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Date: Tue, 30 Mar 1999 03:52:05 EST
From: LizardRoi
Anyway, the Central Americans had no suitable draft animals, so nothing to pull a cart.
All the more reason to use wheels. Sleds are good enough with animal power, but rickshaws need wheels. Wheelbarrows, too. Here's a good one that I don't have an answer for: did they use pulleys?
The appeal lies in hardwired paternal/maternal feelings. We've covered this territory before: virtually all baby mammals (and a great many other species, like turtles) have big heads in proportion to their bodies, and big eyes in proportion to their heads.
Hehe. Hey Davide! How 'bout that synchronicity?
I just finished a message to him about the hard-wiring in connection with the Cabbage Patch doll phenom. Pundits of the time conjectured that the caricatured features of the Cabbage Patch dolls was were a sort of generic template for "baby" that we responded to viscerally. This was expressed by either maternal behavior or at least a reluctance to step on the malformed little trolls.
Call me misanthropic, they made my hackles rise.
On a vaguely related note: has anyone seen those antique grotesques? Those teddy bears with little porcelain human doll faces? Creepy. Surreal. Imagine the warped esthetic that thought those would be great for children. Imagine a child waking from a dream to one of those things at the foot of the crib. Scarred for life.
Date: Tue, 30 Mar 1999 10:49:08 +0100
From: Ward Phil
Argh Porcelain 'dolls', one of my many little childhood fears returns to haunt me!
Those little things were the scariest toys I ever saw. Imagine showing a kid a porcelain doll, it looks strangely threatening, and then they tell you it's too expensive for you to play with. There's some sort of strange psychological lesson in there for kids.
Almost as bad are those collectable hand-made teddy bears which go for USD150 (approx) each, who the hell buys those things, they certainly aren't for kids.
Where's Dr Richard Skinner when you need him eh?
Date: Tue, 30 Mar 1999 14:50:48 +0200
From: Davide Mana
Mark wrote about Cabbadge Patch dolls - probably the first self-conscious attempt at messing with the kids' mind (I guess "Barbie" does not count).
Call me misanthropic, they made my hackles rise.
On a vaguely related note: has anyone seen those antique grotesques? Those teddy bears with little porcelain human doll faces? Creepy. Surreal. Imagine the warped esthetic that thought those would be great for children. Imagine a child waking from a dream to one of those things at the foot of the crib. Scarred for life.
and Phil added
Argh Porcelain 'dolls', one of my many little childhood fears returns to haunt me!
Those little things were the scariest toys I ever saw.
Granted.
I find dolls - expecially porcellain/biscuit ones - to be a generally unpleasant object, and I'd never keep one in my house. _Old_ porcelain dolls I find downright scary.
My biggest scare _ever_, in fact, came form one of those - a porcelain doll representing an infant, with those machanical eyes that close when you lie the thing on its back. We had been exploring my grandmother's attic, and my mother found lots of her stuff, including this old doll.
The thing was in a bad state and absolutely ugly - pale face, partially covered in a webwork of the tiniest of cracks, eyes stuck closed, frilly ivory-colored dress. Ugly.
Anyway, she took it home to clean it and try and put it right somehow or what, and the thing ended up forgotten on an old chest behind a door.
Now picture this - I'm probably ten, and home alone (an unusual occurrence).
The cat starts meowling and raising hell. I go and look for the critter. It's a summer afternoon and the place is otherwise dead silent. Feeling me coming, the cat hides somewhere (obviously).
I go on searching, look behind the door and this ugly doll is there sitting, and as I step back in disgust IT OPENS ITS EYES.
JHC!
I spent the rest of the afternoon barricaded in my room.
The doll finally ended in the garbage bin.
[Cue to manic laughter and hipersalivating revelation "I did it while it was sleeping! Eheheheheh…." while the guys in white carry me to my padded room]
Porcelain dolls are a strange product.
