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Scudworth posted:Nope, not at all. Not ever. I knew my history books were lying to me. But in all seriousness, I meant in today's climate. I don't hear a lot about Catholic/Protestant conflicts unless I'm reading Mid Evil History. Or Northern Ireland terrorism back in the day.
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Apr 3, 2017 02:35
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LogisticEarth posted:Interesting family anecdote: I found out that when my pretty much secular grandfather got "permission" to marry my grandmother, one of the stipulations from her family was that all children would be raised strict Catholics. Fun times. This was the early 1940s though. That is required for a catholic to get married in the church. If they do not marry in the church, then I believe they cannot take communion. It is pretty common.
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Apr 3, 2017 04:42
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Trump.mp4 posted:I knew my history books were lying to me. There's still occasional clashes in Northern Ireland on certain days of the year but otherwise it's pretty much the same as in the US I'd guess.
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Apr 3, 2017 08:44
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LogisticEarth posted:Like, my dad is Lutheran and my mom's family is Roman Catholic. It was never really a big deal, but my sister and I were Raised Catholic(tm). We'd do Christmas Eve at my dad's old church but that was about it. You'd notice small stuff, like my dad not going up to receive Communion and such, since he wasn't confirmed. That's strange, given that (most?) Lutherans practice Confirmation and the Eucharist. Or is it that those don't count by the standards of the Catholic Church? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_(Lutheran_Church) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eucharist_in_Lutheranism
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Apr 3, 2017 08:57
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therobit posted:That is required for a catholic to get married in the church. If they do not marry in the church, then I believe they cannot take communion. It is pretty common. The question was more generally about how serious folks were about the Catholic-Protestant divide. And yeah that's the church's line, and still applies today as you said. It's done most of the time with a wink. But in my grandfather's case the demand was backed up by my grandmother's family and they were pretty staunch about it. As in disowning the daughter and such. For reference though, at the time her parents were first or second generation Irish immigrants. Obviously in the past 80 years or so things have moderated, but many religious families will still get bent out of shape if you don't do the full Catholic thing. In the great state of Pennsylvania though, you can still do a Quaker marriage (or self-marriage). My wife and I, being for all intents and purposes, agonistic/atheist, opted for that route when it came time to get hitched. Kopijeger posted:That's strange, given that (most?) Lutherans practice Confirmation and the Eucharist. Or is it that those don't count by the standards of the Catholic Church? Its this. Has to do with some dude named Marin Luther having a real nasty argument with the Pope or something.
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Apr 3, 2017 11:19
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LogisticEarth posted:Obviously in the past 80 years or so things have moderated, but many religious families will still get bent out of shape if you don't do the full Catholic thing. They were also upset with my grandfather for even attending the wedding in a Catholic church. He told them that nothing was going to stop him from attending his daughter's wedding and thereafter, he didn't attend his own church very much. While my sister and husband had their kids go to Catholic church and participated in catechism up through confirmation, nobody in our families has given me or my wife any problems about not even baptizing our son.
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Apr 3, 2017 17:25
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LogisticEarth posted:Like, my dad is Lutheran and my mom's family is Roman Catholic. It was never really a big deal, but my sister and I were Raised Catholic(tm). We'd do Christmas Eve at my dad's old church but that was about it. You'd notice small stuff, like my dad not going up to receive Communion and such, since he wasn't confirmed. There is a divide in what communion means to Catholics vs Lutherans. Lutherans believe that communion is the flesh and blood of the Lord is 'In With and Under' the bread and wine. Catholics believe in an idea called Transubstantiation, which says that when the Priests blesses the bread and wine, they become the body and blood of Christ. A combination of this plus what is taught in their respective Confirmations is enough of a rift to not make them compatible in each other's eyes. You want to start a slap fight between the two, ask them what the qualifiers for a Sacrament are... You might think this doesn't really matter but Lutherans, especially the LCMS variety, don't really like Catholics at their communion and Catholics don't really like Lutherans at their communion and each denomination generally respects that. Canine Blues Arooo fucked around with this message at 18:21 on Apr 3, 2017 |
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Apr 3, 2017 18:17
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I remember one catholic church I used to go to had a little guide in the back for different flavours of christians (+ one thing for non-christians) about which parts of the mass they could participate in. there were like 6 different gradations!
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Apr 3, 2017 18:32
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Lima posted:There's still occasional clashes in Northern Ireland on certain days of the year but otherwise it's pretty much the same as in the US I'd guess. Which days? St Patrick's day?
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Apr 3, 2017 23:41
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Sheep-Goats posted:I'm sorry to the Canadians reading this but if you take any given Canadian and then go 100 miles south and pick and American out, someone in a state adjacent to the Canadian province, those two people are going to be indistinguishable. Yeah I can tell you apart from a Texan. Big deal. But you're as American as any American. If you're not familiar with Canadian accents, it can be difficult to pick us out. We definitely have them though! When I first went to California a couple years ago, I could definitely tell that the people sounded very different. It felt like being in a movie!
