Elle

There isn’t any.

America stripped the cultures away from all who came here in order to hammer them into the good little uniform consumers that were wanted.

We are casually generous. “I’m going to the store, you need anything?” Does not carry a requirement of paying us back. The other Americans in my program thought nothing of buying one of our British friends a soda or something, whereas when our British friends got each other a drink or something they paid each other back. And if you’re in trouble, Americans will literally offer you the shirt off their back. Or - in the case of one Brit I had a conversation with - a job to a stranger who needed it.

America is brightly colored. I don’t know how else to phrase it. Europe isn’t drab but like the US like brightness, light, and color. It’s the first thing I noticed when I got home - everything was more saturated.

We are genuinely curious. We aren’t always as polite about it as we should be, but usually if we’re asking about your culture, it comes from a good place.

We genuinely love cars. I’m not saying this is a good or bad trait, just that it’s part of our culture. We like to drive a lot more than people in Europe.

We are diverse. I was walking home with one of the other Americans and we were chatting like idk...a couple weeks after we’d met and she was like “ok I don’t want to be weird or anything but like....is it just me or is it SO WHITE here??”. We agreed that, yeah, it was but that y’know...White people came from somewhere and the uk is one of those places. But when I was gone I really missed seeing faces that looked nothing like mine. There are, of course, other ethnicities in the UK but compared to the us where literally half the population isn’t white, it’s definitely a striking difference. And as a consequence of this, our food is way more diverse. We didn’t strip these things from their cultures. The vast majority of restaurants that have, say, Chinese, or Thai, or sushi, or Indian, are run by people who immigrated here, brought their culture here, and adapted to the goods available to them in their new country. That is a natural, normal process and a long-existing part of human migration. And because we have so many more cultures here, we are lucky to be able to take part in what they share with us. It isn’t always a benign process but it’s just wrong to say that it’s always about “us” stealing from “them”.

We talk about our problems. IE, we’re very self-critical. We aren’t always good but we spend a lot of time looking at our culture and our country, breaking it down into pieces, and examining those pieces. We argue about how to make them better. A lot of times we suck at it but at least we’re having the conversation and the argument.

We hate authority. It doesn’t matter what your politics are, chances are you dislike and distrust the govt. we’re rebellious and few things make us more pleased than giving the man the finger or seeing someone else do it. British people protest - I literally saw an anti-Brexit protest march by my window - but they plan a time, politely show up and politely voice their displeasure, and then go home after cleaning up behind themselves. Americans? We fucking RIOT. Part of the entire point of the mall in DC is to yell at the govt every time we don’t like what they’re doing. We hate that we need a permit to do it. We’re always looking for new and creative ways to question authority. I think this is why it bothers a lot of us when people from other countries are like “why don’t you do something about _______”. Like, we’re trying. Trust me, we’re trying.

- Americans smile a lot. Europeans can tell the American in the room just because the American will auto-smile at random passerby. smiling is a greeting as much as “hello” is, and it’s a way of talking. when i talk to American friends, i’m nearly always smiling slightly and my tone rises and falls constantly. my European colleagues do not smile nearly as much, and have much flatter speaking tones. 

- Americans are ultra-casual. after you graduate from school, everyone is going to introduce themselves by their first names. actually, sometimes even in college, professors will do that. Euro and Asian colleagues tell me that in their home countries, professors act like gods and it’s very difficult to disagree with them. one side effect of the casualness also plays into friendliness; Americans are what Europeans consider friendly on a very frivolous surface level, and colleagues of mine have been confused by strangers who they thought spoke to them like friends, but it’s just the American attitude of being casual toward everyone. a German colleague told me that even the notoriously “rude” parts of this country, like the Northeast, are still “friendlier” toward strangers than most of Europe. 

- building on what @kyidil​ said about “Americans love cars”--ROAD TRIPS. road trips are such a staple of American culture. Americans are much chiller about driving long distances than typical for Europeans, and cross-country road trips are a staple of American media, often considered almost a rite of passage.

