#i have three friends who have and that is specifically because i propagandized them into one or both

[nihiltism]

I fully believe that sometimes you need to have a mindset of nothing but "MY CITY NOW" when you make fan content. make crossover aus between two fandoms where you know nobody else in the world is interested in both. it's good for your health.

[blackautmedia]

🥤 ⇢ recommend an author or fanfic you love (Ganondorf please?) 🧃 ⇢ share some personal lore you never posted about before

🪐 ⇢ name three good things going on in your life right now

🍬 ⇢ post an unpopular opinion about a popular fandom character

🧩 ⇢ what will make you click away from a fanfiction immediately?

🥤 ⇢ recommend an author or fanfic you love (Ganondorf please?)

Imani Barbarin aka Crutches and Spice. I honestly started learning so much about communication and writing from her and some of my favorite activist writing.

For Non-fiction, I'm still fairly new to fanfic sites where before I had dabbled in them on and off. I'll come back to you when I'm ten miles deep and can't get out the quicksand.

But now I really want a fanfiction that's written as Ganon writing a self-indulgent fanfic about himself as a story within a story. Could you imagine?

Ganon will also spend time as a leader ensuring the Gerudo have documented events of their battles and disagreements with Hyrule to so doesn't entirely control a propagandized event of what happened…and in his spare time he's also writing fics about himself.

I started an AO3 account because I wanted to get back into writing stories again, but I haven't found the time to finish one I had in mind.

🧃 ⇢ share some personal lore you never posted about before

Muhammad Ali is my dad…or so I like to joke.

My mother's career allowed her to meet a few celebrities when she was working. She has a photo of her and Muhammad Ali together and they look like a couple, so I have it on my phone and like to see if I can get away with convincing people that he's my dad before spilling the beans.

I shared it with a friend of mine who genuinely thought he was my dad even after I told him it was a joke, so…yay? I'm pretty tall if you see me in person (6'3-4 or about 191 cm tall) and about the same height as Ali, so it helps sell the illusion.

Part of the reason I also try to stay quiet about my personal life with most people is because some of my family members are publicly known people for different reasons and I don't want to draw any kind of social attention when I just want to be some TV/gaming nerd on in peace. I'm already very much a black sheep within my family, so it's fine if I stay in the unknown territory.

🪐 ⇢ name three good things going on in your life right now

I have mobility! Life is fragile. Very fragile. It's easy to forget that, but I'm thankful I can still move about easily. I'm lucky that I can feel at relative peace in my body. I haven't felt that way for most of my life, so it's nice.

It's a combo of getting older and unmasking, but it's nice not being bothered by things that used to be a pain, to not care and move on. Whether it's work or a bothersome comment, it's much more tolerable. The ability to stop caring is a virtue.

I got a copy of Sonic Frontiers! I haven't had time to play any new games lately, but I'm looking forward to it. Little things.

🍬 ⇢ post an unpopular opinion about a popular fandom character

This one is Ace Attorney related!

I don't love Miles Edgeworth. I don't think he's a poorly written character and there's a lot to enjoy, but I mean more I feel he doesn't bring as much energy and fun to the cast except when he has the right and very specific selection of characters to bounce off of.

I also wasn't really so wild about his friendship with Gumshoe because so much of it is just him insulting Gumshoe, constantly docking his pay or threatening his salary when he himself is obscenely wealthy and Gumshoe is dirt poor in a way that I never found that entertaining. As far as anime men go, I don't even think he's that fine.

At least he had a lot of fun bouncing off of Ace Attorney's equivilent of Ganondorf in Damon Gant. (I JUST LEARNED THERE'S A DAMON GANON MOD LOOK AT HOW GLORIOUS IT IS)

🧩 ⇢ what will make you click away from a fanfiction immediately?

