Lambent Light Rays @lambentlightrays - Tumblr Blog

"No one remembered my birthday-" Well, but did YOU tell anyone it was coming up and you wanted to celebrate it with them?

"I wish someone would see through it when I tell people I'm fine-" Well, but have YOU considered not lying when people ask you how you're doing?

"I am so resentful of my friend because they keep doing this thing that really bothers me-" Well, but have YOU directly communicated that the thing is bothering you?

"I am burning out because my friend keeps expecting me to help them with serious struggles-" Well, but have YOU tried to establish the boundaries you need to feel okay?

"No one ever asks me about this thing I really care about-" Well, but have YOU brought it up yourself?

"I miss my friend but they haven't texted me-" Well, but have YOU been reaching out to them?

Sometimes people are mean, uncaring assholes, in which case you get to be mad. But sometimes you just need to communicate better. Try communication before you assume someone doesn't care!

snipertrifle

Having someone who knows you on such a deep level that they see past your mask, or sense you need a check in is such a deep satisfying fantasy. It's up there with living in a cottagecore farm, or buying all your friends houses when you win the lottery. But you have to make peace with the fact that this is also a fantasy. It is unfair to expect people to "just know" when to respect your boundaries or to push them.

Being cared for is not a fantasy. But you have to let people know you need it. And you have to understand that sometimes they will let you down. Just like you totally could live in a cute farm, but you still have to shovel shit, and the crops sometimes die anyway. Or maybe you win the lottery, but you still have to manage your money and learn real estate law.

The fantasy isn't the caring, the fantasy is not having to do the work. And it sucks. It's embarrassing. But like the meme says, it's not rotten if it's YOU. So do it for yourself.

lifeafterpsychiatry

"The fantasy isn't the caring, the fantasy is not having to do the work"! Thank you for that addition. Because it's not a naive expectation to want someone to care to treat you right. But it requires communication and mutual effort to actually get there

c-is-for-circinate

There are exactly two takes on 'do your child soldiers kill people or not?' that I really respect, and it's Fullmetal Alchemist and Animorphs.

c-is-for-circinate

From the replies:

@nordicninja Aaaand Avatar the last Airbender

And like, okay, true! But also consider: on this particular front, AtLA is good at this because it is a solid 8.5/10 on the FMA side of this scale.

(The 8.5/10 isn't a critique of AtLA, which is an excellent show on all counts, but it doesn't quite measure up to the FMA threshhold here simply because of the limitations of being an American kids' show. It can do the thing, but it can't foreground the thing or spend five seasons of anime/27 volumes of manga meditating on the ravages and implications of violence, because it's busy also being aimed at 10-year-olds and about other stuff too.)

Witness:

You could defeat the enemy, if you killed him. Your allies say you should. It would work.

It wouldn't even make you a bad person -- not here, not now, not in these circumstances. Of course you wouldn't be "as bad as they are," that's bullshit. Putting down a single mad dog does not equal literal genocide. FFS.

You could do it. You should do it. It would work, and isn't that the most important thing? To stop the horror? In the light of all the sheer destruction and evil at play, your own personal lily-white rejection of culpability is purely selfish. Isn't it?

But, god, you don't want to. You don't want to kill. The whole point is that life is important, is sacred, is worth protecting. You haven't been forced to yet. You keep finding ways around it. You've seen enough death. You don't want to do it.

Here and now, if you did -- it would fix the problem. It would fix things! It would save the day! The world would be inarguably better. You know this!

You know this. You know it because the world will not stop telling you this. Everything you've seen, everything you've been taught. Everything the people you love and respect say to you. And it's not a lie, it's not made up, it's true -- killing, here, in this one case, would help.

Why is the world so set on forcing you to kill? Why is this how the world works, that a child (you're not as young as you were when you started, but you're a child, you were a child, the first time somebody assumed you would someday simply have to be a murderer) gets handed a weapon and made to use it?

We are using the rules that the world set. We are using the rules that the genocidal maniac set. They are the same rules, because there's a reason genocidal maniacs are able to come to power in the first place, because the world is built in a way that violence works.

You know this. You're good at it! You're skilled at violence. It's how you've come so far.

But.