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Apr 4, 2017 04:22
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Trump.mp4 posted:Which days? St Patrick's day? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_walk Every couple years one of these goes badly, although it seems to have calmed down a bit.
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Apr 4, 2017 09:57
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Corrode posted:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_walk These cunts also march in Scotland (mostly just Glasgow, but I once saw them in Edinburgh). It's absurd and infuriating that sectarianism is still a problem in a country as irreligious as Scotland but here we are.
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Apr 4, 2017 10:39
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quote:I don't read as terribly American abroad because I don't wear jeans, am literate and am politically liberal Nessa posted:If you're not familiar with Canadian accents, it can be difficult to pick us out. We definitely have them though!
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Apr 4, 2017 13:05
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I always wear orange on St. Paddy's in America. The worst I've gotten in a pinched cheek but I can reliably get a lot of free beer at English and Scottish pubs.
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Apr 5, 2017 04:30
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Cicero posted:Pretty sure this is most Americans who frequently travel abroad. Well maybe not the jeans thing but everyone wears jeans these days, that's not particularly American. Some people adapt, yeah. There's a rural town here that has it's own accent and my mom picked it up for a while when she worked there one summer as a telephone operator. It's similar to the Minnesotan accent. Americans are less likely to pick up on Canadian accents due to lack of exposure to them I think. Here are some examples of Canadian accents. Captain Bailey from Mass Effect. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BH917daeHOk Being a Bioware game, Mass Effect is full of Canadian voice actors, like Commander Shepard, but Bailey sticks out. His accent is a very distinct Ontario accent. Listen to the way he prounces "guard". Look up Rick Mercer for a similar example. The Smoking Man from X Files https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7OZwMHSQ6wY Another Ontario accent. Being filmed in Vancouver, you can make a bit of a game out of picking out all the Canadian actors in X Files. Listen to the way he says "about". He has what I call a Canadian Lilt. It's mostly heard in eastern Canadians. Frasier from Due South https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uunV2QmnIb0 I grew up with this goofy show. Frasier has a typical, subdued Canadian accent. He's very soft spoken compared to the other cast members. (Leslie Neilson is also Canadian.) Everyone on Corner Gas https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vyEaHqs3N7g Canadian sitcom about small town prairie life. The Pinkertons is Canadian show where everyone is playing Americans, but few, if any, attempt an American accent. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FlMOD35502E I didn't know anything about it when I started watching it on Netflix, but it didn't take long to learn that it's a Canadian show. However, the most distinct Canadian accent of all, that even most Americans should be familiar with is the Newfie accent. You can always pick out the Newfie in the room and even we can't understand them half the time. The Newfoundland accent is very Irish like, as the land was settled primarily by the Irish. . https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-vWlIvfQTck All in all, we do have our own accents here in Canada, though they may be subtle and difficult for any non-Canadians to pick up on. Our word usuage is also about half American, half British, with a handful of uniquely Canadian terms thrown in. Sorry for the derail there. I hope GrandmotherOfFive doesn't mind.  Back to your regularly scheduled programming!
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Apr 5, 2017 06:42
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I'm from Mississippi but have a much less pronounced accent than a lot of people here since I live on the coast. When I lived up in Winnipeg for a bit, people still had trouble understanding me even when I made an effort to speak slowly, and generally guessed I was from Texas because I guess that's their idea of what a southern accent is like, even though Texans definitely aren't southerners.
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Apr 5, 2017 07:19
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Nessa posted:Here are some examples of Canadian accents. That's the actor who played Tigh on Battlestar Galactica, and I do find it interesting that viewers in other countries would not immediately pick up that his accent is rural/hick as gently caress, and have that play in to how they see his character as it did for me.
