tales about mysterious staircases deep in the forest and started reporting it as if this had been around for a long time, instead of some poo poo one guy made up. /nosleep is basically gbs ghost story threads: the subreddit, and the only good thing about reddit e: i was going to post one of the best stories offhand, Spire in the Woods, but it looks like amblim entertainment picked it up for development, so now i cant show you why you should be excited to watch a movie or show based on it i'd tell copyright lobbys to eat poo poo™ but they'll have to pay me first Hodgepodge has a new favorite as of 18:14 on Mar 26, 2021 |
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Mar 26, 2021 17:56
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Log082 posted:Let's talk about vaguely plausible sea monsters, then! Blue holes are pretty neat choices for "plausible" cryptids. They're really difficult to explore and a lot of divers get out of their depth (no pun intended) very quickly and drown. For a summary of types in the Bahamas (although they exist in other places), check out this website that (at least on my computer) has...interesting formatting: http://www.bahamascaves.com/blueholes.html
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Mar 26, 2021 19:14
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Log082 posted:What the boys saw was the head of the the head of a North Atlantic right whale, surfacing to filter feed. They drowned due to panic and exhaustion, not attacks by a sea monster. There's a video in the link that looks exactly like their description, and frankly I don't blame them. I'd panic too if I didn't know what that was and it was coming straight for me in an already stressful situation. Even knowing what it is in the video I kind of panicked.
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Mar 26, 2021 22:14
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Marcade posted:Even knowing what it is in the video I kind of panicked. Here's the video for anyone who doesn't feel like driving into reddit comments: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scoJ6IsU7B0 Yeah, that's pretty bonkers. I could imagine seeing it from the right angle in the fog, already in a bad mindset, and having no clue what it is.
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Mar 26, 2021 22:20
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veni veni veni posted:I've really wanted to pull a cryptid hoax for pretty much my whole life tbh. Not a cryptid hoax but a couple of guys I went to school with back in the 90s created crop circles that gained a lot of attention in the local press and had loons coming in from across Ireland and the UK to commune with the visitors. A few years later they went on a TV show called Simon Mayo's Confessions. Simon was a popular BBC DJ at the time and it was a light comedy show where the audience confessed to harmless poo poo they'd done. Sadly I can't find the video online. While that gained some national attention they also pulled another stunt that tied up our local news rags for a few months. The farmland around the crop circles had a bunch of rundown abandoned farmhouses. There was a bit of a satanic panic going on at the time in our very Protestant evangelical corner of Ireland. They used a few candles and cans of spray paint to decorate the abandoned houses, making them look like occult sites of worship. I got involved because I was friends with them but also a school computer nerd. To get the local papers to take interest in the "occult" sites we made a bunch of flyers in Aldus PageMaker, printed out on our school's sole LaserWriter printer. The flyers were supposedly secretly distributed but sent to our two local newspapers by concerned citizens who had received them by accident. The flyers had pretty easily decipherable secret directions to the abandoned houses where the supposed Rites of Jabber were supposed to take place. In the flyers Jabber was an ancient Babylonian cat-headed god, whose resurrection would rise the ancient kingdom of Mu from the sea. In reality he was a chonk of a cat who lived next door to one of the other guys, and he wasn't even called Jabber. Nothing ever really came from it, but the local rag ran with it for a couple of months and it spurned a big response from evangelicals writing in with stories of their personal experiences with the Cult of Jabber and other stdh.txt experiences with the occultist underbelly of society. Clyde Radcliffe has a new favorite as of 00:20 on Mar 27, 2021 |
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Mar 27, 2021 00:18
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You lived the dream!
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Mar 27, 2021 00:48
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Sorry I got nothing to say but keep these awesome posts coming!
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Mar 27, 2021 01:02
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okay, thought of another nosleep classic, maybe not quite as good as Spire in the Woods: Has Anyone Heard of the Left/Right Game? another solid one is Borrasca. the author of this one has at least one other well known series, but for spider lovers i have selected In a land of weeping corpses. Hodgepodge has a new favorite as of 01:54 on Mar 27, 2021 |
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Mar 27, 2021 01:44
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Hodgepodge posted:okay, thought of another nosleep classic, maybe not quite as good as Spire in the Woods: Borrasca was turned into an awesome podcast starring Cole Sprouse https://www.qcodemedia.com/borrasca
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Mar 27, 2021 02:47
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I keep meaning to check out the stand alone podcast for Borrasca, but that writer sure fuckin' loves to write about child rape and or murder and it rubs me the wrong way
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Mar 27, 2021 02:54
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Len posted:I keep meaning to check out the stand alone podcast for Borrasca, but that writer sure fuckin' loves to write about child rape and or murder and it rubs me the wrong way Thank you for warning me about this. I looked up what you were talking about and yeah I do not want to listen to any of that. My least favorite horror trope is "Surprise! It's rape! Lots and lots of rape!" I'm here for monsters and ghosts and other weird spooky stuff, not brutal sexual assault.
