Where it Begins, Erica Jong 

[ID: The corruption begins with the mouth, / the tongue, the wanting. / The first poem in the world / is I want to eat.]

this is probably an unpopular opinion but I think interpreting the doctor as passively evil is an interesting character experiment. like, by human standards they’re pretty much an immortal, ancient, godlike entity. they travel all of time and space, saving or destroying entire civilizations on a whim. they travel with humans because they’re obsessed, almost addicted, to human mortality and naivety. sure, they claim to love their companions, but involvement in their lives almost always ends in misery, and then it’s onto the next. imagine the TARDIS filled with abandoned bedrooms, clothes on the floor, beds unmade, toothpaste in the sink. their things frozen in time, dust-covered and tomblike. and the doctor is drifting through space, surrounded by evidence of all the lives they’ve ruined. anyway, if anyone has evil doctor fic recommendations pls drop them below.

“time lords are friends with each other. anything else is cradle snatching.” she had a point.

📚 QUEERBOOK 2024 is hereee! We made a book by and for LGBTQ+ youth! 🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈

Last year, we asked LGBTQ+ youth: what's your idea of a "queer utopia?"

Not gonna lie - with more than 150 bills introduced in 35 states in 2023 that aimed to restrict student access to inclusive and diverse books and other library materials, the theme felt pretty radical.

And you DELIVERED. With the help of our Youth Voices (amazing queer youth activists from across the country), we compiled your amazing submissions of poetry, short essays and letters, visual art, photography, and more into Queerbook 2024. Like a yearbook, it captures what queer youth are feeling, going through, and hoping for - right here, right now across the U.S.

It's also no accident that it's the perfect small-ish size to stash in your locker or backpack so you can crack it open any time you're looking for some queer connection. :3

Read some more about the book and grab your own limited-run copy of Queerbook 2024 now here.

last night I had a dream that I met Bill and Ted, and I complimented Bills crop top and said something about how I would wear crop tops if my body was less bogus and he put a hand on my shoulder and said “what’s truly bogus is the way you think about yourself” and Ted nodded solemnly and then I woke up

Shaking in terror how did tumblr discover my bill and ted hyperfixation

:) we always know :)

“You shouldn’t self-ID as ADHD/autistic, you’re turning a very real mental condition into a trend” Ok then stop saying delulu. Stop speculating on which cluster C personality disorder the criminals you hear about on the news have. Stop saying “schizoposting” and “acoustic” and “is it restarted?” Stop using “psycopath” and “sociopath” as catch-all ways of calling someone a bad person. Stop saying “the intrusive thoughts won” when you bleach your hair and then turn your nose up at people who suffer from very real, very scary urges of physical/sexual violence. Stop saying “I’m so OCD” as a way of calling yourself neat. Stop treating BPD/ASPD/Bipolar as inherently abusive. Stop saying “OP I am living in your walls” without tagging for unreality. Stop diagnosing complete strangers you’ve never met on r/AITA with NPD.

You first. If you don’t want our disabilities to be treated like trends then stop belittling and minimising them. I’ll NEVER judge a person for trying find labels for their symptoms when an apathetic, racist, sexist, ableist healthcare system refuses to. But I will absolutely judge a hypocrite. Which a lot of you are

Acab because the people that made this meme thinks the cops should just kill someone like this

Cops having a chuckle because they’re too cowardly to take a beating in order to save a life. All cops are cowards.

I can’t stress this enough, the people agreeing with this meme think having a psychotic break should carry a death sentence.

So cops wanna be able to kill people but don’t want to risk their life to help people?

The only people who want to be cops to begin with are mostly people who are chronically terrified of everyone else and can’t even take a punch. They know being a cop is actually the single safest job that gives you authority and a gun, so little spineless pissbabies flock to it.

"A world without trans people has never existed and never will"

Poster spotted in Olympia, WA

light a candle. remember their names.

i would love for you all to reblog with the name(s) you lit candles for and any information you can find about them. gentiles are highly encouraged to do this as well, we need you to remember them with us. the shoah is so mythologized that people don’t seem to see it as affecting real people anymore, but every single person who died had a life, a family, a mother, they laughed and cried and deserved a kinder world than this one. so please help us remember that these people were more than just numbers. please help us remember them.

These are amazing — and shockingly accurate. Did you know there’s a “Bechdel test” for female scientist biographies?

Follow @the-future-now​

Alright, nevermind, don’t write about women like men, write about men like women, this is way better

Oliver Sacks, everyone

Also go read his books they’re really good and very approachable

It is never too late to learn to speak Irish.

