#like literally driving and flying

[prettyboysdontlookatexplosions]

i think climate change discourse often uncovers ways that people have trouble thinking about things on a certain scale… for example it feels counterintuitive to say that on the one hand, the US is iirc the second biggest emitter as a country and the biggest per capita (since number one is china whose population is famously quite large), and on the other, if we waved a magic wand tomorrow and the US went fully net zero, that would not really have a huge impact on the situation as a whole. but it’s true, because there are just that many more people living Not In The US. or like, it is both true that taylor swift traveling is probably responsible for more emissions in a year than you or i would be in several lifetimes, and that banning private jet use entirely in every single country in the world would be a drop in the bucket at best because it’s a relatively small subset of a relatively small fraction of global emissions. a lot of ostensibly justice-focused climate rhetoric has a very moralistic viewpoint on what we might call disproportionate emitters - which is why many people read a sentence like “taylor swift’s private jet use is mathematically negligible in the grand scheme of things” and assume it’s some kind of ethical or moral defense of taylor swift (or the US, or 1%, or whatever) - but i am starting to feel like “what we really need to do is hold the rich accountable” is just as much performative magical thinking as whatever alleged greenwashed bandaid someone is bringing it up to criticize, because saying it feels radical or serious but betrays a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of the actual scale of the problem.

[girlwiththegreenhat]

im gougn to fuckin g cry it looks like a 4th grader remade sputnik out of cardboard and garbage

[snezus-christ-risen]

Currently crushed and useless under the heavy weight of the sexual tension between Rio and Agatha. 😩 About to call out of work horny.

[jackredfieldwasmyjacob]

i spent all morning looking for the cheapest ways to get to venice next monday and i feel like i've cracked the code or something i think i got it

[become-a-robot]

The variety of distances attendees are from concert venues is so funny. What do you mean this place was just down the block for you, I had to drive 12 hours to get here

[mashmouths]

save me mango yogurt

[pynkhues]

https://www.tumblr.com/pynkhues/766748848331898880/growing-up-in-a-cattle-station-family-in-rural?source=share

This is kind of blowing my mind--I'm American and we are obviously a very big country, but I'm trying to imagine anyone having so much land (or just so much land being available anywhere) that they would have to drive four hours even to reach the edge of their own property

Yeah, I mean!! Australia's a big country, and - globally speaking - no one lives here, lol. I can't articulate to you how small some towns in rural/remote Australia are, despite the country's size, but mm, okay, I'll try, haha:

When I did that particular tour of rural Queensland [I live in Melbourne, Victoria, but 'm from Brisbane originally, which is the capital city of Queensland], it was a part of a creative project funded by the state archive to build a food memory of Q, and a part of that was taking celebrity chefs to remote parts of the state to help people write about passed-down family recipes. It was genuinely one of the most fun jobs I ever had, and I met so many interesting people, and I think about it all the time, haha.

In that, we flew into Mount Isa, which is a mining town, and then just - - drove! For hours! And the landscape just alternates between this:

And this:

(Both of these are literally just Mount Isa too)

It honestly is such a unique landscape, and when you're out in it truly, you don't feel like there's anyone else in the world. Like, God, half of Australia's entire population lives between Sydney and Melbourne! That's always crazy to me, especially given the breadth of the country. Jodie Foster filmed a movie here years ago and just said she couldn't believe how much of Australia was untouched, which is a lovely thing to say, but only partially true, of course.

But yeah, like, I also did a year-long freelance writing contract for the Q Department of Education about five years ago, and there are schools there which have literally six students per year level MAX. One school we were preparing child safety documents for was a prep-10 school (a lot of remote schools don't offer year 11 and 12) had eight students total in the entire school.

(Slightly off topic, but a lot of the resources I was writing there were just begging children to stop daring each other to eat kangaroo poo, because they kept getting Q Fever, so there's a little bit of trivia for you, haha).

It's why a lot of kids are still sent out to board in city schools - particularly if they intend to graduate - hence Sam going to school in Sydney doesn't surprise me at all. Again, I don't know if he was a boarder, but Cranbrook offers it and I know anecdotally farm kids tend to board (again, my mum did, and I know a lot of other people who did too), and I know Cranbrook caters to rich rural farming families.

Also just anecdotally, outside of schooling, my sister has been living regionally so when I say she's in family court, she's in a regional one, and one of the things that I hate to say surprised me given what I talk about above was that in the Readiness & Compliance Hearing where a group of us are all getting to hear each other's business, the average time to get to the closest court from remote Australia was 7 hours. So yeah.

Big country, and a very, very dispersed population.

