(TikTok screencap)
I don’t know why, I just have to keep poking that fucker with the dedicated poking stick, then wave the burning poking stick around for a bit.
Brown guy here, I like fire too
I went to an engineering school and I am here to tell you that pyromancy is practiced by every type of person.
The best pyromancy comes from the United States, we have such classics as The German Barbeque, Korean Barbeque, Vietnam Barbeque, and California.
You forgot the Midwest Bonfire with 1000 drunken teenagers and a fire big enough that the local fire chief comes to check on it.
Isn’t that just Sunday?
Is that a jab about all the forest fires CA keeps experiencing? If so, well done. I chuckled.
I’m from the Inland Empire here in SoCal I have to make jokes or the sirens call of the inferno starts to eat away at ones mind.
Yeah, whats the deal with “white guy”? Guys like fucking with fire. Black, white, brown, blue. If theres an alien species on the other side of the galaxy, you can bet they have something very much like guys, and the love fucking with fire.
You know it’s American when skin colour is mentioned for no reason
I wonder if there is a genetic component to keeping fire for recreation or comfort.
I think all societies have a cooking on fire aspect.
The use of fire seems to play a much more active role in societies in cold climates. It seems to play a less prominent role in the tropics with warmer nighttime temperatures.
Survivalists like to boast of their skills to start a fire from scratch with no modern tool. But that wasn’t the main skill in ancient times. Most societies found it easier to start a fire once and then keep the flame going through several mediums. It was a practical, mundane but vital activity that everyone participated in. The calories gains from eating cooked food was our cheat code for unlocking brain power.
This reminded me of something my dad told me when I was younger. It was mostly to justify saying that no, I did not need a TV in my room, but still kinda interesting:
In many cultures (definitely the ones my family grew out of), the fire served as a gathering spot. People would talk about stuff, share food and jokes, and relax together. It was a shared experience and source of comfort that helped strengthen interpersonal bonds.
His argument was that the family TV served a similar function (without the whole ‘also it’s the means for cooked food’ aspect, which shouldn’t be overlooked). It’s a point that made some sense to me at that stage of late 20th century mainstream society.
Hmm…the 21st century, defined as billions of little fires, and many of us cold. There’s a really pretentious poem here somewhere.
Yeah I miss the days when my entire family would gather by the TV at night to watch something, anything really, I could be laying on the sofa reading a book but still enjoy the company and finding something interesting while channel surfing was it’s own joy, now I can stream or download anything I want to watch on all my devices and I can’t find anything interesting that makes me feel the sense of peace I had back then as a kid
This is a white thing? I never knew that.
The OP’s observation is that there is at least one white guy that fucks with keeping the fire going. There can be as many others as you wish!
I’m black and I like fire, though aside from a fireplace visiting family once, I haven’t had much opportunities to tend an open flame. I did enjoy keeping it going that one time though.
I grew up in the woods and chopped wood and did all the back-country stuff, but it wasn’t until looking back way later in life that I realized that we lived in what was basically rural, racist, white America. The segregation that still exists is unfair in what it denies to children growing up. I feel like if were a black parent I might have serious reservations about taking my family out to most of rural America.
The legacy of homesteading being a “white settler” thing has left indelible marks on many places.
There’s at least one organization working to fix that lingering impact. Outdoorafro.org is all about linking Black Americans with the parks and wild places that have historically been off-limits, dangerous, or discouraged.
I would love to see more people of color embracing America’s wilds, if we had larger communities of color in the woods it wouldn’t feel so dangerous out there. Diversity leads to people not feeling like they own a thing and can make rules about who belongs there.
I would also love to see more progressives broadly reclaim the US flag and responsible gun ownership. I feel we lost the country because we let them plaster themselves with propaganda and made it feel “gross” to support our country. We allowed the seeding of far too much “America Bad” sentiment and it led to too many young people tuning out and not caring what happens to our home.
I didn’t know it was a racial trait.
Yeah, like why does race need to be involved here? Fire should be for everyone to enjoy.
