@creachr - Tumblr Blog

it sucks that the backrooms and by extent liminal spaces turned out the way they did in popular culture. i love dreamy places not because they're full of Scary Screatures or whatever but because they're fun and interesting and cool and a perfect place for a girl like me to lay her eggs

dragongirlsweetie

i could make a nest here it would be so good it's got the perfect amount of structural support for the strands of goo to connect up and hold together easily without collapsing and forming a cozy little den for me to sleep in. but all anyone cares about is booboo's playtime party friends

foxxear

Hate to be the bearer of bad news but you are one of the Scary Screatures

dragongirlsweetie

i'm a cute girl and everyone loves me

bigtasty

hates her father realness

bigtasty

alot of you seem to think when i say "her" i mean falin

werewolvesnearyou

i will smile at everyone i see

Dandelions

miau

Its cute when peoples understanding of Tumblr comes from screenshots of our best posts. They come here and post with a Screenshot Accent

cryptotheism

Hey if you're feeling anxious because of this post I just want you to know you're being watched like a hawk and everyone is making fun of you and every time you ever make a mistake we go out to the woods and write it down in excruciating detail upon a big ancient oak tree that has a record of all your mistakes and we are all beautiful with aesthetically pleasing cocks and holes and breasts and we make out and what flaws we have are romanticize-able-- unlike yours-- and we are all deft cooks who produce sensual meals while we think of your lesser actions and activities.

couchnapping

deft cocks

catluvr985

around the world aropund the world

vonkarn

find me fishing down by the tracks + look at the trout we caught (and released) ft my lovely 'lope @jackalopescruff

(it/its. personal art, please don't tag as "me," thanks!)

vonkarn

they don't look open to me.

self portrait, please do not tag as "me"

vonkarn

it's harder to be yourself, than it is to be anybody else

it/it's. photo from an AJJ concert years ago. 30 minute cooldown.

personal art, please don't tag with "me," thank you!

zlo-sovs-lifeboat

If humans share >50% of DNA with bananas... does that mean that the cylinder lost 50% of it's virginity in the m&ms tube?

beanytuesday

Social Media in 2035

toskarin

[shaking your hand] hey you ever hear about the scorpion and the frog [not letting go] exciting friends and a good adventure

shortcircuit908

mutuals... my greatest secret is that i am shortcircuit908 on every platform i've ever been on. find me there.

shortcircuit908

discord. steam. github. i'm there. bluesky. i don't and won't use it but it's there. factorio forums. yup. remember cohost? i was there. shortcircuit908.

dragongirlsnout

that's right! you live on my hard drive now :>

shortcircuit908

waow... hey can i get some jpegs in here or something

shortcircuit908

hello?

shortcircuit908

it's so dark

shortcircuit908

something touched my leg something touched my leg something touched my leg something touched my leg something touched m

dragongirlsnout

Oops! That wasn't supposed to be there, sorry

shortcircuit908

my spoole :) #myspoo

derinthescarletpescatarian

Foreigners tend to assume that the big cultural confusions between Australians and most other countries are gonna be based on our food, or social services, or weather, or weird animals. But it’s never that. In my experience, the real cultural confusions re: Australians are about The Respect Thing almost one hundred per cent of the time.

deathsmallcaps

? I realize im proving your point but what

derinthescarletpescatarian

The broader Australian culture doesn’t, as a whole, have status-based respect. Some individual groups might, because they’ve brought it from other cultures they’re involved in, but the general culture doesn’t. There’s no sense that your boss or scout leader or the guy in charge of your country deserves more respect than you, or that you should behave differently to them than you would to any random person you know similarly well. (The very rare exceptions include ritualised settings, such as courtrooms, and for some reason the fact that children use “Miss/Ms/Mr” honourifics for teachers at school.)

I don’t mean Australians are a “stick it to the man, fight back against those in power” kind of people – we’re generally not. And I don’t mean we have a “we’re going to do the status thing but pretend we don’t and pretend to all be equal in mixed company” thing that middle-class Americans do. I mean the status-respect system does not exist, and if you try to use it, it weirds people the fuck out at best, and insults them at worst. Treating someone most countries would say is ‘above’ you differently in Australia is basically telling that person that you hate them; it’s saying “I’m forced to interact with you due to our current circumstances but I don’t see you as a person and won’t grant you the basic respect of treating you like an equal”. (When I was in America, I was constantly suppressing the instinct that random service people were sassing me because they overuse honourifics and were so keen to help me.)

