Names: Katie Barber and Megan Revell
Year: 3rd
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What made you decide to start up a blog?
In all honesty it all started as an employability thing, we both want to work in creative industries so thought it would give us interview ammunition. However, it soon spiralled from a CV builder to a borderline obsession! Now that third-year has kicked in though it has become more of an enjoyable habit. We donât really do it for the page views (especially when we know itâs only our Mumâs that are half-heartedly reading it), and do it more for the pleasure of writing and designing. However we do still have to put up with the occasional sarcastic commentâŠ. âWhy donât you blog about it?â
Why the name âCulture Vulturesâ?
Well The Man Repeller was already taken, and weâd been insulted/complimented on being âculture vulturesâ before. Plus we couldnât think of anything else, really⊠we struggled. Oddly enough we both thought of using âculture vulturesâ separately, and when fate hands you a gift like that you just canât ignore it! Itâs supposed to be mildly ironic, although as people probably know sarcasm is a lot harder to pull of in print (as you can tell from this interview!).
In your mind, what defines a âculture vultureâ?
There is a section on the blog about this, we couldnât quite decide if a culture vulture was an insulting or descriptive term. Seeing as self-deprecation usually wins people over, itâs usually the former! Basically a culture vulture is a profoundly pretentious specimen who, like us, is âall talk and no gameâ, especially on the art front! Read: someone who has a big interest for all things cultural, but doesnât really have any expertise on the topic to back up their pompous opinions.
Why did you decide to do a collaborative blog instead of going solo?
Sheer lack of balls. We are advocates of the whole safety in numbers, travel in a pack thing. Plus it seemed a lot less work and less intimidating to do it together. Itâs like doing a joint house party, if no one shows up at least itâs not just you that looks like a loser. Also as people who know us will probably agree we are really good friends, but chalk and cheese. So we work quite well together (we hope!)
Do you each have a favourite post from Culture Vultures?
Katie: I really like a current thing we do which is a monthly Moodboard. It is by far my favourite post to create. It has basically given me an outlet for all those bookmarks I have been saving up over the years of images I really like. We are also delving into the more opinion piece-esque genre, although that makes it sound a lot more high-brow than it really is. It is basically a lame attempt at humour through sweeping generalizations and unfounded societal statements â so worth a read!
Megan: I always enjoy reading and writing the travel posts, probably because they are always the topics I drool over on other peopleâs blogs, and itâs a way for me to vicariously leave Lawsok and pretend I am partying it up in Sweden or swanning around the streets of Rome. I am also really enjoying writing a post at the moment entitled âIs Art Porn for Posh Peopleâ â You can read that particular post here
 Do you think in contemporary society it is important to have âyour own little piece of the internetâ?
Not at all, in fact we actively discourage it because if everyone did people would figure out how awful we actually are and stop reading our blog! However we are both big fans of the internet, we can say this knowingly because our broadband connection is currently down, so we find ourselves relying on the Vicâs free connection for sheer survival.
What would your advice be to anyone wanting to launch a successful blog?
Weâre not 100% sure weâre at the delving-out-advice stage yet, in fact weâre confident that weâre not. There are some areas of blogging that we quite frankly suck at (e.g. Social Media – if any of you are interested in filling the spot of CV Media Manager we pay in love, affection and Twiningâs.) One piece of advice we can say is that itâs obviously more natural to write about things you want to talk about, rather than what you think people want to read.
What are your favourite âCulturalâ past times?
Instagramming overly decorated vegetable cakes, taking notes from Martha Stewartâs craft books in Waterstones (because we are too stingy to shell out the thirty quid for it), and making lofty but unfounded opinions on the design industry, when actually we know diddly squat.Â
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