jamtlandsarkiv

[jamtlandsarkiv]

Late summer nights

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Drawing other characters is usually a challenge to me, but it's always relaxing to draw Björn 💙💛🇸🇪 (Probably because he's my country)

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It's my 8 year anniversary on Tumblr 🥳

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apparently, I joined this tumblr place at 9/6/16, 2:52:11 AM.

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Happy (very late) birthday to Mathias!

Fun Danish Fact: The Danish flag is a very common decoration for birthday celebrations in Denmark. In the 19th century, the Danish flag's reputation in Denmark changed from an exclusive royal flag to the people's flag. Danes today use their flag in all kinds of celebrations and events, which include baking it into cakes and using it as confetti.

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Happy (very late) birthday to Mathias!

Fun Danish Fact: The Danish flag is a very common decoration for birthday celebrations in Denmark. In the 19th century, the Danish flag's reputation in Denmark changed from an exclusive royal flag to the people's flag. Danes today use their flag in all kinds of celebrations and events, which include baking it into cakes and using it as confetti.

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I'm glad to see the fandom losing interest in the Olympics 😆

In my country Sweden, the Olympics live broadcast can only be viewed on a paid channel. It's not available on public service channels except for a short daily recap. The Olympics Corporation made broadcasting companies bid for the exclusive rights to broadcast the games in each country, and Warner Bros put up a bid that was too high for our public service channel SVT to compete with. I can't watch the Olympics unless I pay for Warner Bros-owned channels or access other countries' public service broadcasts with a VPN. Which I won't, because I think this kind of corporate greed isn't acceptable for an event that's supposed to be about connecting the world through sports.

If I draw any Olympics art, it's going to be about this issue and nothing else. The organizers want to be greedy like this, reduced enthusiasm for the games is what they deserve.

It’s the Olympics now, where is all the Hetalia fan art of the characters wearing their countries sports uniforms?

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Fanart and doujinshi on Pixiv. Athletic physique Mathias and bodybuilder physique Björn with no shirt and no pants on 😋

They both looked cute in the comics and after Season 5, but Seasons 1-4 didn't do any character any favors.

Do you remember the moment you fell for your favourite Hetalia character? The episode? The strip? What did it for you?

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Hiking trails - seventh day of @summertalia-event

Out in the Norwegian wilderness there are hiking trails upkept by the Norwegian Tourist Association (DNT), all marked with red Ts.

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New song about Trøndelag just dropped 😩🙏☕

Local electrical company decided to make a music video honouring the region ✨

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Speaking from just the Nordic countries' perspective, it would be pretty hard to pull off correctly because traditional clothes have different implications in the modern day. In all Nordic countries, traditional clothes represent a specific town or region of the country, so they would imply that the character's background is from that region. There are also modern designs that are regionless, such as that bright blue Sverigedräkten, but they are not truly traditional clothes. Using them could imply that the character is a cheapskate, as modern designs don't have a requirement to use traditional fabrics and sewing techniques, and are much cheaper to produce. They could also imply that the character has no regional background in the country or doesn't regard their background as important. In the case of Sverigedräkten, it was designed with the political purpose of symbolizing the modern land area of Sweden unified under the Swedish Crown.

To make it more annoying, the usage of traditional clothes is also different in the modern day. Danes and Finns never use traditional Danish or Finnish clothing in the modern day except in niche historical reenactment hobbies, while traditional Norwegian and Icelandic clothing is still used in the modern day during Independence Day celebrations and life milestones such as confirmation. Swedish traditional clothes are also a niche interest, as Sverigedräkten is seen as an acceptable (and affordable) substitute. It wouldn't make a lot of sense to put Mathias or Timo in traditional clothes when the rest of the nation hardly uses them.

That's why I just put them in modern clothes that the average person would wear...

have i ever seen hetalia? no, i have not, do i know for a fact that it would be better if the countries wore their traditional clothing? yes

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This is wonderful! I am even less of a historian than you, not even a student with a humanities background (I was on the technical track all the way), so I'm not aware of the philosophical terminology. Here is my uneducated elaboration on what the Tumblr comment character limit didn't allow me to fully express.

I'm thinking in the context of Swedish and Nordic cultures here.

It’s hard to say if the Hetalia creatures would be more sick today or in the past.