Pretty much any of the stuff to fall under the proship umbrella (ex. incest, age gaps, etc)

There's also a specific writing pattern I notice in a lot of fanfics where there's a lot of transition between dialogue and the writer can sometimes feel strained in trying to not have their writing be repetitive, but they change the words around rather than the sentence structure. It ends up sounding both repetitive and awkward with the random word choices that don't address the root issue.

It looks something like this:

"The air seems to have chilled. I haven't felt this excited in a while. This will be a glorious battle." - Ganon said.

"Do you really think so?"

"I do." - The king of evil replied.

The demon king sat down and began tending to his weapons carefully for battle.

"This time, I will be ready" - The demon king chuckled.

It becomes really apparent when there are animal characters and they sub in things like "The fox said" the "vulpine said" and it just gets to me. I get why it happens! But for some reason it bothers me specific to fanfiction.

[askcherrypie]

“My Little Pony Gets Political” - saywhatnow?

I have not bothered to see the new MLP movie for the same reason I haven’t seen ANY of the MLP movies throughout the existence of the franchise - they always manage to dumb it down (even the ones made for Gen3). MLP’s problem, prior to Gen4 (Friendship is Magic), was that Hasbro almost invariably wrote insipid material aimed at an audience they didn’t think very highly of - pre-teen girls. Gen4 broke that mold by treating its target demographic as thinking (albeit young) human beings, which meant NOT smacking them over the head with blunt, trite, saccharine nonsense. Sometimes, Gen1 and Gen 2 managed to do the same thing even though they hadn’t been blessed with the initial direction of someone like Lauren Faust.

Unfortunately, Gen5 appears to be reversing Lauren’s course.

The new movie (WELCOME TO SPOILERSVILLE, POPULATION: YOU) was apparently written by people who did not watch Gen4 even though Gen5 is supposedly a sequel. In Gen4, the “three tribes” had legendarily distrusted and feared one another in ages past, a state of affairs which almost got them all killed by an emotionally-predatory species called Windigoes. The resolution to this problem, the unification of all three tribes into a single nation, became celebrated as the pony version of Christmas, complete with gifts and pageants.

So, at some point in the apparently distant future relative to G4, absolutely all of that is forgotten and thrown out the window with not a single reason given. The movie never explains it, although it does take pains to make clear that the heroines of G4 have legendary status - which only one pony seems to know about. The closest we get to an explanation is that magic just stopped working one day for no apparent reason, and BECAUSE of that so did friendship. Which, again, is something that happened in G4 when all the tribes had their magic taken from them AND THEY FIXED IT BY REFUSING TO STOP BEING FRIENDS.

So you have this incredibly pointless situation which appears to have no rhyme or reason and exists solely to give the one pony who remembers G4 even happened a goal: reunite the tribes in friendship.

Um. We did that already. Multiple times.

And then we have a bunch of special morons out there who have decided that anytime there is the appearance of a “military dictatorship” - which itself apparently is a matter of somepony wearing a military uniform (hello, Wonderbolts, hello Commander Spitfire, guess G4 Pegasi are Nazis now) and other ponies standing in ranks as though part of a military organization (hello, entire Royal Guard, guess the Earth Ponies and Unicorns in the Guard are also Nazis now and Celestia was running a military dictatorship the whole time).

idk if the generalissimo is “supposed to be” Trump or not, but if he is that’s even more retarded on at least five levels, starting with the fact that Trump didn’t use military troops to lock down the Capitol out of fear he would be ousted from power by American citizens: Biden is. You know, that whole “insurrection” that the FBI ended up saying never actually existed.

But it’s not just retarded because the (apparent) target is misplaced: it would be just as idiotic of a move to make the character a parody of Biden. Contemporary politics never age well, often because more information later comes to light, making such on-the-nose attempts at portrayal fall flat with future viewers. In the current year, it’s not considered socially acceptable to air or even watch cartoons which propagandized the Axis powers of World War 2. Including actual Nazis, on the argument that laughing at cartoon Hitler getting pied in the face somehow denigrates the Holocaust.

