#cultural information

[angstandhappiness]

Interesting

Cnetizens are asking OP why burning the lions

OP: Releasing the lion back to the mountains

Cnetizens:

[saja-star]

a phrase that kinda bothers me when talking about women's historical roles in europe is "cooking, cleaning, and taking care of the children." you hear it so often, those exact words in the same order even. and once you learn a little more you realize that the massive gaping hole in that list is fiberwork. im not an expert and have no hard numbers, but i wouldnt be surprised if fiberwork took up nearly as much time as the other three tasks combined, so it's not a trivial omission.

it's not a hot take to say that the mass amnesia about fiberwork is linked to the belittlement of women's work in geneal, but i do think there's a special kind of illusion that is cast by "cooking, cleaning, and taking care of the children." you hear that and think "well i cook and clean and take care of children (or i know someone who does) and i have a sense of how much work that is" and you know of course that cooking and cleaning were more laborious before modern technology, but still, you have a ballpark estimate you think, when in fact you are drastically underestimating the work load.

i also think that this just micharacterizes the role of women's work in livelihoods? cooking, cleaning, and taking care of the children are all sisyphean tasks that have to be repeated the next day. these are important, but not the whole picture. when we include all kinds of fiberwork—and other things, such as making candles or soap—women's work looks much more like manufacturing, a sphere we now associate more with men's work. i feel like women's connection to making and craftsmanship is often elided.

[benjaminallhope-fulltimemind]

just a handy little info chart on the spectrums of sexuality.

/Edit: I forgot to give credit this is a screenshot from a video made by a content creator called Lily Orchard you should check her channel out it's amazing

[teaboot]

When I was a kid, I regularly lost reading privileges for "having an attitude" and "acting out".

It wasn't as simple as being told not to read during other activities- one of the first times it happened, I remember being six years old, watching my stepfather pull fistfuls of books off my bookshelf and throw them to the floor in a heaping mess while I cried and asked him to stop.

It was weird. Every other adult I knew described me as exceptionally well-behaved, but at home, it was the opposite, and it was blamed on "learning bad habits from that shit you're reading".

Because I couldn't read at home, I spent all my free time at school in the library, reading with my friends.

When I grew up and moved away, I realized that my family life was toxic and abusive, and the "attitudes" I was being punished for were standing up for myself, standing up for my younger siblings, and resisting actual, real-life psychological abuse. Because I'd learned from what I'd read that my family wasn't normal, not like my parents said it was, and in my stories, the heroes were the people who spoke out when it was hard to.

It is insane to me that there are students right now who can't access books. It is insane that books are being outlawed. It is perverse that we are stealing away an entire generation's ability to contextualize their lives, to learn about the world around them, to develop critical thinking skills and express themselves and feel connected to the world or escape from it, whatever and whenever and however they need.

That is not how you raise a compassionate, thoughtful, powerful society.

That's how you process cattle.

It's fucking disgusting.

[buried-in-stardust]

A tea "gangster"

This is the gongfu method of brewing tea (功夫茶藝):

刮沫 (gua1mo4) Rotating the tilted lid around the outer edge of the cup to remove foam

搓茶 (cuo1cha2) Rotating the lid around the inside to press on the tea leaves and release their fragrance

搖香 (yao2xiang1) Putting the lid on, then tilting and turning the whole cup to let the excess spill out

入海 (ru4hai3) Pouring out the tea (first onto the "tea pet", then after refilling, into teacups)

蝶舞 (die2wu3) Turning over the saucer and place the cup on top

(There are more steps but OP didn't do them)

[housedyke]

The thing about Buffy is that it's been thoroughly established that she doesn't do casual sex. She rejects guys in high school who move too fast too soon, is devastated when she find out there isn't anything emotional between her and Parker, and makes no non-magical attempt to sleep with people she isn't in a relationship with

So option 1 is that she's decided Spike, of all people, will be the first time she has casual, no-feelings sex. Or, option 2, she knows they have some weird fucked up relationship but doesn't want to say it out loud

[parsabad]

Bādgir/ Iran's ancient windcatcher/ Iran

[atlaculture]

Cultural Fashion: Katara's Fire Nation Outfit

Was looking at some of my old posts and wanted to re-do a few of them, now that I'm 4 years older wiser.

Katara's Fire Nation outfit is inspired by the outfits worn during traditional Dai folk dance performances. These outfits are typically comprised of form-fitting tops that show off the midriff paired with flowing skirts or pants that emphasizes the elegant movements of the dancer. The necklace and other accessories that Katara wears are also reminiscent of the costume jewelry worn for these performances.

