#cultural fun facts I guess

[aswebeg]

on one hand I stand against anything and everything the institution of a catholic church does in this sad, sad country of mine

on the other I cannot pretend it hasn’t been a big part of our culture and what made us who we are today as a nation (whether it’s good or bad)

so although I do not go to church myself I always prepare the basket and eggs for my mother, out of my love for her. hard boiled eggs, meat (#kielbasa), bread, and salt (hidden), are a staple, I think, but the rest varies from region to region.

the biggest difference is the lamb - it’s made out of sugar (store bought, best shit when you’re a kid) - whereas in my bf’s house it’s made out of butter (homemade from a bar of butter & wooden mould). we also add sweets (homemade muffin), which is also optional for others

[tangledinink]

im just saying that some of the people on this godforsaken webbed site would probably not survive watching siblings/young children interact irl

[non-un-topo]

Trying to kick my art block by doing the opposite of an easy drawing

[monsterkin-culture-is]

Monsterkin culture is feeling slightly kin with every clawed fictional character

^^^

[thevegetablewhichnoonedaresname]

I'm starting Mission to Zyxx Season 5 now, and I have feelings about that.

First, it generally scares me when people hype anything up at all because there is no guarantee that anyone values the exact same thing I do to the same degree. Even if I trust the creators of a thing to value something and try to do right by it, that doesn't always necessarily mean it will be successful, especially if that involves doing something wildly different than what made it good in the first place (I have been burned this way before). I guess I'm just hoping they continue the format of goofy improv shenanigans for the majority of it with something more planned and emotional in the finale if they want, like they've been doing all along. I'd think they would, and I've heard nothing bad about the ending, but I guess it still makes me nervous because I'm so close to the end and I want it so badly to stick the landing. I'm setting my expectations on the floor so I can be surprised instead of disappointed, but honestly, I don't need it to be better, I just need it to be on par with the rest.

Second, and more briefly, I'm happy it's (hopefully) ending before it has a chance to decline. I am so on board with that philosophy. But on the other hand, finishing a thing that I really, really like and knowing there's not another one out there gives me a special kind of heartache. Like, I know there will be other good media, and stuff that's good and unique in other ways, but I know for a fact that there are no other podcasts out there that have the same mix of a balance of off-the-wall improv and structured narrative, quality comedy, fantastical sci-fi setting and loveable characters, and high quality production. There are other things out there with many of those qualities, but nothing that checks every one of those boxes. It's a lightning-in-a-bottle thing that very much feels like the right people had to be in the right place at the right time to do it. Attempts to do it again would feel hollow because it had to be born out of necessity and passion and the talents of the people involved, so if you switch out the people it loses the reasons it's great, and if the same people tried to do it again it'd feel tired. That makes me so, so grateful it exists, but also so, so sad that it doesn't, and I'm 80% of the way done. When it's over, it's over.

Anyway. Now that that's all out there, I'm just gonna finish listening and have fun. Wish me luck.

[neolxzr]

you do see my point though, I was saying that yes a piece of media can have a character imply they are queer, but it’s frustrating when they won’t explicitly confirm such, because of (in the case of… checks app store purchase statistics…. A multi million dollar game franchise!) the need to market to as many people as possible. Shumika will never be “canon” because some people just don’t like shumika and won’t spend money on the game if shu and mika are in a relationship, whether or not that’s because they like the ship or the characters or are genuinely homophobic or whatnot. If the writing team cared about telling a love story, they would tell a love story, not go “well maybe they’re in love, it’s up to viewer interpretation!” like this works, sometimes it adds to the meaning of the work, but enstars really doesn’t have an excuse for their constant “this character might have feelings for this other character, but we’ll never have them say it out loud!” except the fact it makes them a lot of money, since they can market to people who like a character being the way they want that character to be, whether that’s with that character being in love with another in game character or self-shipping or whatever else. Outside of shipping, this is why some characters like Shinobu haven’t changed despite wanting to change (he continuously talks about how he wants to be more mature and taken seriously but his cards continue to make him look small and cute because his fans like that about him and god forbid we change anything!) I just think enstars should not be your first thought when someone asks you about a good piece of queer media because they’re doing just about the same job as large cast games with characters of the same gender (minus Arashi) who continue to have characters go “we’ll do all these things to imply we could be in love, but we’ll never have our characters actually date! teehee!”

i can understand being frustrated about your ships not being "confirmed", but the obsession with what is "canon" and "not canon" is just straight up not a very interesting discussion to have. what happyele's or the writers' agenda is is not of particular importance to me. one of the first things they teach you in classes about media analysis is that once a work is out there, the intentions of the creator no longer matter. the only thing that matters in your analysis is your own thoughts and the way you interpret a text.

