- ED trigger warning -

Being skinny ruined my life. If you’re thin and think to yourself, “why don’t fat people just lose weight?” Please read this

I was the “ideal fat” in the sense that I did everything skinny people wanted me to do. I tried every diet in the book. I exercised regularly. I worked with doctors and dietitians to figure out the best way to lose weight. But nothing worked. I did everything “right” to lose weight, and my weight stayed the same

But the thin people in my life kept telling me that I wouldn’t be happy, attractive, healthy, etc. until I lost weight. So, heartbroken, I came to the conclusion that anorexia was the only option left. It felt safer than bariatric surgery, and was obviously much more affordable

I became the perfect anorexic. 700 cal a day or less, except once a week I allowed myself 1400 cal. For reference, my body required at least 2800 to maintain weight, and at least 1800 to keep my organs and stuff fully functioning. Still, 700 a day, I persisted because everyone in my life told me weight loss was all that mattered. If dieting didn’t work, anorexia had to

And it did. My weight dropped all the way down to 110 pounds. I was skinny - underweight, even - in all sense of the word. The people in my life saw it as a miracle. The ultimate success story. My mother, my “friends,” my doctors, they all congratulated me on my accomplishment

When I confessed my eating disorder to my doctor, he told me, “that’s not the best way to go about it, but I’m glad you lost the weight.” My mother took pictures of me and sent them to relatives to brag

Okay, great. I was skinny. I did what I set out to do. But there were severe consequences

The most obvious was my joint pain doubled, maybe even tripled, to the point that I couldn’t leave the house without a wheelchair

I also developed several health complications, including fatty liver disease and extremely painful GERD. I had to see a handful of specialists and get an endoscopy because of severe stomach pain

My partner, who was the only person who saw my weight loss for what it was (a horrible thing that only happened because of an eating disorder), convinced me to enter a recovery program

For nearly a year, I relearned how to feed myself. I ate everything I was told to eat, nothing more and nothing less. My diet was 100% in the hands of somebody else

And I gained back every pound I has lost. All of the work to become thin went right out the window. It was proven to me that thinness and health were incompatible with my body. If I wanted to be thin, I had to forgo my physical and mental well-being. And vise-versa

Prior to the anorexia, I never once struggled with binge eating. I was naturally an intuitive eater, and I did a good job of having a well rounded diet. After the anorexia, after recovery, I developed a binge eating disorder. I had spent so long starving myself, that my brain and body got stuck in survival mode, desperate to consume any and all calories out of fear that I might starve again. To this day I struggle with binge eating

I did everything thin people wanted of me. I dieted. I exercised. And when all else failed, I starved myself. Now I have liver disease, stomach issues, and BED. Not to mention the loads of mental issues that accumulated as a result of my weight loss journey. During the throes of my anorexia, I had to be hospitalized for suicidal ideation

When you tell fat people to “just lose weight” you are suggesting they give themselves illnesses for which treatments are not always effective. You are asking fat people to destroy their stomachs and livers. When a fat person loses so much weight that they become skinny, they are likely giving up so much of their health in efforts to be treated like a human being

If you’re thin, do your part. Treat fat people like people before we tear our bodies apart

I never had to go into recovery, but I was close. I realized that my family and friends were cheering my ED on, with the exception of my mom, who was shocked at my visible spine and ribs. I was not going to find help outside of myself, just more shame and degradation and fear of being fat and being treated as worthless again. I knew I was going to die if I kept on what I was doing (at the time, eating one meal every three days).

Then I read Gina Kolata's Rethinking Thin, stumbled across the Fatosphere (Shapely Prose and Junkfood Science...anyone remember those blogs?), and I stopped dieting for good. I bounced up back to my old weight in 18 months and have stayed there ever since. My body really, really wants to be fat. I didn't want to battle it, anymore. I wasn't going to win, and I had better things to accomplish with my time and effort.

