(EE) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

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Post by Lao Kou »

eldin raigmore wrote: 21 Jun 2018 18:04 Why are there so many blonde Koreans in Korean manga?
In real life I’ve never met a blonde Korean; not even one who had dyed their hair.

There are also a few more blondes than I would have expected in Japanese and Taiwanese and HK manga; but significantly fewer, it seems to me (I could be wrong.)
I could care less about hair-dyeing. In the US, there are certainly African Americans who go blond or ginger (do the drapes match the carpeting?), and there it is. I, myself, did highlights while I wasn't able to acknowledge my age. As summer vacation is upon us, although I'm getting a little old for this sort of thing, one wonders if a little frolic and having my hair dyed aubergine or mallard duck green next week and letting it grow out before fall semester would be fun.

What worries me about a little let's-be-edgy hair coloration is the accompanying eyelid surgery to turn Asian eyes into pinball, aggie-sized eyeballs. Plenty of documentaries have aired here on various channels about this, and I've seen ads here on sides of busses with "Korean doctors" doing cosmetic surgery. Animé characters have eyeballs that overtake their face; for female characters, breasts that would require a four-man team to get out bed. Hair a cotton-candy pink seems the least of our concerns.
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Post by elemtilas »

Lao Kou wrote: 22 Jun 2018 09:29I could care less about hair-dyeing. In the US, there are certainly African Americans who go blond or ginger (do the drapes match the carpeting?), and there it is. I, myself, did highlights while I wasn't able to acknowledge my age. As summer vacation is upon us, although I'm getting a little old for this sort of thing, one wonders if a little frolic and having my hair dyed aubergine or mallard duck green next week and letting it grow out before fall semester would be fun.
Hmmm. Lao Kou I think would look fun indeed!
What worries me about a little let's-be-edgy hair coloration is the accompanying eyelid surgery to turn Asian eyes into pinball, aggie-sized eyeballs. Plenty of documentaries have aired here on various channels about this, and I've seen ads here on sides of busses with "Korean doctors" doing cosmetic surgery.
This I don't worry so much about. It runs both ways: just as there are Orientals who crave that "exotic" Western look, there are Occidentals who undergo the knife to get that "exotic" Eastern look! From what I gather, it's more of an Oriental thing than an Occidental one, though.
Animé characters have eyeballs that overtake their face
Now that's creepy enough to be of concern!
for female characters, breasts that would require a four-man team to get out bed.
And this one's just plain dumb. But there are people who try for both of those looks.
Hair a cotton-candy pink seems the least of our concerns.
M. [o.O] I think I'd stick with the mallard green!
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Post by eldin raigmore »

Thanks! I didn’t know any of that!
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So in my rock musical The Bittersweet Generation, I've decided to add a new scene. The Bittersweet Generation is my musical about Millennial teens set during the 2007-2008 school year. This is a scene in which Melanie Hayworth and Bryce Schlitter go out together and drink. The character Trina Evangelisti will introduce the chart I've described in this post, under the name of the Evangelisti Chart. To go with the Millennial theme, my plan is for Melanie and Bryce to drink wine, since wine and not beer is the Millennial beverage of choice. I'm thinking of having them go to some type of American equivalent of an oast house, a microbrewery perhaps, and I'll write a new song for the scene, "Zymurgy", whose chorus goes:

A Mass for the masses, and wine for the clergy
Raise your glasses to oenology . . . and zymurgy

(FWIW, Trina is Catholic, and mentions in another scene that she drinks wine when she goes to Mass. Melanie is agnostic, and Bryce is religiously syncretic.)

What I want to know is . . . where can American teens go to get some artisanal alcohol that won't police/enforce America's 21 drinking age? Obviously they wouldn't go to a bar, and a setting like a wild teen party wouldn't be quiet enough a setting for a special date.
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Post by Axiem »

Khemehekis wrote: 20 Aug 2018 02:19 where can American teens go to get some artisanal alcohol that won't police/enforce America's 21 drinking age?
I'm not actually sure if the "artisanal alcohol" scene was a thing in 2007, but that could also be my corner of America, and the fact that I don't really drink. I certainly didn't hear about the craft beer renaissance until closer to the 2010 to 2011 timeframe. And for the record, I'm not at all aware of any wine equivalent to craft beers, or even where I would look to find them in my city (whereas I can name a half-dozen local craft beer brewers without even trying). And also for the record, I am a Millennial and know lots of Millennials, and craft beer is definitely a thing among Millennials.

