Between the Bridges

The full performance of “I Lied to You” from “SINNERS” at the Oscars 2026

occasional posts from users

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Sometimes I still hear my voice

It’s almost like I’m here with us.

5 simple exercises to awaken dormant muscles

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I appreciate this video a lot–people don’t realize how important it is to start slow if you’re trying to come back from a completely sedentary lifestyle, and they get really hurt as a result. Straining your muscles too much, too suddenly can land you in the E.R. and the wrong joint injury can permanently affect your mobility, so please start with absolute basics and easy stretches!

I saw this post on Facebook today, and was gonna make a joke about how he’s so good in the lab because, when it comes to experiment samples, he knows you gotta keep ‘em separated.

But I happened to search the lyric online really quick, and found this:

AMAZING. It’s actually where the line came from! Bravo, sir.

Keep 'em separated

So i jumped out of bed to go tell my wife this (bc she woke up, she has a tendency to wake up around 2 am bc we’re different brands of weirdo) & she said, “Yeah, that doesn’t surprise me. He also flies their tour plane a lot of the time bc he just really likes flying.” Apparently, he holds CFI, CFII, & ATP certifications, so he’s not just a pilot. He’s rated as an instructor. And he owns a hot sauce brand, bc why not?

So he’s like a male Hedy Lamarr.

Boris “professional idiot” Johnson wanted to build an island airport in the immediate area.

it’s fucking visible

madeline odent (@oldenoughtosay.com)

It is fun to learn.

Hey what the fuck

You weren’t kidding they’ve been trying to get the masts off for 5 years and keep getting foiled because there’s probably bombs leaking out of her

Fun fact: Doxing myself but I live in the blast zone if that thing ever goes up! It’s even immortalised in a local artwork:

@tatzelwyrm

I have to say I didn’t expect Nahla to be more or less the Batman but I’m so glad they went in that direction because Batman is cool and all but giving a woman (who ALSO happens to be a manic pixie dream old lady) the traits of:

• Angsty and brooding over her mistakes
• Providing for a bunch of kids both as atonement for things she could’t fix and people she couldn’t save and to raise the next generation of heroes right
• Can’t be with the love interest she yearns for long-term because “dick(s) so good I forgot to fight crime”
• Having a crazy psychosexual relationship with a dude whose life basically revolves around her and causing her the maximum amount of suffering possible; participating in this because she lowkey feels it’s deserved

Is like 5000% cooler. She’s truly one of the characters of all time.

Also every dynamic is Tol and Smol.

stopppp everyone absolutely needs to see this

So my dad was the assistant music editor on Tarzan, and idk if it was Bring Your Kid to Work Day or something but one day he did just that so there I was, this incredibly small 1st grader, in an absolutely cavernous recording studio with a full orchestra and a giant screen playing the scene they were taping the score for, and my little brain couldn’t handle the big music and the big movie happening all at once so I started crying and it was the first time music ever brought me to tears and it was too much to take in so we stepped out of the studio and ran directly into Phil Collins, who looked to me very much like my dad, and in my delicate emotional state I became immediately convinced that my dad had been copied and nobody had told me so I started crying harder, and Phil Collins said something that was probably meant to be calming but it was with a British accent so I thought there was a copy of my dad in every country and I absolutely lost it at the notion that other kids would get to have my dad, and my dad ended up having to carry me back to the car.

So.

Sorry for crying very loudly at you Phil Collins, your work on Tarzan was so moving it triggered my first emotional breakdown.

the only thing that could top that clip is that story

i have never understood or played magic the gathering, but i have nothing but respect for it after seeing this tittieless snake woman

you could have gone the easy route. you could have given her titties. but you didn’t. cause she’s a reptile. thank you mtg. thank you.

She is feeling Fresh and Fabulous. 

SHE SURE IS because she is literally finishing up a shed there, look, you can see the last of it clinging to her tail

but she’s already dressed again, after peeling off the skin that would previously have been under that armor

the only logical conclusion here is that she wanted a picture of herself at her SHINIEST and PRETTIEST and hurried to get dressed once enough of her fresh and shiny new skin was uncovered

I bet her bestie took the picture and has been eagerly waiting with the magical fantasy camera for like, hours

“oh my GOD T’sissra your scales are SO VIBRANT this picture is going to be AMAZING”

Extra bonus points because she used that skin as part of her backdrop. Its like a banner behind her head.