I lost a lot of thin privilege, a shocking amount, in an incredibly short period of time. You can't ever convince me there isn't thin privilege. I was treated like a completely different person practically overnight. It made me--still makes me--incredibly sad. Fat people are the same people they'd be if they were thin.

Thin people, you would be the same, if you were fat. Do you think you'd deserve the derision you pile on fat people if you woke up fat, tomorrow? Side effects of medications, post-pregnancy body changes, accidents that reduce mobility, illness, and aging can all result in weight gain. Wouldn't you like to be treated like a human being worthy of good medical care, professional respect, romantic value, and basic dignity?

Treat fat people well: because we deserve it, because you might be in our place someday, and because it might save a life.

-ArteToLife

Pequeño pero matón

I was going to tag someone, but then I realized I would need to tag almost everyone

girls be like, "why do i have such high standards in men?" my sister in christ you read Jane Austen

*emerges from the other room covered in blood* you should see the word document

does it look like this

i was picturing this as after a successful writing jaunt but this is so much darker

If you’re an adult, do the stuff you couldn’t as a kid.

Like, me and my sister went to a museum, and they had an extra exhibit of butterflies. But it cost £3. So we sighed, walked past, then stopped. We each had £3. We could see the butterflies. And we did it was great. We followed it up with an ice-cream as well because Mum and Dad weren’t there to say no.

I was driving back from a work trip with 2 other people in their early 20s, and we drove past a MacDonalds. One of the others went “Aww man, I’d love a McFlurry.” And the guy driving pulled in to the drive through. It was wild. But it was great.

I went to a park over the weekend and I was thinking “Man, I’d love to hire one of those bikes and cycle round the park.” It took me a few minutes to go “Wait, I can hire one of those bikes!”

I guess what I’m saying is, those impulsive things you wanted to do as a kid - see the dinosaur exhibit, play in the fountains with the other kids, lie in the shade for 2 hours - you can do when you’re an adult. You have to deal with a whole lot of other bull, but at least you can indulge your inner 8 year-old.

this is the purest-realist shit ever

Oh dear.

So as some of you may know, I love to point and laugh at bad legal arguments. And as fun as legal dumpster fires are when they are made by people who aren’t lawyers but think this whole “law” thing seems pretty simple, it’s even funnier when an actual, barred attorney is the person dumping gallons of kerosene into the dumpster.

And oh boy folks, do I have a fun ride for y’all today. Come with me on this journey, as we watch a lawyer climb into the dumpster and deliberately pour kerosene all over himself, while a judge holds a match over his head.

Part two! My apologies for the accidental cliffhanger.

When we left off, a second attorney had just entered the picture, a Mr. "Steven Schwartz." However, I had recognized his name from somewhere...

Some brief updates (nothing too exciting):

Reminder that capitalism is the death of art

are you whiny bitches seriously acting like faster and more affordable and more accessible translation is bad? it’s a bad thing? it’s a thing we should be against now? is that seriously where we’ve arrived? can you people think for ten fucking seconds just ONCE?

machine translation is really good for many languages - esp the romance ones - and while its not perfect or anything, like.. i don’t know how to tell you it’s a good thing we’re able to instantly speak to people, 80% accurately, from anywhere in the world

I went through the notes on this post specifically to find this reply - or one like it. Because it has a point, and it’s a decent point for you, the person. But it’s also missing the info of the larger scale problem.

(Or it isn’t; as you rightly point out in the tags, it’s a capitalism problem. But I’ll expand on this point of “capitalism”. I need to rant. I need to scream.)

I’m a professional translator. I work in video games and software, with an occasional dash of literary translation. I’ve worked in translation proper, I’ve worked on editing other people’s work, I’ve led a couple of translator teams. I’ve worked the occasional miracle, working around some Really Dumb Choices the developers made.

(Spoiler alert: other languages have different syntax and grammar, if you give me a list of nouns to translate, and then give me the plural “s” to translate separately, this is not good. Even in English, woman -> womans is dumb.)

