#like they were 90s hippies but it really doesn't seem to have come from there (they were crunchy but pretty skeptical of the psych-y parts) | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

marzipanandminutiae · 1 year

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I was never into the American Doll toys cus they weren't popular in my country, but I've always had the feeling that the XX century dolls all look like they are wearing adult's outfits. And tbh I don't think it's that bad cus some of the most iconic dresses of their respective eras weren't standard styles for children. I saw someone commenting that the styles on the 90's doll look like tv characters, and I think that's accurate for dolls from other decades as well, maybe it just irks us millenials cus that's an era we were closer to living so it doesn't feel natural.

It depends on the character, as far as I can tell! Going down the decades:

Samantha definitely looks like a little girl from 1904 (see: the dropped waists and short skirts on her dresses- adult ladies in that era wore gowns at their natural waists, with long skirts, and their hair pinned up).

Ditto Rebecca. Similar age rules to Samantha's era, all well-followed. No notes there.

Claudie...was made recently and therefore her collection is peak Mattel-tastic hot nonsense, painful as that is given how amazing her story could have been. Her Meet outfit isn't too bad? Like it's believable for a 1920s girl? But everything else looks awful, from a quick Google search. Not even Adult 1920s Fashion; just bad stereotypes.

Kit seems pretty on-brand for 1930s little girls' clothing, though we're getting further from my eras of expertise. The original collection, not the BeForever BS.

Molly is, again, getting way out of my wheelhouse, but she's definitely not wearing 1940s adult fashions. It's interesting to see the same era done with Nanea considerably later in the company's timeline, because it seems much more like their later "distilled" approach to the historical characters. Less researched, less detailed, less of the period and more Generic Vintage. Also, it's the 1940s and she has NO casual dresses? Really? I get that she lives in a tropical climate, but, again. 1940s. Little girls generally wore skirts most of the time, in any place where western fashion predominated.

(Class photo, Thomas Jefferson Elementary School, Waikiki. 1942.)

Maryellen is very...Intensely 1950s, but based on what I've seen, she's not Overly Mature in her attire per se. I feel like they're leaning too hard on the big fluffy skirts- didn't girls often wear a slimmer silhouette for school, out of practicality? -but it's not too old for her. I don't think. and of course, this is well post-Mattel takeover, as with Claudie's collection

I feel like they're trying really hard to differentiate Melody from Maryellen, but based on photos of my mother as a kid in the early 1960s, there was a lot more bleed-over between the two decades than people realize? this is another Mattel Made It Costume-y one for me, I think. it's not too mature exactly, but it's. Off, somehow

I kind of see Julie as the beginnng of the end, in terms of research quality in the company's history. It's not WRONG, but yeah, it's only one specific aspect of the era's clothing and it's more something popularized by adults. Kids did wear the hippie look in the 1970s, but it's definitely not what you think of when you consider a child's play-clothes or school-clothes back then.

Courtney is just. Okay, while she was considerably younger, my sister was an '80s kid, and she did not dress like Madonna or a Jazzercise dancer 24/7. Serious question- is AG allergic to jeans on historical character dolls from eras wherein jeans existed?

And now we have. Clueless and The Disney Channel Exploded, coming soon to an overpriced mall store near you!

This has been an unnecessarily long walkthrough of AG thoughts with Marzi! Thanks for giving me an excuse, and I'm so sorry.

#ask #anon #long post

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horrorcheck · 9 months

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Organizing in my area means you have to consider religion. A little less than 37% "aren't religious"*, but that doesn't always mean they're atheists. West Virginia has one of the largest "unchurched" populations, but plenty of those folks consider themselves God-fearing Christians, they just think that none of their local churches are the right kind of god-fearing. And of the rest, plenty of us were raised Christian and still have Christian beliefs and ideologies that influence us, even when we stop considering ourselves "religious".

Moreover, you have to look at who in the area is already organizing for collective action, and at least 90% of those organizers are religious people. There are the churches and religious non-profit organizations created by churches, and then there's the less obvious non-profits that just have boards that are 100% made up of religious people.

These religious folks aren't uniformly evil. The local anti-war activism group that takes folks to demonstrations and runs a liberal/left radio station is held together by devout Quakers. The house that feeds and clothes anyone who needs it, including the queer homeless kids, is run by Catholic Workers. The Catholic Workers also did some extremely effective organizing this year to expand public transportation.

Of course the Catholic Workers are also vocally anti-abortion.

I'm thinking about religion a lot because I'm in a book club that's reading "Let This Radicalize You", and religion comes up often in our discussions. Pretty much everyone in the group is very new to the ideas presented in it.

The group includes an experienced Quaker migrant justice organizer and a - well I can't think of a better word than "hippie". The hippie has attended a lot of demonstrations but hasn't done any local organizing before, believes in a lot of conspiracy theories, and is very against "organized religion". If she just criticized Christianity I would understand because like I said, that is the one religion that has enormous political power locally. But she often brings up Judaism out of nowhere and we have to shut down the tangent before it strays into what I worry would be outright antisemitism. Sometimes I wonder if we should ask her to leave, but she also seems to be learning a lot from the book. I think our discussions are helping her consider different explanations for the way things are than "a secret evil organization of bankers did it".