Even more retarded is the argument going around that ANY of this is “fascist imagery”. Those sorts of takes are from people whose only understanding of “fascism” is a style of uniform and a general tendency towards militarism. 

It would be more accurate and appropriate to say these are indicators of totalitarianism. Instead, we are told that the following are full-throated displays of Fascism (directly from one of the schmucks trying to make this argument):

* a leader fearmongering

* dressing in military attire

* use of propaganda posters

* the military marching and assembling

* big posters of the villain being shown during the leader’s speech

Problem: all of these criteria also directly apply to Communist governments throughout history. A Soviet-era May Day Parade is hardly what one would call Fascist, but any number of those Parades matched up with every single item on this list.

Nor is this the first time there was an argument in the fandom about “Nazis” and “Commies”. Fans trying to push their real-world politics on other fans insisted this video was all about either/or - depending on which bunch of totalitarians they wanted to be the “real” villains “the show was speaking against”.

In G4, they were smart enough NOT to try and wedge IRL politics into the show. All of this is specific to circumstances revolving around an attempt at a social revolution in Equestria, where all ponies would lose their “destinies” (as determined by their “cutie marks”), and thus be free and equal to pursue whatever future they “really” wanted.

But Starlight Glimmer never promoted National Socialist ideology, nor Communist ideology. She just wanted to take over Equestria using psychological abuse and mind control.

The new writers don’t appear to be that creative or intelligent. Instead, they’re just trying to map current-day social commentary onto Gen5, at least according to outlets like the New York Times . These were the same sorts of imbeciles who previously claimed MLP fandom “has a Nazi problem” (The Atlantic) or was a haven for school shooters (Rolling Stone).

Don’t let the bastards win. Screw ALL the totalitarians, and when the people insulting you screech that Stalin did nothing wrong, mark them in the same pot as the folks who say Hitler was on the ball. If that ends up including the writers for Generation 5, well, there’s always Generation 6..

[eloarei]

Okay, I’m going to babble about Greedfall under a cut. I just have to.  tl;dr, you should have been able to romance Petrus and Constantin, no I am not taking critique.  Under the cut: 1500 words of basic Greedfall explanation, and then me lamenting ships that didn’t happen; includes spoilers (noted). 

