Food

Food!

   Needless to say food can be considered somewhat important in the general life goal knows as 'living.' It is one of the primary elements and inn the case of most living creatures, a process called eating is required to get the food into the body to be burned and used for energy and nutrition. This process could be seen as exceptionally boring if all food was the same, but fortunately for us food is incredibly varied!

   There are, from memory, 4 main overarching food-types from various cultures. To the bet of my knowledge these are; Westernized (Burger and Fries, etc.), East-Asian (Sushi, Various Chinese Dishes,) Middle-Eastern (Curries, Bhajis) and European (Paella, Pasta Dishes). Each of these are also home to other sub-categories of food. These cultures are not self-exclusive either, for example, most curries sold here in Ireland, like Tikka Masala, are actually not from the middle-east, they took the basis of curries from that region and adjusted them to the taste of our audience. In fact, most of the people in that region are often vegetarian and so most of the meat dishes are made up.

   Another such type of food that is rather popular now is Mexican-Style. Mexican food is often to be considered spiced mince put into a sauce and then put into various types of shells. A circle folded half way over and let to hard is a taco shell. Chicken cooked in sauce, then wrapped in cheese and tortilla bread then further cooked is an enchilada. If you don't cook it afterwards and leave the cheese and tortilla cold, It can be a Fajita or Burrito depending on certain things. I reckon the appeal here is that they are very customizable, which seems to be very popular at the moment, Everything is interchangeable depending on your likes and dislikes. If you don't like a certain sauce, you can get a different one. You can choose your toppings as you go as well. It could also be seen as a broad coverage of the food pyramid as it contains meat, sauce, bread and vegetables, depending on your tastes.

   Another popular type of food in the modern world comes from the opposite sit of the world map. Westernized Chinese dishes have been a staple take-out/restaurant for some time now. If I think to my home town, In <5 seconds I can think of 5 different Chinese restaurants. 8 if I am given a few more seconds. This food generally offers sweet dishes, like the ever so popular Sweet and Sour Chicken. Crispy Chilli Beef and Chicken Kung Po are two common spicy dishes as well, the latter is sweet also. Unlike Mexican food, this style is often a lot more structured in it's meals. They generally give you Prawn Crackers at the start; into whatever starter you chose, like wantons for example; then they give you whatever main you chose. Water Chestnut and Bamboo is a very common ingredient for this style of food, because it adds texture to the dish, being very crunchy, while not changing the flavour of the dish all too much. Carrots also feature, but in a different manner. When these dishes are served it is not uncommon to see a carrot cut into a flower and served on the side.
       Sushi is another popular Asain style of food. This is primarily from Japan and comes in many varieties, my personal favourite is Prawn Nigiri. I have often heard that people refer to chicken sushi as 'not sushi' but this is only due to a misunderstanding. Often people believe that the fish is what makes the meal sushi. This is not true, Fish on it's own is referred to as sashimi, the thing known as sushi is just the rice. Unfortunately, sushi is somewhat rarer to come across here and when you do find it, it is often times very expensive.


TLDR; Food is awesome and tastes great. It is required for living and comes in many varieties.

Thanks for taking the time to read this!



The Internet!

                                                                           Internet!


Oh, The Internet. Many believe that this is man-kind's greatest creation; All the worlds discoveries, any information you could ever need available at the push of a button. This blog would not exist without it. I am not here to explain the bounteous information available on the internet. I am here to explain how I believe that the Internet is it's own culture, divided into many more diverse sub-cultures.




I believe that the Internet is house to the most unique culture on the planet. In this culture, anyone with any point of view can find at least somebody who feels the same way, over time this snowballs into it's own sub-division and spreads on. This is a great thing! Sometimes this group of likeminded people can create a certain degree of aggression, as people are used to hearing people agree with them, but in most instances it's good.




The internet has anything a culture could need. It has a common place, while this generally involves a country, It has the Internet. The internet is like a giant continent. Each country being a different part of the internet. All these different parts of the internet have their own dialects an pseudo-languages, used almost exclusively by them. The largest divide in internet culture is probably the divide between gaming and general social media. While both are available in most areas, a website generally focuses towards one or the other. For example; While there are 'games' on Facebook, It is by no means a gaming website. While Steam, on the other hand, Yes there are groups and some social networking, it is clear to see that Valve were focusing on gaming and they threw the social part in to co-ordinate gaming sessions among friends.