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Apr 5, 2017 07:48
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Thanks again to people who have taken the time to answer questions! Sex Ed sounds like it ranges from way better to way worse than it is here, and that huge variance is just interesting to learn about imo.Nessa posted:Sorry for the derail there. I hope GrandmotherOfFive doesn't mind. I don't mind For the longest time, I thought that Canada was a US state anyway! I mixed it up with California simply because of the beginning letters, I think, and also being a pretty dumb kid. I think you could make an interesting Canada Ask/Tell thread, but I already bugged you about it once. Feel free to post stuff here either way imo. I'd assume that the states bordering Canada would have a lot of stuff that is more in common with Canada, than with other US states.I realize this comparison may not make a whole lot of sense, but I imagine that the US and Canada would have a sort of friendly rivalry that Denmark and Sweden has. Canada is the hoity-toity politically correct overlords, like the Swedes. And the US is basically really strong and smart, and have the best numbers system ever that is easy to use, like the Danes. I hope Google taught you that before your mom did! I don't doubt she meant well, but 21 sure was late for that piece of info
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Apr 5, 2017 11:56
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Grandmother of Five posted:I don't mind Oh, I probably will make my own thread when I'm done school in a few weeks! I suppose you could call it a "friendly" rivalry. The Canadian economy is hugely dependent on the US. When the states go down, they tend to take us with them. I know some Canadians who are more up to speed with American politics than some Americans are, because it can really affect us. Many Canadians like to think we are better than the states, but we're really not. We have our own problems with racism and police violence that gets swept under the rug. We do, however, have universal healthcare. Canadians tend to have an inferiority complex with America, mostly due to America forgetting we exist, dismissing our status as a real country or assuming we all live in igloos or something. When the most powerful country in the world laughs at and dismisses you or calls you "the 51st state", it can get real annoying. Canadian identity is mostly focused around being "not American". Have a cute video about how to be Canadian. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EsL_TAfQxH8 What is this "best numbers system" you speak of? We actually tend to make fun of Americans for not knowing the metric system, though we tend to use imperial for general height and weight and to measure rooms and furniture. Our government system is closer to the British system than it is to the states'. We were part of the British Commonwealth for the longest time, and are relatively new to sovereignty. We've only had our current flag for 50 years and the queen is still on all of our money. She is still the queen of Canada. I think most of us appreciate our ties to Britain. There's always a huge fuss when the royal family visits, and we generally enjoy British television. It's possible that we get more exposure to British television than Americans do. There was a kerfuffle recently involving Via Rail. They claimed they were going to sell $150 passes to youth aged 12 to 25 for unlimited Via Rail travel for the month of July for Canada's 150th birthday. They seriously underestimated the demand for such a pass. Out of the 2 million Canadians who would qualify, they ultimately only sold 4000 passes. Now everyone is mad at Via Rail. It's a shame too, because it would have been a great opportunity for my younger brother, who's never seen the ocean before, to travel all across the country.
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Apr 5, 2017 16:30
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Grandmother of Five posted:
It's more like Germany/Neatherlands. The Dutch hate the Germans and build a lot of their national identity around "not being German" whereas the Germans hardly think of the Dutch at all and when they do it is vaguely positive.
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Apr 5, 2017 18:12
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Grandmother of Five posted:I realize this comparison may not make a whole lot of sense, but I imagine that the US and Canada would have a sort of friendly rivalry that Denmark and Sweden has. Canada is the hoity-toity politically correct overlords, like the Swedes. And the US is basically really strong and smart, and have the best numbers system ever that is easy to use, like the Danes. There isn't really a rivalry. Maybe in sports I guess, but hockey is the only one we really play each other in and most Americans don't care about hockey. Americans like to make jokes about Canadians but it's more like friendly teasing than coming from a place of malice. I'd say probably 90-95% of the population has a positive impression of Canada/Canadians. There are a lot more cultural similarities/shared values between our two countries than there are differences.
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Apr 5, 2017 19:46
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I take more jabs at Canadians than anyone I know. For the most part it's because nobody really knows much about Canada and... well, Canadian history is pretty boring. Most of your atrocities, we did too, and most of your "finest moments" were you taking part in things we did as well. That kinda came off harsher than intended.
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Apr 5, 2017 19:51
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Grandmother of Five posted:I hope Google taught you that before your mom did! I don't doubt she meant well, but 21 sure was late for that piece of info Imagine living in the middle of nowhere and only encountering other people your age at school. A tiny private school with limited potential friends. Parents are too busy all the time to take you anywhere. By the time you can drive, you have no friends in the state even to drive to, they're all in other states/countries on the internet. It was basically the first time I was alone with friends. Welcome to being a super-sheltered conservative kid!
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Apr 5, 2017 21:16
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I'm a dual citizen and canadian antipathy towards the US is so silly as to be infuriating. It is indeed pretty much the same culture. Those iconic ontario accents posted are like... well a part of a clear continuum of dialects in North America. California sounds odd to you? I bet, you know who else it sounds odd to? Frikkin Minnesotans or Mainers. Welcome to the collective.
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Apr 6, 2017 09:53
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:I'm a dual citizen and canadian antipathy towards the US is so silly as to be infuriating. It is indeed pretty much the same culture. Those iconic ontario accents posted are like... well a part of a clear continuum of dialects in North America. California sounds odd to you? I bet, you know who else it sounds odd to? Frikkin Minnesotans or Mainers. Welcome to the collective. I was about to post almost exactly this, so thanks for being more articulate. I'll also add that I have a few canadia friends who I talk to frequently online and their accents feel more general to this whole area (new york state and southern Ontario and Quebec etc.). Being a person who grew up in Brooklyn but lacks most aspects of the comical Brooklyn accent I don't put too much weight in accents as a good indicator I guess. Vocabulary is much easier. It's much easier to ask a person their opinion on bagged milk to figure out if they're Canadian or American.
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Apr 6, 2017 22:02
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 Milk in a bag and throwing loonies at strippers
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Apr 6, 2017 22:19
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Shbobdb posted:
All dressed or ketchup?
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Apr 6, 2017 22:31
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Shbobdb posted:
Oh poo poo I never thought about Canadian strip clubs. Do they throw their loonies, bigger bills, or have some kind of change belt on the dancers?
