Things That Annoy Me, But Shouldn't

I heard form somebody once who explained their clown phobia, which they had before Pennywise had his own movie (possibly before the book?). They had seen a street clown close up as a kid. He was balancing on something like a board on a ball, and kept falling off and leaping to his feet trying to be funny, but they said they could see he was really getting hurt and trying to hide it, sweating profusely under the makeup and panting like a horse. I can see where this would freak somebody out. But yeah, only some people would have experiences like that. It took internet culture to spread these memes far and wide.

What we're seeing is those unexpected ways in which the internet is changing the culture. I think it's too late to put the genie back in the bottle. And unfortunately the biggest social platforms are set up along the well-known lines of brainwashing, to influence social trends and shame those who think individually rather than follow the crowd.

 

Captured? Or generated? Hmmm.... Keep thinking Ronald McDonald. Would McDonald's have chosen that clown as their logo, if 'everybody' was scared of clowns (back in the 50s?) I kinda doubt it. Trust me, this is new. I'm 71 years old, and I certainly remember when clowns were considered fun, and certainly harmless. Some were funnier than others, but they weren't generally feared. That's only taken hold over the last couple of decades. But hey....

 

I can see @jannert’s point exactly. I don’t think there’s any argument to say a fear/phobia of clowns and dolls hasn’t been around for a very long time, but in the last four or five years it’s almost as though it’s become trendy to say clowns/dolls are creepy, even if in truth you don’t think it at all.

And of course a doll is going to have an element of creepiness when you smother its face in mud, pull half its hair out and remove one of its eyes!!

 

I agree with Jannert. Yeah, there were a lot of movies featuring creepy dolls, like Barbarella, that segment from Trilogy of Terror where Karen Black fought the Zuni warrior doll after it leaped out of a suitcase threatening her with a tiny spear, etc, but at that point not all dolls were considered creepy or even most. Only isolated ones that were specifically designed to look creepy, like the clown in Poltergeist. In fact part of the shock was that something as innocuous and normally harmless as a doll could become creepy.

 

I just realized, another thing that plays into the creepy doll trope is the uncanny valley—the fact that artificial humans who get close but not close enough (if trying to be completely realistic) end up looking creepy. Thanks to the internet everybody and their little sister is aware of this and they apply it incorrectly to cartoons and dolls that weren't intended to look realistic.

But there's another closely related factor as well. Thanks to CGI-type technology characters are often designed by computer now rather than by artists, and when non-artists use computers for work like this they tend to go for realism rather than an artistic stylization. There are hordes of non-artists now making things that once only artists would have made, and these people have no understanding of stylization. This is why so many CG movies that attempt realistic human characters have resulted in so much creepiness, and that widespread phenomenon has brought the uncanny valley to the attention of the general public.

 

Yeah, that kind of doll can be creepy indeed! ...although I've seen some fantastic restorations of dolls that were, shall we say, 'badly cared for' by original owners. Can hardly believe it's the same doll sometimes.

 

Coronation Street. It is unarguably the most depressing television show going.

 

How can you talk creepy doll movies without mentioning Puppet Master?

 

Something I don’t like about the iPhone 12 pro... I patch my phone into the car stereo and stream Pandora while I drive. Apparently speaker volume is higher than acceptable headphone volume. Every time I turn the volume up my phone tuns it back down and opens an image saying it was for my safety to protect my hearing. Then I turn it right back up. The part that annoys me but shouldn’t is that there’s no way to turn that feature off, so I’m stuck turning the music back up.

 

That would be annoying.
Kinda like having a fight over the radio with an invisible passenger.

 

Same here though with an Iphone 7. And yes, it is annoying. There should be at least a feature to tell the phone you are using speakers instead of headphones .

 

Sleeping with socks on annoys me. My feet always feel like tv static when I wake up.

 

Have you ever considered taking them off beforehand?

 

I normally do. But sometimes the sleep overwhelms.

 

Nay, t'is the socks themselves! They are masters of Jedi mind trickery.

 

There's something quite wrong with this close association of socks and hands, but I'm unable to formulate the appropriate joke.

 

Well I’m well past taking them off with my teeth.

 

People who think they have to close the trash can lid and you turn to put something in it...

 

I never had this issue with my iPhone 8. I suppose it’s not that big a deal, it’s only a 20 minute drive to work.

 

Hers or yours?

 

The German word for glove translates to "hand-shoe."

 

Yeah. My reaction (as yet unacted-upon) is to say, "Creepy? I'll show you creepy. And trust me, it's not a doll!"