‘Out with the old, in with the glam!’

I read “finishing up a shed” and for a few microseconds I was like “sexy AND an accomplished carpenter”

When they ask you what happened in our era, tell them the first thing to die was the truth.

Cascade of A.I. Fakes About War With Iran Causes Chaos Online

Now that I’m thinking about it, how the $#@% did Grace Augustine not know Jake was going to get Stockholm Syndrome?

After the thing with the thanator and the viperwolves, Jake is half-rescued half-captured by the Omaticaya generally and Neytiri specifically, told “You’re in a new band/tribe/group now, and you’d better start acting like it!” while occasionally getting slapped around. They couldn’t have put the whammy on him more effectively if they’d been doing it on purpose. Not to mention he suddenly went from a human body that was not fully abled, probably in pain, and routinely ignored by at least a subset of women to this other one in which he’s canonically giddy and suddenly there’s this archer lady giving him her albeit unwilling full attention.

Grace was a botanist but Norm was an anthropologist. Someone in there had to know Jake was going to get his switch flipped. Letting him stay was a serious violation of scientific ethics.

Just realized that two of this year’s Oscar nominees for Best Supporting Actress both played witches but in very different contexts.

Reason #1,324,789 of why I love this show.

This was a casual side conversation between Bashir and Sisko about a fellow crew member, completely unrelated to the episode’s plot, and its just so sweet.

It’s nice to know that if you’re a pregnant father-to-be on DS9, your buddies Julian and Miles will build you a hatchling pond, buy you baby clothes, and throw you a shower eagerly attended by the station’s commanding officer (who was practically beaming with joy when he found out that you were expecting).

How wonderful.

This is so much more, though. This is such a massive subversion of 90s toxic masculinity.

A male character is producing offspring, and two male characters are giving him a baby shower, which at the time (and still is) the dominant joke for male characters is how to get out of attending a baby shower.

Add to that Sisko is a absolutely giddy at the thought of new babies, during a time when black men were portrayed at the peak of the toxic masculinity charts, and were usually stereotyped as absent fathers.

The fact that Sisko is a black single father- a very involved, very supportive, very *present* black single father, was a *really big deal*- the writers knew this and were very thoughtful and deliberate with how they approached it. And it’s beautiful.

Sisko is rarely a perfect father, but he’s always a good one.

Has anyone warned @copperbadge yet

What a lot of people outside of Chicago may not realize is that The Beans are a native species to this region and right now is baby season! What you’re seeing there is probably just an instance of a young mature The Bean being kept in a secure enclosure, probably due to some kind of injury that’s being rehabbed.

In urban Chicago around this time of year if you want to go The Bean spotting you mostly just need to keep an eye out around downtown drugstores for formations like this.

I took this picture myself in a Walgreens. As you can see we have a nice healthy-looking family group consisting of a parent The Bean, several juveniles who will often stay with the parent for several years, and some newborns this year who naturally group up protectively near any large sign reading “Chicago”.

The Beans are usually extremely docile and can even be kept as pets once the juveniles separate from their family group, since they are low-maintenance and require only a small flat area such as a desk or bookshelf on which to recline. Fun fact, a group of The Beans such as pictured above is known as a Tchochki!

Are adult The Beans usually around the size of the one in the above photo? The most famous one I know of is about three humans tall. Is that a genetic rarity, or is it more like lobsters?

There’s a lot of debate in TheBean Biology circles about the massive The Bean residing in Millennium Park. It’s not known why this The Bean chose the park or why it has grown to such gargantuan size. I’m not an expert, I just live here, but I tend to agree with the newer theory that they can regularly grow to massive sizes in the wild, but we only tend to encounter smaller ones because such huge sizes generally only occur in deep freshwater lakes.

It’s certainly very unusual to see a The Bean of that size on land. Such a privilege to live in a place where they feel safe enough to take up residence alongside humans.

Mamdani Shuts Down NYC’s Disastrous AI Chatbot

And the funniest part?

this framing really winds me up. no knock on mamdani, but a lot of these key changes are the result of a tremendous amount of unsung work by the DWCP and other agencies and lawmakers. he’s not flipping switches that other politicians have refused to touch, he’s arriving at the moment those switches are ready to flip.

there’s just something off about giving all the credit to a charismatic socialist and ignoring the collective work that made these things actually possible, y’know?

