The TrollDoll Channel: HALLOWEEN IS HERE! Fun Family Unboxing of White W...

This is the most delicious video, combining goofy family times with gorgeous trolls. Predictably, my views are near-zero now, but I have concluded I've been shadowbanned, and it's permanent (subs not getting notifications, etc.) But I have to carry on. It dismays me no end that these highly enjoyable videos are being ignored, while that stupid Daisy one gets gazillions of views and comments, most of them stupid. I've tried to include links to other stuff, but nothing works. They've cut me off for no reason at all, and there's no way out of it - banned is banned, forever. Breaks my heart. BUT, I at least got back in the saddle yesterday and posted two so far, and will continue. I love both of them, but it breaks my heart that YouTube won't let even my most loyal subscribers see them.

😱This Doll Creeps Me Out! (and here's why)😱

My troll/doll videos never get too many views, but I keep posting them anyway. My channel is now up to more than 20,300 subscribers and well over 3,000 videos, and yet, people with a few hundred subs/videos are getting thousands of views every day. Such is the weirdness of the internet, and YouTube specifically, because one of the stupidest videos I ever posted is now well over FOURTEEN MILLION views. 

Don't ask me why, or how, as I made a total of twelve videos which are virtually identical, just with different audio - yet THIS one went through the roof. I get all sorts of bizarre comments, many of them pretty gross, and in some cases people are all angry with me because the audio and video don't sync up! They say things like, oh, this is fake, folks, this is a lie, this is inaccurate, this is just a way to make $$ (though I'm not monetized and never will be).

So I keep on going, as a way to share my interests and hobbies with others, and as a way to keep a record for myself, or to make a video to send to one specific person. Nobody thinks about that.

Is THIS the worst troll you've ever seen?

 

Vintage Miniature Lucky Troll Doll with Red Hat

Condition:

Used Used

“gently preowned vintage”

Price:

US $15.00

ApproximatelyC $20.58

• Buy It Now
• Add to cart

Breathe easy. Returns accepted.

Shipping:

US $18.58 (approx C $25.49) eBay International Shipping

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Located in: Batavia, Illinois, United States

Authorities may apply duties, fees, and taxes upon delivery

Delivery:

Estimated between Tue, May 21 and Thu, May 30 to V3B 5V3

Seller ships within 1 day after receiving cleared payment.

Returns:

30 days return. Buyer pays for return shipping. See details

I've seen some bad ones, but this is BAD. It looks tiny enough to be a gumball troll, and while I had a few of them, they were too ugly to display anywhere. It looks as if someone has mercifully covered the gaping hole in his skull with a homemade pompom. 

Worst of all, the sum total for this thing (in Canadian dollars) is $47.00! For that little piece of junk. 

The Troll Doll Channel: DOUBLE UNBOXING of Juju Doll and 9" Bearded Troll!

O happy day - to have TWO trolls to unbox, with Bentley helping me every step of the way.

The Troll Doll Channel: GIANT Dam Trolls!

One of the more gratifying aspects of troll collecting has been sharing them on my YouTube channel. I suppose this gives me an excuse to buy more of them! These two MASSIVE trolls were actually priced well below normal, and I was able to dress them with things I made myself. 

Creepy comfort: when dolls talk back to you

I just have to dust this one off again. 

Maybe it goes all the way back to voodoo and burning your enemies in effigy, but humanity has always had a very strange relationship with dolls. They're both cuddly and creepy, calling forth a weird mixture of maternal tenderness and hair-raising shock. We don't expect them to talk, and most especially they weren't supposed to talk in Edison's time, which is what made this doll so - unique. The fact that the mechanism inside them (which was actually a teeny-tiny phonograph that played a miniature disc) broke after one or two uses meant that their popularity soon faded. Most of the dolls were returned. A few must have survived more or less intact. It was decades later that Chatty Cathy took over as the most "possessed" doll (meaning, of course, that more little girls owned them) in history. 

I had no interest whatsoever in dolls when I was a child. I was more interested in frogs, toads, newts, snakes, polliwogs, mud puppies, millipedes, salamanders, and anything else that crawled (or barked or whinnied or meowed). I have no idea what has happened to me in the past few years, but my doll collection (if you count the trolls) has boomed, so much so that I don't know how many I have now, and don't want to count. 

