Venting thread that still excludes eddy (2)

[linguoboy]

Chicago's annual celebration of Green Vomit Day falls on a Saturday this year. My friends want me to go out drinking with them but I'd rather be stabbed.

[alynnidalar]

I'm sad St. Patty's Day falls on a Saturday this year because I wanted to wear orange and wait for people to ask me why I wasn't wearing green.

[Vijay]

...did I say anything about the size of the community, or its patterns of locality? I don't think so.

The point was that in both cases there's a relocated community that's been in the country for around two centuries with a distinct subcultural identity even if no great size (and the Chinese population in India was obviously much larger before the persecutions began), adapting substantially to the local culture, and then a modern migrant community directly from the home country.
I guess I could have compared it to the Somali community, say, but I'm not (and I suspect you're not) as aware of the distinctions within Anglo-Somali cuisine, so the analogy would have been somewhat lost on both of us.

But the differences are so great that your analogy makes no sense no matter what immigrant population in the UK you try to use. Recent Chinese migration to India is not comparable to the recent migration of either Indians or Somalis to the UK, to the point where I find it extremely doubtful that recent Chinese migrants to India eat anything that can be considered a distinct "type of Indian version of Chinese food."

Foreigners in India don't usually drive to all the necessary shops, buy all their ingredients, and cook them all by themselves. Every one of those things requires a lot of skills, some of which are beyond the capabilities of a lot of Indians, let alone most foreigners. Instead, they hire (or, if they work for a company there, perhaps their company hires) at least one person to do all these things for them, just like plenty of middle-class Indians do. If anything, they're more likely to be eating either Indian food or some kind of Western(ized) food than any kind of Chinese food - at least while they're still staying in India.

But even if they did make their own food, given especially that most of these people only stay for two or three years, it would probably just be Chinese food. It doesn't make sense to say that temporary migrants have a cuisine specific to them and to no one else.

[Salmoneus]

I'm sad St. Patty's Day falls on a Saturday this year because I wanted to wear orange and wait for people to ask me why I wasn't wearing green.

...were you planning on wearing a swastika armband as well? Maybe waving a confederate flag?

[KathTheDragon]

What the hell, Sal?

[mèþru]

I think Sal went way too far with Nazi and Confederacy comparisons, but he has a good point. The colour orange has a history of being associated with Protestants in Europe. The colour is used today by various Protestant groups in Scotland and Ireland that range from okayish to far-right. The most famous of these are the Orange Order. I would definitely not wear that colour in the British Isles on Saint Patrick's Day.

[alynnidalar]

Convenient that I live over 3,000 miles from the British Isles, then.

[mèþru]

Forgot who made the post; thought it was Kath. No problem there then.

[jmcd]

@Vijay: AFAICT, Sal i referring to 19th century immigrants to India from China. He is perhaps even referring to earlier migration than that.

[Torco]

quickest godwin ever

[Salmoneus]

I think Sal went way too far with Nazi and Confederacy comparisons

nazi? Yes, that was hyperbole. Confederate? No, that seems pretty equivalent in magnitude. Making a point of wearing orange on St Patrick's Day is pretty similar to, say, going to a black church on Martin Luther King Day wearing a confederate flag t-shirt.

[actually, a lot of the arguments, about 'heritage' and 'tradition' and preservation of the majority, vs a history of extrajudicial killings of the minority, are exactly the same. The original KKK, after all, were just the US equivalent of the OO in Canada. (though the modern KKK is obviously much more extreme than the modern OO - but the broader 'confederate' movement seems a really good fit for the OO as an analogy)]

Look, if either alynnidalar or kath is a far-right, white, fundamentalist presbyterian with historic ties to the Ulster Scots community, and they want to wear orange on the Twelfth, then that's one thing. But doing that intentionally on St Patrick's is just sectarian provocation.

I know the graveyards here probably seem a long way away from America. But I know people who know people who were killed (by both sides), and I don't find it just 'lolz' when people adopt the image of race-hatred just to be 'edgy' and look cool and provocative. Analogy: would Americans be happy if I talked about wearing the confederate flag to a MLK celebration because, lol, I want to see how black people react? I'm hoping not.

And if this is really just alynnidalar picking a random colour without understanding what that symbol means in this context... well then take this as a protective warning. Don't go around obviously and provocatively wearing orange at St Patrick's Day parades, because eventually you'll find some drunk person who actually is (or thinks they are) Irish, and you will get punched in the face.

(plus many more people will assume you're either a fascist or an internet troll).

