[Zero Original Content]

@zuloo451‘s Final Fantasy XIV character <3 This is their 2nd commission from me! A smaller-scale one. I’m in love with this character and so thankful to get to draw them again ;w;

DOCTOR FISHER GET OFF THAT MANS FACE YOU’RE A SCIENTIST NOW ACT LIKE ONE

goals

I wonder: Do Americans know about american school buses? Not their existence in general, but how they're seen overseas.

Over here, they're one of the symbols of America, on par with the Statue of Liberty, the flag, the Eagle, and well ahead of any chain restaurant you can name. People won't know any US states, but they will know these vehicles.

The thing is, here in Germany, we don't have dedicated school buses. The general idea is that kids go to school on their own. When that's not practical, they're expected to use (and given free tickets for) public transit. Public transit is designed around this requirement; there are many places where there is a bus, and anyone can get on it, but the route and timetable really only makes sense for school children. In case a dedicated school bus is really needed, that's generally subcontracted out, and the lines either use something like a Sprinter Van for smaller routes, or a normal city or interurban bus (often a used one that's a bit older). School trips are normal public transit, or a rented bus, typically a coach or regional bus.

It's not a perfect system, in the past couple of years there's been an epidemic of people bringing their kids to school in their cars instead of letting them walk, which is less than ideal. It is what it is. But building a dedicated network of public transit lines only for students, and building dedicated vehicles only for that, has never occurred to anyone here.

Of course we know about these buses, from movies and such, but they're as foreign here as cacti or pick-up trucks (actually we're seeing more and more of these here) or yellow cabs (all europeans will assume all cabs in the US are yellow until they actually visit).

You do see these buses here at times, because people still generally like the idea of the US, even if they have a lot of issues with a lot of details, and so folks bring them over, along with stretch limos and stuff (also not really a thing here). And of course, if someone goes to all that trouble, they don't do it to haul school kids, they rent it out for city tours or as a party bus or whatever.

So you see these yellow things as a symbol of faraway places, scenic vistas, some vague undefined idea of freedom that doesn't necessarily hold up to any contact with reality, and it's just a huge part of the whole US aesthetic.

And then you go to a student exchange with the US, and you finally get the chance: You yourself get to ride in one of these iconic chrome yellow buses! It looks just like in the movies! You get in, you drive in them a little…

…and you realise they're shit. Just the worst buses in the western world. Terrible suspension. Uncomfortable seats with weirdly high backs (so they don't have to put seatbelts in, they just restrict how far kids can fly in an accident). Everything made out of the cheapest materials. Turns out the reason why the US uses school buses like that instead of normal modern city buses, which the US has, is to save money and because they just hate kids.

And then it hits you why US Americans say "as American as apple pie", a dish that is made and enjoyed literally anywhere in the world, instead of "as American as yellow school buses". Of course the Americans already knew all this. They got tortured by these things forever. It would never occur to them to see this as a symbol of America, it's just a normal part of life for them. It's a symbol of school and school life and sometimes normalcy, and tells us that these actors getting out of it are supposed to be teenagers, nothing more.

But most people in Europe have, of course, never ridden on these buses. So when they see them in movies and TV, that's a giant big yellow signifier that we're not in Hessen or Wallonia or wherever anymore. A symbol of a different world, one that may be at most a once-in-a-lifetime-experience for most people, just like a picture of a tropical beach, Incan Pyramids, the Great Wall of China, or Hildesheim (there's no reason to go there twice). And I think Americans don't know that, and that's fascinating.

Huh, didn't know school buses were seen like that overseas, I kinda assumed that most countries used school buses. They're just so ubiquitous here (heck I got stuck behind a school bus as it stopped just an hour ago) that I don't really think about how common they might actually be, much less how other countries might view US school buses.

this also says something about expectations of autonomy for children and teens in the US vs other places

and about how in lots of parts of the US, school buses pretty much are the public transit, people who live out of walking distance of their schools don't have any options for getting there except ride school bus or drive car

Yeah, when a lot of the US was getting laid out, late 18th and 19th centuries, the hot scientific new modern community concept was one based on large-ish individual farms, on which a single owner unambiguously lived with his family unit, none of this old-fashioned village-based system with medieval strip-based farming, where everyone lives all huddled together.

Europe was actively trying (for better or for worse) to move away from the medieval model, but it was baked into the existing shape of things; America very much took advantage of not having existing settlement and land ownership arrangements to respect to arrange things according to the zeitgeist.

Which means that American communities, especially west of Ohio, tended to be laid out on a pattern wherein 'going into town' was an operation in its own right. Not necessarily a highly arduous one, but even your nearest neighbors were frequently out of sight.

Then, we got serious about universal literacy, and universal general education beyond literacy, and started mandating kids going to school for increasingly long stretches. And it's simply not practical, with that layout, to have a school in walking distance of even a majority of rural homes, especially if you want distinct curricula for different ages and all of that; you could never train and pay that many teachers.

So school districts are drawn up much larger than it would make any sense to have a kid walk across. Oh yeah, ten miles uphill to school in the snow. That won't impede attendance.

My mother grew up in New York City and most certainly never took a school bus, but because of the settlement patterns that the 18th and 19th century lawmakers thought were up-to-date and efficient for land use, a majority of rural communities were in a position where there wasn't enough demand for establishing public transit to make any goddamn sense, because a majority of adults worked where they lived and tended to need cargo capacity when they did leave home. (Hence the ubiquity of the pickup truck.)

But hundreds of children needed to be rounded up and then dispersed again, every single day. Thus, the school bus. Objectively ridiculous, but in context it's a rational solution to a situation created a few generations previous. One idea of modernity interfering with the next.

The cheapness of them and the way they're used until they fall apart is down to 1) many municipalities are poor as shit and 2) kids are legally obliged to ride the damn things so it's not like they need to make them nice lol.

A small victory to celebrate for today

has anyone ever noticed how theres absolutely nothing to say 🤔

In the club humbled by the totality of my ignorance

Is this about how ppl born in the late 20th century have a unique and fluid experience of navigating barriers to information access and its our responsibility to teach the younger folks how to tinker with technology to avoid being spoonfed everything we experience in order to have critical skills that keep us informed, autonomous, and able to hold power despite looming threats of authoritarianism or..........???

i love love lOVE the additional element of “the only information that’s free is the ‘how we’re going to hell’” BS. Chef’s kiss.

"Rent should be no more than 30% of household income" is a really funny and roundabout way to say "property owners as a class are entitled to 30% of gross wages"

I know that Nintendo gets a lot of hate, but honestly, I think they should be hated even more.

Fucked

Out of Touch (1080 p)

Happy Out Of Touch Thursday

Once in a timeline, out of touch remix plays, and we have to thank the tumblr gods it this to go on for so long