something incredibly American about an Allied trooper yelling brand names at Soviets until they recognize him as an ally.

when I drew this comic 3 years ago I had NO idea how far it would reach. I'm happy to finally share a corrected version with proper abbreviations, and even MORE state names of indigenous origin ♥️

Native people manage to do SO much for the planet as a whole - thanklessly - and with all this stacked against them. Don't even get me started on kin fighting in south america. Could you imagine if there was help? #landback is resistance to genocide, and it is the key to saving our warming earth.

So look into it and the other hashtags, cuz a cartoon goose ain't a substitute for a proper education. Love to my grandparents who always kept a map of tribal territories of turtle island on their wall, to speaking on our Tsalagi & Saponi heritage. Love & solidarity forever, happy research, and happy #indigenouspeoplesday

LANDBACK.ORG

(Also, if you care to support the artist, I'm publishing a book ! and writing another - a fantastical afroindigenous graphic novel - that I post exclusively about with tons of other art on my patreon.)

There's no one's wisdom that's less valuable than this

What source of passive income allows him to just print money like this?

An ‘unlimited’ annual pass with free parking is $1600/year (up from $1400 when he completed his record 2012-2020). And yeah, that’s over $116 a month and not how I’d spend my money but it’s not obscene.

Plus, he’s an older dude with free time every day. DL is a safe venue to walk around and kill time if all you have is time to kill, and from the article it seems he’s built quite the social network of Disney regulars & cast members. So good for him.

The Disney corporation hates people like him, btw. 

Disney considers AP holders parasites, clogging the parks, taking up space that could be better utilized by Big Spending out-of-town visitors. Which is why the price for an AP has gone up so dramatically ALONG WITH a zillion new restrictions like blackout days + reservation requirements.

Up until 2013 or so it was common for local families to buy their kids Annual Passes then drop them off at the park every day during summer as cheap childcare. Seriously, $100/month is a bargain.

thats just the admission and parking though, the park tends to be pretty strict on how much food and drink you can bring in and none of the options inside are cheap, even with the like 10% discount before tax and tips the annual pass holder gets.

You’re absolutely right! 

But AP holders usually don’t buy food & drink inside the parks... unless you’re DisneyFoodBlog or Jenny Nicholson. Another reason Disney hates on passholders.

Most AP holders hit one of the kazillion affordable restaurants outside the park on their way in or out, then carry a water bottle once inside to stay hydrated. And most visits aren’t the all-day-long thing out of towners do; AP folk will kill an hour or two, ride Indiana Jones or the Matterhorn then leave.

The guy in the article appears to have visited once a day just to walk a lap or two for exercise. He wasn’t staying all day, dealing with hotel room reservations, rental car, airline tickets, souvenirs, or any of the expenses a tourist would have.

The real insanity is how the US is so lacking in safe public third places that for some people, an annual pass to Disney is their best shot at having a walkable outdoor space and some semblance of community.

One of the funniest failures of US school system is the fact they are legally obligated to teach us all the states but they never actually show how big Alaska is like I have actually had teachers tell me that Texas is the biggest state. We have all just convinced ourselves that Alaska is that small shrunken down thing on most US maps and the people that know it's the largest state can almost never accurately describe how large it is.

For context here is a picture

what

It has a national park that’s bigger than maine. Or Switzerland. A park. 

I lived in Alaska for two years and I will never get over the sheer overwhelming bigness of it. 

Nights where the sky is clear you can see clusters of stars or the Northern Lights dancing. When the lights are rippling especially strong and fast you can hear a static crackle in the air. When the moon is out after it’s snowed, you don’t need flashlights to see. Everything glows and glimmers like polished quartz.  

But when the sky is clouded over so you can’t see the stars, you can kind of almost sense the mountains towering over you and helping to block out the light, these giant monoliths acting like this void darker than your soul. I’ve never experience night like Alaska night. 

Everything is big, the mountains, the sky, the valleys. 

And the dark. 

what the fuck

🦅🦅🦅🦅OH SAY CAN YOU SEEEE🦅🦅🦅🦅

are you telling me americans have stores that open up SPECIFICALLY for halloween and just. dont exist any other time of the year. you people are insane

Imagine an empty storefront. Some business that closed years ago. The building stands empty, unused for literal months. And then boom. Fall comes around and there’s a Spirit Halloween. There’s no escape.

what the fuck 😁

Yeah this is a thing

Are you serious

Yes and they are divine gifts of beauty and cheap plastic lawn decorations.