I can't account for this, except to say that the reborn doll craze has given rise to dolls that are much more realistic and less creepy (some would say MORE creepy due to the uncanny valley effect) than the staring-eyed, round-headed, stiff-limbed hunks of plastic we used to play with. I've knitted clothes for my dolls, made tons of videos about them, bought more and more of them - and, of course, during the pandemic, have relied on them as a source of comfort. They say we return to the enthusiasms of childhood as old age approaches - but in this case, I seem to have aged backwards, and am catching up on what never appealed to me in childhood.

I still like crawly things, and LOVE birds, which have become a serious interest in the past few years. Sometimes the only thing that pulls my spirits out of a bog of sludge is feeding the red-winged blackbirds at Burnaby Lake. The glossy, sassy males tilt their heads this way and that, their brilliant red and yellow wing patches flaming in the sun. The females, much more practical and industrious, are no-nonsense creatures who get right down to the business of eating, without any flirtation needed.

I can't see ahead right now - can anyone? Are we out of this woods yet? It seems to me it grows darker with every step. Each day HAS to be sufficient unto itself, because I can't plan. We try to focus on how much better our situation is than someone else's - but don't I also bleed for them, my fellow suffering humans? 

For some reason - this is terribly disjointed, sorry - a song jumps back into my head, one that gave me great comfort during another time when I couldn't see ahead. I'd be walking through the woods with this song playing in my ear and try to find some sense in what was happening to me. Mostly I was just trying to stay out of the hospital, and when I was unable to find the light, I had to try to develop a taste for the dark. I don't  know how I survived that time, why those soul-destroying times kept returning, and why I am not in that state now when I suppose I have every reason to be. Maybe the message was finally delivered.

No one is alone

No one here to guide you

Now you're on your own

Only me beside you

Still you're not alone

No one is alone, truly

No one is alone

Sometimes people leave you

Halfway through the wood

Others may deceive you

You decide what's good

You decide alone

But no one is alone

People make mistakes

Fathers, mothers

People make mistakes

Holding to their own

Thinking they're alone

Honour their mistakes

Everybody makes 

One another's

Terrible mistakes

Witches can be right

Giants can be good

You decide what's right 

You decide what's good

Just remember

Someone is on your side

Someone else is not

While we're seeing our side

Maybe we forgot

They are not alone

No one is alone

Hard to see the light now

Just don't let it go

Things will come out right now

That's the best I know

Someone is on your side

No one is alone

Stephen Sondheim

DAM! These trolls are creepy!

 

The Troll Doll Channel: Strangely beautiful! One-of-a-kind trolls

Royal purple: troll in ball gown

The Troll Doll Channel: GORGEOUS Troll Makeovers!

Ah, YouTube! Such a glorious way to not re-LIVE, but re-DO my childhood, taking one element I loved and multiplying it like loaves and fishes. Since I can't keep a horse, this will have to do. But such fun I have. SO FAR, there has been no major blowback from the FTC/COPPA fiasco. NO one knows how to mark their videos now, and so far the only direct result has been YouTube labelling some vids for kids, even though they weren't meant that way. Strange are the ways of YT. But I"m keeping on keeping on, probably not buying as many this year due to our budget, but still wanting to play with them (I never played with dolls as a kid, and NEVER did anything with my trolls, none of which had outfits of any kind). It's fun, that's why, and YT is a way of sharing it with (I think!) other collectors. It's hard to see a six-year-old wanting to watch a video featuring 60-year-old troll dolls. No one says they CAN'T, but they weren't made for them. YT's algorithm is flagging some of them, but in their usual haphazard/scattershot way. It's all done by bot, and the bot has moods, I guess. It's a lot moodier and less consistent than any human being would be. 

The Troll Doll Channel: TREASURE TROVE! SIX new Dams in costume!

The Troll Doll Channel: DAM, I love these trolls!