L.E.N.C.I., a manufacturer of porcelain dolls among the most respected in Europe, is a century-old Turin-based firm, and has a very fancy showroom in the center of town. The general customers are over-35 women that go for the designer fashion bits worn by the dolls (that are, incidentally, expensive as hell). This generally leads me to regard those objects as not to the kids tastes at all, and actually as a "home-decoration" favourite for single urban professional women that want to convey an idea of romanthicism.
I have a slight consolation in the fact that I seem not to be the only one having problems with dolls: judging from various opinions I gathered, they seem to be a close second to clowns/mimes as a general object of popular loathing and as causes of childhood fears.
What gives?
They all tend to have white faces….
And finally…
I dismissed Barbie dolls at the beginning of this post, but what about this as a sinister event: you find a large canvas bag left on the bus, you inform the driver (we do not have conductors in Italy), you and the guy open it up to identify the owner and the thing's full of variously dismembered/broken/tortured naked Barbie dolls. Dozens of them.
This one happened to me and a friend while we were in high-school.
Weird.
Date: Tue, 30 Mar 1999 09:29:30 -0500
From: Graeme Price
My biggest scare _ever_, in fact, came form one of those - a porcelain doll representing an infant, with those machanical eyes that close when you lie the thing on its back. We had been exploring my grandmother's attic, and my mother found lots of her stuff, including this old doll.
Dolls with mechanical eyes (or should that be maniacal eyes from the rest of the post?). Takes me back the "Eagle Eye" Action Man (with the little lever at the back that let you move the eyes from side to side). Now this may say more about me than I intend (and probably explains why I ended up in my current career), but one bored day when I was ten I cut his head open with a penknife to find out how it worked (which I dimly recall wasn't as easy as it sounds). The point? Children have a cruel streak a mile wide (it was my brother's Action Man).
But on a slightly different spin, does anyone remember the spate of cases a few years back when people were seeing "demonic faces" in the grain of wood in furniture and fittings? It got some tabloid newspaper attention in the UK, IIRC. Mythos tampering with the fabric of reality? Latent psychic ability? Some sort of inherited visual interpretation cued by pattern recognition by the brain Or just overactive imagination?
Date: Wed, 31 Mar 1999 20:42:47 +0900
From: "David Farnell"
I find dolls - expecially porcelain/biscuit ones - to be a generally unpleasant object, and I'd never keep one in my house. _Old_ porcelain dolls I find downright scary.
[followed by a great couple of experiences that creeped me out]
Thank goodness I'm reading this in the morning (brrr!). My big fear-doll was the Charlie Macarthy doll (the ventriloquist's dummy, not the red-scare congressman). I had fun playing with the evil bastard during the daytime, but at night he became quite terrifying. Haunted me dreams—lots of biting, I remember. Biting big chunks of flesh out of my arm. No pain, though, which perhaps made it more horrific.
Sometimes I left him on a nearby chair. While waiting to fall asleep, I would stare at him in the shadows, and I would see him move ever so slowly. Yes, I was awake. It was one of those perception things, but of course I didn't know that then.
My sister had a pretty scary doll. It was big, child-sized. Freaky auto-closing eyes, that horrible tangled rat's-nest hair. And it was usually nakedthat was a common factor with all my sister's dolls. For a couple of years she and I shared a bedroom in the basement, and I had that doll freaking me out. Those were the years of the recurring vampire dreamsthe whole family would turn into vampires and come to get me. Or the schoolbus driver—a harridan like the one on South Park. Hmm. I'm starting to see why my favorite RPGs are horror ones. Brings back those fond memories of childhood.
(When we were getting ready to move out of that house, I hid both dolls in the attic so they would be left behind. I wonder now if some poor child found them.)
There was a good collection of adventures for CoC set in the 20s, maybe part of the Lovecraft Country series. One of them had a crazy old hag who ran a doll shop just like those described—porcelain dolls, not to be played with. She dies and her soul transfers into the dolls. The players (who she blames for her death, even though they had nothing to do with it) are hounded by these nasty dolls who do everything they can to kill them. Had fun with that one.