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Apr 7, 2017 03:33
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Pharmaskittle posted:Oh poo poo I never thought about Canadian strip clubs. Do they throw their loonies, bigger bills, or have some kind of change belt on the dancers? No one throws bills at all, since everything is done in $5's. So bills are given out far far less, and usually handed to the people directly. No one "makes it rain". Some people stack loonies and toonies at the edge of the stage politely, throwing them will get you thrown out immediately. Sometimes I've seen a sort of game happen where two dancers will come out with a towel held between them for people to throw change into, but this was a trashier place. This is all based on several places around southern ontario. In Alberta (and only in Alberta) you can throw coins at them. It's disgusting.
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Apr 7, 2017 04:11
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Scudworth posted:In Alberta... It's disgusting. fixed
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Apr 7, 2017 12:56
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When I would go to Edmonton for work, I used to like to use a lighter to heat the coins up. It would really make the girls jump!
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Apr 7, 2017 21:47
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Ever since I was 18 months old, I've lived in the same place: Longwood, a suburban town about 15 miles north of Orlando, Florida. Some of these answers will be more relevant to the Orlando metropolitan area as a whole, as my house is basically right on the intersection of the towns of Longwood, Lake Mary, and Sanford and I go to Orlando proper often. How is the political climate currently in the state and city that you live in? In terms of my city, Orlando is very liberal and has a huge LGBT and hipster culture downtown. However, it's easily possible to end up in an alien environment with just a few minutes of driving. You can take a highway out of the upscale neighborhoods in Sanford or Lake Mary and drive for just five or ten minutes before ending up surrounded by cow pastures and rotting billboards for sex shops. These rural areas tend to run conservative, which led to some nasty shocks during the last election when a lot of Trump supporters suddenly came out of the woodwork in the suburbs. The entrance to the church nearby ended up covered in Trump signs, which made it a bit awkward when I showed up to vote. The state as a whole is pretty purple, which is why it has a reputation as a swing state in presidential elections: the rural areas are deep red while the densely populated cities tend to go very blue to balance it out. Florida also has a huge population (19.89 million as of 2014) and the Orlando metropolitan area alone is 2.3 million (or about 11.5% of the total state population), which gives the state a lot of electoral votes for candidates to fight over. What kind of food culture does your local area have? if you're into cooking, or simply know of some local delicacy, please share a specific dish, with a recipe if you have one, of something that you enjoy making or buying yourself that would be representative of your local food culture. Our food culture is "anything goes" at this point. My area used to have only a few options that weren't fast food chains like McDonald's, pizza, cheap Chinese food, Southern cuisine with plenty of biscuits and barbecue, Italian-American like Olive Garden, or cheap Midwest diner food. Today I can get Japanese, Greek, Colombian, Mexican, and all the prior stated options delivered to my house. There's Korean, Vietnamese, Thai, Indian, Middle Eastern (including transplanted NYC halal cart food), Cuban, Venezuelan, Jamaican, and Ethiopian all off the top of my head that are within a short drive. Closer to downtown you've got plenty of fine dining restaurants serving American cuisine of every stripes, from expensive steaks to organic salmon burgers to vegan chili with rooibos tea sweetened with agave syrup. The only cuisines that seem underrepresented are probably Slavic and Eastern European. We do have one Russian grocery/bakery a little north of downtown Orlando and a Polish restaurant a bit further north, but they haven't gotten much of a foothold. The only place you'll see Slavic food is IKEA. Walt Disney World also holds the unusual honor of having some of the top rated restaurants in Orlando for years. Until the local food scene exploded about a decade ago, searching online for the best restaurants in Orlando invariably brought up the Disney resorts. You have Kona Cafe with its octopus salad and coffee-chili rubbed pork tenderloin, Artist Point with venison and rabbit sausages and aged buffalo strip loin, and Jiko (The Cooking Place) with Moroccan lamb tagine and Malay seafood curry. While independently owned restaurants have been edging them out and we're improving every year in what's available, Disney is still a destination even if you never pay for a park ticket in your life because of how much else it has to offer (which I can get into later). Disney's Grand Floridian Resort & Spa is also home to Victoria & Albert's, one of the top rated restaurants in the country with a $235 tasting menu. I've been exactly once and it was an experience I've never had before. In terms of what I eat on a daily basis, my breakfast is usually some kind of frozen food I brought to the office to microwave; common ones are Saffron Road chicken biryani, Lean Cuisine Thai or Fajita spring rolls, a Jamaican patty with chicken instead of ground beef, or a Boston Market frozen Salisbury steak and mac n' cheese. If I actually get breakfast from an outside place before work or on a weekend trip somewhere, it's typically stopping at Wawa for an omelette burrito (I usually get it with ham, Old Bay seasoning, and onions) or Chick-Fil-A for a chicken biscuit and tater tots. Two or three times a year, my family (myself, my mother, and my fiancee) gets breakfast at Cracker Barrel before going somewhere. For lunch, I either go home and eat something quick to prepare (which can range from lemon dill salmon burgers and aloo gobi in the fridge to a similar frozen food from breakfast to a