this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2024
566 points (90.2% liked)
Fuck Cars
9700 readers
2011 users here now
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
Rules
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
Posting Guidelines
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
- [meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
- [article] for news articles
- [blog] for any blog-style content
- [video] for video resources
- [academic] for academic studies and sources
- [discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
- [meme] for memes
- [image] for any non-meme images
- [misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories
Recommended communities:
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I remember as a kid, I was mystified by this other girl on the block who could do this. I didn't understand why anyone would care. A car is a car?
Eventually I realized it's because she was super into external social status signs. She wasn't a gearhead, so she hadn't picked it up the way guys do bonding over technical stats of whatever, but she was hyper-sensitive to social status, so she picked it up along with anything else related to fashion. And cars can be considered fashion, right up there with makeup and having the right purse.
I don't see it as a status symbol, although I'm certain that is a huge part of it for a lot of people, but fashion part is right. Cars have design styles, motifs, and trends. I don't know the names for most of them, but I can normally place a car in a 3 year range on sight. Make and model are also often very obvious through those same features, even across a larger number of years, slowly transitioning from one "age' of car design to another. I'm not a car person, but I am, in weird ways, a design nerd.
Oh, with me it's shapes, I rely on general shapes slightly nontypically - humans included, I have fairy bad face memory & face recognition, but shapes are easy (and it's more nuanced that just a general shape of the humanoid, gaining or losing weight doesn't change it beyond recognition - like cars/boats/equipment/tools/etc, it's "important" info to understand the underlying build).