One last bit on head-size. Mark wrote that he "draws the Marvel Way." I remember checking that book out when I was in high school, and one of the rules of proportions I remember was that, in the Marvel Way, the person is drawn 7 heads tall (you base the height on the length of the head). Normal proportion for the average Joe is apparently 6 heads tall (very roughly, and it's probably different for different ethnicities, too, and definitely for different ages and genders). So that makes American-style superheroes typically having small heads compared to their bodies. Heroic proportions. Big head=manipulation of maternal/paternal feelings; Small head=manipulation of hero-worship feelings.
Date: Wed, 31 Mar 1999 07:12:09 -0600
From: "Ricardo J. Mendez"
Thank goodness I'm reading this in the morning (brrr!). My big fear-doll was the Charlie Macarthy doll (the ventriloquist's dummy, not the red-scare congressman).
Does anyone remember the old Dr. Who episode "The Talons of Weng Chiang", where the evil guy had gotten twisted into the semblance of a ventriloquist's dummy? A disturbing villain if I ever saw one, and up to date the episode of Dr. Who that I remember most clearly.
Date: Wed, 31 Mar 1999 07:12:36 -0800
From: Bryant Durrell
Ya'll should be going out and finding anything you can by Thomas Ligotti. There's a Web page on him, but I don't have the URL handy, alas. One of the great horror stylists of the day, and he's even done some writing for Call of Cthulhu. He's nigh-obsessed with dolls.
Date: Thu, 01 Apr 1999 12:28:55 -0500
From: Jeff Ewing
On a vaguely related note: has anyone seen those antique grotesques? Those teddy bears with little porcelain human doll faces? Creepy. Surreal.
Imagine the warped esthetic that thought those would be great for children. Imagine a child waking from a dream to one of those things at the foot of the crib. Scarred for life.
Lord, those are the most revolting things I've ever seen. Several people have remarked that porcelain dolls are quite disturbing, and for myself, the scene in the Venice doll factory in _Orient Express_ was *the* scariest in the adventure, but I'm not sure everyone who responded is aware of what Mark is talking about here, and how horrible it is.
These things are plush animal bodies. However, through some vile lapse of taste, these little horrors have, in the middle of their furry heads, not the appropriate animal face, but a leering, destestable porcelain baby-face. How anyone could think this charming, romantic, or anything other than a grotesque travesty I'll never know. Short of poor Davide's experience, which had me horripilating on a warm New York spring day, I can't think of any thing more repulsive. <shudders>
Should you, for any reason, like to see a particularly unpleasant instance of this phenom, take a look here: http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/ewing/dollhorror.html
Date: Thu, 1 Apr 1999 13:46:24 -0500
From: "Eric Brennan"
Should you, for any reason, like to see a particularly unpleasant instance of this phenom, take a look here: http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/ewing/dollhorror.html
I think they're kinda cool, in a Dr. Moreau kinda way. But then again, I'm warped.
On a similar note, my own personal doll-demons are the "Precious Moments" figurines. They're small porcelain dolls of children, but the children are shaped with very, very tiny bodies and big heads with big doe eyes and tiny noses and mouths, all propped up to seem like they're caught doing something vomitously cute, like the boy figure handing a sheaf of dandelions to a girl figure. Boke. They've got titles too, like "Graduation day!" and "Best Friends!" as well as a different figure each month sold at every Hallmark store between here and the ninth circle of hell.
One night, while staring at that shrill harpy I call a sister-in-law showing off her bookcase full of these vile little coldcast troglodytes to my beloved, sainted wife, I realized just what it is that the atrocious porcelain vermin remind me of, and from whence my horror at their visage springs:
Aborted fetuses, dressed up cutely and captured for all time like out of some Hammer horror film. "The Wax Museum" or something.
Now, I can't even look at them without suppressing a chill.
PS: One day, ask Jimmie Bise about how he and a friend of ours came up with the idea for a line of similar figures called, "Tragic Moments." With such titles as:
"Mommy's Liquid Breakfast"
"…He raised his fist in anger."
and "Sparky's Last Romp", with the endearing image of a cute puppy's broken form laying in the street as a car speeds off. That was the same night those sickoes came up with their impression of "Stephen Hawking: Stand Up Comic."
