A Mother’s Journey Through the Unnerving Universe of ‘Unboxing’ Videos

I had to learn these the hard way, my and cannot recommended the system. Interestingly in practice Montessori education is not a chouce between traditional and experimental education, but rather a choice between dysfunctional public schools or experimental education.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Day_in_the_Life_of_Ivan_Den...

Some people record videos of those special sounds and share them. Some of the people who listen to them are the people who feel nice.

A group of people with a shared interest is a community. There is a community for people who like listening to the sounds or who like making the videos.

Some of the sounds that give people joy are: whispering or quiet talking women; quiet ticks and tacks of fingernails on wood; rustling paper; fingers stroking card; and so on.

Cold chills (often called "goose bumps" "goose pimples" "goose skin" "chicken skin") is the most common. Most people experience it from time to time. Like during a scary movie. It feels vaguely pleasant but unusual and is triggered by an emotional perception - like the anticipation of something scary. It's rarely accompanied by a strong emotional reflex in response.

The other two, ASMR and Frisson, are more rare. Most people don't experience these and even fewer experience both. For example, I can Frisson, but I can't ASMR. The numbers for each are something like 3-10% of the population. But it's only recently started to get attention and research.

ASMR is a pleasurable feeling due to a person specific stimulus. It can the sound of whispering, or box flaps rubbing on each other. Usually gentle sounds in certain categories. There are non-audio versions of it as well. something about the stimulus triggers an deep pleasurable feeling in most people who can ASMR. It's probably a little like getting a little endorphine boost or taking a little pleasure drug. It's usually accompanied by "cold chill" like physical reactions but also an internal mental/emotional reaction as well (typically pleasant). People who can ASMR describe an ASMR reaction as being distinct from a cold chill.

Recently the internet has allowed people who can ASMR to share triggers and discuss the phenomenon. I don't know much more about it than any other non-ASMR but I come across it every once in a while while investigating Frisson as the two phenomenon are often confused.

Here's an entire reddit dedicated capturing and sharing ASMR triggers.

http://www.reddit.com/r/asmr

Note that this doesn't mean any person who can ASMR can come here and use any trigger. The triggers are highly specific to the individual.

Frisson is a similar phenomenon and a bit better studied. I can talk more about this one since I can Frisson. Frisson is tied very specifically to musical perception, but can occur outside of music as well.

While the general population might be 3-10% Frisson-able, musicians tend to be much higher. It's similar to ASMR in the sense that a "trigger" kicks off an extremely pleasurable emotional and physical response. For different people who can Frisson, it's usually extremely specific passages in certain songs (or even certain performances of a song).

And yes, there are communities who share their frisson triggers You'll often see a link to a song and a description of the specific passage or time index when the sharer typically frissons. http://www.reddit.com/r/frisson

A frisson is like a very intense cold-chill, usually in the upper body. I get it very strongly along the sides of my upper spine between my shoulder blades. If cold chills can be ranked from 1-10 on an intensity scale, the typical frisson would be like a 20 to a 50.

But there's a deep emotional reaction too. I can't speak for all frissoners, but for me it's a transcendent all consuming emotion, like all of my emotions are triggered at once and amplified out of my own control. It feels like you are right in the middle of the most terrible, most beautiful experience a human can have. Like all of your closest loved ones died and were suddenly found alive at the same time.

The same passage can induce a frisson over and over again for a while. But a bit like a drug, you can "get used to" a passage till you've lost the ability to frisson to it. So frissoners are often on the lookout for new triggers.

Not suprisingly, it's linked to rises in dopamine levels and can be addictive in all the ways dopamine addiction works -- including the withdrawal crankiness. It's rare enough that I've never met another person face-to-face who I was aware was a fellow frissoner. Most non-frissoners just think it's "extreme enjoyment of music" but it's quite distinct and different. I never even knew what it was called until I was almost 30 and decided to investigate it a bit.

I discovered it when I was maybe 4 or 5, I found a passage on a tape and my mother found me playing that passage over and over again on the home stereo while hysterically laughing and crying my eyes out. For a long time my mother thought something was wrong with me or that I was unusually sensitive to music. I was actually so embarrassed by it that I hid it from everybody for a very long time.

But growing up I played some tapes to absolute death trying to get my "fix". Later I started to learn that if I over frissoned to the same musical passage it would eventually lose the effect. So I learned to ration it out and collected a sizable library of tapes I could cycle through. I started to mentally categorize music by how much of a frisson it could create. I started to use frisson to deal with stress and anxiety. It had all the hallmarks of a drug addiction I guess except I only had to find a supply of music and not street drugs.

Happy to answer any questions anybody might have.

Edits appreciated.

There's a bunch of stuff that I haven't bought because I saw it in use on YouTube.