I am a fan of making things affordable and accessible. I am really happy that Google Translate and similar things can tell me the gist of what people are saying in conversations I only half care about. As the poster above says, it’s great! Not perfect, but ok!

Do you know what’s not great? Do you know what the OP in the original image means?

The client the original image is talking about isn’t you. It’s not some person on the internet trying to find out what someone said in a Post. The client they’re talking about is, essentially, the corporation: the translation agency, the publishing house, the IT giant.

You, the individual, do not have the power to demand how I do my job. If you come to me and say, “Sarshi, I want you to take this 300-word post, run it through Google Translate, and then charge me half of what you usually do for translating it”, I can take it or leave it.

But I get contacted by agencies - half of them want this. “We have a game, Sarshi! Just post-edit the results of a machine translation!” “We have support articles, Sarshi! We’re paying you a lot less to post-edit the results of machine translation!”

You say it’s ok to have 80% accuracy, and I feel you! Yes, sometimes it is! But companies are like “lol, this works”, too!

It’s happening over and over. And these aren’t… they’re not people, you know? They’re not Auntie May trying to figure out what the dough recipe she got from her niece in Indonesia says. They’re agencies, trying to increase their earnings by promising top quality to companies, then going, “gosh, we said we’d do it for cheap, how can we manage that?”

Or they can even be large companies themselves. Oh, you’ve spent a bajillion trillion dollars trying to create the CryptoNFTVirtualRealityAI hybrid that everybody knew wouldn’t work and now you panic because your earnings are lower than usual? Oh, and you want to “cut costs” by screwing over every contractor you have? Great. Just great.

This is going to screw you over - you, the individual. Not my client, not the translator’s client in general - the company’s client. The corporation is too big to really care about how you feel about their product - the employees individually might, but the company’s only metric is if you buy it or not. And the company makes decisions based on what brings the most money for the least cost.

So your hardware manuals might be crap and you might be in tears because you have no idea how to make your new appliance do the thing. You’ll go on YouTube and you’ll find a solution, and you’ll eventually figure it out. And maybe you’ll forget about the crap manual in time. So next time, they still won’t get a good translator, because they already have a cheaper solution that seems to work.

So your game looks like it was translated by a bunch of rats in a bunker and you can barely understand what anyone’s saying? Well, maybe they got a bottom-feeding agency overpromise that they totally have legit translators working for $1/hour. Pinky swear! Did you buy the game? You did. So… the system worked! They’ll hire the same agency again!

It’s like the clothing industry all over again. We could have better clothes, but it’s cheaper not to. They’re doing us a service by selling us shoes that won’t last a season, and T-shirts that will look like crap after washing them twice - they’re cheap, aren’t they? They’re affordable. Anyone can get clothes. (So you pay more in time are are more frustrated? Who’s counting!)

And meanwhile, it’s easy to forget things might be different. That we have the ability to create good things, pleasant things. That manuals can be easily readable, that games can sound great, that books can be awesome to read. It becomes harder to trust the market, harder to believe in quality, easier to say that this is normal, this is how things just are.

And if you speak English natively, well… You’re at a huge advantage. A lot of stuff is created by your people, for you. For countries like mine, that are small enough to import a lot, nearly everything is translated. I want you to imagine almost all movies subbed, every appliance made elsewhere (with menus needing translated and all), every app in a foreign language. And everybody who can cut costs will try to.

It’s not… it’s not great.

#excellent breakdown #i promise no translator worth anything is against individual people being able to use mt to understand texts and communicate #i’m a translator and i’m a big fan of machine translation in my everyday life but it should not be used commercially #machine translation in commercial products is at worst a health and safety risk #but NOBODY who actually understands the matter is saying that mt shouldn’t exist. for fuck’s sake

via @nailgun-nali

SUPERNATURAL, 2.19 / BARBIE (2023) 

Most shows with overpowered supernatural characters always try to come up with elaborate excuses to explain why the characters can’t just magic themselves out of every situation. Good Omens doesn’t really do that, but you don’t really question it because you completely buy that these morons are so unequivocally incompetent that they straight up forget that they have the powers of fucking demigods. They’re like high-level d&d characters who only use the same three moves and have completely forgotten about the 73 magic items sitting in their inventory. 

Crowley: I was totally planning on teleporting to this galaxy 4.3 light-years away but then you died and I was sad :(

Aziraphale: Oh I’m sorry. But listen, I need you to go to this village about an hour outside of London

Crowley: You Want me to GO WHere?? How the– how the FUuuck am I supposed to- I can’t Drive, it’s Rush Hour! You want me to WaLK?? In the Rain??! Please, be Realistic.

I cannot express the effect this post had on me. I read it aloud to my roommate and she burst into helpless laughter because it had never occurred to her that Crowley could do anything to get to Tadfield but drive the Bentley. It absolutely never had occurred to me, either. We both have been reading, rereading, and loving this book for about a decade now.

how dare you hide this in the tags omg

[ID: #bold of you to assume he wasn’t going to drive to alpha centauri /end ID]

I need people to stop blaming the death of movies on “quips”. A quip is just a funny line of dialogue. That’s all. Like I just saw a post talking about quips and the death of movies and brought up Pirates of the Caribbean as an example of a better movie and yes it is but also that movie is FULL OF QUIPS. I just rewatched The Princess Bride. It’s all quips. Every single line. And it’s a masterpiece.

Movies suck when people don’t care about the art they’re making. That includes them not caring about their quips. Which is why a lot of comic relief dialogue ALSO sucks now. But the problem isn’t that funny dialogue exists.

#it’s not the quips it’s the complete and utter fear of showing any kind of sincerity#honestly it’s almost the equivalent of saying ‘no homo’ after a moment of being genuine

The Princess Bride is almost all quips, but it’s all sincerity. Every aspect of the plot is ridiculous and yet no movie dialogue has ever gone as hard as “I want my father back, you son of a bitch”

people recognize the problem contained within Whedon-style quippyness without knowing the term for the actual issue so they say “quips” when they mean “bathos”

another problem with quips that’s a little harder to analyze and explain is the quips are all in the author’s voice, NOT the characters’.

steve rogers, natalia romanoff, james barnes, tony stark, pepper potts, and bruce banner are people from radically different walks of life, and should therefore have extremely different styles of communication, despite all off them nominally speaking the same language (english). they should have different senses of humor, different senses of where the boundary lies between irreverence and insult, different boundaries, different sore spots, different goals as well as different methods of communication.

the fact that all these characters banter the exact same way, i.e how joss whedon thinks is funny, is incredibly shallow and grating.

steve grew up as a challenging little shit, who was also very small and poor, and he did it in 1920′s-30′s brooklyn new york. he regularly got his ass kicked. tony stark is also challenging and provocative, he’s a shit stirrer, but he grew up rich as all fuck. no one was beating the piss out of him in a dirty alley. tony has grown up surrounded by sycophants, rich enough to get away with whatever amount of bad behavior he wants to pull; steve grew up poor and disabled in a society that openly advocated for the death and degradation of the weak and unfit. why the fuck would they enter a conversation the same way? why would they deliver a snappy retort the same way? natasha romanoff is a spy, she’s manipulative, she’s always watching to see how a joke lands, she’s always conscientiously tuning herself this way and that to get results. she doesn’t have the luxury of casual defiance, or unthinking obnoxiousness, or even standing by her principles and pissing off someone she hates. again, why would she be tossing off little asides the same as tony, or even the same as steve?

the princess bride is sincere, and the characters still banter in their own voices. fezzik is cautious and methodical, inigo is weary and incredulous, vizzini is desperate to impress everyone with his own intelligence and in so doing often sounds like a complete twerp, buttercup is so incredibly pissed off she doesn’t have any brain cells to spare for joking around, and westley is here to ruin everyone’s day. and it works! the characters have great banter because they’re striking sparks off each other, not meshing like identical cogs in a machine.

humor is about subverting expectations, about breaking up patterns, about confrontation and absurdity. you can’t get that from a blandly uniform pulp.