can of Spam Lite or Libby's corned beef chopped and covered in hot sauce if I want something extremely filling in less than 2 minutes) or get fast food from a place like Wendy's, Arby's, or Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen. There are some rare days where there's enough time on lunch to get something different (usually because I need to head somewhere on an errand), in which case it can be anything from a burger at Five Guys to a pastrami sandwich on rye from LaSpada's. Dinner all depends on what mood we're all in. All of the cuisines I mentioned up top are available if we want to eat out, especially with Grubhub and Yelp Eat24 allowing for delivery. For home cooking, my mom often makes a simple stew of tomato soup, ground beef, tomatoes, kidney beans, and sometimes rice or chickpeas; she's careful about her spice intake due to recent surgeries, so my fiancee Audi and I typically spice up our bowls separately. I have a huge variety of Street Kitchen "scratch kits" of pre-made sauces and spice mixtures that I can toss together with some chicken breast in a skillet to make Indian butter chicken or Moroccan lemon chicken in 30 minutes. Audi loves cooking and loves steak; one night she marinated the steak in some hot sauce before cooking it and chopped it into pieces to serve in a bowl, and it infused the flavor of the sauce into the steak. We've also made pot roast in a slow cooker for 7 or 8 hours with beef, potatoes, celery, jalapeno peppers, and onion. We make pretty heavy use of hot sauce and I have over half a dozen different options in my home at any given time, from Tabasco to Mustapha's Mediterranean harissa to a variety pack of Sharkbite hot sauces. How is religious life and worship for you in the states? As an outsider, it appears as if religious life might vary pretty wildly from state to state, with some US areas having markedly different religious demographics than others. I'd be especially interested in whether people experience any prejudice or bias against their religious practice, or lack thereof, in their home states, or from US society at large. I was raised Catholic and baptized, and went to Sunday School fairly often in my preschool and kindergarten days. I had a flirtation with hardcore atheism in late middle school and all through high school, and have now settled into a sort of generic "I believe in the supernatural without any solid beliefs or knowledge of what's real and what isn't, and have existential terror floating in the background most of the time" belief system; the most I ever say about it is that I've witnessed too many bizarre things to be a total stoic but not enough to have solid faith in anything. My fiancee grew up Baptist and went through a lot of really awful religious-related things that I shouldn't talk about here, but safe to say she's now a firm Wiccan. I looked up the demographics for Orlando. Surprisingly, only 43.21% of the population surveyed was religious at all. Only 13.41% of the population is Catholic and 6.89% is Baptist. This is a bit surprising to me, because Christians are incredibly loud around here and Baptists tend to be the loudest of them all. My fiancee's family is Baptist, and the CEO at work is Baptist. They both tend to be at least a little prejudiced against other Christian denominations and anyone non-Christian at all times, with occasional outbursts telling Catholics that they're going to Hell. The religious right came out in scary force during Trump's election. However, there's not really any active shaming of religious beliefs in most cases. Like I said, less than half of the population is actually religious. As long as you don't wander into a church full of assholes, you're probably never going to experience religious bigotry...unless you're Muslim. While I haven't heard of any cases of Muslim harassment around town, it's the United States. It's probably happened and I just don't know about it. Sharing what you work with or study for, or if you have any specialized knowledge, would imo also be interesting, because it would allow follow-up questions for specific fields, like, imo someone working with law or healthcare would probably have interesting insights on those areas. I work for an accredited company that certifies crane operators and rigger/signalpersons. We're one of only four companies currently in existence who offer certification that's accredited and recognized by OSHA, and OSHA has set a deadline of November 10th for crane operators to get certified. Since our company is one of the few allowable ways for operators to prove that they're qualified to operate a crane, we get a lot of business. We're barely keeping up despite doubling our staff this year because we conduct somewhere in the realm of 100 exams per day around the country on average, with dozens of certification cards being made every day. A lot of people want their stuff now and aren't willing to take no for an answer, but as an accredited organization dealing with a ton of people we have the right to make them follow our rules instead of automatically bending to avoid a situation. I'm essentially the manager of the office while the only 3 people above me are in another building, which means I get a lot of the tough customers who yell, threaten, and lie. I also direct the newer staff members in their daily tasks; with how much work we have to do every day, this takes a little daily micromanagement to put people on card printing when a big job comes in or assign the same person to sending invoices when we need our money coming in. Everyone kinda has to know how to do every job, but I have to know what everyone's strengths are and assign them to the tasks they're best suited for at the time. I'm also the office expert when it comes to a few things like our practical operating exams and usually take calls regarding requirements, materials, and changes to the course or crane that need approval. I also usually take the questions related to how certification works with local regulation and state laws. If you belong to a minority group, do you experience harassment? If you do and you are willing to share personal anecdotes, and thoughts about how your state or city might differ from other areas in the US, then please do. I'm a white cis male, which makes me at