This makes interacting with foreigners really baffling in a lot of circumstances. In university, my international friends would often describe Australians as “friendly, but very rude”. They thought we were all arseholes because of the way we spoke to our PhD supervisors and soforth, and wouldn’t believe us when we explained that our behaviour was respectful and that being deferential would be weird and awkward and insulting to them. Learning Japanese had a similar problem; everyone in the class could get the concept of different levels of formality and deference in language, ans was happy to memorise the usage of various words for Japanese people, but using them on each other was super weird, and we’d only ever use the most casual form of anything unless specifically instructed otherwise by the teacher.

The reason I’ve been thinking of this lately is because I’ve recently become aware that a lot of countries have like… a special respect for their country’s leaders? I don’t just mean “yeah, that guy makes the rules”, but that having that office makes them better than everyone else, somehow. Which I expect from countries with royal families, because Tradition, but I’ve recently found that Americans feel this way about their President, too. (Except the current one, who seems to be enough of a dick to break the system.) Like, if six Americans were in an aeroplane that was going down and there was only one parachute and one of the Americans was A Generic Non-Trump President, it’s just assumed that that guy gets the parachute? Like he’s automatically the life worth saving over the others, and they’d just give up their chance in favour of him? And that’s so weird to me. An Australian prime minister would have a 1 in 6 chance at the parachute; however the people decided, “this guy happens to be the leader of the country” wouldn’t be a factor.

When Americans don’t like a President, they usually feel the need to work in how he’s “not my president”, either through sheer denial, or by finding some way he’s theoretically illegitimate (different ways votes are counted, wild conspiracy theories about birth country, etc.), and while making sure those rules are obeyed IS extremely important, I’ve recently noticed that part of the motivation seems to be that they’re invested in whether he’s Really The President because being the President somehow makes someone Special rather than just a normal dick who’s been put in charge of the group project. (You see the same thing in “THIS IS TRUMP’S AMERICA!”, like him becoming President gives him superpowers or something).

This is getting off-topic. Point is, in Australia you can run into the Prime Minister and ask him to help you fix your phone and if he’s not busy but refused to help you out he’d be kind of a dick; of course he should help you out. And if I walk into your restaurant and you act like I’m a movie star and you’re going to be super attentive to my every need because I’m The Customer, I’m gonna get creeped out. We’re suspicious and insulted by what most people in the world consider to be basic manners, and vice versa. And it makes interacting with foreigners super weird because I always feel like they’ve got some invisible heirarchical flowchart in the back of their minds that I don’t.

becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys

I have long noticed that Americans have absolutely the same cultural attitude to the President as they would to a serving monarchy. They just think they don’t on a technicality.

drferox

Can confirm that if I call someone ‘Sir/Madam’ I generally mean ‘asshole’ (unless talking to an animal or tiny child) and that if I get called Ma’am I feel like I’m being called the asshole, which made time in Atlanta, Georgia suoer weird.

materassassino

Australians have a very good attitude to respect

onionhighonionandrenown

…so this explains why I have spent the last fourteen years low-grade pissed off at nearly every Australian I meet, because every time I try to be American Polite at them it pisses them off. And, for that matter, why my second boss here, the one I was so careful to be Formally Respectful of and always called “sir,” took such an intense dislike to me.

derinthescarletpescatarian

Yeah, even if that boss understood that you were American and what that meant, their instincts would’ve been screaming at them the whole time that you were being a dick. It’s a difficult thing for us to get used to even when we know the culture is different’.

earhartsease

As a Brit visiting Australia, the most vivid experience I had of this is: in the UK it’s really uncool to get into the passenger seat of a cab - you’re expected to get in the back. In Australia the reverse was apparently true.

derinthescarletpescatarian

… I am only just now realising that inAmerican and British movies and stuff, people don’t get in the passenger seat of a taxi.

whitmerule

covid update: you’re now meant to get in the back seat for social distancing and IT FEELS SO RUDE. sorry taxi person I AM NOT TRYING TO SHUN YOu just I know there are rules and we’re protecting each other. let’s be intensely awkward for a while.

makaeru

Reblogging this because I just remembered the time Molly Meldrum absolutely horrified Prince Charles by describing meeting the Queen as “I saw your mum last week”.

love-lays-bleeding

One of my favorite travel books described humanity as, broadly speaking, having two types of culture: one where formal is respectful and informal is rude, and vice versa. Australian culture sees formality as hostile or unfriendly and familiarity as warmth. It’s decidedly not the case in USA as a whole, though as with any broad category the dichotomy changes as the group gets smaller.

wolverrina

YOU PUT THE THING INTO WORDS!

padeko

Different cultures are fascinating.

