Musings of a Faerie Doll

It can also be found on Google Drive here and on Bluesky here.

Spontaneous applause

Noisy make-outs

Food Wrapper/package noise (loud)

Eating noises (loud) which include gum popping, popcorn mastication with mouth open, cracking of sunflower seeds, crunching of corn chips

Slurping sounds (that big bucket of soda makes an excellent amplifier for slorking up those last few ounces of beverage)

Commentary (sibilant whispers)

Commentary (regular conversational levels)

Commentary (sports event levels)

Raucous laughter

Raucous laughter during serious parts of the movie

Conversations about plot confusion (loud)

Arguments about snacks

Arguments about the movie

Arguments about any number of other topics

Cell phone ring tones

Cell phone ring tones plus the phrase "Hey, what's up. Nah, I'm at a movie. The one with that actor in it."

The previous conversation, plus "Yeah, I can talk."

Cell phone conversations (phone caller holds phone to ear)

Cell phone conversations (phone caller has phone set to speaker)

Internet videos playing on cell phones

Texting with the "ticky ticky" noise at full volume (complete with very bright screen)

Video game noises

Now, I should state for the record that there are situations where being part of a community while watching a movie enhances the experience.

Going to a "midnight movie" is almost certainly going to involve people speaking lines of the film, singing along with songs, or yelling things at the screen. The Rocky Horror Picture Show is one of these situations.

Horror movies may elicit screams and shouts from the audience, which is a grand old tradition.

When I saw Black Panther opening weekend, there was absolutely no conversations, phone calls, or interruptions, but there were glorious moments of spontaneous cheering, laughter, and applause.

When I went to see Ultra Violet with a friend, there were maybe a dozen people in the theater, and the movie itself was ... Not great cinema. My friend and I were furiously whispering to each other a lot of snarky commentary, and 20 minutes in, we noticed that people were edging closer to hear us. And howling with laughter at our snark.

If you know what you'd have to do to solve a problem, but you just don't want to do it, your main problem isn't the problem itself. Your problem is figuring out how to get yourself to do the solution.

If your problem is not eating enough vegetables, the problem you should be solving is "how do I make vegetables stop being yucky". If your problem is not getting enough exercise, the problem you should be solving is "how do I make exercise stop sucking ass". You're not supposed to just be doing things that are awful and suck all the time forever, you're supposed to figure out how to make it stop being so awful all the time.

I used to hate wearing sunscreen because it's sticky and slimy and disgusting and it feels bad and it smells bad, so I neglected to wear it even if I needed to. Then I found one that isn't like that, and doesn't smell and feel gross. Problem solved.

All the episodes of Galavant are on the Internet Archive!

A pun post crossed my dash, and I reblogged it with an equally bad pun in return. A couple of my followers find it funny, it's a good day for everyone.

That was on July 7th.

Virality on Reddit was entirely algorithmic. You could garner a couple crossposts, but the success of a post was entirely dependent on whether or not it hit r/all--the main page of Reddit. If your post does that, it's immediately exposed to 10x the number of people and immediately gets upvoted.

On my pun post, I get a couple reblogs. And those reblogs get a couple reblogs--nobody really adds any content to the post, it just gets a couple reblogs here and there.

There's a specific chain of reblogs that I'd like to focus on. The most popular post on this chain has about 25 reblogs on it. Half the posts have three reblogs or fewer. Five posts in this chain have just one reblog total.

But the reblog chain keeps going. And going. It breaches containment many times over. And finally, after a chain THIRTY SIX posts long, at 9:30 AM, July 22nd this morning, it hits a popular account.

99% percent of the people who have seen the post--virtually unchanged from how it left my dash--have seen it because it was curated by 36 different people. That's insane to me.

None of those 36 people know that they're part of this chain. They saw a post, reblogged it, and moved on. If any one of these people had not reblogged, the post would have a fraction of the impact it has.

And yet, after two weeks, the post has effectively hit the main page of tumblr. It was picked up, only because people liked it enough to show it to their followers. There were no algorithms necessary.

are we drawing the connection between worker safety and consumer safety & public health yet?

What I learned is that there is an inflexible rule about how people interact with systems. If your system would work perfectly if people Just Would, and yet they Don’t, then your system is bad and you should feel bad. Systems must be built with an eye toward “will people actually do this”?

Recycling was a thing when I was a child. (The 70’s.) In my home in New York State, you could carry recyclables to a recycling center. Nobody did. Now in 2024 Baltimore there is a trash truck that comes every week to pick up my recyclables, and I and my neighbors fill our cans with objects that can be recycled, because a system was developed that was easy for busy people to do, and there’s a lot of social pressure to do it – but the social pressure wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t easy to do. Only the most crunchy granola people bitched at you if you didn’t recycle in 1979, when it required a lot of effort. Now it is considered kind of on par with spitting in the street or leaving a dirty diaper on the diaper changing table in the bathroom instead of throwing it out, if you don’t recycle.

I remember what it was like before proxy bidding.

I was on eBay before PayPal.

I went to the post office to buy a postal money order and mail it to the seller, then waited until I got notification from the seller that they received my MO before they would ship my item.

I remember when the search function only searched for the specific words and spelling I had typed, and had to say, like, "(Halloween,halloween,Hallowen) Barbie (doll,dolls,toy,toys,doll,dolls)"

I also remember when the search function worked well: "Halloween Barbie -(1998,1999)"

I used to be able to search for the thing I wanted, skipping search term parameters and my search results didn't include "similar" items.