Date: Thu, 01 Apr 1999 15:43:21 -0500
From: Jeff Ewing
porcelain vermin remind me of, and from whence my horror at their visage springs:
Aborted fetuses, dressed up cutely and captured for all time like out of some Hammer horror film. "The Wax Museum" or something.
Y'all know that the Victorians were fond of little tableaus wherein drowned kittens were dressed up in various cute outfits and then posed to make scenes, often with miniature furniture? And people say televison is awful.
PS: One day, ask Jimmie Bise about how he and a friend of ours came up with the idea for a line of similar figures called, "Tragic Moments." With such titles as:
"Mommy's Liquid Breakfast"
"…He raised his fist in anger."
and "Sparky's Last Romp", with the endearing image of a cute puppy's broken form laying in the street as a car speeds off.
That is *way* too funny.
ObDG: I've often thought that some of the creepiest moments in life are:
1) When you see something that looks scary/wierd, but then turns out to be innocuous—for me it recently turned out to be a plastic bag caught in a tree and blowing in the wind that looked a lot like a hovering disembodied face for a second. How to GM this? I suppose call for a spot hidden, then tell the players they see a bunch of preserved fetuses dressed up in "adorable" overalls, then call for a SAN check? Make it and it turns out they're "Precious Moments" seen in dim light?
2) When you develop a somewhat irrational aversion to an object, as your figurines and my stuffed animals. The more you think about it, the more they start to bother you. Another one from me: Several players in my old group seemed to be congenitally unable to say "Nyarlathotep." Variations began to develop, "Gnarly" and "The toe-tapper." This last got me thinking about Fred Astaire: why is he always *smiling* in that smug way, as if he knows something we don't? I now think of our favorite Crawling Chaos as "Fred" and now the sound I dread as I walk the night-time streets of New York is not "Gimme all your money," but a slow time step echoing up the street from behind me…OK, I'm exaggerating, but again, how to game this?
Date: Thu, 1 Apr 1999 18:18:19 -0500 (EST)
From: "Andrew D. Gable"
Y'all know that the Victorians were fond of little tableaus wherein drowned kittens were dressed up in various cute outfits and then posed to make scenes, often with miniature furniture? And people say televison is awful.
Ugh. That's pretty freaking grisly. Is it really such a wonder that this time period produced such exalted paragons of humanity and philanthropy as Jack The Ripper?
1) When you see something that looks scary/wierd, but then turns out to be innocuous—for me it recently turned out to be a plastic bag caught in a tree and blowing in the wind that looked a lot like a hovering disembodied face for a second.
A recent example of this that happened to me over spring break: driving along back roads near my home, at about 1:30 am. I'm passing one of the local "haunted houses" (an abandoned, burnt-out mansion which was once a funeral home) when I see a phantasmal shape in the woods along the side of the road. A ghost or some other supernatural being? No, some fool thought it amusing, I guess, to hang an old trench coat from a tree out front of the place.
Date: Fri, 2 Apr 1999 08:57:12 +0900
From: "David Farnell"
Y'all know that the Victorians were fond of little tableaus wherein drowned kittens were dressed up in various cute outfits and then posed to make scenes, often with miniature furniture?
Whoa, new one on me. Sounds a bit like the laquered frog mariachi bands from Mexico.
Variations began to develop, "Gnarly" and "The toe-tapper."
The toe-tapper? Interesting—please tell us how that came about.
Date: Thu, 1 Apr 1999 19:11:22 EST
From: LizardRoi
They're small porcelain dolls of children, but the children are shaped with very, very tiny bodies and big heads with big doe eyes and tiny noses and mouths, all propped up to seem like they're caught doing something vomitously cute,
"Those incapable of wit will unerringly default to cute."
