(vibrates) it's slug time

CONCLUSIONS!

so there's a lot of ways to chop this one…

"racism and capitalism still exists in the future" is a trope that it's kind of limiting / always grates me in some ways (it feeds into the anti-racism of ppl whose politics doesnt trascend idealist philosophy -> that is, it is an anti-racism that can't conceive of an end to racism bc it doesn't actually have a political project that address the material causes of racism and just tries to fix the "natural prejudices" away with "education". in other words, it cant portray a word without racism bc it cant *conveive* of one.) . however i think im more open to it this time / this series since s11 onwards the focus has been so much on telling stories about the present with scifi make up on. and i think this one manages to do that rlly well. ___

another vertice to look this one on is whether... is it really "doing anything" to have racism portrayed on screen (and other bigotry) in a scifi story? if u already experience racism or understand it happens, who is served by this? it's hurtful to watch and it's like missing the chance to "show a different world" is possible thru scifi. and the counterargument to that is on a """""color blind"""""" 2020s world it is rlly cathartic and re-affirming to have stories that *show* the realities of the world, and that dont shy away from showing those realities in fear of them coming off as "over the top" (bc they arent. some ppl will still walk away from this ep thinking "haha fun satires" but like. this is literally how White Rich People Talk. in real life.......) and again in this one time i think it works really well bc doctor who has… probably never done this? lol there's moments with martha and ryan for example, but never going this hard on it. but im open to discussion tbh. i think the angle of "is this a story about racism for white people to learn or is it a cathartic for *black / brown people to experience catharsis in" is gonna be one for fruitful discussion in the future. ___

besides the socio-political points,,,, bro this episode was a thrill ngl sdlkjf like so many simple, excellent moments like the girl walking into the light post. the made up slang and the real slang!!!!. the excellent interior design. "ruby and fifteen react to doctor who". just lots of fun little details. the execution was really inspired.

character point -> tbh fifteen at the end feels like a bit of Growth from like, ten at his worst moments -> "he's not the person you would have chosen to survive, but if you could decide who lives or dies, doctor, that would make you a monster"

also kinda wonder how this episde will hit for newbies / Not Us. i think a lot of its gut punch comes from dw never doing this before and so the strenght of subverting those expectations. is this an story that stands on its own w/o all the 60 years of context? we'll have to show it to our normie friends and see lol

seeing a lot of "the episode was about social media and suddenly out of nowhere turned into a commentary on racism" THE WHOLE EPISODE WAS ABOUT RACISM. THE WHOLE THING. IT WAS ALWAYS ABOUT RACISM. from how white everyone was to lindy immediately blocking the doctor while only "sliding" ruby to them all being rich kids to lindy being appalled ruby and the doctor were in the same room to everyone saying they could "tame" the wild woods and "be pioneers". it was ALWAYS about racism.

yes the social media aspect ties into it bc racism is RAMPANT on social media. i specifically noticed how lindy made an effort to say how her clothes were sustainable and then turns around and commits microaggressions against the doctor. its the exact flavor of showboaty performative activism you see everywhere. just because you didnt notice it doesnt mean it wasnt there.

Also also the bubblegum and midcentury modern styling was the point. It's a direct reference to whiteness. Midcentury furniture and styling was prevalent in the 50s and 60s, the "good times" of racism and segregation. Bubblegum colour schemes similarly are associated with pop music, itself a very very white space. The reveal of the episode was set up in its styling as well as in the little microaggressions of the protaganist and it's part of what helps "sell" it.

If you don’t believe Ricky September was just as racist as the rest of them because he could READ go back and watch his interaction when he spoke to the doctor. The way he scratched his head and kept looking away. THAT FUCKING AKWARD SMILE EVERY WHITE PERSON MAKES TO BLACK PEOPLE 😑 every black person has dealt with that exact interaction at least once. He knew the history of his people and had no issue with it. And just because he wanted to save HIS people doesn’t mean he would have extended that same kindness to those who don’t look like him. And that fact yall would have needed to see him in that last scene to be SURE speaks volumes on how yall ignore black and brown voices on similar matters in real life.

obsessed with how Russell T. Davies' episodes this season have gone so quickly from "run about with space babies! the beatles return the world's music" to "ruby assassinates the prime minister. mass murder in racism city"

hey wait. Ruby Sunday. Ricky September. Names with the initials R.S with the S being a date. When Ricky’s birth identity was revealed, he was killed for it.

