Qwertystop @qwertystop - Tumblr Blog

#circle of magic #books #tamora pierce #these books were a significant part of my childhood #tortall too

The whole series is excellent - Shatterglass got me a lifelong fascination with glasswork, and my envy of Tris's braids was probably one of my first Gender feelings.

elodieunderglass

You 🫵 person in Europe who’s finding it unseasonably hot and you suddenly don’t know what to wear on, like, a hot train.

You’re going to go on Vinted or eBay and put in “made in Italy”, “moda Italia” or (translation of same.) add the search term “silk top.”

What you want are tops that consist of these really thin jersey vest tops with a floaty pure silk layer over them. You’re looking to spend £8-20. You might need to specify “floaty” or “lagenlook.”

There will usually be a healthy secondhand collection of these online. Try to get a pure silk overlayer if you can - some of them are silk blended with viscose.

You’ll probably find the designs kinda mid or old-lady-ish. Don’t worry too much about this. They’ll actually look pretty cool on, and everyone will be jealous of your freedom from suffering.

These tops will keep you much cooler than skimpier ones.

elodieunderglass

Have the reviews had time to come in? Do you get it now?

#clothes #resources

Fancy and I lay in the grass near the neighbor's yard at 2:00 a.m. The grass is wet, the insects are loud. I sing a sad song to her but change the words at the last minute.

I try to show her the double rainbow halo around the moon. She tries to show me all the night smells. I bring you bad images of both. We all miss part of the experience, yet have a lovely experience nevertheless.

Go explore the front yard with a friend! It can be an adventure if you let it! Night sniffs!

Can we not be one beast?

I'm somewhat hard of hearing. She responds to the sound of a bird's feet as it hops up a branch. I thrive on color, work with it every day, and there's a lot of it she cannot see. Her eyes detect motion faster than the refresh rate of my TV. I can taste sweetness better than she can, but she has a whole wilderness of umami open to her that I can't even imagine. She reads the past with her nose, myriad detailed stories unfold for her in a form of chronological and spatial storytelling I will never experience. I can just ask where Daddy has been. I feel and grasp with my sensitive hands, my skin senses temperature everywhere, but through whiskers and fur, she feels the motion of the air across her entire body.

I can see the birds on the power lines at the end of the street clearly.

When she looks up at night, though they are blurry and soft, she can see forty thousand brilliant stars.

#cats #stargazing #existing

Twenty thousand, only half are visible.

I'm guessing wildly at this, but this is the Large Magellanic Cloud, the best photo I could find showing visibility up to magnitude 8.

Then my approximation of a human view at magnitude 6 from a dark sky site.

Then the same for a cat with blurry vision who can't see all the colors.

Worse than napkin math, but resources for this were strangely hard to find, and I'm not an expert, so don't take any of this as accurate.

But any way you cut it, her sky is so bright and everything is soft and blurred together, like trying to concentrate on something in a dream.

The stars don't move or smell like anything. She doesn't look up while we are outside. I'd be kind of spooked if she did. Instead of stargazing, she spends half an hour cataloging various pisses from the strays and listening to what I think is the sound of the geckos that live in the stonework and creepers.

I cannot perceive these things, but they matter to her, and from the way she lies on the needlework I'm trying to finish, I know she cares about my interests also. The geckos, the pissing, the sewing, the stars, it is all equally important. It all merges in a soft, blurry, bright mass.

We sit in the grass and I get bitten by mosquitoes while she peeps and trills at me in the dark that isn't dark at all.

wizardpostsdotorg

hate shopping in the health food section what do you mean heart healthy happy body gut smile no guilt shame free fat free msg free taste free. i just want some dried mango slices. why are you all so scared

wizardpostsdotorg

sunshine whole farm Snack Bits™️ believe in family, health, and organic three ingredient traditional recipes, with a twist! our splendifferous Snack Bits™️ are perfect for hikes, yoga, your busy life, and WILL NOT MAKE YOU FAT!! THIS WILL NOT MAKE YOU FAT! fulfill those pesky unnatural gross icky hunger feelings with Snack Bits™️ that WILL NOT make you FAT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

#fatphobia #diet culture #why are we like this #food

prokopetz

One the one hand, I basically agree with a lot of the negative reviews that the Kickstarter campaign for Mina the Hollower was not as forthcoming as it could have been about exactly what kind of game they were making, and the end product does feel like a bit of a bait and switch.