if we were having a conversation about how much the creator of something sucks, then sure, talk about that all you want, but i am specifically referring to discussions about the piece of media and these characters and their relationships and their growth and the themes of the work etc. those things are removed from whether or not the company writes the way they do because of profit motives or whatever. companies make money, that's just what to expect. if you want art that is free of profit motives, read something by an independent creator.

even so, it feels strange to place enstars into the bucket of "stuff that should be gayer but the bad company that makes it wont let it be" because the characters ARE so very openly queer. there are so many instances in it where characters pour their heart out to each other or offer themselves to another character in beautiful and poetic ways, and i think it's wrong to claim it doesn't count because they didn't confirm their relationship status at the end of it. if you ask me, there is absolutely no way to interpret enstars in a way completely free of queerness. there is so much explicitly queer text that ignoring it is just plain incorrect. but, if homophobic people like this game and choose to look the other way at all of the gay shit, again, that is not my problem.

why is canonization the only thing that matters? is a shitty BL with awful writing better and more worthwhile than enstars as a queer narrative because the characters had explicit gay sex on screen? are poorly written gay characters in the background of other media with nothing going on more worth talking about than shumika or wataei or rinniki or whoever else just because they say the words 'i'm gay' out loud?

queerness is so much more than all of that. it is so much more than labels and it is so much more than relationships that are easy to understand. it is so much more than the extremely narrow view of it that the internet has concocted about it over the last few years, where you’re only allowed to talk about queerness if you yourself are openly queer and out of the closet, and even then you’re only allowed to make art that makes for “good representation.” that is just so incredibly limiting. i would rather tons of companies who are trying to profit off fujoshis make vaguely gay media with unconfirmed romances and relationships that aren't easily defined by labels than have less queer art in the world.

more queer art means more queer people who will find something to really connect to. more queer art means telling more queer stories. why should who is allowed to write lgbtq media be limited? why should the kind of media people are allowed to make be limited?

its fine to criticize happyelements if youre unsatisfied with the way they do things, im not always 100% in love with everything they do either. i wouldn't even consider enstars to be the worlds' best example of a queer piece of media. but no one is forcing you to like or engage with it or give the company money if you're unhappy with how they write and market their game. they don't owe anyone explicit confirmation that any of their characters are dating, and it doesn't even matter if they do provide that confirmation or not.

regardless of who made it or for what reason, queer stories are worth talking about, "canon" or not.

[pynkhues]

Okay, out of yoga and just because I was percolating on it as I was incorrectly using meditation at the end of the class, haha, but I do think the show is also saying something very specific when it has Louis unable to create art instantly turn around and seek to own, then profit off it without any respect for the artist who made it.

[gingermintpepper]

What’s the significance of each color in Ancient Greece? So green is the only neutral color and it represents mostly natural and earthy things, thank you for telling me that part !! Anyway, as for my Hyacinthus design’s hair being brown, it’s due to the combination of it being a fairly common interpretation of his appearance and also because I find I like how it looks with his skin tone and the purple of his eyes.

Okay, firstly; thank you so much for answering my question too!

Admittedly you can't beat out good, old fashioned colour theory so that's completely fair haha! I still think it's very interesting that brown became the common interpretation of his features so I'm always glad to hear other people's view on it <3

With respect to what colours meant or symbolised in Ancient Greece, it's a super fascinating topic because the Ancient Greeks had a very different perception of colour than how a lot of people - and in this case I'll generalise and say english-speaking people - perceive colour. In a lot of languages, especially older ones, colour wasn't just a way to describe the physical perceptional reality of an observable object (that is, the light reflecting off the object that gives it its perceived hue - the way we perceive colour now) but colour was also used to describe the way in which the people experienced the world. A really good way to think about it is now, if you wanted to distinguish between two types of blue, you would instinctively make a distinction between their shades ("This blue is darker/lighter!") whereas these older people would distinguish based on things in their present, shared world that best matched what they were being asked to describe ("This blue is like the sky/the sea!")

That's an important concept to keep in mind because ancient greek was very unique in that, in addition to this concept of colour being completely intertwined with physical objects (and therefore also acquiring the properties of these objects in the minds of the people), the ancient greeks also did not particularly care about distinguishing between different colour hues (that is, differences in specific individual colour) but rather they were entirely focused on a colour's value - that is, whether it was considered light or dark.

