(TikTok screencap)
There’s something really cathartic about placing shit in a firepit and just watching it burn away.
" …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 "
White guy detected
It’s also the smell of smoke. The crackling. The heat. How the poking stick feels in your hand. Poke poke
Of course I know him. He’s me!
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.
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
no cap man fr fr, gotta recognize the w’s when you get em, appreciate you gassin’ me up!
low key, you gotta lay off that brainrot addiction a bit, replace it with just a dash, a little sprinkle of linguistic hyperfixation, as well as healthy downtime, contemplation, and then a lot of those jokes and memes? they just hit different.
(uh, uh, ok, imagine this comment also overlay bordered with subway surfers or something)
(up to you to determine if the meta irony of that is intentional or not)
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
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?
There are quite a few black comedians in the USA who explain why. Basically life as a black man in the US is hard enough and there is no need to introduce recreational “challenges” like campingto feel fulfilled.
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.
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!”
Brown guy here, I like fire too
You know it’s American when skin colour is mentioned for no reason
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 all laugh until the fire is in the oven of a hut with freezing temperatures outside and the fire guy is the one getting up in the middle of the night to keep the fire going. You then wake up to a cozy hut instead of spending the first two hours awake freezing in your sleeping bags.
Wait… I’m white!?
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 know a set of brothers who all have this ingrained. They have each said at one point or another “You gotta fuck the fire.”
Hope the intent has/will always be basic firepit maintenance.
In my experience, they’ve been Mexican or Puerto Rican. Though those are my two main travel destinations, so there might be some selection bias. Both for me and the meme
I too feel very seen right now.
I kind of get that way but I’ve never really realized it was obsessive behavior until this meme pointed it out.
It’s me, i’m that guy. I’m fun to camp with ladies ;)
This is a white thing? I never knew that.
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.
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!
Right, but it mentions a white guy specifically.