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Mar 27, 2021 03:29
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Right? I heard that story when the Nosleep podcast did it and when it ended up not being supernatural but was instead just rape CK Walker has a bunch of that in her stuff. Like the one where a kid hears a monster in her closet and dad always stops the monster by knocking on the door and saying knock it off. The monster was someone in his rape room trying to get rescued
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Mar 27, 2021 05:05
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there's a lot of that there, for a pretty wide range of reasons. i don't think they tolerate anything that seems fetishistic in itself, though. the problem (besides being a public place for often immature horror writers) being that while there is, for example, a rule that the horror can't be mental illness in too exploitative a manner... sometimes the monster really is child abuse. that said, on various levels, i prefer there to be a focus on a metaphorical aspect, and some thoughtfulness and a non-exploitative take on a subject like that is necessary to get past several of my many red flags from back when i was working graveyard shift at a convenience store and read, well, a lot of nosleep... and to be honest those standards could be pretty low overall on a slow night i won't link it, but i think Tommy Taffy stands on merit, but oh boy does it use surrealism to hammer home the horror of abusive household a few years back, Dopabeane did a take on the subject i liked, with the focus on the experiences of children whose siblings vanish into the failures of the social work system, and a supernatural cult worshiping beings which feed upon the suffering of children as the metaphor: https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/8jsd6s/has_anyone_ever_heard_of_phantom_social_workers/ it's an informal interlinked series, so if it's in your wheelhouse you might have to check her submitted stories from around the same time and look for similar themes also, there was one story which evidently got those weird disney spam videos that flooded YouTube for awhile banned in China. actually iirc it was the author of that spider story i linked above. Hodgepodge has a new favorite as of 06:41 on Mar 27, 2021 |
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Mar 27, 2021 06:38
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i just remembered that this is the site which introduced me to, and occasionally refreshed my memory of, the existence of that one weird power rangers torture fic. we've changed a lot, but not so much that i shouldn't just link tommy taffy. NSWF  this is a story which i just praised for how it "use[s] surrealism to hammer home the horror of abusive household." it's a story about violent and sexual spousal and child abuse. in terms of pure abstract "no" it's probably about as "nope" as that power rangers fic i mentioned. this is a trigger warning for a pair of loaded links: Third Parent and His Name Was Tommy Taffy. NSFW
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Mar 27, 2021 06:56
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I regret reading Borrasca. Cutting out an ingrown toe-nail would have been a more pleasant and productive use of my time. gently caress you for linking it.
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Mar 27, 2021 07:39
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Carnotaurus posted:I regret reading Borrasca. Cutting out an ingrown toe-nail would have been a more pleasant and productive use of my time. gently caress you for linking it. i will admit i probably should have added some sort of warning tag to it
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Mar 27, 2021 08:15
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Kid Fenris posted:Come to think of it, are crytpids copyrighted in any way? Will you get a cease-and-desist from the Loch Ness board of tourism if you make and sell your own Nessie plush toys or keychains? Slender Man is legally owned by goon creator Victor Surge (Eric Knudsen) and a mystery third party quote:Several for-profit ventures involving the Slender Man have unequivocally acknowledged Knudsen as the creator of this fictional character, while others were civilly blocked from distribution (including the Kickstarter-funded film) after legal complaints from Knudsen and other sources. Though Knudsen himself has given his personal blessing to a number of Slender Man-related projects, the issue is complicated by the fact that, while he is the character's creator, a third party holds the options to any adaptations into other media, including film and television. The identity of this option holder has not been made public veni veni veni posted:I've really wanted to pull a cryptid hoax for pretty much my whole life tbh. Me too, and I got as far as buying materials for the props/costumes a few times but never followed through. Ever since the 2009 Balloon Boy hoax I've wanted to make a giant lighter-than-air UFO and deck it out with super bright LEDS and tiny speakers and fly it over the city at night but I'm just too lazy 
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Mar 27, 2021 09:00
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The Cryptids of Fallout 76 Fallout 76 is a game that disappointed a lot of people for a lot of reasons that we don't need to get into right now. But one area in which it didn't disappoint is creature design. A group of artists at Bethesda managed to create some fine looking monsters based on the mythic monsters of West Virginia that are nice enough looking that I really wish they got to be in a better game, let's take a gander shall we? Grafton Monster   Ah, the Grafton Monster. The linebacker of the cryptid world. No head, no problem, just a big hunk of muscle that wants to hit you till you're a fine red paste. They kept it simple with this one, and that was the right move. Mothman   The Fallout 76 take on Mothman is more moth than man and as such is adorable because moths are cuties and anyone who disagrees with that is wrong. The fact that they game doesn't let you have one of these as a pet is one of it's biggest failings. Snallygaster   Look at this thing! Those teeth! Those little grabby little hands! Those eyes on its shoulder! It's such a mess, I love it. Flatwoods monster   I gotta be honest, this one's probably my least favorite of the bunch. It's not bad exactly, but it's a little too generically "alien" and doesn't really incorporate enough of the distinct look of the original Flatwoods monster design of which I am personally very fond of. This dude's not even wearing a skirt! Wendigo   Another good one, just one look tells you "this is a thing that wants to eat me". The distended belly is what ties the whole design together. Easily my second favorite wendigo design in pop culture (or at the very least in the top 5).