On the other hand, as much as I was expecting a retro Zelda-like, the concept of a full-featured soulslike that adheres to the graphical and technical limitations of the Game Boy Color is objectively hilarious, so even if I'm not particular into soulslikes as a genre I feel like I have to give them a pass, because what the fuck.

#video games #mina the hollower #tactus #game design #shameless plug

I contest that description; it definitely doesn't adhere to the limitations any more than Shovel Knight did the NES. It apes the general feel, at most.

I make a point of this pedantry as I have an acquaintance who is currently developing a Crypt of the NecroDancer-type rhythm dungeon crawler that is for the NES. (Tactus, by zeta0134 on Itch)

@wastelesscrafts used to have a big pinned post of instructions and advice and stuff for beginning menders. However, that account seems to no longer exist. Does anyone have that still kicking around in their reblogs, or something like it?

onewayonion

https://www.tumblr.com/wilburscraft/689724764900769792 this one?

#resources #seeking resources

That's what I was thinking of! Unfortunately it's all links to equally missing posts but it might be possible to trace those posts now that we have post IDs? Maybe?

wastelesscrafts

INDEX: Sewing, mending, and crafts

General information:

Fabric types

Basic hand sewing stitches

Hand sewing needles

Knitting 101

Embroidery 101

Visible mending

Crafting on the cheap

How to fix sewing machine issues

Yarn types

Clothing fasteners

Circular knitting

Tutorials:

How to sew buttons

Disability aid tutorials

How to DIY custom patches

Make some pocket extenders for your pants (by Quixiify)

How to darn holes in woven fabrics (by Delicatefury)

How to mend holes in the thigh area of jeans

How to make buttonholes (machine+hand)

How to make pockets

How to use a seam ripper

Projects and patterns:

DIY cotton rounds

Easy knitted gloves

Free customisable sewing patterns

Easy rectangle skirt

DIY tote bag

DIY delicates laundry bag

DIY hot pads

Easy fleece hat

Fingerless fleece gloves

Apron pattern

Knitted weighted blanket (by Knitboyknit)

How to make a custom dress form

(If a link has a Tumblr username in brackets behind it, the link leads to a post I reblogged from someone else instead of a post I wrote myself.)

#resources #crafts #wastelesscrafts #visible mending #mending

Anyone know if there's a way to find reblogs of these with the originals gone, now that we have the IDs?

sometiktoksarevalid

sandersstudies

More about Nora!

Research finds many hand dryers operate at noise levels that are harmful to children. Nora Keegan is the 13-year-old student who did the stu

bransler

I love it when a researcher from a marginalized group proves an important point.

#science #research

spockwithacat

Not a fan of the collective delusion tumblr has going on thinking Luigi didn’t kill that guy and is being framed

penrosesun

Look, there are two distinct things going on here, and I really fucking hate that they happen to overlap and look like the same thing:

Thing #1 is that a bunch of Tumblr users have decided that they support the murder and want the murderer to get off, so they’re basically just repeating crap like “Luigi is innocent, he was at my place the whole time *wink*” and it’s kind of weird and gross

Thing #2 is, the case has been actually quite horrifically botched by the cops pretty blatantly planting evidence, some of which has actually been thrown out at pretrial. Relevantly, the cops didn’t obtain a warrant to search the backpack until after they had done so, and they all turned off their body cameras for 11 minutes between finding the backpack and opening it “for the first time,” for some unexplained reason. To be clear, this doesn’t mean that Luigi Mangione didn’t do it in an “eyes of heaven” sense; this means that there is less untampered evidence than there should be in a “presumption of innocence” sense. He might very well have actually killed that guy, but him being framed is nonetheless very real.

azarias-everywhere-else

"Framing a guilty man" is exactly what went down in the OJ Simpson murder trial.

OJ did it. He killed those people. There was ample evidence. But the LAPD was so corrupt, so routinely racist, so accustomed to simply dictating the terms of a case, that instead of simply collecting the evidence that proved his guilt and letting the prosecution take it to court, they framed him. They fabricated evidence, broke chains of custody, tampered with witnesses, lied under oath, to make sure the guilty man looked guilty. This was how they typically treated Black men they wanted to pin a crime on, guilty or not. But OJ was rich and famous and could afford a legal team that fought back and exposed the corruption to the jury —a jury of Angelinos who had witnessed the LAPD's lawlessness during the Rodney King beating.

