Basically A Rocket Scientist

First let me start with a disclaimer that I am speaking generally here. Of course both the U.S. and Europe are both massive and diverse places containing hundreds of millions of people, and a lot of regional differences. Neither the U.S. or Europe are a monolith (although a lot of people on the internet speak of both places as a monolith, which I wish people would stop doing, since neither are).

I could be wrong about this, since I don't live in the U.S., and haven't visited everywhere in Europe. But between where I have visited in the U.S., and where I have visited / lived in Europe, and from what I know from my friends in the U.S. and friends in other European countries, I get the feeling that overall the U.S. has stricter disability access laws than a lot of places in Europe do, especially in regard to building codes.

Of course there are exceptions, I know New York city is abhorrently hostile in its design towards anyone elderly and/or disabled. Although when I visited New York city it really just felt on par with a lot of major European cities with how abhorrently inaccessible it was.

One example of this is that recently I saw a Reddit discussion where a USAmerican vacationing in France was surprised at how many staircases didn't have handrails, because according to this man handrails are required by law in the U.S.

The comments were all Europeans having an absolute field day with this. Pretty much all of the comments were some variation of "I can't believe Americans are too stupid and lazy to use the stairs without a handrail 🤣🤣🤣 what's wrong with you fat lazy stupid Americans that you can't even use stairs without a handrail 🤣🤣🤣 thank GOD I was born in Europe where I was just taught how to walk up and down the stairs on my own and don't need a handrail like a lazy fat stupid American 🤣🤣🤣"

A few people tried to gently point out that this was about accessibility for elderly and disabled people, and it's not cool to laugh at building codes that are about accessibility, but those commenters were usually shut down with some variation of "yeah well in MY European country if someone is disabled or becomes elderly we either move to a more accessible building or we modify our home to be more accessible, we don't sit around whining like a bunch of Americans that our building isn't already accessible 🙄"

Which is, such a cruel way to talk about accessibility. Why wouldn't disabled and elderly people deserve the same access to a building as anyone else? Are elderly and disabled people not allowed to visit friends and family? Anyone could get hit by a car today, and after that struggle with going up and down stairs without the use of a handrail for the next several months, years, possibly the rest of your life. It's so easy to feel smug when you can easily trot up and down the stairs without a handrail, but so cruel to be unwilling to consider anyone who struggles with stairs should maybe be allowed access to the same places as you.

Honestly when I go on vacation abroad with my elderly + disabled mother, it's often easier to go to the U.S. with her than other places in Europe, because the U.S. does tend to be more accessible (in my experience, and except for New York city ofc) making going around to different public places with my mom generally a lot easier than somewhere like France or the Netherlands.

The USA has something called the Americans With Disabilites Act (ADA), and apparently it works fairly well. An American in my WhatsApp group went to a figure skating championship in Toronto a while back and was stunned that the arena didn’t have wheelchair access for spectators. Because an American arena would have.

Not everything about the USA is awful. Not everything about Canada and Europe is great.

Also, I live in Vancouver. We didn’t have a subway system until 1986, that’s when the Skytrain was finally built. Several of the Skytrain stations were originally built with no elevators. People with wheelchairs were expected to enter or exit the system at a different station that did have wheelchair access. In 1986.

The system wasn’t built in 1896 or 1926, when wheelchairs were a newfangled idea. It was built in 1986. British Columbian Rick Hansen’s Man In Motion world wheelchair tour started in 1985 (in Vancouver).

Or well, the Skytrain was opened in 1986. Let’s say the plans for it were finalized by 1983, since it would’ve taken a few years to build. In 1983, there was already a substantial disability rights movement in Canada, but several Skytrain stations didn’t have elevators anyway, presumably because it was cheaper.

Naturally, it eventually became politically unacceptable to make wheelchair users (and people with strollers, and people with canes or walkers, and people with suitcases) skip a station because they hadn’t bothered to put an elevator in that station.

So those stations had to be retrofitted at vast expense to make them wheelchair-accessible. It probably would’ve been cheaper to just build them accessible from the start, in retrospect. But we didn’t have a Made In Canada version of the ADA, so it didn’t happen.

Also, wheelchair accessibility does not only help wheelchair users. It also helps people with babies or toddlers in strollers, people using walkers, crutches, or canes, travellers with heavy suitcases, elderly people, etc, etc. I take the Skytrain several days a week, and I see all those people taking the elevator instead of the stairs or escalators.

The fight for the ADA was long, and bitter, and every single line of it is thanks to decades tireless activism work. Evangelical religious groups widely opposed the ADA because they believed that disability (and especially particularly disabling conditions, such as being HIV+) was God’s will, and wanted disabled people to be reliant on (religious) charity. Most large corporations and business interest groups opposed the ADA, because complying with accessibility requirements might hurt their bottom line. The US Chamber of Commerce came out swinging against it. The National Federation of Independent Business called it "a disaster for small business" and fear-mongered about it shutting down mom & pop shops and throwing hard-working American out of work. Greyhound Bus Lines literally testified before Congress that they were ~so concerned~ about the costs of requiring disability accommodations that they believed that passing the ADA would be tantamount to denying all rural people access to any buses, because apparently having to install a few fold-out ramps and fold-up seats would instantly bankrupt every extant bus company.

