Don’t let people make fun of you for liking japanese culture.
I am living in japan right now and let me tell ya:
There are people here who can’t speak or understand English who play nothing but Missy elliot and ludacris, even in businesses like housing offices and restaurants.
There are people who have cowboy hats and dead cow skulls in their home because they idolize what they assume American homes are like.
There are people who learn English strictly through music videos and American television shows.
There are entire karaoke bars with english songs often sung by people who have no idea what the lyrics mean.
Japan often takes American shows like the powerpuff girls and make japanese versions of them.
They often mistake common Americans for celebrities. I have been mistaken for Micheal jordan, tiger woods, Shaquille o’neal, Tyler perry, and saddest of all: queen latifa.
The act of sprinkling English into your japanese sentences is considered cute and cool and is popular with teenagers. Bonus points if you happen to use it correctly.
Japanese stores sell shirts with english on them and people buy them not knowing that most of those word combinations are nonsense.
Don’t let someone shame you for singing an anime opening, using japanese in your sentences, wearing clothing with japanese on it, ect. If anything, this is just one more thing that you have in common with them.
The American/Japanese cultural exchange is so pure and wonderful and I love it so much
OK BUT RESONATE WITH THE SHIRT THING THOUGH
My Chinese relatives buy me shirts from China with English letters on them hoping I think it’s cool
I have a shirt that says “Hi Quality Uality”
It’s amazing
It happens alot.
And then what’s really great is Americans getting tattoos of Chinese characters thinking they mean one thing when they really don’t
Also a topic where the reverse happens.
lemme tell you..i have been in a grocery store in Japan and heard the unedited Get Low playin over the intercom..it was literally a Katt Williams moment
Oh, unsensored songs are pretty common.
I should not be hearing an unsensored ‘Magic Stick’ playing at a family restaurant.
And the best thing is when literally no one shows that they understand what is being said.
I was in a Chinese cafe one time and they had obviously put on their “fuck you” playlist. I mean, uncensored versions of Fuck You by Lilly Allen, Fuck You by Cee-lo Green, etc. No one else had any idea.
Oh, also, I got my favorite shirt ever in a little tchotchky store in Sichuan:
Pillowfort.io is a new blogging platform
that aims to improve the current state of social media by providing better privacy and communication tools. We wanted to make a user-friendly space on the web for creativity, communication and content-sharing. Pillowfort aims to be a hybrid of Tumblr, Twitter, and LiveJournal– keeping the strengths of these sites while giving you more control over how your content is seen an shared, as well as providing better communication tools. Everyone who contributes $5 or more will get a registration key to create an account on the site once the Kickstarter completes, and we also offer a bunch of cool physical rewards pictured above, so click through to the Kickstarter for information about the site, our business plan, and more!
if you can support i highly recommend this platform, its a breath of fresh air after tumblr and all the ways you can customize your experience on pillowfort is A+
I’ve been really loving Pillowfort so far. It’s a great platform for fandom, giving us a lot of the same functionality as tumblr while also providing the same kinds of privacy / community tools that ye olde LiveJournal used to give us. I really, really recommend supporting the Kickstarter and joining us over there. I want to see this site take off as THE fandom hub.
One thing I feel like I need to talk about, though: right now, people are talking a lot about how friendly Pillowfort is and how much less toxic everyone is over there. This is absolutely true – the place is a total breath of fresh air. But bear in mind that this is just a natural result of it being a much smaller collection of people with more or less similar interests who are all really happy to be somewhere new at the moment. The bigger a social platform gets and the longer it’s around, the more toxicity has the chance to take root. There is ALWAYS a small percentage of toxic people and/or toxic behaviour in ANY group of people, and the number of people who make up that percentage grows in proportion to the size of the overall group. There is no magical social platform that is ever going to be completely immune from toxic elements, and nobody should join Pillowfort expecting sunshine and rainbows forever.
What you should expect is a platform that cares about its users, and offers plenty of tools to help curate your experience and cut down as much toxicity as possible. You can blacklist content you don’t want to see. You can set the privacy level of each individual post you make (visible to the public / followers only / only you). You can delete your posts and all reblogs of your posts. You can create your own communities and moderate them based on your and your community members’ needs. There’s no algorithm controlling what shows up in your feed. There are no ads being forced on you and no investors dictating how the site should be run. Also, “No Nazis allowed” is basically right there in the TOS, which is really nice.
There’s also native image hosting, nested commenting to encourage long discussions, and communities so that everyone who loves a thing can gather and squee about the thing and make friends over the thing. It’s everything I wish Tumblr could have been and everything LiveJournal and its clones should have evolved into but didn’t.
If this is of any interest to you at all, toss ‘em $5 on the Kickstarter, get your access key, and join us over there. Or if you cannot justify spending $5 right now but are genuinely interested? Get in touch with me. I’m going to be throwing a little more than $5 their way, so I’ll have a few extra invite codes to spread around. You won’t have to pay anything that way, but what I do ask is that if you want an invite code from me, you have to give me your word that you’ll be an active, positive member of the community and won’t waste my invite code by grabbing an account and then never using it, or using it for like a week and then abandoning ship. Be willing to commit. Be willing to help us build the Pillowfort community. If it’s not what you want it to be, help MAKE it what you want it to be.
there’s a lot of questionable things about this site. the biggest red flags to me are the single-digit amount of workers, and plans for hiring… two? two??? back end coders? there’s no LLC or anything for this “company” either.
another big issue? they… don’t really talk about servers, at least from what I’ve seen. they’d need a lot more money to store and maintain servers for a social media site.
smaller red flag is the lack of design. or, amateur design. everything from the branding to the interactivity. feels like a high school project.
at worst, this is a scam, and all the money is going to one person who has some hair brained scheme to run off with it. it’s happened with Kickstarters before; legal loopholes are abundant. they could deliver a technically finished site with no maintenance or service.
but I could be wrong. I HOPE I’m wrong. I’m just skeptical. the theory is wonderful, almost too good to be true. maybe I’m just jaded. I hope so. I’d love to see this be an actual thing.
i never realized how much i hate modern art until i took a class in modern art
it’s so pretentious. like half of the pieces we’ve looked at have been purportedly commenting on elitism in art and income disparities when the piece itself sold for thousands of dollars to be put in a museum for rich people to look at. you’re supposed to look at barren canvases with vague splotches of color and meditate on the nature of life, navelgazing for an hour. bitch I can do that in my own home for free. most of the time the pieces themselves don’t require any skill, it’s just an asshole with some bright idea that ~~~no one has ever thought of before~~~ (which is bullshit, originality is a myth) and the gall to pretend that they’re saying something meaningful. A bunch of postmodernists specialize in literal plagiarism but with a different title. wow so edgy. really thought provoking. you sure are making a statement that’s relevant and people care about.
the most egregious example is this bullshit:
this is an overhead view of a plaza wherein some famous guy was commissioned to design a public art piece for. The brick and nonfunctional fountain was already there. The sculpture? a literal wall of iron bisecting the courtyard. this guy was paid over 100k to design this.
Now, this is located in a city, smack dab in the middle of a bunch of office buildings. Workers who had to spend 8 hours a day 5 days a week doing menial desk jobs had to look at this ugly piece of shit. You want to have a nice picnic during lunch break with your work buddies? tough shit. You get tilted arc instead fucko. You can’t see from one end of the courtyard to another because some dick thought rebar sheet metal was more important. It also impeded movement between the buildings so that you have to go around this fucking obstacle instead of just fucking walking from one side to the other.
So yeah, these workers got pissed, because you’re making an ugly place even uglier for obscene amounts of money without thinking about the ppl who actually have to look at it every day (who had no say in the design). There have been countless studies done on stress and related health problems in office workers and having to look at ugly as sin shit like this piece of work actually contributes to stress and decreases mental and physical health (as opposed to pretty scenery or plants etc).
When the designer was told what people thought of his masterpiece, he threw an absolute shitfit. “art doesn’t have to be pretty”, he said. “art isn’t for the public”.
while it is absolutely true that art doesn’t have to be aesthetically pleasing to be meaningful or relevant, putting this fucking monstrosity in a place where people are forced to look at it day in day out, in addition to the ugly buildings and streets and shit that comprises the rest of their lives is just kind of a dick move. Yes, people are painfully aware that life and art and all that shit isn’t always pretty. they’re the ones who have to live with that fact, not some pompous asshole who thinks he’s god’s gift to man because he put some metal wall in a plaza.
And yeah, not all art is for the public. Art can be self-expression or just for your own enjoyment. But if you are being commissioned by the state, paid hundereds of thousands of tax dollars to make a PUBLIC art piece, yeah, it’s for the public! saying that other people have no say in what that public art piece looks like, implying that if other people don’t like your art that they just Don’t Understand True Art TM, is this hugely egotistical self-masturbatory elitism that puts the artist above the working people (when like the whole point of art is supposed to be disrupting this kind of bullshit thinking).
But that’s not even the best part. This fucking douchebag, upon being told that people don’t want this metal wall in their courtyard and that they want him to move it, freaks the FUCK out about how he “designed it just for this space and taking it out of its context would destroy it”. Which like, yeah context is important when understanding the meaning of a piece. but literally the only meaning of this piece was “i got paid obscene amounts of money and im gonna use it to make the ugliest thing i can think of literally just because”. If you move it out of the context of the plaza it wouldn’t be impeding foot traffic or being an eyesore to the workers who are forced to spend their days there, which is destroying the purpose of the work. So in the end this guy opts to have the piece destroyed rather than moved because he can’t stand to have his ~~~high art~~~ removed from its PurposeTM which is to be unpleasant. i dont give a single goddamn fuck about ‘advancing sculpture’ or whatever the fuck, if it’s causing people stress on top of their already stressful lives just because you thought it would be great to create this atrocity in a place where no one can escape from, you’re not ‘advancing’ anything, you’re just being a dick.
So now the space has been converted to a rather plesant little oasis with plants and lots of benches.
anyways thats my dissertation on how much i hate contemporary art and find it to lack relevance or meaning to the people it supposedly represents or defends. it takes itself too seriously and imposes arbitrary and hypocritical statements on the nature of art at the expense of any real substance. in the world we live in, pretty things for the sake of being pretty, having stories that are entertaining and engaging and relatable, having fun and feeling good in a world that devalues those things, etc. are far more impactful and radical than anything sitting in a museum created by some millionaire who jacks off to their “fine art”. thanks for coming to my ted talk have a good night
Thank you for completing this and not stopping halfway through with “in this essay I shall…”
Now listen, you rich people, weep and wail because of the misery that is coming on you. Your wealth has rotted, and moths have eaten your clothes. Your gold and silver are corroded. Their corrosion will testify against you and eat your flesh like fire. You have hoarded wealth in the last days. Look! The wages you failed to pay the workers who mowed your fields are crying out against you. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord Almighty. You have lived on earth in luxury and self-indulgence. You have fattened yourselves in the day of slaughter. You have condemned and murdered the innocent one, who was not opposing you.— James 5:1-6
At first I thought this was an angry Tumblr post but then it turned out to be the Literal Bible and it got 1000x better
When it comes to stuff like racism, sexism, homophobia, etc, I’ve found it’s usually way better to think to yourself ‘I don’t want to be’ than ‘I’m not’.
I.e. if someone goes ‘that thing you just did is ableist’, instead of going ‘I’m not ableist, I don’t hate disabled people!’ it’s usually a lot better to go ‘I don’t want to be ableist, I should rethink what I’m doing/saying/etc in light of that fact’. Because that shifts your thinking so rather than jumping straight into denial and attempts to defend your character, you’re instead more inclined to look at how your actions could be misrepresenting your intentions. Or whether you’ve overlooked something, been callous, or acted in ignorance.
there aren’t enough posts going around about the swedish cryptid known as the skvader which is a rabbit with pheasant wings and also a very good boy.
like this one dude just made a fake taxidermy and spread it around as a hoax for a good ass while and it lead to this really cool fantasy creature and i am genuinely dissapointed that it never gets used in anything
THE BOY
Rabbirds, by the amazing @tkingfisher/Ursula Vernon (source).
The lack of skvaders is particularly frustrating when you realize it forms the third point of a wonderful cryptid trifecta.
You got the jackalopes, which are rabbits with antlers.
And you got the wolpertingers, which are rabbits with antlers and wings.
And then… what? Do you escalate? That’s unbalanced, those two rabbit cryptids don’t have the same number of extra things, the wolpertinger is clearly the jackalope But More.
BUT with the skvader on the other side, balance is restored. Antler rabbit, winged rabbit, winged antler rabbit. It’s a classic Venn diagram of imaginary lapine beasts, and it’s only complete if you acknowledge the fucking skvader.
Good thing Ursula’s got our back, at least.
This is a really excellent point and I applaud your advancements in Cryptid Theory.
Gentleman, if I might add:
yes you may add this
Ok, but they are ACTUALLY cute
I want cards of the snow pic ones for my midwinter greeting cards! Anyone got a link?
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