New things to read!

After a vigorous discussion with a friend last night about stories that are head trips, emotional bombshells, or overall mind screws, I was alerted to the genre known as SCP. And down the rabbit hole I went today, spending hours read the various ones. SCP is basically a sci-fi genre in the vein of a creepypasta meets Warehouse 13/Men in Black, but with way more fatalities and needless expenditure of human life. SCPs are all written like semi-redacted files as one would find in some clandestine organization that finds, captures, studies, uses, and/or kills weird shit. It's all the fun of conspiracy, creepypasta, and documentary all in one. It's like reading the write-ups from survivors of Lovecraftian horrors who see this stuff every day and are a bit blasé about it at this point.

It also makes me want to go back and read some of the better creepypastas, though at the same time, I kind of don't? I enjoy the what-if nature, that inherent quality of all good sci-fi, and many are incredibly well-written, but a person can only handle so much of the dark, depressing, and horrifying. Not terribly healthy to be in that headspace for long.

Huh?

Why is it that most of the journals out there that I see are either majority American/British/Aussie, or Russian? You can look at trending words on journal sites, such as this one, and you will only see english and cyrillic. That's it. No kanji, no farsi, no hindi, nothing. Which begs several questions. Do most other countries not journal online? Or are there a lot more country specific ones I don't normally see? I know China has their own version of everything so they can control it, but what about everyone else? I occasionally stumble across japanese sections of the internet in my nerdery, so I know there's definitely more than my little area. But that then begs the other question. Why so many Russians on the english side when they could be on their own? I know Russia basically wants the same control over everything as China, but don't yet have it. Are many people from that whole region (I generalize everything as Russian, but I am aware that many in that part of the world write in cyrillic) doing it as a freedom thing? Is it more sinister? Something completely other?

I do realize that certain cultures, such as mine, are more forward and open with, well, most everything, but that doesn't mean people don't still write and journal. I would love to see the breakdown of stats by culture/country/region and how they go about it. Does this group just never do it, or is it all hidden away? Does that group have way more, but in a place I never see? How much do people in general even do journals anymore? A lot of people basically have video journals anymore. So many questions.

Also, I know that a lot of websites have specific versions for whichever country you are visiting from, ie a bbc.com is going to look different from the bbc.co.uk, which is different from bbc.jp, but now I wonder how much is out there that I'll never see because it's all behind country extensions. Hmm.