The bill was trapped in limbo for months. It looked hopeless. A lot of people thought it couldn’t happen – that the lobbies against disability rights and the disabled were simply too strong.

And in response, hundreds of disabled protesters showed up in Washington, DC and crawled up the steps of the Capitol.

Da Geese:

Nicole Gosling, Julia Gosling: Our beloved goosies. Maximum goose

Goose adjacent:

Sydney Healey: Befriended a goose named Gus as a child. Goose ally.

The Vancouver Goldeneyes: Geese are birds that live by water. Ducks are birds that live by water. Therefore, goldeneye ducks are like small geese

Not goosey enough:

Everyone else

I laugh so hard even if is only 8am

KOSA IS MOVING FORWARD IN THE HOUSE!

It's part of a package called the KIDS Act, filled with digital ID and age verification and censorship!

MAKE THOSE PHONES RING!! CALL YOUR HOUSE REPRESENTATIVES ALL WEEK

202-224-3121 i HIGHLY encourage everyone to read the bills in the KIDS Act, because you will be doing more than 95% of people who read and introduce these bills

incorrect response: write the rest of the story to be as twisty, shocking and counter to expectations as possible, regardless of whether this is a logical or satisfying way for the plot to go

correct response:

(you’re not stupid. I posted this thinking it would amuse a handful of mutuals who all knew the context and that would be about it, so I didn’t think about providing any other explanation. I had no idea it would spread this far.)

I’ll start from the very beginning just to be thorough. so this is Alex Hirsch, creator and head writer of Gravity Falls, a show which had a big focus on mystery, conspiracies, codes and ciphers, etc. the whole plot is kicked off by one of the main characters finding a mysterious old journal in the woods, which detailed all kinds of weird and supernatural things, but then ended abruptly with the author saying they had to hide the journal because they were being watched. the central driving mystery of the show, therefore, was the question of who wrote the journal and what happened to them.

now, the thing about Gravity Falls is that, while it must be said that the writers weren’t always quite as sure of their plans as we tend to like to think they are, it is very much a fair play mystery, with legitimate clues to what was going on. but the writers were caught off guard by how quickly the show attracted a dedicated audience, including a lot of people outside the primary presumed demographic, who started solving the clues faster than expected. so some of the fans were able to correctly guess who the author was before it was revealed in the show, and the theory started spreading. this put the writers in something of a panic, because this was THE mystery that the whole story revolved around, with ¾ of the show building up to the dramatic reveal in the middle of season 2. they wanted it to be a mystery that could be figured out, sure, but they weren’t prepared for people to solve it so far in advance of when it was planned to be revealed, which would have really taken away from the big moment. they weren’t going to change the main story itself, but having been caught unaware by how much attention the fans were paying, they wanted to up the ante and make the mystery more complex to solve going forward–but first they needed to buy some time and throw the fandom off the scent for a little longer.

hence, Alex’s plan as described above. they whipped up a fake shot that appears to give away the identity of the author as being another character in the show, put it on a screen in the studio as if it was a real animation frame, took a picture of it, and ‘leaked’ it online. it was initially decided to be a hoax (albeit, I think, presumed to be a hoax originating from outside the production team), until Alex posted this tweet:

…before quickly deleting it (though not so quickly that it didn’t get seen, of course).

it worked well enough to distract most people for a while, and wasn’t revealed as a hoax until a year later, when an episode aired that definitively proved that the supposed screenshot could never have happened, at which point Alex owned up to the whole thing as seen in the tweet above. by then the episode with the real reveal wasn’t far off, and while people did still work it out ahead of time, it was more of an “OH MY GOD I KNEW IT!” moment than a “booooooring, we’ve known that for ages” moment, which of course was what the writers wanted all along.

personally I find this a fascinating approach to dealing with the problem of spoilers, because it doesn’t affect the story itself at all; if you watch Gravity Falls today–or if you were watching it when it aired without any significant contact with the fandom–you’d never know about it. ultimately, the problem the writers were facing wasn’t that some people might guess the answer to the mystery–they never wanted to make it completely impossible to predict–so much as it was that they hadn’t designed the story to stand up to so many people working on the puzzle together, which resulted in a sort of total output of puzzle-solving ability that far outstripped the capability of any one solo human being. so their solution is something that’s very much targeted toward delaying that group problem-solving, without actually affecting the experience of any individual person watching the show.

plus, it’s very in keeping with the overall tone of the show.

don’t:

change the ending

do:

look at buckles shoving fries into boulier's mouth with me instead