So. Greedfall. Basically, I had never heard of this game until it was free on Playstation Plus a few months ago, and I was like “yeah okay sure, I’m not doing anything else”, so I played it. I had no idea what to expect. I don’t recall watching the trailer. From the icon, I expected maybe pirates? As it turned out, no pirates ...exactly? But kinda. They’re mostly just colonists with pistols and big hats. Lots of big hats. There are a faction of characters that live on ships, but they’re not pirates. I don’t think they’d appreciate being referred to as such.  Anyway, it’s a rather Dragon Age-like game. I don’t mind saying so, since everyone else has. It has its similarities and differences, but it definitely feels familiar in that way. It’s definitely not a copy, just... inspired, I guess.  You play as Lord or Lady de Sardet, (that’s a silent t, btw), who’s tasked with representing her people on the ‘new continent’ of Tir Fradi-- mostly to the other countries that settled there in the past few years, but also to the natives, who’ve lived there for ever and ever and actually respect the land, unlike you dumb colonizers.  The factions are real pains in the ass, but in a way that’s a litttttle bit charming. Theleme is full of propagandizing Catholics who aren’t above a little witch hunt now and again. The Bridge Alliance are all science-obsessed atheists who think progress is more important than basic morals. The natives are VERY in touch with nature, and have cool Russian accents, skull-like face paint, and sometimes branches growing out of their heads. (The natives have the most diverse opinions, so they’re the least annoying. In fact, they’re rather likeable, except that sometimes they hate you, and don’t bother with pretending they don’t for diplomacy’s sake.)  There’s also the Nauts (the pirates), the Coin Guard (mercenaries, but they kind of work for your country?), and the Congregation of Merchants, aka your country, which are basically neutral ground capitalists that everyone sort of doesn’t hate. (Theleme and Bridge Alliance despise each other, roughly a little more than they hate the natives.)  You’ve got one companion from every faction:  Siora from the natives, Kurt from the Coin Guard, Vasco from the Nauts, Petrus from Theleme, and Aphra from Bridge Alliance. They’re all representatives of their people, but also (as you might guess) non-extremists. Because otherwise you’d want to murder them.  Siora isn’t desperate to kick out the foreigners, she just wants her people to be safe and respected. Kurt and Vasco are basically just following you because it’s Kurt’s job and Vasco’s boss told him to. Petrus is a conniving old man, but he doesn’t shove God down your throat too much and seems to respect the natives, sort of. And Aphra has enough morals to agree that killing for science ain’t cool, and maybe the natives aren’t just savages. All in all, they’re all pretty reasonable.  Compared to Dragon Age, none of your companions (or other NPCs) have a ton of personality, but somehow they still manage to have a good bit, and I ended up really liking them.  SO LETS TALK ABOUT SHIPPING You can romance Kurt if you’re playing a woman, Aphra if you’re playing a man, and Vasco and Siora in either case. But, oh my god?, getting the romance to happen is practically impossible. Save first. I romanced both Kurt and Siora (in different saves; can’t do ‘em both in one), using a guide, but by the time I had thought about romancing, I’d already said one wrong thing to Vasco and screwed my chances hahaha. There’s basically 3 specific conversations you have to have with them, and each time you have to pick the right thing to say, out of three choices. If you offend them at all, there’s no going back. Wow. They’re not very intuitive, either.  ANYWAY. The romances aren’t all that interesting, but they add a bit to their stories, so it’s cool. I think my ship preferences with these four characters are Kurt, Siora, Vasco, and Aphra, in that order.  But you KNOW WHAT? I wanna romance Petrus. Yes, the old man. The bishop. And yeah, I know why you can’t.  (It’s spoiler time!)  You can’t romance him basically for the exact reason you should be able to romance him: he was in love with your mom. Your birth mom, who was a native, which you never knew about. He pined for her after she was captured and taken from her land, and when she was in pain and wanted to die, he didn’t help, and now he’s like “woe is me, I’m flooded with guilt”. Which is partly why he’s following you/ de Sardet around.  So you can’t romance him because he sees you as his kid... kinda?... ish?... I guess? Sure. Ok. I mean, that’s cute. I like it. He makes a pretty bad dad, to be honest, because he’s more like that one slightly morally corrupt uncle who lets you drink hard alcohol when you’re a teenager but only under his supervision. But he cares, and that’s the important thing. I don’t dislike dad-Petrus at all.  But you should still be able to romance him because of the good old classic “you’re so much like your mother”. Problematic? MAYBE. =D But a real missed opportunity. Also he’s my favorite companion. He’s a real manipulator. Gets excited about blackmailing politicians. Sounds like he’s smoked a pack a day. I just like the guy a lot. (And you know how much fanart he has? Like none. Le sigh.)  (Also very few ship fics with him; I’m not surprised, but of course I must remedy this. I’m 4k in already and it’s a lot of de Sardet thinking, and her friends poking at her.)  BUT ALSO, to move on from Petrus.  There’s a character I neglected to mention at all, because he’s not a playable companion (except for a tiny while in the beginning, iirc). He’s perhaps my real favorite character... or maybe tied with Petrus.  Yes, it’s Constantin, de Sardet’s “dear cousin”. Oh my lord, Constantin. What a cutie??? He’s basically the prince. He’s been appointed as the governor of their city on the new island, and he’s precious. Genuinely a puppy.  And I think you should be able to romance him. (It’s less crazy than you might think!)  MORE SPOILERS TIME  So, as it turns out (well, I already sort of spoiled it up there), because de Sardet is actually a native, s/he and Constantin are not actually cousins. They love each other immensely. The game makes no mistake about this. They’re absolutely besties. I think Constantin calls you his lucky star. He’s always so flattering, and seeing de Sardet just makes his day. And since it turns out you’re not really cousins, you should be able to romance him.  And do you know why?  I mean, because they love each other, clearly. But also, that ending. Good lord that ending. I mean, if you didn’t think that they loved each other that much, the ending basically says, “HEY ACTUALLY they totally love each other more than anything”, which makes it terribly depressing either way, because you can either... well, stay with him forever, to the detriment of literally everyone else, or, you know, not stay with him, in order to kind of save everyone. It’s already very heart-wrenching, but letting them literally be in love? GAWD. Talk about pulling heartstrings. It would have made the ending like... an actual choice.  (BIG SPOILER BELOW although you probably already guessed.)  Yeah so you have to kill Constantin to save the island. OR, you two can become the new gods, and everyone fears you and it’s terrible. Lordy. Just terrible either way, because there’s no way you played the game and didn’t end up loving Constantin somewhere along the way, even when the red flags started going up that he’d gone power mad. (Because even when he’s power mad, he still obviously loves de Sardet SO MUCH,  OH my god...)  So. As I said. You should be able to romance Petrus because, well, I want to. Need me that problematic ship, c’mon! And you should be able to romance Constantin because the whole plot is literally written that way??? It’s like the romance that is set in stone, you know? And it literally drives the plot.  The whole “Constantin gets native powers and decides he wants to be a god” thing was sort of predictable (as soon as it started happening, because shit, I didn’t have a clue what was going to happen before!), but overall I thought the game and story were pretty good. I recommend playing it if you’re got 40 hours free and it’s really on sale or something. I give it an 8.2 out of 10. (Higher if it didn’t start to feel kind of grindy at points. Lower if I’d had to pay for it. Much higher if they let you romance your pseudo-dad or pseudo-cousin, hahaha.) 

