Cars and Independence

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Raising kids in a walkable town really underscores the inconvenience and dependence of cars as well. The reality really is completely opposite from the belief. It’s hard to really get across that using a car is a barrier/limiting factor when you have babies and small children. And it’s hard to get across what a much higher quality of life you have when the stuff you access most often - daycare, school, train station, coffee shops, toddler groups - is within a ten-minute walk, so you just wrap the baby in a carrier, fall into step with a friend and go do it. I think that car-centered parents in America are living a much harder and more isolated life, and I’m sure it ripples outward from there. I think that the children in turn have more independence, more relationships, more control, more feeling of ownership of the spaces they move through.

Walkable cities with good and save and free/cheap public transit are FREEDOM for kids, teens, and also parents! And all those people who for some reason are unable to drive on their own.

Cars isolate people.

If you go by car everywhere, you're in your house-box then you get in your car-box to go drive your kids to their school-box and then go to your work-box and back to the car-box and to the store-box and then pick up your kid from the school-box to their training-box box box boxes all the way down.

And all you see of your city and your neighbourhoods are ugly ass stroads, disgusting.

Until your kids get their license AND their own car they always depend on someone else to take them somewhere. I would have LOST my mind at age 11 or 12!

ARASHI SNS UPDATE [220910]

I'll tell my future children this was Eurovision 2024...

The Pacific Ocean is huge.

If they make an earth flag it should be of this angle to piss off the most amount of people

None Earth with South New Zealand

The amount of time you have to spend on this website to still remember the Deep Lore like None Pizza with Left Beef, only to apply it to this post. Truly, boggling.

https://vm.tiktok.com/ZTdQuxw52/

I think I found my new favorite rabbit hole. This voice actor does Shakespeare scenes in a southern accent and I need to see the whole damn play. Absolutely beautiful

if you're not from the us american south, there's some amazing nuances to this you may have missed. i can't really describe all of them, because i've lived here my whole life and a lot of the body language is sort of a native tongue thing. the body language is its own language, and i am not so great at teaching language. i do know i instinctively sucked on my lower teeth at the same time as he did, and when he scratched the side of his face, i was ready to take up fucking arms with him.

but y'all. the way he said "brutus is an honourable man" - each and every time it changed just a little. it was the full condemnation Shakespeare wanted it to be. it started off slightly mock sincere. barely trying to cover the sarcasm. by the end...it wasn't a threat, it was a promise.

christ, he's good.

the eliding of “you all” to “y’all” while still maintaining 2 syllables is a deliberate and brilliant act of violence. “bear with me” said exactly like i’ve heard it at every funeral. the choices of breaking and re-establishing of eye contact. the balance of rehearsed and improvised tone. A+++ get this man a hollywood contract.

Get this man a starring role as Marc Antony in a southern adaptation of this show PLEASE.

This man is fantastic. 💕

The thing that just destroys me about this, though -- we think of Shakespearean language as being high-cultured, and intellectual, and somewhat inaccessible. And I know people think of Southerners as being ill-educated (which...let's be fair, most are, but not the way it's said). But that whole speech, unaltered, is so authentically Southern. And the thing is: Leaning into that language really amps the mood, in metalanguage. I'm not really sure how to explain it except... like... "Thrice" is not a word you hear in common speech...unless you're in the South and someone is trying to Make A Fucking Point.

Anyway. This was amazing and I want a revival of Shakespeare As Southern Gothic.

One of the lovely things about this, and one of the reasons it works so well, is that from what we can piece together of how Shakespeare was originally pronounced, it leans more towards an American southern accent than it does towards a modern British RP.

In addition, in the evolution of the English language in america, the south has retained many of the words, expressions, and cadences from the Renaissance/Elizabethan English spoken by the original British colonists.

One of the biggest examples of this is that the south still uses “O!”/“Oh!” In sentences, especially in multi-tone and multi-syllable varieties. We’ve lost that in other parts of the country (except in some specific pocket communities). But in the south on the whole? Still there. People in California or Chicago don’t generally say things like “why, oh why?” Or “oh bless your heart” or “Oh! Now why you gotta do a thing like that?!” But people from the south still do.

I teach, direct, and dramaturg Shakespeare for a living. When people are struggling with the “heightened” language, especially in “O” heavy plays like R&J and Hamlet, a frequent exercise I have them do is to run the scene once in a southern accent. You wouldn’t believe the way it opens them up and gives their contemporary brains an insight into ways to use that language without it being stiff and fake. Do the Balcony scene in a southern accent- you’ll never see it the same way again.

