When I’m an old lady I’ll still be informing young people that Halloween never existed in this country until the 90s /early 00s when people who sell us stuff realised they could use it to sell us more stuff, and Halloween-themed stuff suddenly appeared in shopping centres without warning and was relentlessly marketed to children, and adults saw right through it and disliked it (“what’s this American sh*t, why are there pumpkins and witches in shop windows this never used to be a thing”) until they got used to it and young generations grew up thinking Halloween had always been a thing here even though kids born just a decade earlier had to be taught about it by the TV or school. Also it trampled over our pre-existing Fun Cultural Event When Kids Get Dressed-Up which had never needed to be marketed so aggressively and therefore became less relevant

I don’t mind at all if you love Halloween but it’s so weird to see my younger cousins convinced that it was always a thing in France when I remember being taught at school what trick or treating was, like “let’s learn about cultural traditions that are exotic and fun and different from ours!!” and I’m not old. Millennials literally saw Halloween get astroturfed into our culture with no explanation when shopping centres just went “from now on this is something we’ve always done” and we had no choice but to be like well OK I guess 🤷‍♀️

can African Americans please stop saying "black culture" in reference to the homogenised African black cultures in the United States please

tatooine slave culture has ar-amu. the mortis gods are canon. this gives across the implication that most planets an idea of the force as a deity

anyway so this shows that within the star wars universe belief in the light (god, if you will) is inherent, as within all people the acceptance for god is inherent. in this essay i will

no more Fatshe Leno La Rona for me until football season is over until ACoN is through I’m a Nkosi sikelel' Afrika girlie

Starting a collection:

Jerusalem (the play)

Jerusalem (Blake's poem)

The Sound of Silence (song)

That tweet from some governor or something calling women breeding machines or whatever it was

All those corporate guidelines that refer to workers as "units of productivity" etc

Feel free to add on if you get what I mean. I think there's a song I'm missing that's on my mind, too.

Like I want folks to consider why the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy and the other western European nations have only a few major spoken languages between them each? Is it because they've just always been homogenous or is it part of specific nation building agendas that has led to the suppression of minority languages in order to promote "cultural cohesivity".

Dutch and German used to be part of a dialect continuum (a series of interrelated languages across an area that are all mutually intelligible with their immediate neighbour but at the ends of the continuum they are essentially wholly different languages; think the Arabic dialects from Morocco to Iraq). That continuum has disintegrated because of the standardisation of the language being brought on through the development of the nation state.

Britain has Irish Gaelic, Scottish Gaelic, Scots, and Welsh as living minority languages, but none of them are taught outside of their respective heartlands. Instead, people learn pointless languages like German or even better, Latin. Manx and Cornish have also had revivals but are oft mocked in discourse as not really being spoken languages.

Fascist Spain specifically banned every language in Spain outside of Castilian with the specific intent to promote nationalism in Spain. "Si eres español, habla español" being the motto of the time.

This is something that is true for almost every nation-building project on earth currently to some extent, due to how nation states operate. This need to homogenise language is heavily related to the imaginaries of authenticity, which, of course, is highly regulated by the dominant forces within a culture. If we accept that certain "others" are not really representative of a culture then its not hard to jump to "unless you speak x language then you're not really one of us".

my cousin is doing a theology degree rn and yesterday she was blowing my mind telling me she's learning about how popularised narratives of the nativity strip out the social and cultural context of the story. and the way she explained this (for context we're from an Arab Christian family), she was like, "cuz, think about it. Joseph is an Arab SON visiting his HOMETOWN with his pregnant wife. And no one will put them up. Do you really think it's cos no one had SPACE? have you met Arabs?!?" anyway and then she proceeded to explain how biblical texts actually point to Mary being subjected to social ostricism for being pregnant out of wedlock. I know this makes me sound like an idiot but I honestly never considered how weird how it was in the popular version that a bunch of Arabs weren't being hospitable to a man and his pregnant wife, and when my cousin told me this I was so deeply angered by how the whitewashing of the bible and Christianity is not only harmful because of colonialism but also because it homogenises these very specific cultural stories to the point they don't actually make sense.

I can't agree more with your post about how natural languages are intimately tied to power dynamics, culture and personal identity. To make the nation personifications magically understand each other all the time is removing the depth and potential of their relationships with each other.