[thomasreedtn]

Timothy Glenn ~ A Game of Attachments

Another good one from Timothy Glenn: some friendly reminders that you are so much more than your sect, your tax return, or your party line. In a world of all possibilities, what would you love to create? How would you love to feel? What would you love to experience? What small step can you take towards those things right here, right now?

A Game of Attachments

by Timothy Glenn

In a few channeling sessions spread over the last quarter century, the Proterrians have asked audiences a probing question about their attachments; specifically religious, economic and political attachments.

Religious Attachments

This pertains to our philosophies. How do we perceive and interpret life, the universe and everything? Who are we, where did we come from, and where are we going? In general: what’s the point?

Economic Attachments

We all have our ideas regarding how to attain, cultivate and distribute resources. And in such processes, do we need to control and keep track of what comes and goes? If so, who controls and keeps track, and how do they go about it?

Political Attachments

How do we structure our societies? If certain people are to assume various positions of responsibility and authority, how do they attain those positions? This involves our traditions, laws and other forms of keeping order.

The Question

Reflecting on those three categories, which type of attachments do you feel would run the deepest?

Back in the 90’s, almost every audience member answered “religious” with little or no hesitation. After the turn of the millennium, more people started giving it a moment of thought and then selected “political”. It wasn’t until just a few years ago that the clear majority of an audience determined that the deepest would definitely be “political” attachments.

The Answer

Throughout the years, the Proterrian perspective has always been that our political attachments run the deepest.

Religious attachments revolve around abstract gods and goddesses you never see in your entire lifetime. You are told a lot of tall tales about someone who allegedly lives in another realm of existence. They claim to have created you, and thus claim dominion over you. In Churchianity, you are told that the Sky God will supposedly reward or punish you when your life here is finished. This remains extremely vague, so that it utterly fails to qualify as evidence. Of the three categories, religious attachments tend to be the shallowest.

