#only been to France and the UK so far

[forever-ago]

Amsterdam soon🇳🇱

#only been to Italy France Greece Spain Switzerland so far. & Uk. love Europe

[reasonsforhope]

"The amount of electricity generated by the UK’s gas and coal power plants fell by 20% last year, with consumption of fossil fuels at its lowest level since 1957.

Not since Harold Macmillan was the UK prime minister and the Beatles’ John Lennon and Paul McCartney met for the first time has the UK used less coal and gas.

The UK’s gas power plants last year generated 31% of the UK’s electricity, or 98 terawatt hours (TWh), according to a report by the industry journal Carbon Brief, while the UK’s last remaining coal plant produced enough electricity to meet just 1% of the UK’s power demand or 4TWh.

Fossil fuels were squeezed out of the electricity system by a surge in renewable energy generation combined with higher electricity imports from France and Norway and a long-term trend of falling demand.

Higher power imports last year were driven by an increase in nuclear power from France and hydropower from Norway in 2023. This marked a reversal from 2022 when a string of nuclear outages in France helped make the UK a net exporter of electricity for the first time.

Carbon Brief found that gas and coal power plants made up just over a third of the UK’s electricity supplies in 2023, while renewable energy provided the single largest source of power to the grid at a record 42%.

It was the third year this decade that renewable energy sources, including wind, solar, hydro and biomass power, outperformed fossil fuels [in the UK], according to the analysis. Renewables and Britain’s nuclear reactors, which generated 13% of electricity supplies last year, helped low-carbon electricity make up 55% of the UK’s electricity in 2023.

[Note: "Third year this decade" refers to the UK specifically, not global; there are several countries that already run on 100% renewable energy, and more above 90% renewable. Also, though, there have only been four years this decade so far! So three out of four is pretty good!]

Dan McGrail, the chief executive of RenewableUK, said the data shows “the central role that wind, solar and other clean power sources are consistently playing in Britain’s energy transition”.

“We’re working closely with the government to accelerate the pace at which we build new projects and new supply chains in the face of intense global competition, as everyone is trying to replicate our success,” McGrail said.

Electricity from fossil fuels was two-thirds lower in 2023 compared with its peak in 2008, according to Carbon Brief. It found that coal has dropped by 97% and gas by 43% in the last 15 years.

Coal power is expected to fall further in 2024 after the planned shutdown of Britain’s last remaining coal plant in September. The Ratcliffe on Soar coal plant, owned by the German utility Uniper, is scheduled to shut before next winter after generating power for over 55 years.

Renewable energy has increased sixfold since 2008 as the UK has constructed more wind and solar farms, and the large Drax coal plant has converted some of its generating units to burn biomass pellets.

Electricity demand has tumbled by 22% since its peak in 2005, according to the data, as part of a long-term trend driven by more energy efficient homes and appliances as well as a decline in the UK’s manufacturing sector.

Demand for electricity is expected to double as the UK aims to cut emissions to net zero by 2050 because the plan relies heavily on replacing fossil fuel transport and heating with electric alternatives.

In recent weeks [aka at the end of 2023], offshore wind developers have given the green light to another four large windfarms in UK waters, including the world’s largest offshore windfarm at Hornsea 3, which will be built off the North Yorkshire coast by Denmark’s Ørsted."

-via The Guardian, January 2, 2024

#uk #united kingdom #england #scotland #wales #northern ireland #electricity #renewables #renewable energy #climate change #sustainability #hope posting #green energy #fossil fuels #oil #coal #solar power #wind power #environment #climate action #global warming #air pollution #climate crisis #good news #hope

[matan4il]

Update post:

Most of this will be about the unprecedented attack of the Islamist regime of Iran against Israel, but first I have to take a second to mourn a 14 year old boy, who was murdered in a Palestinian attack on Friday. At around 6 in the morning, teenager Binyamin Achimeir led his sheep herd out of the farm he lives in, but a few hours later, the sheep returned to the farm without him. At first, it was feared that he had some accident, or was dehydrated, and thousands of people voluntarily joined the search for him. On Saturday, at around noon, the IDF found his body, with signs of brutal violence on it. Based on the forensic evidence, he was murdered by several Palestinian terrorists, and he fought back. The army is still hunting down the murderers. May Binyamin's memory be a blessing.

Right, back to the Islamist regime of Iran's attack on Israel. I posted about it as soon as the news started being aired here, in case someone didn't know about it. The news broke past the normal time when people watch news on TV in Israel, I noticed it by chance right before I was about to turn in for the night. I'm physically okay, but I didn't get that much sleep, I had to wake up early to take care of some stuff, so I AM very tired, which is why I'm not going to do the usual thing I do, which is to look for English journalistic sources for everything, but I have no doubt even the stuff I won't look up can all be easily found online.

On a personal note, I can tell you that at 1:43 in the morning I heard the first explosion, but no sirens went off. A few more explosions followed, and only then did we hear the sirens. It was scary, for a moment we couldn't tell whether we're hearing explosions of missiles from neighboring areas, or whether something went wrong with the sirens, and we need to hurry into the bomb shelter. It seems like in Jerusalem specifically there was some issue with the sirens, I heard a reporter mention it. Also, the alert app didn't go off, even though it should have, at the latest when the sirens did.

This is what the Temple Mount looked like from an Iranian attack that could have easily destroyed the al-Aqsa mosque (it's not in the frame, but it's right next to where this was filmed):

Quick background: Iran is the biggest financier of anti-Israel terrorism for decades now, including funding Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis, all of which have been a part of a continuous attack on Israel since Oct 7 as Iran's proxies. Iran has sent its own military seniors to help and instruct those local terrorists, in places like Lebanon, Syria and Iraq. Israel has eliminated them whenever possible, this is not something new. On Apr 1, Israel carried out such a strike, in which it targeted 7 Iranian army seniors in Damascus, Syria's capital. Iran claimed Israel targeted the Iranian consulate in this city, but diplomatic buildings are all publicly listed. Iran has an embassy in Damascus (in a separate location) and no consulates. That's why the magnitude of Iran's response to this has taken Israel by surprise, because the Israeli strike wasn't that out of the ordinary. In fact, the US assassination of Iran's military commander, Qasem Soleimani, back in 2018, was a far graver blow for the Iranian regime, and yet it did not lead to an attack as massive as the one launched against Israel last night.

It is now known that some of the attack waves against Israel were intercepted by other countries, including The US, the UK, France and Jordan. It's been said that there's at least one more Arab country that helped in intercepting Iran's attack, but it can't be publicized. Many countries denounced Iran for attacking Israel.

