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 was an American blog founded by Nick Denton and Elizabeth Spiers that was based in New York City and focused on celebrities and the media industry. According to SimilarWeb, the site had over 23 million visits per month as of 2015. Founded in 2002, Gawker was the flagship blog for Denton's Gawker Media. Gawker Media also managed other blogs such as Jezebel, io9, Deadspin and Kotaku.
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.
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WordPress.com is a web building platform for self-publishing that is popular for blogging and other works. It is owned and operated by Automattic, Inc. It is run on a modified version of the WordPress software. This website provides free blog hosting for registered users and is financially supported via paid upgrades, "VIP" services and advertising.
X, commonly referred to by its former name Twitter, is a social media website based in the United States. With over 500 million users, it is one of the world's largest social networks and the fifth-most visited website in the world. Users can share text messages, images, and videos through posts. X also includes direct messaging, video and audio calling, bookmarks, lists and communities, and Spaces, a social audio feature. Users can vote on context added by approved users using the Community Notes feature.
Neil Stephen Cicierega is an American filmmaker, YouTuber, animator, and musician. He is known as the creator of Potter Puppet Pals, "The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny", and multiple music albums under the name Lemon Demon. He also released a series of mashup albums under his own name that have since gained a cult following.
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.
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.
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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".
This page is a timeline of social media. Major launches, milestones, and other major events are included.
Mastodon is free and open-source software for running self-hosted social networking services. It has microblogging features similar to X, 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.
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"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. Set during a storyline in which the main character Ethan and his fiancée Lilah are expecting their first child, the strip—presented as a four-panel comic with no dialogue—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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