This is exactly what bothers me. Changes like this take hundreds of people and thousands of hours of work to pull off. Everyone wants to sneer at the idea that important things take time, effort, and money to implement, and use Mamdani as evidence that everyone who claims it can’t be done in 5 minutes with some elbow grease is a scam artist and a liar, but it’s flat out not true.

In Mamdani’s own speech, he says:

“Under President Biden, the FTC took sweeping action to go after junk fees and they delivered change. Under Chair Leader Khan, they instituted a junk fees rule that they estimated would save Americans 53 million hours a year that they would otherwise spend searching for the true price that they would have to pay, or $11 billion in time savings over a decade. We are going to deliver similar action on behalf of the 8.5 million New Yorkers who call our city home.”

Lawmakers and agencies have been working to eliminate junk fees since at LEAST 2023, when Gavin Newsom signed a bill banning junk fees in California. Biden then took up the work with the FTC, targeting hidden fees on live event tickets. Biden went on to work with the CFPB to remove junk fees on banks and credit cards. The CFPB is continuing this work, which you can learn more about over here.

Even with the Chatbot thing – Mamdani didn’t just turn it off. He (and especially his crew) worked up a report to show where funds were being wasted in city government, and then did a presentation on it where he pointed to the specific failure of the Chatbot. He still had to go through a process to prove why he was taking action, it just so happened that this was comparatively quick fix, on account of being one single program running on one single government website.

#stop ignoring the work #it has to get done #there is no loophole #there is no perfect person who can just make things happen #there are only people doing the work #and people continuing the work until it is done (via beezelbubbies)

Yes to all of this.

BUT, and this is important, there has to be a leader who wants to do the damn work and who wants these projects enacted.

Yes hundreds of people worked on these, but you wanna know why these things weren’t happening under Mayor Adams? Because he didn’t care. So he didn’t order them to work on it. Because, and this is important, government employees arent going to work on a project unless ordered to. Especially when they’ve been assigned to work on something else.

Leadership matters. Anyone claiming otherwise hasn’t been paying attention to the world the last few years.

I had a more sustinct version of this in one of my reblog tags, but basically yeah. People can do all the work they want, but when the person holding the reigns of the budget tells them the pound sand, that work comes to nothing but wasted effort. Both the hard effort of people on the ground floor and the coordination and cooperation from the people in power are needed for effective change. If one or the other is missing, we get what we’ve had the last couple decades: stagnation and regression.

Please for the love of all things good and true in the world, remember this!!! The progress DOES actually take time and budget! Drill it into your head as we go into the midterm election season!!! There are already people in the comments of this very post comparing Mamdani to encumbant Republicans because “he’s just breaking things”. That’s not what is happening here!

Anyone who bleats about socialist Democrats being the same (or worse!) than conservative Republicans is either an idiot or a psyops. Block them, drown them out and remember that progress is a journey made one step at a time.

SO weird to me that the default assumption in modern fandom is that you must be attracted to your favorite characters. nah man those are just my funky little guys and gals i want to study them under a microscope. i want to put them in a mason jar and shake it and see what happens

One of the surest signs that business executives are failing their way to the top is that every company you so much as order a toothbrush from thinks it’s a sound marketing decision to email their customers multiple times per week, and then when people inevitably “update their email preferences” to tell the company never to email them again, they add more and more checkboxes to the email preferences page and say, oh well you never explicitly told us not to email you about toothpaste, because they only just added the toothpaste checkbox, so now you have to go uncheck the toothpaste box or just start marking all their emails as spam.

And it’s not just retailers that do this! If I donate to your nonprofit, why are you punishing my donation with a constant barrage of spam? A few times a year, sure, send out a newsletter that actually has something to say. Anything more than that indicates to me that your nonprofit is dumping my donation into the bloated salary of some C-suite executive that spends half their day watching TED-X videos and the other half driving competent staff crazy by demanding they do stupid marketing schemes that will drive away donors.

There is a very specific charity… I made one donation at the funeral of someone I didn’t know. They hounded me for years. For years. Phone calls. Mail. Emails. I told them and told them and told them to leave me alone. They have a good mission and good reputation but I am never donating to them again.

