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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   2058 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 21, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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There's certain content -- certain types of gore, certain furry content, etc -- that gives me "the ick".

Sometimes I remember that many people get the same "ick" feeling from anime art in general, particularly the type of anime art that gets criticized as "overly-sexualized".

What are some times when you were reminded of the unbridgeable gap between different modes of perception?

I won't go into examples of the 'ick' factor, but I know it when I see it. And when I come across these visual hazards I let my mind slide past the images and quickly move onto the next piece of content. Its a very helpful self defence measure.

Some Christians believe that demons can actually attack you through various mediums like the above. I'm agnostic, but I definitely don't feel the need to observe and ingest horrible things in some display of bravado.

For icks, I share celluloid_dream's loathing of the rictus-grin-faced youtube promoter. It's not that they're always bad people! But the entire thing looks entirely less human than Reboot-era CGI.

For the other direction... I don't have the same variation-desire most people seem to have, especially around food. Every time I run into someone that makes a decision around not wanting to repeat something they did the day before and liked, it's a bit of a non-sequitur.

For the other direction... I don't have the same variation-desire most people seem to have, especially around food. Every time I run into someone that makes a decision around not wanting to repeat something they did the day before and liked, it's a bit of a non-sequitur.

My wife loves eating the same thing at the same place if she liked it, while my modus operandi (again, parental influence) is "you're on vacation, you have to try as many different things as possible!". We compromise on going to the same place until I complain that I've tried every thing that caught my eye.

Clickbait thumbnails fill me with utter revulsion.

You know the ones. Giant faux-surprised face projected deep into your simian hindbrain, grabbing your eyeballs and therefore your attention without your consent. You might consciously not give any fucks what this annoying soyjak is so startled by, but it does not matter. You will look anyway because there is a face, and faces are important, says millions of years of evolution. What's he looking at? Is something happening? Predator? Mate? Monkey get banana? And the text.. you can't not read the text. It's bold and bright yellow, and all caps, and there's a giantfuckingarrow pointing to it. And an emoji (another face) You are pwned. You cannot unsee it. You can only feel rage and vow not to click on it.

You are pwned. You cannot unsee it. You can only feel rage and vow not to click on it.

This is an excellent way of putting it. Even worse is when the video topic is something I actually do want to see, and then I have to decide if it’s worth the dirty feeling of clicking on it…

Yeah. I feel bad for the video creators who, probably, are making good videos, but are stuck in this equilibrium where they have to use a stupid clickbait thumbnail or else no one will watch them.

I can't say I find my attention hijacked like you describe, but I share your distaste. When I see a channel start making videos with those thumbnails, it's a fast track to the "don't show recommendations from this channel" button. I refuse to engage with anyone who makes thumbnails that stupid.

Watching someone stir up some natto with grated yamaimo and a raw egg, then transport it with sticks into their mouth, the inevitable nebaneba (translation: gooey smelly glop) a demonic tendril connecting the bowl to their lips--well this was enough to make me realize I am in Japan by fluke and this is not supposed to be my destiny. Probably the result of one of those times I "almost" died but actually did die, was given a second chance but spared the memory of the death, and this was enough of a glitch (via interfering with fate) to settle me in a land where people eat the vilest food imaginable with great relish (if not actual relish).

That plus full body tats, piercings of any sort other than the ear, and sometimes, though this bears the sort of explaining I am not ready to attempt at 5:25 am, just looking at a woman I marvel at la difference. Mind you this is only with relatively girly, feminine women (in other words not American). This is not what you're calling "the ick" but there is certainly an unbridgeable gap there. Dress, stockings, painted or otherwise decorated nails, long carefully tended hair, mascara, blush, lipstick, earrings, etc. Not the ick. But a gap of experience. This is not even accounting for the invisible undergarments and whatnot. Anyway yeah it's early.