Taking all of this into consideration, the question 'what is the significance of the different colours in Ancient Greece' is a bit of a tricky one to answer because unlike say, Ancient Egyptian which has very clear colours (red, white, green), very clear physical objects that give those colours their property (the desert sand, the sun, people's skin) and very clear symbolic meanings that arose from the natures ascribed to those physical objects due to their influence on the people's lives (hostility, power, new life), Ancient Greece's colours and the perception of those colours was much more abstract and poetic, contingent on their understandings and perceptions of things like light and dark, the sense of touch or taste (sweet and bitter/wet and dry) and what quality was ascribed to the object whose colour is being perceived. Colour was a matter of cosmology, of philosophy and there were many different schools of thought on it from Empedocles' physicalist theories to Anaxagoras' realist theories.

All of this is to say, take the meanings I outlined in this handy-dandy table with a tablespoon of salt! These are based on my understanding of the language used to describe things in classical writings that have survived and my own bias towards Empedocles' physicalist theory of colour and the nature of colour which I also think is very useful for people into greek mythology as a whole due to it making clear links between various gods creating things from mixtures of the four basic elements of nature and the colours that are the result of these mixtures.

I hope this helps even a little and I very much encourage you to do some research into different Greek schools of thought when it comes to colour and the perception of colour as well as how colour affects/reflects the innate nature of all things!

(Also, slight extra note, I left out Kokkinos (scarlet/blood-red) from the table because I didn't really think it was relevant for this outline despite it definitely being an ancient colour. It's a bit difficult to find examples of it with the kind of descriptors Empedocles outlines and I don't want to make assumptions based on third hand knowledge on the greek concept of the nature of things. I'd like to believe it was addressed in more detail in Empedocles' original document - only a fragment of the original some two thousand lines have survived after all - it is confirmed that Empedocles spoke on the recipe for blood and flesh, an equal mixture of all four elements as opposed to bones' four parts fire, two parts earth and two parts water (which is why bones shine white, there's more fire than earth or water) - and I don't want to conject or make assumptions.

I also left out Erythros or basic/primary red according to Plato's list of basic colours because that seemed to have specifically been preferred by Egyptian Greeks according to linguistic data. If I opened up that can of worms with respect to the shared Egyptian-Greek colour language including the way the Greeks like many early peoples did not culturally perceive blue until the invention of Egypt's blue dyes then I would be writing forever and you would never get an actual clear answer about Greek colour symbolism separate and apart from Egyptian cultural influence lmfao. )

A few of the documents that helped me consolidate this information include Sassi's 2022 Philosophical Theories of Colour in Ancient Greek Thought and Ierodiakonou's Empedocles on Colour and Colour Vision. There are also a fair few translations and discussions of the fragments of Empedocles' On Nature still floating about - my copy is a somewhat archaic volume of Leonard's 1908 translation but I never went out searching for updated interpretations and translations of the text since its constantly referenced in perceptional philosophy papers LOL

Anyway, yeah, hope this helps! :D

[lupismaris]

Happy Baltimore Pride, the parade starts in 3 and a half hours and I'm already exhausted

[reel-fear]

Honestly, every single time the whole 'poppy playtime is a bendy rip-off' stuff ever shows up I find it all extremely unconvincing and silly.

For one thing, rip-off usually is meant to imply that it's a cheap lazy copy of a better more polished thing, and uh. Sorry but even from chapter 1? Poppy Playtime is a better game than Bendy, it has a simple but understandable story, the game manages to be thrilling, creepy, and very intense at times... I mean that Huggy chase in the vents ALONE puts it way above Batim for me.

I mean BATDR had the most slow stupid chase I've ever seen [and every other encounter with the ink demon is text telling u he's there and then a timer goes down and u get jumpscared] and batim's chases were either silly or just not nearly as theatric or terrifying as that.

When making the vent sequence I mean not only is it absolutely horrifying to realize how fast Huggy is in there but also it's so theatric and cool? The fact that you round a corner after thinking you escaped only to see a terrifying animation of that thing crawling toward you is awesome! I wish Bendy had stuff like that!

And all the stuff it shares with Bendy are generic things Bendy ripped from other horror games/media anyways. I'm not saying Poppy Playtime isn't inspired by Bendy I for sure think it is but Bendy is such a generic story that somehow fails to do tropes 100 other horror games have done any comparison only makes Poppy Playtime look better.

"It has employees being sacrificed for their company" That is not a concept Bendy invented, literally look at any of the sci-fi horror series Bendy is very inspired by. This is literally a twist in the original Alien.

"It has a scary woman forcing you to do tasks for her" Once again, not a concept Bendy invented, a scary mysterious person forcing you to do fetch-quests is a concept found in tons of horror media. And at least Poppy Playtime gave you a chase with her and let you defeat her, look at poor malice. She's barely on screen for more than 10 minutes before she gets stabbed.

"It has a cult worshipping the monster" This is something tons of horror games and media have done too. I mean In The Tall Grass has a guy who worships a giant magical rock in the middle of a grass maze, Bioshock [which Bendy has only been taking more and more direct inspiration from while failing to grab any of the compelling parts] also had a lot of themes of religion and cult-ish behavior, almost every horror media franchise has at one point done a cult thing.