You do not have to be Irish to speak Irish.

Once you're out of school, there is no grammar police and most people are just excited to have someone to speak Irish with.

Incorporating Irish words into your day when you're not fluent (I have to go to the leithreas, throw it in the bruscar, that's a gorgeous gúna) is an act of decolonisation.

Helping people to understand the language is an act of love.

Gaeilge go deo ❤️

For extra impact, sign off your emails with "Le meas" (with respect), "beir bua" (Best of luck/wishing you success)

Scottish gaelic has the phrase "is fhearr gaidhlig briste na gaidhlig sa chiste"

Better broken Gaelic than dead Gaelic.

we have a similar phrase in irish too!

"is fearr Gaeilge bhriste ná Béarla cliste"

broken irish is better than perfect english

everyone who thinks they could get into hip hop from the kendrick vs drake beef, do yourself a favor and listen to good kid m.A.A.d. city by kendrick lamar, a truly incredible album front to back.

then you really can't go wrong by going back to the classics--tupac, biggie, lil kim etc etc. but kendrick's body of work is all pretty great if that's what got you interested.

honestly it makes me SO HAPPY to see people get into kendrick through this and tbh he's the perfect tumblr artist. he's erudite and dense and the more you dig into his work the more interesting it gets. his ability for wordplay, like double, triple, quadruple entendres is masterful. and also he is a messy bitch who lives for drama lmao.

but i also wanna add.... someone in the tags said that you can't consider yourself a real music fan if you don't know about hip hop and that's absolutely 100% true. i've long lamented that fandom's taste in music is way too white and rock oriented (see also: kendall roy, a canonical hip hop fan, listens to taylor swift!). it genuinely makes fandom people look..... mad ignorant and is a big reason why this site feels so culturally white.

sit down and listen to some of the acclaimed albums from the genre. if you don't fuck with misogynistic lyrics, try some female MCs (we are literally in a golden age of female rappers there is no shortage of them rn). if you can't fuck with the occasional homophobia guess what...... there are also mad cool LGBT rappers to choose from. if you like stuff that's rock oriented or confrontational, try death grips and jpegmafia, there is something in this HUGE genre FOR YOU.

Cannot second this post enough. As someone who has multiple advanced degrees in music and went to a conservatory, there's a reason that the more formal education I got in music, the more I learned to love hip hop. The people I know who know the most about music love hip hop and can write long rants about how right this post is about how you need some appreciation of it to be truly informed about music... and the biggest rockists and "classical music elitists" I know are people who think they know a ton about music (because they took music lessons once as a kid or whatever) but in fact have a hard ceiling* on that expertise and a terminal case of Dunning-Kruger Syndrome. The reason is because if you truly understand music, you know that a) what we learn about what makes music "complicated" and "technical" and stuff in the earlier stages of Western musical learning are very particular to specific styles of music, and that plenty of other styles of music have their own other ways of being intricate and colorful and varied and virtuosic, and b) hip hop is absolutely 100% that once you learn what its own grammar and artistry is based on, rather than judging it through the lens of Western classical music or rock music. (For more on this, and how a lot of what we call "music theory" really comes out of a particular kind of white Western European classical music, and therefore other genres are inevitably going to come up short if that's the only way you know how to look at music.... I recommend watching this video.)

I think one of the problems with this on white nerd spaces like Tumblr is that white nerds have a bad tendency to associate love of current popular music with "the cool kids who were mean to me in high school." The kids in high school who made fun of me for liking Mozart and the Beatles listened to hip hop (among other things). But once you're out of high school, you need to get over those associations and recognize how you fit into much broader, more deeply-seated inequalities.... and that something like hip hop that comes out of a marginalized group that struggled with structural racism and poverty and that is in dialogue with those experiences (whether explicitly or implicitly.... a lot of parts of "hip hop culture/aesthetics" are rooted in the existence of poor black and Latine people in Harlem in the 70s and how they expressed themselves outside of institutions they had no access to, so even stuff doing it flippantly is part of that legacy), is NOT the oppressor of your white introverted ass. It just isn't! And lots of people of all walks of life love hip hop; there's a reason that it's become so popular all over the world.