We don't have numbers regarding the full size of the attack. Out of all the countries who participated in curtailing this attack, we know that the US has intercepted at least 70 suicide drones and 3 cruise missiles, while Israel has intercepted at least 185 suicide drones, 36 cruise missile and 110 ballistic missiles (that last one is the missile type that causes the most damage). Israel's interceptions are said to have been 99% successful, but like I said, no defence system is perfect. A small number of ballistic missiles did land inside Israel. One hit an Israeli air Force base in the south. There's over 30 people who got injured when rushing to the bomb shelter in the middle of the night (elderly people, including Holocaust survivors, have died from such injuries), and over 30 more ended up in hospital due to severe mental health reactions. On top of that, there's a 7 years old Muslim Bedouine girl who was injured by interceptors debris. A friend of her family that I heard being interviewed said the family wanted to go to the communal bomb shelter, but before they even had a chance to make it out of the house, the girl was hit by the debris piercing into their home, and she is suffering from severe head injuries. The hospital is currently fighting for her life.

The estimate of how much it cost Israel to defend its citizens from this one attack last night is 5 BILLION shekels (which is over 1.3 BILLION US dollars). That's for one night.

Israel will respond. According to one reporter I heard, that was decided as soon as it was clear how big the attack is, so this isn't about how much damage Iran caused, it's about how it crossed several red lines. This is the first time Iran itself attacked Israel itself, it's not an attack on an extension of Israel, nor was it done by using proxy terrorists. Israel has had terrorist organizations attacking it continuously since 2001, but this is the first attack from a fellow sovereign country since Iraq (led by tyrant Saddam Hussein) in 1991, so that in itself is crossing a red line. The size of the attack is also considered an escalation on Iran's part. In 2019, Iran launched a smaller scaled suicde drone attack on Saudi Arabia, and the latter's western allies refused to launch a counter attack, which led to these countries being seen as unreliable, and some Middle Eastern countries renewed their ties with Iran. That's why how it would seen in the Middle East if Israel doesn't react to an even bigger attack, and how it might drive more moderate countries to grow closer to Iran, is another consideration in why Israel must respond. Not to mention that launching such a mass attack basically caused a paralysis of the country once the first intel became known. For example, all educational activity (schools, universities, you name it) has been canceled, Israel's air space had to be closed, every single ambulance across the country had to be manned, and so on. That is not something any country can simply shrug off. Not to mention, Israel financially can't afford this reality to become normalized.

Not to mention, Israel tried to contain Hamas, PIJ and Hezbollah's rocket attacks for decades. What we got for it was the invasion and massacre on Oct 7. The lesson for most Israelis is that containing mass attacks on our population only leads to worse ones.

That said, there's also no desire here of getting dragged into a war on another front while we're still in the middle of one in Gaza and with Iran's proxies on several more fronts. So, Israel is looking for a balanced response, one that won't let this mass attack slide, but hopefully doesn't make matters much worse.

(for all of my updates and ask replies regarding Israel, click here)

#israel #antisemitism #israeli #israel news #israel under attack #israel under fire #terrorism #anti terrorism #hamas #antisemitic #antisemites #jews #jew #judaism #jumblr #frumblr #jewish #israelunderattack #iran

[probablyasocialecologist]

Many on the right have sought to depict the protesters as extremists, but the sheer scale and regularity of the protests and actions are in fact a sign of how mainstream pro-Palestinian feeling is within British society. The question, assuming the movement succeeds in ending the Israeli assault, is where does it go next? What becomes of movements when they stop moving? Traditionally, social movements went through phases of emergence, coalescence, institutionalisation and decline, followed by dissipation and co-optation by mainstream parties. This usually took decades, the classic case being the US civil rights movement. Yet the era since “Occupy Wall Street” in 2011 has been one of so-called “flash movements”. From Black Lives Matter to the gilets jaunes, movements have coalesced around hashtagged slogans with astonishing celerity, producing deep political crises – and then subsiding. The Gaza campaign resembles a flash movement. It didn’t come out of nowhere. Palestine has been a cause of the international left since the six-day war in 1967, and the UK has seen repeated protests over Israel’s flattening of the West Bank, invasion of Lebanon and serial bombardments of Gaza. There is a network of organisations doing the groundwork, such as the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and Stop the War. But the turnout for these protests shows the virtues of the flash movement: it can rapidly mobilise masses of people, tolerate a diversity of tactics and keep focus on a simple, morally obvious demand. In many respects, it is succeeding. In the UK, despite efforts to demonise the protests as “hate marches”, and the then home secretary Suella Braverman’s inept provocation of the far right against the protests, the demonstrations brought up to 800,000 people to the streets on 11 November. This was the largest such demonstration since the invasion of Iraq. Nor was the UK alone. There have been mass protests everywhere from Tokyo and Kerala to Cairo, Washington DC and Rio de Janeiro. In France and Berlin, protesters have defied official bans. In the US, the Jewish left has led the movement and often engaged in the most militant tactics,including blockading Manhattan Bridge. The embattled Israeli left has also staged protests, despite a climate of police repression and mob violence. The movement has done what successful movements do: win over public opinion, catalyse cracks in elite consensus and expose divisions in the state. These splits were visible in the form of staffer dissent in the US state department, frontbench resignations in Labour over Keir Starmer’s refusal to support a ceasefire, protests by Dutch civil servants and EU employees, Macron’s ceasefire demand, and recently the call from Canada, Australia and New Zealand, three of the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing coalition countries, for an “immediate humanitarian ceasefire”. Only the US now vetoes UN ceasefire resolutions.

#israel #palestine #gaza #uk politics

[yourvirtualgoddessforlife]

They work so hard, so you take them on holiday

Where do (Gaz, Ghost, Soap, and Price) like to go on holiday

Not spellchecked :)

Gaz

He's still young and carefree so I see him as a city lover

There's so much to see and do and he has an insane love for street food

He loves all the major cities but some of his favourites are Berlin, Tokyo, and New York

Isn't afraid to stay in a hostel

Ghost

In game he mentions that he goes hunting so it's not a stretch to say he enjoys outdoor activities

With his love of solitude he most likely enjoys visiting countries with nice forests or countryside

Because of this I think he'd like central and eastern Europe

This region has beautiful landscapes that aren't too dissimilar to the ones in the UK

Plus the traditional food and drink in these countries is amazing

If you manage to convince him to go into a city he spends most of his time looking at the architecture

His favourite cities are Budapest, Varna, and Rijeka

Bonus: He is in love with the history of Liechtenstein

Price

As much as I can picture him as the stereotypical British tourist in a resort because that's all British dad's I don't think he enjoys resort holidays

In fact I think if he is going on holiday he's having a staycation, a vacation in the UK

The UK has some lovely holiday destinations up and down the island and they all feel different

Plus every town and city in the UK has a pub, guaranteed

His favourite places to holiday are Cornwall, Devon, and the Lake District

If he does go abroad it's probably not too far, most likely France

Soap

Different places in Scotland

He loves his home country and isn't ashamed to admit he hasn't been to most of it