Since you mentioned that Alfred's first language was a Native American language, it sounds like he was close to the Native Americans as a child, and not only the English settlers. My thought is that Alfred, the personification of what would become the USA, was only "born" after the English settlers arrived. He was raised by Pilgrims, spoke only English and didn't have meaningful contact with the Native Americans. I'm not a fan of the idea that Alfred was a Native American personification who was born before the arrival of the colonists and was "kidnapped" by Arthur, as it implies that the tribe that he represented was the foundation of the modern USA. It makes more sense to me that he was a personification of the Pilgrim settlements when he was born. What are your thoughts on Alfred's "birth" and his relationships with the personifications around him as a child?

hello, thanks for your question!

to start off, i don't headcanon that nations are born the human way, but when they come into being, there are real cultural/linguistic links they have to other nations which I model on historical interactions and influences. my conception of Alfred is that his "birth"/beginnings are linked to Roanoke (aka the so-called "Lost Colony") and Jamestown (and its famine)—less so the Pilgrims/Mayflower in Massachusetts. but that difference aside, Alfred's 'beginnings' in my view certainly stem from British imperialism and European colonisation all the same. so he is not the personification of "Native America", because this would indeed be racist and homogenising: there can't be such a singular personification but would have to be multiple personifications to begin with. All of whom are much older and culturally distinct just like how Asia/Europe/Africa as a continent doesn't have one personification. this is a similar approach I take with my Mexico OC; she is Indigenous/European and spoke Nahuatl and Spanish, but she herself didn't come into being until Spanish colonisation—and there are other older personifications like Tlaxcala and Mexica (who was the head of the Triple Alliance/what we call the Aztec Empire and rivals with Tlaxcala, another pre-Columbian political entity).

so, for me Carolina Algonquian is one of Alfred's first languages—the other is English. the reason why I think he speaks Carolina Algonquian: the real-life interactions (from cooperative (barter, trade) to neutral to hostile—conflicts that happened since obviously the colonists were encroaching on other people's land) that occurred between the colonists and Algonquian-speaking peoples (such as Croatan and also Powhatan) occurred. All these were central to the history and trajectory of the early colonies. further, the research material on early colonial America I based his character on examined the experiences of biracial/multiethnic people and the dynamics of assimilation & cultural imperialism into Englishness that occurred. i'm from an ethnically-mixed family myself, which experienced cultural assimilation because of British imperialism that also resulted in a deprioritisation and loss of our other ancestral languages, so the cultural dimension of imperialism: how people navigate these faultlines, and pass or don't pass as a dominant group is something I'm interested in exploring.

hence, while i personally headcanon Alfred as mixed-race, he is certainly not an older personification that predates European colonisation of the Americas, and Arthur claims him as his son when he finds him with the Jamestown colonists, after the famine—so he isn't really 'kidnapped' because he isn't the personification of a pre-existing, Native nation. the Jamestown colonists don't really 'raise' him either—he appears to them as a young child who can already talk and walk, and they assume he is an orphan of sorts—after which Arthur comes into the picture. Arthur asserted his power by claiming Alfred as his son—just as the English politically claimed their colonial holdings, but Alfred certainly interacted with other personifications like Croatan or Powhatan and others, because that's who the English colonists themselves in Roanoke and Jamestown met. this contact imo, was meaningful in the sense that it was important and extensive—though obviously not wholly peaceful or conflict-free. So, in my headcanon, before Arthur arrived with the relief ship that met the starving Jamestown colonists, Alfred was regarded with some curiosity and at least distinct wariness, if not apprehension, by other nations because despite his familiarity with Carolina Algonquian, they know he is clearly linked to the encroaching English colonists—and they've heard similar stories already, about Mexico and Cuba.

overall, yes, the political/cultural origins of the United States are very much connected to the British Empire's settler-colonialism. For that reason Alfred is Arthur's 'son', because he is English—but he is not just English or European, because the truth of the British Empire is that while there was a racial and class hierarchy that privileged Englishness and then whiteness generally, the actual human communities that shaped the colonies were never homogeneous ethnically/culturally. Biracial/mixed people existed—and those European colonies as a whole were shaped by the varied dynamics of Native and other non-European influences and contact—whether it was involuntary or voluntary, cooperative, neutral or hostile. that's the angle I've personally chosen to take—and I would end off with emphasising that this is just my approach—because I think there's certainly more than one way to approach Alfred's beginnings and cultural identity.