One of the things I love most about hip hop is how, even more than other genres of music, it is so tied into local cultures everywhere it goes, and takes on a distinctly different flavor not just from country to country or city to city, but sometimes even within different regions of a city. Another aspect of it that I love that I think would be particularly appealing to nerds is that the sampling and remixing that is such a cornerstone of hip hop (and wrongly derided as less "artistic" as opposed to its own kind of artistry) means it is constantly in dialogue with other forms of culture: with other music, but also other cultural works in general. Kendrick is a master of this, referencing everything from classic rappers to local LA landmarks to postcolonial African literature. (Did you, too, read Things Fall Apart in your honors English class? Kendrick references that in "King Kunta." As well as, obviously, Roots.) Nerds love references. We love callbacks to other media we love. We love Easter eggs. We love the postmodern turn in media where everything old is new again, and recognize that those "remixes" are commentary on that original work. Well, hip-hop is full of that. As someone raised on Motown and '70s funk, nothing delights me more than hearing hip hop sample - and put a whole new spin on, make me think about in a whole new way - some Isley Brothers or Parliament or Stevie Wonder or Marvin Gaye song I grew up jamming to in the car. You love Easter eggs, hip hop has them all over! You could argue if you wanted that it's the ultimate postmodern musical genre.

Hip hop is not responsible for the (I'm guessing, probably also white or otherwise privileged) people who liked it who bullied you, and it's wrong and ends up perpetuating your own privilege to use that as an excuse to dismiss it. You can learn to love it on your own terms, especially because there is so much of it to discover, sampling so many different genres of music, with so many rapping styles, some that's even purely instrumental like the "lo-fi" videos on YouTube. There's bound to be something out there that you'll like if you just give it a try!

Like, we joked on here about all the super white people here who went bonkers for Hamilton circa 2016, but that just showed that there was a type of hip hop out there that appealed to them. The only shame is that more of them didn't go on to explore more of the genre, let it be a gateway drug that was the catalyst for a genuine appreciation rather than a one-off thing. There's no shame in wherever you get on the train, as long as you don't just get immediately back off again at the same station where you started!

*On that note, a great way to put a firm ceiling on what you're going to learn is by being closed-minded. I've met sooooo many people who have the potential to be so much smarter than they are, who are being limited by the fact that they're judgmental and closed-minded and therefore are refusing to open themselves up to new ideas. Not that you must be open to everything, don't be so open-minded your brain falls out as they say, don't surrender your critical thinking... but you should at least be willing to entertain everything. Refusing to so much as consider new, challenging ideas is a great way to limit what you're going to know!

Zoozve, my beloved

"...we don't live in a big clockwork, we live in a dance club..."

This is my favorite line.

I have learned so many things from this.

@dduane - one for you!

It's a fabulous thing, isn't it! :)

As usual, science is busy being not only weirder and more interesting than we imagine, but weirder and more interesting than we can imagine.

From now on, every time someone calls gay marriage or gays in the military an "assimilationist" thing or an "assimilationist victory," they owe me $5. If they're under 35, they owe me $10.

Come here. Sit down, @thegreenbisamurai, and shut the fuck up for 5 fucking minutes so maybe you can pull your head out of your ass.

It's not about wanting to join the military, it's about having the right to join the military without having to hide who we are.

It's about having the right to participate in every part of public life, even the ones that suck.

Got it?

Sometimes, I forget that some of you are young enough to not understand what it was like 25+ years ago, and that you really can't fucking comprehend what it was like to live in even the greatest bastions of liberalism back then, but you really fucking can't, can you?

And some of you are just so fucking happy to throw poor and red-area queers under the bus because our lived reality is just not radical enough for you, and that's so fucking obvious.

The only way for my grandfather to not go back into the coal mines as a young man was to join the Navy. There was functionally zero other economic opportunity for him. This is still the reality for a lot of people, including a lot of queer people, because, wait for it:

The Department of Defense is the largest employer in the United States. In many places, it is functionally the only major employer.

There are approximately 2.1 million active servicemembers. Counting civilian employees, the DoD employs approximately 3.2 million people. For comparison, the largest private employer in the US is Wal-Mart, which employs ~2.3 million people.

Do you think that it might matter to our overall civil rights to have the largest employer in the country (and one of the largest employers in the world) change its position on whether us dirty fags can have jobs there? Do you think that it might make a difference in whether we can work in other, better jobs to have an employer have to make a decision on whether they're going to fire ✨️a veteran✨️ for being queer?

I do not actually think it's fucking great to join the armed forces. I am not fooled by the flag-waving bullshit that I was raised with, and in fucking fact, I have an extremely low amount of tolerance for worshiping the military and the country and all the OORAH fuckshit precisely because I was raised by a father who worshipped his Greatest Generation father. Okay? Mistake this for some idolization of the military or some wilful ignorance of how shitty it is you should not.