Sharing a little bit of one of my favorite hobbies, which I hope YouTube doesn't take away from me. I have over 700  subscribers now, and though many have 7 MILLION, to have any at all is gratifying for me. It is so easy to get caught up in numbers as a source of personal worth. I don't know what the future will bring. 2020 SEEMS lucky, but is anything really lucky? I remember all those zeroes in 2000, but it was 2001, the actual start of the millennium, when everything changed forever, and a terrible ugliness was born. Please, God, if you're there, save us from this! Meantime, I will try to enjoy my ever-burgeoning collection.

Three speeds of Lucretia

(From eBay page for Lucretia's Lair) 

This is "Candy". She is a vintage Scandia house troll doll 2-1/2" .

She's had a spa bath and has new long soft Icelandic sheep fur hair in shades of strawberries and mangoes, and new hand painted spiral eyes in shades to match her hair.

Her "skin" is rough in spots and is not perfect on her little face so I gave her a bunch of curls and pulled her hair off to the side which detracts from her flaws.

She comes wearing a little double ruffled dress in white iridescent fantasy fabric trimmed out in a pink/green mini gimp making up the bodice/sleeves.

Her hair clip is covered in the same trim and has a single ivory Mulberry flower that I dusted with iridescent glitter.

I design and make these clothes/accessories by myself. I create my own

patterns and most of the embellishments.

BLOGGER'S NOTE. As addicted as I am to trolls, and let me tell you it's bad, I don't have a Lucretia troll (yet) - that is, a troll made by Lucretia's Lair, an Etsy store specializing in trolls so deluxe that when you're around them, you always feel underdressed.

I've been "trolling" and making videos to share for quite a while now, and when I look up I am startled, even shocked to see how many of them there are. WHY did I do this? Have I really gone crazy, at last? I've been called crazy, often very graphically and nastily, and by family members, so it's not a good look for me. People jocularly telling me to "just embrace your craziness" is like saying "enjoy your leukemia". Or so it would seem to me.

There IS something crazy, though - in the extremity of it - the need - the fact that maybe nine people see those videos (or none at all - YouTube seems to want to shut me down for no good reason, leaving the billion-view channels to transgress in any way they see fit.) And though I've sort of come to and rubbed my eyes lately, and wondered what the hell it is really all about, these trolls are really beautiful to me. I have worked on costumes and hair replacement and all sorts of things, and no, I am not going to sell them, which seems to be most people's imperative for enjoying something this much: surely I MUST be going to DO something with them. Get rid of them? 

I don't post many of my troll videos here, mainly because it just doesn't occur to me. Separate worlds, you know! But here are a few. Just a few. 

A Dam-sel in distress

The Paw of Death! (Bentley vs. the troll)

I WANT THIS TROLL!

I. Want. This. Troll.

Don't ever start a collection, of anything, or this will happen.

What happened was - I don't know if I want to go back that far! Let's say I had a troll collection already, but somehow it was never complete. I felt guilty about every purchase I made, since we're on a very modest budget all the time.

AND THEN.

And then, today, rummaging in my wallet for my bus pass, I spied - a cheque. It had my name on it. I had almost forgotten I had it! And it had a tasty amount on it, too, very tasty.

The Canada Council for the Arts had sent it to me, not for a specific work but for contributing to "the arts" through publishing three novels and writing approximately 300 book reviews and over a thousand newspaper columns over a substantial period of time.

Pay.

I don't get pay from too many other sources. It also delighted me because it easily covered ALL my trolls, most of them costing five bucks and none of them more than forty (most of that being postage and handling).

I couldn't think of anything more apt than covering the cost of all my trolls with my Canada Council cheque. But do you realize what this means??

That's right. We're square, and I can once more feel guilty lusting after new trolls, looking on PicClick (an eBay search site) late into the night. My last "big guy" was most unusual, looked brand new which he couldn't be, and had a totally different configuration, as if made by another company. The troll world is odd and full of anomalies and huge gaps in information. I assumed however that he would be my last "big guy" and that if I got anything else, it would be a small Wishnik, simply because I didn't HAVE any Wishniks and it made a hole in my collection.

But I don't like Wishniks. I tried to like them. Their bulging eyes were pretty much their only outstanding feature. Most of them were old and the worse for wear, with sad clumps of hair coming away from the scalp. Some had no hair at all. The larger ones had hideous flat, elongated heads with huge ears and evil faces. No charm at all.

Wishniks were a direct knockoff of Dam trolls, which are still the gold standard for collectors, mainly because there are just more of them, at different price ranges, different manufacturing dates, and with vastly different designs. Wishniks are just, well, Wishniks. The ad that used to run when I was a kid irritated me: "Just let a Wish-nik/Let you come smi-ling through." They have double horseshoes engraved on the bottoms of their feet. 

Plus they just cost too damn much, $40.00 or more for a small troll in so-so repair.

Whether I get this "big guy" troll or not is undecided. There were a ton of photos on the eBay page, which was nice because sometimes you only get one grainy one, so I was able to make this wonderful animation. Often when I finally make my move, the troll is gone. Or I suddenly change direction and decide that I hate that troll and want something else.

THAT troll.

Post-mortem. Sigh. It happened again. Somebody bought that troll. That troll that was far too expensive for me, anyway. This is what happens when you start a collection. And the weird thing is, I've never collected anything in my life before!

Now I know why.

Trolls! Trolls! Everyone trolls!

It has been a while since I posted about trolls. In fact, I can't remember if I ever posted about them at all, so I guess it's time.

I now belong to not one, not two, but THREE Facebook troll groups. By the time I actually post this, I might belong to zero troll groups, because I have gone back and forth a lot in my feelings about them.

Yes, it's nice to connect with people who love their trolls and have an enthusiasm for them. No, it's not so great to have someone push and push and push to try to sell expensive trolls to me, or tell me they collect nothing but one-of-a-kind 24" trolls from Denmark that Thomas Dam created with his own two hands in 1942. Or see photos of ultra-expensive trolls posing on the deck of a cruise ship, or in a room with a view in Sicily. Or see someone casually mention a small collection of, oh, say, about 5000 or so Dam trolls, only the finest and the oldest, and -

You know what I'm saying. It's all the same problems I have had with social media from the beginning. Troll elitism! It's beyond my powers to comprehend.

My trolls, the ones I started out with until I began to branch out a little, came from the wrong side of the tracks. They came in a little plastic bag:

. . . and cost me, rounded off, about $5.00 each at the dollar store. I had never seen a troll at the dollar store before, so soon I was stoking my collection and making them little felt outfits. I began replacing their silky but rather sparse hair with great spills of yarn, the fibres all pulled apart for maximum volume.

I thought they looked great! 

Needing a place to store them and not wanting to just use a shelf, I  converted some old CD racks and began to stack them in. 

There weren't too many at first.

I am not sure which troll group I joined first, but it didn't make me very happy, even though I got some initial "likes" for my poorhouse trolls in their CD highrise.

But I still had the feeling they were from a different social stratum, and I was never allowed to forget it. People talked in "troll-ese", I am convinced to make people left out who DIDN'T speak troll-ese. It didn't occur to me that Facebook and its intentional envy syndrome had anything to do with it.

But then the inevitable happened, and I began to "covet". I knew I couldn't begin to afford the holy grail ones, but even the mid-sized Dam trolls cost plenty, what with outrageous shipping charges and conversion of the American dollar to Canadian.

But I went ahead. I looked on eBay, I ordered trolls, I bought trolls. I couldn't help myself.

I don't know how to feel about it now. I haven't counted how many trolls I have, and I don't want to, though I did move a bookcase into my office for the overflow. I have spent a lot of money, for me at least, which translates to a few hundred. Money I can't spare. I think I still like my "Dollarinas" best, my yarnies with all the masses of hair I created from material I already had. But the problem is, their faces all look pretty much the same. They're identical cousins. Their bodies are so fragile, knockoffs of knockoffs made of thin plastic, that you could squish them flat by sitting on them.

The feeling is exciting when I order "real" trolls, and even more exciting when I get them and open the box. It's Christmas morning! One of my faves is the one I call Grumpy Grandpa:

But now I want another one. With the same face. Should I get it?

Collections are horrible things, voracious, insatiable. I've never really had one before, and now I don't know what to do. Stop buying them, maybe?

Am I honestly trying to reproduce my Year of the Trolls when I was ten years old, which was (though of course I didn't know it at the time) the best year of my life?