It’s a joke.
I see that. But where lies the joke exactly? My interpretation is that this white dude barely knows what he’s doing, like constantly moving the wood. To me is more like set it up, and watch it burn. Then, from time to time, you add another log.
Mmm, but what if a log falls over? Or all of one side of a piece of wood burns? Or someone decides they wanna make s’mores and they need a good spot for it?
I mean, there’s no way of knowing with any certainty from this image alone whether or not the guy is tending the fire competently…
But it is actually not as simple as ‘just throw on another log’.
How long do you want the fire to burn?
How hot do you want the fire to burn?
Do you have an accelerant, or no?
Is your timber and kindling very dry or very wet?
Is your timber and kindling going to need to burn through bark or not?
How sappy is your timber and kindling?
How hot or cold or windy is it, is it expected to become?
All these things and more can and do affect the initial layout of the campfire, how to adjust it and maintain it to keep it going at the rate and intensity you want it to, especially if the desired goal state of the fire changes, and/or environmental conditions change or are expected to change significantly.
…
Anyway, the ‘joke’ could be more or less racially based.
I’d say yeah, you probably are more likely to find a random white guy that uh… knows all the stuff I just previously said, but thats because a random white guy (in the US, at least) is more likely to have come from a family that could afford camping trips, could send their kids to the scouts or something.
(This is basically the same root behind the ‘black people don’t know how to swim’ uh, ‘joke’.)
(Yep, turns out you’re more likely to learn how to swim if your parents could afford to / were not segregated out of living in a community with access to pools or beaches)
Again though, there’s no real way from the given context to determine… whether or not the image was made by someone aware of this, and is referencing that…
… or if they’re just making a very basic, pithy, uninformed, surface level observation…
or somewhere in between this.
…
There could also be an element of sexism to the ‘joke’, if you interperet ‘and I respect that’ as completely sarcastic, sort of going along with your interpretation.
‘Oh, clearly this dude doesn’t know what he’s doing, he’s just trying to look like he knows what he’s doing.’
…
So yeah, if your ‘joke’ is possibly racist, possibly sexist, unclear about whether or not it actually is, and generally illicits confusion when it is described or explained as a joke…
Then uh, I agree with you, its not a very good joke.
…
Also, to perhaps clarify younger / more modern slang:
‘really fucks with’, to maybe a millenial or older, would mean that you keep consistently interfering with or engaging with some person or process or activity.
But! To Gen Z / A, ‘really fucks with’ is closer to… ‘spends their time’ or ‘engages at all’ or even ‘is seriously dedicated to’.
Like if I asked a Gen A if they knew person A, they could respond, ‘No, I don’t really fuck with person A’.
And that would basically mean that they don’t know them that well, or at all.
Whereas if a millenial or older person said ‘I don’t really fuck with person A’… that would be more like a denial of bullying or harassing them.
The Gen Z/A usage of ‘fucks with’ is much more morally/intent neutral, wheras the Millenial/Older usage is more morally/intent negative.
Thanks a lot :) There’s always a lemmy user who really fucks with explaining a meme and I respect that <3
This is some damn fine analysis of a screencap of a TikTok.
Autism + Boredom + Lemmy =
Inordinant level of analysis on entirely random subjects
EDIT
Oh right, social norms!
Skipped my mind.
Thank you for the compliment =D
Outdoor recreation and camping was and still sort of is exclusionary to black folks especially, but there’s a lot of people trying to change that
I live in the UK so I don’t think this really applies here. If you are not going out and touching grass, its on you. Not the colour of your skin.
Yes I think there are some differences between racism in the UK and the US
I am curious now, how does race stop someone touching grass in the US?
Lookup “Sundown Towns”
Intersectionly.
The US has extremely shit PT, with black Americans often living in already under-serviced communities, and with less disposable income and social services to support them to travel off to touch some grass.
What does PT mean in this context?
It doesn’t, but it does result in comments like yours. I’m not interested in responding further to you.
