That thing you could’ve sworn you existed, remembered existed and how it has now turned into a great wonder of a chase to acquire again after so long. What is that thing for you?
Mine is discovering what music was played during an old internet radio show I still listen to was. The episodes I’m listening to are 21 years old now and for years I wondered what specific tracks were played on that show that I so want copies of. In one of the episodes, the host mentions that the backing music is from Digitally Imported now known as DI.FM.
However, that doesn’t do me any good since newer music is played now on that platform and with no hint or source telling me what tracks were played on that show in show notes or even word of mouth, I’ve no hope in tracking them down. So for so long, I’ve had to listen to this show’s episodes almost religiously, just because of the music that was played.
And my only hope now is tinkering with audio tools so I can figure a way to rip out the parts where the hosts are talking so it is just the music, then go around online asking people who’re more expert on the genre than I am to tell me, then find them and download them.
OQ and OC text by @[email protected]
There’s a “famous” gore video showing a Russian soldier being brutally murdered by Chechen rebels. Ya’ll probably already know what I’m talking about, so I don’t need to explain (and if you haven’t seen it or don’t know what it is, don’t bother looking for it, it’s not nice and does you no good to have it on your psychic hard drive). Since seeing that clip in ~2000, I’ve desperately wanted to know the man’s identity and the circumstances in which he was killed. I’ve had people swear to me that they also saw the clip, but the version they saw was quite a bit longer than the ~20-second clip everyone is aware of, and they describe some details that could well be useful in identifying him, but alas this alleged longer version seems to have vanished entirely, if it ever existed. The version we have is obviously heavily-edited, lots of quick cuts and time-jumps, so there is at least a version without all of that, somewhere.
Trust me when I say that I’ve looked into this issue on and off for the last 25 years, and I have heard many bullshit claims about who he is: they’re all wrong and provably so. I’ve watched hundreds (literally) of clips from that conflict that show barbarity of one degree or another, and in doing so I have identified the clips that specific reports and testimonies are alluding to when they claim to have identified the victim. None of them is our guy, it’s always some other video clip where some other Russian is knifed by a Chechen (there’re a lot of such clips).
There was a user on a gore forum who uploaded the Tukhchar massacre (safe click) video in full, and he claimed to have the full version of our mystery clip, but refused to post it and grew increasingly hostile the more people asked him for it, eventually taking his ball and going home by stating his intention to never post it because people were mean to him. He was obviously a bullshitter who had a few good uploads and decided to use that momentum to generate hype around this other ‘holy grail’ clip which he almost certainly did not have. Other than that one prick, nobody online has access to the full video or the identity of the man. At least, not on the English-speaking internet.
I’ve seen a lot of awful videos on the net, but there’s something about that one in particular that really energised me to find out who he is. I guess it being the first video of that kind I ever saw would probably have something to do with it, but it’s also just so fucking cold. You could sense the all-consuming hatred in the killers in the way they staged the scene and the matter-of-fact way they slaughtered him. Just pure inhumanity. There are “worse” videos, there are drug cartel videos that would make a Spanish Inquisitor lose his lunch, but man, that Russian dude is always lingering in my mind.
That video scarred my brain for a long time.
I saw the 20 second version of that video around that time. I thought it was a fake at first and then the next time it replayed it became clear that this was no fake. The person who showed me it was showing it to share the burden of having seen such a thing.
No desire to see it again. And after that I saw all sorts of things like rotten.com, goatse, the BME Pain Olympics and all sorts of other gross stuff on the early WWW. Some of that came pretty close but nothing has topped it.