Why is it so hard to have a valid opinion on Sparta? If you say that you hate them or hate a specific part from their culture, that means you're an idiot who fell for Athenian propaganda. If you say you like them, that means you're an idiot who fell for their propaganda and the exaggerated pop-culture depiction of them. Oh, and that you're probably fascist. Whyyyyy?
probably doxxing myself by doing this but idc GRANDE PRAIRIE MENTIONED???? WITH THE LIL SWAN EARRINGS??? OMG I LOVE. i'm not a hetalia fan but i am enamoured with all of this
oh hi!! YES! northern alberta solidarity!!
i made this silly blog mostly out of spite but also out of love and the point of it is to see the bits of this stupid goddamn province as more than just [gestures at the news cycle and social media]. I'm so glad you like it, thank you for reaching out <3
(admittedly, I haven't been to GP but i have had friends and fam from the area and im looking forward to come up and visit when travel is a bit easier!)
"#but i have met europeans who absolutely Loathe that we consider ourselves funny" They?? Dislike that we think we're funny? Or that other countries think we're funny?? why???
man i had this girl (Eastern European/Baltic iirc) in my German class many years ago who got very adamant about how unfunny Canadians are when we were brainstorming Canadian stereotypes to the point she wanted it removed from the whiteboard - I was being very good and quiet because I tried really hard not to speak English in class and I just did not have the vocabulary to explain that there are internal stereotypes and external stereotypes and neither of them necessarily have to be true.
I think she was of the opinion that our internal stereotype that we're funny is Very Wrong, but humour obviously varies a lot just in the anglosphere alone and I have no idea what kinds of things she found funny if anything or where she got this impression from. It's also, I figure, because many of our stereotypes come from our own myopia and comparing ourselves to the States only, we don't always perceive ourselves in relation to the international community because, well, they either distinguish us from Americans or more often they don't anyway. I felt that trying to have that conversation with her would have been a waste of time (and part of me recognized that she was probably just homesick because I've seen that adamant refusal to understand in myself before, haha)
Do you have any advice for high school students wanting to study humanities?
Sure! I’ll preface by saying this is my experience as a Canadian student at Canadian highschool and uni, it might make a difference. But here are some things I wished I knew or believed when starting uni.
1. People are going to hound you non stop about ‘what are you going to do with that’ whether you do social sciences, cultural studies, language, history, classics, philosophy… When I say be prepared I don’t mean have an amazingly detailed 4 year plan, I mean be confident in saying ‘i don’t know!’ sometimes!! In my experience so many people who have known what they wanted to do or who won’t shut up about what they are going to do after uni, whether they are in hs or uni, are the ones who are the most insecure. Sometimes those people aren’t actually prepared for the realities of uni and will end up on an entirely different track, and that’s ok!! Anyway, don’t waste time trying to make every single person believe in the power or value of humanities. For one thing, humanities teaches the ‘soft’ skills of communication and critical thinking that a lot of employers are missing from engineering or sciences; it’s really adaptable to whatever the market might throw at you in the future. Sure I don’t use ancient Greek in my every day life, but the challenge of learning a dead language, making inferences about a culture we no longer have direct access to, reading primary sources in the original language… All this was intensely valuable to me even if it doesn’t have obvious value to someone else.
2. To elaborate on that note, sometimes it’s the most important thing just to have a degree in Anything. This is as straightforward as it sounds: if you want that piece of paper, it’s far more worthwhile to get it by doing something that makes you excited to show up to or at least doesn’t make you miserable.
3. Re: plans changing, your first year is important for finding what you like and don’t like! Take some basic requirements, but also take classes that look interesting. I found out pretty quickly that I knew East Asian studies was interesting but not as interesting as classics/linguistics/art history within my first year. It’s really easy to change your major, but it’s best if you try a lot of things early on! Don’t worry about sticking to a path right away.
4. While you are still in high school, there are some things you can focus on. For example, critical thinking in humanities is vital, always be asking where a source comes from, the agenda behind it, the intended audience, etc. Always be on the lookout for your own bias and perspective. Never accept anything as fact or common sense immediately. That said, sometimes even in uni you won’t be able to write about your own opinions, it’s still a lot about making sure you get the basics. Still, critical thinking will take you very far in your essays (and whatever you study, there will be a Lot of essays.)
5. Also… Sometimes it doesn’t matter how good a writer you are. Sometimes you really have to watch your profs carefully for quirks. Some profs have a real hatred of semi colons for no reason. Sometimes English profs will be a non native speaker and might disagree with your intuition. Some profs will only give you an A if you mention the four humours in every essay. All real experiences of mine haha. Figure out what your profs like, don’t cater to them at the expense of your own opinions, but if you get docked on something silly on the first assignment, memorize that and move on.
