Foremost Hater and Most Incessant Whiner

25 years of ads peeled away

A warning

tomorrow

gootbye riverdale i will miss scrolling past you on social media + lightly raising an eyebrow at the next batshit plotpoint being described

when i ask my wife for some of her food

hm

ahh

saw someone misspell "stochastic terror" as "socratic terror" so I'd like to clarify that stochastic terror is the public demonization of a person or group resulting in the incitement of a violent act that seems random but is not, while "socratic terror" is what every athenian felt when they went down to the agora in the 5th century and saw an old man with a beard approaching them

Writing fanfic as a non-US citizen like

In case anyone actually wants to know the answer: it’s the plot of Cars. The difference is literally the plot of Cars.

Highways are usually two-to-four (at the widest) lane roads that meander the US landscape. Think Route 66, dinosaur statues, mom-and-pop diners, southern gothic. There are state-level and national-level highways. Some run for a 100 miles, some, like US HWY-17, run most of the East Coast:

That red line is US HWY 17. If you follow it, you will go through tiny towns. You may hit stoplights. I kid you not, you will see spinning cows on poles. Businesses exist along highways that you are encouraged to pull over and visit. They were designed to let you see America.

Yeah.

Now, interstates were made in the 50s and were made to get people from Point A to Point B. These suckers range from four lanes to eight lanes around big cities. They cut through everything. If you want to get to a business, you have to take an exit ramp and detour. They are great for getting places fast. You can still have weird experiences on them, but usually at night, when your eyes start playing tricks on you. Or there are deer.

I-95 is a massive corridor that runs from the Florida Keys to the Canadian Border. You can see the difference just looking at the maps.

As far as writing goes:

If you want quirky character development inside the car, you’re looking for an interstate. The majority of Americans take interstates to go on road trips.

If you want mysterious and/or supernatural hijinks, you’re looking for a highway. They are weird, weird places, and they’re surprisingly easy to wind up on if you leave the interstate.

(Even in America, no one’s really sure what a freeway is. Just ignore it.)

Freeways exist in big cities where cars are more prominent than public transport, such as LA or Atlanta. You’ve year of liminal spaces? Freeways during rush hour are a physical manifestation of hell.

Awesome! Now what the hell is a turnpike?

If you find out, let me know. Maybe ask someone from New Jersey.

A turnpike is a highway with a toll. Turnpikes are special highways where you drive really fast and it’s usually linking big cities with each other and you keep going until you hit a toll booth.

They’re called “turnpikes” because in the olden days, there were pikes or barriers up and you had to pay the toll for them to be raised or turned to let you in.

Also, just for the record, Hawaii does have interstates.

For everyone who didn’t want to know, expressways are a form of highway that connect both suburban areas and major interstates to a city They often have both an alphanumerical name and a colloquial name In Philly we have the Schuylkill Expressway (I-76)

Would like to add that highways and mainly interstates were made specifically so THE MILITARY could get from Point A to Point B. This combined with a post-WWII boost in the economy and car industry gave Americans the ability to tour the country on their own for the first time ever. A whole chunk of American culture was created by just expanding the road system.

Think about road systems and other systems of travel when worldbuilding!

All this being said, most East Coast US people will refer to all of these things interchangeably as “highways”/”the highway.”

Another note for non-USians trying to write a road trip story – if your characters would definitely be taking the interstate, but you want them on a highway in order for the supernatural shenanigans to start (or whatever), the solution is very simple: they hit a traffic jam. Could be due to construction, could be due to an accident, but traffic slows to a crawl and they say “there’s gotta be a way around this” and take the next exit. Then it turns out their cell phone has no coverage in that spot so they can’t just pull up a map, and VOILA. Into the Twilight Zone! One of the things about an interstate is that USUALLY, there’s an exit and an entrance right by each other, so you can exit, find a gas station or a place to grab lunch near the exit, then get right back on, but this is not always the case. Sometimes there’s an exit, but nowhere nearby to get back on.

I just want to add that there’s a slightly different vibe if you’re in the midwest. Because cities on the coasts are closer together, the interstate is just a super efficient point A to point B, city to city, no interruptions.

In the midwest, and I expect the southwest, to the interstate can get some real wonky vibes because YOU ARE ALONE. You are on one black strip of neverending road across hours and hours and hours of alone. You can drive very fast for a very long time and not see signs of another human being. Sometimes the alone-ness is added to by the sheer flatness of the land around you. You can see for forever and there’s nobody here. You sometimes see dead gas stations or billboards with only scraps of paper left on them.

You are in tornado ally and there is NOWHERE to hide if a blizzard or thunderstorm or twister comes for you. If it’s winter the snow is BLINDING.

It’s beautiful. But it’s horror is less small-town-gothic and more existential threat.

For clarity: the term freeway literally means it’s an interstate with no tolls. It’s free for every driver to use.

The West Coast of the US doesn’t have tolls on our interstates, but some of our big important bridges have tolls.

Seconding @leebrontide’s bit about interstates in the mid and southwest. I have Seen Things doing cross-country moves through the southwest and midwest. One experience that we refer to as “Silent Kansas” we literally went across the entire width of Kansas without seeing a single other vehicle, open gas station, or sign of life, while shrouded in a blanket-thick fog that dissipated essentially immediately upon crossing the border into Colorado. Or the time we were driving south on the I-17 in Arizona after midnight, and there was something following us for a full hour that was a pair of glowing lights that looked like headlights but, I swear it’s fucking true, was not another car. they disappeared in my rearview on a stretch with no exits just outside the Phoenix city limits, and to this day I have no idea wtf it was.

weird shit happens on interstates away from the coasts.