This guy is also doing two things that are absolutely spot-on for this speech:

First, he’s using the rhetorical figures Shakespeare gave him! The repetition of “ambition” and “Brutus is an honorable man”, the logos with which he presents his argument, the use of juxtaposition and antitheses (“poor have cried/caesar hath wept”, etc). You would not believe how many RADA/Carnegie/LAMDA/Yale trained actors blow past those, and how much of my career I spend pointing it out and making them put it back in.

Second, he’s playing the situation of the speech and character exactly right. This speech is hard not just because it’s famous, but because linguistically and rhetorically it’s a better speech than Brutus’ speech and in the context of the play, Brutus is the one who is considered a great orator. Brutus’ speech is fiery passion and grandstanding, working the crowd, etc. Anthony is not a man of speeches (“I am no orator, as Brutus is; But, as you know me all, a plain blunt man”) His toastmaster skills are not what Brutus’ are, but he speaks from his heart (his turn into verse in this scene from Brutus’ prose is brilliant) and lays out such a reasonable, logical argument that the people are moved anyway. I completely believe that in this guy’s performance. A plain, blunt, honest speaker. Exactly what Anthony should be.

TLDR: Shakespeare is my job and this is 100% a good take on this speech.

definitely one of the challenges I have with reading Shakespeare is that it sounds so weird to me. “The good is oft interr’d with their bones”?? Who talks like that?

Well,,, rednecks. Despite being Elizabethan English, none of this is really out of character for a man with that accent; southern american English has retained not only (I am told) the accent of Shakespeare, and the “Oh!” speech patterns, but also so many of the little linguistic patterns: parenthetic repetition (“so are they all - all honorable men”), speaking formally when deeply emotional, getting more and more sarcastic and passive-aggressive as time goes on, etc.

So funny when some random ass blog you don’t know has you blocked like. Um do I know you.

“Good to see you in the flesh! The totally-unbroken, skin-not-bitten-by-zombies flesh…right?”

this reply made me laugh harder than any reply I think I've ever gotten

How did they find the worst audio ever made

"surely an exaggeration" i thought, before hearing the worst audio ever made

When I went to Sunderland, my grandad told me he’d teach me how to ride when I came back for Christmas and then he fuckin’ died and I haven’t been on a bike since. And now I’m saying that out loud I realize that never learning was actually a great disrespect to his memory and now I feel ashamed so can we stop talking about it and go back to me just taking out my negative emotions on you even if you deserve it or not.

Come on, Roy. For grandad.

we've done it again folks

the class war is not some hypothetical future event. class war is being waged right now, by the ruling class, against you, every single day of your life. the question is what you're going to do to fight back.

Hey so like, join the fucking IWW and take the OT101 and get to work, because this right here ⬆️, this is how all these fuckers think and feel. They want us all scrabbling and kneeling and subservient and suffering! This is 1 guy actually saying it, but they all believe this is how the world should work. Learn how to fight back effectively!

this is an employer saying the quiet part out loud. pay attention.

Relevant comic by Dee Huez

Just to remind people: yep, that's the infamous "avocado toast" douche. That he still has a head is alarming.

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I am American and I have never seen photos like this. I had no idea there are borders like this. Even though I LOVE the idea of open borders, I am staring at these pictures like “wait…people can just…walk across some stones or grass and BE IN ANOTHER COUNTRY??? and nobody stops them?? how does that WORK?!” So you can tell that my country’s propaganda has gotten to me by convincing me that this CAN’T work even though…it…obviously can. These pics just seem unreal to me. I’ve been taught my whole life that this can’t exist. In 27 years no one has ever sat me down and gone, look, here’s how it is elsewhere. It isn’t impossible at all.

I want to add something, but I’d just be restating what they said. I.. didn’t know peace and kindness like this was possible.

All of the above, and …

Why did the chicken cross the road?

To get to Belgium, apparently.

This also leads to some funny images like: GuEsS wHeRe ThE bOrDeR Is XD

this is real, but it also gets at why hopeful stories are so important - its real hard to make a better world if you cant even imagine it existing

So remember this small side blog I used to run where we all collected our fun ZR Playlist coincidences? This one right here?

Yeah, it got marked as explicit by tumblr...

Honestly, of all my little side blogs and my main blog, that fact that THIS ONE was flagged is hilarious to me. Let's see if tumblr support can sort it out...

So... this old side blog of mine got flagged as explicit, and I'm honestly flabbergasted...