What you should do is understand that for a lot of people, joining the military is a ticket to eating. Joining the military means being able to get health care and a roof over your head. That is done on purpose because the military fucking preys on poor kids, and that fucking sucks, but it's still reality right now. Shutting queer kids out of that means shutting them out of the ability to get out of where they are economically. And, again, more than that, it means shutting them out of the public commons. It means that when gays gained the right to serve openly, the biggest employer in the US said "FAGS CAN WORK HERE AND YOU CAN'T FIRE THEM FOR FAGGOTRY, ACTUALLY."

And that changes things in other places much the same way that Medicaid changing a policy almost invariably causes insurance companies to follow suit.

This is why you will often see, when you look at timetables for employment rights, that people gain the right to be out at work and have employment protections first in state & local employment and then those protections are extended to private employers. This is because - as I've said before - it is easier to accomplish getting state employers not to discriminate first. It's easier to make the argument that the state shouldn't discriminate rather than that the state should enforce non-discrimination on private employers, so you make that argument first, and then you continue on to the private employers. It isn't an end point. It isn't the final answer to the problem. It's a strategic step along the way that immediately improves life for queer people and creates precedent for further improvement.

This is also why when people try to take rights away from queer people - like with bathroom bills - they often start by trying to remove those rights in state-owned locations. This creates precedent.

So, like, unless you're going to show up with jobs falling out of your pockets and a strategic way to accomplish the same fucking thing while still leaving in place the precedent of the largest employer in the US thinking it's A-OK to fire fags, dykes and trannies, kindly shut the fuck up, because your words are more than pointless.

I know that's not as like, cool, hip, and groovy to think "hey, this is a load-bearing pillar of society, maybe we shouldn't be shut out of it," and it doesn't make you feel like you've got the Purest Of Leftist Ideology as saying ASSIMILATIONIST seems to for you, but it does have the upside of actually doing something that measurably improves the lives of queer people and sets a precedent for future improvement rather than being pointless [wanking gesture] posturing for leftist clout.

That will be $10. :)

Nah, man, I just have no patience for people squirting juice out their assholes and pretending they're performing a symphony.

My grandfathers served in WWII. All three of 'em, because my grandmother remarried after my granddaddy died. I have plenty of complicated feelings about all of it, but fuck you if you think I'm talking about it with you, buddy.

You got me! You're in the right! It sure doesn't matter whether the biggest employer in the country thinks fags are dirty or not. We can't try to dismantle the military industrial complex and set meaningful legal precedent at the same time! We are just silly people who can only hold the most pure thought in our heads at any given time.

Your praxis sucks and I'm not wasting any more time on you.

You still owe me $10.

I got up and switched the laundry and I'm still like

Do... do people like this think the military stops existing if queer people aren't in it? What... what is the point of that point?

it occurs to me that to people like this, "queer people collectively refuse to enlist" and "queer people are banned from enlisting" probably sound synonymous

Yes, it probably does.

I have to admit that i think it's really funny that this person thinks they triggered some "innert" [sic] trauma in me bc I wrote a lot of vehement words. Like, I guess you're new here.

I love how this person's attempt at a rebuttal didn't actually address any of your main points. Like my bro I think I figured out why your opinion is so shitty, sorry about your reading comprehension.

I think there's something broken in some people's brains in that they claim to have totally dismantled the idea that the US is inherently superior in their own minds but they will speak in such a way that makes it clear that they don't think that anyone in the US starves to death or dies from exposure or dies because their perfectly treatable medical condition... wasn't.

Like, if the argument is that it's only death that matters, like, people do actually die from poverty, y'all. And like, having the right to do something doesn't mean you have to go and do it. I have the right to do a lot of fucking things that I don't do.