Hey. HEY

Ethical consumption under capitalism? These slug creatures only eat white supremacist influencers

i think people are forgetting that ricky was also complicit?? like mans read the history of their people, he knew how inherently racist and classist their society was and despite having the platform to say something about it he just kind of went along with it. people comparing him to harry styles really hit the right mark huh

Doctor Who - Dot and Bubble (2024)

Reading a reddit thread about how many trains/buses/cars take to move 50k people and

Once again, I'm appalled at how much some USians think the rest of the world doesn't exist, is lying, or we are too stupid to understand we are making obvious (for them) bad choices

Also, quite a lot of "but public transport don't work in rural areas!"

Look, I grew up in a rural area. I could literally watch sheep grazing on a hill less than 50m from my parent's house kitchen window. My town was around 4k people.

Still, we had a bus going to the nearby (and similarly-sized) towns every 15 minutes. Two buses per hour to the provincial capital, and one to the other "big" (around 200k people) city of my province. A train to the capital and another to the 'big city' every hour. My town was in the bottom of a valley, and around it had maybe 20-30 hamlets (10-100 people each) between 2 and 10 km away from town, mostly in the surrounding mountains, and every day several buses go through them to pick the kids who live there and take them to school/high school in my town and back.

I don't think I've ever seen more than 1 or 2 people take or leave the train in any of those three stops. In the last one, you couldn't even see any houses around from the train. Most of the times, the train just stopped and left without taking or leaving anyone. Still, they were important for some people, who deserved to have a trustable public transport network.

Public transport in rural areas is perfectly possible. You just need to remember that it is a SERVICE and not a BUSINESS.

... no. Sorry jv but your idea of what rural means is not the same as its meant in the US. Both of my (divorced) parents live in rural areas. My mother lives across the street from a cow farm. If someone screamed, no one would hear it. The road she lives on is a 55mph road and the nearest store is an hour walk away and that is the only store for MILES. And she's the one who lives in what is "barely rural".

My father though? He lives rural. Like rural rural. You can't even walk to his nearest neighbors house in under 40 minutes. The nearest store is a gas station and the next closest store is over an hours drive away, and thats another gas station (and a mcdonalds) just before you can get on a highway to hopefully get somewhere near civilization again another 30-45 minutes later.

You lived in a town. When we say rural over here, we mean near complete isolation, less than 500 people types of places. A bus every 15 minutes to drive from rural US to the nearest town an hour and a half away for people that would use it maybe once or twice a month would just be a waste of resources and be bad for the environment.

Don't get me wrong, Im super for better public transit, but the 'rural problem' isn't what you think it is

oh no, I don't think you are right.

Why? Because that doesn't count. Of course, there's going to be a small percentage of people who lives in places that can't be serviced by the public transit network. Let's arbitrarily put that threshold in the 10% of the total population of the country. So someone living on a farm, 5 km away from the nearest population center? Or course they won't have a bus to their door. But I'm pretty sure less than 10% of the US lives in similar conditions. And still, they should be able to get to their nearest village or town, either by car, walk, whatever, and be able to pick a train or a bus to any other place. And no, it's not wasteful. If a bus is carrying 3-4 people per trip, you are removing a bunch of cars from the roads, and you can play with bus frequencies to improve the ratio.

Less than 500 people villages here have buses, most of the time. Maybe only a handful per day if they are isolated, but to find a place that doesn't have any kind of public transport here you need to hit the "very isolated" and "two digit population or less" combo. It's actually very rare to find a place that doesn't have at least some bus service a bunch of times per day.

And again, the US is not some special case in pretty much any area: the central plateau of spain, if you remove the province of Madrid, has a population density close to Iowa. "The empty Spain", we use to call it. And you can take a bus to visit it.

That's literally illegal here and it should be there too, but it's not because of the same reason you don't have public transit everywhere. It's not a matter of "special circumstances", it's a matter of priorities and a lack of will :)

Let me clear this: here (Spain) the maximum speed for any road when it's going through a populated area is 50km/h (30mph). And that's only in a few multi lane big roads, you average two-lane roads top speed is 30km/h (20mph)

Thinking about having cars passing at 80km/h next to a pedestrian area all the day is pretty terrifying.

i mean the point is that those aren't pedestrian areas, they're incredibly sparsely populated and there's no sidewalks - there's houses, sure, but it's not a "pedestrian" area by any stretch.

