How Do I Know If My Imaginary Friend Is Sentient?

I have tried for years to discover something, anything, about this card with no success.

Turnchetta playlist for @lesmisshippingshowdown

This is for @lesmisshippingshowdown which allows fanworks to give extra points in the polls. We are trying to get the very canonical and important pairing of Turning Woman #3 (a chorus member from the 2012 movie) and Musichetta (Joly's never-onscreen girlfriend from the book) onto the next round.

Even if you don't have a clue what Les Miserables is, can you vote Turnchetta here? As a favor? And if you're not sure, maybe this playlist will convince you of their deep canonicity and long-term importance to the fandom. Or just do it for chaos. Either one as long as you do it.

Spotify playlist:

Tracklist

Three Coins in the Fountain - Connie Francis

Musichetta stupidotta, scanzonata, innocente - Commenti Sonori

My Baby Loves A Bunch of Authors - Moxy Fruvous

What's Love Got To Do With It - Tina Turner

You Turn The Screws - Cake

Turn, Turn, Turn - Dolly Parton

Who Will Shoe Your Pretty Little Feet - Tennesse Ernie Ford

The World Spins Madly On - The Weepies

Sunday Bloody Sunday - U2

飛哥跌落坑渠 (Teddy Boy in the Gutter) - 李寶瑩, 鄧寄塵, 鄭君綿 歡場三怪

Turn Around - They Might Be Giants

Tangled Up In Blue

Heartaches by the Number - Cyndi Lauper

Three Times a Lady - Sissel

Let's Face The Music And Dance - Diana Krall

Turn The World Around - Womansong

Liner notes and Youtube links under the cut. (Fanmix liner notes means "write a synopsis of an entire hypothetical musical" right? That's how I've always done it.)

These are largely old standards, which meant I had a range of cover options, and I went with women's covers most of the time. However some of them I couldn't find an exact match on Youtube and Spotify so a few tracks will be different between the two.

Three Coins in the Fountain - Connie Francis

This was the first song I thought of for a Musichetta and Three mix! You can read this either as the three being Musichetta, Joly and Bossuet, and only one of them gets a happy ever after - or you can read it as Musichetta, Three, and one of their other working woman friends, and only one of them ends up marrying rich.

2. Musichetta stupidotta, scanzonata, innocente - Commenti Sonori

We needed an actual musichetta on this mix. The title translates as "Muschetta stupid, carefree, and innocent" - this is her in her early days, working, spending time with the girlfriends of her youth like Three, dreaming of a superb future.

3. My Baby Loves A Bunch of Authors - Moxy Fruvous

Here she is getting as she gets more involved with the students, gets drawn into the artistic world, goes to fancy parties, becomes someone's mistress.

4. What's Love Got To Do With It - Tina Turner

That world of surface romance and semi-transactional sex starts to harden her, even as she has one (two?) boys who delight in her and she in them.

5. You Turn The Screws - Cake

In the full musical version this would be a duet between Three and Musichetta where they are growing apart as she draws further into the political, literary, and bourgeois world of her students and Three commits to staying as she is and they both become scornful of each other's priorities. They see each other in passing around the Corinthe and don't speak. (This is probably happening around the time of the July revolution.)

6. Turn, Turn, Turn - Dolly Parton

And time passes and everyone gets older, and maybe it can go on like this forever but time passes and it won't, but it's always been that way. (This song is a quote from the book of Ecclesiastes which is very good poetry to read when you're disillusioned with the world and not sure what the point of keeping going is when it's just more of the same.)

7. Who Will Shoe Your Pretty Little Feet - Tennessee Ernie Ford

There start to be ominous undertones in Musichetta's world. It feels like July 1830 only somehow not the same. Her sweet boys fuss over her but at the same time start making noises about what she'll do when they're gone (but with very little understanding of what she *will* do if they're gone. She doesn't disillusion them of course.

8. The World Spins Madly On - The Weepies

This song plays while both Musichetta and Three are hold up in their separate apartments across town from each other, hearing the gunshots go off and staying in bed, Musichetta thinking about how she's abandoned her boys to fight without her and Three thinking about how she's let Musichetta get involved in all that without her

9. Sunday Bloody Sunday - U2

They wake up and go down to the Rue Chanvrerie and get blood all over their pretty little feet and their eyes meet while they sing.

10. 飛哥跌落坑渠 (Teddy Boy in the Gutter) - 李寶瑩, 鄧寄塵, 鄭君綿 歡場三怪

This is a reprise of the first song, courtesy of 1960s Catonese cinema which rewrote the lyrics as being about a girl of the town finding her boy stinking and disgusting in the gutter. I think it's supposed to be a scathing parody and he's just drunk and wearing too much perfume, but to the extent of my ability to translate the Cantonese, I think it also works here, as Three and Musichetta find the remains of her boys and Three is scornful of her squeamishness while hiding her compassion for her grief

11. Turn Around - They Might Be Giants

Trauma. They don't deal well with the survivor's guilt.

12. Tangled Up In Blue - Indigo Girls

This is the key to the whole love story, I knew this song in the Indigo Girls cover first, so it's always been a song about start-cross lesbians; they knew each other once, and they weren't even that different in class, but one of them ended up drifting and taking whatever manual work she could to get by, and one committed to spending time with college boys and reading medieval Italian poetry, and they keep coming together and separating again because they can't stay apart but they can't compromise with each other either. This is Three's song for Musichetta (how the specific incidents in the song line up with the plot is up to the person who ends up writing the book.)

13. Heartaches by the Number - Cyndi Lauper

This is Musichetta's song for Three - from her POV Three keeps leaving and breaking her heart while stays still, even though at the time Three left she thought it didn't matter and she didn't care, looking back from this end she can't stand it, and she's determined the next time she sees Three she makes it clear how much it hurt her.