[mèþru]

I think most Americans don't even know about the Orange Order and related stuff, even if they are of Irish descent.

[Vijay]

I know I don't, and I dare say I (like basically anyone else on this forum) tend to know more about these kinds of things than most Americans.

@Vijay: AFAICT, Sal i referring to 19th century immigrants to India from China. He is perhaps even referring to earlier migration than that.

He was referring to 18th- and 19th-century immigrants at first, but when I mentioned Chinese Indian food, he suddenly started talking about the food of immigrants who are/were more recent than that.

[Vijay]

I can't seem to find a proxy for Twitter anymore. This is getting increasingly inconvenient.

[mèþru]

The board is my twitter.

[Nortaneous]

Wow, your description of banh mi seems even more restrictive than the definition. My initial hypothesis would be that (at least some) Vietnamese Americans heavily specialised.

My impression is that they're more a West Coast thing. Over here, they're known for being cheap ($4 or so) insofar as they're known at all, and around DC they're not.

When you eat at other people's places, how do you feel about the seasoning?

There usually isn't much of it.

Scrapple looks like square sausage/lorne sausage/etc that we have in Scotland (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpvBB3aPnn0)

They're both square sausages, but scrapple isn't big enough to fit on a roll, wouldn't be cut that thickly (you want the slices to be crisp all the way through, so they have to be as thin as they can be without falling apart), and is made of pork.

If steak sub is associated with Philadelphia, would they not eat cream cheese with it?

Cream cheese doesn't go on sandwiches, except for the lox bagel, which is a bagel.

I don't think I have ever encountered a specifically Vietnamese restaurant, of any stripe.

Patterns of migration, I guess.

I don't encounter Vietnamese restaurants in the sense that I encounter Chinese restaurants. There are pho restaurants and banh mi places.

Well, I imagine once the first few immigrants get established in a particular business, subsequent ones are likely to enter the same industry (either because they see their fellow countrymen succeeding at it, or because they work for/with their fellow countrymen initially), and over time it just becomes ingrained as a viable career path among that community.

Didn't Steve Sailer have some kick about Cambodians cornering the Californian donut industry?

[Travis B.]

I think most Americans don't even know about the Orange Order and related stuff, even if they are of Irish descent.

I would agree here; most Americans, ones of Irish descent included, wouldn't know the significance of dressing up in orange on any given day.

[linguoboy]

My sleep was so restless last night it was like not sleeping at all. All I want to do is go home and crash but I have one meeting today I really can't miss...and it's at 4 p.m.

[Vijay]

Pop songs from the Balkans creep the shit out of me sometimes. As someone who basically majored in Romani linguistics and had Ian Hancock as his advisor, I can't help thinking about how the model singers with powdery white skin and/or nationalist music videos might play into general antigypsyism. I was watching this because somebody nominated it in a forum song contest elsewhere, and my eyes were wide the whole time.

[linguoboy]

Two of my friends share a birthday today and one was complaining to me about the other's choice of restaurant. When we heard he wanted rotary sushi, I was like, It won't be good but I'll humour him. Then I realised it's Monday which--unless things have changed--is traditionally the day fresh fish markets are closed, so most industry insiders warn people to avoid ordering fish on Mondays and I was like I hope it's not bad enough to make me sick. Now he's just revealed that he picked the place he did because it's "all you can eat" for $20 and I'm like I hope I survive.

[Vijay]

Is that place even open on Mondays? EDIT: Can you just get something that doesn't have fish in it?

Vent:

Moderator: I'm thinking of splitting up this subforum for Native American languages into the following language family-specific subforums. What does everybody think?
(discussion ensues)
Me: I like your idea, but I'm going to tentatively propose adding a few more subforums for the following language families because they have many members.
(Admin jumps out of nowhere)
Admin: Unless by "members" you mean forum members, it doesn't matter how many speakers a language has.
Me: ...I was talking about the members of language families, which are languages. Next time you want to shoot someone's ideas down, maybe try asking what they meant first instead of giving them a fucking heart attack for no reason.
Admin: But Vijay! What is so bad about jumping out of nowhere commenting on languages I know nothing about and putting words in your mouth even though I can basically do whatever the hell I want with this subforum and you can't do diddly squat?

[linguoboy]

Is that place even open on Mondays? EDIT: Can you just get something that doesn't have fish in it?

I'm not sure how much they offer which doesn't feature fish, but I plan to favour the cooked dishes.