searchingcassiopeia

Look there’s honestly a lot of history that build our culture today to be like this. We never really had a true aristocracy or class system in Australia and was still considered the dirty colonies up until federation in 1901. Even when we had the gold rush in the 19th century there were rich people but also anyone could dig up a nugget and get rich so no one really bothered with the rich = better than you thing because old johnno down the road who normally is on the piss all day and lives in a swag just picked up a 2lb piece of gold that’s worth thousands of dollars so now he can go buy his own pub and sell his own beer but everyone will still think of him as that guy who was always cracking bad jokes at the end of the bar and drinking a minimum of 8 beers a day. Sure we have rich people but we also pull them back down to earth when they get hoity toity. Australia is one of the most unionised countries in the world and yeah its true we dont get upset by much but when we do, all hell breaks loose. Look up some of Australia’s biggest protests and union movements like the convict rebellions, Eureka stockade, the campaign for the 8 hour day, and he general history of our Australian Labor Party. Australia was the second country in the world to grant women’s suffrage. So many unions and strikes and demands we made in Australia demanding equal and fair rights to working class in the 19th century that by federation in 1901 we were ahead of the world with workers rights and equality. Really the only class system we had was the employer employee divide but we still never bowed down and took it from them just because they boss. I’m not going to go into what happened in the 20th century but if you’re interested definitely look up post war Australia, the women’s working unions in the middle of the century, definitely look up the late Bob Hawke and his legacy, the nurse’s strike in Victoria in the 80s, the land rights movement and Eddie Mabo, and go from there.

I remember in school we were always taught to treat others how you wanted to be treated. You were no better or worse than anyone else. You want to be treated equal to everyone else and that meant being polite and showing decency and helping each other out. It’s true we only use titles for teachers or elders (indigenous Australians use “Aunty” and “Uncle” as a show of respect to their elders) but outside of that if someone calls you Miss y/n or sir or whatever it’s just uncomfortable. In hospitality and retail some of us will still use sir/ma'am mainly because we don’t know customers names but even then that’s rare and usually applied only to elderly. We personally don’t want to be addressed by titles or even surnames (unless it’s a nickname which I’ll get to) so we don’t use the titles or surnames for other people. With surnames often we use them as a nickname if we dont/can’t shorten their names. Getting a nickname (a good one, not one that is intentionally meant to bully you ofc. E.g. ScoMo is the nickname for our PM but he’s a piece of shit and ScoMo sounds a lot like Scum-mo) is the biggest show of respect in Australia. Usually it’s simply just adding a vowel or changing it up a little. I.e. John = johnno, Darren = Dazza, etc. If we can’t do it to your first name we do it to your last name. If we can’t do it to your last name it’s either a feature or behaviour and we put it in a good light. You ever notice that Australians like to make fun of each other and “insult” each other? There’s a very subtle difference when it’s truly meant to be insulting but that’s our way of being affectionate for each other. We will point out your flaws and make fun of you (and stop if you say no) and we will give you a nickname and it’s all in good humour. It’s one of the things I find foreigners get really upset about because they dont understand why we are so rude to each other. You build up a hard skin in this country and forget hat sometimes that stuff IS a bit insulting.

It’s a very backwards system of respect but it is a very honest one. No one is better than you. No one is worse than you. We are all humans.

silvergryphonart

We treat our acquaintances like friends and our friends like family. Teasing your friends is expected the same way it is for siblings. If you act like someone is above you, in a not-joking way, that’s basically declaring that you don’t see them as potential friend material—that something about them repels you and you want as many barriers between you as possible.

It would hurt my dad so badly if I ever called him “sir.”

confusementation

Yep, and the automatic assumption that you think I’m an idiot/bitch if I’m called ma'am. The only time it has ever happened and I haven’t taken offence has been brand new army recruits/cadets, who are required to use it while in public to show deference to civilians.

I legit take less offense from being referred to as a pigdog cunt than I do being called ma'am. Getting a sweary character reference or having a friend call you a mad cbomb is totally fine in Aus. Ma'am is not something I associate with respect, being included as part of the group, or acceptance in any way - it’s pointing out rather emphatically that you are “other”

alwaysfrowningslightly

This is interesting as hell as an American raised in an Active Duty environment. As a kid I called everyone Ma’am or Sir and I wonder how jarring that child would be in Australia

derinthescarletpescatarian

Whenever I watch an American show and a kid calls their parents ‘sir’ and/or ‘ma'am’ I immediately assume that the intention is to clue the audience in on the fact that that child is being very severely abused. Addressing an elderly neighbour or something like that would be seen as charmingly respectful from a kid, but doing it to all adults would set off alarm bells in the heads of any Australian adult who wasn’t familiar with your past. They’d get it once they learned you were raised around American soldiers though, and expect you to grow out of it.

rianarchy

Huh. What’s it like living in Australia on the whole? Overall, not necessarily pertaining to the “respect” culture depicted here.

derinthescarletpescatarian

It’s fine. We have good beef. The towns and cities are far apart. I don’t know enough about other cultures to elaborate further.