I have never heard anyone summarize Westley’s character so perfectly in a single line

man sometimes all I want to talk about is that ugly little kernel of truth that both Steve and Peggy carry, that maybe some of the best years of their lives came at the heavy human cost of a destructive, overwhelming world war.

I mean, Steve loves being Captain America. He loves having a body that does what he tells it to and more. He loves having the respect of not only his friends, but strangers too. He fucking loves it and he only has the opportunity because the world is at fucking war with itself.

Peggy loves being in the SSR, loves being in the Howling Commandos, loves having the respect of her male peers, loves having responsibilities and the trust to follow through, loves wearing slacks and carrying a gun and punching assholes in the face. She fucking loves it and she only has the opportunity because the world is at fucking war with itself.

it’s just.  

it’s so delightfully sad.

00q fic rec masterlist

last updated: 18 May 2023

authors

beaubete

beginte

SvengoolieCat

Tokyo_the_Glaive

aus and fusions

author au

coffee shop au

different first meeting, pt 2

fantasy au

his dark materials fusion

historical au

m lives

nttd fix-it

q doesn’t work for the mi6

role reversal

soulmate au pt 1, pt 2, pt 3

spectre fix its pt 1, pt 2

wing fic

bond

jealous!bond, pt 2, pt 3

pining!bond pt 1, pt 2, pt 3, pt 4, pt 5, pt 6, pt 7, pt 8

protective!bond pt 1, pt 2, pt 3, pt 4

retired!bond

q

bamf!q pt 1, pt 2, pt 3, pt 4, pt 5, pt 6, pt 7

competent!q

god!q

holmes!q

jealous!q

kidnapped!q, pt 2

oblivious!q pt 1, pt 2, pt 3

pining!q pt 1, pt 2, pt 3, pt 4, pt 5

protective!q

holiday themed fics

christmas fic pt 1, pt 2

valentine’s day fic

other tropes and categories

5 + 1 things

auction

bets

bond’s break ins

bond’s swimming trunks, pt 2

bond the conspiracy theory

cooking pt 1, pt 2

crack, pt 2

domestic fluff pt 1 , pt 2, pt 3, pt 4, pt 5

epistolatory

emotional hurt no comfort

fake relationship, pt 2, pt 3

fandom iconic fics

fics with good mysteries

fluff, pt 2

fluff and getting together

friends with benefits

forced proximity

funny fics, pt 2

games

getting back together

getting together pt 1, pt 2, pt 3, pt 4

gift giving pt 1, pt 2, pt 3, pt 4

hurt/comfort, pt 2, pt 3, pt 4

insomnia

kid fic

kinktober

knitting

longfics

madeleine pov

meddling!moneypenny, pt 2

miscommunication

mission fic pt 1, pt 2, pt 3, pt 4

non slow burn long fics

not actually unrequited love

other 00s

outsider pov, pt 2, pt 3

pets

post nttd

q centric

q has a family

q’s name, pt 2, pt 3

q rennovating skyfall

safe houses

sick fics

smut with a side of relationship development

ok, i’m built like a noble ox. like i am 6′1 and i am sturdy lady. like thighs for days. if you try to move me. you will be moved. body images aside (lol, i am self conscious about my size, yeah it’s life) 

so like, i am very used to girls standing next to me in public places. i end up acquiring a pack of ladies. just because women are like, that lady is a lady men stay away from. i am jerk kryptonite (usually, i get my fair share of creeps, such is life) but most men have self preservation that this 6′1 ox will break them. and i will

so usually i am in my own phone and look up to another lady standing next to me. and i will immediately look up and make eye contact and nod. like, you know, that nod. i see you and you can talk if there is something wrong. i end up on a reg basis being a defacto bodyguard to these young ladies and small women while waiting for buses and in the metro. 

i am a large oak tree. i protect the other birds. 