I told my friend that next year he needs to get the drop on everyone and choose his restaurant well in advance. He's got professional training and really knows his food. At least his boyfriend took him out for good sushi on Saturday.

[alynnidalar]

Been peeved at work lately. A bit of background, followed by a giant rant (sorry):

I work on a team of five. There's me, "Dan", "Cameron", "Nick", and "Kevin". Dan and Cameron have been on the project the longest; they started it and had a lot of impact on its direction. Nick has been on the project the third-longest, but isn't as experienced of a developer. Kevin and I are new to the project, but Kevin is an experienced developer. I'm the least-experienced developer of us.
Our main problem is the division between the "old-timers" (Dan and Cam) and the "newcomers" (Nick, Kevin, and me). On one hand, because of their experience, Dan and Cam know a lot that the rest of us might not consider when designing and implementing stuff. On the other, this means they can fall into the trap of assuming their methods are best by default. Dan is usually fine—he's chill and willing to listen, even when you're telling him you think he's wrong.

Cam, on the other hand...

Cam does not take well to disagreement. His method is the One True Method, and he is Always Correct, and if you disagree with him, you are Wrong (and a threat). He sticks his nose into everyone's business, is nitpicky to the extreme about things that don't matter, and gets passive-aggressive when he perceives people as Doing Things Wrong. Besides these pleasant qualities, he's also horrible at communicating (he ONLY communicates via Slack, even though he sits three feet from me, and his messages are so vague they're impossible to decipher). I'll be fair to him—he's a good developer and he often is right (or his way is also valid). But his attitude makes you want to disagree with everything he says.

This didn't used to be a problem for me, mostly because I was new enough to the team that I'd go along with whatever he said. (and he's only in the office two days a week anyway) But lately I've noticed two things:

1. The more I push back on what Cam says—not, like, screaming that he's wrong, but questioning if his way really is better or pushing back against his nitpicks—the more passive-aggressive and nitpicky he gets toward me.

2. Cam hates Nick, and constantly blames him for things (not directly, but passive-aggressively).
These two things together have made me realize a third thing: Cam is only nitpicky and blamey with me and Nick. Not Dan, who's too nice to be angry at, and not Kevin, who takes no crap from anybody. Just me and Nick.

This all culminated yesterday when I needed his help to sort out issues I'd caused in our code. Instead of just buckling down and helping me figure out how to fix it, he spent like an hour rehashing what went wrong (I UNDERSTAND WHAT WENT WRONG) and subtly blaming Nick (IT WAS ME, NOT NICK) and refusing to answer yes or no questions (I JUST WANT TO KNOW IF MY SUGGESTION WILL WORK OR NOT). After like three hours of this, it culminated in angry crying in the bathroom, after which I literally screamed the entire drive home. (kind of surprised I didn't lose my voice)

THIS DUDE

I HAVEN'T GOTTEN FURIOUS ENOUGH TO CRY AT WORK IN LITERALLY YEARS

AND HERE WE ARE

I've finally put it together, though. I knew he didn't like being challenged (why he and Nick don't get along—because Nick can be obstinate and argumentative himself, so he disagrees with Cam all the time), but I've realized his main thing is that the project is his baby and he doesn't like other developers getting their dirty fingers all over it. But he knows intellectually that we all need to work together to get it done. So instead of handling his issues like an adult, he lashes out passive-aggressively against people he perceives as vulnerable: the two least-experienced developers on the project, who he might browbeat into listening to him. (which explains why he doesn't do it to Kevin, despite Kevin disagreeing with him as much or more than Nick does)

I'm also pretty sure that Cam legitimately doesn't realize this (why he's such a dick, or that he's a dick at all), but I don't accept that as an excuse. Part of being an adult means not alienating all your coworkers, or at least realizing when you've done so.

tl;dr: my coworker is a very tall infant

[Vijay]

That's too bad. And that reminds me:

I get along with everyone at work: my co-workers, the supervisors, people from other teams, even the janitors. (Well, okay, I have a few (newer) co-workers who I haven't managed to talk to yet. Some of them don't even say hi to me even though we see each other every day, but then I'm equally or perhaps even more guilty in those cases. I've been thinking maybe I should be the one to try initiating the interaction, and I unfortunately keep forgetting to make it a point to do that). Then today, I found out that my employers have asked whether the one person I have not been able to get along with whether she'd like to come back. Neither the person who told me that nor I know whether she's accepted or not yet.

[mèþru]

I've worked with people like Cameron before. They are the worst. I know that I can be like that with my own conworld, but there's a reason for why it is not a collab project.