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Mar 27, 2021 10:11
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Space Cadet Omoly posted:The Fallout 76 take on Mothman is more moth than man and as such is adorable because moths are cuties and anyone who disagrees with that is wrong. I used to agree until a moth violated my personal space and got right up on my face while I was taking a shower, it was awful and I hate them now Without my glasses it took me a bit to register what exactly I was dealing with, and being wet and naked on top of that made me feel extra vulnerable and basically meant I had the dumbest fight-or-flight moment imaginable
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Mar 27, 2021 10:29
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Snowglobe of Doom posted:Slender Man is legally owned by goon creator Victor Surge (Eric Knudsen) and a mystery third party the third party is my new favourite cryptid
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Mar 27, 2021 11:17
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alf_pogs posted:the third party is my new favourite cryptid I have a horrible feeling it's Lowtax, the worst cryptid of them all
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Mar 27, 2021 11:40
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Carnotaurus posted:I regret reading Borrasca. Cutting out an ingrown toe-nail would have been a more pleasant and productive use of my time. gently caress you for linking it. Looks like the reddit chain only goes out to part 4, you didn't even get the whole story https://ck-walker.com/borrasca-v/
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Mar 27, 2021 12:29
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Clyde Radcliffe posted:Not a cryptid hoax but a couple of guys I went to school with back in the 90s created crop circles that gained a lot of attention in the local press and had loons coming in from across Ireland and the UK to commune with the visitors. A few years later they went on a TV show called Simon Mayo's Confessions. Simon was a popular BBC DJ at the time and it was a light comedy show where the audience confessed to harmless poo poo they'd done. Sadly I can't find the video online. There's a great book called "Round in Circles" by Jim Schnabel that's all about the history of crop circles, from earliest reports right up until to the modern craze. It reports it fairly straight, just taking people at their word, listening to everyone's theories, without expressing much of an opinion ... Until the final chapters where the author reveals he was one of the most prolific crop circle hoaxers. He started out as a genuine investigator but at some point became aware of groups of pranksters hanging around the scene, made contact, learnt the trade and got addicted to making crop circles. He ends up being fairly scathing of how people allow themselves to be tricked.
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Mar 27, 2021 13:26
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I will never stop believing crop circles are made by overactive hedgehogs.
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Mar 27, 2021 13:40
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I love the way crop circles look: here's a video of two dudes making one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYqOV5abAfA Space Cadet Omoly has a new favorite as of 13:45 on Mar 27, 2021 |
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Mar 27, 2021 13:41
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Space Cadet Omoly posted:The Cryptids of Fallout 76 That's cool, I never knew about any of that. Really good art too, it fooled me into thinking they found an obscure old book series to base them on (and I'm a little disappointed that I can't read them now).
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Mar 27, 2021 18:52
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Don't go and make me want to install Fallout 76
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Mar 27, 2021 18:57
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Captain Hygiene posted:That's cool, I never knew about any of that. Really good art too, it fooled me into thinking they found an obscure old book series to base them on (and I'm a little disappointed that I can't read them now). Good news! They actually made little recorded short stories to go along with each of the book covers: Flatwoods Monster: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlVZ_u_LtgY Mothman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QE61dsL-7Uw Wendigo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCGixTX1EAA Grafton Monster: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnKyDnaWOOg Snallygaster: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKva32t0kAM And here's the full set all together: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJluhDdl0DA
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Mar 27, 2021 20:02
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I really wish SP offline was an option in 76 because the Cryptids in it really fascinate me. I was fine with just having a bit sandbox to screw around with but needing to play with other people, i don't really care for that. Anyways, SuperEyePatchWolf puts up videos about weird stuff every once and a while. There was fake martial arts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjbSCEhmjJA And then today he uploaded a video about Psyhics https://youtu.be/qFyCJU3AFSA I had no idea John Edwards is still working.
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Mar 27, 2021 22:10
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Space Cadet Omoly posted:Good news! They actually made little recorded short stories to go along with each of the book covers Awesome, thanks 
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Mar 27, 2021 22:26
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twistedmentat posted:I really wish SP offline was an option in 76 because the Cryptids in it really fascinate me. I was fine with just having a bit sandbox to screw around with but needing to play with other people, i don't really care for that. Yeah this. it wasn't FO76 being bad that put me off of it when I tried it, it was that I really dont like other players running around in my game all the time. The map actually seems good I just play those games for the solitude.
