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Sandpaper Floor Room is a hypothetical torture device first described by the Daily Dirt blog in 2004 and popularized by a 4chan post in 2014. The device is a locked room with a rough grit sandpaper conveyor belt floor that moves in one direction at a very slow but constant speed. The naked victim, trapped in the room, is forced to walk constantly to avoid being scraped until they collapse from exhaustion. Starting in 2021, the post has been the subject of memes and humorous references.

Origin

On January 8th, 2004, the Daily Dirt[1] blog published a top 10 list for worst ways to die. Ranked one on the list was "The Sandpaper Room," a hypothetical torture device that consists of a locked room with an abrasive floor that moves at a constant speed of two or three miles per hour. The victim, trapped in the room, is forced to constantly walk to avoid being sanded away until they collapse from exhaustion, at which point the pain from scraping will likely force them to move again. Eventually, the victim, no longer able to get up, bleeds to death (original post shown below).

1. The Sandpaper Room. There are two rollers hidden behind the walls on either side of the Sandpaper Room that keep the abrasive floor in motion at all times. Not too fast, maybe two or three miles per hour, which is easy enough to keep pace with... at first. Eventually though, you get tired and stop. But the moving floor pulls you up against the wall, where you realize that the soles of your shoes are slowly being sanded away. So you start walking again, but it dawns on you that you're only delaying the inevitable... that your time is limited to how long you can stay awake and moving, while your captors have all the time in the world. How long will it take for you to die? How many times will you drop unconscious from exhaustion, only to be ripped awake by the pain of your skin being sanded away? How many times will you be able to force yourself to get up and walk before your body simply isn't able to obey your mental commands anymore? Hours? Days? A week? Once you make the final drop, how long before the sandpaper grinds your flesh to the bone? How many days before you bleed to death? How long before there's nothing left but a red wet stripe on the floor... of the Sandpaper Room?

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On April 10th, 2006, Yahoo Answers[2] user OneRunningMan cited the blog post in his reply to the question, "What's the worst way to die?"

On February 6th, 2014, an anonymous 4chan user then posted a PNG drawing of the sandpaper floor room in a /b/ thread, describing the design (original post no longer available, screenshot shown below). On May 26th, 2014, Redditor WinWing posted a screenshot of the post to the /r/4chan[3] subreddit, where it garnered over 500 upvotes in nine years.

The post first saw use as a meme reference in 2021. For example, on March 14th, 2021, iFunny[5] user TurboGuy4k posted a Wow This Is Your Room? meme that received 340 smiles in two years (shown below, left).

On March 13th, 2023, an anonymous 4chan user posted the image of the Sandpaper Floor Room in a /tv/ thread, with another user replying[6] with a still image from the "Virtual Insanity" music video, in which a visual effect of a moving floor is used. Later that day, the Twitter[7] account @greentexts_bot posted a screenshot of the exchange, which gained over 660 retweets and 8,300 likes in two months (shown below, right).

In April and May 2023, the concept saw viral spread on Twitter and other social media websites through reposts and memes.

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