My Eyes!

Scott Hardie | October 31, 2004
What image do you wish you had never seen?I ask mainly about images that you regret you'll never be able to get out of your mind, but other answers are welcome.

Anna Gregoline | October 31, 2004
Texas Chainsaw Massacre - the hook scene.

That one rotten.com style photo of the guy with this face exploded from a shotgun.

Stuff like that - visceral stuff.

Watching surgery rarely bothers me though.

Steve West | October 31, 2004
Everybody remember James Brady? Press secretary for president Reagan who was shot in the head during Reagan's assassination attempt. He suffered a frontal lobe injury to his brain from the gunshot wound. Sometime after his "recovery", he was interviewed by Barbara Walters inre the "Brady" bill. Many people know, and I'm sure Ms. Walters knew at the time, that people who suffer frontal lobe injury are often emotionally labile, that is they swing into emotional extremes quickly and uncontrollably. Ms. Walters (the bitch) asked him early in the interview, (paraphrasing) When you got shot in the head, how did that make you feel? Mr. Brady almost immediately burst into tears (Quick! Close-up on camera 3!) while another camera was focused solely on Ms. Walter's concerned, sympathetic expression. Putting that man through an emotional wringer just for the sake of "good" television made me want to heave. I wanted to put my fist through my television over that and have hated that woman since. A scene unfortunately riveted in my own memory.

Jackie Mason | October 31, 2004
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Scott Hardie | November 2, 2004
I've seen lots of the visceral stuff on the web – rotten.com, stileproject.com and the like. I don't understand the appeal of it, but to each his own. None of it has ever bothered me, except for one. You know him, you loathe him: The maggot-brain guy. (link) I first saw the photos years ago and I have never since been able to get them out of my mind (no pun intended), and I wish so much that I could.

Anna Gregoline | November 2, 2004
Why o why do I look at those things.

Scott Hardie | November 2, 2004
I know, I know. I figured any link in this discussion didn't really need a graphic-nature warning. :-\

Scott Horowitz | November 2, 2004
I think the most disgusting think I ever saw was at tubgirl.. didn't want to make it a link, it's just nasty

Scott Hardie | November 2, 2004
Yeah, I hear goatse and tubgirl are regularly debated as to which is the most disgusting web site ever, along the lines of tastes-great less-filling. (Actually, maybe that's a bad way to phrase this...)

Kris Weberg | November 2, 2004
Which one of those is the harlequin fetus site?

Dave Stoppenhagen | November 2, 2004
The other day my wife and I were driving to my parents and there was a deer in the middle of the road still kicking its legs, looked like it had just been hit. I thought i was going to have to go put it out of it's misery but called the cops instead. My wife burst into tears. That one is going to be plastered on my brain for a while

Anna Gregoline | November 2, 2004
Kris - neither, I think.

Jackie Mason | November 2, 2004
[hidden by request]

John E Gunter | November 2, 2004
I saw the video of the train hitting the child that I will never ever be able to get out of my head. Most movie images don’t bother me, it is just a movie after all, but this was a real video. Can you imagine what the parents of that child went through?

I usually avoid those kinds of true videos, but didn’t know anything about it when I saw it. Was sent to me via email from a friend. Consequently, I voiced my upset with him about it and he apologized after realizing I might not be interested in seeing something like that.

That’s why I’ve never watched any of the faces of death videos or visit those kinds of websites. Don’t know, but watching death doesn’t seem to appeal to me.

John

Anna Gregoline | November 2, 2004
I remember now accidentily seeing a video of a young Japanese girl being held down so that two men could rape her. This girl was really young, like 9 or something. Horrifying.

Mike Eberhart | November 2, 2004
For me, it would be seeing the people jump out of the World Trade Center. I just did not need to see that.

Anna Gregoline | November 2, 2004
Yeah, that was pretty bad, Mike. The towers themselves falling for some reason always freaks me out the most out of anything that day. Just thinking about floor after floor pancaking makes me sick.

Every time anyone mentions Fareinheiht 9/11, I think of the Iraqi woman screaming and crying about her dead children and asking why. It's horrible.

Lori Lancaster | November 2, 2004
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John E Gunter | November 3, 2004
I think our shock at seeing the towers fall was just that we always thought they were built so solid and anything America built would stand until we knocked it down. Much as I hated what happened on 9/11, it was an important wake up call for the U.S.

The rest of the world has had to deal with rampant terrorism, and for the most part, we have always been left out. All of that changed that day and if our government is smart, they'll do what they can to make sure it doesn't happen again. How well they'll be able to do that? Only time will tell.

But I purposely avoided all of the shows that contained coverage of the destruction of the towers because that is again a faces of death kind of video that I don’t want to see. I did watch shows that discussed why the towers fell, which I had kind of figured out on my own already, but they didn’t show any of the sequences of the people jumping out of windows.

