Lord of the Midnight Sun

It started with someone listing "places with uncanny energy," like gas stations on a road trip, empty movie theaters, etc.

Then someone reblogged it and said those are called "liminal spaces," defining liminal as in-between, neither one thing nor another.

Tomorrow (July 4th, 2026) is the 10 year anniversary of the-crepes-of-wrath's comment, which:

Predates the 2020 spike in interest by four years

Predates the original backrooms post, and the the creation of r/liminalspaces by three years

Predates the earliest mention that KnowYourMeme attributes to Twitter by two years

I'm pretty sure this is the moment the term "liminal spaces" was attached to this sort of imagery, and it's TEN YEARS OLD TOMORROW!

So 12-foot-tall Grandma was actually a star basketball player back in the 70s for a very brief period of time– her career as a professional athlete only lasted between October and December of 1972.

The reason for this was because John Basketball, the inventor of the sport, realized that the WNBA had not yet been established, so he asked her to please sit out until the Basketball Elders got a chance to make a space in the sport for women. Grandma thought this was pretty bullshit, but she decided to leave the NBA anyway because nobody could keep up with her balling, and the sport had lost its novelty.

After she settled down in her new-but-less-exciting career as an astronaut, she met Pop-pop on the moon. It turns out that he had been a big fan of her and had recorded all her matches on U-matic, and had fallen in love with the sport.

Anyway things happened, the two fell in love and got married, and Grandma and Pop-pop had a beautiful family together. She became especially close with one of her granddaughters, Ballin’ Jessie, who inherited her propensity for basketball. The two would often dunk hoops with each other, and developed trash-talk as their love language.

Pop-pop also had an interest in the sport, but his height had made it difficult for him to keep up with the others. In fact, he had actually lost about a foot in height as a result of being compressed by Earth’s stronger gravitational pull. Despite this, Pop-pop was never really bothered by this because of his exceptional love for Grandma, who was always more than happy to lend him a helping hand. 

And this forces you to decide whether your autonomy matters to you more than the approval of the group - while they'll still act like you're on thin ice either way, if you give in at this point they know you're theirs forever, because now they've established a foothold, you've shown a moral weakness, which they will brand you with so it can be used against you in the future ("hey RICE-addict here doesn't want help break into the city records office") to force you to double-down and isolate you further.