[stuck-in-the-ghost-zone]

OH MY GOD. GOT TO THE MARK MOMENT IN THE BEGINNING OF E20 U MENTIONED. WHAT A WAY TO START AN EPISODE?????? i love him so dearly....holy shit. holy shit.

AHAA I CAN GIVE U ONE OF MY FAVORITE ANIMATIONS NOW. THE FUCKING SILLY.

[boxwinebaddie]

HE JAS A PROSTHETIC LEG OMG? WHAT HAPPENED

hoooo...so *looks away because god is about to smite me for this and i really can't take any more abuse, but i'm a loose cannon, baby!*

sooo uh...hypothetically speaking...

toolshed mechanic stan's grandmother might have been a really famous female drag racer once upon a time and stan may have been a Really REALLY GOOD Driver...oooonce...upon a time...

-- because i'm not saying there was an Incident, buuut...

but if there was an incident about a year or so ago, toolstan and the boys ( kenny and butters, holla at them ) may have been on some late night Degenerate Shit ( drinking, smoking that good tegridy weed, getting dummy stupid and schwifty ) and small town hick nowhere mechanic stan maaaaay...may have been driving them back DRUNK!!

AS! ALL! FUCK!! ( it used to be his favorite party trick; he used to say he could do it with his eyes closed or steer with his feet/use his legs where his arms were / drive backwards...that joke Did Not age well.

and...hypothetically speaking, he may have actually physically humored that joke, or regardless was prolly doing donuts and stupid ass shit ( butters was throwing up and kenny was having a blast ) but uhhh...it's very possible that things might have been going very well...

( as well as driving your friends home blackout drunk can be -- which is never a good idea even if you live in a tiny rural colorado town that doesn't even make the map most years, have done it a million times and there is never anything in the road... )

because HYPOTHETICALLY SPEAKING!!! THERE WAAAAAS SOMETHING IN THE ROAD!!!! it was a deer, toolshed stan SWERVED HARD, they hit a massive tree and...Sigh...

hypothetically speaking, mechanic stan only really remembers it in horrible mercurial ptsd flashes and is extremely haunted by it...but in the accident, i think stan's leg got crushed between some part or the car or idk, maybe it had something to do with the handle he was drinking ( yikes super best friend ), a massive shard of glass got butters in the eye and he literally lost his eye and kenny???

so...they never found kenny's body...but they did find...

His Severed Right Hand.

[999-roses]

unpacking 'sinophone' and its sinophobic roots

so. it never occurred to me to just type "sino diaspora" into google before.

and google is like "oi!! you meant sinophone yeah? here's wikipedia on sinophone" and here's like the other top results

I'm squinting. What the hell do you academics have against diaspora using the term diaspora?? I click.

inb4 this whole rant: I have no qualms with using sinophone as a language-family-use descriptor (like sinophone media), but coming from academia or as an academic field unto itself. but. the literature about wanting to use it as a demographics thing & separate it from "chineseness". just. looook if anyone knows that they're no longer like this let me know. with what im seeing, im having a bad faith moment

so... this is the academic that's hard pushed the term for sinophone.

"crit on orientalism might be complicit for allowing Chinese intellectuals to call themselves victim under an 'unreflective' nationalism" & "but the flipside may be a new imperialism" yeah?? any more unsubstantiated claims???

What a joke!! Clearly only takes authority about Chinese history from western sources, like literally has the uncritical echo of "X country doesn't deserve territorial integrity" that literally fueled western imperialism, and not just of China. Treaty of Nanjing 1842 ringing no bells? Sigh. National sovereignty is the barest basis against overt imperialism where someone just comes over and declares where you live their colony!!! ... is this a test in how far can you stretch the definition of imperialism or colonization? lmfao, China invests in poverty-relieving measures like building houses and improving infrastructure out in Tibet, Guizhou, Xinjiang, and you have the audacity to call that colonizing?!? 我真无言了。

different article by the same person:

laughable to think that the Chinese state even bothers to think I exist, let alone talk to me about my diaspora status. (I was born in the US)

also, people are really out there saying 'diaspora has an end date' huh

here it is. here is the 'scholar' conflating American or western imperialism with things Big Bad Scary Red China does.

Clearly mixing up concepts of tributary system with colonialism, and acting like historically (other than Yuan era under Genghis) that ancient China/Chinese culture was expansionist, going around trying to conquer peoples and set up colonies. Admiral Zheng He would spit on you.