And that's the issue. If there are houses, if pedestrians can be there, those are pedestrian areas. Or should be. But the USofA refuses to make it law.

I mean, I'm not making up this shit, the US has about twice the fatal car accidents per person than most of the rich countries in the world and speed limits has a lot to do with it:

https://usa.streetsblog.org/2018/12/13/why-the-u-s-trails-the-developed-world-on-traffic-deaths

the issue with that is that there really... isn't anywhere where people don't live? and if you limit every single highway to 30mph then it's going to take twice as long to get anywhere between cities, which can already be a multi-hour affair (if not multiple days if you're going to another state). that's not a problem that can be fully solved with more robust transit, because there are plenty of legitimate reasons someone might want to make that kind of trip by car instead of mass transit (moving house, fussy kids, disabilities, etc). robust transit would decrease accidents, certainly, by reducing the number of cars on the road - but it wouldn't eliminate the need for personal vehicles entirely, and i genuinely can't think of a way to make 30mph max speed limits on all roads in the US logistically feasible.

Well, for starters, you don't get highways near populated areas. Here it's not legal to walk next to a highway, so it's literally impossible to build a house with direct access to one.

And then, if a highway goes through a city or town and you don't have any way to isolate it, then congrats, your highway stops being a highway for the length of it that goes within that town limits! It happens sometimes here with highways that were built before modern traffic rules. And that's why the ones built in the last 30-40 years don't get too close to any populated place. And if they do, the highway is surrounded by walls isolating it from pedestrians.

So you don't need to reduce the speed limit to 50km/h / 30mph everywhere, but only where you can't isolate the road from the people. And where you can't? Yeah, it's going to make cars slower. But it's a choice between adding some extra travel time and literally thousands of deaths per year.

Most of the counties pick to reduce deaths. The USofA picks to reduce travel times. And that is the entire gist of this post: the US is not any special place with special conditions that prevents them from creating the same infrastructures and life conditions most of the rest of the rich side of the world has. It's everything a matter of policy and priorities.

The "that wouldn't work in the US because ... " argument is almost universally wrong, because it's not that the US is any kind of weird place with weird intrinsic conditions, it's just a place where a majority of people (smaller every year, the youngsters seem to be very alright) have weird priorities about what's important and that creates bad outcomes.

I could think of no better way to share the news than this!

So when I was 17, my cat went missing and I'd given up hope of ever seeing him again.

Until on Monday, 27th of May, 2024, my friend sent me a FB post asking 'isn't that your mother?' about the person named on the microchip.

Here he is! 16 years old, and found safe, twelve whole years after he went missing!

Yesterday (Tuesday the 28th of May, 2024) I went to the rescue that had him, and I reclaimed my boy, renaming him Artie! (He'd originally been called 'Cat' because my mother and I couldn't decide on a name)

He's home safe with me now, currently inhabiting my bathroom and purring up a storm every time someone goes in there!

I'll be doing slow introductions between him and my current cat to give them the best possible chance of living in harmony!

Here's some pictures of Artie once we let him out of the carrier:

Update!

Me and Artie are gonna be in a local newspaper!!!

And he now has a gofundme to help with his medical expenses. The link is here but there's no pressure at all!

He's settling in well and keeps trying to escape the bathroom to go see my other cat, which I can't let him do yet!

Also he nearly had my hand off for his breakfast this morning so his appetite isn't being dampened by him not having any teeth!

Hey, y'all. Calling special attention to this one bc I know this community is really good about helping ppl take care of their animals. Y'all helped me get chemo for Lyudmila Pupperchenko, and we got 5 more months with her as a result.

Let's do this. What an amazing gift OP has gotten.

TROD Au / Narilamb doodle dump

Part 1??? I've got a bunch of others and comics but I need to organize them all. I'll say that the first comic happens sometime after this post though

continuing the cotl hyperfixation

this was my reaction when i first beat the one who waits

addition to this, cannot stop thinking of them

screw logging and worship. leshy concession stand worker

bonus

until death do us part?? WRONG death bringth together. based off this ask i got

they are so dumb i love them