((and you know, the only reason you're able to have these thoughts, is because other people have already killed for you. will kill for you again. will wear the blood on their hands to save your life. somebody else is taking it so you don't have to, and you do not get to forget that.))

But maybe, if you're skilled enough. If you're good enough. If you can find a third option. Maybe, maybe, if you are just clever enough, if you're willing to risk losing entirely, you can do more than save the day.

Maybe you can rewrite the rules. Maybe you can rebel, not just against the genocidal horror villain about to doom the world, but against the entire world in the process.

If you're good enough to find the loophole -- to master the magic -- to put everything you've ever learned into practice. If you can find another way. If you can prove that another way exists.

Maybe you get to do more than close the door on one evil.

Maybe you get to open a new door on the possibility of changing the world.

c-is-for-circinate

And also:

@thoughtful-collections Could you go into the Animorphs side of the child soldier question? Obviously they do kill and I think one character even kills many of the yerks while they are defenceless and justifies it as a necessary step to win. I suppose that series is saying there is no avoiding murder/killing/getting your hands dirty in war?

Yesssss

Look, there are a lot of child soldiers in the genre, whatever 'genre' that may be. Some kill easily, thoughtlessly, like any action movie star. Some have Important Moral Lessons on how killing makes us no better than the bad guys. Many of them get their very own generous plot device get-out-of-jail free card: either they have some form of captivity that their opponents get sent to at the end of a fight and we never have to think too hard about false imprisonment without trial (Steven Universe; at least one instance of Power Rangers?; Batman and Robin generally; etc), or, their opponents aren't really people, so it doesn't actually count as murder (media as diverse as the Persona series all the way back to good old Buffy the Vampire Slayer). Sometimes, through sheer force of will, grit, and absolute unparalleled protagonist energy, child soldiers get to avoid killing in a world that makes it a genuine option.

Animorphs looked at all of those options, and it said, nah.

You want a war story, little child? Okay, the books say. Here's a war story. This is war.

Here's how it starts: you're goofing around with your friends one night. You take an ill-advised turn. You watch somebody get horrifically murdered.

No, you can't save him. Yes, you can save yourselves. Get used to that. Get used to it so, so fast.

You're on a trolley. Up ahead are two tracks. On one side: a dozen evil aliens. On the other side: your brother. Make a choice.

Good job, you didn't crash the train into a cliff. By the way, did we mention there are a thousand more tracks? More people tied to each and every one?

You get to put your hands on the steering wheel. You get to drive the trolley. This is a gift. Make a choice.

(Refusing to act is still a decision.)

You can jump off the train, if you want. You don't have to be the one to steer. Maybe you'll even survive the fall. Maybe the friends you're leaving behind will be good enough to make sure they don't run you over on your way down.

Your mom is on one of the tracks, by the way. Your dad. Your sisters, your cousins. Your brother, still.

You don't have to steer. You don't have to do this. You can let the train take its course, you can let it plow through all of humanity. You can let it happen. You get to do that, if it's what you want to do.

Nobody is coming to save you.

On one track: the aliens have names, thoughts, dreams, personalities. On the other track: there are six billion humans on this planet today.

Every single option in front of you is a war crime. If you're lucky, you'll get to pick which one.

(Refusing to act is still a decision.)

It's fun sometimes, driving a train. When there's nobody in the way, for just a little while. When you can pretend you're mowing down enemies in a video game. When you can give into the rush of adrenaline and just be glad you have the skill.

Maybe, maybe somebody will come to save you. They'll take over steering. You won't have to choose.

(Refusing to act is still a decision.)

Who will they choose to hit? Will they care? Will they care enough?

You watch TV. You watch Xena, and X-Files, and Buffy. You can pretend to live in a world where your enemies are nameless monsters without souls, if you want. If that makes it easier.

Is it easier, to kill them soft and vulnerable and completely powerless, unable to fight back? Does that feel better than killing the ones hunting you down, weapons in hand?

You are looking for a loophole. You are looking, and looking, and looking for a loophole. You don't get to fight monsters without souls. You don't get to lock them up in tiny bubble jail. They are going to kill you. This is what you get.

It's you. You're the one standing here. This is what's happening.

