as a general rule. if what we’re calling ‘cultural appropriation’ sounds like nazi ideology (i.e. ‘white people should only do white people things and black people should only do black people things’) with progressive language, we are performing a very very poor application of what ‘cultural appropriation’ means. this is troublingly popular in the blogosphere right now and i think we all need to be more critical of what it is we may be saying or implying, even unintentionally.

There is nothing wrong with everyone enjoying each other’s cultures so long as those cultures have been shared. 

Eating Chinese food, watching Bollywood movies, going to see Cambodian dancers, or learning to speak Korean so you can watch every K drama in existence is totally fine. The invitation to participate in those things came from within those cultures. The Mexican family that owns the place where I get fajitas wants me to eat fajitas. Their whole business model kind of depends on it, actually. 

If you see something from another culture you think you might want to participate in, but you don’t know if that would be disrespectful or appropriative, you can just…ask. Like. A Jewish friend explained what a mezuzah was to me, recently. (It’s the little scroll-thing near their front doors that they touch when they come into their house. It basically means “this is a Jewish household.”)

“Oh, cool,” I said. “Can I touch it? Or is it only for Jewish people?”

“You can touch it or you can not touch it,” she said. “I don’t care.”

“Cool, I’m gonna touch it, then.”

“Cool.”

It’s not hard.

You want to twerk, twerk. I’ve never heard a black person say they didn’t think anybody else should be allowed to twerk. Just that they want us to acknowledge that they invented that shit, not Miley fucking Cyrus.

It really boils down to three simple things:

1. Consent. Is the culture open to sharing this thing? (& don’t cheat by finding one person who consents while most of the culture disagrees.)
   
2. Context. If a culture is open to sharing a thing but it is a thing of great religious significance, take the time to learn what is a respectful way to treat the thing. Probably don’t use it as random decoration or sexualize it unless that’s what it’s for. 
   
3. Credit. Give credit and if possible, buy from the original creators so the money goes where the credit should be.
   

This is really useful to me personally because I’ve definitely caught myself losing sight of what cultural appropriation actually is, and why it matters, so thank you, and everybody else pay attention too

People are interpreting my “feeling embarrassed at the bakery” post so literally and seriously, as “The French are terrifyingly judgemental and love to bully and humiliate” and that’s how you know these people are not chronic worriers. My fellow stressed people are in the notes like “I feel you, this is me and the Threatening Stationery Shop.” I mean that post was just my internal monologue as a perpetually nervous person who tends to feel defeated by normal social interactions—the baker didn’t say anything mean, just corrected me when I got a bread name wrong, the rest was my brain filling in the blanks with fear of inadequacy and I Must Get A Good Grade In Buying Bread. So many people in the notes are like “this is why I can never go to France” but that one time I went into a Starbucks in the US I found the place to be a reservoir of agonies, I promise I would feel every bit as judged and woeful buying bread in your country, it wasn’t a post about being French it was a post about being anxious!

my friend told me that her boyfriend got her a super cool rock while they were on vacation together and you would not BELIEVE my disappointment when i realized she was talking about her engagement ring

*holds your head in my hands* im sorry i let you down

Here’s some fossilized coral.

shoutout to the lord of the rings lighting directors. bold move to let the audience see what's going on in nighttime scenes. i miss that.

"Where's the light coming from?"

"The same place as the music."

The conversation

it’s horrific. awful way to die. either you’re trapped with no chance of being found, air running out, everyone around you suffocating, or the hull is broken and you get turned to jelly by the crushing ocean depths. ik they’re billionaires so it’s very contentious for me. generally i prefer no one dies horrifically. like just as a fellow human being on earth. but i dont think the ultra rich ever extend that mindset to others. climate refugees. and just everything. it feels like something a greek god would do to punish them. it has a certain swagful je ne sais quoi if removed from the human suffering which billionaires have to do philosophically to maintain their positions. very haunting. the hubris of it all. old jalopy metal tube steered by a mad catz controller. to go look at the titanic. which is nothing but a rusted out metal wreck full of fish and silt. btw. the grandiosity of it is completely unrecognizable. one has to wonder what compels ppl to even look at it in the first place. like the prestige of seeing some filthy grown over shell? crazy thing to die for. very textually rich… bad way to die as a human being. great way to die as a narrative about human greed and folly i guess. good job. mission accomplished?

In Japan, you can be indefinitely detained by the police and “interrogated” til you sign a confession, and have this coercive measure hold up in court as evidence. There is a reason that Japan has something close to 100% conviction rate for crimes.

In South Korea, the military and the police both have been used, since 1945, to put down those protesting their government’s actions, mostly targeted towards leftists and those who wanted USAmerican-installed/backed regimes to be more democratic. Even as recently as 2015, the police fired water cannons with enough force to kill a pro-democracy activist.

In India, the police happily abuses the indigenous people of Kashmir. This has been an issue for forever, but the recent events in Kashmir (Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation Act of 2019) has magnified the brutality greatly.

In Canada, the police is brutal against the indigenous folks, as well as other people of color. Starlight Tour is just the tip of the iceberg for how the indigenous folks are treated by the police.

In Australia, the indigenous folks are treated much in the same way as Canada, with the police as a state tool for brutalizing and even displacing indigenous folks.

In Chile, during the recent riots over austerity, the police did much of the same things as the USAmerican police: meting out state violence gleefully, faking violence (such as setting their own patrol cars on fire and damaging private properties) and blaming the people for their own violence. This is just the tip of the iceberg also: the violence towards the Chilean people by the police goes very, very deep.

In Sweden, the mounted police trample protestors (much like in Houston, Texas the weekend of May 30th, 2020), not to mention the standard barbarism you see in European nations.

In France, the protests against pushing back retirement ages for a ton of people (including those whose bodies literally cannot take the work past the current age of retirement, like ballet dancers) saw the Police brutalizing the public, intensifying the already massive riots.

This isn’t even getting into the weeds with the Great Britain, Portugal, Spain, and other European countries’ police forces’ barbaric treatment towards those who come from its former imperial/colonial holdings.

Police is never your friend, anywhere in the world.

Whales are cool as fuck and im sick of them being out in the ocean where I can’t see them

whales: [exist]

sci-fi authors: clearly they belong in their natural habitat...

Details: On the high Seas, Michael Zeno Diemer (German, 1867-1939)

Roomba kept crying because she couldn't find her spring toy and uh. Well, she had a good reason for it.

spring

She's blind, she makes a lot of different sounds, and her poor social skills mean she tries to groom any other cat she bumps into. She doesn't bump into furniture or walls anymore but she used to. Whenever she bumped into something, she'd just turn around and keep going.