[The line of absurdity and reality is blurred.]

If you use arab.org like I do please consider taking the extra 30-60 seconds to click on ALL of their causes. Palestine is important but so are the environment, refugees, children, women, and the impoverished across the middle east and it doesn't take away from Palestine to click for multiple causes. The arab world faces a lot of problems and they only get worsened by how western nations have oppressed and attacked them. Clicking is small but it generates something and overtime it does benefit the greater good. It takes all of us clicking as often as possible but we can do it! It's really easy and safe and they have proofs on their site on how they do make an impact and are donating your click money

YES. All of them. Every day. Here is the full list of causes.

Here are links for all the causes you can help with a daily click (you can use different browsers, incognito and/or mobile to click more than once), as well as the organizations where the proceeds go to:

Help Children with a Click. All proceeds go to UNICEF (United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund)

Help the Palestinian People with a Click. All proceeds go to UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East)

Help Fight Poverty with a Click. All proceeds go to UNDP (United Nations Development Programme)

Help Refugees with a Click. All proceeds go to UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees), the UN Refugee Agency

Help Empower Women with a Click. All proceeds go to UN Women

Help the Environment with a Click. All proceeds go to Greenpeace MENA (Middle East and North Africa)

Arab.org also includes a link to other other trusted organizations accepting donations:

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.

This is all very informative, but I have to point out that the first person to start explaining began with this:

Which, ah, is also not something we outside your country are automatically going to have knowledge of. Especially if we don’t have small children. Despite …Disneey?’s best efforts, your media is not completely universal.

Adding some things:

ONE: When interstates came in, a lot of the towns along the highways that economically depended on people stopping there to eat and gas up as they drove through got bypassed - and started dying. This is the basic plot of Cars; the protagonist gets stuck in a dying town.

TWO: you get gothic weirdness on the highway in the Midwest and you can pull off into equally gothic towns. Night Vale is set in the Midwest/center of the country-ish for that reason.

THREE: The parts of interstates near big cities are also used for local commuting and will absolutely gridlock during rush hours. I-95 shown above? Is also the fastest and easiest way to get from the DC beltway to the Baltimore beltway, so anyone commuting anywhere along that route takes 95 twice a day.

FOUR: The picture below occasionally wanders through tumblr titled “Every American Small Town” or some similar bullshit. This is Breezewood Pennsylvania and it’s not a town at all. Nobody lives there. It’s literally just the quarter mile where Highway 70 meets the Pennsylvania Turnpike (aka Interstate 76 at that point, although it changes numbers randomly). When I-76 was put in, it was illegal in Pennsylvania to force people from a freeway onto a turnpike. Therefore, in this one section of PA only, you get off a highway at a stop light - you can see it in the middle left - drive for a quarter mile, then have the option of turning right to get on the turnpike across the top of the photo.

Which everyone wants to do. Except if you’re between roads already, you probably want to pee or eat and you might need gas. Breezewood provides. In a tiny quarter mile.

And, irrigation canals.

Saves 82% of water evaporation. 💧

Actually do cover our fields.

Solar doesn't compete with agriculture, and can be beneficial to it.

Just also cover our car parks.

Especially with summers getting hotter and dryer in a lot of places, solar panels in agricultural fields is a really good idea. Sheltering vegetables from the hottest, driest time of the day will help them grow better. Cows and sheep and such seek out shelter from the sun. I think I recall reading that they found higher biodiversity in pastures that had solar panels because of the shelter they provide.

Level of respect a class of teens I have to teach art to have for me when I walk in: 0%

Level of respect after I draw sasuke from memory on the whiteboard: beyond anything you could possibly imagine

the true reason i rarely teach classes is to keep my ego at bay

happy Thursday the 20th

I’d have to wait months or even years for another chance to reblog this, so why the fuck not?

next days you can reblog this on a Thursday the 20th

August 2015

October 2016

April 2017

July 2017

September 2018

December 2018

June 2019

February 2020

August 2020

You know, just in case you wanted to set your queue for the next 6 years

TODAY

Heritage post

April 20, 2023

July 20, 2023

June 20, 2024

February 20, 2025

March 20, 2025

November 20, 2025

August 20, 2026

May 20, 2027

January 20, 2028

April 20, 2028

July 20, 2028

Another round of Thursday the 20ths for you to queue up for the next six years

people got mad the last time i said this but you HAVE to stop pretending that people of the past were more intellectual and thoughtful and you need to model yourself after them because modernity pales in comparison. that's nazi shit

basically

Watching a big frightful iceberg drift past me. Wattpad users are doing what now?

Wattpad users stop fucking that thing right now. Start eating it.

