the more i talk w/ leftist friends the more i start to realize that they think culture is only defined by food or “traditional” (i.e. “ethnic”) garb and nothing else
mentioned how white americans do in fact have a common culture and they genuinely thought i was joking. culture isnt something only granted to the Cool People of Color. just feels like among progressive groups there’s this dichotomy created in which only the virtuous oppressed minorities have culture and anyone who is privileged some sort of void cultureless being
As someone with a background in anthropology, culture is everything and everywhere. It’s so all-encompassing it’s hard to even wrap your head around. Everything you do, say, think, eat, wear is wrapped up in culture. Even being deliberately counter-cultural, by consciously defying the expectations of your culture, is still an engagement with culture (often by adopting a sub-culture).
Sure, it’s the “simple”, “surface-level” things that people tend to think of, like
In your culture, how many meals a day are you generally expected to eat, and when are you expected to eat them?
In your culture, which clothes are considered “formal”, and when would you wear such clothes?
But it’s also so much more:
If you were dating someone, at what point in the relationship would you be expected to introduce them to your parents? That’s culture!
How much respect is given to artists? Are people like poets or musicians revered as an integral part of society, or is the predominant attitude “get a real job”? That’s culture!
How much value is given to education? What’s considered more socially embarrassing - academic failure, or academic achievement? What’s the intellectual landscape? Do people tend to respect experts, or denigrate them as “elitists”? That’s culture!
Which things are generally considered to be “high culture” or “low culture”? Which kinds of media and art are considered “for the masses” versus “for the elites”? That’s culture!
How are politicians treated? Do people tend to respect them as their “betters”, their “leaders”? Or are they assumed to be lying, conniving, corrupt, the worst of society? What kind of thing would end a politician’s career? That’s culture!
What’s considered more egregious behaviour - bothering other people, or asking someone to stop bothering other people? That’s culture!
If you were attending a job interview, how would you want to come across? How would you be expected to dress and behave? Would it be better to come across as very bold and confident, or humble and subservient? That’s culture!
If you found yourself in a tricky situation - say, broken down at the side of the road - would you confidently expect strangers to come and help you? Or would it seem really weird for some random person to come and involve themselves in your situation? That’s culture!
How are you expected to communicate? Is it seen as rude to be very blunt and straightforward, or is it considered rude to beat around the bush and make allusions and try to soften what you’re saying rather than quickly getting to the point? That’s culture!
I could go on (boy could I go on). This is so not meant to be all-inclusive; this is just a tiny sample of the things that make up “culture”.
To put it bluntly, a lot of the time the word “culture” seems to be used to mean, essentially, “the things that make people of colour different from white people”. Oh, this guy eats this different kind of food; that’s culture. This lady wears these clothes to a wedding; that’s culture. But we white people, we don’t have “culture”; we just do what’s normal. But it’s all culture! Everything! All of it! And culture isn’t just the result of where in the world you come from - class, occupation, rural/urban location, minority status, political affiliation, all these things and more can result in cultural differences even within a small area. Multiple cultures often co-exist, blend, overlap, and borrow from one another within the same place, which is especially noticeable in places with legacies of migration. People bring different cultures from around the world, and these interact with the dominant culture in all sorts of interesting ways. But a culture being dominant doesn’t mean that it ceases to be a culture.
Claiming that certain groups of people (generally, whoever is the dominant majority group in a particular context) “don’t have culture” is just as dumb as when people claim they “don’t have an accent” simply because their accent is the most common one where they live. There is no “default”, every deviation from which is “a culture” or “an accent”. Everyone has an accent. Every community, everywhere, has culture(s). If you aren’t aware of your culture, or don’t think you have an accent, you’re probably just so used to being considered “default” and “normal” that it doesn’t occur to you that no such thing actually exists.
One thing I loved about Heated Rivalry that I don’t see people talking about as much is the visual style that Jacob Tierney spent the better part of a decade developing first with Letterkenny then Shorsey. Like yes HR is bigger and shinier but the base of it is shot like Letterkenny and I love that so much.
straight up it should be illegal for a physical storefront not to accept physical currency, or for restaurants not to provide physical menus
I’m assuming the above is a normie opinion (as it should be) so i do wanna go a tiny step further and explicitly state any laundromat that requires digital payment should be burned to the fucking ground
if a business cooerces its customers to download an app, i should legally be allowed to set both the business and its board of directors on fire
The assumption that every single business, or service, is owed your personal data, and should be able to track you and mercilessly spam you and monetise the ability to sell off your contact details and so on it’s absolutely deranged.
I have flashlights that are borderline unusable because, while the hardware is fine, the company that made them (hello OLight!) demands that you install and login to the storefront before you can access the configuration software.
But they don’t actively maintain the software or provide any of the new utilities that they promise. They are mostly using it as a way to turn off functional hardware to try and force you to upgrade.
We are living in a society where you can pay for something and the manufacturer can turn it off because they’ve decided that you’ve owned it too long .
I’ve just had to warn my family not to buy electronic door locks because the chances are, if they are Internet connected they will be disabled once the company that owns them has decided that they’re not making enough money charging you a monthly fee to open your own front door.
This is part of an ongoing trend to turn money into something that is no longer usable by everybody .
The eventual aim is to be able to pay people company scrip: If you lose your job, or badmouth the company, or disagree with the dictator, they severely curtail what you are allowed to buy, and from who.
And at that point, you have to pick sides – do you want to be able to have drinking water from Coca-Cola, or Pepsi, and whose package allows you to buy Doritos, and use your smart oven to cook food? Because it won’t turn on unless you use the app to scan the appropriate barcode from the company who now owns your ability to eat drink, heat your home, and wear clothes from brands that they approve.