6. If you have the idea that you shouldn’t ask for help, snap out of it asap before you get to uni! Even classes of 500 people have office hours where no one shows up because they are too nervous to ask for help. Ask your profs questions. Ask your high school teachers questions. Don’t be afraid to admit when you don’t understand. Your profs are there to help, even the scary ones! And if you befriend them, they will sometimes even go out of their way to check up on you if you get an uncharacteristically low mark and suddenly they are offering to buy you coffee or treat you to lunch at the end of the semester… My profs are gr8.
7. The best and most basic advice I can offer while you are still in high school is show up and do your work. I went to a subrural high school with a drop out rate of like 70% or something, I was one of the few who did go on to post secondary and I did it by being on time with all my assignments and just friggin doing the work and paying attention. It also helped that my dad was a uni prof and would proof my essays or at least discuss the assignment until I came to my own conclusions. It sucks but grades are what matters to get scholarships, you really have to stick to the system. Focus on classes you struggle with; if you hate math like me, you can still pull a 75% doing the work and trying your best, maybe higher if you ask for help! Eventually, you won’t have to do it again!
8. Oh and… If you are like me and find things like social studies too easy to study for… Try anyway. Try making notes as if you want to teach someone else. Try helping someone out. It seems unnecessary but if you do have the time, learning to study in hs and particularly learning to read textbooks will save your life at some point. Some lectures, like intro courses on anthropology, will be 50% on lectures and 50% on the textbook. If you don’t read the readings, it doesn’t matter how well you paid attention in class or how pretty your notes are. Your profs won’t remind you all the time, and if they’re real mean they might do pop quizzes on it. In high school, if you have the option to read ahead, do so! Look at the headings first, break down the topics you need to understand, and try to do it ahead of time so you can concentrate on the things you really struggle with. Oh, and put the date on Everything!! It might seem useless in hs but in uni it might save your life haha.
I hope this helps. Feel free to ask anything else anytime :)
#Whaaaaaaat#You guys are still around?!#That's amazing!#I remember binging the IAMP channel years ago.#wow#It's so cool seeing you're are still part of the fandom.#Even if you're just clarifying some things.#Thank you for reuploading ctcsherry's old art.
hi @thisisnothowithappened who tumblr is refusing to let me tag
just replying to say ahahaha ahaha yeeesss just clarifying, nothing else to see here [kicks the past 15 years of rambling and art and research and stupid ongoing projects i dont finish under the rug]
It is always nice to hear from people who still look back fondly on IAMP after all this time. And while things change a lot some things also stay the same (i cannot leave let me out let me out)
Anyway apart from reblogging my own hetalia-adjacent/iamp/spinoff oc projects here on main, i do occasionally also remember to update @project-canada where i try to collect fanworks when I remember to look at the tags (my apologies - its a bit dusty at the moment because life happens and i haven't caught up in a few months). Enjoy if ever you feel the need :)
Hello Hapo! I know that you have a background in museum studies, so I wanted to ask you a question about museum exhibits. I was reblogging some posts another user made about an exhibit at their local museum and compared it to the RAM's featured exhibit about orcas (among other comparisons). That got me wondering though. Are museum exhibits that draw from multiple disciplines like those exhibits a new idea, or is this something that's common and I'm just learning about it now?
Hi!
I looooved the Orca exhibit and I was tempted to go a second time when I was last there but didn't. It gave me a lot to think about but I'll start with a general sort of answer to your question. I'm not basing this on specific literature, just my general vibes from doing the degree and having been to numerous museums. Apologies if this is a bit rambling and long.
Interdisciplinary stuff in museums
Interdisciplinary exhibits are a new-ish idea in the sense that museums have changed a lot since the 19th century as has curation. Traditionally, in big and old institutions like the British Museum, the curators would be academics who were specialists in their fields and had their own focuses and collections to manage, and I think there are still some people who view museums in this way. Art galleries have traditionally been the slowest to change, so you see this most obviously in the "stereotypical" image people have of those. (That said, they are also changing and there are plenty of good examples of galleries being more conscientious about the contexts of the works on display or the gaps in their collections!)
Over the 20th century, there has been an enormous shift in who is responsible for curating or how much institutional power curators have, and even just in the 21st century alone we're kind of dealing with what some people see as the democratization of curation - everything from music to food to social media profiles are seen as "curated" and this has been a big challenge to the more traditional "specific experts, specific fields, specific portions of the collection" structure. Now, there is an ENORMOUS interest in relying more heavily on people with backgrounds in education rather than only experts in one specific field, and you're definitely seeing more and more of that in exhibits today.