Refusing to act is still a decision.

(There is a loophole, eventually. A third path. One of you finds it, eventually.)

(It would not have worked, without years of war first. It took you years of war to find it and if you hadn't killed so, so many, it would not have worked.)

You don't get to be good, in war. You don't get to save the day by sacrificing your own life and remaining morally pure. That would be too easy. War means dead bodies. That's what it means.

That doesn't mean you give yourself over to despair. That doesn't mean you shrug and figure the lives being spent don't matter. You don't get to throw your own moral code on the altar of heroic sacrifice and claim to be the real victim here. It never stops mattering. It will never, ever get to stop mattering.

That doesn't mean you never fight. It just means that when you choose to step up and fight for something, you'd better be goddamn sure it's worth the cost, because chances are somebody a lot less powerful than you is going to be the one to pay.

On one track: Your brother. Your cousin. Seventeen thousand unarmed, helpless enemy agents.

On the other track: a new train's barreling straight at you and all six billion members of the human race. All-out slaughterous war. Giving over the steering wheel to the last hands that decided the best answer to their problems was genocide.

(REFUSING TO ACT IS STILL A DECISION)

You make a choice.

onetruesirius

obligatory Open Letter addition:

Dear Animorphs Readers:

Quite a number of people seem to be annoyed by the final chapter in the Animorphs story. There are a lot of complaints that I let Rachel die. That I let Visser Three/One live. That Cassie and Jake broke up. That Tobias seems to have been reduced to unexpressed grief. That there was no grand, final fight-to-end-all-fights. That there was no happy celebration. And everyone is mad about the cliffhanger ending.

So I thought I'd respond.

Animorphs was always a war story. Wars don't end happily. Not ever. Often relationships that were central during war, dissolve during peace. Some people who were brave and fearless in war are unable to handle peace, feel disconnected and confused. Other times people in war make the move to peace very easily. Always people die in wars. And always people are left shattered by the loss of loved ones.

That's what happens, so that's what I wrote. Jake and Cassie were in love during the war, and end up going their seperate ways afterward. Jake, who was so brave and capable during the war is adrift during the peace. Marco and Ax, on the other hand, move easily past the war and even manage to use their experience to good effect. Rachel dies, and Tobias will never get over it. That doesn't by any means cover everything that happens in a war, but it's a start.

Here's what doesn't happen in war: there are no wondrous, climactic battles that leave the good guys standing tall and the bad guys lying in the dirt. Life isn't a World Wrestling Federation Smackdown. Even the people who win a war, who survive and come out the other side with the conviction that they have done something brave and necessary, don't do a lot of celebrating. There's very little chanting of 'we're number one' among people who've personally experienced war.

I'm just a writer, and my main goal was always to entertain. But I've never let Animorphs turn into just another painless video game version of war, and I wasn't going to do it at the end. I've spent 60 books telling a strange, fanciful war story, sometimes very seriously, sometimes more tongue-in-cheek. I've written a lot of action and a lot of humor and a lot of sheer nonsense. But I have also, again and again, challenged readers to think about what they were reading. To think about the right and wrong, not just the who-beat-who. And to tell you the truth I'm a little shocked that so many readers seemed to believe I'd wrap it all up with a lot of high-fiving and backslapping. Wars very often end, sad to say, just as ours did: with a nearly seamless transition to another war.

So, you don't like the way our little fictional war came out? You don't like Rachel dead and Tobias shattered and Jake guilt-ridden? You don't like that one war simply led to another? Fine. Pretty soon you'll all be of voting age, and of draft age. So when someone proposes a war, remember that even the most necessary wars, even the rare wars where the lines of good and evil are clear and clean, end with a lot of people dead, a lot of people crippled, and a lot of orphans, widows and grieving parents.

If you're mad at me because that's what you have to take away from Animorphs, too bad. I couldn't have written it any other way and remained true to the respect I have always felt for Animorphs readers.

K.A. Applegate

animentality

weaselle

Whenever I think about the value of something being done by a person who really understands the job from a lifetime of experience, I think of my first restaurant job. My goal was to work every position, and I started with a year and a half in the dish pit at 16yo.