least 3/4 of the way to being a shitlord. For the longest time I was also pretty sure I was straight as an arrow. A few years ago I finally started coming to terms with being at least a little gay, but I don't feel that I'm attracted enough to men (I can be attracted to trans individuals any sex) to truly call myself "bisexual" or any other solid term. I haven't tried to come up with a term for my sexuality beyond "a little gayer than normal". As such, I also kinda feel like I'm not part of the "LGBT community". Under a strict definition I am, but I've spent most of my life figuring I was a straight guy out of the loop; I haven't suffered any kind of discrimination, nor is my sexuality enough of my identity to really care about it. Of course, Orlando isn't like that. And as everyone probably remembers, we were home to the Pulse night club shooting. The massacre still has strong effects that are felt everywhere, especially among my peer group; one of the victims was a Universal Studios team member who knew several friends and acquaintances personally. A friend and coworker of mine regularly attended Pulse. Someone else's teacher was in the club at the time the shooting went down and made it out unscathed. There are still tributes visible if you look in the right places on billboards or on the sides of buildings. Orlando is the probably second gayest city after San Francisco, and the event thrust us into the spotlight like never before. What I now get to experience is the feeling of having your town and your people co-opted for political campaigns like gun control and Muslim bans. In terms of non-LGBT minority groups, we have the lot. More than half of the population is black, Latino, or a white Hispanic and our entire state is about 38.5% from those groups. The northern end of Orlando proper has Little Vietnam, a neighborhood stuffed with Vietnamese immigrants (Colonial Photo & Hobby still has bilingual parking signs in English and Vietnamese). One of my aunts is Jamaican and another is Korean, giving me four mixed race cousins. We have a huge population of Puerto Rican, Dominican, and other Latino immigrants (some third or fourth generation), and Tampa and Miami are famous for Cuban influence on their cultures. Key West is so far south that it takes 2 hours of driving across islands to reach it from the southern tip of Florida, and is so close to Cuba that before the communist revolution it was common for Cubans to boat over to Key West for tourism or work. How familiar are you with other US states than the one you live in? Like, how many different ones have you lived in, or visited for a shorter or longer period of time. Are some states essentially as foreign to you, or even more, than some foreign countries might be? Do you feel as if there is animosity between your home state and other states? I was born in Canada to American parents, but when I was 18 months old my parents divorced and I moved down to Florida with my mom. I've lived in the same house all my life, but I travel often and I've gone on as many as four or five out-of-state trips in one year. I've been as far north as Boston and Niagara Falls and as far west as New Orleans. The first thing to understand is that taking a road trip out of Orlando is long as hell because our state is long as hell; it takes about 2 hours just to drive far north enough to leave Florida, and there's a lot of Georgia in between us and any smaller states too. New York City is probably my favorite place to go out of everywhere I've been so far. I grew up without being able to drive because of citizenship issues related to my Canadian birth, so any city that gives me the freedom to move around without having a car is a godsend. I love its density, with seemingly every culture and form of entertainment represented somewhere as long as you know where to look. As someone who loves food and will eat pretty much any cuisine, it has more to offer than anywhere else I've been. Since 2008, I've made regular trips to NYC and I've spent probably over 2 months of my life since then in the city. The part of Florida I live in is extremely different from the rest of the southern United States; ironically, despite being more southern than any other part of "the South", only the northern part of the state and the empty inland swamps south of Orlando and Tampa are really redneck. It's commonly said that "the more north you go, the more southern it gets". This is probably because of the aforementioned isolation Orlando has to ground traffic from the rest of the country (imagine how long it took to travel to Orlando from the Georgia border before good roads and interstate systems, and especially before airliners) and the heavy influence the state has received from foreign cultures thanks to nearly a quarter of the state population being Hispanic. Racism exists everywhere, but it's a little harder in a place with bilingual billboards. Have you experienced any stereotypes against your nationality or state when travelling? Not really. I haven't traveled out of the country since moving from Canada, so I haven't encountered any anti-American prejudice or stereotypes. Out of the state, nobody really points out that you're a tourist unless you ask a really dumb question or are somewhere it should be obvious, like a hotel. The most I've ever gotten was a "So where are you guys from?" from a waitress or something. If someone was to visit the US for the first time, or your state or city in particular, what sights would you recommend? For Orlando, everyone is obviously going to say the theme parks. They're a major part of the Central Florida economy and most people here know at least one person who's worked at a theme park; I have worked for Universal. Walt Disney World may have the theme parks, but they've been building themselves up in the past two decades as a destination even outside the parks. Downtown Disney was recently rebranded as Disney Springs and has opened a beautiful outdoor marketplace full of brand stores like Uniqlo, Lucky Brand, Sephora, and Under Armour. They've opened high quality restaurants like Morimoto's and improved the food available at the resorts. Even residents who don't own annual passes (and a lot of Orlando residents have annual passes) go to Disney for dining and shopping. Outside