Well, when you're young, girls can be boys and boys can be girls.
It's a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world.
Except for Lola.
Well, when you're young, girls can be boys and boys can be girls.
It's a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world.
Except for Lola.
did you even watch the show, because from this post i'm assuming you didnt watch more than a couple episodes
Like some twenty-ish episodes, I think. But mainly only when I was waiting for something else to air, so I can't really even remember most of them. The stuff that I've seen was gross, but please do tell if it was actually very different from what I think. There's honestly a reasonable chance that I'm completely wrong.
@Panda:
It's a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world.
Except for Lola.
Please no. Stop. xD
Just took both of my online midterms and aced both of them without using the books
Back after a third day of construction work.
Today I couldn't even stay at our subcontracting company HQ so I waited outside for my dad to gwt the money.
As fo the reason: Basically imagine someone dumping a container filled with trash into a room that's not been aired for a few months, and have dirty people drinking boxed wine wandering inside, one of them who I've never seen with pants on.
L-O-L-A, Lola.
Today finishes a 6 day work week, I can finally sleep in tomorrow.
Today finishes a 6 day work week, I can finally sleep in tomorrow.
So I guess moving on from your obsession is movin' along then?
gj dude, even if it seems mundane, it sounds huge
@Print:
Do you have an entirely free choice of topic?
Basicially. I was planning to argue against the practicality of the "gangster" image (pants sagging, jewelry, sideways cap, etc.)
@Monkey:
So I guess moving on from your obsession is movin' along then?
gj dude, even if it seems mundane, it sounds huge
There has just been an insane amount of work at the family business, been working since Sunday. I'm starting college next Monday and am focusing everything towards that now. Yeah its moving along thanks, no more spending all my money on figures.
L-O-L-A, Lola.
–- Update From New Post Merge ---
Basicially. I was planning to argue against the practicality of the "gangster" image (pants sagging, jewelry, sideways cap, etc.)
Sounds interesting. Good luck with that :D
@Toraish:
Like, surely you would say that despite the atmosphere being dead as a rock in places like Savannah or LA or Austin, TX, those places still have stores that sell Halloween costumes, decorations, and sweets? And that it's either becoming or has become a part of their yearly traditions as well?
I'm thinking of my personal experience with it though, that it fits better in a colder woodsier area. Rather than flat swamps and dry medditerrarnean esque climates.
What I mean is that it seems to me that the reason Halloween has become a thing in other parts of the US in at least some form is that it's being subconsciously marketed as an "American" tradition in a way that allows it to bypass all negative cultural connotations it might have.
It's not a New England thing. It just looks better here is all I was saying lol.
And what negative connotation? The only people who see it as having negative connotation are crazy religious people.
It's easy to love something that is made to seem fun by popular media if it has no clear downsides. Kids are all over things like that. Cool costumes? Candy? Doing stuff with friends? Heck yes! But I don't think it's as big amongst the Native Americans or immigrant groups with their own strong cultural traditions.
Native Americans except on reservations (and even then) are LONG since not some exclave culture. They would definitely.
And uh…immigrants from when? The only people who wouldn't would be first gen immigrants. And their kids might still.
That's actually a nice thing about Halloween and Thanksgiving, they are national holidays, but not ethnic in any way. Anyone who comes here can participate and join in.
Unlike say Christmas or certain holidays in nation-states like Finland.
A kid whose parents moved from...Burma can go to class and do Halloween stuff and it's no issue. He won't have to feel left out. Granted he will when Christmas rolls around. But the other two big kid holidays? No problem. I think that's kind of nice.
Or am I really just reading way too much into it and it's only spreading because people think it's a fun thing to do?
That's exactly it.
But that's not the point. I'm not saying that mass-produced crap and homemade stuff are in conflict or that such an imagined conflict would be significant. I'm saying that your idea of commercialism only working when there's already a recipient audience for it is only half true. Commercialism only works when there are people buying stuff that producers produce and retailers sell, but what about when the audience is simultaneously being created by cultural marketing from the same place of origin?
Like what, McDonalds cutting beef in India?
You can't say that the fact that there are willing customers proves that it fits the modern Finnish calendar when the customers are those who romanticize "American" culture to begin with - especially when it's trampling under foot some of our own old festivities.
Do these people grab EVERYTHING we do lol? Like ok they like this one thing, but I bet they aren't too keen on Nascar.
Yeah, I know, it's pretty shabby if you think of it solely as economic colonialism. It really isn't that at all. But what I'd argue it is is cultural colonialism. Obviously you can present the argument that the old cultural traditions weren't very strong or significant to begin with if something like Halloween advertised in films and cartoons ported over from the States is actually enough to outgrow and replace them (and I can attest to that, me and my folks haven't probably ever celebrated them), but it doesn't remove the awful feeling of your personal space being invaded by something foreign that is taking away from you and replacing your old things with new that only they and their fans think are better in some way.
