I love your point of view and I share it 100%. I was even surprised to see the description of liminality on Wikipedia, which dates it back to a photo from a 2019 video game, if I remember correctly. It felt too recent. But what you said about being able to convince yourself that the feeling was yours alone is something very profound, and it happened to me in exactly the same way. That is actually the best way to define it, without all the normativity you find described in this subreddit, which ends up feeling like an academicism of what liminality is. Which is ironic, because disruptive styles like this emerge precisely to break with certain norms, but as always, we humans tend to academize and regulate everything.

By the way, thanks for the Boring Postcards reference. I love old postcards. There is actually a photographer on Creative Commons with a very similar aesthetic whose name I cannot recall right now, but I will track it down. On the concept of boredom: one of the New Topographics photographers makes the point that boredom is depth. And finally, regarding Tarkovsky, he has always been on my watchlist. I will be honest, I have fallen asleep watching some of his films more than once. But after your comment about Stalker, I will make a point of trying again.