Highway: a high-speed and long-distance road, but without limited access. You will have occasional stop lights or stop signs, and you’ll go through small towns. Most likely place to see a cryptid. (also a generic term for all of these roads)

Expressway: a high speed road with limited access. There are no stop signs or lights. There are entrance and exit ramps. These usually cut through the landscape to a greater degree than highways.

Freeway: an expressway without tolls

Turnpike: an expressway with tolls. So called because they had a long stick (a pike) on a pivot that blocks the road until it is turned to let you through after paying the toll.

Interstate: a (usually particularly long) expressway built as part of the interstate system. Has a designation I-## (eg, I-95). There are also local expressways that are part of the interstate system that get a third digit (I-495). These generally connect Something™ to the larger two-digit interstate (so I-495 connects to I-95). 3-digit interstates are most often freeways. A two-digit interstate may be a freeway or a turnpike and will probably switch back and forth over its length.

Also, everyone will use most of these terms wrong most of the time! You can call any of them a highway and no one will bat an eye. You could call a turnpike a freeway and people will literally not notice. If you call anything an expressway you’ll sound like a nerd or a politician. We usually only say interstate to differentiate it from some other similar road. But if you call something a turnpike that doesn’t have turnpike in its name, even if it is a toll road, people will look at you funny.

Additionally, sometimes “turnpikes” are called “tollways.” Like the Tristate around Chicago.

Really love that these explanations, while they technically explain everything, have even left me, a born American, more lost than before. Rip in pieces, non-American writers, we did our best.

Each drip of hot glass that hits the shaping roller on a marble production line is called an "ingot". A "double ingot" is a marble error that occurs when two marbles meet on the roller and fuse together into a single, shaky sphere.

Because they tended to be either thrown out or taken home by production line workers, double ingots (as well as triple and even quadruple ingots) are rare collectibles. They are often found and sold by marble diggers (those who visit abandoned marble factory sites and dig for discarded marbles around the area), though more modern marble companies like Jabo and D.A.S. have purposefully distributed their double ingots.

The first two marbles in this set are from Akro Agate - lifesaver and sparkler respectively - while the last three are from D.A.S. runs -  carnival and wildflower respectively.

A crop of just the Kermit Blade Runner 2049 meme I made on stream

I love opening up this website first thing like the morning paper and immediately seeing multiple posts like "how to get rid of the evil clown on the dashboard". like oh is this what we're doing today

data is such a bitch

The genius of Dr. Isomov in creating war machines is beyond compare. His preference for "Cat Girl Robot Maids" as a template, although questionable, does not diminish their capabilities.

Armored Core 6 plays with names a lot.

Your main comms partner, Handler Walter, treats you as nothing more than a tool. In time he starts treating you with some slight kindness, maybe even taking pride in your performance under his directions, but he never stops calling you by your serial number: 621. You hear that there's been people before you. You're just a number to him. Distanced. Disposable.

Ayre, your other main comms partner, urges you to care about the locals of the planet you're fighting on. She calls you Raven, a moniker you stole, but later find out is a word that signifies a freedom fighter. She doubles down, hoping you'll live up to the name. Trying to impart those values on you.

The corporations both try to claim you. To the Balam Redguns, you're Gun 13. One of them. Part of their squad. Meanwhile, Rusty of Arquebus consistently calls you his "buddy." Both corporations want to endear themselves to you, convince you to fight for them. But they're exactly the same.

Then there's the Dosers of RaD. Cinder Carla, Chatty Stick and the other Dosers only ever refer to you as "tourist." You're a guest in their territory. First they spit the word at you, but later on it starts sounding almost like a term of endearment. You're not one of them, but you're not necessarily an enemy.

A fun thing about computer skills is that as you have more of them, the number of computer problems you have doesn't go down.

This is because as a beginner, you have troubles because you don't have much knowledge.

But then you learn a bunch more, and now you've got the skills to do a bunch of stuff, so you run into a lot of problems because you're doing so much stuff, and only an expert could figure them out.

But then one day you are an expert. You can reprogram everything and build new hardware! You understand all the various layers of tech!

And your problems are now legendary. You are trying things no one else has ever tried. You Google them and get zero results, or at best one forum post from 1997. You discover bugs in the silicon of obscure processors. You crash your compiler. Your software gets cited in academic papers because you accidently discovered a new mathematical proof while trying to remote control a vibrator. You can't use the wifi on your main laptop because you wrote your own uefi implementation and Intel has a bug in their firmware that they haven't fixed yet, no matter how much you email them. You post on mastodon about your technical issue and the most common replies are names of psychiatric medications. You have written your own OS but there arent many programs for it because no one else understands how they have to write apps as a small federation of coroutine-based microservices. You ask for help and get Pagliacci'd, constantly.

But this is the natural of computer skills: as you know more, your problems don't get easier, they just get weirder.

you know you've made it when you're googling problems and ending up with 0-9 results

#you don't actually have to be good to have these problems#you just have to be obsessed with a micro-issue that no one else cares about

The Lincoln County, MO Drug Task Force arrested a pirate.

When arrested he begged to walk the plank, he decorated a pontoon to sell drugs from. Which he required customers to say, “Ahoy matey, I come to purchase ye party favors.”

His nickname was Red Beard.

KING SHIT FR

bench

they just added sparkledogs to the kennel club registry

hades is a really fun game but i still cannot believe the note it ends on. like i get that the devs probably intend for it to be bittersweet and moving but really it just feels like everyone settles into a tense 'trying to make thanksgiving dinner pass uneventfully' vibe all around. even with some of the characters you're presumably closest to. absolutely does not work for me.