So the jury, correctly, found him not guilt. Not because he didn't do it, but because corrupt officers of the state made it impossible to prove his guilt.

I don't know if Luigi Mangione did it or not. But if the cops set out to frame someone for murder, I think their behavior would be indistinguishable from how they've behaved towards Luigi Mangione.

cuzosu-blog

Do I personally feel that if he did actually kill the CEO, he should walk? Yes. CEOs like that do their best to kill more people than that on a daily basis, and there are few, if any, consequences. So I feel there is a measure of "turnabout is fair play" involved, but!

Even if I didn't hold that opinion, there was reasonable doubt and then some, and the cops were doing their best to either get the case thrown out (which is possible but unlikely) or to frame him, in which case the law can and should toss out anything they may have planted, which is exactly what happened.

And frankly, the amount of people acting like they know he did in fact do it are buying into copaganda, because we have insufficient proof!

Do we know he did it? No.

Do we care if he did? Probably not. Mostly because the CEO had it coming as far as the general populace is concerned.

Do we care if he was framed for it? We should. ACAB.

penrosesun

Man, I hate to be a party pooper and drag someone who has like 90% of the point, but this right here? This is exactly the gross conflation I’m talking about.

Imagine if people kept starting every conversation about Kimberly Long by opining on whether or not they thought her boyfriend had it coming. Imagine if in order to talk about the Central Park Five, we first had to go through a pantomime about sexual assault statistics in relation to the crack epidemic.

Not only does none of that matter with regards to the central point of police and prosecutorial malfeasance, but it is completely weird and tasteless, and yes, actively harmful to a potentially innocent man’s ongoing legal case to bring it up.

Let me be very clear here: OJ’s “not guilty” verdict had fuck all to do with what we as a society should or shouldn’t think about domestic violence. No part of that case was about whether or not the murders were justified, or whether or not we should hold sympathy in our hearts for Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman and their families, or anything else about the actual crime.

Do I personally feel that if Luigi Mangione actually killed that CEO he should walk? Completely and totally irrelevant! Nobody cares! Why do you need to start with that, when you even go on to outright state that it literally does not matter???

Bluntly, it’s exactly crap like this that is leading to people like OP having reactive takes based on not understanding that there are actual real problems with the case against Luigi Mangione.

Let’s imagine a counter-factual for a moment. Let’s imagine that @azarias-everywhere-else had opened that very succinct and well-written summary of the OJ Simpson case by saying “Now personally I do think that Nicole Brown was racist and was physically abusive towards Simpson, and her claims of domestic violence were probably exaggerated because she knew that no one would question those sorts of allegations against a Black man.” Would you have believed even a word of what they said after that about the cops framing the guy? No, right? Because that would indicate that they had an agenda, and it would make every allegation that followed suspect to the tune of that clear agenda.

No fucking wonder OP thinks “the cops very likely tampered with evidence in the Luigi Mangione case” is some form of weird wishful thinking or collective delusion! It’s not, but to hear some of you defend him, you’d think that the only way Luigi Mangione looks innocent is through a haze of irony poisoned copium. With friends like this, who needs enemies to convict them in the court of public opinion?

#luigi mangione #innocent until proven guilty #actually though not just as an excuse

fullmetalfisting

Tbh germ theory DOES sound crazy. Like if you told a regency-era nobleman that tiny creatures lived on the surface of everything and THAT’S what causes consumption, they’d be like “ah, I see you are a lunatic. Would you reside in my hermitage? Rantings and ravings do so amuse my guests”

mysteryteacup

But if you told a Medieval person this they would probably go "Ah, so when the miasma settles on surfaces it gains evil life. I understand."

alarajrogers

Yeah, actually, it would probably be pretty easy to explain germ theory to a Medieval person as tiny evil spirits that live on everything, but they can be purified by soap and water, or by alcohol, because that is why God has granted us those things. And because they can float in the air, if you cough or sneeze after they have infested you, that can cause them to infest others. And when you are sick, the angels God has deputized to defend the bodies of His beloved children are at war with the evil spirits, and, sadly, sometimes they lose, but the best way to help your angels win their battle is to rest, drink plenty (this would probably be small beer in this time period, not water, because the water was also infested), stay clean, and for the sake of God do not allow anyone to let your blood, for the angels need that blood in their war against the evil spirits. Bloodletting is good for some types of illnesses but not the kinds caused by the tiny evil spirits.