14. Three Times a Lady - Sissel

And here she finally meets up with Three again but instead of pouring out her hurt she ends up pouring out her love instead!

15. Let's Face The Music And Dance - Diana Krall

Well, says Three, the world is awful and nothing we do matters, so we might as well keep trying to make it better (this is Three admitting that she loves Musichetta too, and her boys and their lost causes weren't all wrong.)

16. Turn The World Around

(Couldn't find the version on spotify on Youtube, so this is a random women's community chorus.)

With Musichetta's and Three's views reconciled, they realize that the key is to forget everyone's old grievances and come together in solidarity to make the world better for everyone with everyone's skills and resources together, and it does matter, and they lead the Turning women (who have also all paired off now) in this song instead.

Curtain call!

the fact that pro-monarchy arguments have degenerated, over the past few centuries, from “the king rules by divine right and is accountable to nobody but god”, to “uhm the royals generate a lot of income from tourism” will never stop being extremely funny to me

do you guys know about the internet roadtrip? right now somewhere between 500 and 900 people are collectively 'driving' a car on google street view trying to make it to canada. it's fun i recommend it

The Hanged Man by Victor Hugo

This is a good example of what are called "Barnum statements" -- things which are true of almost everyone, but which seem insightful when you read them because they are true of *you*. Furthermore, each result contains many statements (I counted 56 in mine), so that if any one of them matches your current preoccupations or self-concept, you'll forget the ones that didn't apply or only slightly applied.

A fun exercise when you encounter something like this is to tally up all the statements and see how many were really true. In my results, I counted 20 statements that were true about me and 25 that were false.

This doesn't mean that the results are useless, since you may not have thought about your life and emotions in these terms before, and it is still useful to consider e.g. whether you harbor resentment about someone in your life, or whether peace is truly achievable with your current approach. It just means that the usefulness of the results depends entirely on you and your self-knowledge, and the test has no special insight about you.

Quotes from my results under the cut for spoilers.

[disliked olive green] ...inhibiting limitations. Difficult circumstances limit your opportunities for experience and your freedom of action. You feel deprived because you have to do without some of the things that would make life pleasant. You expect far too much understanding for your needs from other people, and as a result, you often feel disappointed. You might ask yourself how much understanding and empathy you extend to others. You would like to be free of your...

I think it's quite clever in the way it mixes different motivations and traits. Here, the main topic is "inhibiting limitations", which makes me think of anxiety and an aversion to breaking rules. But then the next two sentences are about being constrained by non-omnipotence and unable to afford everything you want, which is a universal complaint among finite beings, but not one that seems particularly related to inhibitions. Then, the next two sentences are about wanting others to understand you but not being very understanding of others, which again is very common among humans, but which has even less to do with inhibitions.

As a result, someone whose main problem is any one of {anxiety, poverty, ingratitude} might feel like this paragraph applies to them "uncannily well". And there are 12 such paragraphs! It's no wonder that so many people upthread have felt understood.

where’s that quiz where you choose lke 4 colours u like and 4 u dont and it hands your ass on a plate

I'm not beating myself up for no reason, I have to acausally incentivize my past self not to have fucked up

That's Danish; IKEA is Swedish.

the bluetooth chip in my beloved ikea eneby speaker (with the gay pride front cover) decided abruptly to stop connecting to devices today TT__TT i cracked the thing open of course and had a look but unplugging and replugging various cables had no effect; next course of action is probably to try to resolder the bluetooth daughter board (which i HAVE identified, thank you ifixit) except i still haven't unpacked my soldering iron post move and now it's buried in the shed in one of several boxes all of which are behind the woodworking bench and like three bikes. fortunately the 3.5mm jack still works so i THINK my strat is going to be to just fucking plug in one of those bluetooth 3.5mm adapters until i can get my tools unfucked enough to hopefully fix it properly. and of course i can't just get a replacement because ikea has discontinued the eneby because fuck you that's why

a cellar spider! they like dusty corners and awkwardly hustle themselves away when you touch their webs. their cobwebs are unusually strong and can hold even large insects like stinkbugs and paper wasps! when something threatens them they whirl their long bodies around and it makes their web tremble. they don't like being outside or traveling long distances, so all the cellar spiders in a building are usually descendants of one founder.

the internet also says that they are good at eating other spiders (which is a shame because i also like the other spiders) and that they tolerate each other and visit each other's webs. i guess that makes sense if they're all related. i once saw a mother and her children all sharing the same web, spaced a few inches apart like Finnish people waiting for the bus

I don't know what's happening or if it's a coincidence or what but three times today the spiders in my home have gotten closer to my personal space than they normally do. I like spiders but I think it's best for all of us if we stay out of each other's way, and I thought we were on the same page about this. Hopefully they resume their established habits tomorrow and we can all forget about this little escapade.

One thing that's interesting about Dr. Phil is that his show is a spin-off of Oprah and one thing I've discovered, that's interesting, is that it's virtually impossible to find footage from Oprah's show. Go looking and you'll find it hard to find uncut clips of even well-liked famous moments; instead they're all intercut with commentary on the event. Interviews watched by tens of millions of people now exist only in twenty seconds of clips interspersed with talking heads telling us how to feel about it. Over 4,5000 episodes, almost all of it vaulted

Remember Oprah platforming anti-vaxxers and all kinds of alt-med scams and literary hoaxes? Uh, no you don't, prove it. She doesn't even let people see uncut footage of the Good Moments of her show (since she seems to be deeply embarrassed by literally all of it?) so of course she's burying any Bad Moments.

In conclusion the Rainbow Parties segment is one of the few full clips you'll find online intact, somehow. Enjoy.