- and yes, Americans often have a much deeper-seated distrust of authority than Europeans. it often doesn’t look like it, especially due to the Trump phenomenon, but even that’s a type of backlash against authority. it also doesn’t express itself well; our government has eroded a lot of freedoms that Americans are relatively unaware of, but mostly in the realm of privacy. for both good and for bad, the particular form of the American obsession with freedom comes very much in a “don’t tell me how to live MY life” way--regardless of enforcement. ie, i have a strong sense from growing up in this country that if everyone knew they were spied on all the time, but the government actually did nothing with that information, that would be fine. on the flip side, if the government set “how to live your life” laws in place but didn’t check up on anyone or enforce it, Americans would be rioting in the streets. basically, it’s a libertarian streak that runs through the entire political spectrum.

Oh also, complement to the casual generosity thing: while the details of this practice vary a lot regionally, a great way to communicate to an American that you don't like them and are refusing to be their friend/friendly is to politely decline whenever they offer to do you a small favor, like grabbing you a drink or giving you a ride on their way to somewhere.

It doesn't matter how nice you are about it or how cordially you act in general, if you say 'no' to all offers over time without at least coming up with an equally easily fulfilled counter-offer to one of them, you are cutting your American acquaintance dead. Depending on how sensitive they are and why they were trying to bond with you, a grudge may even result, and you may be labeled 'fake' or 'cold' or 'a snob' or some similar thing.

Music: Jazz, Hip-Hop, Rap, Country, and Blues are all inherently American music styles that have spread worldwide

Religion: many of the various major Protestant Christian denominations that exist were founded in the United States. Baptists, Methodists, Episcopalians, Quakers, the AME and other African American churches....you just do not get the same Vibe™ anywhere else. The history of Christian evangelism/evangelical churches is embedded in our culture. The American South is called "The Bible Belt" for a reason, and that reason is the existence of a particular unique culture that gets exported elsewhere.

Also...Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons. Both are "fringe" but largely inescapable parts of American culture.

Architecture: Art Deco, skyscrapers, the concept of American suburbia

Technology: the pervasiveness of Apple/Apple products as a cultural signifier of wealth and status

Clothing: wearing a baseball cap abroad is literally the easiest way to get identified as an American. Also, our 'casual clothes' culture compared to most other countries

Holidays and Traditions: Thanksgiving and Memorial Day are the two most notable holidays with unique cultural characteristics and traditions

Sports: American football and baseball, but also "regional" sports like ice hockey, rodeos, and lacrosse....also, frankly, the way that sports and sports teams are integrated into the school system. That's largely unique to United States culture. The concept of Homecoming straight-up doesn't exist in most other countries. Related: the Kentucky Derby and horse racing as social events, golfing as a part of American business culture

Literature and Media: Disney, caped/masked superheroes, the Transcendentalist movement, Slavery narratives, the Beat Generation, late-night talk shows

Other general pieces of American culture: driving at 16, high school prom, car and driving culture, volunteerism, gun and hunting culture, and our weird cultural relationship with alcohol and drugs due to the history of the Prohibition movement and the War on Drugs

“you’re just racist”

“My grandfather immigrated to America with his wife and four kids looking for a better future. And nobody has ever told us to go back to our country, or adapt to the culture, or start speaking like everybody else. My mom had two kids here and nobody has ever accused her of using us to stay in the States, get citizenship, accused us of stealing resources, or taking jobs. Which all of us have! In fact, when I tell people I’m a first generation American, they think it’s really cool. My uncle was deported for running a drug ring! Yet none of us have gotten any shit about it. We’ve never been called criminals. Or dangerous. In fact, the only thing people say when they notice my mom’s accent is ‘oh that’s so cool, where are you from?’”

A picture of the speaker’s mother, a white woman with long blonde hair, is shown in the background.

