Anarchy

Ok so what is jaywalking then

Oh I did not know that's what it was called! How fascinating!

Yeah it's technically a crime in the US but as far as I know it's basically never enforced

Nah they enforce it. I know someone who got a $30-ish fine for jaywalking.

and of course your experience of whether it is enforced or not depends on your race and class

A dad of a friend of mine visited the USA and crossed the street like a normal human and a cop told him he wasn't allowed so he did what any Australian man would do and called the cop a cunt and crossed the street again and the cop pulled a gun on him. For crossinf the street like a normal human.

also I don't think parents "these days" are uniquely terrible, I just think neglect is showing up in new ways as technology progresses. today's ipad kid would've been wandering around in a ditch alone all day and night before. parents not wanting to have to deal with children is not a new phenomenon.

THE BOTTOM IS A PAINTING????

also does a really good job reminding the view just how much air quality has improved since we stopped burning coal in every building lol

part of being an adult is figuring out what eveyone else's definition of "going crazy" is. to you it is not sleeping for 60 hours, writing 80k words in one sitting and expiriencing enough anxiety to kill a horse. to beth from accounting its buying a ticket to Columbus, Ohio. and to your friend its consuming so much ketamine you lose all of your posessions and wake up with five broken bones in a ditch somewhere and then proceeding to do it again the next day. to your other friend its writing a letter to their favourite actress about how much they appreciate her work. to your neighbour its laughing loudly in a grocery store whilst in pajamas. maya from uni hears the voice of her dead father making jokes with no punchlines and she considers that to be quite normal - to her going crazy would be hearing her husband instead. your downstairs neighbour will take night walks naked sometimes and claim there is nothing weird about him. there are literally no rules to life and all meaning is in the eye of the beholder.

wait so vesper died in 2003, 23 years ago, and nancy is 51. she was 28 when she wrote that obituary. how long do you think she’d been working for the omaha sunday scoop at that point? no wonder it hit hard, a girl just a few years younger than she is, passionate and driven like she is, who never had the chance to be more. how much of nancy’s career do you think was driven by the determination that someone needs to tell the story of people who think they’ll disappear without anyone noticing, how many nights did she spend doggedly pursing a story, exhausted and upset, and pulling out that old obituary for the strength to keep pushing forwards?

And they didn’t have a body. Nancy is an investigative journalist. Did she look for Vesper after she disappeared? Is that what sparked her career? Searching for a girl who vanished into thin air no body to be found. How long did she look? Do you think she looked longer than the cops? It often takes a while for a missing persons case with very little evidence to become a closed case. Nancy didn’t give up on Vesper when everyone else did.

"these researchers published a paper on something that literally any of us could have told you 🙄" ok well my supervisors wont let me write something in my thesis unless I can back it up with a citation so maybe it's a good thing that they're amplifying your voice to the scientific community in a way that prevents people from writing off your experiences as annecdotal evidence

they did the research in the first place because they believed you and wanted to tell people about it. they are not our enemies.

I hate you Ozempic craze I hate you 'heroin chic' I hate you weight loss ads on public radio I hate Burn Fat Fast ads every thirty seconds I hate you I hate you I hate you

I grew up before the term 'thigh gap' was invented I grew up before 'hip dip' was invented I was born before 'muffin top' was a thing before 'clean girl look' was a thing before 'glass skin' was a thing before razoring off peach fuzz was a thing and I'm so so so fucking tired of us inventing new concepts purely for the purpose of convincing people to hate their own bodies enough to buy products

Last time Tuberculosis ran through the USA a small number of people got it on purpose to look skinny and waifish and delicate and used makeup to look flushed and bony and when the Victorians figured out tapeworms people would infect themselves on purpose to starve themselves smaller and women and now in the year of our lord 2026 there is a noticeable fraction of the USAmerican population genuinely thrilled about a treatment-resistant microbial parasite that makes you shit and vomit your brains out for a month because side effects include weight loss and STILL we talk about being skinny like it's the natural default setting for all healthy people as if it's a self-sustaining standard and not an imaginary goal that we are constantly constantly constantly beating ourselves with a whip to acheive