cherry's room

death videos i've seen lately

weather: ☁️ temporary drear
critters: admiral butterfly

the food bank second harvest heartland is taking donations for minnesotans under ICE occupation.

death videos i've seen in the past year:

i've seen them all called "snuff," but planning and profit are key ingredients in actual snuff. these four are just death videos.

i have written on this blog about looking before--specifically, accepting that i am someone who looks, with full knowledge that "bearing witness" is totally useless. even my fellow history people writing everything down are weary of "bearing witness." knowing we will be vindicated after our deaths is no comfort.

death grips made a track about the horror of seeing, "i've seen footage," back in 2012:

what's that? can't tell
handheld dream shot in hell . . .
can't delete it, feels like jail

if can be so bold as to declare a 2020s successor, it's gotta be "infohazard" by ninajirachi:

in my dream, i saw him
the man without a head . . .
what does it mean to see him
now all this time has passed?

the elder generation of my family tearfully asked me to mourn charlie kirk, or at least denounce the liberals online supposedly dancing on his warm corpse. (anything short of rending their garments and throwing ashes on their heads was "celebrating" his death.) i refused. a vector of online prions getting sniped by a guy with online prions is a pretty clear-cut case of a snake eating its tail, and i told them as much.

i have never heard my relatives speak the other names. they would be shocked and offended if i asked them to perform mourning for any of these three dead. i have little doubt at least a few of them have now seen alex pretti's murder, and even less doubt they've seen renée good's, if only from the state-approved angle. but what their senses have told them about the death videos is immaterial to what fox news has told them about the deaths and the dead. one corpse gets state-mandated mourning, the others the state smears as terrorists. these are a conservative's defenses against their eyes and ears.

part of my compulsion to watch these videos is to keep this tendency out of my own brain. what if failing to accept the world's evil is at the heart of rightism, and what if it's genetic? what if the thing that compels them to outsource their thinking will activate in me one day? what if the way to become like them is to turn my face away from death videos?

i once heard a few tips from a journalist on how to watch a disturbing video while minimizing psychic harm. i should have written them down because now i only remember three:

  1. watch it just once.
  2. close the window.
  3. play tetris.