… I honestly assumed that the existence of Halloween stores was just a running joke in American TV shows.

No they’re very real

Can confirm this phenomenon also occurs in Canada

It’s fun

Oh, it’s a blast.

Wait, so during non-halloween they are just empty? Like, they don’t switch between seasonal decorations (like christmas, easter, etc), they just…close and wait for next year???

Yeah, it’s not a permanent store. A company will rent an empty building for the 2-3 months before halloween, sell halloween stuff, and then clean everything up and disappear until the following year. And they’ll usually set up in different buildings from year to year. They just find any good-sized empty store space that will give them a cheap, short-term lease.

It’s so temporary that the halloween stores don’t even have a real sign, they just hang up a banner outside:

So you’re telling me that every year for a month or two the Spirit of Halloween possesses a dead building then disappears?

that is exactly what we’re telling you

inspired by the quiz i saw for the countries!

take this quiz to see how many USA states you can name in 10 minutes, because i was curious to see if i still remembered. i got all but blanked on wyoming, maryland, and oklahoma. (and i only got nebraska, missouri, and mississippi in the last 10 seconds. when i blank out i BLANK out.)

when I gave up trying to think of more states vs the game shaming me for forgetting states I should’ve known because I know people who live there.

Lighthouses of the Great Lakes.

by researchremora

And people will say Chicago is not a coastal city

Okay so, it took me a second to remember that the Great Lakes fucking massive, and I couldn’t help imagining

We could have this if we weren’t a nation of cowards

Fish in the great lake being like

the extent that i would be at emo night at sneaky dees every single weekend is crazy. you would think i was canadian.

@amtrak-official

So connect the Windsor-Quebec Corridor and the Northeast Corridor with HSR, that isn't that bad of an idea. It doesn't even need to be that distant dream that is Meglev, just making it fast frequent rail would do it, I would prioritize getting a connection between Boston and Montreal in this system but it is an exciting idea

Anyways the travel times on that map are insane, but it would be a good system still. Anyways here is a picture of the proposal from a geographic map instead of a stylish visual

So anyways I decided to edit this to make it more of an interconnected system but adding Boston to Montreal via Albany and Boston to Toronto via Buffalo as well as a Chicago Connection

fwiw: these maps were made by @segregationbydesign on Twitter, based on an analysis of flight patterns, who does incredible Transit related work. Here are the extensions they proposed:

Bringing this back up because it is one of my favorite posts I've been a part of

In 2022, Massachusetts residents voted in favor of a Fair Tax ballot measure to extra-super-duper-tax those earning more than one million dollars a year and to spend the revenue from that on education and transportation initiatives.

Naturally, there were the naysayers. Those who warned that all of the state’s rich people would move away to their very own Galt’s Gulch or whatever, if they were forced to pay a four percent tax on anything they make over a million dollars. The implication there, of course, is that raising this tax would, ironically, lead to the state collecting less revenue overall.

That didn’t happen! In fact, the state has already raised $1.8 billion in revenue so far for this fiscal year — which is $800 million more than they expected, and they still have a few months to go. The vast majority of the surplus will go to a fund that legislators can use for one-time investments in various projects.

The revenue has already been invested in universal school lunches, in more scholarships to public colleges, in improvements to the MBTA, and to repair roads and bridges. These are all things that will improve the quality of life for everyone, including the “ultra-rich” who happen to live there. The fact is, it’s just nice to live in a society that is more civil, that takes care of its people and its children and that fixes things when they are broken.

[ ]

Elizabeth Warren, Pramila Jayapal, and others have introduced bills in the House and Senate for a nationwide millionaire’s tax of two percent — two cents on the dollar for all wealth exceeding $50 million and six percent on all wealth over a billion dollars. This would bring in an estimated $3.75 trillion over 10 years, which we could use to improve the lives of all US citizens. We could have so many nice things!

It’s time to stop living in fear of what millionaires and billionaires — who have made their fortunes off of roads we’ve paid for and employees we’ve paid to educate — will do or where they will move if forced to pay their fair share. That’s no way to live. If they have some place better to go that won’t force them to contribute to improving their community? Let them. Other people will come along and be more than happy to pick up where they left off. But more than likely, they won’t do jack shit because they’re rich, and if they wanted to live someplace else, they’d be there by now.

Official Post of Massachusetts

same energy:

gotta love the irony of the u.s. americans in the notes defending not putting their country name on international mail because their state is in the address, on a post about how u.s. americans themselves don't even know what country all their states are in.