chekhovs-raygun

boiling as a sterilization measure is also easy to explain. water returns to the air when heated and it rises as steam back up to the floodgates of heaven; we know God created the world in seven days, He's not up there making more water every time it rains. it circulates. the returning of water to heaven also purifies the water of unclean and malign influences. you know wormy water from a muddy puddle will kill your kid. you know you wouldn't wade into a bog and have a slurp. water that remains in the low places of earth absorbs all that is unclean from our waste and it may also sponge up new diseases from hell, we're not totally sure about that one, but it seems likely. God set up the heavenly water cycle so that the earth's waters wouldn't totally fill up with gunk.

what does this have to do with boiling your surgical tools? well look, the boiling water releases bubbles of steam which carries the malign influences up to heaven. you boil a knife, you send all the miasmic particles off with the steam to heaven. if you rinse the knife off in a bucket the water isn't hot enough, the particles go into the water and then right back on to the knife. you gotta boil it to get the particles all the way away. how can a tool or rag or a bed have miasmic particles on it when you can't smell them? humans have a lousy sense of smell. look at your dog on the hunt. are there no rabbits in the woods just because you can't smell them? we know that miasma is carried on the air, and is what makes stench so dangerous, and we know that humans can't smell worth a damn compared to dogs cats horses etc. a dog can smell if a rat died in a corner of the room last week. you can't. do you think licking the spot where the rat died is going to go well for you? luckily, what humans lack in snout we make up for in brains. we have extra brains where our sniffers should have been. God set that up for a reason.

and why does a rinse with wine spirits work? man, look how fast alcohol evaporates. my guess is that because wine contains a lot more vice than water, it evaporates a whole lot faster, in sort of an equal and opposite way that a rock falls faster than a feather. if you want the miasmic particles to get off there FAST, you dunk it in something that's going back to heaven at a gallop.

what's up with honey? it just preserves things against corruption. doesn't clean them off. honey doesn't evaporate at all. probably because bees don't sin. it's not good for ridding a tool of particles-- it's sticky-- but fine for preserving anything you don't want to go to heaven OR hell. this is why you wash the wound with wine spirits or purified water FIRST, to sluice the miasma out, then slap the honey on AFTER. and boil the damn bandage, too. you wouldn't put a rotten door in a sound doorframe and expect it to keep out bandits, would you? cmon.

#natural philosophy #science #germ theory #medieval

vinceaddams

It's nice that loud noises don't stick to clothes like smells do. That would be really bad if they did.

zinderant

This tells us how clothes respond to two out of the five senses. What can we say about the others?

Colors are kind of the opposite. We try very hard to make colors stick to clothes, but they get unstuck when bright lights hit them too hard. Fortunately this is a slow process and you can enjoy your colors many times before they come unstuck.

It is unclear whether clothes can gain or lose taste through exposure. Most of taste is mediated by smell, and clothes tend not to be exposed to sweetness, sourness, bitterness or umami, and even if they did, they would not give up this taste in turn unless consumed, which one does not do with clothes. We'll call this 'not applicable'.

Textures can go either way: clothes that are touched by things can either become more textured (pilling) or less (wearing thin), but eventually they break the clothes entirely, suggesting perhaps that clothes are most sensitive to touch of all the senses.

#laugh rule #seriousness #only on tumblr #collaborative #clothes

I think I disagree with your conclusion, there. True, touch is the most common sense by which clothes are destroyed, but it is also the sense most commonly applied to clothes in both their standard use and their storage. If clothes were continually exposed to very strong light, as they are for continual touch, they could be burned away and not merely bleached.

#gnu terry pratchett #glorious 25th of may #glass #crafts #bringing this back

Glass lilacs for the Glorious 25th.

A little broken, but that's okay.

chongoblog

Here’s the thing about realizing gender is fake. It gives you a lot of freedom to ask yourself the question of “if you can be whatever you want, then what would you be?” and that’s a dangerous question when you’re a cis person, because the answer to that question could be “suppress yourself or get your rights stripped away”. But if you dive deep down and answer that question for yourself, and you’re still cis, then hell fucking yeah baby!! You won tha jorkpot

#gender #social norms #gender theory

We gotta do something about ecoableism, guys, I can't keep seeing people confidently assure everyone that their ideal world is one where disabled people with specific needs don't get to be alive.