As for where to go, your options are basically "someone's house" (which doesn't have to be a party per se; just a group of kids hanging out will do) or maybe like, a frat party, if you look old enough and the frat is willing to look the other way? It probably also depends on the setting: in a more urban situation, bars are going to probably care a lot more about carding; in a rural area, they're a bit more likely to look the other way, or at least not inspect a fake ID too closely. (That could also be stereotypes talking, though. I never actually tried to get alcohol until I was 21. America is also a big place; you maaaay want to narrow down what part you're talking about when asking cultural questions like that.

Those are my thoughts as an American; others may have different thoughts.
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Post by Khemehekis »

Thanks for the response, Axiem! I'll consider making it craft beer. Someone else's house sounds like a good possibility.

Some more cultural information: The Bittersweet Generation takes place in a fictional suburban town called Armando. It's a college town in a Sun Belt state, with the public high school Dulcevida High and the Catholic St. Angela's College of Armando within its borders. Like Springfield or Lawndale, the exact state it's in is never revealed.
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Post by shimobaatar »

Khemehekis wrote: 20 Aug 2018 02:19 since wine and not beer is the Millennial beverage of choice.
"Millennials are killing the beer industry".

In all seriousness, though, what's your source for that idea? I've never heard anything along those lines before.
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Post by Khemehekis »

This states that the Millennial beverage de choix is wine rather than beer:

https://seekingalpha.com/instablog/3009 ... e-industry

I think I first read it somewhere else, though . . .
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Post by Dormouse559 »

The article says millennials are drinking more wine than other generations, not that they drink more wine than beer. I'd also hesitate to apply this information years in the past to high schoolers. (The article says its statistics are for 2015.)

I'd try to answer your central question, having been a millennial in high school at about that time, but I'm like Axiem; I didn't try alcohol until 21.
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Post by Khemehekis »

Dormouse559 wrote: 20 Aug 2018 03:10 The article says millennials are drinking more wine than other generations, not that they drink more wine than beer.
Well, I was thinking of this line: "Obtaining alcohol for consumption is no exception, and the millennial beverage of choice is wine."
I'd also hesitate to apply this information years in the past to high schoolers. (The article says its statistics are for 2015.)
This brings up an interesting point. In the late nineties, my peers were basically copying Gen-X culture. Listening to artists like the Offspring, Third Eye Blind, Alanis Morissette and Sarah McLachlan, partaking in extreme sports, drinking beer, raving, getting body piercing (the last of which would later prove as permanent as blue jeans instead of a temporary nineties fad). In social/political views, however, the first Millennials represented a break from the Reagan conservatism of eighties youth or the Clinton-voting Xers of the early nineties. Every year, my high school history/gov class would hold a reënactment of the Eugene Debs Trial, and the teacher asked the jurors to rule the way a teen-age Californian from the late nineties would instead of trying to be historically accurate. My 1979-born peers were the first class in the history of Mr. Hart's class that ruled in Debs' favor (not guilty). (Mr. Hart also explained that we rewrote history, as in the real Eugene Debs trial Mr. Debs was convicted.) We were called Generation Y, a sort of minor variation on Generation X. By the end of the decade, even the oldest American Millennials were too young to legally purchase at a bar.

In the current decade, the eleventies, on the other hand, the whole Millennial thing came out on its own, and this was when "Millennials" became a household word. Now media talk about Millennials all the time, how we're "disrupting" various industries and machines, and how we'd rather eat avocado toast than spend our money to settle down (while Xers, conversely, are settling down or have already). They ascribe to us some decidedly un-X-like traits, such as being soft snowflakes instead of tough realists; politically earnest and leftist instead of cynical and pragmatist; optimistic instead of pessimistic about the future of the world and the planet; helicopter-parented instead of thrown on the streets and neglected by parents; soi-disant "special" instead of self-loathing; giving free hugs instead of being standoffish. Whether or not all of you agree with these assessments (of Millennials or of Xers), America woke up and realized: Millennials are not Xers. The oldest Millennials are in our late thirties now, soon to be middle-aged. The youngest are in junior high.