ladies, we all got roles. find tree in the wild. we’re always happy to provide shelter from the creeps.

i’ve regularly said, “move on, she doesn’t want to be your friend”

I’m in love

Story time: So I’m 6’2 and “big boned” as my mother would call it. This happens to me all the time and a couple years ago I managed to get the the front row of a Macklemore concert. This woman, probably 5’4, squeezes up next to me and says, “Hey, I’m here alone, do you mind if I stand in front of you?” Of course not. So we’re all having a good time, dancing around, when all of a sudden this Bro™️ is behind me telling me that I’m too tall to be in the front row and it’s not fair. Now, keep in mind that this concert was outside, in February, in Vail CO. It was FREEZING so not only am I of the stature I am but I had my hair up and a beanie on and a big coat and boots. We try our best to ignore him but Bro™️ is drunk and very clearly thinks I’m a man and proceeds to punch me in the back of the head.

LIL SIS WENT OFF, FOLKS. This tiny woman literally moved me out of the way, jumped up, and head butted Bro™️ in the face with such a fury. I thought she was going to kill him, it was truly a beautiful moment in my life.

The moral of the story is that for every tree in the wild there is a cute little birdy who will defend its shelter to the death. Stick together ladies👯‍♀️

Oh this is why every gardening person I know keeps trying to give me the food they grow

That, and we love you. Homegrown produce is a love language.

Unless it's zucchini. Then it's a cry for help.

Tomato (June) - I think highly of you; treasured friend

Tomato (September) - you are a warm body that is nearby

Fresh new asparagus - romantic love

Artichoke - fondness

New rhubarb with leaves removed - flirtatious potential

Rhubarb with leaves left on - the bloom is gone

Swiss chard - I have made mistakes

Perpetual spinach - declaration of animosity between our houses

White-fleshed potato - you are a neighbor

Blue or red fleshed potato - as above, but with overtones of camaraderie/affection

Kale - you are a person who was nearby when I had kale

Raspberries - you are a person I admire

Strawberries - you are a treasure

Onion - I am confused

Young French beans or young peas - I thought of you especially

Runner beans - mild criticism; familial ties; gift from parent to child

Pumpkins - overt romantic, sexual or childhood-bestie interest; highest declaration of loyalty

Prettily coloured popping corn, I.e. glass gem - let this seal the breach between our houses

Zucchini/courgette - cry for help, resignation

Novelty pumpkins - marriage proposal

Match teachers gotta stop telling lies like "you won't always have a calculator on hand" and start telling truths like "someday you're going to use A=PB in a restaurant to calculate a tip and people are going to look at you like youre the goddamn Mentalist" cause I fucking hated math as a kid but now it's a superpower

And the thing is, damn near everyone has a calculator on hand and has for about the last fifteen years. And when you HAVE calculator, it is smarter to USE the calculator, because the calculator will never forget to carry the on.

But the focus on "work the problem out in the least efficient method possible" means that every one remembers their goddamn multiplication tables, but not.... for example.... A=PB.

Let the kids use the damn calculators, so they focus on learning the important shit.

The thing I got told by a teacher I greatly appreciate is this:

Even when you have a calculator, you need to know enough math to a) enter the thing in the calculator correctly and b) figure out if you didn't.

In other words, you don't necessarily need to be able to do 15% of $17.85 in your head, but you do have to know how to tell your calculator to do a percentage calculation, and if you try to figure that out on your calculator and it gives you an answer of $7.14, you should be able to recognize that that's wrong and you need to fix something about what you entered and try again.

Like computers (because they ARE computers in the most literal sense of the word) calculators are only as good as the instructions they're given. They can't figure out what you mean, only what you tell them.

Exactly this.

I honestly don't know how it's taught today, but when I was taking math classes (class of 1991), all the focus was on working the problem out longhand, because "you won't have a calculator every time you need one"... which was hooey then. Every household had at least two calculators, and a lot of people had the ones with ticker tape. Like, a LOT. And most of the kids in the room had a light-powered calculator that was the size of a credit card in their purse or wallet.