It's a borderline case of whether that's cultural protectionism that I'm advocating here, and I would like to think not because that would go in the same vein of France banning headscarves and veils that I am constantly so offended about, but I'm honestly both scared of it and disturbed by it. The fun part of it all is absolutely cool by me, I think it's a fun idea, but when it's also a commercial, money-grubbing celebration that has no roots here but the aping of several TV shows and is replacing some of our old traditions, it freaks me and many people out.
Look I do understand this, even if I think it's ultimately small potatoes. I think to some extent you also need to understand there isn't so much an American culture, as just a huge gumbo of thousands of different hands of origin. Culture here is generally rootless, America being rootless. So it just doesn't seem so much like our roots going into your soil when it just doesn't involve roots at all I guess.
But I get it. But at the same time I dunno dude, I think it is the Old World's interest to just…get over that to some degree.
On one hand your culture won't disappear, it will change a bit, but it won't die.
And on the other hand, welcome to the modern world. I don't mean "WELCOME TO AMERICAN CONTROL HOHOHO", I mean welcome to porous cultural borders and increasingly mixed up nation states. The immigrants are coming, they're not gonna be like you. And that's not some crass consumerism, that's real people looking for a better home.
If American culture imploded tomorrow, and Finland returned to being Finnish as fuck...the immigrants would still be coming or trying. Orthodox Slavs and Muslim Arabs and whatever else. Things that aren't Protestant Finns. And your culture would still be forced to evolve.
And the mindset has to change.
If America proves anything it's that even a rootless culture can be powerful.
And America does have it's local cultures and some that have been melted into a larger thing.
My region that I never shut up about used to have a strong solid Protestant English unity to it across the board. Then it was assailed by Catholics and Ashkenazi Jews from Ireland, Italy, Poland and Russia.
Now we are a hybrid of these things and continue to change. Now Puerto Ricans are all over, the great migration brought a bunch of black people from the South here, lots of Hindu South Asians are moving in, as are various Muslim groups to New Haven. If that trend continues we'll grow sizable Hindu and Muslim populations alongside our sizable Protestant and Catholic and Jewish and
It just keeps going, and it's GOOD. It's fine, by blood I'm connected to that assimilated old Anglo-Protestant order. It's part of my heritage I guess. This is the future for Europe, rich Europe anyway. And it's not something to be feared. You might have an ancestor that might be 1/4 Finnish, 1/2 Iranian, and 1/4 Ukrainian. Is that so bad?
Music is a different beast, though. While it's born of culture-specific undercurrents and (sometimes) attitudes towards things that could be talked about in similar terms than what I'm describing Halloween with here, it always has a deeper universal appeal because it touches emotions and is aimed at a listener with the purpose of making them feel something.
Dumb pop music pushed by huge companies really isn't at all different from the way you're describing Halloween.
I mean this is your Eurovision representative this past year.
Even in the case of stuff like Black Metal where the lyrics can be completely out of this world, it still conveys a message.
Black Metal is pretty much Halloween for young men if you think about it dude.
Dress up for thrills and social experience?
And music rarely ever replaces existing traditions.
Uhhhh… so do you hear as much folk music on the radio or is it all like stuff of British/American origin.
That has happened in some smaller circles where people have shifted from one thing to another over time, but rarely nationwide. Take us for instance. We're probably the most "Metal" country in the world, but still our own original music "scene" is alive and well and keeps producing things for people to enjoy. We even "produce" the most world-class conductors per capita, lol, if that amounts to anything. That's real diversification.
Conductors? Of European Classical Music? That's not Finnish either though!
Yes, there is the fact that the Halloween tradition is also about making people feel something, i.e. fun, but the version we're getting here is honestly less about that and more about getting people to buy as many Halloween-related things as possible.
But those people buying those things, what do they think.
We're not even encouraged to go trick-or-treating, they just keep selling us pricy special candy that they call Halloween merchandise.
So then that's not Halloween.
Heh, that's actually a bloody good question now that I think of it. Most Japanese stuff isn't any different, really, except for the few rare gems that everyone everywhere agrees are something special. Honestly? I think it's probably because the first few things that ever landed here a few decades ago were Miyazaki's masterpieces that everyone thought were profound and taught good things,
Yeah dude, because the way you're talking about American stuff makes it sound like well…One Piece should be the target of your ire as well.
Exactly. Before this post, I hadn't ever even heard of Jabberjaw.
Jabberjaw is like…what every fucking American cartoon from the 70's was like lol.
Evil? Menacing and scary, maybe, but they hardly ever did anything that was considered actually dangerous or harmful to anyone. They boasted about making soup of the gnomes, but never actually did, and whenever they would catch someone they more or less just did weird things with them like little kids do with small animals that they might catch. Don't tell me you've never caught a frog and dangled it from one of its feet (before realizing that it might be hurting and then letting it go, wait was that just me?).
To a little kid though it's obvious they are Bad Guys, and the gnomes are Good Guys. How is that different from Thundercats or whatever?
They're more harmless because the audience is younger, but they're still Bad Guys. It's black and white.
But when it comes to stuff like PPG, yeah no, it's not a show that I approve of at all. No, you're right, it's not very serious, and listing it next to a bunch of Superhero comics (that I haven't read either, btw) that can be very grimdark and serious in tone is just stupid. But the thing is that its target audience was little kids, or at least here it was.
PPG was older kids stuff. Like latter primary school. I know my parents wouldn't have let me watch it at 7 or whatever.
And while you can say that kids of age 5-10 enjoy watching stuff like that, I think it's absolutely appalling that kids of that age are taught that people who are asses are always asses no matter what and that it's right to beat the snot out of them if they don't stop.
They're taught what? You're making American kids seem really sophisticated lol. Like we were just able to naturally parse how silly and post-modern PPG was.
Like it was ridiculous as hell on purpose. You would RUIN that by forcing in solemn moralizing. It's supposed to be absurd. It's the very definition of a cartoon.
I mean dude, come on.
I hate that kind of thinking and I would rather see toons that try to explain why bad guys might behave the way they do and that maybe even show ways of helping them out.
There were cartoons like that. But you're ignoring tone.
Heck Batman for instance you always had a backstory for the villains, and they were usually tragic. That's a dark grim show.
Meanwhile stuff like PPG is pure goofy crazy, it has no place there.
Let's think of a American cultural cornerstone, Star Wars. The entire thing is like a huge redemption story of not just a villain, but the ultimate villain
I agree that I hate that sort of stuff in especially serious stuff. It's why as a kid I could never enjoy the Redwall series (British btw), those books were just retardedly black and white. To the point of seemingly like thinly veiled racism.
@Monkey:
That's actually a nice thing about Halloween and Thanksgiving, they are national holidays, but not ethnic in any way. Anyone who comes here can participate and join in.
Uhhh.
@Monkey:
PPG was older kids stuff. Like latter primary school. I know my parents wouldn't have let me watch it at 7 or whatever.
I was watching that shit at like, 5. But then again, I was also watching Law & Order.
Uhhh.
It's ethnicless, national but ethnicless.
Like the 4th of July.
In a European country a similar holiday might be connected to the ethnic group of the country.
Like ON THAT DAY THE GREAT STRUGGLE OF THE SLOBABIEN PEOPLE AGAINST THE TERBS WAS REWARDED, and that little difference of ethnicity as opposed to nationalism? It may seem small but it's huge, trust me. It's the same distinction that means Chrissie comes here and becomes instantly American, and that if it was the other way around I would not be Cypriot…ever.
I was watching that shit at like, 5. But then again, I was also watching Law & Order.
My parents were stricter than average I admit lol.
@Monkey:
It's ethnicless, national but ethnicless.
Like the 4th of July.
Uhhh kind of? But I know plenty of people who refuse to celebrate Thanksgiving for pretty obvious reasons. And then you have my nutjob family who don't celebrate anything cause of religion, but they're an outlier. :P
@Monkey:
My parents were stricter than average I admit lol.
Nah, it's just that my upbringing was comparable to Helga Pataki's.
Uhhh kind of? But I know plenty of people who refuse to celebrate Thanksgiving for pretty obvious reasons
Yeah the origin thing. But most people who celebrate it, it's not a celebration of some myth about pilgrims and their best buds 4 ever the indians.
It's a day off from work you spend with as much family as possible with a gratefulness theme.
Like people don't sit around going "GOSH WE WERE THE BEST OF FRIENDS WITH ALL INDIANS FORVER." Hell the "we" is kind of confusing and meaningless for most people anyway lol.
@Monkey:
Yeah the origin thing. But most people who celebrate it, it's not a celebration of some myth about pilgrims and their best buds 4 ever the indians.
It's a day off from work you spend with as much family as possible with a gratefulness theme.Like people don't sit around going "GOSH WE WERE THE BEST OF FRIENDS WITH ALL INDIANS FORVER." Hell the "we" is kind of confusing and meaningless for most people anyway lol.
Yeah, you're right about that. I guess I'm just having flashbacks to school, where they made you construct those artificial turkeys and wear those pilgrim/Indian costumes (and some teachers like to be dicks and assign the costumes in a very specific way). Also, this reminds me of my town's Mission, though it's kind of unrelated… There's a plaque somewhere that says "Thank you to the friendly Indians who helped us build this Mission" or something like that. Pretty funny.