Bendy couldn't even come up with a reason Sammy worships the ink demon, the best motivation we've ever gotten is just that 'he's crazzyyyy the ink made him insaneeee'. Who is the cheap rip-off here?

At least Poppy Playtime gave their cultist a motive for worshipping the monster + a proper boss fight that feels intense and looks awesome! Bendy didn't even let you kill Malice [she got stabbed in front of you and then just collapsed on the floor how thrilling] meanwhile you get to kill three of the villains in Poppy Playtime and the gameplay and action in those scenes have only gotten better as the game went on.

I mean Sammy walks into a room and goes "AAA SCARY I'M BEING MURDERED" then later shows up and for NO REASON sees a normal human man and assumes it's the ink demon before once again someone else kills him for you. In Poppy Playtime you defeat Catnap as he floods the world with this horrible nightmare-inducing gas that intensifies the color palette and his design. Fight off versions of him that are illusions that you need your flare gun for, then watch in a wonderful animation as he mistakes the monster for his savior before getting killed by it, in a brutal way I might add, which game are we accusing of being cheap, lazy garbage again?

I just find this argument to be people who Really Really need to find a reason to hate Poppy Playtime which I think is silly. The devs being weird, shady people is already enough reason to dislike the game, you don't need to invent reasons why secretly every part of the game is malicious or bad. But esp when I see Bendy fans saying they don't support Poppy Playtime or dislike it bc of its devs or even saying its cringe ummmm.

I have bad news about the fact Bendy's devs are worse and it took not one, but TWO over an hour long videos to cover it all. Plus the Bendy games are just the worse games in every aspect, if I could sell my batim copy for a copy of Poppy Playtime I wouldn't hesitate at all.

Saying this as a bendy fan, we have no right to be super judgy towards Poppy Playtime. If Poppy Playtime is embarrassing cringe, Bendy is too and is way more embarrassing of an interest. We shouldn't spread misinformation just because we all want to hate Poppy Playtime, you can dislike Poppy Playtime without making up a bunch of nonsense to justify it.

Honestly seeing people just blatantly be unfairly mean to Poppy Playtime only makes its critics look worse and makes it hard to take any backlash to the games seriously. Because surprise surprise if you spread misinformation to make a point people will quickly stop listening to Anything you have to say bc they won't trust you're telling the truth anymore.

[genesisvirus]

it's 2024 and we still have leafyishere clones thinking that it's funny to make edgy jokes about content that ultimately doesn't affect them. hate to be negative, cuz i mean it's your content you can do whatever you want with it, but on the other hand it's really annoying and those same people won't offer the same level of respect back. if the content isn't actively harmful stop acting like you're the bigger man for shitting on it? maybe? idk :/

[socrates2point0h]

What is youre favorite fact about Venezuela?

gotta be the dancing devils of yare. look at these absolute beasties

who else is doing it like this

[wastrelwoods]

imagining a world in which people chose to talk about BSE/vCJD in the same way they talk about kuru and made weird misinformed posts about how only isolated backward primitive cultures and crazy suicidal people eat beef because eating beef gives you a special rare illness that melts your brain into mush. oh is it more nuanced than that? is there some kind of deep internalized bias about the boundaries of correct human behavior that’s leading you to mythologize and fearmonger about one illness and not the other?

[a-eo-iu]

Selection of characters for a possible story set in 1900s northeast Brasil

Mira is a jagunço, a sort of gunslinger who works as hired protection. He used to be a cangaceiro (criminal gunslinger who operated in bands and often attacked farms and small cities), but his band fell apart, and he started working for the first farmer who caught his attention: nhô Carlos.

Nhô Carlos, a rich (and single) ranch owner, and Dona Ana, last heir of a powerful family of the region, are rival farmers/land owners. The two often clash over claims on each other's territories, and each has gathered a small personal army to protect their properties.

Sôr Sérgio is Carlos's most trusted employee and boss of the cowboys/ranch hands in his property. Mira often spends his time helping sôr Sérgio with the animals instead of doing his actual job of guarding the property.

Coronel Alexandre, who is not actually a colonel, is a captain of the Guarda Nacional, the imperial and early republic equivalent of the police. He's in charge of keeping the peace in the region the story is set in, and Mira is in charge of causing trouble, so you might guess they do Not like each other very much.

[ynwa4eva]

Mfw my friends send pics of their xmas eve outfits but because my parents are so alienated from catholic culture we simply dont celebrate it

[hillbilly---man]

Only 3 days until the lead singer of The Chicks and enemy of the right wing circa 2003 Natalie Maines's birthday!