When i started as a dishwasher, i was trained by an old career dish pit man named Claudio. He'd spent his whole life washing dishes. It allowed him to move to just about any city in the world that he wanted to and get a job without having to deal with complex hiring processes or strict resumé requirements. Which was the main thing he wanted out of a career. I still think about him.

He'd seen a lot of people come through that station who either didn't consider it a real job or thought it was beneath them, on their way to "better" or "more important" things. And, in retrospect, those first two days he was sort of doing the minimum with me that he could do and still respect himself when he told the manager he'd trained me.

But, maybe it was because i was really interested in learning all the positions there were in a restaurant because i knew they were ALL important, or because i was a hard worker, or maybe it was because i tried to have real conversations with him in my broken spanish and did my best to not make him speak any english unless he wanted to, but after a couple days there was a big shift in the way he and i worked together, and he started to really teach me.

That place ran the dish pit with one dishwasher, so when he was done training me I was going to be doing the job on my own.

The thing that stuck with me the most, for the rest of my restaurant career, was this... and it wasn't just the actual things he was saying, but a completely new way of looking at what i was doing within the context of how the restaurant ran. I came in for my 3rd day and he said

"When you work alone, you want to go home by midnight?"

we clocked on at 3:30 and took a half hour lunch break and usually skipped our tens, so, yeah i absolutely did want to get off work by midnight

Then, even tho i already knew where most of everything was by that time, he took me around and showed me all the dishes, cups, pots and pans, spatulas, silverware, had me look at all of it. Then he told me to remember that almost every one of the dishes I was looking at would be used more than once by the end of our shift- we were clocking on to wash the entire building full of dishes multiple times.

Then he led me back over to the industrial dishwasher most restaurants have, which looks like this:

and then this 60 year old career dishwasher from Mexico City said the thing that changed how I looked at restaurant jobs forever

"This machine takes two full minutes to run a cycle. We are on the clock for 8 hours. That means we have a maximum of 240 times we can run this machine. If you want to wash all those dishes, clean your station, mop, and clock off by midnight? This machine has to be on and running every second of the shift.

If you don't have a full load of dishes collected, scraped, rinsed, stacked, and ready to go into the dishwasher the second it's done every single time? You can't do it. If, over the course of 8 hours, you let this machine lay idle for just one minute in between finishing each load and being turned on again? Instead of 240 loads, you'll do 160 loads.

[like, literally, he had done this math, he had these exact figures]

160 loads instead of 240 loads means you are doing 20 loads in an hour instead of 30 loads. That means the dishes are going to pile up. The cooks will run out of pots and pans and will have to stop and wait for you, the servers will run out of plates and cups and have to stop and wait for you, and your night is going to SUCK. Every part of how this restaurant works can grind to a halt because of that idle minute between dish loads, and if it does you'll have an entire building of people in a hurry and all waiting on you.

And it means you're going to be here until 2 am doing the 200+ loads of dishes this restaurant goes through every night.

For this to work, you MUST have this dishwasher on and running every minute of the shift. As soon as you turn it on you have two minutes to have the next load ready. See these large items i put to the side down here? One or two of them takes up all the space in the machine. I keep them here so that if the machine finishes and shuts off before i'm ready for it i can stick one of these in there and turn it on again immediately. You have to think like that to do this job without stress."

The way he was looking at how the whole restaurant ran, the way he was looking at how he'd spend each minute of the entire shift, the way he broke down what the physical limits were and how to max them out so he could do his job and go home on time without stressing out... The way this 60 year old guy, who had never had professional ambitions beyond being a dishwasher, was still such a competent and brilliant expert in his field.

It was all such an important lesson, and one that stayed with me through every position i went on to work in restaurants, dish pit, busser, server, cook, all the way up through manager before I finally got out of my restaurant career

Claudio never wanted to be anything but a dishwasher who didn't stay any later than he had to.

But he knew how that restaurant ran better than most of the other people in it. I never had a chance to truly thank him for the specific lesson he taught me, because while it had an immediate impact, I didn't really understand how valuable a lesson it was until much later.

But I've thought about Claudio and what i learned from him many MANY times in my life.

marisolinspades

All of this. Disaster befalls any company that holds no regard for the expertise of the lowest level staff.