Funny that, innit?

va worker here: yeah the military sucks. know what else sucks? almost losing your job and your livelihood while an administration thinks about forcing you back into the closet you left. the trump admin floated a lot of anti-trans military policies, up to and including kicking out out trans people (who were supposed to be safe being out because that's how it works right now). the "compromise" position was reinstating dadt (don't ask don't tell) for trans people. like, do i even have to draw the line between that and where we are right now?

wanna know what else sucks? people killing themselves or losing their workers' benefits because someone found out they were queer. which, yes, happened (and still does but to a much lesser extent). most people in the us military right now never see combat. those that do? it can fuck them up. seriously fuck them up. wanna guess what happens when they don't have access to teams of doctors who know this shit inside and out? go ahead, fucking guess. or read a newspaper, there are plenty of stories out there about what happens when vets can't access the vha. when they're not allowed to? yeah.

know what else sucks? having a uterus and being unable to get an abortion because of the state you live in. the military, right the fuck now, is offering to pay the travel expenses for their members who need an abortion, queers included. my local vha hospital is also getting the discharged folks abortions or performing them. but, and this is crucial, this only applies to people who were honorably discharged. aka their fucking benefits weren't yanked because of xyz.

yeah, the military sucks and has a billion and one problems right now. know what problem it doesn't have? queers losing the benefits they earned and signed a contract to get. the military and vha are now upholding their end of the contract instead of exploiting queer workers and tossing them out when the bill comes due. and that's fucking important.

I'm forever stuck on being grateful of the fact they can't hatecrime queers in the military and get away with it as easily anymore.

do people like this forget/not know military queers were endangered by their own squads?

Also, and this is a comparatively minor point compared to the rest, but do these people not realize that non-combat military roles exist??? Please explain to me how a trans lawyer who wants to join the JAG Corps because they want to make a difference in the treatment of rape survivors in the service is "exterminating brown people". Explain to me how a poor person who pays for medical school by working for the Medical Corps instead of doing a residency is "stealing native land" or committing murder. Fucking explain to me the problem with a queer person joining the Merchant Marine or the Coast Guard.

The answer there is that by being part of it at all, you're complicit. Remember that this mindset hounded a trans man who handles software license renewals for a defense contractor off of Twitter entirely bc he's "complicit in war crimes."

That any American is that level of complicit does not seem to occur to them.

I disagree, that any American is that level of complicit is actually an important part of that mindset.

In the same way that TERFs believe that every man is a threat and must constantly check himself to make sure he isn't accidentally indulging his nature as an aggressive abuser, but also can never escape the fact that he has male privilege, every American is guilty of being American.

Even if they want to do better, every American is complicit in and responsible for the violent actions of their government, and every American should be held accountable for their personal decisions because they all have the privilege of making choices that affect the actions of their government. So if you're an American and choose to join the military, you must want all of the terrible things that the military does because you had the privilege (because you're American) to do anything else you desired. But you chose the military, of course, because that's just how Americans are, and trying to argue nuance is just trying to escape accountability for being American.

Just look at that popular post that was circulating about how the OP was going to "hold every American accountable if Trump gets elected again, because collective responsibility and all that" as if every American has a voice in that. We ARE all complicit to them. I think some of them just haven't realized they believe that, yet.

I ... don't think so. The people making this argument, like thegreenbisamurai, are Americans who truly believe that they are not complicit because they have managed to divorce themselves from what they feel is visible complicity. I'm genuinely not talking about international perception of Americans but of internal perception of one another.

These are the people who -- again -- hounded a trans man off of Twitter because he renews software licenses for Lockheed Martin or whatever, but don't comprehend that -- for example -- banking with pretty much any major bank makes you complicit, because I guarantee you that any major bank not only has significant investments in the War Machine, but they have an entire team of people whose whole job it is to specifically make investments in the War Machine, and those investments are not a small part of that bank's investment profile. Not at all.

This is sort of a 'no ethical consumption under capitalism' thing, honestly, and I don't think that a lot of Americans are truly honest with themselves about exactly how intertwined with their daily lives the US Military actually is, and how absolutely impossible it would be to live a life which is not complicit in varying degrees.

Does this mean 'throw your hands up and give up, because we can't not be complicit'? Does this mean 'people actually doing war crimes with their own hands are as complicit as someone who enlists as a medic or does firejumping to avoid going to Vietnam?' No. It means being honest with yourself about what's going on. It means thinking about what you say when you say things like calling the places the military is sent to a 'godforsaken corner of the earth' or drawing a bright line between 'brown people' and 'queer people in the US.' (Boy, that was telling.) It means being honest with yourself about the fact that when you put things that way, you're saying that it's okay for brown people in the US to die from malnutrition or unaddressed medical needs, as long as they die in an ideologically pure way.

People will do a lot to avoid starving. A hungry man knows no G-d but bread. So the answer is not to judge people for survival-based complicity in a system that is designed to keep them hungry and subservient, but recognize that yes, the system is designed that way, accept where reality is right now, not judge people for the things they do to stay alive, and continually work on harm reduction. This is, in essence, a trolley problem, and the only real solution to a trolley problem is to build a third track.

