Inactive BME.com/Body Modification Community - TW: crazy people, gore, NSFW

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Turns out the leader of the site has died, and site has been down for some time

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Rachel Larratt 1980-2022​

Posted on April 26, 2023 by Jen Savage
Unfortunately, when we lost some of the ModBlog content, it included the post about Rachel’s passing. (Original Post) Rachel passed away on June 22, 2022. She died in her sleep.

Even now, it’s extremely difficult to write this post. Rachel meant so much to so many. She was my friend but she was so much more than that. For me, she was family and today, just a week after what would have been her 43rd birthday, the pain is still very raw. For those of us who really knew her, Rachel was a light and a force. She was passionate, generous and kind. She was goofy and ridiculous. Without even knowing it or trying to, she could command a room.

I’ll never stop missing you Rachel.
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Product Placement said:
Turns out the leader of the site has died, and site has been down for some time
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Based on the status updates the downtime is likely to be permanent. Before the updates stopped altogether ~half a year ago most of them talked about one or more of setbacks, the Mastodon site being used as a backup, or claims that  this time they really do have everything they need to bring the site back online.

No big loss imo, the site was near-dormant for years before this and the really sick stuff is mostly archived.

Edit to Add: Here is the synopsis of the site's issues as best I can tell:

1) Issues with Rachel Larrat's estate left her child(ren?) locked out of her accounts for a prolonged period after her death. The radio silence means I cannot tell if they got access and the clunky wording means I cannot tell if this means Internet accounts, financial accounts, utility accounts, or more than one of the above.
2) There have been billing issues with the webhost and possibly other hosting issues beyond that. Again, the wording is vague and clunky.
3) Hardware issues resulted in a sitewide outage in April 2020 followed by a potentially irretrievable loss of backups in late 2022. There were no status updates in between these two posts so I can't tell if the site ever came back up after the 2020 crash.
4) The site's userbase were a bunch of deviants demanding to be taken seriously. Oh wait, that was true before the site crashed, carry on.

As a personal aside, good riddance - plenty of people, myself included, have piercings and still manage to lead productive lives. We don't want or need to be lumped in with the crazies who get horn implants or whatever the new thing is.

Edit x2: The Mastodon site for BME returns an error page and I do not know enough to say whether the problem is on my end or theirs. If it is on their end I do not know how long it has been down. All I can tell you is that the BME mods last linked to it on 20 March 2023.

Edit x3: Apparently the hardware issues also took down some of the mod posts on news.bme.com so my first edit to add might be incorrect - there could have been that more posts were lost and became irrecoverable but we can't know for certain.
 
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In case you haven’t followed the drama of this site over the last 20+ years, Rachel is the estranged ex-wife of the originator of BME, Shannon Larrat. Around 2007, he was suddenly locked out of the site in a weird hostile takeover by his wife. As far as I’m aware, the full behind the scenes story has never been told. Shannon said he couldn’t give details because of the legal settlement, and Rachel was always much more tight-lipped about her personal life in general than Shannon.

It was always tough to tell exactly which side was the more reliable narrator there. Shannon was extremely public (in a very articulate, thoughtful way, imo) about his severe mental and physical health struggles. He painted a very negative picture of Rachel, who I’m sure was no peach, but they both seemed like hot messes. I would be surprised if Rachel’s death didn’t involve drugs, suicide, or worse.

Shannon died from a rare muscle degenerative disease about ten years ago. They left behind a daughter, Nefarious (yeah I know, she went by Ari) who’s probably 18-20 now. I always felt so bad for her. Shannon’s blog is still up, and worth a read. He seemed like a great dad on his posts, all things considered, though obviously we can only see what he showed us. But Ari’s parents’ chaos, and now early deaths, has dealt her a hell of a hand.

I’ll likely return to my years of dedicated lurking again, but I couldn’t remember how much of this story is in this thread, and since I’ve been rubbernecking bme for decades I figured I’d hit the highlights.
 