In my younger years I worked at a medical office that managed both mental health and addiction recovery. The company had purchased an empty lot down the road from the building we rented to build a better facility with larger capacity. The CEO worked for months with the architect, and just as they were finalizing everything they happened to let me - who was the receptionist at that time - take a gander at the blueprints. It took all of three seconds for two major issues to jump out at me.

“The receptionist can’t see the waiting room from her desk with this layout.” I said. “It’s around the corner and blocked by a wall.”

“Is that important?” They asked.

“Do you want me to be able to keep track of the patients who are waiting?” I asked.

“Isn’t that what the sign-in sheet is for?” They asked me.

“Not everyone who comes here is signing in for an appointment, some are coming to check in, some people are here for the group therapy and need to be directed to the other side of the building, some people are painfully shy and if I don’t appear warm and inviting they won’t approach.” I explain.

“How often does that even happen?” They asked.

“Every day.” I explain.

“Bullshit.” They said.

“I’m not joking at all. Also, where is the chart room?” I asked.

“Oh, over here.” They said, pointing to a tiny closet on the far side of the building from the receptionist and check out desks. It was tucked neatly beside the CEO’s office. To get there the secretaries would have to go through two sets of security doors and it would be a five minute walk each way.

“Why isn’t it next to the front office, since that’s where the people who use it are?” I asked.

“We had concerns about people just going into the chart room to goof off and not do their work. It takes them away from their desks too much. You should only go in the chart room twice a day - once in the morning to pull the charts for the day, and once in the evening to put way the charts. It would remain locked and the CEO would have the key and let you in to supervise.” They said.

“We pull charts the day before so everything is ready to go and we can alert staff if a patient with additional needs is coming in. We have to go in the chart room every time a patient calls in that’s having a problem with their meds or is in crisis or otherwise has a question for the nurse. We have to go in there every time someone cancels and we are able to fit a waitlisted patient in. We go in there 20 - 30 times a day for legitimate reasons. The only reason any of us has ever gone in there to take a minute was when we got news that a patient had died and we were crying. And even then, we filed charts as we sobbed because no one in this office has free time.”

They stared at me.

“Sit with me for an hour and see what happens up here.” I said.

They took the blueprints away from me before I could keep looking at them, but they took me up on sitting with me. They didn’t last an hour. They changed the blueprints to fix both things I’d pointed out.

Unfortunately, they didn’t let me keep looking at it and they never asked the janitor what he thought, so no one caught the final fatal flaw in the design.

There were no closets in the entire building. Nowhere to put our supplies. And I’m not talking just a place for stationary and pens. I mean no janitorial closet. Nowhere to put paper towels and toilet paper or cleaning products. Nowhere to put holiday decorations or anything at all. They completely forgot about storage of any kind and immediately started eyeballing my hard-won chart room for it.

They wound up putting all the supplies in the cabinets under the sinks in the public bathrooms. And, surprising to no one, all of it got stolen after our first week in the new building. All our spare keyboards and monitors and phones and even our paper towels just walked out of the building. Because the CEO who had never worked a lower level job in his life wasn’t convinced closets were worth it.

ijustgotherebro

neovagina-penisis-evangelion

When people argue that food from Chinese and Mexican restaurants in the US are not 'real' representations of that culture's cuisine ignore the historical reality that these dishes were developed by diasporic communities striving to recreate the flavors of home with available resources. Such criticism frames adaptation as a loss of authenticity, rather than recognizing it as a sincere and evolving expression of culture by people separated from their homeland.

ninhaoma-ya

Too good to leave in the tags

blackr23

260509

Come let’s go back to life #StrayKids #스트레이키즈 #한 #HAN #SKZ_PLAYER #슼즈플레이어 #YouMakeStrayKidsStay

bucketofdeltav

So my beta reader for the Big Fics is an astrophysicist, right. Who is currently also writing a hard sci-fi novel about the exploration of Phobos (more power to them, I cannot with the physics required for that, best I can do is soft sci-fi/fantasy and that reminds me I should finish that story).

Anyway I was bitching about how hard it is to come up with feasible planets in Star Wars because sometimes you need a new planet from scratch and sometimes you need to know more about a planet than the 'has jungles, is probably a moon technically' than Wookieepedia will give you, and they're like 'oh yeah I can do something about that'.