Economic attachments run significantly deeper, because these involve the food on your table. This involves matters much more down to Earth because food, clothing and shelter register as a lot more basic and real to the average human. Games of the “haves and have nots” find their roots here. Physical hunger and other forms of deprivation make a more profound impression on your subconscious than phantasmagorical characters in myths and legends.

Your political attachments actually run the deepest, because here we have the guys who come along with weapons, and wield force against you for any real or imagined infraction of someone else’s rules. You may have had lifetimes of facing lethal force, having your possessions confiscated, or being locked up in cages. That’s about as real as it gets for just about anyone, and most people still harbor fears of experiencing such violations in this lifetime. As a result, locked away deep down in their unconscious knee-jerk reactionary inclinations, they will find their underlying political attachments.

An Age of Universal Deceit

We have been swimming in a ubiquitous ocean of lies for ages, and never more so than in modern times. With the advent of mass media, the average human has been propagandized, mesmerized and programmed to believe the false narratives of professional pathological liars.

Here is a useful rule of thumb: the more “mainstream” or “official” the source, the more suspect it is. But until someone sees through the illusion, they will probably continue believing in the illusion.

For those of us who have awakened to the nature of the game, it can be breathtakingly boggling to hear people back up their political narratives and attitudes by saying, “it was on the news” or “it was on television” or “it was in the newspaper”. And they state it with such conviction, it’s as though they are saying “God came down out of the sky, and lightning shot forth from his index finger and indelibly etched it into a five mile square slab of polished marble – now and forever more. Amen.”

Yep. It was on television, alright.

When Lightning Strikes

For the article Uranus in Taurus: The Preview, Laura Bruno included this caution in her helpful introduction:

“I know so many good-hearted, intelligent people about to have their world shaken like an electric popcorn maker struck by lightning. If you find yourself knee-jerk reacting to anything, it’s wise to step back and humbly reassess. Maybe your original assessment will hold, but it’s wise to examine any and all ‘of course’ ideas. Look for those areas you consider ‘so obvious’ that you’re certain anyone who disagrees with you is a neanderthal or idiot.”

The more emotionally charged your negative reaction is – the more loaded it is with denunciation, anger and fear – the greater the likelihood that your perspectives are skewed because you have been disinformed and are believing in something erroneous – even though it seems “so obvious” and “it was on the news”.

As the lightning bolt of Uranus dances in the earthy sign of Taurus for the next several years, the world will come to appear vastly different than it had. Illusions will be shattered, especially regarding “the system”.

Systemized Apparitions

The Matrix has conditioned people to fear the system. This fear helps the system herd the masses around. For almost everyone on Earth, our deepest mental and emotional body attachments have been rooted in this very fear.

The so-called “dark side” has only one power, and that is the power of deception. Its inner manifestation allows us to deceive ourselves into believing we are whatever we have been programmed to believe we are. For most of us, that illusion says that we are what Proterrian calls “nothing more than pathetic little snotlings from 3D Planet Earth”. For others, it allows them to perceive themselves as vampires or other kinds of predators.

Its outer manifestation deceives us into accepting the bogus belief that the “dark side” has power over us. But in the act of believing it, we give the “dark side” that power. This wool has been systematically pulled over humanity’s eyes for millennia.

But now we have a massive window of opportunity to see through the customary misapprehensions. We can look at the system and give it clever descriptors like “The Matrix” or “a movie” or “a dog and pony show” or “a video game” or “the deeper dream” or “a hologram” or “an acid trip” or “a computer simulation”.

We can step firmly and fully into our Creatorship. And this transformation can be filled with love and fun – whatever we choose.

As our old friend the Buddha said, “Change does not cause pain. Resistance to change causes pain.”

Timothy Glenn http://www.soulpurposereadings.com/

from Thomas Reed https://laurabruno.wordpress.com/2018/08/27/timothy-glenn-a-game-of-attachments/

[xu-miao-blog]

Final Discourse Community Paper

Explore the hip-hop dance community

Introduction

Street dancing becomes a popular activity among young people, no matter as an entertaining exercise or as a professional career. Among all genres of street dances: such as popping, locking, breaking, and jazz, hip-hop dance is the greatest in popularity due to its easy access and relatively low-skilled content. Compared to modern dance or classical ballet, hip-hop dance is more improvisational, and the choreography follows the rhythms and lyrics of the music (Sato, and et al, 2015).

