Category Archives: general

Red Woven Bracelet during Chinese New Year

Main Text:

“When it’s your year of the Chinese Zodiac, you have to wear something red for the whole year and not take it off”. Informant wore a bracelet, brother wore a bracelet, dad wore something around the waist. 

Context:

“I think it’s for good luck? Usually it’s something woven like string. I’ll shower with it on and everything. We put it on at Chinese New Year and cut it off at the following Chinese New Year. I only remember this being a thing for immediate family plus my grandma and grandpa. Maybe other families have different traditions. We also have to go to the temple during their animal year for prayers.” Red is a lucky color in Chinese culture. 

Thoughts:

As an outsider, it is difficult to add anything to the context already described by the informant. This is a New Year tradition and lines up with other Chinese New Year traditions that value bringing about good luck for the coming year or keeping bad luck away.

“The White Hat” A Rocket League item

Context: 

Rocket league is an online competitive game – quickly described as “car soccer”

Text: 

An item called “the white hat” is the rarest item in the game (at least one of the rarest). It is only given to people who find game breaking exploits in the game. The information has never seen one in the game – there are probably 18 in existence and agreed that the status of this item is “Kinda like a cryptid – enough people have said that it really exists for it to be true, and this is believable even though I haven’t seen one”. 

Thoughts: 

Items in this game are cosmetic and do not serve any mechanical purpose. However, this particular item strikes fear in the heart of any opponent who encounters it in competitive play. It takes a lot of creativity and time to find things in a polished, multiplayer game as there has to be substantial faith in the system for pro play to be supported. If the community thinks that the game is too buggy and broken or that it is unfairly balanced and full of exploits, the esport scene rarely develops. Hence, when these exploits are found, they are immediately removed or fixed. A player who can find these exploits is incredibly rare and the hat as a physical symbol in the game functions as a status symbol – recognized by the entire community.

The Athena Flick

Context: 

Rocket league is an online competitive game – quickly described as “car soccer”

Main text: 

Content creator named Athena. “She plays rocket league a lot, and is like fine? But people give her shit for being bad at it. Mechanics in rocket league are named, and the community named a flick after Athena. When you rotate the car to tap the ball it’s called a flick, and when the ball is flicked, then bounces off the crossbar, it’s called an Athena Flick. You can read into the misogynistic connotations as much as you want as she is one of the few women in the Rocket League content creation space. Again, she’s not like, bad at the game? Sure she plays a lot and isn’t a pro-esport player, but she’ll trash the average player right”
Thoughts:
Named mechanics in video games are often the ultimate status symbols. These mechanics are not named by the developers and are named by the community, so for a name to emerge, a substantial majority of the community must actively start using ang continue to use the name. Male streamers in the space are not “given nearly as much shit” as Athena in particular. In the broader streamer context it should be noted that viewers often “meme on” women in the streaming space by just throwing hate at them. Sometimes it can be funny and tasteful, but often, especially for women who have young communities (not age wise – in terms of how long the community has been around) will receive a ton of hate for no reason outside of the fact that they are women. Some fans try to turn this around by making it humours, but the misogyny is not to be ignored. In the case of the Athena flick, the informant seemed to sheepishly find it funny that this flick was named at all (as mechanically it is specifically a flick that fails), but seemed conflicted because of some of the connotations behind it and an awareness of how horrible viewers can be to streamers.

The murder and blue eyes

1. AG:Okay, So this is like a ghost story. In A small town in Michigan it’s called Marcellus Michigan. My family has had a house there for like several decades, And so, basically when my grandfather was living at our cabin on a lake in Michigan. It was winter, and the lake froze over, and some of the people who lived on the lake would build ice fishing huts on the lake when it froze over. During the winter, and one of the man who did was found shot in the head, and he murdered his wife and shoved her in the ice fishing hole and her body was never recovered.  So my grandfather was sitting at the local bar, and one of his friends came in and said, John, you need to see this. And so he takes him to the carpet store in this tiny town where the back of the carpet store was also the morgue, because the carpet store owner was also the mortuary.

 And This man was out on the table, and my grandfather was like, yeah, like what is this?

 It’s just a dead body and the other man grabs the match box from his pocket, and my grandfather grabs it, opens up the match box, and 2 blue eyes are staring back at him because the man loved his wife’s eyes more than anything else, and before he shoved her in the ice fishing hole ripped them from his her skull.

ME: Oh, my God! 

AG:So the lesson is that if you go on the lake in the middle of the night, and you have blue eyes

you’re endangered of being pulled under by the woman missing her blue eyes because she wants to replace them.

ME: Oh, my gosh, Okay, Yeah, that’s a good one and Okay so, Why does it remain significant to you like where you always told it from your childhood? 

AG:Yeah, I was told this from my childhood. like, several times. Throughout my life. My dad, whose dad was the one involved in the story, would always like to tell it at night. When we were at our cabin, in Michigan, like sitting outside in front of the campfire, like right against the lake, and My brother and I both have like bluish green eyes, so he would always joke with us when we were younger that like Oh, like don’t go out on the lake in the middle of the night, because, like she’ll try to get you or something. And then it became a thing where, like my brother and I, we would have friends up there like we would tell them the story, and that was kind of fun.

ME: So do other people in your town know it?

AG: So it was pretty widely told, especially like right after, like the murder suicide happened.

Yeah like in the seventies. No, the sixties. And I don’t really know how widely said it is any more, because like a lot of people from that generation no longer like living. I know my 2 next door neighbors in Michigan know the story. Yeah. and like their families, know it. And anyone like that they have told. 

2. The informant verbally performed this piece over zoom. They specified its origins in Michigan specifically a small town there, the informant explained it to be a story within the family specifically shared by their grandfather and father growing up. The folk tale serves as a ghost story with both entertainment factor and also a lesson to children to be careful on the frozen lake because of this legend. 

3.The informant was told this Michigan specific folk ghost story/legend that incites fear of the frozen lake because of the haunting of the woman character. They talked about how it was passed on throughout the town for awhile but now since a lot of that generation has passed away it’s not as commonly shared although other family friends know and share it as well as their own family. 

4. My reflection: This is a regional specific Legend that acts to entertain and also warn/ teach of the dangers of the ice through the use of ghostly characters with bad intentions. I found this piece intriguing because of how specific it is to the small town in Michigan and to the tellers family. I would have never heard it if I had not known the teller personally as it seems confined to their town but still just as impactful to their folk group especially children in the town. I drew connections of this story to my own stories that were used to keep me away from specific lakes in my hometown in order to avoid a creature that lived at the bottom of it. Across folk groups stories, specifically legends and ghost stories, are used to teach children to be careful and weary of certain places that may be dangerous by causing fear through storytelling.

“How many tries does it take a monkey with a wooden leg to kick the seeds out of a watermelon”

Date: April 1, 2022 

Source and Relationship: Grandfather

Type: Riddle, Family

Folklore/ Text: “How many tries does it take for a monkey with a wooden leg to kick the seeds out of a watermelon?” 

Explanation/Context: My grandfather had seven children in the 60s, my mother being one of them. Needless to say, lots of nonsense was spilled around the house to merely fill the space with something more than chaos. One of my grandfather’s favorite sayings was this one, and depending on the day, the children would interpret it as rhetorical or not. It was then passed on through generations – my mom first taught it to me as a child and I have found myself teaching it to my younger cousins. The delivery of this riddle is best served quickly, so as to distract and confound the listener in a humorous way.