So they've written (in Matlab but they swear it will run as a .exe as well and I may be conscripted to embed it as a web tool at some point) a star system generator.

You input what you know about the planet (ecosystem, population, sun colour, does it have liquid water, does it have a moon or moons, is it a moon or moons, temperature averages, atmosphere, you get me) and it will give you the... everything else about the star system, in obedience to real-universe physics. And if you input nothing you get a randomly generated star system.

And I’m like oh I know people who will be into this with a vengeance, and they're not on Tumblr, so this is me seeing who exactly would be keen on, and I cannot stress this enough, a real-physics comprehensive star system generator.

It's still in the debugging phase (last error fixed: every planet wants to have a population of exactly 5000 regardless of other factors, turned out to be a missing equals sign somewhere), but I'm psyched for this and trying to gauge interest for how high a priority 'make this an accessible web tool' needs to be.

melyzard

elodieunderglass

@bucketofdeltav says the URL is here: http://tumblr.com/star-system-generator

Follow @star-system-generator and get more of the good stuff by joining Tumblr today. Dive in!

leonkennedysprostate

"don't assign human morality to non human things" is so true except when it comes to printers. they know what they are, they understand dilemmas and ethics and morality. they choose to be how they are, they choose to be evil, at their very core they are rotten

rhianne-k

Merry finals week to all that celebrate! May God have mercy on our souls :)

lifeofclonewars

Happy May the Fourth!!! Here's more textposts :D

stayobsessed

Thunderous MV

barillapasta

i95 perfec t place for european to c\ross! cars very Soft and Slow european cross easily put european on 95. Put football fan On 95. no problems ever on i95 because good Crosswalks and Stoplights for european walk to met life stadium for european pedestrian culture. i95 yes a place for a european put european on 95 can trust new jersey for giveing good love to european. friend i95

sceptixfakemon

i really genuinely wish I could hit chatgpt with my bare fists and hear its pityful electronic voice fade into glitched robotic gibberish and choking beeps as I hit it before I smash it for good and it shuts the fuck up forever

sceptixfakemon

no no it's fine

sceptixfakemon

why are so many people wondering if I'm horny for chatgpt. it's like the most unfuckable robot ever created heeell NO

sceptixfakemon

dragging you out of the tags like it's the last thing I'll ever do on this site

puppyms

급류(Into The Current) ࿐࿔ Seungmin ࿐࿔ art by myzy.space

akaanmo

🕷🕸

agendratum

i do love that seungmin was like hey 3racha could you each write me a song

and all three of them were like sure thing buddy have this most heart wrenching shit we could find

agendratum

and just to be clear

he then performed it just as heart wretchingly in response

lesbianshepard

Current twitter drama is Europeans confidently declaring that they don't need to drive or use overpriced public transport to get to the MetLife stadium for the World Cup; they will simply walk down the highway to get there. Girl it's New Jersey. They're gonna splatter you for fun.

lesbianshepard

If you manage to get on the turnpike before the cops stop you, a soccer mom is gonna do the Jersey slide in a RAV4 and turn your entire group into a wet speedbump

bunjywunjy

this? you want to walk down this????

please say sike

bunjywunjy

IT'S NOT A FUCKING STREET ITS AN 8-LANE SUPERHIGHWAY THAT GOES OVER A SWAMP

hapalopus

footpath

bunjywunjy

that is grass. just like ur ass, if you try to walk this thing

phantomomo

Image me gently taking your hand as I tell you the following:

This is ABSOLUTELY a perfectly fine footpath.

In fact, with how much space I’m seeing here, it is entirely plausible, that the European hordes will just create a temporary little Wanderweg right next to the highway. With that much space they might not even have to interfere with traffic.

But also have you seen the space between your highways? I‘d say the gaps each easily fit another whole stream of European walking hordes. Or maybe even two going opposite directions :D

bunjywunjy

tightly grips your hand with both of my sweaty hands.

the grass is not a permanent feature. there just happens to be a chunk of it there. the side of the road can vary from grass to swampwater ditches to steep embankments to absolutely nothing within a very short distance.

they will call in every highway enforcer in the state and mass incarcerate the lot of you before they allow you to Darwin Award yourselves across 6 lanes of traffic into an international incident or, (their real concern) impede the progress of the single most important north-south interstate corridor in america, ball kicky game be damned.