From 1970s, under the influence of disco music, a type of dance called breaking dance came to light, which evolved to later hip-hop dance and derived rap music as well. In the late 1980s, hip-hop dance became the mainstream of dances for youth, and this period is often referred to the “golden age of hip hop” (Rajakumar, 2012). Since then, hip-hop dance discourse community has formed. Dancers gathered together to find like-minded friends, learn core techniques, and improve dancing skills. According to Schmidt and Vande Kopple, a discourse community is a group of people who share the same goals and interests and communicate through certain ways (Schmidt and Vande Kopple, 1992). Hip-hop dance community is such a discourse community, where dancers love to dance to express their feelings and release stress, and this is their common goal. They usually communicate through social medias, such as Facebook or iMessage. Some large hip hop crews (dance groups) communicate through weekly or monthly practices and workshops. There are also performances, shows, and battles, in which they meet and interact with each other.

Methods

In this research paper, I will use both primary and secondary research to analyze the discourse community of hip-hop dancers. I conduct a survey, a questionnaire specifically, aiming at college hip-hop dancers. The planned number of survey takers is 20, which is enough for a summary of dancers’ opinions towards the hip-hop dance community. Since I am a hip-hop dancer myself, I can access to other dancers. Therefore, the results of this survey are from hip-hop dancers at my age. Their answers will be valuable in evaluating how the discourse community is like from the perspectives of actual hip-hop dancers. Secondary research on hip-hop dance is included as well. My interest in this particular discourse community leads further attention to how the community works and communicates, hip-hop dancers’ intentions of staying in the community, and how the community helps them. I researched on other scholars’ articles and journals on the topic of hip-hop dance. Based on these articles and journals, I gain a deeper understanding of how hip-hop dance affects the dancers, and how dancers have changed because of doing hip-hop dance. The positive effects it brings become part of the reason hip-hoppers remain the community members.

Discussion

Based on my knowledge, most hip-hop dance communities aim to build their reputation. UC Davis has more than 5 hip-hop dance groups, and each one of them does its best to propagandize on various social medias whenever there is a show or a recruitment for new members. For example, the hip hop crew I am in, the AX Crew at UC Davis, advertises on its activities such as workshops and performances to raise public interests, so that more people know us and come to join the group. We regularly hold workshops for non-dancers and beginners, so they get to learn pieces of choreography and improve hard-core skills. The workshops are great opportunities for non-members to know the community leaders and members, and thus decide whether they want to join. In addition, when there is any performance that we participate, our crew is known by more people. For those who love dancing, they will consider joining the crew.

The genres of communications are not limited to social medias and meetings. Outside communities know the hip-hop dance community through advertising flyers mostly. Every fall quarter when there are freshmen coming to campus, the hip-hoop dance community will manage to advertise on its crews like what many other discourse communities do. The most common way is to print flyers which include main information about the crew, such as the name, activities, and major achievement. By distributing the flyers to college students, the hip-hop dance community is known by non-dancers. Another kind of written communication between hip-hop dancers and outside communities is the dance critiques from professional hip-hop dancers or critics. For example, every year at UC Davis, there is a dance competition called Davis Dance Revolution (DDR), at which all dance crews at UC Davis can participate. For the impartiality of the competition, three to five well-known professional dance critics are invited to be the judges of the competition. After they decide on the winners of the DDR, they will give formal critiques about their opinions and comments towards different teams. The critiques are send to each team, and the dancers can find out their strength and weakness from the critiques. The community members value the critiques by professionals because they can use the comments and advise to improve and perfect their techniques.