2007-2008 was a sort of in-between zone. The first recognition of the nascent Millennial spirit by the public that I noticed was in 2001, when my high school and college peers accused Bush of being oil-hungry instead of falling in line with the jingoistic mood shared by most non-Millennial Americans after 9/11. Such earlier events as the Battle of Seattle and Napster began to look like harbingers of all this in retrospect. Then when Bush invaded Iraq in 2003, many different generations protested the war, including many Silents, but I saw a lot of "This generation is coming of age protesting a war like the Boomers instead of being like Gen X!!!" I even saw one blog entry that suggested generations alternate between conservative (Silent, Gen X) and liberal (Boomer, "Gen Y") . Then came MySpace and Facebook, and I began to hear people complain that these new kids couldn't write music the way Generation X did -- the new music, everyone was saying, was terrible! Jean Twenge wrote Generation Me, popularizing the idea that teens and twentysomethings couldn't adapt to a cold, hard world and had grown up constantly told they were special. There was a media furore over the victorious college women's lacrosse team greeting Junior in their flip-flops. Iraq loomed on with no end in sight, and older liberals criticized youth for not protesting the war the way young Boomers would have, while older conservatives criticized youth for not rallying around the president the way young Greatests would have. In 2007, Barack Obama was becoming a major celebrity, a "rock star politician", and the book Generation We was written. During this decade, Millennials were clearly forming a voice -- and a popular culture (emo, anyone?) -- separate from Generation X, but we were still called "Generation Y" by most people. Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, the Parkland school shooting, the candidacy of Bernie Sanders, the word "disruptive" applied positively, flipsters, and avocado toast were still in the future. Few people had heard of Antifa.

My musical is set right at that point in the 2007-2008 school year, when the oldest Millennials were 28-29, and the youngest were still preschoolers. So perhaps I should stick with beer. After all, in the late nineties, I was drinking beer, vodka and Drambuie.
I'd try to answer your central question, having been a millennial in high school at about that time, but I'm like Axiem; I didn't try alcohol until 21.
Well, thanks for trying to help. [:D]
Last edited by Khemehekis on 27 Aug 2018 04:09, edited 2 times in total.
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Dormouse559 wrote: 20 Aug 2018 03:10 The article says millennials are drinking more wine than other generations, not that they drink more wine than beer. I'd also hesitate to apply this information years in the past to high schoolers. (The article says its statistics are for 2015.)

I'd try to answer your central question, having been a millennial in high school at about that time, but I'm like Axiem; I didn't try alcohol until 21.
Y'all are good kids. Personally I find the smell of alcohol to be atrocious. I've known a couple of people who've gotten ragingly drunk. Already had bad opinions of them; and for the most part I'll attribute my puritanism to them

[but from what I hear, they'll get smashed on whatever they can find. Apparently there's a vodka or sth called "evergreen" or similar, and it's been associated with some alcohol poisonings]
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Post by Khemehekis »

qwed117 wrote: 20 Aug 2018 04:19 Personally I find the smell of alcohol to be atrocious.
I'm anosmic, so all I can do with alcohol is taste it (and some of it tastes pretty bad).
[but from what I hear, they'll get smashed on whatever they can find. Apparently there's a vodka or sth called "evergreen" or similar, and it's been associated with some alcohol poisonings]
Everclear?
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Ive always preferred wine to everything else. For people who dont like the taste of alcohol, there are some sweet wines like Zinfandel that to me taste just like soda, even with ~13% ABV. I used to drink several bottles a night whenever I didnt have work the next day. Mead tastes just like honey, I cant taste the alcohol in that either. I'll drink vodka but it's a drink of convenience ... no calories, so im going to get hungry soon .... and not that tasty. The other drinks Ive tried,Ive disliked for reasons of taste only. that includes beer, flavored vodkas, tequila. even good beers are just not my thing.

yes, i think Everclear is what youre thinking of, its basically pure alcohol, I wouldnt think it would cause poisoning though. Drinking hand sanitizer coul cause poisoning because of the other chemicasl in it but alcohol itself will not become poisonous just by being a very high ABV.

other reasons i like wine:
1) price isnt that much higher than beer. the cheapest wine is 2X the price of the cheapest beer, and cheaper than most other beers.
2) its versatile ... can mix with icecream, soda, or other drinks to make something that's chock full of calories and nutrients but also rich in alcohol. this also applies to vodka, though Ive never tried it. i think the fruitiness of wine leads to better taste combinations in general than with vodka.
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Post by KaiTheHomoSapien »

I mean, I live in wine country and we have a vineyard on our property, so...yeah...if I didn't like wine, my family would probably disown me [xD] That said, I haven't had much, but I have liked what I've tried, though it has all been locally made. Wine is a common gift around here :)
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Khemehekis wrote: 20 Aug 2018 04:11Well, I was thinking of this line: "Obtaining alcohol for consumption is no exception, and the millennial beverage of choice is wine."
The article writer says that, but that just tells me they haven't read their own evidence; it's irrelevant to their assertion. And well, they're an undergrad writing in a section of a website with no editorial oversight. The little librarian on my shoulder says they don't qualify as a reliable source.