The Book of Virtuals
by Rex Saurus
Date: Thu, 1 Apr 1999 19:11:25 EST
From: LizardRoi
I just got off work after 26 hours straight in emergency mode. Neither hell, nor shit, nor Nick at Night shall this yada yada. The second wind and aaaalllll that caffeine have kicked in and I've got Happy Fingers. So anyway, it's like, see…..what up with Pinnochio? Some of us are getting weirded by dolls and I remember this Disney Classic about a puppet (doll, dummy) that is trying to Assume the Flesh and Be Made Real accompanied by a singing conscience. SURREAL adventures ensue with meditations on Sin and Vice and the dichotomy of Man and Animal. He is swallowed by Leviathan and reunited with his Maker, whereupon he becomes a Man. The nose.
Nope. Can't make anything out of that.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. And sometimes it's one of a Cyclopean series of hot, smokey towers of tobacco; thrusting, ever thrusting at the sky and blasting sparks in their joy. Or not.
Fun for kids of all ages.
Spielberg loves it, featured it in Close Encounters.
Date: Fri, 02 Apr 1999 12:52:21 +0200
From: Davide Mana
Y'all know that the Victorians were fond of little tableaus wherein drowned kittens were dressed up in various cute outfits and then posed to make scenes, often with miniature furniture? And people say televison is awful.
I missed that, but I can believe it.
Victorians had quite a line in less-than-tasteful stuff.
Mourning jewelry has become a staple of goth-chick fashion, even if even die-hard goth-chicks are staying clear of the more extreme accessory stuff you see in Victorian catalogues.
And I once met a guy that actually collected victorian porcelain hands - another downright creepy kind of thing. He had this huge antique table in his house, and a quantity of hands on it, of various sizes; some, at the back, upright like a forest of surrealist trees and the rest resting palm upwards in the foreground.
Ugly.
<street psychologist>
Clearly Victorians had some weird software running - probably comes from being imprinted by a monarch that overemphasized her own mourning and stuff. Is it just me, or it was almost an exclusively Urban Upper Class thing? I'm pretty sure there are some social-psychology studies out there about the more twisted aspect of the Victorians as a whole. I'll have to check through the net for data - great steampunk/gaslight resource.
</street psychologist>
And on an unrelated subject…
Another one from me: Several players in my old group seemed to be congenitally unable to say "Nyarlathotep." Variations began to develop, "Gnarly"
This one seems to be universal.
Despite lenghty and learned discussion on the way to properly place the accent in the name Nyarlathotep (on the second a, on the o or on the final e?), my team generally resorts to the "Gnarly" subriquet during play. [and note that "Gnarly" has no meaning in Italian]
Nyarlathotep, place the accent where you like, is a name that they don't feeli like saying aloud.
They also created a series of sadly impossible to translate and oh-so-funny nicknames for various beasties and N. avataras. When they start using them during play I know I'm making them nervous. And I know they'll be unable to put up a common, coordinated response when the next problem arises. Which normally does, big time. <evil, Vincent Price-style laugh>
Date: Fri, 02 Apr 1999 08:29:37 -0500
From: Jeff Ewing
Ahh, I had forgotten about the Mariachis! Thanks (?) for reminding me.
As for the toe-tapper, it's a simple transformation. I say "Nye-ar-lath-otep", but several people in my group couldn't quite get this out, so it was more like "Narlith-totep" — hence "Gnarly Toe-tap", and finally "The toe-tapper."
But I still want to know, how has anyone gamed this sort of thing? The aversion case would seem like a good phobia, perhaps referee imposed.
Date: Fri, 2 Apr 1999 08:36:13 -0500
From: "Eric Brennan"
Y'all know that the Victorians were fond of little tableaus wherein drowned kittens were dressed up in various cute outfits and then posed to make scenes, often with miniature furniture? And people say televison is awful.
Oh, that's bad. I've got to use that somewhere. Victorians were just evil…
That is *way* too funny.
Somebody on list pointed out that the two stole this from an MST3K episode. I only wish the foul jokes from the Stephen Hawking: Stand Up Comic impression could be as easily blamed on someone else…
ObDG: I've often thought that some of the creepiest moments in life are:
1) When you see something that looks scary/wierd, but then turns out to be innocuous—for me it recently turned out to be a plastic bag caught in a tree and blowing in the wind that looked a lot like a hovering disembodied face for a second.
