A cursed image refers to a picture (usually a photograph) that is perceived as mysterious or disturbing due to its content, poor quality, or a combination of the two. A cursed image is intended to make a person question the reason for the image's existence in the first place. The term was coined on social media in 2015 and popularised the following year. [2] [3]
The concept of "cursed images" originates from a Tumblr blog, cursedimages, in 2015. [4] [5] The first image posted by the account shows an elderly farmer surrounded by crates of red tomatoes in a wood-paneled room. [4] In a 2019 interview with Paper , the blog's owner described the aforementioned image as follows: "It's the perfect cursed image to me because there's nothing inherently unsettling about any part of it. It's a totally mundane moment transformed into something else by the camera and the new context I've given it." [4]
While the term "cursed image" had been used on Tumblr since 2015, [4] [6] it became more widely popularized by July 2016 due to the Twitter account @cursedimages. [2] [3] In a 2016 interview with Gizmodo writer Hudson Hongo, the owner of the account explained that he had seen "one or two" posts on Tumblr containing "unexplainable and odd" pictures that were simply captioned "cursed image". Intrigued by the pictures, the owner of the account began searching for similar images and after finding more photographs in that vein, decided to "post them all in one place". [7] That same year, Brian Feldman of New York magazine interviewed Doug Battenhausen, the owner of the Tumblr blog internethistory, which also posts "cursed images". [8] Feldman asked Battenhausen about the appeal of "cursed images", to which Battenhausen replied: "It's a lot of things. It's the mystery of the photo, it's the strange aesthetics of them, it's seeing a place that you've never seen before, or an intimate glimpse into somebody's life." [8]
Feldman attributes the "cursed" aesthetic to the nature of digital photography in the early 2000s, where point-and-shoot cameras lacked modern filters and were often used with "blaring" flash, and where a photo would be taken more for archival purposes than performative social media sharing. Feldman regards such photography as "not old enough to scan as 'vintage', but not well-manicured enough to be recognizable as contemporary", and sees this as an instance of the uncanny valley. [8]
The opposite of a cursed image is a "blessed image." The term "blursed image" has also been popularized, particularly on the social media platform Reddit, combining the words blessed and cursed [9] to describe images that could fit into both categories.
Gawker Media LLC was an American internet media company and blog network. It was founded by Nick Denton in October 2003 as Blogwire, and was based in New York City. Incorporated in the Cayman Islands, as of 2012, Gawker Media was the parent company for seven different weblogs and many subsites under them: Gawker.com, Deadspin, Lifehacker, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Jalopnik, and Jezebel. All Gawker articles are licensed on a Creative Commons attribution-noncommercial license. In 2004, the company renamed from Blogwire, Inc. to Gawker Media, Inc., and to Gawker Media LLC shortly after.
Darkchylde is an American comic book character created in 1996 by Randy Queen. It was originally published by Maximum Press, and later by Image Comics, through Homage Comics, a publishing imprint of Wildstorm. Subsequent projects would be published by Darkchylde Entertainment, through Wowio.
Benjamin Feldman is an American actor. Throughout his career, Feldman has undertaken roles on stage, including the Broadway play The Graduate, along with more prominent roles in television series such as his role as Jonah Simms in the NBC sitcom Superstore, Michael Ginsberg in Mad Men, and Ron LaFlamme in Silicon Valley. He has also played lead characters in films including The Perfect Man with Hilary Duff.
Neil Stephen Cicierega is an American musician, filmmaker, YouTuber, and animator. He is known as the creator of Potter Puppet Pals, "The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny", and various music albums under the name Lemon Demon, along with a series of mashup albums under his own name.
Tumblr is a microblogging and social networking website founded by David Karp in 2007 and currently owned by American company Automattic. The service allows users to post multimedia and other content to a short-form blog.
Yahoo! Meme was a microblogging site launched by the Yahoo Latin America team in August 2009. The platform was conceived as a mash up of functionality derived from Twitter and Tumblr. Its beta version was originally launched to a Brazilian audience with later versions expanding into Spanish, English, Chinese, and Indonesian audiences.
