The reflection of my face on the monitor.

A black and white comic about a stranded astronaut walking back to base, and his suit’s nano bots are doing everything necessary to keep him alive while it keeps walking him, day and night, toward their goal. Even disassembling his limbs and torso to turn them into water, nutrients, and fuel to keep everything else running.

It’s been living rent free in my head for a couple years now.

I used to work in IT forensics - there’s nothing that will ever be worse than the things I saw there. People are freaking scary.

But outside work I’ve seen my part of shit, puke and other strange fetish videos, and people being blown up or driven down - being on the internet in the early days sort of made you numb to those things.

I will say that I saw a paper cut fetish video once. That shit hurt through the monitor.

Probably not the most disturbing thing but still kind of funny.

When the internet first came out we were in middle school or high school and my friends dad had great internet connection because he worked for the Navy. Anyways we were amazed that you could find anything about anything just by typing it into the web crawler (I think that’s what the search engine was called back then.

One night we were just chilling and looking up random stuff and we were like damn, you can literally find anything.

“I bet they even have horses fucking chickens!”

And well. Yes. Yes they do.

The video of the brick hitting the woman in the car. Saddest dashcam video I’ve ever seen

Tub Girl

Things I didn’t look for. CP. I am trying to forget that to this day. There were children there who were a couple of months to couple of years old. When I realize some of the adults in there were probably their parents it makes me sick.

The things I looked for. Beheading. There was a reddit post about beheading without providing the video. Even though most of the commenters said that nobody should watch that, I was curious and I looked it up. Now, every time I see somebody say “trust me, you don’t want to see that”, I believe them.

Saw some pretty gruesome stuff during my snuff film phase. Once my daughter was born, I couldn’t do it anymore.

Saw a video once of a woman in stiletto heels stepping on a kitten. If there was one thing I could erase from my brain it would be that.

Cartel torture and execution video. I tried typing up what I remembered of it, but even omitting half the details left me with a very gruesome and disturbing story. I’ll just say that the casual nature of the men doing the torture was the most disturbing part. They laughed and took turns as they drank beer. They made other victims watch while having demented smiles across their faces. They delighted in the screams. I suppose not understanding Spanish was a blessing for a curious child.

The Russian video of them castrating a prisoner of war.

There are surveillance camera feeds online and I discovered one was for a camera near where I live.

I’ve seen a lot of gross stuff, but diturbing? The guy eating another man on a train. Dudes just flailing while he has chunk bitten out of him, everyone on the tube is just filling on their phones.

I’m older than some in here, I think (judging by the answers). For me, a couple of the things on steakandcheese.com and rotten.com (back in its early days, not the later milder days), cartel videos, beheadings, hangings etc. The standout though was a video called ‘Terrorists, Killers & Middle East Wackos’… Grim stuff. From Wikipedia:

Terrorists, Killers and Middle-East Wackos (also Terrorists, Killers and Other Wackos in the UK) is a shockumentary video from the makers of Bumfights. It includes footage of riots, suicides, executions, and the televised suicide of R. Budd Dwyer. All the scenes included are real scenes of death and suffering. The Bumfights website store touts the video as “One hour of the sickest images ever put to film.”

I was young and dumb once, but I actively avoid things like that nowadays. There’s knowing how things happen in the real world, and there’s traumatising and desensitising yourself to the worst depravities possible for… reasons? Just no. You can’t unsee some things, and some things shouldn’t ever enter your consciousness at all (unless you’re really unlucky IRL…).

It might be subjective but for me the most disturbing thing was the alarming amount of spider porn/hentai. Like, are there actually people out there who fantasize about being mounted by a spider the size of a car? As someone who has arachnophobia, I really don’t understand it.