#do you really want to DISincentivize communication about that
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Episode 7: The Truth Behind Gang Violence.
You need to have (and it needs to begin with) public safety. The sidewalks need to be safe to walk down. The store needs to be safe to go to. People need to understand that they're not going to be shot when they're at the red light. Their kid’s not going to be killed in the baby seat while they're driving through an intersection. So until you get that under control, nothing else is going to happen.
So again, the average black American between the ages of 12 to 24 is 13 times more likely to be murdered than a white American.
Ninety percent of these shootings are done by the same demographic: young, 15 to 24-year-old primarily African-American fatherless children killing other young African-American fatherless children over issues related to status. Understand that that’s what’s going on.
People who say pointing that out is just a racist act…to me that's not even a logical statement because you're pointing out a fact. If there's true racism within the system, then we need to identify it. Let's find out where it is so we can remove it. I'm 100% on board with that goal. Unless someone else has another solution, the only way I know that we can do that is to look at the data and to control for different possible scenarios that would explain that.
The fact of the matter is you can control for education. You can control for household income. You can control for unemployment. You can control for all this and still see large discrepancies in the numbers between different racial groups in the United States as far as crime.
The only statistic that I've seen that actually matches, and when you control for it, makes sense as it relates to the violence we're seeing not just in the black community, but everywhere, all over the world, and especially in the United States, is out-of-wedlock birth rates. The moment you start controlling for that, then you're going to start to see those numbers correlate with the areas where all the violence is occurring.
In the black community, out-of-wedlock birth rate is over 70%. When we get into the neighborhoods in Chicago and Baltimore, it's closer to 95%.
These are young black women having young kids. Those kids grow to the dangerous age of 12 to 19 where we all like to get in trouble. There's no male mentors or fathers around. They form gangs and they shoot each other over petty disputes related to status.
This isn't happening because of hundreds of thousands of dollars at stake. This is happening because somebody stepped on somebody else's shoe, or something like that, and the next thing you know there's going to be a drive-by shooting.
The only thing that's going to stop that short-term is putting more police in those neighborhoods to save lives. That's the only thing that's going to stop that.
Long-term, we have to be thinking about how we can disincentivize young people from having kids when they're not married, when they're still in high school. When they're 12 to 18. That's the problem that needs to be addressed. It's also something that nobody wants to talk about in the United States. There's a lot of lying, and a lot of obfuscation around it, but the numbers are very clear. Again, I encourage everybody to go and take a look at it themselves.
When you talk about the reasons why the out-of-wedlock birth rate is so much higher, that's something I think we as a society and people much smarter than me need to sit down and really assess and try and figure out what led to that. But what I can tell you is it wasn't always that way. The out-of-wedlock birth rate in the black community was actually almost the same and in some cases a little bit higher than white Americans up until about 1963. Something happened around 1963 where they started to diverge. The out-of-wedlock birth rate rose across the board in the white community, but especially in the black community. If you go back prior to 1963, you don't see these kind of numbers and you also don't see this kind of violence and this kind of crime. Once we go past 1963, that's when it skyrockets.
What happened in 1963 that explains this? I'm sure it's a complicated problem. It's probably going to admit to more than one answer, but it is something that we need to look at. And one of the things I think we need to look at is whatever economic incentives, that might have been well-intentioned, were put in place which caused this problem to happen. If we don't look at that and we repeat that same mistake once again, there's going to be a lot more violence and a lot more innocent victims shot and dead.
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This is a great demonstration of why the wail of "systemic racism" is not just useless, not just intellectually dishonest, but actively contributes to the deaths and suffering of black Americans.
Here's what might be the most perverted thing of all, though: this is already well explored and well understood.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Father_absence#United_States
In 2005, the United States Department of Health and Human Services reported that the average experience of the American teenager includes living in the absence of their father. This leads to multiple negative impacts on youth in which 85% are reported to have behavioral issues (Center for Disease Control); 71% of high school dropouts and teen moms come from fatherless homes, which is 9 times the national average (National Principals Association Report); 85% of all children who show behaviour disorders come from fatherless homes, which is 20 times the national average (Center for Disease Control); 85% of youth in prison come from fatherless homes, which is 20 times the national average; (Fulton County, Georgia, Texas Department of Correction), and 63% of youth suicides are of children who come from fatherless homes, which is 5 times the national average (US Department of Health/Census).
More:
https://www.baltimoresun.com/opinion/bs-xpm-2014-10-08-bs-ed-child-custody-20141008-story.html (Archive: https://archive.vn/TkXoW)
https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2002/03/custody
The U.S. is screwing around with "systemic racism" when the effects of single parent childhoods - and fatherlessness in particular - is already known. From high school drop out rates to crime to suicide and even through to early menarche - early onset of puberty and menstruation in girls, thereby moving their reproductive window forward and increasing the likelihood of the cycle perpetuating - are all known to be correlated to out-of-wedlock and single parent situations, and particularly paternal alienation. It's also known that black Americans tend, on average, to be more religious.
From the Baltimore Sun link:
"... three separate and independent groups of experts reviewed decades of child development research. They found that after parents separate or divorce, children do much better with shared parenting — joint custody — on multiple measures of wellbeing than with single parenting. Yet in more than eight out of 10 custody cases today, one parent (usually the mother) is awarded sole guardianship."
But nobody wants to talk about or deal with this. U.S. society is pretty much actively involved in a program of deliberately ignoring the reality. If black lives mattered to self-stylanted "antiracists," they would want to tackle the reality. They don't.
Because reality doesn't lend itself to hashtag campaigns and pithy slogans. Nor is it conducive to maintaining political and social influence; if god kills the devil, you can stop tithing and you don't have to come back to church next week.
This is how wokeness kills. Not by going around and murdering people. But by deflecting and distracting away from reality towards bogus academic grievances and god-of-the-gaps analyses, and vilifying those who notice the Emperor has no clothes.
#Matt Thornton#policing#black men#black boys#fatherlessness#systemic racism#violent crime#antiracism#antiracism as religion#nobody wants to talk about this#racism of the gaps#out of wedlock#single parent#joint custody#shared parenting#wokeness kills#woke#wokeism#cult of woke#wokeness as religion#wokeness#religion is a mental illness
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“but if we get rid of police how will we deal with all the rapists and serial killers?”
I’m gonna be talking about sex crimes and violence in some detail - I do understand if you don’t want to read that, so it’s all under the read more.
1. Societal overhaul. Rape is seen as permissible by men - a “tut tut, shouldn’t have done that” instead of a violent assault using sex as a weapon, with the emphasis frequently placed on how the victim could have avoided being raped instead of the accusations being placed upon the rapist who committed the crime - and when a woman performs rape on a man, many people are reluctant to even acknowledge that that’s what happened, framing it instead as “oh you got lucky then!” instead of what it is: sexual assault. By culturally re-framing rape as the evil it is, those who would otherwise commit it are much more heavily disincentivized, and with proper community support for victims they are much more likely to come forward (estimates are that roughly 80% of rape and sexual assault cases go unreported as the victims fear reprisal) which drastically reduces the ability of rapists to recommit. Furthermore, such assaults are often a sign something has gone wrong with the rapist’s life - therapy and counseling can help them find constructive, non-violent outlets.
2. Serial killers and mass murderers are heavily reported when they happen because of how rare they are - while mass murders are relatively frequent in the US, at least one occurring each year, they are extremely scarce elsewhere in the world due to better gun control regulation. While yes, a gun requires a person using it to actually kill people, those guns make murder, especially murder at scale, far easier to commit. Furthermore, police already don’t handle serial killers and mass murderers very well - just look into how many stories there are of police officers arriving at the site of a mass shooting and staying back out of fear for their lives, contrary to their training in regard to mass shooters, allowing even more people to be harmed and killed as a result.
3. The police don’t really handle rapists and serial killers. Their day to day is protecting capital, protecting businesses and wealthy land owners, aiding landlords in evictions, sweeping homeless camps and destroying what precious few possessions the homeless have, racially profiling minorities, planting drugs on people they want to screw over for life, pulling over people and attempting to get them to confess to crimes they weren’t sure they committed, and multiple other things that have very little to do with sexual assault and mass repeated murder. The resources we are currently spending on police could be better spent on programs directly tasked with stopping rapists and murderers.
4. Far too many rapists and mass murderers and serial killers are cops. They use their authority to harass, stalk, assault, and murder, knowing that the greatest punishment they can realistically receive is to be given paid leave. Crooked cops walk free to commit more of the very crimes we want them to stop.
Tl;dr: abolishing the police IS working to stop rape and mass murder.
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Honestly I think its really weird that like the vast majority of beefleaf fics are mlm like 1172 vs 220???? Like. Ugh. I don't know how to explain it but it makes me feel really weird and uncomfortable that a character that's so heavily transfem coded and at the very least genderfluid has 1172!!!! gay fics and only 220 lesbian??? Idfk maybe its because I myself is a genderfluid lesbian
so okay as a fellow genderfluid lesbian I have a lot of thoughts about this and I could talk all day about it but here's my spark notes --
My girlfriend and I had a really good discussion once about how fanfiction in general is just... not made for trans women or lesbians in general? The genre is heavily weighted toward mlm content, which I suspect is a combination of the genre's history and a lot of cultural weirdness around representing wlw relationships. But trans women (based on her experiences and discussions) just don't consume fanfiction the way other demographics do, and thus also don't produce fanfiction to the same degree.
So the onus falls on other demographics to create that content, but since non-mlm content gets heavily overlooked (because again, the demographics most interested in it aren't reading fanfiction to the same degree as other demographics), people are disincentivized from creating it.