But he wants to change that and he wants to bring you along

Going abroad? Somewhere warm

Typical tourist places like Spain and Italy

Only wants to stay in hotels or apartments in the city

Can't stand resorts or hostels

Really likes fun cocktails

#call of duty x reader #call of duty modern warfare 2 #cod x reader #simon ghost riley x you #ghost x reader #simon 'ghost' riley x reader #simon riley x reader #simon ghost riley #soap call of duty #soap x reader #john mactavish x reader #captain john price x reader #john price #john price x reader #john soap mactavish x reader #captain price #gaz x reader #kyle gaz garrrick x reader

[eretzyisrael]

by John Spencer

Hamas forces indisputably violated multiple laws of war on October 7 in taking Israelis hostage and raping, torturing and directly targeting civilians, as well continuing to attack Israeli population centers with rockets. Years of intelligence assessments and media reports have shown that Hamas also commits war crimes by using human shields for its weapons and command centers and by purposely putting military capabilities in protected sites like hospitals, mosques and schools.

On the other hand, nothing I have seen shows that the Israel Defense Forces are not following the laws of wars in Gaza, particularly when the charges that the IDF is committing war crimes so often come too quickly for there to have been an examination of the factors that determine whether an attack, and the resulting civilian casualties, are lawful. The factors that need to be assessed are the major dimensions of the most commonly agreed to international humanitarian law principles: military necessity, proportionality, distinction, humanity and honor.  

President Joe Biden and multiple European countries, including the UK, Germany and France, are supporting Israel’s self-defense even as they express concerns over the humanitarian situation in Gaza. Though Gaza’s legal status is unresolved under international law, Israel needs no permission to enter the territory and resort to using force in order to wage defensive operations because Israel’s right to immediate and unilateral self-defense in accordance with Article 51 of the UN Charter is universally recognized.

Israel has pledged to obey international law, and one of its cornerstones is proportionality. The concept is often misunderstood to allow only for equal numbers of civilian casualties on both sides, with any lopsided numbers considered disproportionate. But proportionality is actually a requirement to take into account how much civilian harm is anticipated in comparison to the expected concrete and direct military advantage, according to UN protocols. In other words, a high civilian death count in Jabalya could potentially be considered legal under international law so long as the military objective is of high value. The Israel Defense Forces said the intended target in this case was the senior Hamas commander who oversaw all military operations in the northern Gaza; neutralizing him is an objective that most likely clears the proportional bar. Furthermore, Israel pointed out that the loss of life was compounded because Hamas had built tunnels that weakened the targeted structure that then collapsed in the strike.

The attack also passes muster on the level of “military necessity,” the principle that the action was necessary to pursue an allowed military goal (killing enemy troops), rather than an illegal goal (causing civilians to suffer). The IDF has said that its aim is to remove the rockets, ammunitions depot, power and transportation systems Hamas has embedded within their civilian population. So far, a number of military experts have assessed that Israel appears to be trying to follow the law of armed conflict in its Gaza campaign.

#hamas #gaza #laws of war #israel #military necessity

[haveyoureadthisfantasybook]

some preliminary statistics

(based on the first 102 polls)

general

we’ve had 10 majority-YES results so far

the highest result by far is J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit (76.5% YES), followed by Maggie Stiefvater’s The Raven Boys (60.4% YES) and Terry Pratchett’s Going Postal (59.5% YES). this mirrors the pattern of overall results by age demographic.

publisher

there is a clear and dramatic divide between books published in English by Big 5 imprints, which have an average YES rate of 21.3%, and books published by independent publishers, academic publishers, self-published books, or books not published in English (average YES rate 3.1%). this is unsurprising, considering the market dominance of Big 5 publishers, especially in fantasy and science fiction.

age demographic

adult books

there have been 70 adult book polls so far, of which 4 have had YES results (5.7%). the average YES rate for adult books is 13.6%, the lowest for any age demographic — unsurprising, I think, for a number of reasons.

teen/YA

there have been 14 teen/YA book polls so far, of which 2 have had YES results (14.3%). the average YES rate for teen/YA books is 20.4%, ahead of adult and behind children’s. this makes sense to me, since tumblr users mainly came of age during the YA boom of the 2010s.

children’s

there have been 17 children’s book polls so far, of which 4 have had YES results (23.5%). the average YES rate for children’s books is 24.5%, and it’s being dragged down by a) Frances Hardinge’s books, which were mostly published a little late for the tumblr userbase, and b) a bunch of non-anglophone children’s books that either haven’t been published in English or were published in English a little late for the tumblr userbase. if we exclude non-anglophone children’s books the average jumps up to 31.4% (even with the loss of Tintenherz / Inkheart), and if we exclude Hardinge it jumps to 41%. I expect this trend will continue at least for anglophone children’s books published before ~2010.

publication date

average YES percentages are on something of a bell curve centered on the 2000s (’m excluding everything before the ’70s because there’s only 1 book for each of the earlier decades):

1970s: 8.5%

1980s: 12.2%

1990s: 18.5%

2000s: 21.2%

2010s: 15.4%

2020s: 10.7%

this also makes conceptual sense to me but I can’t explain why.

race

sadly but unsurprisingly, books by white authors have an average YES rate of 19.7%, versus 4.8% for non-white authors. I expect this trend will continue — if N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season, one of the most highly acclaimed books of the last decade, can’t get a majority YES result (which it’s currently not on track to), I doubt anything else will be able to. the one other thing that seems possible to me might be Mo Xiang Tong Xiu’s webnovels, which have been submitted but aren’t yet queued. we’ll find out eventually!

gender

books by men (17.9% YES average) are slightly more likely to have been read than books by women (15.9% YES average). there are two few data points for nonbinary writers for that average to be meaningful as yet.

geography

books from the Europe (read: almost exclusively the UK) are slightly more likely to be read than books from North America (read: almost exclusively the US) — average YES percentage 20.5% for Europe vs. 16.1% for North America. the average for the rest of the world is 5.6% — no other single continent has enough data yet to really be meaningful.

this attests perhaps to the relative prestige of British fantasy — the percentages are being skewed upwards by Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Diana Wynne Jones.

language

books originally published in English have an average YES percentage of 17.9%; books originally published in other languages average 6.5% (2.2% excluding Tintenherz / Inkheart)

#not a poll #statistics

[motsimages]

I am stuck with this here and the longer I look, the more questions I have. I will make this post here because OP is quite young and it is a silly post after all.

First, it assumes that "your country" now is the same as it was when "great-great grandparents" and the same as "farther back than that". When the reality of most countries is that they've been changing borders.

I am not going further than the 19th Century (great-grandparents time) because things get really interesting before that, amongst other things because Nationalism was a big thing then and it's when governments really tried to make a statement about This Is My Country and when many colonies gained independence. Before the 19th Century, the world as we know it now was completely different and the further back into the past you go, the stranger it gets.

Without leaving Europe, which is what I know better, Germany and Italy had what is called "the unification" in the second half of the 19th Century, which means that before that they weren't what they are now. In recent years, Germany also had the Federal Republic of Germany, which was technically another country which disappeard in 1987. And Yugoslavia became separate countries in 1992. So Yugoslav born singer Zdravko Colic is now Bosnian-Serbian. How would he answer to this? He didn't move. His country changed around him. And he is old, but think of all the 30-35 year-old people who were born in a different country. All the people who never left their native city and who have children born in a different country.

Africa has the before and after Western colonisation to thank for borders and countries and to also complicate this reply. Again, just in the 20th Century, because of colonies, some countries were what is now France, Portugal, UK or Spain. Maybe the status wasn't the same as being born in Europe, but still, a different country.

I don't know how Asia has been in this regard but I bet similar things apply with colonisation between them and then Europeans. Even America (understood as the whole continent, North and South, not just the US) was changing borders up until the 19th Century.

If you go to before the 16th Century, which is when Western colonisation really began to change the shape of the world, it gets even more fun. This would be between" "farther back but I do know when" and "too far back to remember". Without getting into colonies, Spain as a country was formed in the 16th Century. Before Christopher Columbus (and even during his lifetime), it was two separate kingdoms united by the mariage of the king and queen who agreed to send Columbus to America. And that was more or less the looks of everywhere around the time.

And now we reach the difference between "too far back to remember" and "indigenous". Polynesian people remember when they went to certain places, when they reached mainland here and there for thousands of years. Europeans do not. Polynesians are indigenous and Europeans aren't. However, even Europe has indigenous people (because of all the mess with countries and borders).

Many people can actually answer to both of these. The poll assumes that, unless you are indigenous, you are an inmigrant, except indigenous people also travel and migrate and non-indigenous people also stay in the same place. Indigenous is a thing completely unrelated to migration.

There is also the succint assumption (bias, if you will) that people only migrate willingly. Sure, it can be a choice you make for the sake of your family, for a job, for safety and whatnot (how "willingly" that is, it's up to the person), but there is a moment in history when many people were migrated forcibly, so to say, as they were kidnapped and made into slaves.

In short... it's one of those post that feels a bit too white US.

[trainsinanime]

The shapes of railway networks

A while ago @ariadsishereagain asked me about countries that have no railway networks, and what I think of them. That's a fascinating question that has been in my mind ever since, because the truth is you can tell a lot about a country and in particular it's history during the 19th and early 20th century by its railway network. So let's do that. And the best way to do that is by looking at the incredibly detailed open-source world railway map OpenRailwayMap, a part of the OpenStreetMap project. I really recommend it! And let's start with one of my favorite examples of how railway networks differ:

At this zoom level the site sadly only shows incomprehensible internal abbreviations rather than city names, so let me explain: What we have here are France and Germany, along with some of the UK and Italy, some of various neighbouring countries and all of Switzerland, Belgium and Luxembourg.

France and Germany are the ones that I find the most interesting, because the shapes of their networks are so different. Not only is the german one much more dense, but you can see completely different patterns.

In France, the job of railroads is to bring people to Paris (PLY, short for Paris Gare de Lyon) The lines stretch out into every part of the country, but almost all of them converge onto mainlines going into Paris. You can see some lines along the coasts and the borders, and there is a medium distances circle around Paris (passing MZ, DN, TO, short for Metz, Dijon, Tours). This whole pattern is known as the Legrande Star, after Baptiste Alexis Victor Legrande, the french government official who designed it. His goal was to provide great access to Paris, the nation's undisputed political, cultural and economical centre. A couple of decades later, Charles de Freycinet added plans to connect all departments to the railway network, but he still followed the idea that the ultimate goal of almost every rail line was Paris. And so it was, and largely remained. Even the high speed lines, in red, follow this pattern to this day.

A result is that you will have to go to Paris whether you want to or not. Lille-Strasbourg? You're going through Paris. Bordeaux-Dijon?

You're going through Paris, and get to make your own way from Gare Montparnasse to Gare de Lyon on the Metro (and it isn't even a direct metro, you have to change trains). It's a massive detour but it's not like you have a choice.

Even if there is a direct TGV or a connection outside the main stations of Paris, you're still ending up very much near Paris; the difference is just that you're not going via the city centre, but rather via Disneyland. Legrande wanted to bring people to Paris; he was less concerned about connecting other places with each other.

Now compare Germany, and you will see a network that is more dense, but most importantly, utterly chaotic. You can see hints of a France-like star around Berlin (BSPD, short for Berlin Spandau, which isn't the most important station but what can you do), but it's really only dominating its immediate surroundings, the region of Brandenburg. You can see vague hints of a similar star around Hamburg (AH; don't ask) or Munich (MH), but also a massive tangle around the Rhine-Ruhr industrial area (around KD), or around the Frankfurt am Main area (FF). Red high speed lines are essentially random. Some of them do go to Berlin, sure. But many, like the one from Cologne to Frankfurt (KD to FF) or the one from Hanover (HH) south, do not.

And that really reflects the history. Germany wasn't a unified country when railroad construction began, and even though it did unify shortly thereafter, there's no hiding that its different parts developed separately, with no central planning, ever since the middle ages. Germany doesn't have a single central city like France. Berlin is the biggest and most important city, but not by far. Hamburg has huge cultural and industrial influence, Frankfurt is the most important financial centre and airport, Munich is huge, and there are agglomerations like the Rhine-Ruhr region that used to beat all of them in terms of industry. And the rail network, with no single central focus point, reflects that.

That doesn't mean Germany doesn't have its own blind spots. Due to being split in two, the east-west links aren't great. Getting e.g. from Cologne (near KD) to Dresden (DH) is pretty painful. Ironically, Berlin is one of the places that really suffers from this. There are plenty of trains to it from Cologne but they take forever, and you can see why: A lot of the route isn't high speed, it's just more or less upgraded normal lines. If you have a single destination, then it's easy to build all the lines there. If you want high-speed connections between everything, that's more difficult. (Also, our government isn't investing anywhere near enough into the rail network, both compared internationally and on its own terms, but that's a different issue)

Other countries in Europe tend to be somewhere between the extremes. Spain is fairly centralised around Madrid.

The UK is just as focused on London as France is on Paris, but it has strong regional networks around Leeds and Sheffield, and the weirdness in Scotland (four different lines between Glasgow and Edinburgh and counting!).

Italy, especially south of the Po valley, almost looks like a ladder: Lines are either on the one side of the Apennines or the other, with a few brave ones crossing through.