I've been reading about Japanese food (the one that doesn't get served in Japanese restaurants abroad) and I've come to the conclusion that it's self-inflicted patriotic torture, just like traditional Japanese housing. People eat it only because they grew up eating it and think it makes them more Japanese.

Every culture has dishes like these, but Japan probably has the highest proportion of them among the developed countries. I'd rather turn to the Dutch cuisine than eat oden or zenzai.

I have to disagree strongly on the zenzai. Having a warm, sweet soup on a cold winter day is like a mug of hot cocoa. The toasted mochi on top is like a savory toasted marshmallow.

I'm curious if you just don't like anko in general, what are your thoughts on taiyaki, anpan, and daifuku?

I haven't tried them.

Funnily enough I like oden but not everything in it. It's best in winter after a night of drinking beer with friends. You then drink more beer and eat the oden and eat the daikon radish with a bit of mustard. But you may be onto something.

That plus full body tats, piercings of any sort other than the ear

Yeah for me it's when Mottizens claim that heavy tattoos and facial piercings objectively make a woman unattractive. For me the libidinal effect is something similar to seeing/smelling a perfect crust on a steak. Maybe, as @Earendil would say, I have evolved to digest organisms that would be poisonous to others, and my phenomenology has evolved likewise.

I remember reading an OK Cupid blog post that said exactly this: tattoos and piercings are very divisive, but when they work, they work.

À chacun son gôut as the French say. I make only subjective claims here, mind you. Even natto with okra must be eaten, after all. I am happy there are those who are up to the task.

Plus, there are studies coming out that says nattokinase is great for your blood pressure. Sadly not the case with these girls.

There's certain content -- certain types of gore, certain furry content, etc -- that gives me "the ick".

Sometimes I remember that many people get the same "ick" feeling from anime art in general, particularly the type of anime art that gets criticized as "overly-sexualized".

Does gore or furry content go beyond the ick in making you seethe at its producers and consumers though, like "overly-sexualized" anime art does to some people (predominantly women)?

It extends beyond anime art too, to video game depictions, live action media, even print media descriptions (e.g., /r/menwritingwomen). Male gaze discourse: the haunting fear that some man, somewhere, may be sexualizing a female character—whether through text or on screen, whether animated or live action—without your permission.

Avant-garde art.

I'm a chronic philistine that Just Doesn't Get It, and looking at most of high-brow art made after the turn of the 20th century fills me with a sense of not just indifference, but mild rage.

Every time I step into a modern art gallery or watch an artsy movie I feel like I've become the main character of The Truman Show, with the people making that stuff, critiquing it and respectfully looking at it all engaged in a giant, elaborate troll aimed at convincing me that any of those works are actually good.

I'm not proud of this trait, and I've tried reading up on art, but I just can't reject the evidence of my eyes and ears. I simply can't see it. I'd rather look at anything else – modern imitations of classicist paintings, Kinkade, AI art of big-ttited anime girls – on the wall of that art gallery than a Picasso. Because all of those look much better to my eye than any of Picasso's work.

I imagine that's how a child who got a taste of beer from his dad at a family gathering feels.

You never know what you might like. I considered Western art music to be either boring or contrived until I went to a company training seminar where they mixed practical sessions with various invited guest speakers. One of them was a pianist who talked to us about modern art music. When he played Phrygian Gates by John Adams, my reaction was normal: politely trying to look attentive and respectful of his effort. When he played a few fragments of Steve Reich and Philip Glass during his talk to illustrate something about minimalism, it was as if I was struck by lightning. "This! This is what music sounds like!" I thought and looked around me to see if everyone else was as shocked as I am. Nope, everyone else in the room that I could see was politely trying to look attentive and respectful of his effort.

My MIL (a big lover of art music) looks at me like I have two heads when I listen to music for 18 musicians, but I don't care, I love it.

I'm not proud of this trait

You should be. Modern art fucking sucks.

