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Comment by incognito124 | Hacker News Reader

Please be careful when visiting the homepage

It gave me serious vibes of the old internet homepages of highly eccentric people that became a part of the internet folklore, whether in a good way or a bad way.

The video is probably the least bizarre thing there, if that's what you are warning about.

What were you browsing where someone cutting off their own testicles is not as bizarre as other things? I didn't watch the video but atleast there was a warning.

Feds this guy right here ^^

> What were you browsing where someone cutting off their own testicles is not as bizarre as other things?

One of my formative early internet experiences was loading up a video of a man being beheaded with a knife.

Luckily, I realized what was about to happen, and didn't subject myself to the whole thing.

There's some distance between setting pubes on fire and cutting testicles off, dare I say.

Although, setting any kind of hair on fire in public should be punishable, primarily because of stench of the burnt hairs.

Looks at the chain of comments, then at the URL domain

Thanks for the warnings, kind strangers.

As a transgender woman, that isn't something I'd expect to see but am not surprised to see on a site called girl.surgery. dead doves and all that

as always, genius and insanity are only 1 step apart

Load of bullshit. Let's not romanticise mental illness.

You now have a generation of people who think it is cool to be mentally ill.

or a generation of people who feel comfortable talking candidly about their mental ilness(es) and feel safe seeking help among others like them??

You mean the people marketing their mental health issues online?

Where can I buy some of what they're marketing?

I mean, some of the things on that homepage are truly the works of a genius IMO

no, homepage is insanity

blog post is good

Mental illness has always been common and often been cool in one form or another.

Serial killers get fan mail, that’s true now and it was true 100 years ago.

I think a lot of people still grow out of that phase. Like wanting to be like the Joker or taking a 'am I a sociopath' test online and finding your new edgelord persona only to find it deeply cringeworthy later.

100 years ago, people with mental illness were assumed to be "possessed by demons" and were either institutionalized against their will, lobotomized, or both. Or just left to die.

People are still institutionalized against their will others are left to die on the streets, but not all mental illness is particularly severe.

Psychoanalysis while mostly quackery is ~135 years old providing an example where talking was considered a viable therapy not just locking people up or tossing out lobotomies left and right to anyone slightly abnormal.

So sure, 100 years ago there was quackery just as today, but “possessed by demons” wasn’t considered mainstream back then any more than it is today.

This really reminds me of the web as I remember it from the mid-to-late 90's; I feel like I'm just a click away from the old deoxy.org, if anyone remembers that. (Don't go there now; the domain appears to have been long-ago hijacked.)

or kittens on encyclopediabrittanica

I loved the deoxy site, it was one of my favorites :-) Next to the site and writings of the esoteric Brother Blue, who was he? It eventually caused me to go in a reality tunnel for a few years. It was a fascinating and puzzling experience similar as to what was described in Cosmic Trigger III by R.A. Wilson.

I guess we visited different parts. I don't remember any videos of people burning their dicks off on the early internet.

If you paid for MS FrontPage, you better get some value out of it!

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