I love this lol. I had a coworker from Thunder Bay and he did not speak highly of that place.
Nevermind looks like I mixed them up with Monster Truck! I think Red Fang is safe. I also thought those guys were from Vancouver and Wikipedia tells me no so I have clue what’s real anymore.
https://youtu.be/agvibm7Wqy4?si=489mwmM2GHlH0FBH
My job has a vendor in Thunder Bay and I’m always like hell yeah. Thunder Bay 
the mid-size Ontario city dirtbag hemisphere of my brain just activated
I’m torn between responding to this by trashing Thunder Bay more, and asking what their given name and first letter of their family name is to see if I know him lol.
Thunder Bay is that awkward size where it’s too small to be a big city but too big to be a small town. Not everyone knows everyone else but you tend to know someone who knows someone, if you know what I mean.
Red Fang are from Portland, which is still the PNW! I feel it’s a safe bet that Red Fang probably bring the house down in Vancouver, love it there, and are beloved there.
Do I know them?
I’m so sorry 
u don’t need to indulge this!! You live in civilization now don’t you??
Perhaps I’ll clarify–if, in downtown Kingston on a random night, you went up to a random cool girl specifically, and not a random white boy, and asked them for a dart, they’d have a much higher chance of knowing you’re asking them for a cigarette. But that could very well just be because cool girls are by default much smarter and obviously much more intuitively empathetic than white boys.
I wonder if a lot of that kind of terminology was spread all over rural Ontario through, like, the province-wide amateur youth hockey scene. And where did a disproportionately high number of those dirtbag hockey boy superpredator white boys come from? That’s right, fuckin’ Thunder Bay
my local bodega resells natives under their own brand guess what they call them
I don’t live there anymore but I’m from Oshawa which is not a city I would place in the same league as Thunder Bay but is still at least another city that everyone in the province has osmosed an opinion about
I sat out in the bush on top of a hill for four days and four nights trying to think of what they would call them, and unfortunately or perhaps fortunately nothing was revealed to me. But I’m gonna say that it’s not gonna be good
THE SHWA!! I can just hear the voice of that weird asshole I went to school with from Cobourg say “the dirty shwa.” But that surely says more about Cobourg while saying nothing about Oshawa.
Oshawa seems like the kind of place that produces either the more humble kind of Toronto dwelling expats, who feel a freeing and self-edifying sort of resentment towards their hometown, or the kind of guy who would move to Sudbury, and tell people they were from Toronto, because they did the first half of their undergrad at Ryerson (which of course isn’t called Ryerson anymore, but they’d probably still call it that), before transferring to Laurentian, and you’d have to really interrogate them to figure out they weren’t, like, saying they were from Toronto because they were born in Scarborough. And if you knew they were from Oshawa, and you were in earshot when they were introducing themselves, they still wouldn’t say they were from Oshawa. They’d say they were from “the GTA,” and just hope Sudbury people wouldn’t be interested in what part of the GTA they were from.
trigger phrase
you kinda nailed it tho
I’ve only ever lived in Ontario, I know the kind of heady mix of affection and loathing every aspect of living in this province inspires
If you ever need to wound me back you can whip out “TBAY ALL DAY” once I’ve let my guard down
Also the Laurentian guy in Sudbury is just as easily a Lakehead guy in Thunder Bay, to be clear. One of my alma maters for the record
To be fair, when abroad, we just tell people we’re from Vancouver because they won’t know what Victoria is.
I’ll say my coworker’s name was Johnny, and he explained that there’s a lot of racism towards natives over there, and having brown skin, he would sometimes find himself on the receiving end of that. The dude is pretty obviously hispanic though lol.
I think he said Thunder Bay has some of the highest crime rates too?
Weirdly if he makes it to Alberta (and god help him if he does) he’s 100% saying he’s from Oshawa
The west coast feels like it’s a different country sometimes. Though we share usage of fuckin’ eh, get er done, and such. Weather’s a lot nicer too.
i came of age right as the GM plants started closing down, a lot of folks started losing their jobs and the class divide in the city started to calcify. i recently discovered my sifu used to work where i grew up and started taking martial arts seriously in part as a response to the closure, which is kind of intense to think about. looking back i hold no genuine loathing for the city or my time there in itself; oshawa was/is a weird and flammable vibe born of weird and flammable times and i wouldn’t be nearly as readily equipped for 202X if i hadn’t been raised in an environment defined by a lack of belonging. at least now we belong to the catchphrase that defines us and somehow not the half-dozen other midsize southern ontario cities whose youth culture revolved around hanging out in oshawa
Murder capital of the country by the metric of homicides per capita, at least for certain years. The sad reality behind at least one of those years is that I think a large proportion of those murders were related to alcohol intoxication and if I remember correctly were in the second degree.
Let’s just say that Thunder Bay racists are definitely stupid enough to be racist towards a hispanic guy because they’d be misidentifying them as indigenous, yeah. Racial ambiguity is enough for them. Though these days the overt stuff I get to hear because I don’t superficially appear to be indigenous to them is mostly about South Asians takin’ ar’ jobs.
I wouldn’t raise a kid here, because even though they’d be less indigenous by ancestry than me, a kid I make with my Korean partner will probably end up looking more indigenous than I do. Certainly enough to attract attention from dumbass Thunder Bay racists who will see non pale skin and dark hair and a few facial features not exclusive to East Asians and not make a distinction beyond that.
That would be even more the case if they were a girl. That’s the kinda scumbags we got here tbh
damn… yeah…
I got way less neutral feelings about where I come from but that probably has a lot do to with how I’m stuck back here rn against my will for the time being. But I probably felt more closely to what you said when I was still living in the city.
the last time i was trapped in my hometown i played final fantasy xiii for the first time and it made me very emotional. i tentatively recommend
I’ve been trapped in my hometown for years and I haven’t played Final Fantasy XIII even once!! Perhaps I should try that
Ok this congenial Ontari-ennui has been refreshing but I need to go to bed
Oh but before I forget
I’ve been there!! I was 10 so I don’t remember anything other than being terrified to walk across the gangplank on to the ferry because I was and am viciously afraid of heights. Also that it had a pretty downtown. Also I just now googled “gangplank” because I wanted to make sure I was using the right word, and I had to add “define” to that search string, because Google thought I wanted to know about Gangplank the fucking League of Legends character. Cooked fuckin website. Anyway goodnight everyone
I’m out in LA right now apartment hunting because I thought I’d want to move here, but I’ve overthought the whole thing to the point of giving myself a migraine.
Would someone like to tell me which neighborhood I should live in? Or, given that this whole thing is imploding in on itself, which city/state/province/country I should live in? It would be helpful if someone else made the decision for me so that way when I don’t like it I’ll have someone else to blame
I got you one sec