of the theme parks, downtown Orlando has some gorgeous areas. Lake Eola is surrounded by a large park that has a farmer's and artist's market every Sunday and is near quality restaurants like Artisan's Table. Winter Park and Sanford both have downtown shopping and dining districts and parks, and lots of little businesses like quirky bookstores, art museums, and galleries. Lake Mary has a farmer's market at city hall every Saturday, and my fiancee's family runs a fresh produce and meat market there and at Lake Eola so we occasionally go to get some free groceries and check out the dogs. Outside of Orlando but still within a decent driving distance, there's the beaches like New Smyrna, Cocoa, and Daytona. Daytona is obviously home to the Daytona 500, but it and the rest of the major beach towns have a classic "beach culture" with boardwalks, hot dogs, and fairs. St. Augustine is the oldest continuously inhabited European settlement in the continental United States and is home to a Spanish star fort, museums, and ghost tours. Tampa is about 1.5 hours south of Orlando and people from both cities commonly travel to the other one. Tampa has the Bay Area Renaissance Festival in February and March, a Busch Gardens theme park, a Yuengling beer factory open for tours, and a thriving downtown. Ybor City's stretch down 7th Avenue bears a striking resemblance to walking through the French Quarter in New Orleans with open air hookah bars, regular bars, tattoo shops, and night clubs all stuffed into historic buildings that may date back to the 19th century. It's also not a far drive from St. Petersburg, another beach town and home to the Salvador Dali museum. During the haunt season, we've got plenty to offer as well. Universal Studios famously has Halloween Horror Nights, which has an incredible budget for sets and effects in exchange for incredibly high ticket prices and relatively mediocre scares. Busch Gardens has Howl-O-Scream, its biggest competitor. There are local haunts everywhere, some of which move year to year. St. Petersburg has the Radley Haunted House, a backyard haunt that always has lines stretching down the sidewalk. Screamageddon is a set of indoor and outdoor haunts set up at a ziplining place near Tampa, with a "county fair" atmosphere.
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Apr 23, 2017 16:38
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Tony Montana posted:oh wow At LEAST 30% of my neighbors here in rural SC are strapped every time they leave their house. E: and those are just the ones that carry them, I know maybe half a dozen people who don't own a gun. Double edit: Not even making GBS threads you until 2 or 3 years ago our county jail used to reward inmates for good behavior with a trip to the gun range My high school had a mandatory "Hunter Education" component that culminated in two highway patrol officers bringing shotguns for the class and letting us blast clays on the baseball field. This was 3-4 years after Columbine shame on an IGA fucked around with this message at 17:36 on Apr 23, 2017 |
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Apr 23, 2017 17:27
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chitoryu12 posted:Orlando words My cousin lives in Fort Lauderdale and this makes me nostalgic for visiting him. Florida has this weird dichotomy of being full of awful poo poo but also being a really great and relatively cheap place to live. And by god Disney has amazing restaurants. I got drunk, went on my ancient okcupid, and messaged my top "anywhere" match last night, and so suddenly I've been chatting with a girl from London. One thing that's already stood out about the US is how politically polarized we are. For the most part, your friend group is either very right-wing or very left-wing. Obviously you're forced to interact with your political counterparts thanks to family ties and work obligations, but in terms of who you chill with, chances are your group is either left or right. That even applies to your interests, your bars, your food, your activities, your clothes... I'm a leftist and voted Bernie, as you'd probably expect for a goon, but I'd like to say I want to connect more with conservative people. I'm aware of this phenomenon and still it ends up that 95% of people I click with have the same political views as me, cuz anyone who disagrees with me is in a totally different school or restaurant or bar, or wears clothes that look ugly as hell to me, or has a different accent than me. (and I mean more drawl vs. generic newscaster, not immigrant vs native-born.) It's crazy. At least here in Texas it's insanely easy to guess someone's political beliefs on sight. Edgar Allen Ho fucked around with this message at 19:32 on Apr 23, 2017 |
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Apr 23, 2017 19:29
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Florida's a state with pretty relaxed gun laws, but I've personally never witnessed gun crime. Obviously we had the Pulse shooting and you hear about it happening in other places, but I'd imagine the majority of the state has never been threatened by a gun or seen it happen in real life and the average citizen only sees guns at a gun store, range, or in the hands of police. I've only seen a gun in civilian hands on the street once, when a guy's shirt rode up and exposed his concealed pistol (we were helping free a goat that got its head stuck in a fence), and I'm sure I'm around people carrying all the time, but you never really think of it or think about any kind of danger. I felt much less comfortable in Atlanta, but that's because Atlanta is the post-apocalyptic stereotype people apply to Detroit as a joke. Just this month, one interstate burned down in a giant fireball and a different interstate started buckling. It's the only city I've seen a homeless man get mobbed and beaten up in the middle of the road as traffic passed by. My mom was born and raised in the suburbs outside Detroit, so I've been up there fairly often in the past 10 years. It's really not as bad as people make it out to be, especially when you leave the inner city area for the surrounding urban sprawl and suburbs. The Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village is also an incredibly fun place to take a day trip.