Some tribal owned grocers that ship:

Bow and Arrow (Ute Mountain)

Native Harvest (White Earth)

Red Lake Fishery (Red Lake)

Wozupi (Mdewakanton Dakota)

Ramona Farms (Gila River)

Tanka Bars (Oglala)

Indian Pueblo Store (Pueblos)

Twisted Cedar Wine (Cedar Paiutes)

Ute Bison (Ute)

Seka Hills Olive Oil and Vinegars (Yocha Dehe Wintun)

She Nah Nam Seafood (Nisqually)

Sakari Botanicals (Inupiaq)

Honor the Earth (? Anishinaabe)

Nett Lake Wild Rice (Boise Forte Anishinaabe)

Passamaquoddy maple (Passamaquoddy)

BONUS: coffee :)

Yeego Coffee (Navajo)

Spirit Mountain Roasting (Yuma Quechan)

Birchbark Coffee (Anishinaabe)

I say we hang out, have a drink, and enjoy all of us being together one last time.

jennifer isn't a bogeyman, she's isn't something that goes bump in the night. she is never supposed to be the anonymous evil in the dark.

no, jennifer is set up as needy's personal monster, in a number of ways. she's needy's very best friend, her abuser, her worst tragedy, her responsibility. needy's nightmare isn't what jennifer does to people, it's what's happening to jennifer.

the movie follows a teenage girl, who watches as her drunk best friend is taken away and can't do anything about it. needy has to watch her friend self destruct directly in response to her assault. she does all of this research and finds the right term and tells other people only to be...

dismissed. not believed. told to calm down and not jump to conclusions because nothing is wrong with jennifer.

fucking look at this shit though

The triceratops for instance, was also animatronic.

Motherfucker randomly started moving.

And i just googled malfunctioning t-rex and was not disappointed. Apparently in order to put the skin on over the steel frame a guy had to crawl inside the t-rex while it was turned on and glue the skin down. And if somebody turned the t-rex off or the power went out the guy in the t-rex stood a very real chance of getting mangled and killed by the hydraulics.

So of course, the power goes out.

And this guy is still in there gluing the skin down.

Apparently the way to survive getting sheered to death by huge sheets of metal while you’re inside a giant t-rex robot is to curl into a ball and hope for the best.

And this guy hoped for the best and got it.

So they got hold of some of the best paleontologists they could find and said, “We want you guys to take this tech that your labs could pretty much never afford and use it to build us the most realistic, accurate dinosaur models the world has ever seen.”

The paleontologists knew an opportunity when it bit them in the ass.  They plugged in everything they knew about dinosaurs, all the skeletons and their best guesses about soft tissue and all that.  And when they’d created those dinosaur models, they had the computer start moving them as they realistically would with anatomy like that.  One guy took a look at those walking t-rexes and velociraptors (really utahraptors, but whatevs, fam), and he said, “Wait a minute, I’ve seen movement like that before.”

He called up film of a chicken walking.  Everyone in the room said, “Holy shit.”

This scene was the big one. All these Gallimimus were implemented in through CGI. In reality, Alan, Lex, and Tim were just running through an empty field. And this seems ho-hum now, but you have to remember that this was one of the first times CGI was ever used.

The human frowned. “Like - into humans?”

“No, no, it’s like - it’s like the sunlight thing. One day we’re fine with sunlight, and then the next day you go, ‘You know what, we’re changing the rules, now sunlight makes you burst into flames and die.’ Half of us were wiped out because we didn’t get the memo, and the other half had to go underground.”

“We never-”

“You did,” said the vampire. “Ever since Nosferatu came out, humans have known that sunlight kills vampires. It never did before, but it always has ever since.”

“Because of a movie?”

“Because of stories. That’s your part of the power. Humans tell stories to change the world around them. You don’t know you’re doing it most of the time, but whenever we get too big, you change the rules and make us start from scratch.”

“So you get super-strength, shapeshifting, flight, mind-control, and an unending bloodlust-”

“And you get to be the kid on the playground who says he has an ‘everything-proof-shield.’”

“I still think you have the better end of the deal here.”

“We really don’t. Now let me in.”