I was writing about this in the supernatural sense of homesickness for the immortal's own culture and people, where you said that modern technology would have allowed them to live anywhere in the world while still remaining connected to their culture. I was thinking, no, cultures are still very different in different geographical regions, and because modern technology is accelerating the homogenization of cultures, more immortals should be endangered than ever. What I hesitated on is whether we would be seeing an unprecedented extinction event for immortals in the 21st century, or if most would continue to survive. Cultural transmission and homogenization has also happened historically, and it's not clear when a culture stops being "its own thing" and is fully assimilated into another (which would kill its immortal).

Regarding digital privacy, which is one of my other favorite yapping subjects, it wasn't really related to the point I was trying to make about technology. I was really thinking about the "network effect" where the value in a lot of systems today is in the number of people they can reach. Tumblr for example would be completely useless if I was the only user on it, no matter how polished its features are, because I wouldn't be able to connect with anyone. The problem is that because systems need to expand to a global scale to be valuable in the modern day, local and minority language (and I mean languages with <100 million speakers here) spaces die out and are replaced by ones where everyone is subjected to The Globalized Anglosphere™. That would be contributing to the sickness in immortals as the digital spaces (and physical, social, academic, political, economic ones too) that are tailored to their own culture are overtaken, and the values of their people shift towards a "global norm".

In Irene’s Headcanon Universe™ the Hetalia Immortals Vampires get their life force from people’s belief in them. Hetalia’s fictional universe is inherently magical. In my interpretation, the magic originates from the core idea that thoughts and feelings have supernatural influence over the physical world. Basically, the Hetalia creatures spawn from large-scale manifestation, and their supernatural origin is where they get their immortality and other abilities.

HOLY SHIT.

YOU HAVE THE SAME CONCEPT OF THE ORIGINS OF MAGIC AS ME. I added a bit of nuance where the only biologically human immortals who are able to engage with the physical world gain their life from human cultures, so there aren't "political ideology personifications" and other abstract concepts. My idea is that only these immortals have both biological bodies and magic, as cultures, while being abstract concepts, are able to manipulate the perception of reality at a biological level. Some examples are how Russian speakers are able to differentiate between shades of blue better than English speakers as the Russian language has more words for shades of blue, while Japanese speakers lose the ability to differentiate between the sound of L and R at 9 months old because their language doesn't require it. It's not that their eyes and ears are structurally different from ours, but their culture teaches them to prioritize information differently that it literally rewires their brains. You could argue "but perception doesn't mean the physics of light and sound has changed", but I'll just hit back with the "is it real if there's nothing to perceive it".

Meanwhile, other abstractions do not affect biology directly, so in my universe other magical creatures live in a magical dimension of the world and cannot interact with the physical world the way the personifications can. I like the idea that the purely magical creatures are based on folklore, so different parts of the world have different species of magical creatures according to the locals' traditions. I joke that Coca Cola Santa Claus is an invasive species in the magical dimension in the 21st century.

The personifications are not vampires to me, though. Vampire would imply that they're draining their people's life force by existing. No, your culture is not killing you 😆

Not to bring out the “emic” vs. “etic” stuff, but the duality of the observable cultural practices and the inner feelings of belonging (quoting your comment) in group identities is such an interesting part of being human.

Thanks for teaching me about these terms! My personifications draw from cultures, so I was always coming back to the same question "Where is the line drawn between belonging to a culture and not?" Is it from inner feelings of belonging alone? However, that would mean that Björn would represent Swedish-Americans who insist they are Swedish. There's clearly another factor here, which is the opinions of others from that culture about whether someone is allowed to identify with it or not. At the same time, it can't just be about upholding traditions of the culture, because traditions are always changing. One could argue that when Norse pagan traditions and artefacts were forbidden and destroyed, ancestral Swedish culture was already lost. Perhaps even earlier, before documented history, when other traditions went extinct. What about speaking the language? People can easily learn languages for practical purposes only without feeling that they belong to the culture. So we've looped back to identifying, but identifying is not enough. You need to get approval from the majority of others who identify with the culture. To resolve disagreements, those whose ancestors were the earliest inhabitants in the geographic area the culture was established in have the authority to decide the cultural boundaries. Okay. That's quite vague.

And these standards are in themselves cultural values, as other parts of the world draw the lines differently... You can't escape culture even when you're trying to deconstruct it...

Circling back to Hetalia, I’d really like to read more takes on how cultural shifts, such as the changes in languages, religion, or things like Westernization (which Himaruya did tackle for the case of Japan) influence how the Hetalia creatures understand themselves.