dashboard simulator

mutual 1: feeling so normal about blehrbo from my show tonight

mutual 2: are the trik tok girlies okay ? do they actually believe that draining leeches is a viable substitute for a fresh blood diet? this is worse than the bloodmoonstone trend

mutual 3: rip mutual 4 but personally i love getting hard while feeding and can keep my prey also

mutual 4: do NOT listen to fleetwood drac while feeding quickest way to get hard and have your prey escape

mutual 5: [three paragraphs on why it's ableist not to trigger tag the colour theory post]

mutual 6: IF Y'ALL HAD TOLD ME THE THREE WEED SMOKING GIRLFRIENDS WERE FROM DRACULA BY BRAM STOKER I WOULD HAVE GOTTEN INTO HISTORY AGES AGO #i thought they were fictional!

mutual 7: if i have to see another post about the ethics of human killing my immortality might get reversed

mutual 8: [rant about the westernization and homogenisation of vampiric culture and how so many beautiful archaic rituals were lost to colonialism and forced christianity]

mutual 9: damn they weren't kidding blood Does taste different when your human starts hrt (i kinda wanna fuck her now? is that normal?)

mutual 10: til that the reason why transformations are usually so painful is because vampiric venom stimulates your pain receptors to make your dendrites more receptive to the newly formed vampiric neurotransmitters!

mutual 11: about to suck off my 17th human husband sloppy style

People on tumblr like to treat native people as a painting of someone hunting a buffalo rather than like... my mom making chili with beans because meat is too expensive for YEARS and then still doing it now that money's less tight because I'm vegan so she wants me to be able to eat it too.

It's a weird one. Every culture is allowed to change and develop except for indigenous Americans. We've got to be museum exhibits for everyone else to look at when they feel like it and otherwise ignore.

Colonialism and the monarchy are part of the culture of England, but we don't see tumblr leftists saying that has to stay. When parts of your culture hurt others, it's okay for it to change. It's still you. It's still there. The history doesn't go away just because things are different now. Me owning a bike isn't an insult to my ancestors just because they didn't have one.

As an outsider, most of what I see on tumblr is essentially weaponisation of the ‘noble savage’ stereotype. There are of course wider issues with the misunderstanding and especially the homogenisation of indigenous culture, but most don’t want to understand or acknowledge the complexity of a group that includes radically different and changing traditions, they want a stereotype they can point to and use in their arguments.

It’s a shallow representation of what it is to be ‘native’ to them, based on little more than western novelisations and films. It’s the same as their understanding of farmers as local, benevolent small land owners and vegans as rich white people. It doesn’t matter that it flies in the fact of the reality, one dimensional stereotypes are neater, easier to understand and serve their arguments better.

Whether right or wrong about the sacredness of things like hunting and sacrifice, nobody from outside any community should be telling those inside it what their culture is ‘supposed’ to be. They especially shouldn’t be using groups they don’t belong to as essentially ammunition to defend their own, completely unrelated choices - which is usually the case.

The tyranny of the algorithm: why every coffee shop looks the same (Kyle Chayka, The Guardian, Jan 16 2024)

"These cafes had all adopted similar aesthetics and offered similar menus, but they hadn’t been forced to do so by a corporate parent, the way a chain like Starbucks replicated itself.

Instead, despite their vast geographical separation and total independence from each other, the cafes had all drifted toward the same end point.

The sheer expanse of sameness was too shocking and new to be boring.

Of course, there have been examples of such cultural globalisation going back as far as recorded civilisation.

But the 21st-century generic cafes were remarkable in the specificity of their matching details, as well as the sense that each had emerged organically from its location.

They were proud local efforts that were often described as “authentic”, an adjective that I was also guilty of overusing.

When travelling, I always wanted to find somewhere “authentic” to have a drink or eat a meal.

If these places were all so similar, though, what were they authentic to, exactly?

What I concluded was that they were all authentically connected to the new network of digital geography, wired together in real time by social networks.

They were authentic to the internet, particularly the 2010s internet of algorithmic feeds. (…)

My theory was that all the physical places interconnected by apps had a way of resembling one another.

In the case of the cafes, the growth of Instagram gave international cafe owners and baristas a way to follow one another in real time and gradually, via algorithmic recommendations, begin consuming the same kinds of content.