Khemenekis wrote: My musical is set right at that point in the 2007-2008 school year, when the oldest Millennials were 28-29, and the youngest were still preschoolers. So perhaps I should stick with beer. After all, in the late nineties, I was drinking beer, vodka and Drambuie.
Yeah, I doubt anyone will raise an eyebrow at beer.
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Post by alynnidalar »

I was a high schooler in 2007-2008, and while I wasn't the drinking type, people generally drank what they could get their hands on--when you're reliant on what other people buy for themselves (or for you), you don't have a lot of choice in the matter. As far as I was aware people mostly drank cheap beer and whatever stronger stuff their parents had around.
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Khemehekis wrote: 20 Aug 2018 04:11 My 1979-born peers ... We were called Generation Y... By the end of the decade, even the oldest American Millennials were too young to legally purchase at a bar.

...

in the 2007-2008 school year, when the oldest Millennials were 28-29, and the youngest were still preschoolers
Based on Wikipedia:
A minority of demographers and researchers start the generation in the mid-to-late 1970s, such as MetLife which uses birth dates ranging 1977–1994,[23] and Nielsen Media Research which uses the earliest dates from 1977 and the latest dates 1995 or 1996.[24][25][26]

The majority of researchers and demographers start the generation in the early 1980s, with some ending the generation in the mid-1990s. Australia's McCrindle Research[27] uses 1980–1994 as Generation Y birth years. A 2013 PricewaterhouseCoopers[28] report used 1980 to 1995. Gallup Inc.,[29][30][31] and MSW Research[32] use 1980–1996. Ernst and Young uses 1981–1996.[33]

A 2018 report from Pew Research Center defines Millennials as born from 1981 to 1996, choosing these dates for "key political, economic and social factors", including September 11th terrorist attacks. This range makes Millennials 5 to 20 years old at the time of the attacks so "old enough to comprehend the historical significance." Pew indicated they'd use 1981 to 1996 for future publications but would remain open to date recalibration.[34]

Some end the generation in the late 1990s or early 2000s. Goldman Sachs,[35] Resolution Foundation,[36][37] all use 1980–2000. SYZYGY, a digital service agency partially owned by WPP, uses 1981–1998,[38][39]. The Asia Business Unit of Corporate Directions, Inc describes Millennials as born between 1981-2000,[40] The United States Chamber of Commerce uses 1980-1999[41] and United States Census Bureau uses 1982–2000.[42] The Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary describes Millennials as those born roughly between the 1980s and 1990s.[43]

A 2013 Time magazine cover story used 1980 or 1981 as start dates.[44]

Demographers William Straus and Neil Howe who are widely credited with coining the term, define Millennials as born between 1982–2004.[2] However, Howe described the dividing line between millennials and the following Generation Z as "tentative", saying "you can’t be sure where history will someday draw a cohort dividing line until a generation fully comes of age". He noted that the millennials' range beginning in 1982 would point to the next generation's window starting between 2000 and 2006.[45]

In his 2008 book The Lucky Few: Between the Greatest Generation and the Baby Boom, author Elwood Carlson defined this cohort as born between 1983–2001, based on the upswing in births after 1983 and finishing with the "political and social challenges" that occurred after the September 11 terrorist acts.[13] In 2016, U.S Pirg described millennials as those born between 1983 and 2000.[46][47][48] On the American television program Survivor, for their 33rd season, subtitled Millennials vs. Gen X, the "Millennial tribe" consisted of individuals born between 1984 and 1997.[49]

Due to birth-year overlap between definitions of Generation X and Millennials, some individuals born in the late 1970s and early 1980s see themselves as being "between" the two generations.[50][51][52][53] Names given to those born in the Generation X and Millennial cusp years include Xennials, Generation Catalano, and the Oregon Trail Generation.[53][54][55][56][57]
Personally, the way I define Millennial is: 1) remembers 9/11, and 2) does not remember the Challenger explosion. That generally means around 82—96, depending on the individual. It's fuzzy at the edges, though.