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UncleTusky said:
No big loss imo, the site was near-dormant for years before this and the really sick stuff is mostly archived.
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Funny, but a friend of mine commented a couple of days ago that he almost never sees new people with extreme body mods any more—just the same old ones who have been around since the '90s, and even they haven't bothered to get new mods in a long time. Ear gauges, nose rings, certain facial piercings, and being covered in tattoos is so mainstream now, nobody bothers to notice them. The most radical things he sees among the Millennial/Zoomer crowd is just a bunch of ugly facial piercings that anybody on BME back in the day would have thought was just a nice start.

I said, without even thinking about it, "Yeah, because all the attention-seeking, self-loathing Cluster B kids are trooning out now. Fucking yourself up with exogenous hormones, cosmetic bilateral mastectomies, and having your genitals mutilated by an actual surgeon are pretty radical body mods, if you ask me. Who needs a forked tongue and tattooed eyeballs when you can have the real horror of a fecal-smelling manhole that grows hair inside it, or a Mengele-tier meat tube phallus made out of your own flayed forearm?"

There's a lot of cultural factors that have led to so many people trooning/pooning out, and I think the extreme body mods community was a forerunner for it. If you can make yourself look like a tiger or dragon or demon, why not a cute anime girl or a manly dood? Especially when you've got the entire tech community and medical-pharmaceutical complex to back you up?
 
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Angry New Ager said:
There's a lot of cultural factors that have led to so many people trooning/pooning out, and I think the extreme body mods community was a forerunner for it. If you can make yourself look like a tiger or dragon or demon, why not a cute anime girl or a manly dood? Especially when you've got the entire tech community and medical-pharmaceutical complex to back you up?
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That's an interesting point and it reminds me of something I saw on old body-mod threads (it was long enough ago that stretched ears or any facial piercings would make you stand out, I can't remember the site but I'm confident it wasn't BME): Whenever someone raised a concern about how mods upset family members or make it harder to get a job, the community response was 'you have a right to express yourself, it's their own fault for being so close minded'.

Sounds an awful lot like the modern rallying cry of 'accept us unconditionally or you're a bigot', doesn't it?
 
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Nonny said:
In case you haven’t followed the drama of this site over the last 20+ years, Rachel is the estranged ex-wife of the originator of BME, Shannon Larrat. Around 2007, he was suddenly locked out of the site in a weird hostile takeover by his wife. As far as I’m aware, the full behind the scenes story has never been told. Shannon said he couldn’t give details because of the legal settlement, and Rachel was always much more tight-lipped about her personal life in general than Shannon.

It was always tough to tell exactly which side was the more reliable narrator there. Shannon was extremely public (in a very articulate, thoughtful way, imo) about his severe mental and physical health struggles. He painted a very negative picture of Rachel, who I’m sure was no peach, but they both seemed like hot messes. I would be surprised if Rachel’s death didn’t involve drugs, suicide, or worse.

Shannon died from a rare muscle degenerative disease about ten years ago. They left behind a daughter, Nefarious (yeah I know, she went by Ari) who’s probably 18-20 now. I always felt so bad for her. Shannon’s blog is still up, and worth a read. He seemed like a great dad on his posts, all things considered, though obviously we can only see what he showed us. But Ari’s parents’ chaos, and now early deaths, has dealt her a hell of a hand.

I’ll likely return to my years of dedicated lurking again, but I couldn’t remember how much of this story is in this thread, and since I’ve been rubbernecking bme for decades I figured I’d hit the highlights.
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I'm pretty sure Shannon died by suicide before his muscle thing degrenerated too much. Can't remember if it was assisted or not though, it has been a long time since I frequented that kind of scene tbh.
 
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Clicking the Social tab on the website took me to a BME Mastodon instance with the error: 401 This method requires an authenticated user. Is that an issue with not having a BME or Mastodon account?
 
Oh wow, these guys are back. Some of the places I got pierced back in the day were also doing some of that extreme stuff behind closed doors, and it was more or less thanks to this community that my now-boring vanilla holes were even something I could get done. I kind of wonder what they think of the changes in the industry and clientele that have happened over the years.
 
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