Give me a map of the midwest how you imagine it, and don't just use state lines, show me how you think the cultural area of the midwest actually exists in the US

Blue dots: cities that come to mind if I'm trying to name a Midwestern city to explain the Midwest to someone

Green dots: other cities among the 120 most populous cities in the US which feel probably Midwestern to me

Orange shaded region: Midwest core

Purple shaded region: yeah sure probably Midwestern but it kind of depends on context (Food? Demographics? Religion? Politics? Music? Natural environment/climate?)

Black dotted line: approximate "upper Midwest" versus "lower Midwest" boundary

Red line: approximate "the South" boundary- yes I guess I believe the South and the Midwest aren't mutually exclusive

Pink circled region: the Great Plains- a unified region which should be included or excluded from the Midwest as a package deal. I typically include it but I don't feel strongly about whether it would be better to consider it a separate but related region. However, if someone thinks the only thing west of the Midwest is The West, then the Great Plains should be in the Midwest, because they are definitely NOT the West.

I thought about some of the qualities people might think about the Midwest and looked up maps for them. Here they are, with the Midwest indicated by that quality circled. Note I am not making claims about whether any of these qualities are good or bad, they're just things that get associated with midwesternness.

"the Midwest is flat"

"the Midwest is not diverse"

"the Midwest was a hub for the Great Migration"

"the Midwest is union states that were not the original colonies or the far west"

"the Midwest has a significant mainline protestant population" (pink ABCUSA, orange ELCA, and green UMC on this map)

"the Midwest is farmland"

"the Midwest has wet summers and dry winters"

"people in the Midwest are of primarily German, Scandinavian, and Native American ancestry"

There are lots of these kinds of things that aren't occurring to me at the moment. But just for fun let's combine these ones into a map! There's a transparent purple layer for each of the previous maps, and a black outline for places that fall into at least 5 of the 8 regions.

Maybe this is the Midwest? Probably better than my first reblog on instinct alone.

100% Disagree

It’s an underdog story about classism in which the folk hero (Johnny) is confronted by a powerful man (the Devil) who tries to exploit the hero’s perceived ignorance and inferiority by offering a great reward with impossible odds. Although Johnny warns him that looks can be deceiving, and that he’s going to regret the dare because Johnny is the “best there’s ever been”, the devil is blinded by his greed and arrogance.

The devil creates an awful cacophony of technically excellent fiddle playing that would be impossible for Johnny to replicate. It’s a trick.

But Johnny just grins at him and starts to play “simple” classic country fiddling songs - Fire On The Mountain, House Of The Rising Sun, and Daddy Cut Her Bill Off. He doesn’t rise to beat the Devil - he simply creates his own music from his home, in the style that he knows, and his love of it and the familiarity of the music make his “backwoods” fiddling more perfect than the Devil could ever achieve.

It is thus the devil’s pride, not Johnny’s, that allows Johnny to Bugs Bunny his way into a golden fiddle.

(In that sense, I do agree that it is the most American song: in a land of prejudice and inequities, great power lies - dormant but ever-present - in those we underestimate and attempt to exploit.)

Also people initially react to the devil's part like "holy shit that's badass" because he's got electric guitar and bass and a whole backing band to make him sound good. Of course he sounds amazing. But if you drill down to the actual fiddling -- and this is straight from Charlie Daniels -- it's not as technically difficult as what Johnny does. It's fast? But it's mostly just going up and down scales.

Here's a good performance -- the devil's part starts around 2:00. Check out how long Daniels just stands there holding his fiddle while the guitar and piano carry the weight. I love that piano bassline but fiddling it ain't.

It's still an American narrative: if you can afford to hire a bunch of more talented people, you, too, can look like a genius. Doesn't make you one.

Watch: John Cena continues, “So, let’s try this one more time. Close your eyes.” 

x

King

Worth noting that he protested loudly against the WWE doing a show in Saudi Arabia after the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi, and the company retaliated by making sure he hasn’t been on TV or PPV since. Not fired, of course, so they can keep selling merchandise with his face on it (and keep him from joining the competition), just out of the public eye so he and his protests gets forgotten by the fans.

Picture that: an ubiquitous celeb and household name like John Cena basically got black bagged and vanished for speaking up for human rights. That’s the power of capitalism, kids

i love you USPS I love you NASA i love you taxpayer funded services that actually contribute positively to society i love you libraries i love you public transport

US state borders but they are based off rivers and mountains

@blinded-by-love

I think we should do this but leave Colorado alone so there’s just an extremely jarring rectangle in one part of this

I like how you think.

enough. to the Box with you