(I'm starting to believe that a fair number of you in the notes have We're Better Than Stupid Americans embedded so deeply into your cultural identity that you will Just Not Listen to anything we say to you about the material circumstances about the place we live in, rather than taking us at our word that there is a reason that most Americans travel the way we do and it's a good reason.)

saltedweather

do.... do the Europeans realize that all eight to ten lanes of that highway are also full of vehicles going potentially over 100km/hr?

and that our government has extremely lax safety standards for our vehicles and trucks, such that many of the SUVs and pickups on our roads frequently kill pedestrians because they can't see them?

and ALSO that we ship most of our goods by 18-wheeler, which are also on the same highway?

i pass so. much. roadkill. on my commute. worse right now, because it's spring and so the raccoons and possums are all out foraging after a hungry winter. it's just. it's very, very, very easy to die by car in this country.

saltedweather

so this is one of two highway bridges that crosses the Hackensack river into the swamp island that houses the Metlife stadium.

that shoulder is wide enough, technically, to walk single file. but the speed limit of the cars is 80km/hr, but most of the time, cars will be going between 88 and 100, on average. and you'd have to walk on the shoulder to cross the river, at least.

it may not be obvious in that picture, but the ground with the marsh grasses visible on the other side of the little wall (called a "jersey barrier") is at least a foot or two below the level of the road, and it's also going to be soft, foul-smelling muck - the kind that sucks your feet down several inches at least. there will be broken glass embedded in it throughout, because of the number of accidents that have happened over the many years of this highway existing.

i have walked along highways - including an interstate, for highway cleanup. I walk regularly, instead of driving, when i can. My friends back in the Pacific Northwest walk most of the time, or take public transit (in the actual cities of the US, there is public transit, even if it's not up to European standards. it does exist. it just doesn't exist in the suburbs). A lot of people in the area where I now live walk, because not everyone has a car, or has access to a car all the time. I've walked along busy roads for long stretches, and I've walked along highway shoulders with no sidewalks, and I've walked along dangerous ground under highways because there was no sidewalk or pedestrian bridge and the highway was dangerous.

Walking from New York to New Jersey is. it's a really really, really, really bad idea. I've done the drive several times. I cannot tell you how bad an idea it is. I have been hit by a truck in this area, back before trucks were all mandated to be big enough to kill on impact. (that's a joke. they aren't mandated to be that big, except by the makers.)

Don't do it. If you have a friend or loved one, tell them not to do it. You're literally safer taking the train the night before and sleeping in the parking lot.

xcal1bur25

I have zero investment in sports but i just read that they're closing off all the parking for the stadium for a "security perimeter" and...

wow this is not going to end well is it?

kurowrites

This entire thing is funny to me primarily because it just seems that the organisers of this event have spent precisely 0% of their time researching football culture. Like, do they know what football fans usually DO?

Like yes, this will probably end in an absolute shitshow and I for one will not be surprised!

just-a-cheese

Ok, not european and not from the usa, so sorry to butt in. But as someone from a football centric county I think you are all missing the obvious.

This is what highways look like when fans are getting in or out of a coup game.

Notice how there wasn't a pedestrian walk there. Police usually shuts down the roads when they see the ocean of people coming in, but even if they didn't, people would just walk in between the cars, no matter how big or fast they are.

Also, I would like you guys to know that most countries have been making fun of the usa since it was announced they would be hosting because of course the only county that doesn't even call it fútbol would know nothing about the game, the culture, or the big mess they just got themselves in.

lesbianshepard

If you manage to get on the turnpike before the cops stop you, a soccer mom is gonna do the Jersey slide in a RAV4 and turn your entire group into a wet speedbump

bunjywunjy

this? you want to walk down this????

please say sike

bunjywunjy

IT'S NOT A FUCKING STREET ITS AN 8-LANE SUPERHIGHWAY THAT GOES OVER A SWAMP

hapalopus

footpath

bunjywunjy

that is grass. just like ur ass, if you try to walk this thing

phantomomo

Image me gently taking your hand as I tell you the following:

This is ABSOLUTELY a perfectly fine footpath.