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Apr 23, 2017 19:41
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Thanks again to everyone taking the time to answer questions so in-depth!Edgar Allen Ho posted:I got drunk, went on my ancient okcupid, and messaged my top "anywhere" match last night, and so suddenly I've been chatting with a girl from London. One thing that's already stood out about the US is how politically polarized we are. For the most part, your friend group is either very right-wing or very left-wing. Obviously you're forced to interact with your political counterparts thanks to family ties and work obligations, but in terms of who you chill with, chances are your group is either left or right. That even applies to your interests, your bars, your food, your activities, your clothes... I meant to ask a question about this! Is that an experience that the others of you living in the US recognize? That people are divided socially along political lines? How strict is that, like, do you have barely any, or no close friends at all who doesn't share your party affiliation? Do you pretty much know the political affiliation of all your friends and family members? If your social circles are largely divided this way, then how do you feel about people who abstain from voting? As I understand it, voter-turnout is relatively low.
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Apr 23, 2017 20:26
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Grandmother of Five posted:Is that an experience that the others of you living in the US recognize? That people are divided socially along political lines? How strict is that, like, do you have barely any, or no close friends at all who doesn't share your party affiliation? Do you pretty much know the political affiliation of all your friends and family members? The political divides in the United States are pretty huge. There's two political parties: the right-wing Republicans and left-wing Democrats. There's other small parties like the Green Party and Libertarian Party, but they have little to no power at anything above a city level. This is mostly because we have a "first past the post" voting system for presidential elections: every state gets a certain number of votes in the electoral college based on their state's population. The higher the population, the more votes you get. In theory, this means that states with a higher population get more say than the empty rural areas. In practice, it hasn't worked out too well recently. In order to keep the extremely underpopulated states from Wyoming from having only 1 vote or a fraction of a vote, additional votes were given to these states so no state would be below a minimum. This has had the effect of inadvertently giving additional weight to your vote if you live in a rural area, which tend to run rather conservative. This is what resulted in George W. Bush and now Donald Trump winning the election despite losing the popular vote: the empty areas in the middle of nowhere that would vote conservative every single time have more power than expected, allowing an unqualified Republican candidate to get additional electoral votes that they ordinarily wouldn't have had access to if the proportions were done normally. The two parties tend to run pretty centrist compared to your average European parties (where someone talking about a "left-wing bloc" would probably be referring to open communists), but they have huge differences otherwise: Democrats are more pro-choice, anti-gun, pro-civil rights. Republicans tend to be anti-abortion, pro-gun, and anti-anything-for-dark-people. This may shock people when they look at past candidates and find that Abraham Lincoln was a Republican and the Democrats were the pro-slavery candidates. A big part of this is that Barry Goldwater, in the 1960s, started appealing to traditional conservative enclaves like poor whites and right-wing religious folk to try and get more votes. Goldwater failed to become president, but he successfully sparked the current Republican focus on hardcore conservatives while the Democrats stayed closer to the center and gradually moved to the left. As demonstrated by the election of Donald Trump (probably the least qualified candidate to ever become president), the Republican party has been taken over by the hardcore authoritarians, religious fundamentalists, militia movements, white nationalists (now represented by the "alt-right" that tries to dress up Neo-Nazism as digestible for college students), and "gently caress you, got mine" capitalists. Your average right-wing and left-wing Americans won't really interact with the other group when they don't have to because the two sides couldn't be more different. All of the rhetoric Trump spouts is basically what his party's core has believed in for a long time, just given form in a corrupt businessman with a louder mouth than anyone else. There was a definite uptick in interest among my LGBT and non-white peers in firearm ownership when Trump got elected, and you can probably imagine why.
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Apr 23, 2017 20:48
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chitoryu12 posted:Your average right-wing and left-wing Americans won't really interact with the other group when they don't have to because the two sides couldn't be more different. All of the rhetoric Trump spouts is basically what his party's core has believed in for a long time, just given form in a corrupt businessman with a louder mouth than anyone else. There was a definite uptick in interest among my LGBT and non-white peers in firearm ownership when Trump got elected, and you can probably imagine why. This is true, to a point. For one thing, in the US (and probably elsewhere?), people of different political stripes often find themselves in different career tracks. Example: In the US, most surgeons are conservative, while most pediatricians are liberal, so your colleagues tend to be in the same ideological silo. Outside of work-related acquaintances, politics have become so contentious in our environment that friendships can literally be unmade when poor conversationalists cannot refrain from talking about politics when together.
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Apr 23, 2017 21:22
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left-wing democrats fuckin lmao
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Apr 23, 2017 22:32
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Tater Love 
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zakharov posted:left-wing democrats fuckin lmao Democrats are centrist compared to a typical "left-wing" party elsewhere, but they're still the leftmost of the two political parties that actually have any power in America and overall don't go as far to the right as Republicans.
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Apr 23, 2017 23:44
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