The problem with tran girl!SQX and wlw Beefleaf content in specific is that (1) there's just enough plausible deniability about SQX's gender feels that writers can depict her male form without feeling like they ever need to address her genderfluidity/trans femininity, (2) a lot of readers take He Xuan's comments at face value and ditch any nb/female depiction of He Xuan because "clearly he doesn't like it" nevermind that SQX shows she'd leave someone alone if they didn't want to transform with her when talking to Xie Lian, and (3) all the previously mentioned biases present in fanfiction writing communities make it easier to steer toward writing mlm.
(Interestingly, when you look at artwork for Beefleaf it's overwhelmingly female depictions and wlw/nblw. Visual mediums don't seem to have the same hang-up that fanfiction does.)
I am a strong believer in "You can write what you like and I'll take or leave it", but I also think it's important to consider WHY we keep falling back on creating mlm content when presented with characters whose genders aren't cis. And I wish more people were thinking about it outside of those who are desperately seeking that kind of content.
#shut up sadie#sadie has a lot of thoughts on the psychology of fanfiction#I'm not saying mlm is bad btw or we shouldn't be consuming it#I think there's a very good reason so much content is mlm#but it's disappointing that it's 2022 and we haven't diversified#I'm going to have to run a femslash big bang aren't I?
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The "Morality" of Making Abortion Illegal
The Supreme Court is considering a few cases that could overturn Roe and remove the right to abortion, which would make it immediately illegal in many states with quite severe punishments for all involved. Given this, I wanted to look briefly at the morality of the kind of people who want this to happen (SHORT RANT ahead).
First of all, if the goal is actually to reduce the number of abortions, the data is fairly clear that increased access to contraception, comprehensive sex education, better maternal health care, better women's education, and a whole host of other things are enormously effective. Simply making abortion illegal really isn't.
But this group of people isn't looking at data, they're acting out the morality they've been taught. It's a morality that basically teaches that people only do bad things because they're bad people. This means that people can't be simply offered other, better, options in order to get them to stop doing bad things, they want to do the bad things so you have to actively disincentivize them through punishment. This is why they only support punitive measures even when they're not productive.
Beyond this, beyond just what their system of morality makes them do to other people, is what their system of morality does to them.
You see, if only bad people do bad things, then you really can't afford to ever do a bad thing. Since any real person does bad things, that means that, in order to avoid being a "bad person" in their community, they have to lie about it. This primarily happens in two ways, hiding any misdeeds or by rationalizing them in such a way that it wasn't really bad.
Of course, once you've learned how to hide or rationalize anything bad that you do, it's much easier to do bad things. And that's pretty much my experience with people who live in these kinds of black and white communities. Effectively, they lack morality in the sense we understand it because in their world there are no bad actions, only bad people.
For those who weren't aware, I grew up in a place where this kind of thinking was prominently represented in the community and I knew and still know a good deal of people who see the world in this way.
And that may be the worst thing about this kind of morality. It's not just that it forces you to treat everyone else with anger and violence, it's that it also makes you exactly the kind of terrible person that you would otherwise claim to be deterring from wrongdoing.
Unfortunately, I don't know a quick way to get someone out of this kind of thinking. Anyone else who has experience with this kind of thing want to chime in with some ideas?
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Are you friends with any other IF writers? Do you talk about your IFs?
Oh yeah !! Honestly just the circle of modest CoG WIPs (whether or not they made the jump to Twine) is such a community in and of itself that it drives me feral to know that there’s so little coverage of a significant demographic of indie developer. Everyone loves a developer who makes a little 3D game, nobody wants to talk to romance VN developers for like, a variety of reasons. Games journalism is disincentivized to do introductory type deep dives because there’s a chance that there will be minimal clicks about a topic nobody really knows anything about (which is less the fault of the journalist and more of the corporate structure; journalists can commit different sins, but people seem to think that they have a level of power that they simply do not as a profession constantly subjected to mass layoffs).
People also tend to get extremely weird about romance like we’re all making the top fifty most obscure fetish VNs instead of like, relationship exploration (to say nothing of how relationship exploration is still seen as inferior because of my aforementioned beef about how some hobbies are seen as the desperate escape of extremely lonely people from their pathetic lives instead of just, you know, a thing people enjoy (as if no one in a relationship would ever stoop to enjoying romance content which is just provably false), but people can occasionally see past their discomfort with the idea of people consuming romance and sex content for clicks). We’re also not wild success stories (yet) so there’s no inspiration to be gained from the slow steady slog of publishing something for the entertainment of your modest following (all coverage I’ve seen of popular CoG WIPs make sure to mention that they’re crazy popular as if to justify their inclusion).
And the community deserves a little representation from someone other than the maybe four most popular CoG WIPs (a generous estimation as I’ve seen perhaps two that were extremely niche/brief) and maybe some experimental Twine projects about queer pain (not that those aren’t valuable, but if one more article talks about how Twine is used as an engine for “queer stories” and then lists extremely intimate stories about coming out, community acceptance and rejection, self hatred/harm, and NEVER ANY ABOUT THE STORIES OF QUEER ROMANCE unless it’s also packaged with the coming out/pain/suffering........................). I generally post stuff I’ve read in my recs (and apologies to anything I haven’t read but my metre runneth dry) and I mean, usually most authors have some sort of rec tag! Uh, don’t feel bad if I’m implying your joint is modest, it’s not meant to be a commentary only to suggest that you ultimately deserve more attention.
One thing I have noticed that I didn’t notice when I wasn’t very active in the community is that people can be extremely mean to these authors? They don’t always post it when someone sends them a hate message and I’ve had the good luck to avoid dedicated trolls (the most bizarre comments I’ve received have been off Tumblr and never like...directed at me as a person). So that’s extra incentive to spread the WIP authors you know some really nice messages, both today and like, in general, because some people really have nothing more efficient to do with their time than to harass someone who’s writing a story for minimal personal gain.
#talkForge#it's lovely and everyone is very nice#everyone screams in the same note about coding bugs#Anonymous
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Episode 18: I Am a Man! Ranma's Going Back to China!?
Oh my! It’s here! It is finally here! This is it, the 18th and final episode of the first season of Ranma 1/2. It feels like it took such a long journey to get here, but when you think about how much more of this series there is to come, I really haven’t even made a dent. Still, I’m eager to see what this one is like, because I have only the vaguest memories of what it entailed. Next paragraph, I’ll have rewatched the episode, and be ready to discuss it fully.
...
It was a clip show.
How did I not remember, the end of the season, was a clip show?!
I didn’t even bother watching it a second time subbed! Why would I?! More than half the episode isn’t actual content!
Okay, so, here is what did happen. This episode consists of Ranma telling his dad that he wants to head to China to find a cure for his curse, and his Dad telling him not to. Ranma complains about all the stuff he has to go through, Genma tells him to stop whining.
This goes on, and on, in-between clips. Then, all the main cast shows up to be mad at Ranma because they misunderstood what he was saying, and think he wants to head to China to marry Shampoo. Akane hits him the end.
I...genuinely have nothing. Well, that’s not entirely true, but a lot of what I want to say about this episode should be reserved for the Character Spotlight. The pacing was terrible, because of course it was, and there was no real plot here. My brain somehow invented that this whole episode would actually be about Ranma being tempted to head back to China (even though he did that last episode), but nooooooooooo.
You know what? Screw it, next paragraph I’m talking about Genma.
I have been waiting, and waiting, and WAITING for an episode to focus on Genma Saotome so I can finally do a Character Spotlight on him, and I feel like it’s kind of fitting that this, of all episodes, was it.
In terms of voice actors, in the English dub he was voiced by Robert O. Smith, who...did some stuff? But I haven’t really seen any of it? In contrast, his Japanese voice actor was Kenichi Ogata, who is considered “The Father Figure of the Japanese Voice-Acting Industry”. Things I know him for include Gran Turino in My Hero Academia, the professor in Detective Conan, and Shamisen in The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. Their voices for the character aren’t incredibly dissimilar, but from what I can tell Smith makes Genma sound a bit deeper and more gruff, while Ogata is a bit more focused.
Um, so, I don’t really like Genma Saotome. He’s kind of a trash dad. This episode was a great examination into why. Ranma wants to tell his father about all the stuff he’s going through. He wants to help make his dad understand why he wants to go to China, to deal with his curse. Genma responds by getting annoyed that Ranma is even talking about any of this. He refuses to accept any blame in what happened to his son, and he is annoyed at about Ranma ‘whining’.
This is just, like, my opinion, man. But parents shutting down their child’s attempts to communicate? Penalizing them for being emotionally honest? Being rude about them voicing their complaints? That’s bad. That’s very bad. And when it’s being done because the child is a ‘man’, and they need to ‘man up’, it is toxic masculinity in effect.
When you look at how Genma has raised Ranma, you can start to see where some of the boy’s rougher edges have formed. Why is Ranma so bad at talking to anyone, especially Akane, but his emotions? Maybe because Genma disincentivized that with his parenting. Genma doesn’t seem to value education much, so why should Ranma?
Now, to be fair, Genma does seem to be a lot more willing to choke on his own pride than Ranma is. He’s constantly annoyed by how Ranma messes up his relationship with Akane, and he’s pretty much willing to do anything to survive. He’s far from the worst character in the series, but he’s one I don’t care to dwell on for too long.
We’re not heading into the Ranking just yet, because with the end of this season, we should discuss the ED’s! The start of the season was where I covered the OP, so I thought it would be some nice symmetry to things.
The odd thing is, because of some of the strange production stuff I talked about before on this blog, there are actually two ED songs, and three different ending credits sequences. The first song was “Platonic Tsuranuite” by Kaori Sakagami. I love this song, and it’s been one of the best finds for me with this blog so far. I never listened to it before, but this song just slaps. I don’t know anything about music, so all I can really tell you is that it’s delicious cheesy 90’s goodness, in the best way possible.
Now, this one song had two different ending sequences. The first was a bunch of still images with credits over them, and it was fine. Lots of anime have done something like that, and I do like the art style on the characters in the visuals.