I went to a Catholic School and nobody there saw anything wrong in celebrating Bonfire Night, despite its origins.
Though for a Year 8 history assignment, we were all asked to write essays on whether the Gunpowder Plot was a set-up orchestrated by an agent provocateur.
We do Bonfire Night in a similar way you do Halloween, I guess. It's a way of challenging the gradual onset of winter and its cold and darkness with light and warmth.
@Print:
I went to a Catholic School and nobody there saw anything wrong in celebrating Bonfire Night, despite its origins.
Though for a Year 8 history assignment, we were all asked to write essays on whether the Gunpowder Plot was a set-up orchestrated by an agent provocateur.
We do Bonfire Night in a similar way you do Halloween, I guess. It's a way of challenging the gradual onset of winter and its cold and darkness with light and warmth.
Wait are you talking about Guy Fawkes day? We wear that guy's face on our faces over here.
Wait are you talking about Guy Fawkes day? We wear that guy's face on our faces over here.
That whole thing has spoiled my enjoyment of V for Vendetta.
Everytime I read or hear someone ranting about the history of Thanksgiving, I never see how it connects to just eating food and talking about life around a dinner table. Must be a global conspiracy.
@Print:
I went to a Catholic School and nobody there saw anything wrong in celebrating Bonfire Night, despite its origins.
Though for a Year 8 history assignment, we were all asked to write essays on whether the Gunpowder Plot was a set-up orchestrated by an agent provocateur.
We do Bonfire Night in a similar way you do Halloween, I guess. It's a way of challenging the gradual onset of winter and its cold and darkness with light and warmth.
In England maybe, but I've seen vids of some seriously nasty Northern Irish bonsfire nights among the Unionists.
Like masses of little kids throwing irish flags and stuff into the fire and shouting "FUCK TEH POPE" to the approval of their elders 0_o.
This being from the past decade.
@Monkey:
In England maybe, but I've seen vids of some seriously nasty Northern Irish bonsfire nights among the Unionists.
Like masses of little kids throwing irish flags and stuff into the fire and shouting "FUCK TEH POPE" to the approval of their elders 0_o.
This being from the past decade.
Ah yes, well, Northern Ireland (and parts of Glasgow) are a bit different in that regard :/
Everytime I read or hear someone ranting about the history of Thanksgiving, I never see how it connects to just eating food and talking about life around a dinner table. Must be a global conspiracy.
I don't understand your point here. For most Americans, Christmas ain't about some bearded dude dyin' on the cross, either.
@Monkey:
I'm thinking of my personal experience with it though, that it fits better in a colder woodsier area. Rather than flat swamps and dry medditerrarnean esque climates.
It's not a New England thing. It just looks better here is all I was saying lol.
Lol, okay, point taken. I thought it sounded pretty weird considering how widespread I thought Halloween was in the States, but hey, assumptions. We all make those.
And what negative connotation? The only people who see it as having negative connotation are crazy religious people.
Native Americans except on reservations (and even then) are LONG since not some exclave culture. They would definitely.
And uh…immigrants from when? The only people who wouldn't would be first gen immigrants. And their kids might still.
That's actually a nice thing about Halloween and Thanksgiving, they are national holidays, but not ethnic in any way. Anyone who comes here can participate and join in.
Unlike say Christmas or certain holidays in nation-states like Finland.
A kid whose parents moved from...Burma can go to class and do Halloween stuff and it's no issue. He won't have to feel left out. Granted he will when Christmas rolls around. But the other two big kid holidays? No problem. I think that's kind of nice.
I meant a negative connotation as in the feeling of a particular newer tradition taking over the role of something old and cherished and replacing it. Like, say, if some first generation Bulgarian immigrant family thought that the US Halloween is overwhelming their own thing. They will no doubt find a way of uniting the two traditions eventually, but in the process something might get lost because of it's hard to maintain everything. It's kind of how culture works, yeah, but it's pretty sad.
That's exactly it.
Aight, keeping that in mind from now. I think I kind of associated the non-ethnicity with the idea of it being American there, but that's probably exaggerating what it's like a lot. Like it probably has had something to do with the ease by which the Halloween tradition has spread and has been adopted by different groups of people, but it's not too important.
Do these people grab EVERYTHING we do lol? Like ok they like this one thing, but I bet they aren't too keen on Nascar.
Of course they don't take everything, but you probably know the archetype of people who are so tired of something old that they riot against it by breaking the norms and absorbing outside influence. That's the kind of people who, always in the beginning, do stuff like that. But then again, that only leads to new cultural traditions forming so it probably isn't a bad thing in and of itself.
