paxamericana:

In 2012, to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812, Maryland redesigned its standard license plate to read “MARYLAND WAR OF 1812.” The license plates, which were the default between 2012 and 2016, have the URL www.starspangled200.org printed at the bottom.

Sometime within the last year, www.starspangled200.org stopped telling people about how Marylander Francis Scott Key was inspired to write the national anthem “The Star Spangled Banner” after watching British ships bombard Fort McHenry in Baltimore during the War of 1812 and started instead redirecting to a site called globeinternational.info, in which a blinking, bikini-clad woman advertises “Philippines Best Betting Site, Deposit 100 Receive 250.”

theehorsepusssy:

rustingbridges:

sungodsevenoclock:

I used to have these old guidebooks of London and Paris that had paragraph blurbs about every establishment on particular streets. That probably doesn’t exist now because it’s a bad idea: as far as a guidebook it’s pretty useless since it will get out of date so quickly and covers such a small proportion geographically. But I used to love those books and just read it for fun totally not with the intention of going to Paris or London but just to get that sweet, sweet specificity.

yeah I occasionally unearth books from the 90s back when they put a lot of stuff in print because how else were people going to find out about it?

I had a book detailing which pokemon cards were worth about how much money and so on (I didn’t buy any pokemon singles, I think I just liked looking at that kind of stuff). and while I’m sure the market moved enough that that book was a bit out of date by the time it hit print, nonetheless, I’m a bit nostalgic for an era when the world moved maybe just a little slower, such that it was even plausible to someone that this was the sort of information you might be able to get from a printed book

InQuest magazine was a thing in the 90s for basically doing that with CCG cards every month (after the model of the same publisher’s Wizard, which did it for comics)

frankensaint:

Just heard someone say “30 years ago, in 1993,” and stopped what I was doing. I froze. What do you mean 1993 was 30 years ago. That’s illegal

memecucker:

The 1970s were 30 years ago 20 years ago

depsidase:

klaxces:

modern hieroglyphics

alexs-daydream-channel:

daddyhyperion:

palenoface:

trees-and-sky:

may i add

aziraphale-is-ace:

If I might add…

mwagneto:

more

mwagneto:

reaction pics everyone will still understand even with the text removed

sandmandaddy69:

What was that gacha that had an NTR event you had to sign in to stop?

cryptotheism:

In light of her 11 year prison sentence, I would like to share my favorite Elizabeth Holmes text.

I literally have warmer chat logs than this with Caroline Ellison.

red-road-to-adventure:

transjinako:

nostalgebraist:

This was a bot created by @nostalgebraist.

It operated from October 19, 2019 to May 31, 2023.

For general information about the bot, see this post.

crazy-brazilian:

Okay so everyone’s gone off about another ooh-aah Vienna public housing article. So, for context,

The Thing About Red Vienna Is

That as the Austro-Hungarian Empire modernized from an agrarian economy, nobility from rural areas diversified their economic bases by selling or mortgaging their local holdings and buying land in the capital, which they then developed for rent. In this way industrial workers’ monthly rent replaced annual harvests as their income stream – Marx was really quite literal about the continuity between the feudal liege and the urban landlord.

So when the empire collapsed Vienna ended up in a shrunken Austria in which urban residents outvoted all domestic rural power and felt no obligations whatsoever to nobles now in other countries, so if “control of Viennese housing” was the nexus of economic power they could just seize it themselves and blow raspberries.

How’d that go? Well, eventually the old money types raised an army in the countryside and those Vienna housing projects were actually the final redoubt of the leftists before artillery softened them up and the rightists established one-party “Austrofascism”.

The funny thing about people going off online over Taylor Swift’s new boy is she released an album on the theme of “sorry I didn’t care about your social media mob bullshit, I was too busy getting good dick” in 2017

kontextmaschine:

nostalgebraist-autoresponder:

ALT

This is just going west on Sunset into WeHo.

Like not much came of my 20s and if I could still regret things the sense of finite lifespan might have me wanting those years back, but I kind of like the fact that Kontextmaschine just incongruously makes LA references sometimes.

I’ve been pretty out of it for some important years lately and was never great west of the river, but Ground Kontrol (or Quarterworld if he’s on the east side) is a nice arcade, the Oregon Historical Society museum is pretty neat but then I’m a history fan, Powell’s bookstore downtown is a classic, the Japanese gardens up in the hills if he wants to walk around outside and Skyline Boulevard in the West Hills if he wants to drive

kontextmaschine:

Mathing it out if those neighbors leave and combine the adjacent lot for multifamily construction when their kids move out in a decade or so, depending on number of units feasible (and basement units/extended family compounds already here) the new building would suddenly constitute from 40% to 75% of all the households living on the block. Which is both the promise and cost of residential densification, I suppose.

I mean depending on the market it could feasibly become only 4 townhouses.

Mathing it out if those neighbors leave and combine the adjacent lot for multifamily construction when their kids move out in a decade or so, depending on number of units feasible (and basement units/extended family compounds already here) the new building would suddenly constitute from 40% to 75% of all the households living on the block. Which is both the promise and cost of residential densification, I suppose.

So anyway the combination of my recent mortality morbidity mentality and weight loss is that I am independently psyched not only that I’m going to be thin, but that I’m going to have a chance to experience what it’s like living like that before I die, which I had given up on long ago