Comments are not a pressure but they’re definitely a very positive motivation! I can’t remember how many times I pushed through a writer’s block by reading the comments and remembering that people love the works and want more!

Seconded. If you want another update, you can leave a comment on an earlier chapter. This will establish to the author that people still care about the story.

The Hobbit movies would have been vastly improved by going the same route as the The Princess Bride movie

Just constant cuts to the future with Frodo chiming in as Bilbo tells the story to be like “that’s not how you told it when I was little!” and “wait, you never mentioned these orcs chasing you!”

And Bilbo hems and haws like “well, I didn’t want to scare the children” etc and we see the same scene get replayed multiple times with slight variations as Frodo and Bilbo bicker about the details of what actually happened

(And then we can do an extra gut-punch at the end where Bilbo tells the little kids “yeah, the dwarves were all fine, nobody died, they recovered from their wounds and went on to rule the kingdom” and maybe we get a glimpse of a universe where that happened… but Bilbo turns away as soon as the children are gone and stared out the window while he relives the truth all over again 😭)

That would have been a much better way to pad for length to get three movies than having Shai Halud show up at Erebor.

hi anon,

okay. I’m gonna hit you with something:

turning 18 does not actually change the way you feel about porn or sex or anything. the difference between being seventeen and 364 days and being 18 is nonexistent. there’s not a magical switch that changes you as a person; that comes from lived experience. if you’re 18 and your experience is still that porn and smut and what have you i something that you should feel bad about, it’s still going to feel that way and a birthday won’t change that.

look, the whole notion of “I saw [x] that I shouldn’t have when I was young” is like. okay. so you saw something that was a little mature for you that you didn’t quite get? awesome. did you die? no. most people’s hangups about sexuality don’t come from seeing a rogue titty when they were a teenager, they come from the culture that person was raised in that made seeing a rogue titty feel like something to be ashamed of instead of a completely natural part of life.

story time! when I teach my 4th-6th grade OWL classes (Our Whole Lives, great human development program) I always start by holding a meeting with the kids’ parents. I’ve been doing this for seven years, and every time without fail some of the parents will recall seeing porn for the first time as a kid. these guys were kids when printed porn magazines were still a thing, so they were discovering them in all kinds of places - the bedrooms of their parents or their friends’ parents, at bus stops, in the woods, once even stowed in some farm equipment. and they remember it feeling illicit and exciting, sure, and possibly making them confused or even horny for the first time in their young lives, but like… that’s it. none of these people are irreparably damaged by seeing porn. in fact, they’ve grown up to be the kind of people who go out of their way to make sure their young kids are enrolled in a queer-friendly, body-positive, diversity-embracing sex ed class to counter stereotypes and misinformation they might receive elsewhere.

looking at things that arouse you is morally neutral. it can be a great way to help you learn about what turns you on, and even if it’s not the best source of factual, realistic depictions of sex, it can still help you discover things - hell, I only figured out what the clitoris was by reading Young Justice fanfic (shout out Snaibsel).

you can’t ruin yourself, at any age, with the media you like to consume. what makes you uncomfortable and anxious is the attitude you’ve been taught to have about that media, which is something that has to be actively unlearned, because it’s certainly not going to just disappear on its own when you become a legal adult.

tl;dr obviously no one is making you watch porn and you shouldn’t if it makes you uncomfortable, but if you drop it right now and come back when you’re 18 don’t expect to feel any different if you haven’t done any more unpacking re: the conservative Christianity of it all.

amplifying this reply with permission from @atohii, because it’s a very helpful framing:

ALT

Fanfiction was some of the LEAST BAD stuff I read/consumed when I was under 18. Did it always depict healthy romantic and sexual relationships? No. What it did always do was present romantic/sexual relationships, healthy or otherwise, in the context of characters who, in addition to what else was happening in the story, had lives and interests outside their underpants. They weren’t just there to have sex. By definition, fan stories, even porn-without-plot fan stories, are about characters that the reader knows and that are already by definition, developed. Even if the fanwriter only writes about sex, the character is never only there for sex. That is never the only thing that the character wants. Fanfic is much, much better for teenagers than made-as-porn porn.