As you can imagine, even with the infinite vision of a curator or an interpretive planner, the interdisciplinary nature of an exhibit is limited by the institution's collection / loans and their collections mandate, the personnel (and the inter-personal dynamics!), funding of course, and also the connections the institution is building with other museums, with the local communities, and with the peoples whose objects are in the museum's care (casting a protective spell over this post to not devolve into arguments about repatriation because there are so many people out there who have spoken on this more eloquently than i have and that's not where I'm going today.)
The Tyrell is a good example of a museum that fits the model of a science museum, which limits their scope and mandate as well as the sorts of professions they are interested in hiring. If I recall correctly, there are also agreements between museums in Alberta about their collections mandates, so other museums in Alberta are more likely to give the Tyrell the priority for fossils and dinosaurs and take objects on loan from them rather than loan them to the Tyrell.
The creator of the travelling Orcas exhibit, the RBCM, on the other hand, like the RAM, has a much bigger collections mandate, and as the official provincial museum they also have a more interdisciplinary collection and staff, so they are able to create these kinds of interdisciplinary exhibitions in house much more easily than the Tyrell can. I recall the Tyrell having some illustrations like the ones in the post you linked, but they're definitely a very small portion of the collection and not something to my knowledge that an entire exhibition has been built around (yet).
Still, who knows! The Tyrell has an internationally renowned collection (and I'm always looking for loans from the Tyrell whenever and wherever I encounter dinosaurs) so I would think collaborating with another institution or with a local community to create something that breaks out of the traditional science museum schema is definitely a possibility. (Tyrell / James Gurney's Dinotopia crossover when...)
Orcas and the Big Idea
Back to Orcas to gush for a moment. When I was first learning about interpretive planning in school, the example we used was the exhibit on blue whales created by the ROM (I finally got to see it last year at the science centre here, yay! blorbo from my homework!) (Also why do whales make such good big ideas...). We were exploring "The Big Idea" as a focus for exhibition development, and so now whenever I go to an exhibit I always try to think about what the Big Idea is (or try to create one for my own exhibits, although it's easier said than done and especially when you are working with people who don't have a museums background and want to just put as much as humanly possible into a space... sigh.)
Sometimes the Big Idea is made explicit and usually in the intro text (which, people do sometimes remember to read, lol) but much more often it's implicit. It's a fun piece of detective work and travelling exhibits like Orcas which have to be made sense of outside of their home institution usually are a great place to practice this skill.
I think what was most unusual about Orcas to me is how Indigenous perspectives on orcas were not, as has been popular for most of my lifetime, simply used as a "prehistoric" introduction to a topic that after that point on would only be about the biology and the conservation and the "serious sciency stuff". Confronting this tendency to historicize Indigenous perspectives is a recent trend not just in museums, but certainly a welcome one in the spirit of reconciliation. As I was walking between the sections of the gallery, from the lifesize models to the descriptions of pod hierarchies, the NFB animated short and the bentwood boxes, the demonstration table allowing people to touch and feel teeth and baleen, the memorabilia of captive whales from my own youth and the current challenges to conservation, I was thinking about the Big Idea.
I have been to so many conservation-oriented science exhibits through my life and so I always kind of expect that the take home message is going to have something to do with "this is a vital part of our ecosystem and needs to be protected" "humans are responsible for doing xyz to make sure these creatures don't go extinct", that sort of thing. Orcas was different, and I think it occurred to me why near the end as I was watching the videos on whales in captivity. Shamu and Tilicum were of course familiar to me, but there happened to be a short film on Morgan, who my visiting Dutchie @en-theos immediately recognized, and about the current legal battles to have whales recognized as persons under the law to prevent this inhumane treatment in the future.
I think 30-40 years ago, even with the very serious conservation attitudes I associate with my youth, this idea of personhood for non-humans is something that would have been laughed at or ridiculed as tree-hugger greenpeace nonsense. The Big Idea became crystal clear at this moment, as well as with the part of the exhibit that dealt with the tricky topic of balancing the recommendations of scientists with the cultural significance of orcas to Indigenous communities (specifically the whale who had been welcomed into a community on the west coast as a relative and met an untimely end getting too close to a motorboat.)
It is so very rare still to see Indigenous knowledge and artefacts centred in exhibits like these - typically these pieces are a supporting argument to the cross-cultural importance or interest in the "real" science or the "real" history or as one possible subject in a demonstration of art and technique in an art gallery context. I think the real strength of the Big Idea in Orcas was that it presented the larger argument that Whales Have Personhood, it's just that it has taken some of us a lot longer to recognize this than others, and that perspective was woven throughout. To me, this kind of interdisciplinary work is something that everyone can and should strive for, but it often takes an institution like the RBCM with the resources and the investment in communities it has to make it happen.
Hope that answers some of that! :) Thanks for sharing!