And if you think that Bezos wouldn’t do that or run his own ghetto where employees have to use Amazon brands and be paid in Amazon money… You haven’t been paying attention to what he’s been building lately.
Read “Unauthorized Bread” by Cory Doctorow, from his book Radicalized
Ok ok ok but like. When I complain about cyclists on the road, it’s not that I don’t want cyclists to exist. What I want is for cyclists to understand that “not matching the speed of traffic” is considered dangerous behaviour for every other vehicle on the road. Cyclists should, please and thank you, have their own place to create their own speed of traffic to match.
We were driving downtown, y'know, the downtown with bike lanes down all the side streets, that they spent who knows how long, and who knows how much money, implementing. So cyclists have a place outside of the flow of traffic. And there was a gentleman. On a bike. In the middle of traffic.
When I tell you the indignation I felt, as a person who Does Not Drive, watching this man completely ignore the space he was given to bike safely and choose instead to impede vehicles that can take him out with prejudice. It was complete.
I feel confident enough to post these now. A collection of all the existing posters after some edits from the other post that got 13k notes! These are full size/quality. Go nuts.
You may use them for wallpapers, tabletop campaigns, whatever. Consider tipping me or buying a print or sticker on ko-fi here! If you do use them, let me know what for, or send pictures!
A Vulcan named Stork works at the Terran adoption agency. Parents always request that he be the one to deliver their child to them.
It’s years before anyone explains it to him.
People keep gifting him robes with long white birds on them.
The fun thing is he would understand why people were getting him outfits with storks on them. That’s a word, it’s his name, straightforward. All the humans get him the same gag gift, but like, they’re putting effort in at least. This is a genuinely nice outfit. Stork will be a walking zero-effort pun sometimes, rather than waste a perfectly fine robe.
It’s fine. This is a readily comprehensible human illogic. Exactly the kind of thing he expected from moving to Earth.
Six years in he finds out about the stork bringing babies.
Stork has a good long meditation session about this myth, his name, his job, the outfits, the whole shebang (or whatever Vulcan concept is the equivalent).
And he decides he’s honored by it, in a humanly illogical way.
The humans are asking him to do what is after all his job, and specifically requesting him for the joy his name brings them on top of an already agreeable and satisfying task. He has no objection to engendering positive emotions in others. Harm hastens the heat-death of the universe, Surak teaches, so happiness must logically slow it down.
Plus, Vulcans of his generation love puns. There were two decades of punning competitions in colleges across the planet. So when he realizes that he is a walking zero-effort pun, and that the humans also love the pun, he is all for it. He is the Joe Cool of the entire Vulcan population in his city.
And via this pun, the humans are including him in a cherished and traditional myth, by casting him as the literal bringer of life and the expander of families.
There’s no downside. Stork wears his robes, pins, keychains, and other bird-related tchotchkes with genuine pride.
YES IT’S BACK ON MY DASH AT LAST
For real though working together with some human social workers, a Vulcan would be an excellent caretaker for children in an adoption center.
Child has a meltdown? Imagine Stork, perfectly calm and unbothered, approaching the kid and saying “You appear quite upset, Eliza. If you would please allow me to relocate you to the ‘bean-bag-chair,’ we can discuss the source of your distress.”
A Vulcan educated in medicine and child psychology would be endlessly patient with a kid with behavioral issues. Stork wouldn’t get or upset or frustrated. After all, these are children with medical and psychological conditions. It would be illogical to blame the child or to not treat them with the appropriate care.
Even if the a little one was having a bad day or was just overtired, Stork wouldn’t get angry. He might even be a calming presence. Any new kids acting out would learn real quick that they’d have better luck trying to arm-wrestle a Klingon than get a rise out of Stork.
Not only that, Vulcans live much longer than humans. Imagine Stork looking virtually unchanged as decades pass. Kids he’d helped years ago would turn up fully grown, maybe there to adopt their own kids, and run into Stork, looking almost exactly as they remember him.
And he’d probably remember them too. “Welcome back, Eliza.”
“…Harm hastens the heat-death of the universe, Surak teaches, so logically happiness must slow it down…”
Will reblog every time it crosses my dash 🖖🏾
star trek heritage post (November 14th, 2020)
Periodic reminder that the compiled tag I use on AO3 is “Stork The Vulcan (fanon)” and so far there are 6 fics featuring him:
amateur detective who solves crimes out of curiosity and then just. doesn’t bother to tell anyone the identity of the perpetrator
armchair detective who investigates objectively funny and morally correct crimes so they can help the perp cover their tracks
bystander who accidentally observes the protagonist commiting a felony and just…quietly walks off stage. they’re no narc and frankly? not their business
For anyone who wants this exact premise, told like an Agatha Christie-esque mystery combined with Silver-Age style masked vigilantes, check out Lavender Jack.
One of my favorite comics of all time, with gorgeous art, themes of power, wealth, law, justice, and corruption. With incredible characters who bond and grow as the series progresses, including some amazingly well-written villains. With a dash of Steampunk sci-fi for good measure.
Hi! I’m really sick of whitewashing and the various excuses that artists come up with, so I wrote a guide! How To Not Whitewash, at least with regards to skin tone. Please make use of it, and encourage other artists to do so as well. Here’s a link to this guide on a Google Doc - this document has image descriptions. Feel free to contact me if the link stops working, or if you have questions (in good faith).
writing style: author from the 1800s with a severe love of commas whose sentences last half a page
I came out here, to this point, to this place, hoping against all hope and despite signs and portends suggesting otherwise that I might, somehow, find myself having a pleasant experience, and yet here I stand, alone against the world, feeling assaulted, attacked on all fronts, knowing not my enemy’s name nor his face nor whether our battle is done.
….is that “I came here to have a good time and I’m honestly feeling so attacked right now” but by Oscar Wilde