Comparing the spread of culture and language in Ancient China to the colonization and subjugation that the French/Belgium did in Africa, or the British Empire, or the Spanish and Portuguese in Latin America, is so blatantly dishonest. The indigenous people of Tibet, Inner Mongolia, and Xinjiang still speak their own languages and use their own scripts, and yes, they learn them in schools alongside the national language... which is Chinese!!! Yes the Hanyu writing system was adopted and adapted by many neighboring cultures in ancient times, but you literally don't examine WHY? The fluidity in its system: frequently non-Han peoples invented characters to suit their language, like there's even some Canto-specific characters that are in use today. Another reason that Chinese writing system was so popular was because two Sinitic language speakers who do not speak the same language could communicate through the same script. Yeah, Ancient Chinese scholars and dignitaries often had an insufferable elite-ness and superiority complex, but describing their attitude as subjugating and forcing other people to adopt their system? What a wildly malicious mischaracterisation!

just... mask off, gringo butt-licker.

Please. where is the "Chinese containment" policy? The white papers reaffirming what the international community agrees, what Taiwan historically agrees (tho Taiwan held that it was the true capital/head of all of China), that Taiwan is part of China?? I know this article was written back in 2010s but are you seriously comparing American weapons deals and boots on the ground with Chinese military exercises in Chinese territory that haven't harmed a single civilian? "critical" my ass!

gotta love the title of this one. yeah, I know it, I've seen it before. the Chinese or feminist binary, pick a side /s

but hey in this piece she admits she's ignorant and unobjective and out of her league sometimes?

edit: found this:

yeah that about seals it for me. anti"diaspora" sinophobe

[didnt-hear-idsb-live-again]

curious why you prefer Aus to Europe when a lot of the policies you like in Aus (better social safety net) exist in Europe too. is it the weather? for me I prefer Europe since it's less car-centric, has great train coverage, and there's a ton of cultures rather than being stuck on one giant mostly empty island that's all the same country 🙈

I touched on this in the original ask I think you're responding to, but aside from those points, it's not only about social safety net! it's the combo of social safety net, people's attitude & demeanor, my ability to effectively communicate with those around me (even if I learn a new language via living someplace it'll never be my native language, just as Europeans don't typically natively speak English, so there's a lot of small things that can wind up being quite isolating when stacked up over the day-to-day. When I visited my bf's family in Portugal in the fall, not 10000% easily having everything I say be understood and having to alter my speech patterns for effective communication made me REALLY depressed and that was just for 2 weeks)

I think it's a bit dismissive to reach out to me and call a place that you know I love "a mostly empty island that's mostly the same country", even if you're being a lil silly. First off I'd argue that Australia's geography is FAR more diverse than Europe's. Europe is predominantly mountains, farms and rolling hills, and mediterranian / coastal. I'd say in the US it's akin to (in order) Montana, Ohio, and Southern California. I can't really name much more, though two of those things are beautiful. Australia has farmland, desert, tropics, swamplands, beaches, mountains, etc. Australia has regions that are akin to (in order) central California, rural Texas / Arizona, central Florida, Louisiana, Southern California, AND Virginia. Not to mention a stunning, rich biodiversity. ultimately why, at this moment, I am choosing America over there is that I appreciate America having more nuances culturally than what Australia has within that terrain. But there is more to life and more that I appreciate about the world than cities having different food and cultures, and while Europe brings those things to the table (in languages I don't understand, which like I said makes living and not visiting extremely tough), there is FAR more that it doesn't. And also, for the record - if you've ever driven straight across Europe multiple times like I have, I don't think you'd be able to call it much different than "a peninsula with tons of nothing in the middle". While one 'nothing' is obviously bigger than the other, Australia's middle is a vast and beautiful red desert. A lot of Europe's middle / middle of nowhere is just Ohio. I prefer the desert.

[unproduciblesmackdown]

minneapolis, so far…(and a little Chicago)!!!

from erica durham (chiffon)

[south-sea]

mysteries of the universe (or i’m just incredibly out of the loop): what is metal sonic powered by

[ocdhuacheng]

I love my parents like I get this is because they’re worried about me but they’re so annoying. They’re saying they’re not gonna let me drive from Long Island to Cincinnati EVEN THOUGH

1) who the fuck do they think they are to talk, my dad drove NON STOP from Wyoming to Pennsylvania when he was in college and they’re bitching about me driving less than half that distance? At least I know when to pull over and take a nap when I’m feeling tired Jesus fucking Christ.

And 2) they let my brother drive ALL THE WAY TO THE GRAND CANYON AND BACK. And I can’t even go to CINCINNATI??? Are you fucking kidding me?????

[jellybracelet]

Buying a car here is literally impossible. I'm gonna have a hernia

[balteus]

raime/velstadt too, is yuri