Look I do understand this, even if I think it's ultimately small potatoes. I think to some extent you also need to understand there isn't so much an American culture, as just a huge gumbo of thousands of different hands of origin. Culture here is generally rootless, America being rootless. So it just doesn't seem so much like our roots going into your soil when it just doesn't involve roots at all I guess.
But I get it. But at the same time I dunno dude, I think it is the Old World's interest to just…get over that to some degree.
On one hand your culture won't disappear, it will change a bit, but it won't die.
And on the other hand, welcome to the modern world. I don't mean "WELCOME TO AMERICAN CONTROL HOHOHO", I mean welcome to porous cultural borders and increasingly mixed up nation states. The immigrants are coming, they're not gonna be like you. And that's not some crass consumerism, that's real people looking for a better home.
If American culture imploded tomorrow, and Finland returned to being Finnish as fuck...the immigrants would still be coming or trying. Orthodox Slavs and Muslim Arabs and whatever else. Things that aren't Protestant Finns. And your culture would still be forced to evolve.
And the mindset has to change.
If America proves anything it's that even a rootless culture can be powerful.
And America does have it's local cultures and some that have been melted into a larger thing.
My region that I never shut up about used to have a strong solid Protestant English unity to it across the board. Then it was assailed by Catholics and Ashkenazi Jews from Ireland, Italy, Poland and Russia.
Now we are a hybrid of these things and continue to change. Now Puerto Ricans are all over, the great migration brought a bunch of black people from the South here, lots of Hindu South Asians are moving in, as are various Muslim groups to New Haven. If that trend continues we'll grow sizable Hindu and Muslim populations alongside our sizable Protestant and Catholic and Jewish and
It just keeps going, and it's GOOD. It's fine, by blood I'm connected to that assimilated old Anglo-Protestant order. It's part of my heritage I guess. This is the future for Europe, rich Europe anyway. And it's not something to be feared. You might have an ancestor that might be 1/4 Finnish, 1/2 Iranian, and 1/4 Ukrainian. Is that so bad?
And here I have to say no. It's absolutely not bad at all, not by any stretch of imagination. There's only a few things that annoy me and make me as frustrated as those extremely conservative attitudes that advocate some imaginary cultural purism that doesn't exist and suggest actions like closing the borders and stopping immigration to make sure it never get sullied. And you heard me right, there are actually people here who want to shut the doors and let no one in so that the proud Finnish culture would not get muddled. It's ridiculous. And it's scary as hell. Good thing it's only a very small minority, but regardless.
I really really love the 21st century porous world. The human civilization has finally come so far that our knowledge and our technological innovations are finally making it possible for everyone to realize that we're but a mass of ultimately very similar individuals that can all communicate and interact with one another. Watching the world change for better bit by bit through that interaction and spread of culture is so amazing. It's hard to find words for how beautiful it is. We're definitely still very far from a utopistic Global society, but we're getting there.
But then there are things such as this case of the commercial "non-Halloween" spreading here that are ugly and that disturb me a lot. I'm a cultural naturalist, for the lack of a better term, and I kind of believe that the globalization of cultures should be voluntary and should always come from people who take the initiative and introduce first themselves and then other people around them to new forms of culture. It's simply the best way because it's the purest one. It spurs out of genuine curiosity and interest.
I hate this so called non-Halloween because it was weaved out of thin air, mostly on the basis of advanced 21st century hearsay, without understanding anything about the atmosphere and the culture of the original celebration, and was insidiously brought into the knowledge of people who like costumes and colours and spirits and candy by marketing spoofs only. It's man-made, and it's hollow. What makes it even worse is that it is, as I said, overwhelming an old cultural tradition of our own that is swiftly losing ground over here. It's very ironic, too, that the celebration that it is sucking dry just so happens to be the old Finnish Halloween that was just transformed into a Christian thing here with the arrival of the church about a thousand years ago.
But I can't blame the people who dig the Halloween stuff either, to be honest. You have pointed out in a way that's much more lenient than I would have been to myself that there are always those who start doing things because they enjoy it. The people buying all that mass-produced Halloween junk? They wouldn't spend a cent on it if they didn't like it. And that's exactly how new cultural things get created, like I already said above too. I should be liking it if anything. It's just very frustrating to see something being done in good spirit actually kill something else because people are not aware.
My apologies, by the way, for anyone who was somehow offended by me saying that Halloween sucks. It doesn't. It's just the way in which it has manifested here that kind of does.
Dumb pop music pushed by huge companies really isn't at all different from the way you're describing Halloween.
I mean this is your Eurovision representative this past year.
Ughhh, you got me, I was hoping I could avoid discussing this thing. The song contest is just a bad joke, so I'm not even going to go into that (we only send bad underground artists that no one's ever heard of there), but pop music is definitely a thing. And lol, as you can probably guess, I hate it. But I have to admit that I haven't really ever thought of it in the same way, I just hate it because it's mostly braindead and just… not very interesting.
Music, I think, as much as you might want to argue against me with the pop music thing, doesn't really do the whole replacing thing. Sure the amount of what types of music gets played the most and on most public venues varies from time to time, but seldom does a new genre of music completely subvert some older one. They always stick around as another form of music that just recedes in popularity. And I think it's because you can't really kill things off by creating new music in that sense. Every genre has such a distinctive sound that we automatically compartmentalize them as different things.
Whether the same applies to cultural traditions, I'm not entirely sure. But I don't think so.
Black Metal is pretty much Halloween for young men if you think about it dude.
Dress up for thrills and social experience?
Heh yeah, I give you that one. I was thinking of that when I wrote that paragraph and hoped you wouldn't catch on.
Conductors? Of European Classical Music? That's not Finnish either though!
Mmhm, but again, diversification through the birth of new things. It's not originally Finnish, but it became that through people starting to like it, and it didn't replace anything at all so it's all good.
To a little kid though it's obvious they are Bad Guys, and the gnomes are Good Guys. How is that different from Thundercats or whatever?
They're more harmless because the audience is younger, but they're still Bad Guys. It's black and white.
It's only different because it's explicitly made clear to the kids watching that they're not bad apples who are rotten to the core but are just misbehaving poor creatures who aren't really that bad if you get over how they act. Yeah, it's black and white because that's the easiest way to tell kids of that age a story that entrances them, but there are different ways of handling what black and white is and how it should be regarded. That's my point.
PPG was older kids stuff. Like latter primary school. I know my parents wouldn't have let me watch it at 7 or whatever.
They're taught what? You're making American kids seem really sophisticated lol. Like we were just able to naturally parse how silly and post-modern PPG was.
Like it was ridiculous as hell on purpose. You would RUIN that by forcing in solemn moralizing. It's supposed to be absurd. It's the very definition of a cartoon.
I mean dude, come on.
Mm, okay, I'm seriously starting to think that I haven't watched enough PPG to make an accurate assessment of what it was meant to be like. That clip? Clearly very intelligent, lol. I honestly thought that PPG was aimed at kids of ages 5-10 or 7-12 at most because that's how it was advertised here.
@Print:
Though for a Year 8 history assignment, we were all asked to write essays on whether the Gunpowder Plot was a set-up orchestrated by an agent provocateur.
I remember doing something like that! Isn't that actually a legit debate though? :p
–-
I feel the need to confess on this topic of discussion that the actual happening of Christmas pretty much passes me by. Like I've often kind of vaguely registered that it's Christmas Day on Christmas Day in this sort of "Oh yeah, it's Christmas today, isn't it?" in much the same way I do Easter. Usually prompted by seeing the calendar, what's on TV, and/or my parents being off work.
I think it was a couple of years ago, I was in Pakistan over Christmas. In the run-up, I was in Islamabad (it's fucking freezing there. I am so glad for decent insulation and central heating. And windows.) I was kind of amused that I was reminded it was nearly Christmas by some one shop selling Christmas cards~
I remember doing something like that! Isn't that actually a legit debate though? :p
Very much so, and the evidence is pretty strong that it was at least in some regards a set-up. It's nothing new for governments to do this, after all. But obviously my Catholic school had its own agenda in setting that question for Year 8s, back when history is mandatory and not particularly in-depth (I'm a history grad).
I feel the need to confess on this topic of discussion that the actual happening of Christmas pretty much passes me by. Like I've often kind of vaguely registered that it's Christmas Day on Christmas Day in this sort of "Oh yeah, it's Christmas today, isn't it?" in much the same way I do Easter. Usually prompted by seeing the calendar, what's on TV, and/or my parents being off work.
I think it was a couple of years ago, I was in Pakistan over Christmas. In the run-up, I was in Islamabad (it's fucking freezing there. I am so glad for decent insulation and central heating. And windows.) I was kind of amused that I was reminded it was nearly Christmas by some one shop selling Christmas cards~
My parents are quite religious and that's why my Christmas never seemed to match up to most people's. Christmas Day would be a case of waking up, getting dressed up for church, church, greeting people after church, heading home and then helping my parents do chores to get the house ready for extended family, then hosting that extended family for several hours, and maybe some presents at the very end of the day if my parents weren't exhausted…it wasn't actually all that fun, and I always felt we were 'doing it wrong'
@Print:
My parents are quite religious and that's why my Christmas never seemed to match up to most people's. Christmas Day would be a case of waking up, getting dressed up for church, church, greeting people after church, heading home and then helping my parents do chores to get the house ready for extended family, then hosting that extended family for several hours, and maybe some presents at the very end of the day if my parents weren't exhausted…it wasn't actually all that fun, and I always felt we were 'doing it wrong'
My parents are quite religious and therefore decided that there shall be no celebration of Christmas in our house :p
But to me that sounds pretty fun :p Well, chores are chores, but otherwise . . .