The second set of visuals, which came somewhere around halfway through the season, had actual animation. It shows Ranma and his father, who is in panda form, relaxing on a hill looking at what seems to be the ocean before sundown. They’re just relaxing, then Akane walks up and laughs about something. That sets Ranma off, they start arguing, and then they stop, and we get close-ups of each of their faces. Then they smile, lean a little towards each other, and it zooms out to show they’re all actually looking at a billboard. I just adore the little character animation here, it’s so nice, wonderful ED.
The second song, with the third set of visuals, is “EQUALロマンス” by Coco, the girl group I’ve mentioned here and there that formed from five of the voice actresses in the original Japanese production. The song is...okay. Very low energy, just kinda cute, nothing worth thinking too much about in my opinion. The visuals are a bunch of still images cut into different shapes, showing the characters. It exists. No other opinion.
Well, that sure is the final episode all talked about and one with! Now, this might not be something you’re aware of, but I didn’t much care for this episode! The only question with ranking is, is it the worst so far, or still better than the Dr. Tofu episode? Is nothing better than something displeasing? I...think I’ll actually say this one was the worst. Right now, boredom is a bigger sin than annoying me.
Episode 7: Enter Ryoga, the Eternal ‘Lost Boy’
Episode 12: A Woman's Love is War! The Martial Arts Rhythmic Gymnastics Challenge!
Episode 15: Enter Shampoo, the Gung-Ho Girl! I Put My Life in Your Hands
Episode 9: True Confessions! A Girl's Hair is Her Life!
Episode 2: School is No Place for Horsing Around
Episode 6: Akane's Lost Love... These Things Happen, You Know
Episode 13: A Tear in a Girl-Delinquent's Eye? The End of the Martial Arts Rhythmic Gymnastics Challenge!
Episode 17: I Love You, Ranma! Please Don’t Say Goodbye
Episode 16: Shampoo's Revenge! The Shiatsu Technique That Steals Heart and Soul
Episode 8: School is a Battlefield! Ranma vs. Ryoga
Episode 11: Ranma Meets Love Head-On! Enter the Delinquent Juvenile Gymnast!
Episode 4: Ranma and...Ranma? If It’s Not One Thing, It’s Another
Episode 5: Love Me to the Bone! The Compound Fracture of Akane's Heart
Episode 1: Here’s Ranma
Episode 3: A Sudden Storm of Love
Episode 10: P-P-P-Chan! He's Good For Nothin'
Episode 14: Pelvic Fortune-Telling? Ranma is the No. One Bride in Japan
Episode 18: I Am a Man! Ranma's Going Back to China!?
So, that’s this season done with. I’m not taking a break, though. Next week, I’ll be back ready to start Season 2. The episode then? “Clash of the Delivery Girls! The Martial Arts Takeout Race”. I definitely remember that one. Tschuss!
#episode 18#I Am a Man! Ranma's Going Back to China!?#ranma 1/2#ranma saotome#genma saotome#anime analysis#anime rewatch
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The complicated issue of the ‘war on science’ in the United States.
We are all painfully aware that there are individuals and communities in the United States of America that believe garbage like, “The earth is between 2021 and 6000 years old.” That’s not where the story begins or ends.
Yes, individuals like this exist. Small communities of people like this exist. I’m not denying that. They’re well documented and will out themselves in the right section of the country. They do tend to be right wing voters, but not exactly for the reasons you’d think. And it is an anti-science position to say the earth is only that old. This is not in dispute.
Typically the conversation then goes to a smug look at the 4th wall, some smug assed, “LOL LOOK AT THE AMERICAN MILITARY BUDGET VS. ITS PUBLIC EDUCATION BUDGET. :^)” And the implication for this thinking is that North America is so full of religious zealots, systematic conservative theocratic control and by extension nativist white supremacism based on bellowing blowhards that it does not value science, “as a society or a culture.”
This is pure and simply masturbatory fantasy on behalf of people that tend to see all religious culture under this light. Or at least, Christianity. Since they often don’t have the balls to apply these “harshly judging medieval superstitious culture” standards to immigrants from Islamic countries or cultures or communities.
The actual numbers of flat earthers, young earth creationists, etc. are extreme outliers with very little actual power. However, those people are good caricatures to shame and embarrass and stigmatize and stratify religious people. They don’t have to DIRECTLY mock the religious, they just have to mock those extremes, get the actual religious to also join in and be part of the cool kids for mocking the more extreme and nonsensical beliefs. That creates a mental, psychological and social division. It’s a Mean Girl tactic and technique to make a person socially divorce themselves and shun and ostracize someone else in order to be spared being made fun or, or similarly be shown that derision or hostility.
The people doing it the loudest and most subvserively tend to do it because they aren’t JUST atheist or agnostics, like normal scientifically minded individuals, but zealous atheists and secularists that have a big mind about what “society” is and means and what they want it to mean. And they abhor that religious culture that is so contrary to science and reality exists. Especially when they’d much rather those people stop existing in their own bubbles, (”Atomization”) and get on board with THEIR brand of culture, society and, dare I say, revolution.
So they publicize and shame the religious by showing every potentially inbred, belligerent, anti-science yokel from a small community where a religious culture is the norm of the territory by embarrassing them, they put it in the news to create this image of a basis and normalty. “Look at how stupid and anti-intellectual the seedy underbelly of the US of A’s culture is!”
When in reality, that’s the sign of multiculturalism. Multiculturalism does not mean, “a bunch of different cultures that also fit your neat ideas of reality.” Some cultures, despite what your cultural relativism says to you, really are that stupid. And guess what? Many of them would make their new home a lot like the failed or inadequate idea of home, if they could.
Multiculturalism is not, “we’re all different but we all believe the same things!” Multiculturalism doesn’t even necessarily mean all cultures will cease being based on imaginary shit and only pull from objective, measurable reality. When you shame an outlying religious community for their asinine beliefs and then try to use the broad strokes to negatively portray the land they live in as dangerously unhinged psychopaths purely based on what the outliers believe, you lose any and all credibility when you defend corrupt religious nations like Pakistan or Taliban era Afghanistan.
The, “War on Science” is a lot like the War on Christmas. In that, neither are quite happening in quite the same way the people crying about them are saying.
If you asked a person that voted more left-wing or liberal, they might say the US was full of religious kooks that vote contrary to reason or science. That they think with their egos, not their rational brains, and that the only thing that has stopped them from destroying everything is exploitative greed and/or sadism. They imagine people that disagree with them as effectively screaming, shit throwing chimpanees wearing papal gowns and beating people with scaramental candle holders.
If you asked a person that voted more right-wing or conservative that also happened to believe the hooey about the US being a “blessed Christian nation,” they might say that “liberals’ (an umbrella term used by these types) are waging a war on North America’s religious Christian traditions and culture. Firstly by trying to disentangle Christian participation in public schools, such as getting rid of Christmas decorations, holiday songs, even cutting snowflakes and stuff. Not in any display of multiculturalism, but simply to eliminate “respecting establishment of religion” in a secular public school environment.
By trying to stigmatize “Merry Christmas” as unwanted and uncalled for, the product of assuming if you’re wished one, they assume the recipient is inherently Christian, and that’s either annoying or offensive depending on the religion of the recipient. Borderline hate speech, if the recipient is a member of a religious faith or culture that sees such well wishing to be heretical.
Both of these examples are of people with a vested interest in painting your perceptions of the issue from a position of bias. Both of these examples have elements where they are correct in all the wrong ways and incorrect in all the right ones.
The truth is that the US also has a problem with smarmy assed people that rue the power of the religious communities and would give anything if only they could find some legal avenue to make them go away, short of going out and firebombing churches in high profile. Some way to disincentivize going to church, to get observation of religious culture and beliefs to have the communal aspect removed from them in order to be acceptable, since they view the entire concept of culture and society to be the sole domain of secularism, and religious community is seen as a stumbling block, opponent or even a danger to their preferred majority society.
We seldom get to hear about these ones outside the context of an angry religious idiot harping on about, “them godless li-bur-awls.” That doesn’t mean these people that are just jealous they bow at the altar of a different god aren’t the secular, dogmatic yuppies and shit. It just means the reason they’d specify as to why they have a problem with them gets stuck in their own personal bias and perspective. From their view, erroneous as it is, the United States was a country created by the will of God and ordained for a purpose (it wasn’t) and to divorce God and Christianity from dominance in the United States is to deliberately be spitting in the face of god and trying to destroy the world.
Outwardly, that sounds crazy and stupid. And it is. But just because that guy is crazy, egotistical and stupid does not make the objectives, reasons and goals of the person doing it noble, reasonable or even beneficent. Not even by comparison.
Socialists and communists style themselves as The Scientists, The Thinkers, The Creatives. Which is why so many of them wind up burnt out, addicted to drugs and miserable, while going nowhere. They share many of the same ideological trappings as creationist Americans. They do not share much of the same peace of mind as the simple minded religious folk that everything happens in some grand plan or because some beneficient deity willed it.
American socialists/communists desire a more unified and singular society and culture that does not bow its thought processes to religion. Which isn’t to say that it bows to science, just that it doesn’t bow to other religions and disagree. For you see, the major failing of socialist/communist culture is that it sees itself as THE way fashioned and formed by objective science. At the same time and in the same breath they fashion their own proposed solutions to problems based on the ideals and “theories” (opinions, editorials) of social science. Which ultimately are just arbitrary crap from people produced with degree granted institutionally provided papers of authority they believe gives them more credibility and justification to run their mouths, because they’re “valid to society.”
They do not see the inherent contradiction of hating religious and theocratic institutions for doing the same bogus shit, just under the pretense of a creationist shared myth. In fact, they view the shared myth and everybody believing the same shit with veneration and ideals. They just don’t want people believing rival or opposing things to their Grand Society.
