Wednesday, 23 December 2020

Christmas Quiz 2020

 I suggest watching this video in full screen.


In the before times I use to usually meet up with friends in Glasgow for a while.

But, due to current events, those meetings were moved to Microsoft Teams.

However, it has given me the opportunity to try something out.

One activity we decided to do in these meetings is a quiz, using PowerPoint to present the questions.

I made a few this year and the one here was one presented yesterday.

Consider this my alternative Christmas card for this year.

 Happy "I survived 2020, as well as winter" everyone

(Excuse the voiceover quality. It was done in a hurry.)

Friday, 18 December 2020

Meme Dictionary Future Proposal?

 Hello everyone. I have been kept busy with the Snacking Otaku (and other reasons), hence the lack of posts this year. I have not abandoned this blog. It’s just I had to prioritise other things.

The reason for writing this post is this.

Back in 2018 I had the idea of making a dictionary of memes. Soon afterward I bought an external hard drive and began collecting research material. It has been neglected a bit, but I was expecting this project to be a dip-in dip-out thing anyway. Originally, I planned to make it a book, but recently I had a thought. Maybe I should publish this dictionary as a blog, in the similar style to the Snacking Otaku. As of now, no entry is complete let, so don’t expect anything any time soon. In fact, I was thinking of making it an online depository for notes. But this incompleteness gave me another idea. What if I made two versions of the dictionary? A “fixed” official one (written by me) and a wiki version people can contribute. And if someone adds something interesting it gets added to the official one.

This is all for off into the future … if you want me to do so. That is why I’m posting this. I want your opinions on this project.

But I want to address something about this project. This project explores ALL ASPECTS of culture. Not just the obvious stuff, like music, literature and paintings. I’m exploring everything – architecture, fashion, graffiti, linguistics, gardening, product design, baking, knitting, sport, pornography etc.

That last example touches something I need to address about this project. It will involve subjects that are taboo. The kind of things most people are embarrassed or ashamed to acknowledge happens in their culture. But you can’t have a full picture of a culture without exploring these subjects. Its like writing about 18th century Europe and only talking about royalty and aristocrats. It’s a nice cultured story, but it leaves out a lot of information to build context, such as how dependent they were on servants or how some made their fortunes through African slaves.

Talking about taboos is tricky. Not only because of their artificially-created nature, but also the fact that taboos are not a fixed constant through space and time. This is something many “lazy thinkers” don’t seem to know or realise. A society’s moral compass can change and is shaped by the unique history of a tribe. In other words, what can be seen as “fine” in one culture can be a taboo in another and vice versa. For example, how much skin exposure is okay on a female. Today (ignoring COVID for a moment) the sight of a woman in a bikini almost won’t shock anyone on Miami. In Dubai, however, she’ll be likely to be arrested for indecency. However, back in 1920, the woman in Miami will also be arrested for the same reason.

Let me put what I’m saying another way. What you think is “taboo” or “offensive” is not the same everywhere and everywhen. You can’t judge the past with the present day’s moral compass. The fact that they were people who made fortunes on trading slaves in the past should be an indicator of this fact. 

In fact, what is considered “offensive” can vary from person to person. For these reasons, when I considered making this dictionary a printed book, I thought it should come with a free black marker pen so people can censor their own individual copies. It’ll cost a fortune to make different edited editions for various territories.

If this dictionary does go online, I have to print this disclaimer at the top.

This dictionary will contain things that are not suitable for children and things some will find “offensive.” This dictionary is committed to explore all aspects of culture to build a complete picture of the world. None of this dictionary’s example content originates from the main author, so if you do find something here offensive, blame the thing’s original creator for having such bad taste to begin with, not the creator of this dictionary, who just put it there as an example form history.

Of course, the actual number of “offensive” things would probably only make up, at most, 1% of the content of the final dictionary. Although a lot happened in the 20th century, that only covers a tiny fraction of all of human history, even if you exclude the Stone Age. So, that disclaimer is just a precaution … like a face mask. There’s always going to be that 0.1% that’ll genuinely find it sick … while an extra 1% find it a cause worth making a fuss about – even if it doesn’t affect them at all.

What do you think?

Should I peruse the online idea?