Something similar used to happen to me all of the time…the same kind of "fevered imagination" that all of the best horror writers used to love to write about, along with near-blindness and no glasses for two months, and combined with walking to work each morning along a long country road at 3 AM, used to provide me with all kinds of "visual artifacts." (Artifacts apparently being a term for an image the brain received but that is based on misinterpretation of the visual data.)
There was a willow tree that looked like a massive tree covered with hanged men… My moon-cast shadow that looked like a fellow following me (it was cast against some trees, so it looked like it was walking upright.) And then there was the roadkill that looked like…well, roadkill. Yuk. How to simulate that in the game? I don't know. I'd keep creating the visual artifacts on a more frequent basis as their SAN creeped steadily downward. And all of those investigators with the bottle-cap glasses would have to deal with 'em when the glasses broke…
Date: Fri, 02 Apr 1999 10:03:28 -0500
From: Jeff Ewing
And I once met a guy that actually collected victorian porcelain hands - another downright creepy kind of thing.
So dang creepy! These things were portraits, if you can believe that. Many are baby hands, executed so that the parents would have something to remember the child by if it died. This is the early days of photography when you had to sit still for quite a while to get the plate exposed. I just saw a very funny picture of a rack-like brace being used to hold a small girl still while her photo-portrait was taken.
He had this huge antique table in his house, and a quantity of hands on it, of various sizes; some, at the back, upright like a forest of surrealist trees and the rest resting palm upwards in the foreground.
Of course, no Victorian would have a forest of these things, and they'd probably be dimly (gas) lit if on display.
Clearly Victorians had some weird software running - probably comes from being imprinted by a monarch that overemphasized her own mourning and stuff.
The answer for the hands, anyway, lies in the appalling infant mortality rate. This explains some of the Victorian's attitude towards children, at once drippily sentimental and callous. To be sure, only the well-to-do would have the portrait hands. The wierd software also comes from the sense of uncertainty C. 19 people lived with all the time. You hear a lot about how we are so anxious, but, for example, I'm about to fly to Seattle. I'm (fairly) confident that my plane has been inspected and is up to federal standards (although I'm bringing my own smoke hood). Not so the Victorians. Steamboats exploded with horrific frequency and loss of life and no one knew when/if they'd been inspected or serviced, or whether the engineer was drunk, if there was life preserving equipment, etc.
One more wierd bit of Victoriana, then I'll stop: A guy who invented a special headstone with a signal rocket inside it, set up so you could fire it from *inside* the coffin should you be buried alive, was hailed at the time as one of "mankind's greatest benefactors." DG ideas: What if one of these went off today? Evil sorceror from the 1870's in some kind of suspended animation? Or, what if these were adapted to warn of ghoulish activity?
Is it just me, or it was almost an exclusively Urban Upper Class thing?
Date: Fri, 2 Apr 1999 11:12:12 -0500
From: Graeme Price
One more wierd bit of Victoriana, then I'll stop: A guy who invented a special headstone with a signal rocket inside it, set up so you could fire it from *inside* the coffin should you be buried alive, was hailed at the time as one of "mankind's greatest benefactors." DG ideas: What if one of these went off today? Evil sorceror from the 1870's in some kind of suspended animation? Or, what if these were adapted to warn of ghoulish activity?
For more on the former idea, check out some of Poe's stuff - the story "Buried Alive" for example, but also "The Cask of Amontillado" plus numerous others - the guy had a mortal fear of being buried alive. On the latter (1870's people in suspended animation), this reminds me of the now slightly obscure, but downright strange British TV show from the ealy 1960's "Adam Adamant"… in which dapper 1870s upper class secret agent male chauvenist type (plus evening suit, opera cape, top hat and swordcane) gets frozen by evil sorceror/scientist type and wakes up in 1960's London. Cue lots of fencing with sword canes and people with strange speech patterns running around London trying not to look at miniskirts, because "ladies just don't wear that sort of thing". Very, very cheesy. But good fun.