God and the different religious communities, to them, aren’t a bunch of different cultures we all need to make room for and tolerate and appreciate and let live. They’re rival oppositional sources of competition for society’s attention. The only use this particular brand of secular dogmatist has for religious multiculturalism is to break up the homogenuity of a small community without dirtying their reputations or even having to lie about their intentions when they try to derail the inertia of celebrating things like religious holidays in those small, homogenuous communities defined by their populations and people.
They’d rather drive to get a number of similarly devout religious people, toss them into the same population, and not only make the established population fight for dominance, but deal with the incoming sects trying to use secular, neutral civic government as a bat to disentangle things like Town Christmas Parties from being acceptable, community gathering things.
The people conspiring and trying their hardest to inflate and magnify the expanse and reach and power of the religious right, the supposed anti-intellectualism they see as so base and prevalent in the United States, are simply covetous of the useful idiots in the Christian pews, when they could be useful idiots in yoga class, or gazing into crystals and inhaling incense fumes and doing irresponsible amounts of shrooms. Anything but being part of a coherent and established mainstream religion or religious culture and anything but a cloistered off community that differentiates itself with space and partitions itself with ideas.
And given the predatory, condescending, often “ends justify the means, by any means necessary”, culturally predatory way these types conduct themselves, using psychology, social psychology, institutions of state and interpersonal relationships to peel away the onions of misc. groups identities, try to force them down specific lines of social thought using the bridge of modernity as the means to reach them, I simply cannot mention the US’s supposed “War on Science” without also explaining that these people have been deliberate agitators in the debate between the place of religion, faith and society and secularism in the US since at LEAST the rise of communism across the US, if not the rise of anarchism in Europe.
The argument of the war on science is not, “polite and civilized society desperately trying to calm down a schizophrenic and make them take their anti-psychotics.” The war on science is more like a corrupt psychiatrist that detests the local church and would rather not just own the property the church is built on, but disestablish the entire religious community, chemically treat and psycho-condition the flock to feel (not think) the same way the psych does, and have them operate in the way he (or she) sees as “normal and good.” Whatever that is at any given moment, based on whatever doctrine they feel serves them.
It’s not about science. It’s about control. The fact they make the environment contested about secularism in the state and creationism in the mind and civilized society in the heart and soul of a given population or community is just good human resources and public relations nonsense. They honestly don’t give a fuck about anything but being right. The minute they don’t have competition for thoughts, out comes the Lysenkoism. The minute they don’t have to worry about shit like armed insurrection or forceful resistance, out comes the jackboots and the open shirking of legitimate channels of government. Out comes more blatant and blazen corruption.
So if you are not a fan of either extreme, you realize the status quo is simply a rapidly diminishing peaceful, middle ground. A middle ground that has been the inertia and the status quo of secular mainstream society, put in place literal centuries before you were born, maintained with temperance and discipline not by innocent cavemen that could not possibly understand the things you’ve seen and understood because they lack a modern perspective, but reasoned and civilized individuals that had more intimate schooling and treasured it all the more when they had it to spare. That they didn’t “finish off” their competition, be it religious docmatic or “li-bur-awl” anarchist/socialist, because they staunchly fought for the ability to respectfully disagree and would shut down, by force if necessary, any extreme that tried to assert itself over these values of tolerant religious secularism in government and society.
You realize that the religious people seldom can make more than even minor headwinds in even the most bumpkin and backwater of places without the next generations moving away and leaving them decaying husks, unable to properly establish themselves for long. And that while the disgusting megachurch evangelical pews of the 80s were monolithic and ridiculous, they also all but curled up and died by the turn of the century as secularism and reason and simple CHOICE allowed young parents the luxury of not forcing religion on their kids. And so, attendance dropped.
And you realize a lot of the supposed “war on science” is in fact a smear campaign levlied against a weakened religious institiution and its credibility and justification for existing in a modern society. Designed like putting the poor, simple fool in stocks in the middle of town while some falsely compassionate jackass of a jester disingenuously asks it, “harmless questions,” only to get back vitriolic declarations of fire and brimstone and just generally behave like an irrational, angry poked bear. So the faux-intentioned performer can shrug helplessly and go, “Eh, religious nuts, what can ya do?” before mourning how anti-intellectual and misplaced our values are, pumping so much money into national defense and so little into secular, federated, public education.
And as much as you may despise the preacher being socially and mentally flogged and made to look like an idiot, a loose and unhinged cannon, a danger to themselves, others and every impressionable child they are allowed to bark mythical nonsense at, the people behind the camera, the people directing where the camera looks, the people arranging this “interview” to show and bring out the worst in the targeted, vetted mark, are just as insidious and disgusting as the Holy Rollers extorting millions from dying old people that want to buy their way into heaven.
And you realize the enemy that they want you to shake your head at in sadness and pity is just one enemy on that stage. One easily spotted wolf in sheep’s clothing that lures the gullible, the mentally troubled, the simple, the emotionally unwell and looking for purpose, structure and community belonging to function.
And the other is so slick and sneaky, you don’t even notice they exist. Their campaign to embarrass the predatory they see as their competition so organic and well orchastrated and asymmetrical, they don’t even get their name dropped. The nature of the relationship is not mentioned. Their presence, obfuscated unless you know what to look for or suspect conflict of interest behind it.
And this predator vying for the pews and the flocks from the religious authority? Here’s the biggest kicker of all.
They wage their own war on science, too. By labeling their religion as ‘social science,’ and demanding when hard, empirical, objective, physical or biological science butt heads, it is social science that gets to dominate, get priority and interpret other science based around the social science. Based on what? Abstracts and constructs in law and philosophy that say to not do so would be a violation of civil rights and protections. To NOT give them ideological right of way is oppression of other people.
The American war on science is not limited to fire and brimstone spewing megachurch preachers. It’s in the heart and on the face of every horn rimmed glasses wearing, “quirky hair dyed and dyke short cut”, “nonbinary and politically ‘kweer’“, hammer and sickle flag waving asshole, as well.
Both want to destroy culture and philosophy which are not their own. Both want to dominate how government works and why it functions and how. Both want to dictate what is right and wrong based on ideology. Only one observes an organized creationist myth, though the other may harbor some arbitrary individual “spiritualism” if they’re particularly narcissistic or crazy.
But explaining this takes a lot of time, space and breath, and, well... saying it is one thing, proving it is another.
Thems my thoughts. I hope they help in some small way.
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Hi! I'm new to your blog because i really really enjoy your writing. Tho i hope this won't be offensive in anyway but seeing as you're an American i would like to know you view in what's going on rn. What with Covid, Trump, BLM. It just seems everything's wrong nowadays but anyway i hope you and your family stay safe!
Hello! I’m so glad you happened across it! Thank you! It means a lot that there are people out there that still find some happiness from my writing :D Lol it’s fine, I don’t mind. There is a LOT going on over here, no doubt. I try to view the situation as the bigger picture. It’s a challenging time that will pass, as every other has before.
COVID is confusing, and it’s almost impossible to find true information between people that want you to be afraid to maintain their control and the people that have already made up their minds from one doctor’s words without hearing opinions from other medical experts. But with deaths and hospitalizations trending down, I hope the country can begin to open more--those who are vulnerable I think are smart enough to stay safe, and the government needs to trust them to make the right choices. The rest of us need to be more courageous and recognize how many risks we take on a regular basis to live instead of just survive.
Trump is heavily shrouded by his own stupid big mouth and a media that does lie about him on a regular basis. Both of these things are true, and the people that understand the nuance of that are largely forced to be silent lest they lose their livelihoods. I investigate when he does or says something new, and usually the latest outrage is a far cry from what actually happened-so much so that I’m exhausted and hardly believe anything I hear anymore. After the whole Russia thing turned out to be nothing, I just lost my patience with media. Most Americans I know have already made up their minds, and many tune out of traditional news media in general because it’s so hard to get anything true. I’m not very bothered by Trump like some Americans. People react to every time he wipes his ass, and I’m over it.
Black Lives Matter is a funny statement to me, because it’s so obviously true and everyone agrees with it, like naming an organization “don’t kick puppies.” It seems obviously deceitful to name the organization something that no one with a conscience would disagree with, and then make a platform that many people WILL disagree with. I tend not to want to align with trained Marxists and people that disavow the nuclear family. I want to have a conversation about helpful police reform and policies that will actually help the black community, like disincentivizing single motherhood with the welfare system and promoting school choice/school vouchers. But it seems that peaceful protests tend to turn into unhelpful and deadly riots, and the conversation is being drowned in chaos. Virtue signaling abounds and does no real good for people who are suffering. The riots are damaging black neighborhoods and if the city officials actually gave a damn, they would have done their jobs and helped protect their communities rather than ignore the destruction of people’s livelihoods. Most of the talk about it from government officials and people on social media I see as disingenuous and shallow, and the BLM organization’s radicalism doesn’t improve the situation either. I don’t know the solution to this much built up anger, but as for me, I tend to spend time with people who recognize the issues and try to better themselves to better the situation as much as they can. You are all you can change, after all.
This is my overall position at the moment. I’ve spoken to liberals and conservatives about it, and we agree a lot more than we think when all the screaming is going on. Luckily, my family is safe from the riots for now, and none of us are at risk for COVID complications. Thank you so much for the kind and thoughtful ask, and I hope you and your family are doing well too!
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Ok, so, apropos of this post, where I claim that the whole concept of teenagehood has been lost:
This is why I think so.
There is a particular institution of teenhood of the late 20th century - in general, in the 50s and beyond - that I'm referring to.
This is very much the context I came of age in, and part of why I argue that Gen Xrs were "the last generation of American teenager."
As a late 20th century teen, you're not an adult yet, but you're also not a child, either.
I WANT to do what we do here on Tumblr and argue that this is class based but I just can't, except in the sense that maybe *rich* kids, especially girls, might exist in a more sheltered delayed-development social space, and there are some culture spaces (this was true with some families who were tracking their kids into professional/STEM careers) where young people were discouraged from focusing on anything at all except for getting into a good university. But the thing is, it was still pretty broadly true for the time that what we think of as the "twentieth century teenage lifestyle" per the media *did* represent, even if clumsily, more actual teenagers than it does now. I really feel like many more of us had a life independent of school and our family. What's been normalized as a teenager now is very much something that would've been considered a child/tween/early teen lifestyle *at the time.*
What was common in a middle class teenage lifestyle, where I lived, across a broad social spectrum:
* preparing for a career. What differed between social classes, is the shape that this takes. Many solid middle class kids that I knew, had part time jobs. It's important to point out that Boomer expectations around what constitutes "entry level" are based on Gen X and older employees. It didn't mean someone who had just graduated college, with zero work experience. It meant, specifically, someone with 80s/90s teenage/young adult-typical work experience who was entry level *in a career track job.* (it was also based on the assumption that people stay with the same company for a decade or more and are making a long term investment in training that individual.) The whole concept of what "entry level" even means, is just a confusing mess now. It definitely had one specific meaning in the 1980s and before. Also, most middle class college students that I knew in the 80s and 90s, had part time jobs, and so did I during my first try at college. But the rising costs and changing work world (it was a lot easier to have a fixed schedule in the 80s and 90s from what I gather) actually disincentivized student employment to a huge degree. Can only get sufficient student aid as a full time student, can't work enough hours/get enough pay while in school to make it worthwhile, increased stigma on student workers that didn't exist when a student worker was a potential 20 year employee. And if you're on a loan then it may even be more financially viable to double up on coursework and try to get done as quickly as possible.
* making money. I think there were just more ways to make money in the community, away from the internet, for older children/younger teens. Just to use broad stereotypes: we allowed 12 year old boys to chuck a newspaper from a bike at the crack of dawn, and we allowed 12 year old girls to be alone in a house with a baby. I can think of lots of things, though, that older children and young teens no longer do for money.
* dating. We were caught in a cultural liminal space between Silent Generation and older courtship practices (and earlier marriage), and a 70s-90s more liberal dating culture that allowed for sexual experimentation and serial monogamy. It isn't that so many older adults turned a blind eye to our dating so much as that they thought we were COURTING. High school dating used to be taken a lot more seriously. And in between the time when our parents married their high school sweetheart and our kids got brought up with abstinence-only sex education... there was a lot of dating.
* sex. Ok, so: I grew up in a fairly liberal big city. The reason why socially awkward people felt like everyone was having sex but them was... in many spaces, partially TRUE. And even if you were only going to have sex with one person ever, I'm sure that if you're my age and relatively neurotypical and not the most isolated teenager on the planet, and raised in a really average west coast white middle class family, then you probably made out here and there at a party and got in some heavy petting at a makeout spot before you finally had sex for the first time. (Or maybe I just ran with a fun crowd, I don't know.)
This brings me to how all of this sex and dating was even possible for so many middle class teens.
How could this happen, you might ask?
Many, many more teens drove cars.
If you had a car, or dated someone with a car, you had a place to make out. (This got more complicated if you're in a visible, socially unacceptable relationship. But I am talking about broad norms.) I'm guessing some of you (if you're my age) made 3rd base in yours or someone else's car.
Also: most of my teen friends with cars were driving big old American beaters, not cute little economy cars.
What's a big old car?
For lots of us, a hotel room on wheels.
But driving is still the biggest rite of passage I can think of, for many teens of my generation and older, that marked the passage into a space that was no longer a child but still not an adult. (There was a lot of cultural pressure and economic/insurance stuff to end a broad culture of teenage driving. That happened after I was out of my teens. **sniff** I'm so lucky.)
Maybe not as many girls drove (I didn't), but in my middle class crowd a majority of boys did starting at 16.
We not only had more freedom than Millennials and Zoomers did, we had way more freedom than you probably are even possibly imagining.
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Isn’t tumblr fun
Okay, so I’ve seen some conflicting information flying around since the announcement literally an hour ago about tumblr’s new policy.
Fandom content will be affected, first of all. Here’s a direct quote from the new TOS. Bold is mine.
What is considered adult content?
Adult content primarily includes photos, videos, or GIFs that show real-life human genitals or female-presenting nipples, and any content—including photos, videos, GIFs and illustrations—that depicts sex acts.
What is still permitted?
Examples of exceptions that are still permitted are exposed female-presenting nipples in connection with breastfeeding, birth or after-birth moments, and health-related situations, such as post-mastectomy or gender confirmation surgery. Written content such as erotica, nudity related to political or newsworthy speech, and nudity found in art, such as sculptures and illustrations, are also stuff that can be freely posted on Tumblr.
So what does this all mean? TL;DR:
1). N/SFW fanfic will still be allowed, for now.
2). N/SFW fanart will NOT be allowed.
3.) If you tag something as N/SFW (etc), no one will see it in search.
1). N/SFW fanfic should still be allowed.
Written content is still cool! For the moment. So fic writers (like me) shouldn’t be affected, except for what’s happening to the fanart community. However, if this new policy doesn’t get tumblr back into the app store, I’d expect erotica to be next on the salt and burn list.
Not in the new TOS, but newly added to the ‘why aren’t you appearing in search section’ certain kinds of links in posts now cause them not to appear in search. Tumblr hasn’t told us what those kinds of links are. When I post fic, there is usually a link involved, so that’s fun. This also has the side ‘benefit’ of making it harder to cross promote other platforms on tumblr. Want to post your content from twitter? Or your blog? Or another website? Tumblr might throttle your post.
2). N/SFW fanart will NOT be allowed.
I know it’s a bit confusing. Tumblr is saying that nudity in art (including digital illustrations like fanart) is allowed. However, that only applies to art that does not depict a sex act. Sex acts like—well like any of them. Basically any fanart that depicts characters in a sexual situation is now NOT ALLOWED. They can be naked...but it can’t be sexual. The exact implementation of that distinction is going to be complicated. For example, masturbation is a sex act. So a nude depiction of a character needs to be one where they aren’t engaged in touching themselves or turning themselves on in any way.
‘Sex acts’ is also a pretty broad in another way—characters do not have to be nude to engage in a sex act. I’m going to assume that kissing does not count. What about groping? Humping? An illustration where nothing explicit can be seen, but the characters are clearly doing something naughty? Guess what, that depicts a sex act.
I’m willing to bet that tumblr is going to err on the side of caution here. Tumblr may take an even harder stance in practice, where nudity is only allowed if the art is not meant to arouse the viewer. Basically, if it doesn’t resemble a renaissance painting in spirit, it’s out. At least, that’s my expectation.
For the Transformers fandom specifically:
Some people have said that because we aren’t depicting human beings (usually) in N/SFW fanart, we’ll be fine. That is really not an accurate interpretation of this new policy. Here’s why.
In the language that mentions sex acts, tumblr does not specify that ‘sex acts’ have to involve a human being.
Some explicit TF fanart depicts humanized genitalia on mostly human-shaped robots. I know if I were the moderator enforcing this, that would definitely make the cut as adult content. Actual animals engaged in sex acts, like a photo of two bunnies doing what bunnies do, is probably going to be allowed.
And here’s some proof that is going to segue us into point #3: the ‘furry’ tag has been throttled. Or blocked or shadowed or whatever. Furry art, as we all probably know, does not depict human beings.
3). If you tag something as N/SFW (etc), no one will see it in search.
A ton of fandom tags have been directly or indirectly throttled in the past week/two weeks. What’s happening is that certain tags can no longer be searched for at all. I posted about this when I discovered it last week.
If you search for ‘sex’ it comes up with “That’s about it for sex. Try another search?��� And there’s a whole list of tags (which tumblr has not made public because they suck) that are like that. N/SFW is one, ‘safe sex’ is another, ‘chronic pain’ is also on the list bizarrely. ‘Furry’ is another one—which clearly demonstrates that tumblr doesn’t think that adult content must be about real human beings to get banned, which is why I think the Transformers fandom needs to worry.
But wait, there’s more! If you tag a post with one of the banned tags (N/SFW for example), then it won’t show up in any other tag at all. Tagged your photo of your french fries as N/SFW as a joke? Guess what, it isn’t going to show up in the ‘french fries’ or the ‘fast food’ tag either.
Guess what that does! It disincentivizes tagging to warn! Make a post where you mention sex and tag ‘sex’ or ‘nsfw’ so people who just don’t want to read about sex won’t see it? Well, you’ve succeeded, now no one will! Your N/SFW headcanon won’t show up in the fandom tags if you warn for it properly either.
To conclude:
Basically, yes! We’re fucked! I’m really sad about this, because I love fandom, I love fandom on tumblr even, and the little community of transformers fans I’ve got around me now is great. I’m sad that we’re getting hamstrung here.
I’m also really grateful that I got off my ass and started participating in fandom for really the first time this past year. No more lurking! I’ve made friends, who are wonderful and a delight, and who I know I’m not going to lose because tumblr isn’t our only point of contact. I’ve also got mutuals on here who I don’t have points of contact with outside tumblr. And all the cool people I follow, I know I won’t be able to keep all of them wherever fandom goes next.
But I’m hopeful. Fandom has always managed to find its sea legs in the past. We’ll do it again. We’ll build this city again.
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Straw Wars: the Ableism Strikes Back.
(This is a draft for an article I’m submitting (by request) to a Canadian Student Christian Movement website. I recently posted a version of it on Facebook and thought some of you might like to read it. The title isn’t great or original, and I’m looking for a more clever pun. Hmu.
For the last couple of months, there’s been talk of a ban on plastic straws, or even all single-use plastics. The impetus was simple: plastic waste was a real cause of suffering and death for marine animals, and a threat to the general sustainability of life on earth. It’s production is a major factor in carbon emissions. No one was arguing that point. But there was a group speaking out against the ban that is often overlooked in these kinds of discussions. With the power of social media, they’ve made themselves heard: disabled people.
You see, when you have limited or no control over the muscles in your mouth or hands (or you don’t have the latter), drinking can be a hassle. Virtually the only way to drink unaided from a cup can be a bendable straw, which are currently made from plastic. Re-usable metal straws or compostable bamboo straws will benefit some people, but for others, their pointiness can be a hazard. Plastic straws are cheap and readily available everywhere, meaning that it is one of those accessibility concerns that rarely take a second thought. A ban on plastic straws would change that. And people with palsy, spinal damage and Parkinson's disease were not shutting up about it. Amazingly the responses, if they came at all, were not always understanding.
I’ve seen commentors on friend’s FB pages say things like ‘I’m not going to kill the planet for the convenience of some disabled people’ and I’m sure that’s not an uncommon sentiment. This ignores of course that a) drinking unaided is not a convenience but a source of dignity and a material need for most of us. And b) while the impact of plastic straws is bad and easy to personalize, they are hardly ‘what’s killing the planet’. 46% of the famous ‘Trash Island’ is composed of fishing nets. But so far, the fishing industry hasn’t had to deal with a ban.
This is just the first time the concerns of disabled people have gained serious traction in a debate about saving the Earth. The pattern is typical though: a lot of environmentalism puts the burden of saving the planet disproportionately on the poor and disabled.This is not usually the result of malice, but rather ignorance (although persistent and, as in the example above, sometimes willful). Environmentally sustainable products are often more expensive and require more human power, time and effort to use. Resources the rich and abled simply have more of.
Interestingly, the poor and disabled rarely get credit for all the environmentally destructive behavior they can not engage in if they wanted to. Biking to work or not taking a plane on vacation is only considered an admirable sacrifice for the environment if you have the option of doing those things. But if you can't do those things, but you also need a plastic straw to drink? Or you can barely afford food, let alone sustainably produced items? Or you don't have the free time, money or hand-eye coordination to forgo any other convenient, cheap, 'wasteful' products? Then a lot of environmentalists will blame you, personally, for the destruction of the earth.
On balance, carbon footprint and negative impact on the environment correlate with wealth. Rich people are not only usually more wasteful than poor people (because they can afford to be, and live in places where the effects of that waste are not as noticable), they also by definition have more control over the industries and regulations that truly govern the amount of pollution, overconsumption and waste that ruin the environment. This is how places like Europe can enjoy a higher standard of luxury while still having stricter environmental and labor regulation than other places: we’ve outsourced the social and environmental costs to Asia, Africa and South America.
Food waste is a political problem. Carbon emissions are a political problem. Child labor is a political problem. These are not personal moral problems that you can disinvest from and be done with it, judging everyone else.
The market will not ever solve these problems. They are a result of the market: they are byproducts of policies that are very profitable to rich and powerful people who can avoid these negative consequences. The market will only succeed in hiding the issue. Usually by relocating to a poorer place and some good marketing. The true solution will only come from a sense that we, as a global community need to reorganize the way we produce and distribute goods and services.
Small tasks are things like changing the rules about food waste so that corporations can't just deliberately throw food away if they could just as easily have given it to starving people. Possibly setting up a distribution system to make that happen. Maybe disincentivize overproduction by farmers by changing subsidies. Making companies that use forced or inhumane labor practices criminally liable.
Larger things are like: how to transition to an economy that is not based on fossil fuels while minimizing the opportunity for massive poverty and violence. What are the alternative ways to produce energy and plastics? If there aren't any feasible options, who has to sacrifice what? If we let the market decide, we already know the answer. And it will not be everyone equally.
The inevitability that our current way of life is going to become impossible means that we have to think of new ways of life, not just as individuals, but as a society. It would be really nice if it did not rely on everybody spending more money, and doing more stuff by hand. Not all of us have money. Not all of us have hands.
(for the record: I have both. That is not the point.)
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sitting here listening to 'Ue o muite arukou' and reading again about its being written after the lyricist came home one night dejected after a student protest of American military presence. he was sad about the seeming futility of the protest movement, and that got me thinking in a roundabout way of the recent protest movements and why student bodies/university campuses have historically been so strongly tied to protesting.
i didn't go to the recent family separation protests; it's a poor excuse, but i didn't know anyone else going to one, and didn't want to go alone. (i made a donation to RAICES instead.) i'm incredibly sure this is not a groundbreaking or original concept, but it occurs to me that, were i still in school, i would have at least been surrounded by people i knew, who might go with me. now that i'm out in the world on my own, i am truly On My Own; i know two people in my neighborhood (not very well) and have one friend who lives a little further into town. and then of course my neocon parents. and that's it. i've been feeling more hopelessly lonely than usual, lately - realizing at last that this is just how it is, now: years and years of slogging through things alone, cleaning my house alone, cooking meals alone, going out to movies alone, and - after my parents die - having no one around to help me if I need a ride to the doctor or the airport. it's been this crushing mantle of understanding of the arc of my life, and wrapped up in that is the suffocating knowledge that i will never have support or friendship to go out to a protest. if I ever do it again, i will have to do it alone with strangers, which feels unsafe, although i did do that for the immigration march after the travel ban. it went fine, but i haven't wanted to do it again.
and i know that's not the point and protest isn't comfortable or fun, but it's still...you know, difficult to make myself jump into a sea of strangers knowing no one will be there to have my back if i need it, or be a friendly face if i need help. college campuses provide that built-in community of people of the same spirit and who know you, who know to miss you if you go missing; once you get out into the Real World, you are expected to disappear into your little personal consumer fortress with your spouse and 2.5 children and never reemerge to engage in civic unrest of any kind. and the way our society is set up, we're really disincentivized to get involved, disconnected from social networks that might help us get involved and also, crucially, hold us accountable when we might otherwise just quietly disappear. i desperately miss having even the small community i had in school; the last several years especially i have been profoundly cut off from any social interaction with likeminded people, even though i have TRIED to get involved. generally it's just felt even more isolating.
i don't know, this is a pointless ramble, i just. i don't know if adult life has always felt this lonely and numbing or if this is a more uniquely 21st century deal, but it's sapping what little energy i can muster for social and civic engagement and making the spiritual cost of day to day living higher every moment. so, thanks again, capitalism, for this brutal, grinding, lonely hell existence. it's so much worse than i ever thought to expect.
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11 Years of Untappd: How One App Gamified the Relentless Pursuit of Novelty
On Jan. 20, Gregory Avola announced he was stepping down as chief creative officer of Untappd, the online beer platform he helped found and then actively ran for a decade. This, Avola writes, is driven by a lifestyle change, and he will remain at Untappd’s parent company, Next Glass, as executive advisor. As when software developer Next Glass purchased Untappd in 2016, and then joined it with newer purchase Beer Advocate in 2020, this update is stirring up conversation and reflection on Untappd’s impact on beer culture.
Such reflection yields a mixed bag. In the 11 years since it launched, Untappd has facilitated a wider-reaching community in beer. It’s helped users find beers they otherwise wouldn’t, and, therefore, has helped breweries reach new customers. Some, however, feel that Untappd has fueled “ticker culture,” and that its rating system is a breeding ground for biased, baseless ratings that only favor hype beers and often hurt breweries. Beer’s relationship with Untappd might be complicated, but Untappd’s role has proven undeniably significant.
Foursquare for Beer
Avola created Untappd with Tim Mather in 2010. Perhaps surprisingly, he wasn’t all that into beer when he started working on the app.
“My main interest was in communities and building social platforms to connect people in different ways,” he tells me in a recent call. Avola and Mather used Foursquare as a model — which the press ran with — but, as Avola puts it, with more focus on what those check-ins could do. “No one cares if you’re checking in at a grocery store,” he says. “But people checking in at bars, saying what they’re drinking, that starts connecting people across the globe.”
Avola wanted to take the inherent social aspect of craft beer and grow it online. At the time, there were only BeerAdvocate and RateBeer, both representing an older generation in beer. Untappd arrived at the party hot on the heels of IPAs becoming a thing people traveled and waited in hours-long lines for, a ready and willing platform for drinkers to discover, share, swap info, and, by checking in that they were at those hype breweries drinking those hype beers, brag. In a way, and as was Avola’s intention, Untappd became a wide-scale, virtual tasting room where beer geeks could talk shop but, coming from different cities and even countries instead of different barstools, they could introduce each other to new brews. Avola says that at the time he was living in New York City and learned what Fat Tire was when Mather, living on the West Coast, checked it in.
The Next Generation of Beer Raters
Whereas BeerAdvocate’s pages were filled with long, thoughtful beer reviews, Untappd catered to a generation of beer drinkers that was always on to the next and wanting an app to keep up. This is why Untappd is credited with — or blamed for — “ticker culture.” After all, while Untappd was still in its infancy, The Alchemist was able to survive closing its brewpub after Hurricane Irene by pumping Heady Topper out of its production brewery. There’s no telling if this could have happened had Untappd been in its prime, fueling beer seekers to move on in search of a hot IPA they hadn’t already tried. Indeed, within a few years, the script had flipped. How to be a beer nerd went from having a discerning dedication to select brews to relentlessly trying every new beer released. The proof of your beer cred was in your Untappd portfolio, where millions of fellow users could marvel at the sheer breadth of hype beers you’d checked in.
“Ticker culture represents an emphasis on breadth of experience over depth,” says Alex Kidd, of Don’t Drink Beer. “The pour sizes seem to diminish, the style ratings seem to be heavily skewed as a result, and the check-ins seem to be a system of accomplishments predicated on consumption over contemplation.”