Unlike other types of dances, hip-hop dance is easier to access and learn. In large cities like San Francisco, there are many known street dance studios where people can learn hip-hop dance from zero basis. However, people who are interested in hip-hop dance with no dancing experience tend to self-teach themselves the core movements instead of attending classes in professional dance studios. This is because hip-hop dance is a newly-developed genre of dance with a brief history, some of its movements are originated from breaking and popping dance, and some other movements are based on our commonly-used motions (Bonny, Lindberg, Pacampara, 2017). Therefore, for many hip-hop beginners, communication becomes an important way to learn and improve dancing skills. In the survey I conducted, my peer dancers suggested that they usually communicate through social medias like Facebook and Snapchat. They also text each other in the group chat to inform future practice or performances.

When it comes to how to enter a hip-hop dance community, the results from my survey give the answer that it is not easy to be a dance community member. Beginners only communicate with beginners, and only qualified dancers can join large dance crews. There are usually auditions for dancers to become crew members. I remember when I was auditioning for one of the largest dance group on campus, SoNE1, the process was hard and intense: only ten out of sixty are qualified to become group members. So are other large dance crews. People can not enter the community freely without applying for it. The leaders in a dance crew decide who are qualified to stay in the community.

The responses of the survey show that a large percent of the dancers gain benefits from joining the dance community. Most of them join the dance group in order to improve dance skills while socializing with others, and some of the survey takers also chose the options of building confidence and stress relief. It is academically approved that dancing enables people to have better socio cognitive ability and stronger tolerance as “dancers with greater hip hop experience had significantly better performance when mentally rotating difficult embodied images and were marginally better at identifying positive versus negative emotion states displayed by faces” (Bonny, Justin W., and et al, 2017). Due to these benefits and positive effects hip hop dancing brings, dancers keep on dancing and stay in the community.

Conclusion

Hip-hop dancers join and stay in the dance community because of their shared interest in dancing and both physical and mental changes dancing gives them. Besides the benefits that hip-hop dancing brings, dancers in a hip-hop community get to interact and share experience and techniques. The genres of communication include online communications such as information exchange through social medias and face-to-face meetings like practice and workshops, and written work like flyers for non-members and professional critiques. Dancers learn and improve their skills and give performances together to popularize their groups. There is no doubt that hip-hop dance community has a strict standard on recruiting members. If one wants to join this discourse community, he or she better is a qualified hip-hop dancer or has dancing experience to pass the audition. In order to stay as a community member, one has to view passion in dancing and improvement in skills as a shared goal with other members.

    Works Cited

Bonny, Justin W., et al. “Hip Hop Dance Experience Linked to Sociocognitive Ability.” PLOS ONE, Feb. 2017. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0169947.

Rajakumar, Mohanalakshmi. Hip Hop Dance. ABC-CLIO, 2012.

Sato, Nahoko, et al. “Kinematic Analysis of Basic Rhythmic Movements of Hip-hop Dance: Motion Characteristics Common to Expert Dancers.” Journal of Applied Biomechanics, vol 31, no. 1, 2015, pp 1-7, doi: 10.1123/JAB.2014-0027.

Schmidt, Gary D., and Vande Kopple, William J. Communities of Discourse: The Rhetoric of Disciplines. Prentice Hall, 1992.

Survey Questions

1.      How long have you been dancing hip-hop dance?

2.      How do you know, contact, and communicate with your group dancers?

·       Social medias

·       Practice or workshops (check if it is: weekly or monthly or twice a week or others)

·       Performances and shows

·       Others ___

3.      How did you enter your dance community?

·       Audition

·       No audition required

·       Membership fee

·       Others ___

4.      Was it difficult to join the dance community? Yes/No

5.      Dancing brings benefits to you. True/False

6.      Check if the following reasons are why you stay in the dance community (you can choose more than one)

·       Burning calories

·       Building body shape

·       Building confidence

·       Improving dancing skills

·       Socializing

·       Stress relief

·       Others ___