You know what else I read when I was younger than OP? A Spell for Chameleon. Piers Anthony can be funny and colorful, but that is not where you go for an under-fifteen to develop healthy attitudes about men, women, and sex. You know what I watched on TV? Cartoons in which all the female characters had boobs out to here for no reason. Cartoons in which the female character (singular) was only there to be someone’s love interest. Did I like love stories because I liked love stories or because that was nearly the only time I got to see a girl on screen? I still don’t know. You know what I got in school? So much boys-will-be-boys sexism that I still haven’t unpacked it all. That stuff messed me up

Read fanfic, kids. Read serious stuff too. Take sex ed. Read the Planned Parenthood teens website. Then read some more fanfic.

If you respond to every single bit of positive news with why it is bad or the people involved are bad, you will not only mentally kill yourself but everyone around you.

Especially if we’re dealing with country-level shit. There’s not one totally good country on the planet. Not one. Okay? So if you respond to a victory in the US or something cool that Norway did or positive news out of Germany with “yeah but [country] is a nightmare actually because [things that are happening],” you are not doing anybody any favors.

You’re just being a tar pit.

And don’t fucking turn this into apologia for the bad shit countries do. That’s not what I’m fucking saying.

Y'all need to learn to take a goddamned W every so often, and to let other people enjoy the occasional W, or we will all mentally fucking die.

every single person at kurzgesagt needs to be dragged into the street and subjected to torments dredged up from the depths of hell itself

i am going to turn into an infinite whirlwind of blades.

Ozempic is a diabetes drug with a side effect of weight loss that is now rarely able to be prescribed for diabetes because of the value it possesses to the medical weight loss market, leading to the development of Mounjaro, a diabetes drug that has a less effective weight loss side effect, which is now under restricted prescription in the uk because it has become valuable to the medical weight loss market, driving the price up.

I am diabetic, I am on Mounjaro, and it’s done better for my HbA1c (blood sugar average) than any medication in the previous ten years of treatment, and would likely push me back into effectively “remission” on a higher dose, which I cannot be prescribed because of market conditions; and if I weren’t already on it from the NHS trial period, I would likely not get it now.

This kind of misinformation OP complains about above kills people.

My Ozempic copay almost doubled this year. It’s the only drug that’s managed to get my A1C to a manageable level after years of Metformin.

Fuck anyone who’s on a GLP1 and doesn’t need it to live.

At the risk of sounding like capitalism can sometimes work, is there a reason the companies can’t increase production? Why couldn’t Novo Nordisk, Eli Lily et al. just make enough of this drug for all the patients who have a use for it? Customers who don’t use the drug solely because they can’t get it mean less profit for them. If the answer is “building that factory would take five years,” then reserving the drug for diabetes patients should be a temporary thing.

This is the first time in my life when it’s actually fair to criticize the President for gas prices. I’ve spent so many years explaining to people that Presidents have pretty limited influence over the price of oil and that they do not have a magical lower-gas-prices button on their desk, I almost forgot that the President does actually have a raise-gas-prices button on their desk called “start a war with Iran for no reason”

#generally speaking presidents have very few ways to make the economy better#other than in the long term enforcing antritrust laws and stuff

#however as this administration has shown#presidents have MANY ways to make the economy worse#it’s just that most of them have not been stupid enough to bang on all of them like a toddler on a toy piano

Presidents have a lot of stuff they can do to make the economy better, but almost all of them take more than four years to show results. For example, Biden put a huge investment in infrastructure.

I would love to make one post about aotearoa without people bringing up hobbits on it to be so honest with you guys

listen I understand. they’re amazing movies and I do think it’s awesome that they were filmed here!!!!! but holy shit! it’s the only thing anyone seems to be able to talk about when there is ANY discussion of these islands!! I would super love to be able to discuss our ecology, politics, culture, landscapes, and people without needing to hear about hobbiton every single time

I don’t knowwww. it shouldn’t be a huge deal but at the same time, the image an overwhelming amount of people have of aotearoa comes from those movies. our struggling ecosystems get overshadowed by fields and grassy hills and other non-native biomes that were explicitly chosen to depict the england-inspired fantasy land of middle earth. these same biomes only exist here because english settlers historically slashed and burned massive swaths of forest to create them, and now they’re framed as famous and beautiful. mass deforestation of precious native forests. I don’t know man. it annoys me juuuuust a little when every other post I make about this place gets a lotr joke plastered on it.

hey, do you have any cool facts about aotearoa i can pivot to when people bring it up in conversation

• there are 53 volcanoes in the most populated city in the country
• the largest eagle to ever exist (pouākai) was endemic to aotearoa
• same with the tallest bird to ever exist (moa)
• tuatara is only remaining species in the order sphenodontia and only exists here (for context- the other three extant reptile orders are snakes+lizards, turtles+tortoises, and crocodiles+alligators+caimans)
• only two native land mammals and they’re both tiny bats
• kea is the only alpine parrot on earth
• wētāpunga is the heaviest insect on earth
• hard to condense into a quick “fun fact” but matariki is an incredibly celebration that has a lot of fascinating history and tradition behind it, totally worth researching!!
• less of a fact more of a “check this out” but showing people photos of rotorua’s geothermal areas is a favourite of mine
• we were the first nation to give women the right to vote in 1893, almost a decade before any other country on earth!
• we have the most colourful fungi out of anywhere on the planet!! this is due to our massive abundance of native birds. the fungi mimics the bright colours of fruit, causing birds to eat them!!

people talk about how we need to bring back “don’t feed the trolls” rhetoric for modern internet ragebait and I agree but also I think the most useful thing from the Old Internet that I miss is LURKING

be a lurker. just read things and think about them without feeling the need to weigh in or call out or disseminate everything you encounter. it’s so nice and so freeing and it’s a good way to learn things.

I have frequently regretted getting involved in shit that didn’t involve me online but you know what I’ve never regretted doing? Lurking. literally lurk moar

idk where it was but i remember reading an excerpt of something about how child victims of sexual assault often come up with strategies to protect themselves (mentally or physically) as well as protect one another, despite often being depicted as helpless objects that have things done to them with no reaction. & then i think about how widely accepted it was in my middle + high schools that you could not depend on the counselors for jack shit, especially if you were a mentally ill kid. its just aggravating how children are never seen as active subjects. children are seen as deserving of protection, but you are never allowed to help yourself. you must wait for an adult to decide you are worthy of help, and you only get what help they decide you need. in middle school i got in trouble for skipping math class to have panic attacks in the bathroom. no one asked why i had panic attacks, they just reprimanded me for not going to the counselor (they also did not ask why i, a child with social anxiety, felt safer alone than with an adult i did not know or trust). so often i see kids who are struggling with bullying get told “tell an adult!” with 0 acknowledgement of how the adults in their life may be completely unhelpful or actively dangerous, and how kids are often extremely aware of this dynamic. me and my friends were a mentally ill children who were abused but not in the exact ways which are acknowledged as dangerous abuse (and even if they were, many children do not want to risk being put in the system for various reasons) and we had to share knowledge of the adults in our lives to protect ourselves and each other. this is all very rambly but i just hate how children’s knowledge and strategies for survival are not recognized. i hate how children have a right to safety but only if its an adult doing the saving- because if they take matters into their own hands they are punished for it. safety, whether intentionally or not, can end up being another way for adults to exert control over children’s actions & deny their autonomy because children are still seen as objects to be managed by adults instead of people in their own right

This is some systemic shit right here and it needs addressing if we actually want kids to be safe.

We deny children agency in every possible way because they are small, fragile, and inconvenient. And so much of it is just down to the inconvenience - safety doesn’t enter into it, you just want the child over here but they want to be over there, but you don’t have time for them to be over there so yoink goes the agency. Perhaps with some punishment, so they don’t do it again.

It used to be - you know, I’ve heard - if you didn’t want to be home, you could just leave. As a kid, you were free to leave. There were places you were legally allowed to exist as a kid, without everyone being up in your business about why you were allowed out unsupervised. Maybe at some point you’d go back to have a warm place to sleep, maybe, but that’s it. You could walk, or bike, or get on a bus. Now? You’re a hazard. You’re in danger. You need an adult, with a car!

Bitch, sometimes the adults ARE the danger, and the other adults don’t notice. So what are you gonna do? Me? I shut myself in my room and hid, that was all I had, but I did have a computer with internet - sometimes. That was enough to get me out of there eventually, but that’s getting to be all anyone has. Physically, that’s not enough. Kids need somewhere to run to.

If you can do that for ‘em, do. And don’t ask why. If they think you can help, they’ll tell you.