This works overseas as well. Describing the continental US as "like Germany" is certainly going to raise some eyebrows, but the map doesn't lie:

It's all on a completely different scale, but it's also a federal country with no one single clear centre. Yes, New York and Los Angeles are big and important, but neither is an all-powerful centre of the nation. What's fun about the US is that it's almost gradient-like: The more west you go, the fewer the railroads get. You can also nicely see the Alleghenies by the shadow they cast: Just a few brave rail lines managed to make their way through or around. Other characteristic items are the huge tangle that is Chicago, the closest thing the US has to a railroad capital; and the many places where lines are almost duplicated (just count how many different ways you can get from Chicago to Memphis, or Chicago to Cleveland), thanks to different competing railway companies that all hated (and sometimes still hate) each other's guts.

So that's what's mostly considered the "western world" or "industrialised world". I skipped Japan, China and India because the post is going to get too long no matter what, but they're all fascinating as well.

But if we go away from there look at countries where the colonialism was less settlers and more exploit mostly from afar, we see another very odd pattern emerge, like here in sub-saharan Africa:

The selection is somewhat arbitrary because you can find the same pattern everywhere south of the Sahara, and in one case (Mauretania) even in the Sahara: A railroad that goes straight to the coast. (The isolated sections inland are due to issues with the map software, they're all connected to one of the lines to the coast)

This kind of railroad is designed to extract a country's resources, and not much else. In Mauretania (not in this picture), that's iron ore. Elsewhere it might have been other ores, precious metals, gemstones, but also very often agricultural products, spices, dyes. The railway line exists to take these things, and bring them to a port. The line is not designed to actually help the nation grow economically. Think about it: All things being equal, you're probably just as likely to want to go parallel to the coast as perpendicular to it.

Also, each of these lines were built because there's something interesting at the end of it, or at least someone suspected there might be. If you wanted to develop the area, it would make sense to trade the interesting stuff in Togo with the interesting stuff in Benin. But the railway lines are not set up for that at all. The goal is to get the interesting stuff to a ship, and occasionally soldiers to the place where the interesting stuff comes from.

These days, the area that I screenshotted here is actually massive, full of people. The city of Abidjan has more than four million inhabitants (more than Berlin), Lomé has 1.7 million, Cotonou and Porto-Novo come close to a million if taken together, and nobody's quite sure about Lagos, but it's at least 14 million, and the metropolitan region might be 24 million. This is a band of cities that researchers think might, in the next few decodes, become on par with Washington-Philadelphia-New York-Boston in the US, or the Tokyo-Osaka in Japan.

And the rail connections in this region do not reflect this at all. A high speed passenger line and/or a heavy duty freight line could allow all these places to do business with each other, allow people to move to or visit each other, and just spur a lot of economic development. But the powers that built the lines, the colonial powers, were not interested. They had their harbour, and the region behind it, and they just wanted to extract whatever was there.

To be clear, that does not mean the railroads are evil now. Selling natural resources is still better than bringing no money into the country. And there are a lot of places where railroad junctions and depots became the point where cities were founded, so in some countries these lines do end up connecting the most important cities, more or less by accident. It's just that other lines or more lines are sorely missing.

A simple example for how this could look like is provided by Australia, where the colonists were settlers and did want to develop the land economically:

You have the lines from the coast inland, and sometimes quite a lot of them. But you can also see a line along the east coast, connecting the cities, and you can see that someone said "we need to build a railroad across the entire continent. No, two actually". That is not to say that Australia does everything right with railroads, they have a lot of weirdness there. But you can see that the railroads had more jobs than to just move resources to ships.

(The big exception is the Pilbara region, in the north west, with its odd tangle of lines. Those are all just resource extraction lines, where the world's heaviest freight trains haul iron ore from various mines to various ports. The mines and ports are owned by different mining companies that don't like each other, so everybody has their own line from their own harbour to their own mine, even if a different line would have been shorter. That's why you get the tangle there.)

So, that's basically it. The railroad map of a country shows you a lot about how a country works, and more specifically how it worked during the late 19th and early 20th century, when most railroads were built. Where they lead to and where they don't reflects what planners thought of as important, and in turn, it has shaped the way these countries developed. And personally, I always find this endlessly fascinating.

#railroads #maps #i suppose you could take the 6 to bercy and walk from there but it's still not exactly convenient

[mirai-desu]

Miss Scarlet & The Duke Read-a-likes

I had already started on a post of Miss Scarlet & The Duke read-a-likes before The News, and now I want to prove that hey, you can have historical mysteries with romance and the leads get together! When MSATD first came out I thought, this is like the books love to read! (whoops). The following are series that I feel like, as a librarian, skew closer to the actual original premise (ahem) of MSATD, but aren't the Historical Romance genre (i.e. these books are rated closer to the TV show, when it comes to the steam factor). In these cases, I chose titles that aren't just mysteries but feature the romance prominently, but also aren't just HR with a mystery in the background.

Disclaimer: mileage may vary; for some of these it's been awhile since I've read them and there might be mistakes. There's also a few other series that might work that are on my TBR list, so I might be updating this list in the near future.

Top Picks:

Veronica Speedwell 1880s, London | POV: First person; heroine You've probably seen this book listed as a MSATD read-a-like before, because not only is the time period similar, but so is the dynamic between the leads. The main difference is that the protagonists are actually natural historians and not detectives, and some of the plots are more adventure-like (think "Cell 99") than police cases. If I had to pick one series to rec, it's this one.

Molly Murphy 1900s, New York | POV: First person; heroine While in New York (har har), this series I think has a most general set up to MSATD; a lady detective with an agency that she takes over, and her love interest, a detective with the police force. There's even an Arabella. But don't fret! (ngl, though, this series proves that William wouldn't have an easier time with the NYPD than he does SY… RN might have wanted to do some research…)

Captain Jim & Lady Diana 1890s, India, US, UK | POV: Differs between books, 1st book is more his POV The first book in this series has a more layered approach with the setting of British India (which is fascinating in its own right), but the next two are more in line with MSATD and the other series listed.

Carpenter & Quincannon 1890s, San Francisco | POV: Third person limited, both hero and heroine This series is written by a husband and wife duo (HA), and might be a little confusing to figure out the order given the characters' appearances in their other works, but the actual series linked here is about two former Pinkertons who form their own detective agency together. Some of the cases are a little predictable, and there are a few books where their cases don't intertwine as well as the others, but it's still an enjoyable read of two detectives who make it work both professionally and personally.

Other Picks:

Wrexford & Sloane Regency, London | POV: Third person limited, both hero and heroine The latest volumes actually name check MSATD in their blurbs. I think the feel is slightly different, given the time period and a few other elements that are clear when you start reading them, but they are similar enough that I get the comparison.