Not the Bitbox's packaging, but the postal wrapper which came from France. As an American, I've felt a small bit of fear as I've watched our financial resources diminish. When I saw the multi-colored postal package, with its delicate rose-colored gradient, I had the distinct cognition "Hey, there's a country and a people unafraid to spend some resources on making their postal packages look good."

We should get our national shit together.

This specific video might be aimed at toddlers, but the article notes that there are unboxing videos for all sorts of products with hundreds of millions of views in aggregate. Hundreds of millions of views represents a significant portion of Americans.

I bought a camping tent after watching about 10 unboxing videos. I got a table saw about a year ago the same way, watch a couple videos first.

I am well aware probably 1/2 the video are astroturf. If I tune out the speech the video speaks for itself. Oh, OK, with my own eyes I see thats how you adjust the height of the blade. I like/dislike that particular saw's blade lifting design.

The problem is narrow focus by marketing making at least some purchasers prefer homemade commercials over their hyper focused "professional" commercials which unfortunately suck. Lets say someone is trying to sell a "pro-grade" digital multimeter and I'm trying to buy one. Unfortunately the market "user interface" will be a little too "stylized" and probably rely on sexual objectification of women and business cliche speak.

Some beautiful very young woman who has no idea what the product does reads a script explaining "Our ISO9000 manufactured meter will synergistically energize your resources to proactively meet their key performance indicators". Unfortunately as a mere user of the device instead of being a CEO, that kind of marketing is useless to me as a purchaser, I have no idea how painful the device makes it to switch between ammeter and voltmeter probe wiring topology and how useful is the continuity feature anyway? The official PR materials suck so much I'll just watch an unboxing video. That may be the only way I'll be permitted to get a straight answer WRT the connectors being too tight to easily swap.

I have plenty of experience where the quality of PR has little correlation with the quality of the product, so I'm not overly concerned. I can see why pro content creators are terrified. This is equivalent to when print journalists first noticed some people prefer bloggers to their "professional" productions, following which about 50% of them lost their professional jobs.

From my kids, they like to study stuff they like. In the unlikely event we ever get a Wii-U my son is already an expert on how to connect it to the TV and configure it. I admit I've been window shopping new oscilloscopes, including ones I'll never be able to afford... The article makes fun of a $2 plastic egg, but I don't waste money on that for my kids on a regular basis, so I can see the kid appeal.

Or, to put that more incendiarily: the degree to which a non-voiceover, 100% completion, edited-for-repetition LP (these are usually called "longplays") of a game serves as a good replacement for playing the game, is inversely proportional to the degree to which the game is actually a game, rather than interactive fiction.

The least interesting longplays are made from games that are games in an essential sense: games that are about the aesthetic of exploring and mastering the mechanics of an environment. Simulation games, procedurally-generated adventure games, etc. If you don't wrap a narrative around these, there's nothing compelling there to watch. It's only compelling to play.

I'm wondering whether the proliferation of LPs will actually kill the market for genres like the JRPG, the visual novel/dating sim, etc. as people feel satisfied with just having watched the-movie-of-the-game and are left with no urge to play.

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Three examples:

1. I recently tried to watch a Kirby: Epic Yarn LP and fell asleep after five minutes. Yet I'd gladly play it as a game. The same applies to, say, Tetris.

2. Final Fantasy makes for excellent long plays. I played FFVII once and have no urge to do so again, but I'm still waiting for the FFVII-HD longplay well-cut enough that some friends and I can just watch it and Advent Children in sequence as if it were any other movie series.

3. I still do pull out games like FFV every once in a while, just to faff about with the combinatoric possibilities of the battle system and to replay some of the boss battles--but I have no urge to undergo the grindy bits. What I really want from these sorts of hybrids is a CG movie that comes with a "bonus disc" that lets you jump right into the various preset sandbox fights, plot battles, and minigames. As it is, I frequently keep emulator save states to do exactly this.

I sometimes watch people play video games. Some of my reasons are:

1. I'm bad at video games, but like seeing the story unfold.

2. I'm not sure if I want to buy the game or not, so I watch someone play it to decide.

Some other people also watch others play games to learn, to increase their skill, because they find the player/presenter amusing, etc.

I even had the emotional connection and cried a little tear when one of the main protagonists is murdered as part of the story arc, I have posted it as "most emotional response to a video game" type threads on Reddit.

I learned how to make an automatic egg/chicken factory in minecraft from watching a video. I'd never have imagined something so crazy without seeing it live in 3-D first. You do what with wooden signs, and then pour flowing water on them, and then throw chickens on it? Madness! Yet it works!

I imagine this has a lot to do with 3-d and open world type games where having an experienced field guide walk you thru a real world-ish experience helps.

(edited to add, I live in a geographic area where many people make a living as hunting and fishing guides; the "experienced field guide" phrase for video games is very intentional, I suspect in the next decade or so of video gaming, there will be people making a modest living off literally being field guides for video gamers... just kinda escorting noobs and showing them the ropes, maybe not a lot of money but more than they'd get off the mechanical turk)