Learning to fly in Pennsylvania meant keeping track of the last field we could turn back and crash land in (perpendicular to the furrows so they slow you rather than catching a wheel to flip you) when flying over woodland

Haha a tanker fire under an overpass collapsed I-95, the east coast artery and local trunk, in Philadelphia, and restoration looks to be on a scale of months.

Boy Meets World clowning if they think Philadelphians would ever name a daughter “Topanga”

dreg-heap:

dreg-heap:

dreg-heap:

Swifties acting like this is the first time Taylor has done anything wrong as if she wasn’t responsible for a 50% rise in horse euthanasia in Pennsylvania from 2002-2007

The fact that she was able to get what she did to those horses classified as euthanasia is bad enough

:

vapericot-deactivated20230126:

theweirdwideweb:

amilkyway:

fireflies lighting up a rural Pennsylvania field at dusk

I mean everywhere I get calls them Pennsylvania Dutch, consider that part of the reason carnival and fair rides often have Alpine theming (and honestly even smaller indie amusement parks have pretty German-ass fairy tale theming, and why even Six Flags parks will have Oktoberfest-ass beer hall band shells) is that a lot of American amusement fair culture is honestly pretty German-tinted, and a lot of it specifically comes out of German-settled Pennsylvania and Ohio

kontextmaschine:

morlock-holmes:

wetwareproblem:

nonbinaryspacecase:

wetwareproblem:

bakedbrielarson:

lesbwian:

Is this the latest “we don’t make fun of autistic people, just every single visibly autistic trait?”

It’s not, because it’s not talking about men just naturally speaking in this manner, but men who don’t speak like this regularly switching to this type of language specifically to talk down to women they disagree with. To seem more intellectual then those women.

The context here matters and is different from just someone having this manner of speaking naturally because they’re neurodivergent/autistic. Here it’s someone using this manner of speaking to talk down to others.

Here’s the thing: I don’t talk that way by default either. But if I’m feeling threatened, I switch up to a highly formal register automatically. It’s a trauma response; I’m trying to be unambiguous because I’m scared that any ambiguity will be used to hurt me. Exactly the way this post dismisses.

I’m not alone in this - it’s something I’ve seen in a lot of autistic folks, because a lot of us get punished for misunderstanding or communication issues.

Does that mean it’s not used by sexist sealions in the way described here? No, of course not. But… If you think this isn’t hitting autistic people you’re kidding yourself.

It’s because getting really angry isn’t going to work any better and it’s a good way to rile people up.

When I was in school I realized I could wield this against teachers trying to dress me down by leaning it into talking in school administratorspeak, which was an important step to my later realization of the general point that you establish command over humans just like you do animals, by mirroring them back at themselves with absolute confidence

I was in fact the son of the school district solicitor, and in my hyperlexia read all his little green “Developments in Pennsylvania School Law” subscription pamphlets and most of the notes he brought home, that surely gave me an edge

I just realized for the first time that people who didn’t grow up around Philadelphia have no idea of Mummer’s Day

cop-disliker69:

kontextmaschine:

pileofknives:

memoirsofanescapist:

pileofknives:

I really hate the word “folks” tbh

genuinely, could you elaborate?

Oh it’s just that like “y'all” and “folks” feel like really fake and hollow, overly friendly, like trying to create a community by calling it a community before doing any of the social work necessary to build a community. After typing all that maybe I’m overthinking it.

I had been using “y'all” just cause I like having a second person plural but after recent years I’m switching to the Philadelphia “youse”

Isn’t Philadelphia that one tiny area that says “yinz” for no comprehensible reason? Isn’t ‘youse’ like an old Brooklyn thing?

Yinz is Pittsburgh, Youse is Philly.

Also, congratulations to John Fetterman, I was rooting for him. I do think a part of his appeal was appearance, and not just “big oaf big”, but like thinking back on the guys I’d see around my hometown or in high school, that guy set the “Pennsylvania” slider all the way to the right in character creation.

Also, Man Recovering From Brain Damage Who Underdresses For Pennsylvania Winters solidarity. From my recent experiences, “look at this guy who comes off really unsteady and can’t talk well, sure people say his mind’s intact and he can communicate by computer during recovery but he’s obviously mentally useless forevermore!” was not just uncompelling but personally insulting

In terms of local vernacular building styles of Pennsylvania, colonial stuff was often log cabins or rough unshaped fieldstone, materials you generated in the course of clearing land for farming. As settlement expanded along river valleys you saw a lot of proto-Federal brick stuff. In rural areas you saw a lot of German influence in the wood architecture (and people!), when paint got affordable you saw painted “hex signs” on barns, which I think should be understood as part of a Germanic tradition of mystical radial imagery (the Nazi use of the swastika should be seen the same way). Also Pittsburgh is known for free-standing toilets in their unfinished basements.

Steel country is a bit faded, the central spine was always marginal Appalachia, Philly itself used to really look like Beirut when I went to the Franklin Institute as a kid but it’s gotten better, and the area around it where I grew up is safely part of the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis

But it’s just old, and tired. That coking plant was one of several parts of the state that are more notable for their ruins than any current activity

Like, a lot of Pennsylvania is where it is because those locations made sense given pre-railroad logistics, running from how Philly is at the mouth of the water route through the Alleghenies and Pittsburgh is at the intersection of rivers, to how the iffy soil of eastern PA was closely farmed to feed NYC and Philly, to how the roads are laid out to connect farms to hamlets in a way that horse-drawn wagons could handle in 1760.

And given that Pennsylvania’s only function now is to be “a place with the infrastructure for a lot of people to be” it kind of matters that a lot of it is tied up in not-useful ways that require extensive maintenance to keep from collapse, not viably scalable as is, and preclude any more coherent form

patgavin:

Bethlehem Steel 4/14/2018

Fuckin’ A, Go Birds

♪ Out in Bethlehem they’re wasting time
competing with
Amazon Prime ♪

Seriously though, the reused mill is visually striking but it just reinforces how while piece-by-piece this region has charm and makes historical sense, both the geography and people are dead end writeoffs until they’re shattered in war, occupied, and remade.

So Quakers consider themselves prohibited from doing evil (like going to war) but not compelled to prevent others from doing evil (as pacifists, how would they?) and the legislative result, in colonial Pennsylvania, was a long tradition of pragmatically backing nonbelievers’ violent initiatives ON THE CONDITION that they were worded so they could have been nonviolent if they wanted and their failure to so be was no knock on the Quakers.

Like during the Revolution, Benjamin Franklin got them to make appropriations for “fire engines”, and “corn” (which at the time just meant “fine discrete grains”, cf. “peppercorn”) and used it to buy cannons and gunpowder, which everyone understood would be the result

if this literally comes down to my hometown I will scream

DID YOU KNOW: Pennsylvania was the first and for a while the biggest petroleum-producing region in America, a heritage reflected in the brand names of Pennzoil and Quaker State motor oil?