Daisy Dalrymple 1920s, UK | POV: Third person limited, both hero and heroine 1920s historical mysteries with romance are a genre all into themselves, but I recommend this series over some of the others because of the HEA. (also tacking this on here: Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries is loads better as a TV series, which is why I don't recommend the books).

Inspector Corravan 1870s, London | POV: Third person limited; hero There's only two of this series so far, but I feel like the male lead has shades of William to him.

Athenian Mysteries Ancient Greece | Male POV (from what I remember) This one is off the beaten path compared to the others, but I do recommend it because of the dynamic between the leads and the HEA.

Great series but… the Slow Burn is Still… Slow

Bess Crawford WWI, UK/France | POV: First person; heroine I really do like this series, but I have to have a somewhat spoilery caveat: we are still in the slow burn 13 books in. But I have to recommend it anyway, because there's some striking similarities in that the female lead's father is the mentor to the male lead. I will warn you; there are a few books that he barely appears in. So maybe try this one last lol

Promising Start

Dr. Julia Lewis 1860s, London | POV: Third person limited; hero and heroine + villain My hold on this debut literally showed up the day after I almost finished the post, but I after reading the first one, it's definitely in the same vein (there's also a very overt reference to something that I'm certain is a nod to MSATD...). Looking forward to the next one for sure.

#miss scarlet and the duke #there's also another series that a lot of people rec that I haven't read yet because we don't have it at work (the library) yet #I'll add if I agree at a later date lol #plus there three other series I feel like are similar that I might also add #but yeah I left out a lot of the regency series because it's more like 'a lady randomly gets involved in mysteries' #and it's not quite the same feel imho

[thatscarletflycatcher]

I have finished reading the first volume of the war memoirs of Charles de Gaulle (The Call: 1939-1942).

As I have said before, I was pleasantly surprised by how easily it reads, and how interesting a storyteller De Gaulle is (specially when compared to Churchill's memoirs of the same period).

I went in looking for a different perspective of people and events I was familiar with from English speaking side of documentaries and narratives, but fully assuming I was going to arrive to a "the truth is in the middle" conclusion. So far, I have not, and that is surprising.

De Gaulle is often painted as a guy who identified with and cared for France and its reputation and GloryTM above everything else, and was therefore constantly putting the petty claims of France over the pressing needs of the war with the axis. What he presents is a Britain, and then to an even greater extent, a USA that is putting their petty dislike of him personally, their preconceived notions about France, and the economical and political greed of their governments above the pressing needs of the war with the axis.

And when one turns to Churchill's accounts of the same events, he either confirms De Gaulle's information, or keeps silence on it; he does not offer an alternative interpretation of events. Which is something I very much did not expect at all.

Both Roosevelt and Churchill are playing this game where they cannot really publicly reject De Gaulle and the Free French because their very concept is romantic and widely supported/accepted by the common people both in France and in the US/UK... but they don't like that they have their own agenda and are inflexible about things like French sovereignty. Their blind hope that somehow the US will be able to press Vichy into rejoining the war can only be reasonably explained by their thinking that France surrendered because the French are easily impressionable cowards: the same way they were subjugated by Germany, they could be subjugated by the US/UK and their resources used at leisure by them. The reality that De Gaulle, as a French man who had been in the French Army his whole life, saw in Vichy, was one of tiredness, defeatism, AND antisemitism fueled nazi sympathies. They didn't sign the armistice because they were weak, they signed the armistice because they wanted to not fight or not fight the nazis. History proved De Gaulle right. Vichy was not persuaded to rejoin the allies.

This attempt to appease and persuade Vichy explains the recruitment sabotage: you give De Gaulle 5 minutes on the BBC to talk and rally the French, but on the other hand you undermine his authority and ability to recruit. You attempt to turn him into a romantic, quixotic figure, useful to you but not to French interests.

The documentaries tell you of all the French soldiers that were rescued at Dunkirk, but they don't tell you that the Free French were sometimes prevented from ever interacting with them, and sometimes, when allowed, British officers would then afterwards impress upon French soldiers that if they joined the Free French they would be betraying the authorities of their country and subjected to court martial if the enterprise failed; that most of them were sent back to France. They don't tell you of the times the UK allowed ships deporting degaullists from the French colonies to the metropoli to pass, and therefore weakening De Gaulle's chances of taking those colonies over -because they had an eye on taking at least part of those for the UK. Or how when they did try to take over, they stopped the Free French from recruiting between French forces, took the armament and resources left behind for themselves, and also took over native battallions and absorbed them into the British armed forces. Suddenly the "this cute, endearing figure who only managed to command about 70.000 men" narrative turns into "this man managed to recruit about 70.000 men despite being on exile, his country being half occupied half ruled by colaborationists that had put a price to his head, and his allies constantly sabotaging him. He also managed to take over several colonies, organize the scattered resistance on French soil, and put the Free French on every front of the war."

So. Hm. Yeah. I went in expecting to better understand the conflicts between Churchill and De Gaulle, FDR and De Gaulle as a matter of "both sides had reasonable and unreasonable reasons" and so far I think by the end I will come around to think De Gaulle was actually the less petty and most honest of the three. Stay tuned XD

#History #WWII #Charles De Gaulle

[reasonsforhope]

YES, PLASTIC BAG BANS HELP PREVENT POLLUTION REALLY WELL

"Plastic bags are everywhere - littering our streets, clogging up our rivers, and choking wildlife in the ocean.

But after years of campaigning from environmental groups, many places have banned them entirely.

Over 100 countries now have a full or partial ban on single-use plastic bags. Between 2010 and 2019, the number of public policies intended to phase out plastic carryout bags tripled.

The results of such tough rules are starting to show.

What is a plastic bag ban?

A plastic bag ban is a law that restricts the use of lightweight plastic bags in shops. Sometimes they are totally banned, and sometimes consumers have to pay a fee to buy them.

The bans often only apply to thin plastic bags, with thicker, reusable ones still available for purchase.

Bangladesh became the first country to introduce a ban on plastic bags back in 2002.

Such total bans are common throughout Africa and Asia. These areas import much of the Global North’s ‘recyclable’ rubbish and so face the consequences of plastic mismanagement more acutely.

In addition to plastic bags, many countries ban other types of single-use plastic like in the EU which has got rid of single use cutlery, straws, balloon sticks, and coffee buds.

Which European countries use the most plastic bags?

In Europe, 18 countries have imposed bans on thin plastic bags - including France, Germany, Italy, Iceland, and Albania.

A further 23 countries require consumers to pay a fee. Two more - Switzerland and Norway - allow the plastic industry to impose a ‘voluntary charge’ on the use of the bags.