There are websites that do both. I can think of two websites in particular that do this very well. Reddit and YouTube work well with both sets of users with expertise. I use both sites regularly. YouTube is famous for it's 24-million-user subscription based Let's Players. It is almost as well known for it's vloggers, who take regular videos of their day-to-day lives. Reddit is a giant forum, which helps further my point and was part of my inspiration for this post. Reddit allows for the building of 'Sub-Reddits.' These Sub-Reddits are miniature forums dedicated to a single things. The URL is the general www.reddit.com, then followed by /r/[insert_topic_name_here].


My primary reason for believe the Internet is like it's own nation is that it has it's own language. The Internet isn't some stagnant thing. It is a living thriving community. There are words used almost exclusively on the Internet that would have no meaning if used outside of the internet context. Certain words have only been born or re-born out of necessity from internet communities. Words like gank would never have come to be if not as a global linking words for some communities. Certain anagrams have evolved into words from Reddit and YouTube. Things like FTFY, AFAIK and IIRC only exist because of simplification. Like many cultures we have our own forms of art, We gave new life to the meme. It's our mark on the world's culture.  It's with those pictures and transformations of cultural icons that we have impacted culture the world over.


Not only does the Internet affect the world by throwing it's own culture and language into the mix, It also compliments others. Thanks to where I often visit over the internet, I an frequented by speakers of other languages. I rarely go a day without seeing several Russian speakers. As such, when I realised that they didn't speak very much English, I took it upon myself to learn some Russian that would be most useful in the situations I am in. As such I can now hold a weak conversation, read Cyrillic and trade with relative ease. I have also picked up and actually used other European languages and I've even used Irish to communicate with another human being!


The internet by not be a place on earth. It may not be it's own state officially, but it does everything normal countries do and more. Thanks so much for sticking through to the end of this one!

Music!

Music!

Music is present in every culture that I am aware of, be it used as a war cry or peace talks; to remove a bad mood or to create one. It is one of the oldest methods of cultural sharing. Song writing in the modern world has created it's own sub-culture within the base one, where Vocalists looks for writers, writers for instrumentalists and vice versa. Music of all kinds engages me regardless of whether or not I like it as it shows me an insight into how certain people think.

Music fits into this blog very well as it is the perfect combination of language and culture. It can come in two MAIN varieties, Vocal and Instrumental; both of which are good in their own rights. Personally I prefer music with words as I get a better understanding of what the artist is trying to say with their piece if they are actually saying it, but instrumental music can also be very enjoyable to me.

You can tell a lot about a song from parts of the song, for example; A song containing a didgeridoo is either Australian or is trying to capture the 'feel' of an Australian song. Moreover an Ocarina would indicate more of and east-Asian theme for a song. Another, more obvious, indicator of where a song is from is the language in which the song was written.

Music is also heavily influenced by it's era, obviously. Certain instruments and styles were the height of popularity. For example, Slow Classical was very popular pre-1900s, from what I know. Such pieces would include Violins or trumpets famously. Every decade or so has had it's defining style of music ever since. If you are told to say everything you know about the late 70s early 80s, people will often think of 'Disco' music. Early 2000s were dominated mainly by the pop/ pop-esque scene, which makes sense by definition, then in the later 2000s rap took hold, which I personally find very hard to call music, it I think it's better than the current generation. The Year is 2014, as of writing this, and whenever you turn the radio on, you hear the same four bars on a simple three line progression on loop for 5 minutes, but that's a rant for another day....

Thanks for reading!

Introduction

                                                                Introduction


I have decided to write this blog on the geography of the goings on in my head. Whatever it is I am thinking about I will try to write a blog post on my thoughts on said thing and then go into the geography of it. I have written a sample on language, I will likely expand upon this further.
 


I have decided to write my post as it has always been of interest to me. All my life I have wondered how language has come into being. Often times have I gotten lost in a conversation, thinking hard on a word that was said, my thoughts drift on to questions about how the word may have originated, how a specific noise made by someone sometime has come to mean 'Rock.' I wonder how that one person saying a thing spread to another person and so forth until it became common practice to say certain words with meaning in everywhere within our territory. In some cases, when dialect is involved, I wonder if either different words were used prior to the commonplace words and it stuck instead of the 'official' one or if it were just a case of cultural influence, by an old language spoken by the people. Ireland, my home country, has a lot of different, 'exclusive' words, this is mainly due to the fact that Ireland has another language which , while not used as often as it used to, has heavily influenced the people. For example, we used craic instead of fun.





I will endeavour to explore as many things as I can while I am writing this blog! Thanks for reading!