good day

a little bit under on sleep but only an hour and I guess this is when my alarm would wake me up

I think we have the first real session of the Girl by Moonlight game today!

I need to eat and shower and deal with dishes and meet an FC friend to finish HW before then

"I've got a lot to do!" she said, before lying in bed and not doing much of anything.

ok I think I'm going to get stand coffee this morning because that way I can save my heartier food for later

aw the coffee stand guy missed me and I didn't have the heart to tell him I've been making my own coffee more often

and it looks like no actual gbm session today because a player has to miss but that's honestly a little less stress

like we're going to have a little chat session today regardless so that will be fun

but since that means we won't be playing and thus won't be on stream I'm a little less in a hurry to take a shower

I'm going to take one, just later

🐆: stinky puppy

been doing ffxiv quests since a FC friend helped get me past the last HW trial.

Honestly, finding the Dragonsong stuff quite interesting.

But I haven't eaten anything in over 6 hours...

sadly the gbm chat was also cancelled because my friend the GM had an issue, and I'm worried about that but we'll see

I definitely had some immediate thoughts after The Singularity Reactor but I'm glad I waited to voice them because it feels like they may be addressed in the post-expansion stuff

like very directly

also I fucking _knew_ there was going to be a Warrior of Darkness back during ARR

I am watching Farya Faraji's video on neo Viking music (you may remember him from the orientalist music essay I linked a while back)

and he talks about the way that these neopagans that particularly identify with this music almost seem engaged in something very similar to what I was criticizing Communing with the Ancestors about, namely in an attempt to escape Western Christian hegemony just simply moving to a new type of Western chauvinism with some elements replaced

but a bit different...

I criticized Gramassi for dragging me back to the Greeks and other Western touch points even as he was attempting to be cross-cultural

with these neo-viking fans it's more a case of picking and choosing from other places' indigenous cultures and attaching them to the Norse to create a false image of Christianity and European "indigenous" culture being wholly separate

but as Faraji points out, Western Christianity was incredibly syncretic

I mean look at the days of the week!

look at the neo-classical architecture going back to Greece and Rome you can find everywhere and often in explicitly Christian setting like Vatican City

and I think Faraji makes a great point that lumping all of these various religions and mythologies as "pagan" is itself a result of Christianity

I find myself sometimes thinking I'm trying to find a shared pre-Christian indigenous religion, but I also know that is not the case except perhaps because at the least we can all share in being weird bald apes on this 3rd rock from the sun

and that's not really what I think we need

we need at accept that there are many ways that even among weird bald apes (or at least those who look like them) on planet Earth can come to relate to it

and that's fine

I'm so glad honestly I find points of disagreement and places where I don't quite like Faraji's tone.

Not because at the end I highly disagree with his points, but it makes me feel at least accepting that I am not going into this with incredulity.

Of the particular topic of cultural appropriation, I fucking agree that for the most part attribution and honesty is the big thing

but that's different from "you shouldn't have to ask permission"

not all cultural products are meant to be sharable with others

especially with a group so ravenous and irreverent as many white people are

without the power differential of colonization this more liberal (to cultural exchange) view makes more sense, but as a black person... no

as he points out in his video, people will literally steal something and then say they invented it and the originators are the ones that stole it

but I think this is a case where though I have nitpicks and slight disagreements while I can very much agree on the basic problems and idea that there is a level of honest cultural exchange that can be separated from cultural appropriation.

I also hate the "black Cleopatra" myth exactly because I think eclipses the actual culture of West Africa to instead cosplay as a culture white people find more admirable... especially in the particularity of a Hellenic colonizer of Egypt!