the strident hisses of a nobody

Something like Breaking Bad, for example, has low squiggability (that’s what I’m calling this quality). It’s tightly written, the characters are consistent, there’s little left to interpolate or extrapolate. Obviously, people DO write fanfic of Breaking Bad, but it still has a low squiggability score. Whereas something like Supernatural has a high squiggability score. Fantasy and science fiction often have high squiggability scores. This suggests squiggability could also be related to worldbuilding and potential for people to borrow a premise or setting.

Shining Sunbeam (Aglaeactis cupripennis), male, family Trochilidae, order Apodiformes, Peru

Strawberry Poison Frog (Oophaga pumilio), male calling, family Dendrobatidae, Costa Rica

inat:

because it's genuinely insane the things i've heard americans say 'america doesn't have' when it's just factually incorrect.

for some perspective: during my longest move i did by-car in the u.s., i drove ~3,000 miles. That's ~4,800 km. It took nearly 50 hours drive-times alone. Meaning, if I could have driven without stopping once, it would have taken nearly 50 hours. Of course I split that up over several days.

Driving that same distance here, If there's a ferry+road from Rabat (in Morocco) to Kyiv (Ukraine), I could take it and keep on going another several hours.

So you can understand how silly it is for someone from the u.s. to be asked to answer a question on behalf of the entirety of the u.s.—geographically, culturally, etc.

So now that we've said all that, I need you to know that I listened to a guy from Idaho tell an Irish person today, "yeah, we just don't really get snails much in America."