White people’s ancestors had to survive brutal winters. It’s the reason they’re white.
Ehhhh, even places like the Sahara can get below freezing temps at night. Of course we also shouldn’t forget that people native to the Asian steppe and American high plains would also need to deal with freezing temps. I just think that it’s a human trait in general to need to mess with fires. (That probably stems from a vast amount of people on earth being able to trace their heritage back to the Mongols)
Or gendered. I do this in my friend group. I also grill, smoke, and bbq.
Yeah my sister and I are both the fire keeper type.
DONT HATE it’s all he’s got
Well, technically without him there would be no fire.
be honest, the Nike gel soles are doin most of the heavy liftin’
That’s what I’m sayin’! I’m mildly autistic and not very good socially. Even if I want to be there it can be difficult. Tending to the fire is a way I get to participate.
I kind of get that way but I’ve never really realized it was obsessive behavior until this meme pointed it out.
There’s something really cathartic about placing shit in a firepit and just watching it burn away.
It’s also the smell of smoke. The crackling. The heat. How the poking stick feels in your hand. Poke poke
White guy detected
" …some men aren’t looking for anything logical, like money. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the wood burn "
I’m the one obsessively scavenging for wood around the camp site to keep that wood pile healthy.
I got the largest kelly kettle because loads of friends said they would be interested in using it as a group. This was like 3 or so years ago and since I got it absolutely no one has been interested in actually going outside. So I recently bought the smallest one now as I am only ever using it on my own, may as well get something easier to carry.
Shame that I don’t know anyone else interested in it though, don’t even have to go camping, just a day/afternoon trip or even just sit on the beach, but even that doesn’t get any interest.
Evolved trait
This is the campfire equivalent of that one person who makes best friends with the family dog at every party. Some of us enjoy the group but our social skills are only on par with fires and dogs.
Might be easier to talk to her, if fuckin’ Debra over there’d get off her damn phone while camping, FFS. 🤷🏼♂️
Why is it always the guy who looks like that though? The two main friend groups I’ve been part of in the past decade had that one guy and they both looked very similar to the guy in the image.
They are Carriers of the Bloodline
Destined to link the flame
That’s 100% my brother. The weirdest part, it looks so much like him I had to text him and ask if the chick in the background is an old girlfriend, because I’m genuinely not sure that’s not my brother.
Really not trying to be rude.
I don’t have TikTok and don’t want one. I want to be a part of online stuff such as this story you’re telling. But.
TikTok is fucking cancer on a phone/device that doesn’t have an account and doesn’t (therefore) have the app installed.
Popups of all forms. Just like sketchy websites. It’s just a red flag. That’s all.
These experiences really reinforce my decision to NOT have a TikTok.
100% agree. Fucking hate tiktok. Even beyond the data they collect and shit, how skeezy they are about watching the videos makes them so shitty.
That said, open it in a browser and then set to desktop site it you’re on mobile. It allows it to play without the popups. Mobile browser tiktok feels like a late 90s porn site with the popups
Thx for the info!
It is insane how much that dude looks like my brother. He even has the exact same shirt and shoes. Like I genuinely thought some random picture of him had been put online. When I texted him about it he had to text his best friend to find out if the chick in the picture was maybe one of the friends old girlfriends or something he’d forgotten about. Even my brother thought it was a picture of him. Lol
I feel like it’s a do-or-die caveman instinct or something.
I was hanging out with a group of people in my friend’s backyard. We were supposed to have a bonfire, but the wood was wet and wasn’t burning. We used all sorts of fuel, fire starters, etc. I saw what looked like corner of a log turn into ember, so wouldn’t give up. Never got a flame when we were there, of course.
I felt very proud though when my friend sent me door camera footage of the firepit turning into a massive blaze in the middle of night that woke her up.
Wet wood is the worst. If you have some dry and some wet you can sort of power through it. A cabin we were at with a wood burning fireplace had a lot of wet wood. It kept popping and scaring us so we kept making that joke from The Office “the fire is shooting at us!”