AfterEllen is an American culture website founded in 2002, with a focus on entertainment, interviews, reviews, and news of interest to the lesbian and bisexual women's community. The site covers pop culture and lifestyle issues from a feminist perspective; and the political climate as it pertains to the community. AfterEllen is not affiliated with entertainer Ellen DeGeneres, although its name refers to her coming out, specifically when her character came out in "The Puppy Episode" (1997) on her eponymous sitcom.
Reblogging is the mechanism in blogging which allows users to repost the content of another user's post with an indication that the source of the post is another user.
Shadow banning, also called stealth banning, hellbanning, ghost banning, and comment ghosting, is the practice of blocking or partially blocking a user or the user's content from some areas of an online community in such a way that the ban is not readily apparent to the user, regardless of whether the action is taken by an individual or an algorithm. For example, shadow-banned comments posted to a blog or media website would be visible to the sender, but not to other users accessing the site.
Barack Obama won the 2008 United States presidential election on November 4, 2008. During his campaign, he became the first presidential candidate of a major party to utilize social networking sites to expand and engage his audience of supporters and donors.
The Old Reader is a web-based news aggregator that delivers website, blog, and other Internet content to a web-based inbox. The service sprang up when Google removed social features from Google Reader; the site supports social media sharing, including the ability to "like" content, and find friends via social media networks.
archive.today is a web archiving website founded in 2012 that saves snapshots on demand, and has support for JavaScript-heavy sites such as Google Maps and X. archive.today records two snapshots: one replicates the original webpage including any functional live links; the other is a screenshot of the page.
Doge is an Internet meme that became popular in 2013. The meme consists of a picture of a Shiba Inu dog, accompanied by multicolored text in Comic Sans font in the foreground. The text, representing a kind of internal monologue, is deliberately written in a form of broken English. The meme originally and most frequently uses an image of a Shiba Inu named Kabosu, though versions with other Shiba Inus are also popular.
On August 31, 2014, a collection of nearly five hundred private pictures of various celebrities, mostly women, with many containing nudity, were posted on the imageboard 4chan, and swiftly disseminated by other users on websites and social networks such as Imgur and Reddit. The leak was dubbed "The Fappening" or "Celebgate" by the public. The images were initially believed to have been obtained via a breach of Apple's cloud services suite iCloud, or a security issue in the iCloud API which allowed them to make unlimited attempts at guessing victims' passwords. Apple claimed in a press release that access was gained via spear phishing attacks.
Images and videos of domestic cats make up some of the most viewed content on the World Wide Web. ThoughtCatalog has described cats as the "unofficial mascot of the Internet".
Dat Boi is an Internet meme originating from the clip art website Animation Factory. It depicts a frog riding a unicycle. The meme garnered popularity on Tumblr in 2015 before gaining more recognition through Twitter in 2016. It is usually accompanied by a person saying "here come dat boi".
Mastodon is free and open-source software for running self-hosted social networking services. It has microblogging features similar to Twitter, which are offered by a large number of independently run nodes, known as instances or servers, each with its own code of conduct, terms of service, privacy policy, privacy options, and content moderation policies.
ActivityPub is a protocol and open standard for decentralized social networking. It provides a client-to-server API for creating and modifying content, as well as a federated server-to-server (S2S) protocol for delivering notifications and content to other servers. ActivityPub has become the main standard used in the fediverse, a popular network used for social networking that consists of software such as Mastodon, Pixelfed and PeerTube.
@dril is a pseudonymous Twitter user best known for his idiosyncratic style of absurdist humor and non-sequiturs. The account and the character associated with the tweets are all commonly referred to as dril or wint, both rendered lowercase but often capitalized by others. Since his first tweet in 2008, dril has become a popular and influential Twitter user with more than 1.8 million followers.
"Loss", sometimes referred to as "loss.jpg", is a strip published on June 2, 2008, by Tim Buckley for his gaming-related webcomic Ctrl+Alt+Del. It is part of a storyline in which the main character Ethan and his fiancée Lilah are expecting their first child. Presented as a four-panel comic with no dialogue, the strip shows Ethan entering a hospital where he sees Lilah weeping in a hospital bed after suffering a miscarriage. Buckley cited events in his life as inspiration for the comic.
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