But then what do I know about Christmas.
My parents are quite religious and therefore decided that there shall be no celebration of Christmas in our house :p
But to me that sounds pretty fun :p Well, chores are chores, but otherwise . . .
But then what do I know about Christmas.
I ended up deciding that the True Christmas I knew about from TV was as much as a charade as a Perfect Life. A constructed ideal that reality would never quite meet, and berating reality over it was turning something that could be quite fun into something depressing. But obviously this wasn't when I was 6 or 7 anymore.
Apparently Christmas is super popular in a way in the Muslim middle east, like obviously a secular way, but people really dig the atmosphere or something??
Like I read about how Turkey they even market Christmas sales without the Christmas at malls.
And come to think of it, one of the most interesting stereotype busting things I saw in North Cyprus was a big ol' public Christmas lights tree display thing in the middle of a roundabout green, right across from a mosque.
Funny that this makes sense to me, my whole nuclear family is 0% religious. Even my mom was raised a-religiously (dad is a lapsed catholic).
But we still do all the stuff, just because…well it's nice.
I mean of course my dad's side of the family is still religious so we do things with them for Christmas as part of the family. But it's not like we only do stuff when we visit them. We keep a bunch of non-religious rituals for home on our own.
I guess it's just nice to have a designated time of year for that environemtn I dunno. I guess I'm just saying to the Muslims in the middeast "I get it".
@Monkey:
Apparently Christmas is super popular in a way in the Muslim middle east, like obviously a secular way, but people really dig the atmosphere or something??
Like I read about how Turkey they even market Christmas sales without the Christmas at malls.
So, what do they call it? A - Sale? :p
So, what do they call it? A - Sale? :p
I'd love to find the article again, but searching "Turkey" and "Christmas" together doesn't…work out.
@Monkey:
I'd love to find the article again, but searching "Turkey" and "Christmas" together doesn't…work out.
Even if you put "Turkiye" instead of "Turkey" you get loads of the wrong kind. Google is too smart for its own good.
Want me to find out at some point? I might have a local contact. About a year ago, I interviewed a young Turkish woman who was here on an Erasmus student exchange program getting to know our educational system because she wanted to become a teacher in the poor Eastern part of Turkey where teachers were sorely needed. She was from Izmir, I think, and she seemed really intelligent.
I don't have her email, but I can try to contact the local high school teacher who hosted her here. She told me how she was doing when I ran into her in the summer, so I assume she has her contact information.
I don't understand your point here.
My point? Hmm.
I guess I enjoy just poking fun at people that would rather buzzkill a holiday then enjoy it.
@Toraish:
Want me to find out at some point? I might have a local contact. About a year ago, I interviewed a young Turkish woman who was here on an Erasmus student exchange program getting to know our educational system because she wanted to become a teacher in the poor Eastern part of Turkey where teachers were sorely needed. She was from Izmir, I think, and she seemed really intelligent.
I don't have her email, but I can try to contact the local high school teacher who hosted her here. She told me how she was doing when I ran into her in the summer, so I assume she has her contact information.
I got a teacher from Antalya who I could ask.
Man yeah though, Turkey's coastal area is so nice, and then the deep interior is poopsville.
It's like a delicious candy coating on a sawdust cracker, with a gem of chocolate Ankara inside.
I guess it's the norm of a country between developing and developed to look like that though, with really wild inequalities. Mexico is like that, Brazil too.
Though I guess in Turkey's case it's just really geographically skewed which makes it stranger. Also ethnic since I'm p sure a big most of those poor people are Kurds. Even the urban poor in Istanbul me and Chrissie saw I think were mostly Kurds.
I don't think it's all Kurds, really. You think of Turkey's population and how big it is and then go watch some maps to find out where people actually live. The big cities and the Western coast have loads, to be sure, but there's still a fair share of people living out on the Eastern mountain ranges and highlands that are just naturally poor places because they have a bad geographical location.
Kurds do definitely constitute a big part of that people over there, but there's a lot of other groups living out there too. Unless there's a million times more Kurds than I thought.
@Toraish:
I don't think it's all Kurds, really. You think of Turkey's population and how big it is and then go watch some maps to find out where people actually live. The big cities and the Western coast have loads, to be sure, but there's still a fair share of people living out on the Eastern mountain ranges and highlands that are just naturally poor places because they have a bad geographical location.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b5/Ethnic_Groups_Turkey.jpg
http://quakesos.sosearthquakesvz.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/cedim-25102011-3.jpg
Kurds are nearly 20% of the population I think. And they're the massive majority in the shittiest areas.
My point? Hmm.