Meanwhile the Quaker organizer has this thing where she seems to think motivation or thought is as bad as action. Hating a person who has hurt you or others is immoral. Getting angry (even if you don't act on it or show it) is wrong. Using "violent language" is wrong. Jokes about violence or destruction, about hating someone or something is wrong. And this is clearly coming out of the Quaker culture that she grew up in and still lives within. It seems to cause her a lot of discomfort when it comes to organizing with non-Quakers, but that also seems to be something that she's very interested in. I'd like to help her but I'm not sure how.

Not really any point to this, just lunch-break musings. Now back to work!

* So, during a break I looked up where this number for "No Religion" came from, and it's from the U.S. Religion Census, which asked congregations for "membership" and "adherent" data. So it's really a number of people who aren't in any religious congregation, not a number of people who self-identify as atheist or lacking religion. IMO it's likely that most of these folks consider themselves Christian and just don't go to church. I'd guarantee the number of atheists is much much lower.

#organizing #religion #ramblings

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kontextmaschine · 3 years

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kontext's back

Been feeling up and down and unsteady in a foundational way lately but distinct from either the post-April 2020 crazy or classic bipolar stuff

But I keep connecting it to trends and I realized it's my reverse pathetic fallacy returning, after like 2 years of putting in the clutch and peacing out, a little rough like jumping off a running treadmill and then jumping back on while it's still going

For one it makes me realize that my connection to like, "American culture" and my physical neighborhood are of a kind, maybe that's not that uncommon. And that maybe I should reevaluate NIMBY politics and white "there goes the neighborhood" post-segregation experiences in that light

For two, I may have been saying we'd already passed the tipping point, but I went clutch-in before the election. In my own city mobs roamed the streets and the mayor's hamhanded #Resistance-fanning not only made it worse it left him politically constrained amidst a runoff with this smug professional glib shitlib problem glasses tweeter I had had my worried eye on for years

In the big important cities, a decade of troubling rumbles come to a head in something of a selective-college NCOs' coup with the university students on-side

Like, you remember fluff at the New York Times over running a Tom Cotton editorial laying down the foundation that if unruly mobs take the streets of major cities and demand the suspension of the democratically legitimate force of law the government can suppress them with direct force, that apparently came from pressure from the technical staff

And like, "production staff of major newspaper use labor power to try to control editorial line" is well precedented! A lot of Warsaw Pact regimes bootstrapped that way, the LA Times had a guns-and-bombs war with its printing staff over this once. For it to happen at America's major newspaper in support of challenges to government control of the streets was really a big deal!

The most irritating SJW I knew personally was like, a Drupal programmer who played pinball. And Drupal was apparently something for running web pages, except more than utility at some function "Drupal programming" seemed to be defined as a culture, a kind of tediously shitlib one, maybe in part because their employers seemed to regularly pay to fly them out to these conferences that weren't even about programming, just shitlib stuff, and that was a foundation of the culture

And I heard at one point they all scorned and ran some guy off (from like, his career) for being a Gorean, and were rumbling about how they could use their ideological solidarity and upstream role in web hosting to control content using their webdev tools

And I mean Goreans lol, but if you weren't paying attention in the 90s "we must use our technical knowledge of internet infrastructure to constrain human communication to facile mainstream morality while rigorously patrolling the subculture to keep out dorky SFF fetishes" was… pretty much the opposite of the promise of tech culture, to the point this was really kinda worrying.

And now I wake up and look out of my burrow again in November 2021 and that's in the rearview mirror, on the national and civic levels alike, politics and media, the spirit is "2011 as if we hadn't lost the spirit of 1995 (which was an embrace of 1969 but rejection of 1978)".

Biden's doing "What If Clinton But Also Maybe Turn Presidentialism Down A Notch And Let The Senate Be A Steering Force Of The Republic In Its Own Right", there's a tangible desire to go back to the 90s and a dawning realization that yes, that involves punching hippies, at least enough that you can ignore the rest.

For structural vulnerabilities well – not much has changed in public. It doesn't usually, that's what happens when capital wakes up, it works behind the scenes. I will say that from history this no longer looks like you'd expect from a narrative that ends with sleepwalking into disaster or ineffectually flailing, it looks like one you expect is going to have a crisis point in a few years that the insurgents are going to be completely unprepared for capital to be prepared for and fall on their faces after having exhausted themselves for maximum visibility

There's that one CEO who was like "yeah, this company is for achieving our business purpose, if you want to leverage it for some shitlib stuff please find another" and a chunk of the staff left and the Medium huffers huffed but the company went on to sparkle at the metrics VCs love, adding to the question of why companies staff hufferchum in the first place

Substack is hardened two ways, one thing is they have a solid enough understanding with their VC that nothing Anil fucking Dash says could ever matter; the second is like everyone I mostly read free ones online but being e-mailed to subscribers means writing is shielded against any technical or political interference with webhosting, that archived copies survive any attack on or rejection from the platform and that it can be forwarded and shared with contacts discreetly for samizdat or paywall-gatecrashing purposes

It's morning in America. And they're playing The Tick on FOX. Spoon!

#2021 #amhist #same as it ever was

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