Putting the confusion about what defines culture aside, I write that personifications only have the working memory of a human lifespan, which forces them to grow and change along with their people instead of wallowing in memories of the past. They have personal opinions and beliefs as individuals, so they can have a positive or negative reaction to change, but eventually, if the change becomes normalized in society, they'll find themselves unconsciously embracing it. Just like how things in our childhood seem so normal because we grew up with them, even though they would have felt radically different to the elderly. Their memories of the past are manipulated by their human brains to create an artificial perception of life back then, before the memories are completely forgotten.

I imagine that Björn, because of the liberalization driven by "America hype" of the 1960s in Sweden, would have reacted suspiciously to Westernization at first, then embraced it in the 80s-90s when it was socially normalized, before hopping on the "America Bad" bus of the mid-2010s because that is what the Swedish cultural landscape is like. The 1960s also brought significant language reforms with respect to formality and politeness, which Björn would have become totally accustomed to in the 2020s. Meanwhile, I can see him complaining about the laziness of modern Swedish speakers that caused the Swedish Academy to formalize grammatical simplifications, and the increased amounts of Anglicisms in daily speech. Who knows if 2070s Björn will be talking like a brainrotted TikTok kid with what is today's terrible Anglified grammar?!

I thought of how people have always used fiction, in our struggle understand an inherently incomprehensible world. Perhaps there is nobility in our attempt, futile as it is, who knows?

Everything is meaningless, only we get to create and define the meaning in our life, blah blah blah... and I find it very meaningful to write thousand word text wall about a fictional magical universe in my brain based on history, anthropology and philosophy 😤

I know this is late but I had this drafted in my head and God knows I will post this (should I, though?)

Continuing the discussion with @jamtlandsarkiv in the comments of this post by Nordickies. Sorry for hijacking the original post!

On principle, especially as a humanities/soc sci student, I think cultural transmission is an inherent part of human existence. Personally, I think it's a pretty nice thing in general, even if there are certain Americanisms that get on my nerves. No matter how numerous our numbers, humanity can always find ways to feel connected, because we are social animals after all — something along those lines.

This is not to say that I don't think there are valid reasons to be apprehensive of the role technology plays in all of this. For one, the power of technology also means that more power can be centralized than before, with more efficiency. Cultural transmission tends to flow unevenly from people with more prestige to those with less, and the resulting homogenization isn't something I like seeing. On the other hand, it's true that many communities have maintained their identities while existing in permanent states of diglossia, and there are many cases where technology helped in revitalizing endangered or dead languages, just for an example.

What I'm more concerned about, as a person, is how corporations and political entities have concentrated this power and exploited it to actively suppress minority cultures. The monopoly of large corporations on social media enables such an extensive surveillance on personal life that the "private life" almost seems to disappear. This is not even counting the information that people voluntarily post on the internet, not knowing the reach it could have. I guess I caught a case of internet agoraphobia, but it seems horrifying to live under the scrutiny of so many people. Are humans really supposed to live like this? Most mainstream Anglophone social media are also based in the US, which isn't a state with a good track record of digital privacy; even if it is, is it really a good idea that a single state can have such power over so many people outside of its technical jurisdiction?

I have more gripes with Chinese internet, but I'm visiting family in a few days. Won't be talking about it today🙃

It's hard to say if the Hetalia creatures would be more sick today or in the past. We sure live in some fucking interesting times right now, but at least we have vaccines (no matter how many Americans don't believe in them), germ theory, and antibiotics. Our medical personnel are required to wash hands frequently and all. Society would always have issues. There is a great post from Tumblr user qqueenofhades, a trained historian, on why it's unfeasible to definitively conclude if people in the past lived better or worse using a modern framework of thinking — it's about medieval history, but the points apply. The Hetalia creatures have probably always been sick in some ways, just in different ways across time.

In Irene's Headcanon Universe™ the Hetalia Immortals Vampires get their life force from people's belief in them. Hetalia's fictional universe is inherently magical. In my interpretation, the magic originates from the core idea that thoughts and feelings have supernatural influence over the physical world. Basically, the Hetalia creatures spawn from large-scale manifestation, and their supernatural origin is where they get their immortality and other abilities.

Not to bring out the "emic" vs. "etic" stuff, but the duality of the observable cultural practices and the inner feelings of belonging (quoting your comment) in group identities is such an interesting part of being human. Circling back to Hetalia, I'd really like to read more takes on how cultural shifts, such as the changes in languages, religion, or things like Westernization (which Himaruya did tackle for the case of Japan) influence how the Hetalia creatures understand themselves.

