I miss our serious discussions

[Yuki-Anne]

Specifically the Tl;dr wall of text posts that everyone would so lovingly craft. Ahhhh... it makes me feel nostalgic. I used to craft a wall of text myself back in the day.

What happened to us? Where did our wonderful walls of text go?

Please reply with a wall of text of appropriate length.

[Xeno]

Wednesday, May 1, 2013
Emo Isn't Even A Thing (a blog post I wrote for my music class that I actually liked and am therefore posting here)

Us Hot Topic kids get a bad rep- and even though the artists we love tend to refute the label "emo," for the sake of market divisions and demographic labels (which, according to Frith, are the real reasons for genre labels in the first place), I'm going to go ahead and consider the term a valid one.

There are the artists that catch flack for falling into the "emo" category who then evolve sonically and catch more flack for "selling out" and making "pop" music. It's exhausting. And most of my favorite bands have at one time or another been on the receiving end of the emo label, but as they grow musically, the publications and listeners who loved them begin to throw dirt at their changing genre identities.

Let's start with Panic! at the Disco. Their first album, A Fever You Can't Sweat Out, was an explosive, massive, unprecedented success that was called both baroque and emo. Yes, there was a lot of chamber-esque string elements and an excess of eyeliner, so both labels can be attributed to somewhat universally agreed upon traits. Most importantly, the music itself was phenomenal, and warranted the platinum sales it generated.
Their next album, Pretty. Odd., is like the estranged cousin you only hear from at Christmas. The musical style was so far removed from that of the first album that much of the fan base didn't know how to incorporate it into the aesthetic they had come to expect from Panic. The sales were not as earth-shattering, the music is not as readily recognizable, and even now critics always have to qualify the album as something of a novelty when comparing it to the rest of Panic's discography. The genre change is the most recognizable attribute of the album, and the actual quality of the music is not as largely discussed.
It's the expectations that comes from genre labels that prevents albums like Pretty. Odd. from being discussed in their own context. The sound was such a surprise coming from an "emo" band that it makes appreciating the album in its own right a challenge.

Lying is the Most Fun from A Fever You Can't Sweat Out


That Green Gentleman from Pretty. Odd.


My Chemical Romance faced similar issues with their fourth album Danger Days. The band had gained notoriety for punk and gothic bombast, shrouded in black and red. They were one of the prime examples of what is referred to as "emo" music, and they had earned respect and a great deal of well-deserved credit within their genre niche.
Then Danger Days was released and the color and more straight rock of the album threw everyone out of their comfort zone. The album was so dramatically different from the sound typically associated with the band that, despite technically being what radio stations would normally consider "rock," many critics referred to the album as a "pop" album. Compared to the much heavier sounds of their previous albums, Danger Days was faced with generic categorization that did not necessarily match the actual musical qualities of the album's tracks. Again, the album was good, but the genre disparity was such that focusing on the quality of the music came second to focusing on the categorical changes.

Famous Last Words from The Black Parade


Na Na Na from Danger Days

Posted by Emily at 10:00 PM

lol if you think either of those bands are anything but radio fad machines.

[Davidizer13]

Let's start this story around 1.8 billion years ago. Back then, the only sign of life were stromatolites, these huge cabbage head shaped mats of photosynthetic algae, built over thousands of cycles of getting covered over by sediment and growing through that sediment, over and over again. At that point, all the landmasses in the world were mashed together into a supercontinent known as Columbia. It was made up of what eventually became the ancient cores of the continents we know and love today. Antarctica and Siberia next to North America, South America against western Africa. But this arrangement was slowly pulling apart, creating a huge rift valley along the margins of what became North America. This started filling up with sediment, bits and pieces of the continent behind it. First, it was muds, deposited under water along with some lenses of carbonate, representing huge masses of stromatolite growth, or lenses of coarse sands. In the next stage, the sediments became dominated by coarser grains, deposited as beach sands or as alluvial fans, huge half-cones of messy sand deposited by flash flood deposits in a desert climate. Oh yeah, and there were little traces of sulfur in there too. Maybe there was a bit of pyrite, or a pocket of hydrogen sulfide-rich methane, but there's sulfur available.

Now would be a good time to discuss oxidation/reduction reactions. Oxidation is a pretty familiar topic - iron rusts, metal corrodes, etc. What is happening at the chemical level is that oxygen, in the air or as water, is reacting with these metals, and wrenching electrons off of them, converting them from elemental or other forms into ions or oxides. The reverse of this is reduction, where atoms gain electrons, reversing the process. This is relevant in our case, because the presence of sulfur and the absence of oxygen often creates an environment where reduction occurs.

Anyway. So you've got this sandstone with a bunch of sulfur in it, whether as hydrogen sulfide or iron sulfide. Along comes a brine rich in metal ions, especially copper, pouring off the continent in the form of groundwater, and passing through this sandstone, creating a reducing environment. The metals react with the sulfur and create different metal sulfides, forming tiny crystals or masses throughout the thing. There's a zonation to this mineralization, too: at its center, where the groundwater flow lasted the longest, you have chalcopyrite, a copper-iron sulfide, along with feldspar after altered quartz grains, chlorite, and traces of hematite that color the rock pink. Next, there's a band of chalcocite and digenite, copper sulfides, along with microscopic traces of native silver; then a band of bornite (another copper sulfide), chalcopyrite and the occasional calcite nodule. Then chalcopyrite, galena (a lead sulfide) and calcite, then just galena and calcite, then pyrite-calcite, and then no alteration at all. These bands of alteration follow along the beds of sand/sandstone, bounded by beds of finer material like clay or silt, which block the flow of the solution and limit mineralization across them.