Plastic bag consumption is highest in the Baltic and Nordic countries, Eurostat data from 2019 reveals. Latvia (284 bags per person, per year) and Lithuania (332) consumed far more plastic bags than any other European country. This could change, however as from 2025, Latvian shops will no longer be permitted to give away free plastic bags. A similar prohibition will come into force in Lithuania this year.

The lowest plastic bag usage can be found in Portugal (8), Belgium (17) and Poland (23).  Portugal banned the bags in 2021, two years after Poland. [Note: To be clear, that is 8 plastic bags per person per year! Way lower than I thought was currently possible!]

Do plastic bag bans work?

Plastic bag bans have so far been highly successful. A ban on thin plastic bags in California reduced consumption by 71.5 per cent.

Research shows that taxes work too. According to a 2019 review of existing studies, levies and taxes led to a 66 per cent reduction in usage in Denmark, more than 90 per cent in Ireland, between 74 and 90 per cent in South Africa, Belgium, Hong Kong, Washington D.C., Santa Barbara, the UK and Portugal, and around 50 per cent in Botswana and China.

And the impact is visible on the ground too.

At a 2022 annual beach clean in New Jersey, US - where a ban was recently introduced - the number of plastic bags collected dropped 37 per cent on the previous year. Straws and takeaway containers dropped by a similar amount.

“It’s really, really encouraging to see those numbers trending down for the bags, straws, and foam containers,” said Clean Ocean Action Executive Director Cindy Zipf. Clean Ocean Action is a charity that is instrumental in organising the beach clean."

-via EuroNews.Green, 4/5/23

#sustainability #plastic pollution #plastic #single use plastic #plastic ban #pollution #water pollution #taxes #european union #california #denmark #iceland #ireland #new jersey #ocean #oceanography #good news #hope

[matan4il]

Daily update post:

On Friday, there was yet another Palestinian terrorist attack. Terrorists started shooting at Israelis near a yeshiva, and as security forces gave chase, an explosive device was set off through remote control, which shows just how sophisticated some of these terrorists are getting. Seven Israeli soldiers were injured. The explosives were homemade, and I heard one estimate that if they had been "proper," the number of casualties would have been much higher.

Friday was also International Women's Day, when we asked people to remember Israeli and Jewish women, including the ones still being abused by terrorists in captivity. Here's a small round up of a few related global events... In South Africa, Jewish women marched, asking their president and government to condemn Hamas' sexual violence, protesting against the extra burden of proof demanded of Jewish women. Similar protests were held in other places around the world, among them in front of the UN headquarters in NYC. Following an Israeli request, the US, the UK and France have asked the UN's security council to have an emergency session on the UN report regarding Hamas' sexual crimes, Israel's Foreign Minister and the families of the hostages are meant to attend. But maybe the most poignant news come from the Norwegian capital of Oslo, where protesters holding up signs in support of the Israeli women held hostage by Hamas were barred from participating in the International Women's Day March by its organizers, after other participants of the march were physically stopping the group supporting the kidnapped Israeli women.

Biden's recent MSNBC interview, where he's said that "there has to be another way to deal with the trauma caused by Hamas," has managed to piss off even left wing journalists here. I'm gonna pass along what one said... Biden doesn't get it. We're not fighting in Gaza to deal with trauma, this is not the equivalent of going to therapy. We're facing a terrorist organization that massacred us, rules an entire strip of land, and has turned it into the world's biggest base for terrorist activity, turned its 2.1 million people population into a human weapon, and if there is another way to make sure Israeli civilians are safe by destroying Hamas, with less casualties on the other side, let him present it in practical matters. So far, all he does is to give the vague, abstract, "Israel needs to do better," which is not a practical plan of action, and it's especially condescending, when we don't actually have historical examples of any country doing better during fights conducted under the conditions created by Hamas in Gaza.

I have written about the incident in northern Gaza, where over 100 people were killed in a stampede, as they were storming humanitarian aid trucks. It was a complex situation, in addition to those who died from the pushing and trampling (something we've seen in lots of tragic disasters around the world, which were by no means a massacre, such as a fairly well known stampede of Liverpool soccer fans), apparently some of those who died, were ran over when the (Arab) truck drivers were scared and tried to drive away from the mob, while a small number of suspicious people advanced menancingly on the soldiers. An IDF investigation report confirms the Israeli soldiers only fired at this smaller group, suspected of being terrorists, not at anyone else, and certainly not at the aid convoy itself. Of course none of this complexity was reflected in any anti-Israel propaganda posts, which labeled this a massacre. But now the size of the stampede has been confirmed as well, which in itself says a lot about this tragic chain of events: no less than 12,000 (!) Gazans were storming those aid trucks. Given the size of that crowd, it's almost a miracle that not more people were killed. Just compare the Liverpool fans stampede, where the size of the involved crowd was smaller, the situation less complex (no moving trucks or terrorists around), and the number of fatalities was practically the same, at 97 people killed.

This has got to be one of the worst things I've heard since Oct 7 brought new focus to the antisemitism problem on American college campuses. One of the morally clearest voices against this Jew hate has been a Jewish Israeli professor at Columbia University, Shai Davidai. Now apparently the uni has started an investigation into him, instead of... IDK, learning from the criticism he has raised regarding their failure to address antisemitism. They sure are doing a great job, showing Jews they're listened to and cared about, and protecting Davidai's freedom of speech, that last line of defense that all the college presidents fell back on when they had to address why calling for the genocide of Jews is not considered bullying or harassment on their campuses.

This is 100 years old Yocheved Gold (on the left, obviously).

Yocheved was born in 1923 in Germany. In 1936, as a Jewish teenager who was mistaken for a Christian girl, and despite her fear, she refused to hand a bouquet of flowers to Hitler at the Berlin Olympics. Two years later, at the age of 15, she was among the last Jews to flee Europe before WWII. She managed to make it to the Land of Israel, which saved her life. On Oct 7, she was in kibbutz Sa'ad, one of the southern Israeli communities attacked by Hamas terrorists. Eighty years after antisemites first forced her to flee her home, she had to do it again, and is maybe the only Israeli evacuee to be over 100 years old. Now she has returned to kibbutz Sa'ad, even though most still haven't (as they don't feel safe from Hamas), because she said she doesn't want to die away from home.