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Mar 27, 2021 23:29
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veni veni veni posted:Yeah this. it wasn't FO76 being bad that put me off of it when I tried it, it was that I really dont like other players running around in my game all the time. The map actually seems good I just play those games for the solitude. If you could set up like pve carebare servers like goons have for like Ark and stuff that would be fine too.
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Mar 28, 2021 05:34
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david_a posted:Sea monsters are the best because it’s much easier to suspend disbelief about mysterious creatures hanging around down there then out in the woods. Considering how much we don't know of the sea and what pics we see of marine life in the deeper depths, sea monsters are more plausible than other mysterious creatures. Hodgepodge posted:i just remembered that this is the site which introduced me to, and occasionally refreshed my memory of, the existence of that one weird power rangers torture fic. we've changed a lot, but not so much that i shouldn't just link tommy taffy. I haven't thought about Agony In Pink in years. The author had two versions out there, the basic gory one and a second more gorier one. veni veni veni posted:I've really wanted to pull a cryptid hoax for pretty much my whole life tbh. Closest I've been to this was my fiance's best friend when he was living in England. It was somewhere semi rural. He took in a stray cat that followed him home from the pub. Cat would eat anything put in front of him so over time he grew into a sizeable chonker. Cat also liked to get out and roam on which one of his excursions ended up making the local news as one of those giant cat sightings. His reaction was 'that's not a giant, he's just a fatass!'.
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Mar 28, 2021 08:40
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M_Sinistrari posted:Closest I've been to this was my fiance's best friend when he was living in England. It was somewhere semi rural. He took in a stray cat that followed him home from the pub. Cat would eat anything put in front of him so over time he grew into a sizeable chonker. Cat also liked to get out and roam on which one of his excursions ended up making the local news as one of those giant cat sightings. His reaction was 'that's not a giant, he's just a fatass!'. ABC (alien big cat) sightings are great, they're super popular all over the world because there's a lot of them in circuses and private ownership everywhere so the stories are always plausible to some degree. It turns out it's real easy to overestimate the size of an animal off in the distance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xB7jSZuRgVQ People often mistake other animals for lions as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUcQ2C5LdXg Sometimes a stuffed toy gets mistaken for the real thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCwUj0Nj98A Sometimes they're just a drunk guy on his way home from a costume party Sometimes they just flat out fake the evidence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12jakQCW0Bw But there are a whole lot of examples where a lion or a tiger really did escape, there's lots of old newspaper reports from the 1800s. Probably the most infamous recent example was the 2011 Zanesville Ohio animal massacre where a private collector released around 50 lions, tigers, bears and wolves and the police shot them all. E: some examples of actual ABCs from the UK include the 1980 Cannich puma and the 2001 Beast of Barnet (a Eurasian lynx). Last year there was the supposed case of the Hampstead Cheetah which turned out to be an escaped Savannah cat (a cross between a serval and a domestic cat) Snowglobe of Doom has a new favorite as of 19:52 on Mar 28, 2021 |
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Mar 28, 2021 09:48
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M_Sinistrari posted:Considering how much we don't know of the sea and what pics we see of marine life in the deeper depths, sea monsters are more plausible than other mysterious creatures. Yea, sea monsters are 100% the most likely cryptids. I was very disappointed to find out that the bloop was just the sound of ice scraping against the sea floor and the only reason it sounded like something living because everyone just played the sped up version without mentioning it.
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Mar 28, 2021 22:12
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twistedmentat posted:Yea, sea monsters are 100% the most likely cryptids. I was very disappointed to find out that the bloop was just the sound of ice scraping against the sea floor and the only reason it sounded like something living because everyone just played the sped up version without mentioning it. I mean the ocean does have things like this guy in it: https://youtu.be/IPRPnQ-dUSo I feel like this guy should count as a cryptid.
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Mar 29, 2021 09:57
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Space Cadet Omoly posted:I mean the ocean does have things like this guy in it: https://youtu.be/IPRPnQ-dUSo That's fast!
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Mar 29, 2021 15:07
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There's also the ningen which is a fairly recent ocean cryptid which is supposedly about 20 to 30 metres long and is often depicted like this:  Apart from lovely faked photos the rest of the 'evidence' is pretty terrible:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_S4YwHDtvI A lot of the reported sighting are from crew aboard Japanese "whale research" ships and the few sites I visited thought that this added credence to the claims because whale researchers should be experts on ocean creatures, except that their scientific "research" was only ever an alibi for commercial whale hunters to skirt anti-whaling laws
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Mar 29, 2021 15:51
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