But also have you seen the space between your highways? I‘d say the gaps each easily fit another whole stream of European walking hordes. Or maybe even two going opposite directions :D

bunjywunjy

tightly grips your hand with both of my sweaty hands.

library-seraph

"Jaywalking is not a thing in Europe" may I suggest this is less about the laws of America and more about the laws of inertia

wanderingthunderstorm

Trolley problem:

You are a US American motorist driving along i-95 during rush hour. You see a pedestrian dart in front of you. You have 2 seconds to make a decision:

Attempt to stop (cause multi-car pile up and kill pedestrian anyway)

Attempt to swerve #1 (cause semi truck next to you to jackknife, cause pileup, kill pedestrian anyway)

Attempt to swerve #2 (into ditch/swamp/retaining wall, 85 mph/137 km per hour, killing yourself, your passengers, and a bunch of other people on the road when your car inevitably sends pieces shooting off into traffic. Also, the pedestrian gets run over by the person behind you, who was NOT expecting a pedestrian and didn't even see them)

Run over the pedestrian and hope you can at least stay in your lane and not cause a worse accident while you slow down

thatlittleegyptologist

Okay so this has been a fun thing to watch unfold over the last week and I guess it’s finally reached here. Just like a game of telephone the argument no longer resembles the origin. There was a Reddit thread about it and tbf a lot of the Europeans on there were very confused as to why anyone thought they were going to walk it. Where had all this come from? Who was actually saying this?

So, Reddit being Reddit, had already tracked down the origins. Turns out there were some disgruntled Europeans that were unhappy with the fact that the train operator was price gouging the tickets that were usually $12 so that they were $150+ to get from the hotel to the MetLife stadium. Roughly 900m away (through a swamp). The European complaining was like “it’s 900m I’d rather fucking walk it”. Not that he was going to walk it, just that he was pissed off at the price enough that he’d jokingly consider it.

In swoops a blue check mark rw dude who, like the above, took him literally and explained swamps and how roads work in a very condescending manner (not like the above). The European response was so clearly sarcasm (paraphrasing: “I’m strong! I can make it across a swamp! I’m not paying $150 dollars for a 15 minute train ride”) but it went over the blue check mark guy’s head.

So he doubles down, insisting that they’ll all get run over on the I-95 and Europeans are arrogant and stupid. So what did the original guy do? After a bit of back and forth about terrible infrastructure he starts Smooth Sharking the blue check mark guy! No it’s totally fine! I’ve crossed big roads before! Swamps are nothing! Blue check guy does not recognise the sarcasm or the obvious rage bait so doubles down again.

By this time, it’s got enough traction that more Europeans show up to rage bait this one guy with stuff like “nah the whole Dutch fan walk is gonna walk alongside the I-95!” “You can’t do that you’ll get killed by trucks!” “It’s fine they can’t kill us all there are too many! Some will make it to the match!”

Of course it make blue check mark guy very angry and he started ranting about Europeans being arrogant enough to walk. He was also equating it with them not helping with that Special Operation Tango Toddler has going on, which like okay dude. But others only saw his rants about it and that began to spread. Once it reached TikTok and folks were making videos accusing Europeans of white supremacy (yes that is a thing that happened) it genuinely spun out of control to what we’re seeing now.

I don’t doubt some idiot Europeans have indeed tried to justify doing this, there’s one on this post (along with one person clearly smooth sharking. Like c’mon, circling grass and writing “path” is not a serious response, it’s rage bait) but the idea that “European football fans think they can walk this” isn’t real. No one has earnestly being saying they’ll do it. More people have been shocked by the dominance of car led infrastructure than have thought “yeah I can cross an 8 lane interstate highway.”

Tl;dr: This is manufactured outrage based on one guy getting smooth sharked because some other guy thought a $12 ticket suddenly being $150 was a bit fucking much for such a short journey and he’d rather walk than pay that.

Can we all chill out now?

Trending Blogs

Recently Viewed Blogs

Lambent Light Rays