The idea of a Millennial being in preschool (i.e. 3 or 4 years old) in 2008 is weird to me. I definitely consider them in Generation Z, whatever that ends up being called. And 1979 to me is at the tail end of Generation X.
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I was born in 1998 and do not remember 9/11 (although I am British so hm)
I have always been somewhere on the border between Millennial on Gen Z.
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Jackk wrote: 20 Aug 2018 20:47 I was born in 1998 and do not remember 9/11 (although I am British so hm)
I have always been somewhere on the border between Millennial on Gen Z.
I'm an American born in 1997 and I don't remember 9/11 either.

I don't care what generation I'm part of, because I personally don't think they're a valid way to group people.
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Personally, I think that, sociologically, it makes more sense to divide between 'Generation Y' or, say, 'X 2.0' or whatever and 'Millennials' proper.

To me, "Generation Y" (my lot) grew up alongside the internet. We fully remember Web 1.0, and even some pre-web things (Encarta! Civ II!), and while we're internet natives, we're not social media natives. Socially, we remember Before The Towers Fell and the Eden of the 1990s, but that era didn't belong to us. We tend to be politically and socially cynical and disengaged - we grew up at the high point of postmodern disillusionment, without even the passionate rebellion of the Xers (I remember the conversations we had about how even rebellion was pointless because it was just another form of conformity). We don't really have much identity.

Perhaps a cut-off would be 1993. Someone born in 1993 would have been 3 for Clinton's re-election, 4 for the Blair landslide, 7 for Bush-Gore and the Y2K bug, and 8 for 9/11 and Enron and the Dot-Com Crash - they don't really remember the era that came before, and these events probably had no significance for them if they were aware of it them at all. They were only 6 when they heard about Columbine. For fantasy fans, they were 3 when A Game of Thrones came out, and 8 for the first of the Peter Jackson films - we didn't have fantasy on film, but we did have TSR. In the UK, particularly important, they were only 4 when Channel 5 launched and 9 when Freeview came along: they're used to a TV landscape of dozens of channels, whereas we just had the four terrestrial channels. Similarly, online: they were 8 when Napster was shut down and iTunes was started (they don't remember a time before the iPod, and may not even remember the iPod - we remember miniDisc, damnit!), but 14 when Netflix started streaming video, 15 for Spotify, and so on. If we were the generation of pirates, they're the generation that expect not to have to pirate. And the reason I picked that year: when they turned 13, they were the first young generation to join the newly-expanded Facebook (Twitter launched the same year, and at the same time Google bought the fledgeling little Youtube). Whereas they were only 12 when AOL ended access to Usenet, and probably have no memory of it.

I honestly think that the massive impact of the 'new' web - social media, media streaming, smartphones, the app-ification of everything - makes for a pretty dramatic difference in how this generation - the Millennials - sees the world and acts in it, when compared to my own generation.


What would I set as an anterior bound? Well, anyone born before 1981 would have no longer been in school at the time of Columbine. Someone born in the UK before 1979 can probably remember Thatcher. Someone born in 1981 would have been 14 in 1995 - which means their formative computing experiences were with 3.1 (released 1992) or even DOS. Someone born in 1981 wouldn't have seen AOL access with a flat monthly fee (rather than our old pay-by-the hour, one-person-at-a-time experience) until they were 15. They'd have been 11 for Eternal September - my generation was too young to remember it even if we were technologically engaged. [and in our generation, many people still weren't - being a 'geek' or a 'nerd' was a term of abuse for the small percentage of kids who knew what Alta Vista was...]


So... I think my rough impression is that my generation were born approximately 1981-1993. Americans may want to round that to 1980-1992 and make it the Reagan/Bush years. We're followed by the Millennials. When do the Millennials end? Well, it's too early to say what will matter. But here's a first benchmark: if you were born in 2002 or later in America, you're the first generation to have become teenagers in a country where gay marriage was constitutionally guaranteed. [similarly, if you were born in 2001 in the UK, gay marriage was legal outside of northern ireland by the time you were a teenager]. I suspect this will turn out to be the sort of thing that shapes that generation's views of the world.
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