Out of Touch

Out of Touch Thursday

OUT OF TOUCH THURSDAY

but im out of my head when you’re not around…

"What if we find a way to keep fetuses alive outside the womb" that already exists, it's called the NICU and it took decades of advancements in medical science and technology. it takes an entire team equipped with state of the art technology to keep a fetus alive outside the womb. because it cannot perform basic life-supporting functions like breathing on its own. this isn't an anti-NICU post tbc. I'm actually considering the nicu as an option after going back to school because I really like fetuses and babies, I think they're neat. but the fact remains that it takes an entire team of doctors, nurses, respiratory therapists, and more to keep a micropreemie alive. and most abortions occur even before the point that it becomes possible at all. "viable" doesn't mean ready to be born. it means it is possible to keep it alive thanks to medical science developed by the same "abortionists" whose executions you're always calling for.

also, it's not an "after birth abortion" when they "let" micropreemies die, it's fucking hospice care.

absolutely. and to add onto this, i was a nicu baby, and i was a late term abortion. when i was still in the womb i was dying inside my mother, so they had to induce her extremely prematurely to save our lives. there was a very high chance of me dying because they took me outside of the womb before they knew if i could survive on my own, but the chances of me and my mother dying if i stayed inside her were 100%.

the procedure to remove me is medically and legally a late term abortion. i was aborted, and it saved my life. if they hadn’t aborted me, my mother and i would both be dead, my siblings would have been left with a dead mother, and i would have never even gotten a chance to live a single day. and now, people are being denied this procedure and dying because it’s literally an abortion!! mothers and their babies are being killed because their doctors are not allowed to perform life-saving abortions.

on the same note, my sister was recently denied an abortion. which is to say, cleaning out the already dead fetus after she had a miscarriage from a wanted pregnancy. they refused treatment unless the DEAD fetus was actively killing her, because the procedure to remove it is medically and legally an abortion. they basically said to her “come back when you’re dying of an infection or sepsis or something, until then you just have to bleed out.” my sister could have died from this, people HAVE died from being denied abortions after having a miscarriage. if she was one of these people, my sister would have been dead, my mother would have to live the rest of her life without her daughter, and my nephew would have had to live the rest of his life without a mother.

sick and tired of people saying to me “yeah, but that’s different. you can’t really call those procedures an abortion, they’re not really an abortion.” yes it is. it’s an abortion. any removal of a fetus and/or baby from the womb before they’re sure it can survive outside of it is an abortion. if it wasn’t, people wouldn’t be being told that, sorry! we can’t do that! you’ll have to come back when you’re already dead. i was aborted, my mother had an abortion when she was pregnant with me, my sister needed an abortion after she had a miscarriage. all of these things are ABORTIONS! and now mothers and babies are being killed, murdered by these anti-abortionist fuckers and the laws they put in place to “save and protect poor, innocent lives!”

since wattpad is fucked and banned smut, heres sum for your troubles a badge you can put in your bio. 😭

love when an absolute nightmare of a character is introduced and all you can think is "jesus christ buddy what the hell is your problem" and the narrative gives you a hot minute to stew before explaining Exactly what is Their Problem. and you just sorta sit back in your metaphorical rocking chair and think "huh. yeah okay fair. that would do this to a person, yes."

It's fun to look at old Wayback copies of the AO3 invite queue page.

In 2011, I could not give away AO3 invites. June 4th, 2012, FFN decided to purge the horny again. I'd left with the 2002 rule change, but the culture that had grown up between 2002 and 2012 included a lot of people who weren't even aware that "M" and "MA" or whatever they called it were supposed to be different, and explicit sex was banned.

That rude awakening led to a lot of new AO3 users all at once. Some of the best-organized fandom communities that got the word out about where they were going next were the Edward/Bella people. (And yes, some of them were conservative dipshits who hated AO3's policies, but some of those were also organized enough to go make their own places.)

Back in 2012, a lot of people were like "Wait, my pretty standard het with reasonably tasteful het sex scenes and a plot is a problem for you??? The fuck? They settled in fine at AO3.

It did take months for the queue to grow to its maximum size and then come down again, but the wait time on accounts did eventually drop back down to a day or two.

AO3 did get caught with their pants down slightly when AO3 was banned in China since that led to lots of Chinese people who'd never heard of AO3 finding out about it, lots of those people had a VPN, and the people answering support tickets at AO3 at the time mostly did not speak Chinese. The translation team had to draft some stock responses fast for all of the nice people showing up with their "Here are my fandom bona fides" messages instead of just joining the queue (since that's the traditional way of gaining access to sites in lots of places where we have to be on the down low, including US slash fandom back in the day).

AO3 is much, much bigger now and much readier to accommodate a sudden influx of people.

It does look like the queue size has more than doubled just lately, but it probably won't take six months for it to calm down again like it did in 2012.

Cleaning the pantry and finding things I don’t recall buying

Hi everyone

I need to ask you to help Mahmoud Qassas urgently. His seizures have been intensifying severely, and he has lost consciousness yet again. He has undergone cardiac arrest and needed rescucitation. His wife is calling out for your help. Please help her so she doesn't have to raise three children alone. She already lost her 5 year old son, let's help so she doesn't lose her husband too.

the joy of working with middle school aged children is that, regardless of how long you've been doing it, they will always find novel ways to annoy and confuse you, which is okay because that's the natural state of the middle school aged child. anyway suffice it to say that for the past three weeks of school my 6th grade class has been greeting me at my door by lining up outside of it, playing the national anthem, and saluting me as i walk in.

What they're doing to you: