Maliciously Evil

rest stops on highways

trails by the highway just out of earshot of traffic

schools during breaks

those little beaches right next to ferry docks

your friends living room once everybody but you is asleep

the lighting section of home depot

A lot of these places are called liminal spaces - which means they are throughways from one space to the next. Places like rest stops, stairwells, trains, parking lots, waiting rooms, airports feel weird when you’re in them because their existence is not about themselves, but the things before and after them. They have no definitive place outside of their relationship to the spaces you are coming from and going to. Reality feels altered here because we’re not really supposed to be in them for a long time for think about them as their own entities, and when we do they seem odd and out of place.

The other spaces feel weird because our brains are hard-wired for context - we like things to belong to a certain place and time and when we experience those things outside of the context our brains have developed for them, our brains are like NOPE SHIT THIS ISN’T RIGHT GET OUT ABORT ABORT. Schools not in session, empty museums, being awake when other people are asleep - all these things and spaces feel weird because our brain is like “I already have a context for this space and this is not it so it must be dangerous.” Our rational understanding can sometimes override that immediate “danger” impulse but we’re still left with a feeling of wariness and unease. 

DON’T: -hit them -yell at them -wave in their face in excess

OP: Why couldn’t traditional Chinese Yinpiao银票/silver drafts be forged if they were merely slips of paper? (cr大明宝钞，渐越)

Traditional Chinese yinpiao/silver drafts were paper vouchers issued by private banks starting from the Song Dynasty(960–1279). People could exchange these slips for physical silver at bank branches across the country.

Silver drafts were made in multiple copies with matching serrated seal edges. One copy went to the customer and others stayed at the bank. All edges had to fit perfectly together to withdraw silver. The unique split edge marks were almost impossible to copy.

This mechanism is known as qifeng骑缝 (split-joint seal) in China. It first originated in the Western Zhou Dynasty (1046–771 BC). The Rites of Zhou records that contracts were written on bamboo or wooden slips in duplicate. Notches and marks were carved in the middle before splitting the slips, with each party keeping one half. The two halves would be matched by their notches for verification.

During the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods (770–221 BC), this idea evolved into hufu虎符/tiger tally tokens. A military tally was split into two pieces with identical inscriptions carved along the split edge. Troops could only be deployed if the patterns and characters on both halves perfectly aligned, serving as a metal version of the split-joint anti-counterfeiting system.

The technology matured in the Tang Dynasty (618–907). Government documents and private contracts commonly used split-joint seals stamped across the dividing line. The Chinese character "hetong合同" (contract) was written across the middle before the paper was torn apart, so the complete characters would only appear when the two halves were put together. This split-coupon system was later adopted for Song Dynasty (960–1279) jiaozi paper money and yinpiao/silver drafts of the Ming and Qing dynasties (1368–1912).

Official Song dynasty paper money (Jiaozi交子) was abolished in 1107. Private silver drafts issued by Qing-era piaohao票行 (ancient exchange banks) vanished completely in 1951, hit hard by modern banks and currency reforms. Nowadays silver drafts no longer circulate as currency. Their collectible value depends on their rarity and physical condition.

First they were called "chirographs", but later the word "indenture" (in its earliest meaning as just a legal document of any kind between two people) came to be used, originating from the practice of a contract being written twice on a single piece of parchment and then cut in half with serrated edges (as in dent, "teeth" -> indents -> indenture) in order for each party to take one half, so they could later piece them together and verify that there had been no forgery -- same as the Chinese silver drafts!

(Charter of the Clerecía de Ledesma, 1252, showing the serrated indents at the top -- presumably they are cutting rather than tearing because they're using parchment, which I expect is much harder to tear than wood-pulp paper like the Chinese were using)

you may take it. ONCE.

local area code = hang up. this one is also a telemarketer but trying to be sneaky

If you're on twitter or threads or reddit, and you say, "Oh, I had a terrible experience with Delta Airlines. They canceled my flight and then booked me into a hotel room with a stranger," and you tag Delta, there's a chance Delta Airlines itself will come and apologize. Maybe even give you some SkyMiles or something.

But if you complain about a terrible airline experience on tumblr, all you can hope for is that someone might come along and write slash fiction about two guys who get booked into the same hotel room by Delta Airlines.

You can't gain social capital by being here. Nobody knows who you even ARE because your user name is, like, some randomly generated phrase or else an obscure reference to hockey sex books.

If I try to drive from here in Maine to New Mexico, it’s 2,400 miles. 

From here to Oregon, 800 miles from my current residence to my relatives in NJ, then another 3,000 miles after that. 

A brisk 8 day drive that meanders through mountains, forests, corn fields, dry, flat, empty plains, more mountains, and then a temperate rain forest in Oregon.

The land has some seriously creepy stuff, even just right outside our doors. 

There is often barking sounds on the other side of our back door. 

At 3 am. 

When no one would let their dog out. 

It’s a consensus not to even look out the fucking windows at night. 

Especially during the winter months. 

Nothing chills your heart faster than sitting in front of a window and hearing footsteps breaking through the snow behind you, only to look and not see anything. 

I live in a tiny town whose distance from larger cities ranges from 30 miles, to 70 miles. What is in between?

Giant stretches of forests, swamps, pockets of civilization, more trees, farms, wildlife, and winding roads. All of which gives the feeling of nature merely tolerating humans, and that we are one frost heave away from our houses being destroyed, one stretch of undergrowth away from our roads being pulled back into the earth.

And almost every night, we have to convince ourselves that the popping, echoing gunshot sounds are really fireworks, because we have no idea what they might be shooting at.

pretending we don’t know we’re sitting on top of limestone caverns filled with icy water

meanwhile in maryland the summer is killing-hot, the air made of wet flannel, white heat-haze glazing the horizon, and the endless cicadas shrilling in every single tree sound like a vast engine revving and falling off, revving and falling off, slow and repeated, and everything is so green, lush poison-green, and you could swear you can hear the things growing, hear the fibrous creak and swell of tendrils flexing

The wind picks up, you get nervous. a helicopter passes low overhead, you get anxious. You wait for sirens. You watch more helicopters carrying heavy sacks of retardant, tanks of water, and keep testing the way the wind blows. Somehow, the fire misses you this summer.

Wintertime in California. The yellowed, crackling grass that looks like miles of sand dunes turns gray and falls loose from the baked earth. You pray for rain but you beg that it doesn’t come with lightning. Still, you don’t expect rain because every winter is “dry.” Snow falls somewhere in the mountains where someone skis then comes back and tells you it wasn’t much. No rain means more fire in the summer.

Then, after New Year’s, it rains. And rains. And gushes. The ground is baked stiff and won’t absorb water after an hour of moderate rain. The water rises. It fills streets, houses, threatens levees and dams. After days of this the ground finally softens. The plants, their root systems shriveled and mostly washed away by the flooding, can’t hold the dirt in place. Where it has no choice,the earth gives way to landslides.

The Sierra Nevadas, riddled with abandoned gold mines and in some place stripped by hydraulic mining. The water is always tainted with mercury and alkali. Occasionally a mine collapses and a sinkhole appears. If the house shakes you ask your friends and neighbors if they felt it too, but then you forget it happened. You actually sleep through most tremors.

Everyone knows at least one old mining song. School projects and field trips are to Sutter’s Fort and the missions. Cracking adobe that predates the country. You can tell vultures apart from other birds of prey easy because they’re the ones you see most often. Orchards that go on for miles and towns built on top of old olive orchards—occasionally a business or private home has kept a few to remind you. They don’t plant them. Those are the original trees.

You’re hiking and you find a massive flat rock with fist-sized holes bored into it. Trees and fence posts that look like they were used for target practice with a machine gun. You hear what sounds like a lawn sprinkler go off and you get as far away from the rocks as you can, watching where you step.

Sacramento is a concrete jungle of one way streets and sky-blocking towers before endless miles of ugly industrial wasteland. San Francisco is a twisting maze of clogged overpasses where you drive three miles an hour and watch a dense blanket of bonechilling fog climb over the hills and obscure everything before you enter the city where you keep your foot pressed flat to the brake at the steepest intersections. LA is a fever dream, a knotted nightmare of traffic you can never escape, air you can’t breathe even when there’s no fire, and someone’s always playing Norteño, which sounds exactly like polka but with melancholy Spanish lyrics.

The Central Valley gets funnel clouds that touch down even less often than snow falls, but you remember once as a kid getting sleet in the Valley and thinking that’s what snow was then later huddling in the school cafeteria because of a tornado warning. You remember visiting the ocean and bringing home kelp and colored glass. In the mountains you found a sticky pinecone the size of your head and a snake with minuscule legs. An owl with a broken wing was brought to your classroom, there are giant statues of golden bears at the state fair, and someone’s always going missing from Modesto.