Bringing this one back for Reasons.

Also, a TON of DoD positions aren't even military. There are hundreds of thousands of civilians (many vets, many not) who make sure people get paid and get fed and get medical care and have their insurance forms correct and take photos and do all kinds of other things that aren't "killing brown people." A *lot* of us are queer/trans/whatever. There are at least FIVE queer peeps just in my office of ~25, military and civilian. It's a secure job - barring a second Trump admin - it's supportive, and plenty of us are disabled vets.

I was on active duty when DADT was repealed, and while there were folks that everyone knew were queer, the relief was *palpable* that it was now safe.

Having a job you're good at is hugely important for stability and enjoyment of life.

Today I had the spoons to hunt down my neighborhood council's email and send them an email that basically said "I would like to be able to leave my house but my neighborhood is not wheelchair accessible. Who do I talk to in order to get this fixed?" And I am planning on hunting down whoever is in charge of sidewalks in my neighborhood and getting real annoying about it.

My plan is to email them every time I want to go somewhere but can't.

Email 1: hello, please fix sidewalks so I can ride the bus places I am very passionate about public transportation and also being able to leave my house.

Email 200: This morning I woke up and wanted some delicious coffee to start my day, but upon getting out of bed I discovered we were out of coffee. I would've liked to take advantage of the city's public transportation system in order to support a local business like [examples of local coffee shops] but alas I cannot because I am a wheelchair user and my neighborhood is not wheelchair accessible. [Insert rest of arguement RE accessibility]. In conclusion I don't work I can keep these emails coming until I die please just fix my sidewalks.

This is going to be my new spite hobby. I was already mad about the abuse and general shit hand the disabled get dealt in our culture but then I started using a wheelchair and places like doctor's offices have been inaccessible to me so now I am filled with rage. So I am going to take that rage and do something with it. Like emailing my city counsel representatives at 2 am like "I crave a moonlight walk fix my sidewalks please."

I encourage you to do this!

After the Americans with Disabilities Act passed in 1990, my grandma - who used an electric wheelchair, having survived both polio and getting hit really hard with post-polio syndrome - made a hobby of filing complaints against businesses that weren't accessible.

She also used to run over people with her chair if they were blocking ramps, but that's neither here nor there.

It’s called copula deletion, or zero copula. Many languages and dialects, including Ancient Greek and Russian, delete the copula (the verb to be) when the context is obvious.

So an utterance like “you a bitch” in AAVE is not an example of a misused you, but an example of a sentence that deletes the copular verb (are), which is a perfectly valid thing to do in that dialect, just as deleting an /r/ after a vowel is a perfectly valid thing to do in an upper-class British dialect.

What’s more, it’s been shown that copula deletion occurs in AAVE exactly in those contexts where copula contraction occurs in so-called “Standard American English.” That is, the basic sentence “You are great” can become “You’re great” in SAE and “You great” in AAVE, but “I know who you are” cannot become “I know who you’re” in SAE, and according to reports, neither can you get “I know who you” in AAVE.

In other words, AAVE is a set of grammatical rules just as complex and systematic as SAE, and the widespread belief that it is not is nothing more than yet another manifestation of deeply internalized racism.

This is the most intellectual drag I’ve ever read.

Reblog every time

This is a distance of roughly 625 miles and we are going to assume that the speed does not include the time penalty of Spain having a different Rail Gauge than France.

At 890 miles of rail you can get New York to Chicago which would be the ideal first route, but what can you get with 625 miles that makes more since than Columbus?

Well at that distance you can get Raleigh-DC-Philadelphia-NYC- Boston

With intermediate stops in Richmond, Baltimore, New Haven, and Providence

That is a route that is not only good, but has potential to be one of the most used rail lines in the world if it were at high speeds and a cheap price

How about putting some more rails, especially high speed, out here in the midwest, so those of us stuck out here can travel without hours in a car or spending hundreds on a plane ticket?

I guess another route of equivalent length would be St.Paul-Madison-Milwaukee-Chicago- -Indianapolis-louisville

@amtrak-official is doing good stuff promoting trains but it’s always northern cities. I live in Alabama and I want trains too! I wanna go to the aquarium in Tennessee, I want a fast and easy way to get to Gulf Shores. I want the Grand Canyon, Disney World Florida, Myrtle Beach! I wanna ride a train for less than two hours just to get Starbucks at Rock City

I could do Chattanooga-Atlanta-Montgomery-Mobile -New Orleans within roughly 650 miles of track