One cafe owner’s personal taste would drift toward what the rest of them liked, too, eventually coalescing.

On the customer side, Yelp, Foursquare and Google Maps drove people like me – who could also follow the popular coffee aesthetics on Instagram – toward cafes that conformed with what they wanted to see by putting them at the top of searches or highlighting them on a map.

To court the large demographic of customers moulded by the internet, more cafes adopted the aesthetics that already dominated on the platforms.

Adapting to the norm wasn’t just following trends but making a business decision, one that the consumers rewarded.

When a cafe was visually pleasing enough, customers felt encouraged to post it on their own Instagram in turn as a lifestyle brag, which provided free social media advertising and attracted new customers.

Thus the cycle of aesthetic optimisation and homogenisation continued."

i hate how much english is, like, permeating the danish language. probably all languages. but man, no one speaks proper danish anymore. journalists don't, many writers don't. i don't – i try my hardest to, but often i don't know if something is proper danish or if im directly translating from english and using expressions that aren't actually correct. i suppose it's hard to avoid when we engage so much with the english language, but i find it devastating. danish is beautiful and having different cultures is beautiful. i wish people would make more of an effort, especially journalists and writers who influence the rest of the people. try not to contribute too much to the homogenisation of language and cultures. we have to resist while we can

Forgive the ignorance, but what exactly is the irish problem with irish-americans or members of the diaspora? Ive never seen it until the last year with Saint Patricks day. Im confused, kinda?

Its not a "every irish person has a problem with irish americans" thing. Not all of us take issue. But a fairly big chunk do. Its specifially with those of them who show off that well-known yankee trait of doing fuck all research beyond the superficial, making no attempt to look deeper into the actual meanings of other cultures or actually engaging with them

"My great-great-great granpa was from DAHN-EE-GAL. Im like, pure irish". And then have no knowledge of our history, language, culture or politics beyond what they get from shitty american football team mascots or lucky charms ads. Its the parading of a cartoon of a culture as a fashion icon, trying to desperately believe that just having some long dead blood tie to somewhere is enough to make them a fully ingrained member of a place theyve never been to or engaged with because so many want to be more than "just american". Want all the recognition without putting in fuck all effort

And besides just being very fucking annoying and like they delusionally view Ireland as "the old country" where everything is simpler and better and they'll automatically belong, alot of plastic paddies have this disgusting habit of somehow taking the centuries of solidarity that we're well known for and deciding to say fuck that, and just fell into the american system of homogenisation and become part of the racism problem in the US and beyond. So spitting in the face of the ancestors they love to gawk over

Tl;dr Not all of us have problems with irish americans. Not all irish americans are bad. But a fair view of them are gormless yankee ignorant pricks who think Ireland is still a developing country and their own cultural theme park they have the keys to because of some dead fucking ancestor who moved to Boston and became a police officer and who Daniel O'Connell would have slapped across the face

I imagine New Beijing would have a futuristic fusion language between Japanese and Mandarin because there seems to be a lot of overlap between the two in the books, like Kai’s family for example and other character names. Plus, both languages sound really nice and they share similar characters

The Eastern Commonwealth is practically half of the planet, so I think that the regional languages would still be alive and thriving. New Beijing being the capital--yeah! Maybe there would be multiple languages! There are a lot of Japanese references in the books despite being set in China because...well, probably because Marissa was homogenising those cultures 😬. I personally head canon that Imperial Family originated from Japan--hence the Japanese names--but set up base in Beijing for its historical power and significance. Over time the family became a blend of the two cultures.

The Stages of the Inkling Plague

Collab with Prurientpie showing the main stages of a worldwide Inkling transformation pandemic with Isabella's gradual change into an Inkling idol. Everyone in that world would be going through similar changes, as all species homogenise- culture becomes more loud, inky and music based and life continues on with inklings completely oblivious to the metamorphosis everyone and the world would have gone through.

tbh out of all the things I hate Hindu Nationalists for, one of the top 5 things has got to be them trying to consolidate local/tribal cultures, traditions and gods into hinduism - How coastal Karnataka was saffronised: The story of rise and rise of Hindu nationalism in syncretic South Kanara

thank you for sharing this! and yeah it really is annoying that these guys just homogenise everything and appropriate tribal traditions :/ sanskritisation is a bitch