I guess I enjoy just poking fun at people that would rather buzzkill a holiday then enjoy it.
Stop ruining 'Holiday Analysis Day' with that attitude :P
My point? Hmm.
I guess I enjoy just poking fun at people that would rather buzzkill a holiday then enjoy it.
Your the buzzkill here buster!
Here as in?
@Print:
Stop ruining 'Holiday Analysis Day' with that attitude :P
They place bets on dead turkeys like they are at a jokey instead of eating them. That holiday ain't right.
@Print:
That whole thing has spoiled my enjoyment of V for Vendetta.
When you start to view it as some kind of free advertisement for the film, it becomes less depressing. In fact i'd be willing to bet a lot of people wound up seeing it after the masks origin became apparent. So although its tarnished the image, it still made a contribution towards people viewing it. or at least that is the only positive spin i can put on it.
Wait are you talking about Guy Fawkes day? We wear that guy's face on our faces over here.
Over here? Yo, those things have been showing up everywhere in protests and public stuffs like that. Saw one in photos of Turkish protests.
I don't understand your point here. For most Americans, Christmas ain't about some bearded dude dyin' on the cross, either.
Maybe not nowadays, but Christianity would have been a lot heavier in the early days of north America. This is probably secured by the large amount of European influence before the country really started to go its own direction.
Nowadays its just another good excuse for us all to make a bit more effort with friends and family. :D
–- Update From New Post Merge ---
@Monkey:
Over here? Yo, those things have been showing up everywhere in protests and public stuffs like that. Saw one in photos of Turkish protests.
I don't know where its earliest use was after the film, but i know the online hacking communities and protests around the world adopted and made it the icon it is today.
kind of weird how guido fawkes ended up being the new poster boy of rebellion. throws away his che guevara shirt
@Toraish:
Mm, okay, I'm seriously starting to think that I haven't watched enough PPG to make an accurate assessment of what it was meant to be like. That clip? Clearly very intelligent, lol. I honestly thought that PPG was aimed at kids of ages 5-10 or 7-12 at most because that's how it was advertised here.
the bad guys in this show are all really likeable tbh, they just do bad things kind of like it's their day job. the show takes a lot of jabs at this but my favorite example where the roles are kind of reversed is in Child Fearing
10:48 here
Shows by those Dexter's Lab people often ended episodes on goofy downer notes, so Mojo Jojo getting punched after trying to reform is being played for like tragi-comedy laughs, that leaves you like"shiittt lol".
Dexter's Lab ended like 50% of episodes with Dexter crying over breaking something or having Deedee break something.
It's a cruel humor, but it's not even REMOTELY saying "And now all is as it should be".
In fact it's pretty much saying "that sucks HONK HONK".
I THOUGHT YOU NORTHERN EUROPEANS LIKED FATALISTIC DARK COMEDY WTF
Pffffft!! Have been studying the whole time xD
Pffffft!! Have been studying the whole time xD
that's something i wanna experience.. even once
the bad guys in this show are all really likeable tbh, they just do bad things kind of like it's their day job. the show takes a lot of jabs at this but my favorite example where the roles are kind of reversed is in Child Fearing
10:48 here
@Monkey:
Shows by those Dexter's Lab people often ended episodes on goofy downer notes, so Mojo Jojo getting punched after trying to reform is being played for like tragi-comedy laughs, that leaves you like"shiittt lol".
Dexter's Lab ended like 50% of episodes with Dexter crying over breaking something or having Deedee break something.
It's a cruel humor, but it's not even REMOTELY saying "And now all is as it should be".
In fact it's pretty much saying "that sucks HONK HONK".I THOUGHT YOU NORTHERN EUROPEANS LIKED FATALISTIC DARK COMEDY WTF
You know, I'm starting to think that I've gotten an entirely wrong idea because our dub was godawful. I didn't realize that before since our voice actors are generally speaking stellar and sometimes even better than the originals, but in this case the more I look at those clips you post the more I get the feeling that none of the subtlety or references that are clearly visible in the original were there in our version. Like the Beatles thing? I vaguely remember the episode in Finnish and I think they just named them after some B class local rock band that no one particularly cares about and went with that. That's like Disney movies without any whimsicality.
Maybe that's the reason why they at some point stopped airing the dubbed ones and shifted to the originals with Finnish subtitles instead. It was too late for me at that point, though. The dub had already bored me to tears before and the fact that the voices were suddenly all different and that I had to actually work to understand what was going on made me lose all interest that was left.
@Toraish:
It was too late for me at that point, though. The dub had already bored me to tears before and the fact that the voices were suddenly all different and that I had to actually work to understand what was going on made me lose all interest that was left.
do you know whats worse?
when you watch russian dubbed house m.d.
and you dont know russian :ninja: