![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I'd like to see some statistics on how often people actually send buttons "pinging", "skittering", "popping", or otherwise flying off of their (or someone else's) clothing. I can't help feeling that in fiction it is grossly misrepresented.
16 Dec 2008
(no subject)
16 Dec 2008 05:47 pmThe more I read about this Avatar business (concise version: original American anime-tribute children's cartoon populated with magical Asian children of a wide variety of Asian races to be made live-action! By M. Night Shyamalan! With an almost-entirely-white cast!), the more baffled, enraged, and sad I become.
I was already enraged recently by 21, a tremendous flop about recent real events and a real group of Asian college students who are still living where all the leads were recast as white. That was even more bizarre, in a way, but coming so closely on its heels, there's a mostly-white shitty Dragonball Z movie coming out soon and now this, it's just - the cherry on the sundae of rage. And confusion, too, not just rage, because... I honestly know that Hollywood has a long and shameful history of casting white people to play all the other races, but it's still hard to understand why you'd cast a white person as a black or Asian person at all, let alone when their Asianness was central to the plot (21) or the entire point of it (Avatar). It just doesn't make any sense - it seems utterly counter-intuitive. I find it hard to imagine in a personal sense how it even occurs to anyone. I find it sad that in this day and age, anyone could still believe that only white actors are marketable in a major movie (it's not as if a major movie starring black or Asian actors has never been made, either). And I find it enraging that even with this rationale, it would seem perfectly okay to Paramount execs to just take the cool trappings of the Asian world, that they think will sell, and fill them up with white people. Martial arts! Buddhist temples! Asian philosophy! But no one will notice, right? It's just fantasy. It's white by default! Obviously, magical worlds - even if taken directly from East Asian mythology - must be white, right? ARGH.
It's sort of like how I saw someone the other day say that the traditional trappings of Christmas (including St. Nicholas, Santa hats, and decorated Christmas trees) weren't Christian to her, they were just secular! Because Christian is the default in your society, you fool. Because people celebrate the holiday who were raised Christian or nominally so, who come from Christian backgrounds, even if they choose not to consider themselves Christian or practise Christianity any longer. You have the priviledge of considering various elements of Christianity to be Christian or not according to how you personally perceive them to line up with Christian ideology regardless of the fact that they are inescapably associated with Christianity because you, too, come from their background. It would be difficult and exceedingly odd for an American Jew or Muslim to consider Santa hats, Christmas trees, and all the associated patter - which frequently includes nativity scenes and pageants and exhortations that "Jesus is the reason for the season" - to be merely "secular" and open to anybody.
You'd think the fact that white is the default for a white person would inescapably carry the logical corollary that Asian is the default for an Asian person (and thus that, hey, whiteness isn't!). The fact that Christianity seems natural to someone raised in Christianity should lead them to suppose that the religion and culture of each person's background is what would seem natural to them (and thus, hey, Christianity wouldn't!). But alas, this level of logic is beyond many people - some because they've never thought about it, and more, I'm sure, because they don't care to think about it.
I was already enraged recently by 21, a tremendous flop about recent real events and a real group of Asian college students who are still living where all the leads were recast as white. That was even more bizarre, in a way, but coming so closely on its heels, there's a mostly-white shitty Dragonball Z movie coming out soon and now this, it's just - the cherry on the sundae of rage. And confusion, too, not just rage, because... I honestly know that Hollywood has a long and shameful history of casting white people to play all the other races, but it's still hard to understand why you'd cast a white person as a black or Asian person at all, let alone when their Asianness was central to the plot (21) or the entire point of it (Avatar). It just doesn't make any sense - it seems utterly counter-intuitive. I find it hard to imagine in a personal sense how it even occurs to anyone. I find it sad that in this day and age, anyone could still believe that only white actors are marketable in a major movie (it's not as if a major movie starring black or Asian actors has never been made, either). And I find it enraging that even with this rationale, it would seem perfectly okay to Paramount execs to just take the cool trappings of the Asian world, that they think will sell, and fill them up with white people. Martial arts! Buddhist temples! Asian philosophy! But no one will notice, right? It's just fantasy. It's white by default! Obviously, magical worlds - even if taken directly from East Asian mythology - must be white, right? ARGH.
It's sort of like how I saw someone the other day say that the traditional trappings of Christmas (including St. Nicholas, Santa hats, and decorated Christmas trees) weren't Christian to her, they were just secular! Because Christian is the default in your society, you fool. Because people celebrate the holiday who were raised Christian or nominally so, who come from Christian backgrounds, even if they choose not to consider themselves Christian or practise Christianity any longer. You have the priviledge of considering various elements of Christianity to be Christian or not according to how you personally perceive them to line up with Christian ideology regardless of the fact that they are inescapably associated with Christianity because you, too, come from their background. It would be difficult and exceedingly odd for an American Jew or Muslim to consider Santa hats, Christmas trees, and all the associated patter - which frequently includes nativity scenes and pageants and exhortations that "Jesus is the reason for the season" - to be merely "secular" and open to anybody.
You'd think the fact that white is the default for a white person would inescapably carry the logical corollary that Asian is the default for an Asian person (and thus that, hey, whiteness isn't!). The fact that Christianity seems natural to someone raised in Christianity should lead them to suppose that the religion and culture of each person's background is what would seem natural to them (and thus, hey, Christianity wouldn't!). But alas, this level of logic is beyond many people - some because they've never thought about it, and more, I'm sure, because they don't care to think about it.
glögg expiration...?
16 Dec 2008 11:01 pmWe had a box of glögg bought last Christmas and never opened, but when I was pouring it in the pan to heat, I noticed that it said "Best before May 2008".
I thought it would keep indefinitely - doesn't juice in a sealed juicebox usually keep indefinitely? It still smells like berries, apples and cinnamon.
Will we die if we drink it?
I thought it would keep indefinitely - doesn't juice in a sealed juicebox usually keep indefinitely? It still smells like berries, apples and cinnamon.
Will we die if we drink it?