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Comment by dennyabraham | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of another deep sea mystery trace, Paleodictyon[1]. Once an unconnected set of geometric fossils and modern hole patterns, it's been discovered that this phenomenon has occurred in a consistent form for half a billion years up to the present day.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleodictyon

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There's a nice PBS video about them with footage of the holes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pz1fccY3S84

That Paleodictyon is clearly a fossilized chickenwire fence. Source: grew up on a chicken farm.

Anybody else repulsed by that pattern? I don’t know why but I am.

Trypophobia. I won't link to Wikipedia, if such a thing bothers you I'm not going to try to trigger it.

There is also a subreddit dedicated to that phobia, I don’t believe I have it but some of the pictures there definitely give me the willies.

Fair warning: The subreddit is focused on _triggering_ the phobia.

It takes a particular type of masochist to have tropophobic tendencies and being subscribed to that subreddit.

No more then when people get kicks from horror movies no?

Exposure therapy?

I didn't have trypophobia but after looking at Google Images I think I do now

I'll be looking at lotus seeds differently now

I'm not sure if I have it, but when I searched for image examples it looked extremely gross to me.

EDIT: I seriously regret searching it now. Please don't while you still can. It is absolutely grotesque.

> Please don’t while you still can.

Counterpoint: you (reader) should give in to that gnawing feeling of curiosity. One little peek never hurt anyone.

(Really, it’s not that bad.)

I searched it, and, for me it was interesting and I became curious. Some pictures were obviously doctored and made to make you feel something, others, were just.. interesting.

Not everyone is triggered by those pictures, to me they don't look gross at all. I can scroll through pics of lotus seed pods all day.

What’s weird is the images in the article freaked me out. The Google search images did nothing for me. Maybe I was just primed / warned ?

It's the hands...it's all you get to see with duckduckgo. The hands are nasty...

I can put myself in the headspace of finding it creepy, but by default it just looks like stuff to me. Regular objects. In the case of honeycomb it can actually look beautiful, though.

I don’t get what the big deal is. Most of it was just some fake images of holes in hands and stuff? And the seed pod is scary for some reason?

Some might take that as an indication that you don't have trypophobia.

Okay, the lotus seed pictures did nothing to me, but Google Images is filled with far more disgusting images.

Stay away!

> Okay, the lotus seed pictures did nothing to me, but Google Images is filled with far more disgusting images.

Same! Why does body mutilation imagery like that rank so high for that search term? Ugh!

Fascinating. I'd never heard of trypophobia before reading this post this morning... right after which I walked into an art exhibit and saw this amazing painting by Alfredo Arreguín...

https://ibb.co/GQrrxNY

"trypophobia" ("fear of holes") is a phenomenon where some people find similar patterns to that disturbing or repellant, might be the same thing. Of course Googling that will give you lots of similar images that you might find similarly repellant.

Others linked it, but I believe trypophobia was an evolutionary advantage genetic instinctive trait that kept early human carriers repulsed and therefore safely avoidant of infestations (contagious disease welts/boils, harmful insect hives, and the like).

i had an old encloypaedia when I was a kid. It had been published in the 1960s. In it under the computer section it had a colour photo of a processor or something and it was this incredibly dense criss-cross pattern of what looked like wiring. I never knew why but that picture used to give me a funny feeling in my brain that I didn't like.

Probably a core memory board?

I don't know, next time i'm in my parent's last house I will see if the book made it there.

Yes and no. I’m repulsed when it’s used as some sort of horror imagery superimposed on someone’s skin. But otherwise it’s a fairly pleasing pattern. Unfortunately it’s hard to understand grotesque imagery.

Yes but more scared than repulsed. It made me feel scared for some reason.

Immediately not clicking.

It's a simple pattern which I'll describe in this paragraph with some padding before and after, so you may give up on reading, even though it is in my opinion among the mildest patterns that would trigger trypophobia. It's a fossil of a hexagonal grid of tubes imprinted on a rock. There are examples of the pattern on a sunny rock, on a sandy rock, an isolated slab of rock with the pattern, and finally what looks like a microscope or underwater picture of similar stringy coral patterns. Now I need some final padding, so someone glancing will not glance at the end of the paragraph and see some of the description. But I'm not sure on what to say here, as there isn't much to it, it's just a fossil. There are no gruesome images.

I was being glib. I find myself occasionally silently belittling trigger warnings in social media and news stories, but the Tiny Holes thing really triggers me. I'm not going to Google the word right now to remember how to spell it correctly.

I don't even recall if it was legit - being early days internet - but I remember (and cannot un-remember) the image of a frog that would give birth to tadpoles, or maybe tiny frogs, out of its back. Horrifying.

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