So while all that's going on, there's still more sediment getting dumped on top of all this. There's a good layer of thinly bedded mud, then a bunch of carbonate mixed with clays and silts. The last thing to get dumped on is a bunch of quartz-rich sand, probably beach or dune environments. All these got baked into good, solid sedimentary rocks. And then due to the pressure and increasing heat as they went deeper and deeper below the surface, some got cooked a lot more. The quartz grains reformed, losing their structure and becoming interlocking masses of quartzite; the muds became shales and then argillites, thinly bedded soft rocks that come in a variety of colors like green, red, purple... A few got metamorphosed even more, forming schists with scaly layers of mica between garnet-rich feldspars and quartz crystals.

You remember how all this was happening in a continental rift, where the continent's splitting apart? Yeah. That happened. Part of it gets shipped off to what becomes Siberia, the rest stays attached to the western US. All these rocks remain relatively unchanged, apart from some folding and faulting. But that's expected - the earth doesn't stand still. Over time, they becomes more and more distant from the shoreline, as chunks from other continents glom onto the western coast of the continental core, building up everything west of Boise. There's a bunch of volcanoes that form along the continental margin caused by a downgoing plate, similar to what we see in the Cascades today, that push a bunch of granite blobs through this arrangement, forming a solid mass of plutonic rock miles across. All that pushing and shoving of magma up to the surface breaks our first set of rocks a bunch, creating more faulting and folding, fractures and joints in them, shoving chunks from an ancient time over those from a slightly less ancient time.

A rather clever species of warm-bloods with funny-shaped hands starts poking holes in the rocks, and - remember that bornite I was talking about earlier? Those copper sulfides? The silver? This species loves that stuff. Can't get enough. So they dig a bunch of bigger holes, blasts apart the rock, scrapes it out, grinds it to a powder, pours it through a bunch of chemicals, and gets the copper and silver out. Some of the rock starts moving again, everyone gets out, and these clever animals try their best for a very short time to figure out how best to get back at the shiny rocks. But not all of them.

And that's how I got laid off from the best job I've ever had.

[Xeno]

We Are Still Here

I have to get this out there, feel free to ignore. I’m not offended.

I give lectures to the Anthropology department at the adjacent college about various Native American topics. I’ve been doing so for over a year, and although I’ve basically heard every question about this topic, today really saddened me.

I had 7 people come up to me afterwards and ask a variation of the question, “Are Indians still alive?”

Other questions I got were

What language did Indians speak? (There a different languages still spoken)
I’ve only heard of the Cherokee, Cheyenne, and Sioux. How many tribes are there? (There were many tribes, and still are today)
Do you celebrate Thanksgiving / Columbus Day? (….)

It really shows the great effort our educational system does to teach American children about American history.

The first encounter with Indians in school is Thanksgiving and Columbus Day. Children cut out colored paper for their headbands and paper bags for their vests. They sit together with the kids dressed as Pilgrims and eat their mock-Thanksgiving lunch. That is the illusive idea of Thanksgiving to Americans. They think the Pilgrims and Squanto were good ol’ pals and ate a great turkey feast. It is a celebratory feast for Americans, but it is a mourning day for Indians. In my 19 years of living I have never celebrated Thanksgiving or Columbus Day (to be honest, I don’t even know the names of those ships he had).

Besides Squanto not being the good pal to Mr. and Mrs. Pilgrim, Thanksgiving used to be celebrated on many days as a celebration after slaughtering Indians. In Plymouth Massachusetts the Wampanoag chief’s head was cut off and put on display for over 20 years. “Thanksgiving” was the time when Pequot’s held their Green Corn festival. They were gathered and slaughtered, women and children were burned alive, and then the Americans held a feast afterwards. That’s what people are celebrating every year.

Columbus Day is no better. Columbus didn’t come over on his fancy ships and acted cordial to the Natives. He had many of them immediately enslaved and shipped back to Spain. A lot of them were slaughtered, and the rest were forced to convert to Christianity. If the slaughtering and enslavement didn’t lessen the Native population of the area, the disease Columbus brought over did. Shortly after Columbus’ arrival the Pope issued ownership of America to the Spanish King and Queen. This was among the first times in American history where Natives were pushed off their lands by a couple of white dudes.

Is Native history so sad that history book authors and editors intentionally leave out our history so it doesn’t upset the kids? Or is it because they’re ashamed of what has happened? Perhaps there wasn’t enough room to give our history a decent chapter, rather than a measly paragraph?

Our history has been summed up into a Disney movie, a Trail of Tears, and a couple famous names. Indian children are taught American history, yet Americans can’t be bothered to learn ours.

There’s something wrong, America.