That’s to much sensational journalism for me.

John

Lori Lancaster | November 3, 2004
[hidden by request]

Anna Gregoline | November 3, 2004
I was *gasp* looking at porn and what I saw was mis-labeled as something else not so graphic and certainly not involving kids. Believe me, I didn't watch more than a few seconds of it but it horrified me and I still feel awful about it.

Lori Lancaster | November 3, 2004
[hidden by request]

John E Gunter | November 3, 2004
You would not believe how mis-labeled things are on the Internet. Actually, maybe you would.

I was looking at sites for the TV show, Reboot at work one day and was clicking through a list that I had found with a web search. This one link I clicked mentioned that it was a Reboot site with images from the show, sound bites, etc. When the site loaded, the image of a guy's face showed up.

I'm thinking, ok, the guy has a picture of himself there. As the image continued to download on my machine, I began to notice some odd things about it. First, he didn't have a shirt on and finally, when the image got to waste level; I began to see the back of someone's head.

Now, I don't have a problem with looking at porn, heck, I do it myself. But I do have a problem with people mis-labeling websites like that. Reboot was a cartoon show that both children and adults looked at. Plus, here was a pornographic picture that was available to anyone on the web for free.

Granted, this was a few years ago, about 4, so we've begun to put some control on that kind of thing, but man, that kind of mis-information just bugs me. Email Spam is another kind of mis-information that gets me.

Course I also have to say that mis-information as far as playing games is concerned, is not such a bad thing, because that's something I expect, it's just that when I'm looking for something in particular, and I'm mis-informed that I have a problem.

John

Scott Horowitz | November 3, 2004
I think they said, if you start at Yahoo and do 10 random clicks, you will find a porn site.

Yesterday, a guy here at work got an email from amazon (apparently) telling him to update his account information. the url was www.amazon.com@someurl.com blahblah blah. We knew what it was immediately, but decided to look at it. A perfect mirror of the Amazon.com customer site. It was kinda freaky.

Scott Hardie | November 4, 2004
Careful about following (just for fun) those links that you know are phishers. I did that for a Bank of America spam message and the website installed an .exe file on my computer before I even knew what was happening. I still have spyware on here that the major anti-spyware programs aren't finding. :-\

I'm glad I never saw people jumping out of the towers. I saw maybe forty-five minutes of news coverage on 9/11, and fleeting footage of the tragedy in films since, but otherwise my 9/11 experience has been entirely online, and being kept at an arm's distance from the tragedy has had certain benefits, I don't mind saying.

Scott Horowitz | November 4, 2004
Firefox seems to warn you about those sites. It has better security than IE.... which I guess isn't saying much.

Scott Hardie | November 4, 2004
Yes, definitely! Ever since then, I have never checked my Bank of America account with IE, only with Firefox, though probably neither is totally safe.

David Mitzman | November 4, 2004
I was sent a video of a motocross race. One guy wipes out and looks like he's probably injured and is crawling off the track. The EMT's and the clean-up crew shows up and is getting the injured man's bike out of the way while the race is continuing. All of a sudden, out of nowhere, another biker wipes out into one of the people removing the downed bike from the track and proceeds to slice the gentleman clean in half. It wasn't an upclose but rather a home video made from the stands.

It's like a 5 minute video and from the beginning through minute 4 it's just the guy wiping out first and crawling off the track. I'm sitting there and saying "Ok, this is pretty damn boring and I want the 4 minutes of my life I wasted watching this back." Then the guy proceeds to get sliced up by another motorcyclist and I'm yelling at the screen "HOLY FUCKING SHIT...."

Amy Austin | November 4, 2004
That sounds absolutely horrific. Getting sliced in half made me think of the fact that there are training videos in the Navy about line-snapping and aviation mishaps (akin to the scene in Men of Honor when he loses his lower leg)... they are pretty gruesome, too -- no joke. A jet intake will turn you to a fine red spray pretty fast -- it's amazing that anyone can do the job knowing the risks, but just like anything else, you get desensitized.

And speaking of 9/11... I was in the Arabian Sea when that happened, just days before we were supposed to enter the Gulf. (Needless to say, the plan changed after that, and I spent 4 months straight afloat... gack!) Anyhow, I remember entering a space where the TV was on (and tuned to CNN, natch), and one of the towers was collapsing... I stupidly (ignorantly) remarked that I bet at least a dozen people just died -- because my initial reaction was that there must have been some sort of a "major malfunction" that was foreseen and evacuated for in the time beforehand. A major act of terrorism wasn't even on my mind... or many others', either -- I know of another girl who walked into the same footage and asked, "What movie is this?!" (When you're out to sea, you miss plenty of trailers and premieres, so it wasn't an entirely stupid question.) Imagine how utterly stupid and devastated you feel after that. Enough to keep the next immediate thought to myself -- "well, there goes our liberty..."