At best, it could be argued, ticker culture catalyzes beer sales by keeping drinkers motivated with the thrill of the hunt. At worst, it can be an arrow through the heart of brewers’ ability to create and diversify their offerings, since the haziest IPAs, slushiest sours, and most candy-packed pastry stouts are going to win ticks every time over a loving homage to an English mild. This can also hurt beer sales for breweries on an individual basis, if they decide to commit the cardinal sin of making the same beers and therefore lose luster in the eyes of tick-seekers.
“I don’t want to be an old crank who decries ticker culture, but I really can’t imagine what positive impact it could have on anything,” says beer writer Will Gordon. “The most obvious downside,” Gordon continues, is too many people “stumbling around juggling flights and phones in their mad dash to overrate beers that are either too sweet or too sour.”
“Ticker culture is negative, full stop,” says Gage Siegel, founder of Brooklyn’s Non Sequitur Beer Project, citing people buying cases of beer just to flip and festival-goers trying to cram in 100 different beer pours in three-hour time slots as less-than-ideal results. “Ticker culture certainly doesn’t start or end with Untappd, but I’d say they did a lot to normalize it [and] make it easier to participate in.”
An Inevitable Evolution in How Drinkers Engage With Craft Beer
The ticker-culture discussion never happens without mentioning Untappd, but it’s important to clarify: The app did not create ticker culture. It has aided what could be considered human nature in an industry exponentially exploding with new options every year. One could get bogged down in a chicken-or-egg quandary: Do breweries continuously push the envelope to meet the demand of tick-hungry Untappd users, or are tick-hungry Untappd users tripping over themselves to keep up with the constant deluge of hop innovations and wacky adjuncts? It’s a two-way street, and Untappd provides the platform for everyone to talk about it.
“Untappd serviced ticker culture, but I feel comfortable saying it would have happened anyway,” says beer and spirits journalist and author Tara Nurin. “Across any number of industries … younger generations are more peripatetic. … It’s about what’s next, what’s new, and that plays out very profoundly in beer.” Nurin has mixed feelings about the way Untappd has arguably “gamified” beer. On one hand, it’s a great push for people to try new things. On the other, it could disincentivize people revisiting brews.
“I do think the novelty effect can be harmful to breweries,” says beer writer Carla Jean Lauter. “The pressures of ‘newness’ have led to some of the proliferation of extremely similar beers (e.g., having eight IPAs on tap at once) to try to give something new, rather than to just provide the best.”
Subjective and Unqualified: How Ratings Affect Breweries
Whichever side of the fence one falls in the ticker culture debate, one specific aspect of Untappd’s rating system that helps propel it is especially murky: the subjectivity. Even the industry insiders we spoke with who generally like the app acknowledged that the ratings are far from uniformly trustworthy. Many users skip actually commenting on their beers in favor of punching a number of “caps,” from zero to five. These ratings are obviously completely personal and often offer no explanation, yet, as Siegel points out, they’re considered by beer buyers at stores and bars as well as consumers weighing their beer options. The problem is, what a “3” or a “4.5” means can vary wildly from one person to the next. There’s no agreed-upon metric.
“I’ve just never put faith in numeric ratings of beer,” Lauter says. “In Untappd’s case, there’s also the twist that many people for a long time treated the reviews as their own personal tastes. ‘If I don’t like pineapple on pizza, and I order a pineapple pizza, I give it one star just to remind myself: Yep, still don’t like that.’”
The range of expertise among Untappd’s millions of users may range from from zero to cicerone, but on average, these ratings aren’t coming from people with beer-judging criteria. In some cases, this can be great, as it levels the playing field for anyone who’s enthusiastic about beer. It can be not so great but harmless if you remember to take rankings with a grain of salt. Or, it can do a bit of damage to some breweries.
“Some people develop an over-inflated sense of self because of their amount of check-ins, and they think this makes them some sort of expert despite the fact that they have no formal beer education,” says Paulina Olivares, Sacramento Pink Boots Society chapter leader, who notes that this issue isn’t exclusive to Untappd. Olivares says she’s stopped rating beers on Untappd unless it’s a “5.”
Of course, subjectivity as a concept also isn’t something Untappd created, but for all of its positive features, the app has become such an authority, and the microphone it therefore gives to biased, careless, and/or ungrounded opinions can now in some cases actually affect whether a brewery’s beer makes it onto shelves. A beer might not get a high rating from the Untappd masses because it isn’t hazy or dank enough, even if that wasn’t the brewer’s intention, and many retail outlets take those ratings into consideration. They could therefore decide against selling what could be a perfectly great beer. And this can create pressure on breweries to stick to what lights up the ratings board on Untappd.
As Avola points out in our call, this is rating culture. It happens with everything from restaurants to dry cleaners on Yelp. And yes, it even happens to Untappd itself in the form of one-star, “this-app-sucks” reviews in app stores based on one-off experiences with little context. Avola says he understands that it’s frustrating for breweries to see their beers rated poorly, beers they put a lot of effort into. These subjective rankings, though, are a by-product of Untappd’s main goal to help people share what they’re finding and drinking. The downsides of this are something Avola says really can’t be policed, but that he hopes can be mended as Untappd continues to evolve.
A Platform for Visibility, Discovery, and Nostalgia
On the flip side of the biased ratings are some of Untappd’s key tenets. There is community on a global scale, more relevant now than ever as most beer drinking is done at home, and poised to only become more crucial as beer culture and even beer retail grow online. There is increased visibility, discovery, and access between users and breweries.
Plus, as many users report, Untappd is a helpful tool for tracking one’s own beers: It’s less about a rating for others to see, and more about actually being able to organize and remember brews you loved and brews you didn’t love. This becomes increasingly helpful as the number of options in craft beer only grows and styles bloom into sub-styles and hybrids year after year.
“I do feel like more and more people are using it just to keep track of what they’ve drank versus tracking ratings,” says beer Instagrammer Valerie Delligatti, who appreciates being able to remember what she’s sampled from breweries to (pre-pandemic) bottle shares.
This is even a helpful professional tool, as beer writers can track and sort brews they try and report on, something beer writer and “former semi-professional blackjack player” Mike Pomranz values, noting that even if it weren’t free, he’d pay Untappd for this feature. Checking in beers creates your own library to refer back to whenever needed. “When I check in beers … I am thinking about what I’ll want to know later,” Pomranz says. “So, someone asks me for a good IPA in Arizona. Well, I haven’t been there in a while, but I can filter IPAs produced in Arizona and then sort those by rating, and then read my notes and boom, I have the perfect beer ready to go.”
This also creates a sort of scrapbook for craft beer lovers. “I personally love the nostalgia of looking back and remembering where [I was] when I had a certain beer,” says craft beer drinker and wellness coach Amanda Steele. “That’s kind of my favorite thing about Untappd.”
Beyond this core tracking function, Nurin notes that by the same token as Untappd possibly deterring users from returning to beers in favor of trying new finds, it can just as easily be a conduit for users to remember beers they love. While we spoke, she scrolled through her feed and found promos poised to remind users that a beer they loved once is on sale, or a bar they forgot about is doing a great happy hour. Speak with enough users and it becomes clear: Untappd has definitely, if inadvertently, provided a stage for ticker culture and its disadvantages for breweries. But it’s also achieved its goal of creating a virtual community for beer drinkers, and it’s proven itself quite the handy tool for tracking a whole wide world of beers.
The Future of Untappd
All that remains is to see how Untappd continues to evolve, especially in this new, increasingly online chapter, and how beer culture will evolve alongside it. One safe bet is on Untappd increasing its attention to international markets: In 2020, the app saw growth in European cities where it saw declines in the U.S.
In December, Next Glass also acquired digital beer magazine and event producer Hop Culture; according to Hop Culture founder and now creative director at Next Glass Kenny Gould, we’ll be seeing further integration of Next Glass acquisitions Untappd, Hop Culture, Oznr, and Beer Advocate, playing to the unique contributions each of these has made to beer culture. “I think we’ll continue to see the development of a digital craft beer community,” Gould says, “with more content, sales, and connections happening online.”
The article 11 Years of Untappd: How One App Gamified the Relentless Pursuit of Novelty appeared first on VinePair.
Via https://vinepair.com/articles/untapped-impact-craft-beer/
source https://vinology1.weebly.com/blog/11-years-of-untappd-how-one-app-gamified-the-relentless-pursuit-of-novelty
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11 Years of Untappd: How One App Gamified the Relentless Pursuit of Novelty
On Jan. 20, Gregory Avola announced he was stepping down as chief creative officer of Untappd, the online beer platform he helped found and then actively ran for a decade. This, Avola writes, is driven by a lifestyle change, and he will remain at Untappd’s parent company, Next Glass, as executive advisor. As when software developer Next Glass purchased Untappd in 2016, and then joined it with newer purchase Beer Advocate in 2020, this update is stirring up conversation and reflection on Untappd’s impact on beer culture.
Such reflection yields a mixed bag. In the 11 years since it launched, Untappd has facilitated a wider-reaching community in beer. It’s helped users find beers they otherwise wouldn’t, and, therefore, has helped breweries reach new customers. Some, however, feel that Untappd has fueled “ticker culture,” and that its rating system is a breeding ground for biased, baseless ratings that only favor hype beers and often hurt breweries. Beer’s relationship with Untappd might be complicated, but Untappd’s role has proven undeniably significant.
Foursquare for Beer
Avola created Untappd with Tim Mather in 2010. Perhaps surprisingly, he wasn’t all that into beer when he started working on the app.
“My main interest was in communities and building social platforms to connect people in different ways,” he tells me in a recent call. Avola and Mather used Foursquare as a model — which the press ran with — but, as Avola puts it, with more focus on what those check-ins could do. “No one cares if you’re checking in at a grocery store,” he says. “But people checking in at bars, saying what they’re drinking, that starts connecting people across the globe.”