The most insidious thing about eugenics is that society is so ableist the majority of people do actually think eugenics would work and disabled people are better off dead, they just tack on an assumption that while yes eugenics works it's still bad because disabled people dying for being disabled is morally wrong. But they never actually think it's scientifically or medically wrong. We're just civilized enough we've decided to politely pretend the science isn't right because social justice.

It's like how a bunch of celebs were big on body positivity and fat liberation...until Ozempic dropped and it turns out no, none of them ever believed any of that! They just pretended to bcs up until now healthy, long term weight loss was impossible so they had no choice but to cope by learning to love themselves no matter how they looked...but now that it's here we can go back to the truth! Being fat is ugly and gross and unhealthy and you should starve yourself and take experimental meds right now so you can be skinny which is what ALL humans are clearly supposed to be!! Yeah that body positivity stuff was fun, but come on. We know you actually just wanna be skinny and think being fat is a fate worse than death.

That's what it feels like to me. Every single time. Honestly in a lot of other areas too, one of the big issues with the left is that they really do seem to think that Republicans are right about how things work and should work but we just pretend otherwise because it's the right thing to do and it reduces suffering. Which seems fine, but you cannot be an effective leftist like this. You do actually have to deconstruct your beliefs and biases and world systems, you can't go around like "well yeah we aren't gonna kill disabled people that's eugenics and it's wrong" when you clearly don't actually think it's wrong. You think eugenics would work but implementing it would be uncivilized, and it shows. You have to actually understand that racism and ableism and all other forms of bigotry are not just cruel, but entirely incorrect.

Idk if this makes sense but yeah. We gotta do something about this.

This is what Into the Woods meant when it said nice is different than good.

This is also how you get people being like "I'm not an ableist! I love disabled people!" after making a joke about Trump wearing diapers or not being able to walk down a ramp. They don't think ableism is wrong, they just think it's right but impolite, so only okay aimed at those who deserve to be insulted.

Absolutely part of why shit sucks so much rn.

Ngl I'm glad I figured out how to word this, bcs trying to articulate it as "you don't actually think bigotry is wrong you just think the target should be someone else" always felt incomplete! I now know what I meant was "you don't think bigotry is wrong you just think it's impolite and that's different" that's what I needed. You just think bigotry is being mean to a marginalized person who, crucially, has done nothing to deserve it. The second they do tho? Anything is fair game.

Yeesh. What a rancid ass way to view the world.

#ethics #morality #political philosophy #not sure which of those is right #it goes in both directions #impoliteness being seen like a moral failing

Peer reviewing because yeah.

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

becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys

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.

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.

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.

… 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”

claskerdoodles

It can’t be entirely about how Australia has never had an aristocracy. I’m Danish, and we have pretty much exactly the same concept of respect, and our country is a monarchy. But admittedly, it may be a relatively new custom.

The Danish language used to have a formal register, like Japanese and German and lots of other languages. You used a whole different set of grammar rules when you talked to a superior, and they’d get upset if you didn’t. It was still a thing in my parents’ generation, but these days it has almost entirely disappeared. It’s only used when you’re communicating with an unspecific person, like in “please insert your card in the slot”, where the receiver could be anybody at all - and even there, it’s on its way out. It’s also used when addressing the royal family.

Nobody else - ever - warrants this form of address in 2026. If you use it, you sound robotic at best, acerbic at worst.

We do the exact same thing as Australians where the more deferential we are, the less respectful we are. Even addressing someone by their last name is considered depersonalizing, and generally only something you do after getting permission. And you’d NEVER use the Danish equivalent of ‘sir’ or ‘madam’ out loud, even when you’re being formal - that is used in the military, and that’s most people’s only frame of reference for those titles. If you use them, you sound like a soldier.

When I started working in Germany, it took a bit of a mental shift to get my brain to acknowledge that management expected me to use deferential language, and that wasn’t just a weird power trip. That’s just how it works everywhere that isn’t Denmark, and apparently Australia.

sporifluorous

As an anxious American, I tend to default to Polite when I’m nervous, in order to keep some distance but make sure there’s no ill will or unpleasantness. It’s not warm or super friendly but it is respectful and almost never actively disliked.

Do Australians and Danes not have any option like that? Do you just have to be… Casual and best buds With Everyone At All Times, regardless of how tired or anxious you are?