These days kids have SPREADSHEET capability in their pockets. It should be part of the curriculum.

Drop most of the "do it the hard way" beyond knowing HOW to do it the hard way and knowing approximately the place to look up how to do it the hard way when you invariably forget, and delight in technological shortcuts as the timesaving miracle they are so you can devote the saved time to delving deeper into the beauties of theory that await in more advanced practice.

This is ideal for many subjects. Little point in memorizing dates, just learn how to fucking LOOK UP what year Columbus sailed or World War 1 started, and put more effort into discussing causes and effects. Read fiction that surrounds the history and nonfiction that goes into it, and let a thousand things you'll never memorize flow through you and leave traces behind them that will glow bright when, years later, you read that name again.

You are the sum total of ALL your experiences, even the ones that slipped through your consciousness like raindrops; if you analyzed it and forgot it, you are the person who HAS analyzed that, once upon a time, and some part of it is part of you.

If you have spent uncounted hours playing a million levels of Candy Crush, that enjoyment resonates in your intimate understanding of what leisure is, and the neurons in your brain that sang with each match, each planned microstrategy, each solved puzzle, use that experience to tell you the joys of curiosity and puzzle-solving and apply remembered joy to other problems.

Outsource as much of the drudgery as possible beyond knowing HOW to do the drudgery and maintaining the willpower to do the drudgery if it's on occasion needed. And then use the saved time to chase the wonders.

What if there was an apocalypse but some people were really really in denial and optimistic and thinking everything will be back to normal soon?

Like they’d be foraging through the ruins of New York for supplies, shooting raiders in the face and saying “Man, this recession is really bad, huh?”

Umm….

ARE YOU KIDDING ME

this post, plus that satire one about the increasingly ridiculous callout culture that slowly became more and more accurate

this one

was anything going on in 2017??? did everyone randomly have prophetic visions????????

Another one from 2017 by @nullsynth

the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls

turns out we had the 2020 vision after all

“the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls” is actually a really fucking metal quote and i will be using it in the future

@handoverthehands it’s from Sound of Silence by Simon and Garfunkel. Referenced as well in Spirit of the Radio by Rush and again in Disturbed’s cover of the original.

And that in itself was a reference to the Book of Daniel from the bible, when the words of the prophet were written on the Babylonian palace walls.

In the real world, it’s not the kings and people in power who see the signs of doom, but the poor people in the subway, helpless to stop it.

what happened on this post

Nothing. This is normal for tumblr

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.

I’d like to expound on what @heywriters said. The Interstate highway system was originally designed for the military AND SEMI TRUCKS to move supplies from place to place, fairly rapidly, and without hindrance.

I’ve seen people thrashing semis for being “in their way” and saying “at least we let them drive on our roads.”

For the first decade or more of the existence of the Interstate highway system, you had to have a military pass or a ClassA license and a commercial pass to even be allowed to drive on the interstate.

So if your strange fiction is set in post-WWII America, the passengers on your road trip would be traveling on Highways and NOT on the interstate.

And the next time you think a “big ol’ semi” is in your way, think again. YOU are in OUR way. We are the professionals, and we have a tight clock. Whereas people in cars are out there commuting every day, and every day are doing it badly.

@ruffboijuliaburnsides : I can second what you said about Kansas. I have been through Kansas twice and it has been dark and completely empty both times. My theory is that Kansas does not actually exist. 

Also:

“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.”

This is how the horrifying action begins in both the original, and the remake of the horror movies The Hills have eyes. They go off of the highway and explore a little road that should be faster and then trauma ensues. 

i understand what you mean, but my reaction to the idea that Kansas does not exist is to panic because I sure hope it exists, I LIVE THERE NOW.

@ruffboijuliaburnsides Suuure you do. It’ll be easier if you just admit that you actually live in Missouri. 

YOU TAKE THAT BACK RIGHT NOW