Avola wanted to take the inherent social aspect of craft beer and grow it online. At the time, there were only BeerAdvocate and RateBeer, both representing an older generation in beer. Untappd arrived at the party hot on the heels of IPAs becoming a thing people traveled and waited in hours-long lines for, a ready and willing platform for drinkers to discover, share, swap info, and, by checking in that they were at those hype breweries drinking those hype beers, brag. In a way, and as was Avola’s intention, Untappd became a wide-scale, virtual tasting room where beer geeks could talk shop but, coming from different cities and even countries instead of different barstools, they could introduce each other to new brews. Avola says that at the time he was living in New York City and learned what Fat Tire was when Mather, living on the West Coast, checked it in.
The Next Generation of Beer Raters
Whereas BeerAdvocate’s pages were filled with long, thoughtful beer reviews, Untappd catered to a generation of beer drinkers that was always on to the next and wanting an app to keep up. This is why Untappd is credited with — or blamed for — “ticker culture.” After all, while Untappd was still in its infancy, The Alchemist was able to survive closing its brewpub after Hurricane Irene by pumping Heady Topper out of its production brewery. There’s no telling if this could have happened had Untappd been in its prime, fueling beer seekers to move on in search of a hot IPA they hadn’t already tried. Indeed, within a few years, the script had flipped. How to be a beer nerd went from having a discerning dedication to select brews to relentlessly trying every new beer released. The proof of your beer cred was in your Untappd portfolio, where millions of fellow users could marvel at the sheer breadth of hype beers you’d checked in.
“Ticker culture represents an emphasis on breadth of experience over depth,” says Alex Kidd, of Don’t Drink Beer. “The pour sizes seem to diminish, the style ratings seem to be heavily skewed as a result, and the check-ins seem to be a system of accomplishments predicated on consumption over contemplation.”
At best, it could be argued, ticker culture catalyzes beer sales by keeping drinkers motivated with the thrill of the hunt. At worst, it can be an arrow through the heart of brewers’ ability to create and diversify their offerings, since the haziest IPAs, slushiest sours, and most candy-packed pastry stouts are going to win ticks every time over a loving homage to an English mild. This can also hurt beer sales for breweries on an individual basis, if they decide to commit the cardinal sin of making the same beers and therefore lose luster in the eyes of tick-seekers.
“I don’t want to be an old crank who decries ticker culture, but I really can’t imagine what positive impact it could have on anything,” says beer writer Will Gordon. “The most obvious downside,” Gordon continues, is too many people “stumbling around juggling flights and phones in their mad dash to overrate beers that are either too sweet or too sour.”
“Ticker culture is negative, full stop,” says Gage Siegel, founder of Brooklyn’s Non Sequitur Beer Project, citing people buying cases of beer just to flip and festival-goers trying to cram in 100 different beer pours in three-hour time slots as less-than-ideal results. “Ticker culture certainly doesn’t start or end with Untappd, but I’d say they did a lot to normalize it [and] make it easier to participate in.”
An Inevitable Evolution in How Drinkers Engage With Craft Beer
The ticker-culture discussion never happens without mentioning Untappd, but it’s important to clarify: The app did not create ticker culture. It has aided what could be considered human nature in an industry exponentially exploding with new options every year. One could get bogged down in a chicken-or-egg quandary: Do breweries continuously push the envelope to meet the demand of tick-hungry Untappd users, or are tick-hungry Untappd users tripping over themselves to keep up with the constant deluge of hop innovations and wacky adjuncts? It’s a two-way street, and Untappd provides the platform for everyone to talk about it.
“Untappd serviced ticker culture, but I feel comfortable saying it would have happened anyway,” says beer and spirits journalist and author Tara Nurin. “Across any number of industries … younger generations are more peripatetic. … It’s about what’s next, what’s new, and that plays out very profoundly in beer.” Nurin has mixed feelings about the way Untappd has arguably “gamified” beer. On one hand, it’s a great push for people to try new things. On the other, it could disincentivize people revisiting brews.
“I do think the novelty effect can be harmful to breweries,” says beer writer Carla Jean Lauter. “The pressures of ‘newness’ have led to some of the proliferation of extremely similar beers (e.g., having eight IPAs on tap at once) to try to give something new, rather than to just provide the best.”
Subjective and Unqualified: How Ratings Affect Breweries
Whichever side of the fence one falls in the ticker culture debate, one specific aspect of Untappd’s rating system that helps propel it is especially murky: the subjectivity. Even the industry insiders we spoke with who generally like the app acknowledged that the ratings are far from uniformly trustworthy. Many users skip actually commenting on their beers in favor of punching a number of “caps,” from zero to five. These ratings are obviously completely personal and often offer no explanation, yet, as Siegel points out, they’re considered by beer buyers at stores and bars as well as consumers weighing their beer options. The problem is, what a “3” or a “4.5” means can vary wildly from one person to the next. There’s no agreed-upon metric.
“I’ve just never put faith in numeric ratings of beer,” Lauter says. “In Untappd’s case, there’s also the twist that many people for a long time treated the reviews as their own personal tastes. ‘If I don’t like pineapple on pizza, and I order a pineapple pizza, I give it one star just to remind myself: Yep, still don’t like that.’”
The range of expertise among Untappd’s millions of users may range from from zero to cicerone, but on average, these ratings aren’t coming from people with beer-judging criteria. In some cases, this can be great, as it levels the playing field for anyone who’s enthusiastic about beer. It can be not so great but harmless if you remember to take rankings with a grain of salt. Or, it can do a bit of damage to some breweries.
“Some people develop an over-inflated sense of self because of their amount of check-ins, and they think this makes them some sort of expert despite the fact that they have no formal beer education,” says Paulina Olivares, Sacramento Pink Boots Society chapter leader, who notes that this issue isn’t exclusive to Untappd. Olivares says she’s stopped rating beers on Untappd unless it’s a “5.”
Of course, subjectivity as a concept also isn’t something Untappd created, but for all of its positive features, the app has become such an authority, and the microphone it therefore gives to biased, careless, and/or ungrounded opinions can now in some cases actually affect whether a brewery’s beer makes it onto shelves. A beer might not get a high rating from the Untappd masses because it isn’t hazy or dank enough, even if that wasn’t the brewer’s intention, and many retail outlets take those ratings into consideration. They could therefore decide against selling what could be a perfectly great beer. And this can create pressure on breweries to stick to what lights up the ratings board on Untappd.
As Avola points out in our call, this is rating culture. It happens with everything from restaurants to dry cleaners on Yelp. And yes, it even happens to Untappd itself in the form of one-star, “this-app-sucks” reviews in app stores based on one-off experiences with little context. Avola says he understands that it’s frustrating for breweries to see their beers rated poorly, beers they put a lot of effort into. These subjective rankings, though, are a by-product of Untappd’s main goal to help people share what they’re finding and drinking. The downsides of this are something Avola says really can’t be policed, but that he hopes can be mended as Untappd continues to evolve.
A Platform for Visibility, Discovery, and Nostalgia
On the flip side of the biased ratings are some of Untappd’s key tenets. There is community on a global scale, more relevant now than ever as most beer drinking is done at home, and poised to only become more crucial as beer culture and even beer retail grow online. There is increased visibility, discovery, and access between users and breweries.
Plus, as many users report, Untappd is a helpful tool for tracking one’s own beers: It’s less about a rating for others to see, and more about actually being able to organize and remember brews you loved and brews you didn’t love. This becomes increasingly helpful as the number of options in craft beer only grows and styles bloom into sub-styles and hybrids year after year.
“I do feel like more and more people are using it just to keep track of what they’ve drank versus tracking ratings,” says beer Instagrammer Valerie Delligatti, who appreciates being able to remember what she’s sampled from breweries to (pre-pandemic) bottle shares.
This is even a helpful professional tool, as beer writers can track and sort brews they try and report on, something beer writer and “former semi-professional blackjack player” Mike Pomranz values, noting that even if it weren’t free, he’d pay Untappd for this feature. Checking in beers creates your own library to refer back to whenever needed. “When I check in beers … I am thinking about what I’ll want to know later,” Pomranz says. “So, someone asks me for a good IPA in Arizona. Well, I haven’t been there in a while, but I can filter IPAs produced in Arizona and then sort those by rating, and then read my notes and boom, I have the perfect beer ready to go.”
This also creates a sort of scrapbook for craft beer lovers. “I personally love the nostalgia of looking back and remembering where [I was] when I had a certain beer,” says craft beer drinker and wellness coach Amanda Steele. “That’s kind of my favorite thing about Untappd.”
Beyond this core tracking function, Nurin notes that by the same token as Untappd possibly deterring users from returning to beers in favor of trying new finds, it can just as easily be a conduit for users to remember beers they love. While we spoke, she scrolled through her feed and found promos poised to remind users that a beer they loved once is on sale, or a bar they forgot about is doing a great happy hour. Speak with enough users and it becomes clear: Untappd has definitely, if inadvertently, provided a stage for ticker culture and its disadvantages for breweries. But it’s also achieved its goal of creating a virtual community for beer drinkers, and it’s proven itself quite the handy tool for tracking a whole wide world of beers.
The Future of Untappd
All that remains is to see how Untappd continues to evolve, especially in this new, increasingly online chapter, and how beer culture will evolve alongside it. One safe bet is on Untappd increasing its attention to international markets: In 2020, the app saw growth in European cities where it saw declines in the U.S.
In December, Next Glass also acquired digital beer magazine and event producer Hop Culture; according to Hop Culture founder and now creative director at Next Glass Kenny Gould, we’ll be seeing further integration of Next Glass acquisitions Untappd, Hop Culture, Oznr, and Beer Advocate, playing to the unique contributions each of these has made to beer culture. “I think we’ll continue to see the development of a digital craft beer community,” Gould says, “with more content, sales, and connections happening online.”
The article 11 Years of Untappd: How One App Gamified the Relentless Pursuit of Novelty appeared first on VinePair.
source https://vinepair.com/articles/untapped-impact-craft-beer/
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