The Dai minority group refers to several Tai-speaking ethnic groups in southern China (Yunnan province) that are closely related to Lao and Thai people, both linguistically and culturally. They're a great inspiration for Fire Nation fashion. Fittingly, Katara debuts this outfit in the show's dancing-focused episode. Below are some examples of the elegance of Dai dance:

The "Peacock Dance" is the most famous Dai dance:

[finally-got-a-diagnosis]

Black Autistic Culture is people not believing you're autistic while also critiquing you on everything you said that was "disrespectful" and "rude" as well as telling you to learn how to talk right.

[nenestansunsthings]

having svsss au ideas beyond my station

thinking. shang qinghua goes on a mission as a young disciple to some town in fuckoff nowhere and finds himself in the qiu household. and there he finds a young shen jiu, undergoing the plot he originally intended for him and hadn't realised had become real and he's so young oh god hes so young why is he so small what do you mean that part was real, he hadn't kept it why is it real—

and he panics and sneaks him the Fuck out of that house

and he's not sure what to do but surely sending him to cang qiong will fuck up something in the plot and he can't come under even more investigation and cang qiong tryouts dont happen for months anyway and his system would probably never allow it (it doesnt. it would interfere with yue qingyuans story) but shen jiu is refusing to stay anywhere near this place and wants to learn cultivating to protect himself make sure nothing like this ever happens again and sqh panics harder and

calls mobei jun.

okay. on second thought, maybe this was a bad idea. but he stumbles over himself and shushes baby shen jiu's very understandable freaking out and asks his king for the first thing hes ever asked for other than his own life.

is there any way this human child could learn cultivation in the demon world?

[julijbee]

girlbossing too close to the sun.

[asparklethatisblue]

I cannot even begin to explain the cognitive dissonance of having grown up hearing of how my family survived the holocaust, of how life is sacred above all else and any other commandment… and then watching Israel invoke both religion and the Shoa while committing such violence and invoking the very same stuff that makes me think there's little worse?

Join protests, donate, try to make sure things can't be swept under the rug. I don't know what we can do to actually stop the genocide, but we also can't stop trying?

Donate to MAP - Medical Aid for Palestine

Or if you want a direct way to help a family, my friend Ahmed has a GFM as he's trying to afford food and winter supplies for his family. There is barely any food to be found, and if there is it's expensive, and his brother needs a waterproof tent

[centaurianthropology]

One thing that I think a lot of Disco Elysium meta misses (likely because a lot of it is very clearly written by young Americans writing from an intensely American-centric cultural perspective without even really realizing it) is that one of the singular and central themes of the game is massive-scale generational trauma in a home that is economically collapsing as its resources and people are being drained by an occupation.  People have noted that no one tries to help Harry, despite the fact his mental illness is incredibly obvious to everyone around him.  He tells Kim that he completely lost his memory, and Kim politely asks him to focus on the work.  He tells Gottlieb that he had a heart attack, and Gottlieb tells him that if he’s still alive it couldn’t have been that bad.  That he’ll drop dead sooner or later, but then so does everyone.

And that’s the most important thing: so does everyone.  Look at Martinaise.  Look at the world in which Harry lives.  It is not our own, but it is adjacent to ours.  More specifically, it is clearly adjacent to the states of the Eastern Bloc: overtaken and occupied by a faraway government that clearly doesn’t care about Revachol or its people.  And that is obvious in every tired face, every defeated citizen, everyone trying to eke out a little happiness or meaning in spite of the overwhelming trauma and damage around them.  The buildings are still half-destroyed.  The bullet holes are still in the walls.  The revolution was decades before, but it still feels to the people there like a fresh wound.  The number of men of Harry’s generation who are not alcoholic or otherwise deeply fucked up are very few.  Some, like Kim, hide it better, but the deeper you dig into his history, the more you realize how damaged Kim is.  He’s more than a little trigger happy, and hates that about himself, but he is a product of his environment: Kim’s entire life is seeing people he cared about shot and killed, so his instinct now is to shoot first himself, to protect those few people left who still matter to him.

Harry is not unique in his trauma.  He is a distillation of an entire culture of people who tried to rise up and make something beautiful, and were instead routed and occupied.  He is trapped between the occupation and the people on the ground, along with all the rest of the RCM.  Their authority comes from the occupying government, but it is implied that they were formed out of the remnants of the citizens militia which sprung up from Revachol itself as a way to try to mitigate some of the horrors being committed on its streets.  The Moralintern sure as hell wasn’t going to get their hands dirty, so they happily conscripted (and therefore could better control) this group, who are only recognized in certain places, and whose authority mostly amounts to giving out fines.  The RCM is corrupt, but it is corrupt in the same way its culture is.  Bribes are considered standard with them, not a moral failing, but a necessity, so long as those bribes are correctly logged as ‘donations’.  It’s how the RCM stays afloat, and the rest of Revachol completely understands that.  Everyone would take a bribe if it meant they kept eating.  Everyone would take a little under-the-table money if it meant keeping a roof over their heads.  The officersof the RCM certainly don’t make enough to see a doctor.  They have an in-house lazarus, and if he can’t fix them they just die.  Mental health care?  What mental health care?  Harry doesn’t get it for the same reason no one else does: it doesn’t really seem to exist.  There are no counselors, no psychologists, no psychiatrists.  How would they even start?  If the world is what is broken, if everyone is suffering a similar catastrophic amount, it makes sense that Harry’s trauma would simply get rolled up with all the rest.  Kim asks him to get on with the job because Harry’s suffering is not remarkable in Revachol.  He is one of an entire generation who have an astronomical number of orphans from the revolution, and so many younger people are left more or less orphans as their parents drink themselves into oblivion like Cuno’s father.  So Harry’s truly unique attribute is embodying all that trauma, having it all inside of him, filling him to bursting.

To really engage with the themes of the game, engaging first and foremost with the reality of Revachol is imperative.  Imposing our own reality onto Revachol, particularly if coming from an American perspective (which tend to have the habit of both viewing the world through an American lens and not realizing they’re doing it because they’ve never experienced a different lens), will always feel shallow to me because of this.

All that is to say, I would love to hear some more explicitly European meta about this game, and especially Eastern European meta.  If anyone can point me to some good, juicy essays from that perspective, I would be grateful!

[ignitesthestxrs]

there's something about the way people talk about john gaius (incl the way the author writes him) that is like. so absent of any connection to te ao māori that it's really discomforting. like even in posts that acknowledge him as not being white, they still talk about him like a white, american leftist guy in a way that makes it clear people just AREN'T perceiving him as a māori man from aotearoa.

and it's just really serves to hammer home how powerful and pervasive whiteness and american hegemony is. because TLT is probably the single most Kiwi series in years to explode on the global stage, and all the things i find fraught about it as a pākehā woman reading a series by a pākehā author are illegible to a greater fandom of americans discoursing about whether or not memes are a valid way of portraying queer love.

idk the part of my brain that lights up every time i see a capital Z printed somewhere because of the New Zealand Mentioned??? instinct will always be proud of these books and muir. but i find myself caught in this midpoint of excitement and validation over my culture finding a place on the global stage, frustration at how kiwi humour and means of conveying emotion is misinterpreted or declared facile by an international audience, frustrated also by how that international audience runs the characters in this book through a filter of american whiteness before it bothers to interpret them, and ESPECIALLY frustrated by how muir has done a pretty middling job of portraying te ao māori and the māoriness of her characters, but tht conversation doesn't circulate in the same way* because a big part of the audience doesn't even realise the conversation is there to be had.

which is not to say that muir has done a huge glaring racism that non-kiwis haven't noticed or anything, but rather that there are very definitely things that she has done well, things that she has done poorly, things that she didn't think about in the first book that she has tacked on or expanded upon in the later books, that are all worthy of discussion and critique that can't happen when the popular posts that float past my dash are about how this indigenous man is 'guy who won't shut up about having gone to oxford'

*to be clear here, i'm not saying these conversations have never happened, just that in terms of like, ambient posts that float round my very dykey dash, the discussions and meta that circulate on this the lesbian social media, are overwhelmingly stripped of any connection to aotearoa in general, let alone te ao māori in specific. and because of the nature of american internet hegemony this just,,,isn't noticed, because how does a fish know it's in the ocean u know? i have seen discussions along these lines come up, and it's there if i specifically go looking for it, but it's not present in the bulk of tlt content that has its own circulatory life and i jut find that grim and a part of why the fandom is difficult to engage with.

[beebfreeb]

One of the most heart-wrenching things that've ever happened to me occurred while trying to research the Super Paper Mario art style.

"Ohh what a beautiful and interesting art style! It is very distinctive! I wonder if anyone else has tried or wanted to try breaking it down and replicating it?" Obliviously, I typed in Super Paper Mario Art Style into my search bar... only to find many people calling it ugly and saying they hate it.

This simply could not be... permanent damage was done to my artistic soul.

No joy? No whimsy in this world? No love of computer graphics? Of a certain era of clipart? Of the art that was born from the computer and is difficult to replicate without one? Of the art made when this was something new and fascinating? No love for something unique?

Super Paper Mario don't listen to all those haters I love your geometric art style influenced by what shapes are easily drawn on a computer and the smooth mechanical interpolation within your animations. I love you. Also the music is banger.

[jesncin]

Thinking about Disney and how we talk about Cultural Representation

(concept art by Scott Watanabe)

Old essay originally written on Cohost in November 2023. With additions.

With all the promo stuff about Disney's upcoming animated film Wish, I can't help but think about Raya and the Last Dragon again. I spent a year intensively researching things about that movie and the discourse surrounding it for a series of videos on Xiran Jay Zhao's channel, and oh boy did that reveal a lot about the current way we talk about cultural representation in casual media criticism.

Lately we've grown a habit of looking at signifiers to culture, things like a cultural dish, a nod to a martial arts style, a piece of clothing, maybe a hairstyle, a weapon and so on, and then projecting a bunch of intentions onto the work regardless of authorial intent. I witnessed this a bunch of times in discussions surrounding Raya and the Last Dragon.

You basically get a bunch of 4d chess-style justifications for the lazy implementation of culture in Raya.

random examples cuz there's too many to name:

The movie will do something like make the leaders of the villain nation women, and people immediately assumed it was some kind of bespoke reference to Minangkabau matriarchical society.

the art book of Raya specifically stated that they purposely misplaced things as a stylistic fantasy choice "we could take something that is known and place it in an unexpected location, like coral in the desert and cacti in the snow". But when people saw a water buffalo placed in the desert they assumed it was some super clever environmental story decision.

The movie will tell you it includes things like Borobudur, Angkor wat, Keris, and most people will take their word for it without hesitation. Never mind that Southeast Asians could barely recognize these nods to our culture through how amalgamated the designs are.

(early concept art by Scott Watanabe)

Moving forward, I think we need to talk less about "what" parts of a culture are being represented in these movies, and more about HOW they're being included, we need to ask:

What is this piece of media's relationship with the cultures it represents?

Because Raya and the Last Dragon is not a cultural movie, it's a monolith film pitched and written by white people and a Mexican director with 2 SEA writers added later in production to avoid backlash. Culture serves the purpose of aesthetic set dressing in the film, as opposed to something that informs its themes and characters.

it wasn't even initially pitched as a Southeast Asian movie. The white writers who pitched it were going for a vague East Asian sci fi fantasy story under the working title "Dragon Empire". Southeast Asian culture was an aesthetic change added much later.

This is what happens when a corporation tries to put representational value on a shallow aesthetic. Because of the way Disney constantly marketed Raya as this big authentic cultural film, it primes its audience to read cultural intention in the most benign details. And when we get lost in the details, we lose sight of the bigger picture.

Contextualizing Cultural media criticism

(visual development art by April Liu)

We need to start demanding more context in our analysis. The next time we see a reference to culture in media we consume, take a step back and ask what purpose it serves in the narrative. And most importantly!! What Is Its Relationship With The Culture It Represents? We shouldn't just accept things at face value.

start asking yourself,

through what lens is this cultural dish and its spicy flavors being presented to us? Are the customs surrounding the food being respected?

If martial arts or dance is represented, how is it translated in the adaptation? Are you getting generic hollywood-fu or are you seeing specific movements with purpose and motivation? Are the philosophies or spiritual contexts of these traditions present in the text?

Are the clothing, hairstyles, and presentation of the characters being de-yassified through a colonial filter? Is the non-conformity of the cultures' different framework for gender presentation being adjusted to fit a more recognizable binary?

If language is present, what role does it serve? Is it presented as other through being exclusively used by villainous beings? Is it being made a monolith as one "non-English" language?

is this temple actually a place of worship or is it just a set piece for a goddang Indiana jones booby trap action fight sequence

This way, instead of unquestionably defending a piece of media because a character wore a traditional outfit one time, or because some characters took their shoes off at a temple, or because there were Arnis sticks in that one fight scene, we can approach the text with a more nuanced and holistic understanding of how culture informs narrative.

To quote Haunani K. Trask (author of From A Native Daughter):

“Cultural people have to become political… Our culture can’t just be ornamental and recreational. That’s what Waikiki is. Our culture has to be the core of our resistance. The core of our anger. The core of our mana. That’s what culture is for.”