Avant garde art is all about the meta. It's not about painting an object, it's about exploring the idea of what a painting can be (by making a painting). Ditto music, sculpture, dance, photography, cinema, fashion, design etc etc etc.

The problem in my eyes is that it's experimental and by their nature a lot of experiments fail, but people laud them for their sheer experimental-ness and stop short of judging quality. The number one thing is to do something that nobody has done before and worry about if it's any good later if at all. People neglect that at this point being challenging and shocking is ironically nearly as boring and stale as the sacred cows it once aimed at. We've had an entire century of this. We've even meta'd the meta and had silence-as-music, blank canvas-as-painting, and empty room-as-sculpture. The navel has been well and truly plumbed.

It's funny that you bring up beer because I think that cooking is one area where there's a natural limit on how far the boundaries can be pushed before people literally won't swallow it ("It's rat poison on rusty screws. Go on, try it!"). It's where taste runs up against physiology and not mere cerebral semantics.

ASMR. My wife watches cooking shorts on Facebook and they feature both TikTok editing (which is simply annoying) and ASMR sound, with all the slicing, scraping, sizzling, slurping sounding like it's happening right next to your ear.

She doesn't notice the difference, but I can't stand them. And some people are paying for recordings where they can hear a woman's tongue unstick from her hard palate.

My wife watches cooking shorts on Facebook... slurping sounding like it's happening right next to your ear.

I'd be insanely... cooked... if I were being hazed by a secret society or tortured in interrogation and prolonged exposure to such shorts was part of the torment.

She doesn't notice the difference, but I can't stand them.

This reminds me of a comment in the ACT article on misophonia, where the commenter remarked that the experience is made much worse when others aren't bothered by the same sounds as you are.

Two Kathryns in my life, one who spelled her name Katherine and the other Catherine, provided me with what I can only describe using this ASMR term, which is the only thing that makes me suspect it exists, though probably not the way the depraved, pornhungry sound-gluttons imagine it to exist.

The first Katherine was blonde, pretty in a plain way, and had a brown paper bag during show-and-tell in Mrs. Rice's 1st grade class in 1974. I forget what was in the bag, or what she said, who was there, what I was wearing, or anything else, but I recall that moment I was absolutely entranced by the crackle of the bag and the sound--the lilt, the only true meaning of that word for me--of her voice. I felt a slow fizz at the base of my spine that worked its way up to the back of my neck. It was a bizarre sensation. The closest I can get to describing it is like when the prostate is stimulated during voiding--yeah taking you right out of the beauty of the moment, aren't I? Anyway. The second Catherine was years later, also in school (I feel as if ASMR cannot be brought on, as they keep insisting online, but must be the result of a situation where you're forced to focus on something against your will, like Mr. Drigger's class) and she was also up there talking about something, but in this case there was no paper bag but just her voice, like well water. It's what I think the myths meant, at least partially, in referencing spells in the mouths of certain women. I could have listened to her all day. But this wasn't based in her appearance (she was rather plain as far as it goes) but totally her sound.

Anyway that's my defense of ASMR, but I also don't buy the idea of "eliciting" the sensation via video. That has much the same effect on me as it does on you.

The first Katherine was blonde, pretty in a plain way, and had a brown paper bag during show-and-tell in Mrs. Rice's 1st grade class in 1974.

This is not about ick or ASMR but your story reminds me of a peculiar memory I have. It was late summer in the mid 90s, a few weeks after our confirmation camp (it's a Lutheran thing in some of the Nordic countries). The setting was a "party" (as much as 14-15 year old well behaved kids had a "parties" back in those days anyway) and there was A Girl there. To this day I remember roughly how she looked, her hair, her name and particularly the scent of the perfume she used that day to the extent that on the few times I've smelled that same scent, it's always taken me back to that moment even several decades later. This would otherwise be par the course for an infatuated 14 year old except I wasn't particularly interested in her. She was just an acquaitance I interacted with during the two weeks at the camp and maybe half a dozen times afterwards but for some reason that specific smell has stayed in my memory forever since.