I thought a lot about this when I was watching 《霸王别姬》 Farewell My Concubine and the changing ways Chinese people have perceived our own culture and place in the world over the past 100 years, using 王耀 (and the film characters) as a tool for my thought experiment. Then, I thought of how people have always used fiction, in our struggle understand an inherently incomprehensible world. Perhaps there is nobility in our attempt, futile as it is, who knows?

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STOLT NORRLÄNNING BJÖRN som AVSKYR SÖRLÄNNINGAR I SYNNERHET FJOLLTRÄSKBOR med hela sitt Västerbottenshjärta men tvingas bor i Stockholm ändå eftersom hans äkta hälft Mathias som tillbringade hela sitt liv i Köpenhamn inte klarar av att bo så långt norrut.

Björn härmar omedvetet befolkningens tungomål under hans utdragna vistelse och blir rasande när han reser hem och blir tillfrågad om han är besökare från Stan 💔

Det gör att han anstränger sig för att tala med västerbottensdialekt i sitt dagliga liv då det värsta förölämpning han kan få är att bli kallad STOCKHOLMARE...

(There is a little bit of nuance in hating Stockholm, Stockholmers and the Stockholm accent: it is common to hate the first two but it would be difficult to live in Sweden if you're agitated by the last, because with modern media, Swedish dialects have become very standardized and the Stockholm accent or "rikssvenska" is used everywhere in news broadcasts, public events and in educational materials. Because of its frequent representation in media combined with stigma of other dialects, a lot of young people in regions that are not Stockholm are also learning and speaking with the Stockholm accent.)

This might just be a me thing because I watch too much vinesauce joel, but I think Swe doesn't really like the Stockholm accent. I like to think that Swe is more Northern with his accent and dialect, so hearing the Stockholm accent is very grating to him.

Very true, anon. No one likes the Stockholm accent

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Responding to this very kind anon who requested that I delete their ask after reading just to clarify something - I'm not planning to leave the fandom or stop drawing entirely, I'm only moving to a new account and transferring my original username there. This account was created when I was 15 in 2016, when I had much poorer internet security practices, which caused this account to build up a history of "spambot" behaviors (such as logging in with free VPNs and getting its original login credentials compromised). When Tumblr ramped up its anti-spam measures, I didn't know and continued to use "suspicious" tools, which got my side blogs shadowbanned. This history makes this blog's content very difficult to promote as it's potential spam and doesn't get recommended to new users. I'll be starting afresh on an account with a clean history and secure credentials, but before setting that up, I'm also currently working on completing my backlog of requests in this blog's ask box, so that the new blog can start with an empty ask box too.

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MINE PSIONISKE DANSKE KRIGERE

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via @throw-your-boat

@svenskjavel: jag efter ett mentalt sammanbrott

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It's extremely hypocritical when I tell people "Don't make art a source of stress in your life! Art should be fun and bring you joy!" because art has never been anything but a source of stress for me since I started to take it seriously (that means I don't count the pen-drawn stick man comics I made for myself and my friends as a kid). I always want my art to achieve two things: look like it was made by my goal artists and get many like on social media. The problem is that my goal artists are professionals with 10+ years art experience and my blog is obviously having issues with engagement thanks to whatever spam filtering is going on in Tumblr's backend. I get mad as hell for not hitting an impossible goal and it affects my actual life negatively.

While the logical solution is "don't make art", I'm like a gambler at the casino about it. 1-2 weeks after completing a piece and feeling bad about how it doesn't look exactly like I pictured it in my head, I lose the bad feelings and want to try again. It's like maybe this time I'll hit the art jackpot and it will come out perfect, or at least 95% of that. Of course it never does, even if I think something looks good the moment it's completed, I see it again the next morning and it looks terrible. This is also why I draw so slowly. I spend too much time on correcting little details and need my 1-2 week cycle of feeling bad and getting motivated. It's easier to get motivated when I talk to people, but that's where the engagement problem comes in.

I contacted Tumblr Support about the visibility of this blog and they claimed everything is working as usual, but I suspect that means "there is a problem with the blog (outside of its content), but we can't go into detail about it without revealing information about our spam detection system that bad actors can take advantage of". It should have been obvious that I somehow never got bot followers or hate anons while everyone else was complaining about them. It's nice to have a spam and hater shield like that, but it's too quiet and it's seriously annoying when I always have to be the one reaching out to others because nobody can find me. Thank you to all my old followers on this blog, I appreciate you all. I'll make a new blog and see if the engagement problem is resolved, if not bye Tumblr! To everyone who I gave the useless cliché advice to, just know that there's nothing wrong with not being able to follow it because I can't follow it either.