“I’m going to drive through Appalachia, should I be scared of the inbred hill folk and the cryptids? 😱😱😱😱” no bitch, be scared of sliding off a mountain into a valley and not being found for months or years.

they’re going to be insinuating Bigfoot got you in YouTube docs while your Ford Taurus is upside down at the bottom of a mountain

The Western US has guard rails everywhere they could possibly be needed, but in Appalachia, guard rails are for sissies

I think a lot of us would like to have guard rails. It’s not a matter of pride but a matter of infamously shitty and neglected civil infrastructure in Appalachia as a product of local corruption and perpetual state underfunding.

In 1977, the mayor of Vulcan West Virginia wrote to the Soviet Union and East Germany requesting foreign aid to replace the only bridge leading into town, an old swinging footbridge that had collapsed. This was the final straw that forced the West Virginia Legislature to cough up $1.3 million dollars to replace the bridge. Not the fact residents had been fording the river or using unsecured crossings to get to their homes for two years, the bad press generated by a Soviet journalist visiting the area to assess the situation.

It’s been almost 50 years since that and to be honest not much has changed. A lot of the bridges that would have been considered unsound at that time are still up and being driven over everyday.

Driving on poorly maintained roads over flat land is scary enough but driving on a poorly maintained, cracked, potholed, far too narrow road up the side of a mountain with a sheer drop and no guard rail is enough to give anyone a panic attack. Driving over 125+ year old, narrow, rusty one lane bridges that span rushing rocky rivers is something you SHOULD be scared of in Appalachia.

I love that mayor. He’s my new hero. The BALLS you’d need to do that during the Cold War.

Teenagers are like that because every problem feels the same amount of Catastrophic. There’s no sense of scale going on there cause they lack frame of reference. This isn’t the fault of The Teenager but it does explain the Discourse Circles I was in when I was younger. Like it operates in both “blowing shit that doesn’t matter WAY out of proportion” and “not taking Real Problems seriously enough”. This is why dni banners are like that

I fear the only cure for this is to simply stop being a teenager. If you’re an adult and still like this I hope you stop being a teenager soon

when I was a teenager, I was right. Nothing I was going through would have been acceptable for an adult. You’re at a stage where you’re old enough to not be a child and given a whole lot of responsibility but you are not given any power and that’s the issue. Powerless people act out and that’s valid.

Teenagers are Like That because, for one, they’re developmentally ready to start transitioning to meaningful adult responsibility but are artificially infantilized by the society the live in, and it drives them a little bonkers. It’s like if we all decided that it was actually harmful for babies to learn to walk, so we should keep all children immobilized in hamster cages until they’re 10, and then concluded that children are so irrational for crying instead of sitting peacefully in their cages.

And for two, because adults constantly tell teenagers that every problem is the same amount of Catastrophic. When you’re a teenager, you’re constantly inundated with messages from parents, teachers, and everyone around you that you are living The Most Consequential Stage Of Life, during which any slight mishap can derail you FOREVER! If you get a bad grade on a test, you’ll lose your GPA, and you’ll never get into a Good College, and you’ll never get a Good Career, and you’ll be Poor Forever. If you befriend the wrong person, you’ll Go Down The Wrong Path and end up Ruining Your Life. If you make one mistake, you might as well hold up a liquor store while snorting cocaine off a toilet seat.

Now, when I was a teen, I dealt with this pressure by developing debilitating anxiety, but it’s unsurprising that some other teens deal with it by deciding “If one bad grade is as bad as holding up a liquor store while snorting cocaine off a toilet, I might as well go ahead and hold up a liquor store while snorting cocaine off a toilet.”

I have more than one person in the notes of my post saying they did not in fact know that the ACA stopped insurance companies from being able to deny coverage for a pre-existing condition in case you were wondering where we’re at. People don’t know the ACA and Obamacare are the same thing, they don’t know it’s why they have healthcare, they don’t even know what it does. How do you even deal with that?

ETA:

ALT

walking into the sea

This is why I think the Dems have a communication problem, not a platform problem. The Biden Administration’s work on infrastructure was pretty darn good, but people only found out about it if they took an interest and looked.

This is why we need an educated voter base. I learned about how the McKinley tariff raised prices in grade school, public grade school.

That was long enough ago that I know what a preexisting condition is.