Ah, George is posting about the beautiful women in his life, some things never cha-

The closest I can get to describing it is like when the prostate is stimulated during voiding--yeah taking you right out of the beauty of the moment, aren't I?

And they say you can't be surprised any more as you get older.

I believe A-wooga posting is the phrase.

It's true, but I didn't want to plagiarize such a great bit of description. Perhaps I should, they do say imitation is the highest form of flattery.

The closest I can get to describing it is like when the prostate is stimulated during voiding--yeah taking you right out of the beauty of the moment, aren't I?

I've read Rabelais, so no, you aren't.

I think it's like petting a cat or dog behind the ears. There's a correct cadence/pressure/technique for every animal, and if you hit the sweet spot, they'll slip into a blissful trance and love you forever. Some pets are easy to please. They're happy with any scritch behind the ears. Others are distrustful or tricky, and they don't like it except in very specific circumstances.

Same with humans and ASMR. Some people can fall into ASMR easily and have lots of triggers that work, maybe the whole gamut of YouTube vids. Others maybe only click with very specific voices, or can only do it when they're fully relaxed, or maybe even not at all. Personally, I find it hard to trigger with audio or video alone, but adding a little touch reliably opens that pathway.

and ASMR sound, with all the slicing, scraping, sizzling, slurping sounding like it's happening right next to your ear.

Christ Almighty. When my girlfriend plays that shit, it takes all of my self control to not throw the speaker out the nearest window like a god damned hand grenade.

She doesn't see anything wrong with it. I'm baffled.

Great example.

And some people are paying for recordings where they can hear a woman's tongue unstick from her hard palate.

I don't need to know these things!

I've experienced "low-grade euphoria" observing people doing some task, although rarely. I've experienced frisson from music or speech. I've never seen how ASMR as a media format ties these experiences together or delivers them. The term was apparently coined on a forum in 2007, so it seems more like a cultural memeplex ("brainrot") fueling an industry with paraphilia and fetish branches.

On second thought the Primitive Technology guy could be ASMR adjacent content I've enjoyed.

I've experienced frisson from music or speech. I've never seen how ASMR as a media format ties these experiences together or delivers them.

Neither have I. I know that I can reliably experience frisson by attentively listening to Stairway to Heaven, right around the moment where Page's guitar solo peaks and Plant starts to sing "and as we wind on down the road" is when it hits me. I can even trigger it by thinking about listening to the song. But this has nothing in common with what most people consider ASMR triggers.

One hypothesis is that I have high sensitivity to this kind of stimuli. There are people that are into tickling and find it erotic. Many people find body kisses or balls licking erotic. I find these activities so ticklish that I automatically violently recoil and my wife stopped trying, fearing for the integrity of her nose. But one or two times everything was just right and I could understand how a gentle kiss on the ribcage, just shy of triggering the tickling reflex, can be pleasurable. Just like the right amount of heat in a dish or the right combination of a hot sauna and an ice-cold shower or popping a stubborn, but not too stubborn pimple can be.

So all these people subscribing to ASMR content producers must have an unusually wide gap between the threshold of pleasure and the threshold of disgust/pain, just like these people who blanket their food with cayenne powder or subscribe to /r/popping do.

So all these people subscribing to ASMR content producers must have an unusually wide gap between the threshold of pleasure and the threshold of disgust/pain, just like these people who blanket their food with cayenne powder or subscribe to /r/popping do.

I have similar issues with ticklishness like you described, but I also enjoy ASMR and enjoy blanketing my food with whatever spice I'm into at the moment, so this is probably specific to the stimulus. Never been to /r/popping or know what it's about, but based on context, that sounds disgusting & I'd rather stay away.

I'd say ASMR is as distinctively clear a feeling as frisson, but yeah, definitely two different things caused by practically opposite stimuli. I feel like I've experienced it my whole life, from being in kindergarten and having the librarian read a story to the class, to sometimes when getting haircuts, to even being stuck on the phone with some customer service person taking too long to work through something (clacking away on a keyboard while verbally stalling). So I pretty much knew instantly what youtubers were going for when I started seeing the videos in like ~2012, even with the ridiculous 'asmr' term someone came up with.

My experience was more of assuming everyone else was lying about not understanding it, out of some embarrassment that it was too weird or was somehow sexual. But it does really seem like many people don't get the 'back of the head tingles' feeling. Not sure if that goes for frisson too - are there many people out there who don't get 'chills' from some epic swelling music moment?

Then the asmr videos are trying to inorganically bottle it as a more 'pure cut' for people chasing the dragon, like epic movie trailers have tried to get a few frisson moments down to a science.

I also definitely experience it, although most ASMR videos don't do it for me. I usually encounter it when vaguely sleepy, relaxed, and then a pleasant stimulus happens, like a soft speaking voice (the "being in kindergarten and having the librarian read a story to the class" story seems about right) or a gentle, repetitive noise.

If I do encounter it from an ASMR video, whispering or crinkling does it more than anything else.

ASMR

EWWWW!

That's another of those things that causes instant ctrl-w for me. I'm not bothered by those sounds in the real world since they're only occasional but that entire video format deserves to die a quick but extremely painful death.

I'm not sure what you mean by "different modes of perception" but since I've been watching photography youtubers while being down with the cold, macro photography is one I personally just ran into. Some people love high res closeup photos of insects whereas I get a very strong urge to hit ctrl-W the moment I see a blown up photo of almost any insect.

It's a bit of a problem because I'd like to see if I might like other kinds of macro photography but current enshittified algorithms make it damn near impossible to succesfully search for macro / closeup photography that doesn't feature insects.

I've always felt the way Mulder describes it in War of the Coprophages on the X-files about most insects that are big enough to fully make out their body parts. Zooming accomplishes the same effect.

Mulder: No, no, no. I’m not afraid of them. I hate them. One day, back when I was a kid, I was climbing this tree when I noticed this leaf walking towards me. It took forever for me to realize that it was no leaf.

Scully: A praying mantis?

Mulder: Yeah, I had a praying mantis epiphany and as a result, I screamed. And not, not a girlie scream, but the scream of someone being confronted by some before unknown monster that had no right existing on the same planet I inhabited. ... The mysteries of the natural world were revealed to me that day but instead of being astounded I was repulsed.

I never watched the King Kong remake in theaters, but I caught some of it at some point at a friend's house. Specifically, the dark crevasse with the giant insects.

Years later, there was a copy handy, and I thought, "It couldn't really have been that bad, could it? It's a film, you're a man, it's just an experience like any other... let's give it another try." So I gave it another try.

Nope.

Upon a brief search I realize I recall this episode but not this dialogue. However, I do enjoy the mental image of Mulder needing to clarify the nature of the scream, lest Scully get the ick from his childhood memory—for not even a relatively stoic female FBI agent is immune from the ick. Observant as she is, Scully caught on though, as her next line was: "Mulder... are you sure it wasn't a girly scream?"

Fortunately, Bambi Berenbaum saved the day with her preselection services, overriding any ick induced by triggering Scully's sense of female mate-choice copying.

That being said, I can't relate to Mulder's mantis bigotry. I'm fairly size agnostic when it comes to insects. Stumbling upon a praying mantis IRL would strike me as much more cool than gross or creepy. In contrast, I'd get grossed out by a cockroach of any size, slightly enraged by a mosquito, with a fly somewhere in between. Maybe I'm just an insect racist who hates black and brown insect bodies.

Yeah. It's a "kill it with fire and nuke the entire site from orbit just to be sure" type of feeling.

I have no problem with closeup photos of plants, eyes, amphibians or lizards but as soon as it's insects or arachnids (and probably some arthropods), I nope the hell out.

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