It’s worth pointing out that I’m speaking in generalisations here; Australia, like many modern colonialised nations, is an immigrant “melting pot” culture. Our indigenous population is not very large, partly because their population density wasn’t high (compared to the country’s current density) before England started dumping people here but much more because of, well, all of the genocide. There was quite a lot of genocide. There still is, to be honest. And while the first wave of colonial settlers were mostly English, that very very quickly stopped being the case due to multiple subsequent immigration rushes that I won’t go into here, and despite what the One Nation racists will tell you, constant immigration is still a cornerstone of our culture and our economy, as is foreign students coming here to go to our universities and go home when they have their degrees (which keeps our tertiary education system afloat).

So the general Australian culture doesn’t resolve in smaller communities every single time. Australia works like this on a macrocosm, and any random collection of Australians is likely to behave like this, but if you interact with a community of first and second generation Japanese immigrants then they will of course likely have a mix of Japanese and the more general Australian culture, and no Australian would be at all surprised or confused to see them using honorifics and deferential body language (though many non-Japanese Australians would still be racist about it). And we have a great many communities like that from all over the world, because of the whole worldwide immigrant country thing. Which does cause its own problems, because even if it’s not surprising or confusing, it still creeps most Australians the fuck out to be addressed like that, so unless the immigrants quickly get in the habit of addressing outsiders in the more typical Australian way, you end up with two communities both thinking ‘wow my neighbours are rude as fuck’.

derinthescarletpescatarian

#not to be american but#getting really midwestern vibes from this post#i had a few aussie friends growing up#too hard to keep up as adults#umm but the whole friendliness without honorifics is basically the midwest#midwesterns are nice but we aint gonna call you maam or sir#unless you ask or we need to get your attention

I don’t know about the Midwest specifically, but from talking to Americans I’ve learned (correct me if I’m wrong) that Americans do not have a “status-based respect” vs. “no status-based respect” culture divide – they have a “status-based respect (explicit)” vs. a “status-based respect (pretending otherwise)” culture. Simply not using terms like ‘sir’ and ‘ma'am’ is NOT the same thing as general Australian culture. The whole “oh bless your heart” thing is NOT what we do. (Aussies can of course be passive-aggressive and have hidden social codes, but we don’t have this specific hidden social code.) That creeps us out way more than explicit status indicators because now the rules are hidden, so like, what the fuck is going on. The fact that people are subconsciously doing the status math at all is the difference. It is NOT that we think it’s polite to hide the gears behind a curtain where the guests don’t have to look at them – it’s that we think it’s weird to have the gears at all.

paniknatari

yeah, the Midwest is definitely more of a hidden status-based situation within middle class and fundamentalist/evangelical circles at the very least. The friendliness is only partially real, in many ways it’s also two faced. But many older generations think of service workers as a lower class and people in higher status positions as above them. There’s generational change happening, but it’s absolutely not like how derin is describing Australian culture

derinthescarletpescatarian

I should also specify, since some people in the notes are misconstruing this, that Australians aren’t necessarily nicer or friendlier because of this difference. We just express our friendliness or arseholery in different ways.

onbearfeet

Genuine question for writerly purposes—how do Australians address people whose names they don’t know in a professional context? For example, if a non-elderly customer in a shop drops something on their way out the door, and the something looks important (say, a phone or a set of keys), an American shop employee who doesn’t know the customer’s name would call out, “Sir/ma'am, you dropped your X!” Is this a place where honorifics still hang around in Australian English, or is there a less hierarchical form of address? Mate? Something else? No term of address at all?

derinthescarletpescatarian

We’d usually say “excuse me, you dropped X!” If a term of address is absolutely necessary (like if the customer doesn’t hear you and just ineffectually repeating ‘excuse me’ multiple times feels stupid) then a city employee would likely resort to 'miss/mr’ and a rural one would resort to 'mate’, but on the whole Australians prefer to eliminate terms of address entirely with unfamiliar people where possible. If the employee dropped something, the customer would speak to them in exactly the same way.

Trending Blogs

Recently Viewed Blogs