(for all of my updates and ask replies regarding Israel, click here)

#israel #antisemitism #israeli #israel news #israel under attack #israel under fire #terrorism #anti terrorism #hamas #antisemitic #antisemites #jews #jew #judaism #jumblr #frumblr #jewish #israelunderattack

[probablyasocialecologist]

As a recent report by the Kurdish Peace Institute (KPI) documents, just 4 percent of an estimated two thousand foreign ISIS fighters held in the AANES-run [Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria] prisons have been repatriated by their home countries since 2019, when the ISIS caliphate was dealt the final blow by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). The so-called developed countries of the West have been the most reluctant to take back the men whose sympathy for ISIS first came to life within those nations’ borders. As Matt Broomfield writes in the KPI report, “States like France, Germany, Canada, Australia, Belgium, and the UK have all failed to repatriate a single male fighter.” An additional 12,500 wives and children of foreign fighters are languishing in underfunded camps. With only a trickle having been repatriated so far, the AANES finds itself unfairly burdened by the world’s jihadism problem. For years, the administration has called on the international community to either repatriate their nationals or to come and try them on the land where they committed their egregious crimes. Governing a war-torn region under a de facto embargo by Turkey and the Assad government, with no international recognition, the AANES simply lacks the resources to indefinitely guard and care for thousands of these extremists. With its pleas for help unanswered, it has recently announced that it will try the foreign fighters on its own, hoping to finally prompt action from an indifferent international community.

#isis #daesh #kurds #syria #turkey

[legacygirlingreen]

May 1889 // Farmer Sebastian Sallow x Reader (part 1)

The prologue.

Warnings: parent death

Word count: 800

Masterlist here

Life is emotionally abusive… 

When their widowed mother dragged her and her younger siblings from the only home she had ever known, she was angry. Kicking and screaming, she fought the decision all the way to the United Kingdom.  Their mother brought the remainder of their broken family to the Scottish highlands, where she’d grown up to move in with the kids' dying grandmother. Having spent her childhood rarely visiting the small hamlet of Feldcroft, it hardly felt like home, but instead a strange land in which she was dragged a handful of times. 

The rugged countryside with its cold winters and windy coastline were a far cry from the ever stretching fields of lavender on the Mediterranean she had grown up with. The way the sun cast the lovely bronze on her skin, despite its more fair nature - thanks to her mother’s northern roots unfortunately - always made her feel alive. Moving to a place that hardly experienced a summer at all, instead of the many months of warmth, only further added to the cold and isolating feelings she bore at the loss of her father.

Her father, the ever charming and playful man, had met her mother while visiting London for work. The two, having made such a profound connection in only a matter of days, lead to him whisking her away from the UK to marry and live with him in the south of France. Their whirlwind romance had always been an epic tale of love, devotion and laughter, told over the dinner table and as a bedtime story. 

His passing had been so sudden. The man unfortunately had been killed for his research on magical plants, by a traveling rogue wizard. Later apprehended in Wales, the British ministry reached out to offer condolences. Pairing that with a pain existing in a place without her love, it made sense to her why her mother had left France, despite how much it hurt her and her siblings. 

As they finally arrived via the floo flame in Feldcroft on a late May evening, they were greeted by the sight of their very old, sickly looking grandmother. Their grandfather passed away a few years back, and they’d revived the owl. Their mother left for the funeral alone, before she returned to take care of them. 

Standing in the brisk May air with her siblings, and a simple suitcase housing all her possessions she tried not to grimace. Rickety looking houses, ruins of a castle nearby, cows just simply walking around unattended. The place looked… interesting. 

As her Scottish grandmother made her way down the line reuniting with her younger siblings and mother before making the way in front of her. Reaching out, sensing the panic and fear rolling off her in waves, her grandmother simply offered a small hand, allowing her to take it instead of forcing affections on to her. A fact she appreciated. 

Allowing her grandmother to cup her palm in her old hands, she leaned up to kiss the old woman on the cheek in greeting, before continuing to scan the area. At the house next door she could see broken fences as well as a man grumbling around trying to force sheep back inside. Distracted, she stared until her grandmother broke her out of a trance.  

“That’s Solomon Sallow, former auror. He’s an… interesting man I admit. Has a set of twins in his care a few years older than you, but they are off to Hogwarts this time of year. Their parents died a few years ago, poor things. Anyways, come along dear, you’ll have the loft entirely to yourself” her grandmother said with a small smile and a comforting squeeze before dropping her hand. She tore her eyes away from the gentleman having successfully used his wand to repair the broken fence around his sheep. 

“Did you say former auror?” Her mother, Evelyn, asked her Gran, as the old woman nodded. 

“Yes. He’s a bit grumpy, but it’s nice to know someone who can put dark magic in its place is nearby” Gran said, hoping to ease the tension. 

“Well… that’s comforting to know. Did you hear that y/n? She said that he takes care of twins not much older than you. Perhaps you could make a friend or two” her mother offered and she shrugged, wanting to curl up in bed and sleep. The fatigue of missing her father daily still weighed heavily and after traveling she just wanted to rest. 

In hindsight, she wished she had paid more attention to the conversation between her mother and grandmother as they ushered the family inside, as it told all about the boy next door…

#hogwarts legacy #sebastian sallow #sebastian sallow x reader #sebastian sallow x you #sebastian sallow/reader #sebastian sallow x slytherin!reader #fluff #hogwarts legacy fandom #ominis gaunt #anne sallow

[beautifulpersonpeach]

I feel like the reason why people are pointing to JM akgaes is because there are more people in the current process of becoming JM akgaes, because the breaking point for a bunch of superbiased Jimin-biased Jikookers was the Face v. 7 comparison. Felt like this 'turnover' point for KTH akgaes from Tkkrs was 2017-18. The mistreatment rhetoric was everywhere and even today the Burn the Stage documentary is the holy grail of mistreatment for KTHs.

I wanted to ask you, BPP, what do you make of V's reduced streaming numbers in USA? I was surprised. Does this represent Army's true power with JM / JK's numbers being an additional cherry on top (or whole sundae on top) because of GP / casuals / solos ; or is this a sign of the 'split focus' so-called OT7s with a bias towards members who are central to BTS' image in the USA; or have KTHs done permanent damage to goodwill among Army?

I know you're not V biased but if you have a breakdown to offer I would be greatly interested. (Vminimin bias here).

***

I wanted to ask you, BPP, what do you make of V's reduced streaming numbers in USA? I was surprised. Does this represent Army's true power with JM / JK's numbers being an additional cherry on top (or whole sundae on top) because of GP / casuals / solos ; or is this a sign of the 'split focus' so-called OT7s with a bias towards members who are central to BTS' image in the USA; or have KTHs done permanent damage to goodwill among Army?

Ngl, this reminds me of the discourse about the difference in streaming performance between JITB and Indigo, where RM's streaming numbers were more than Hobi's in the US (and globally). Hobi akgaes thought it was weird considering Hobi had just done Lollapalooza and had a huge turnout. Just like back then, people discounted just how much the fandom shows that everyone here really just does what they want, how people's music preferences show up in their streaming habits, and they aren't coerced to stream like mindless orangutans in the fandom. Tae's album, just like Hobi's album, is really good, but it's also not in a genre a lot of people find accessible, very enjoyable, and can withstand streaming incessantly.

Look at the difference in streams between Yet to Come and RUN BTS.

All that aside, my perception is that the maknae-line have many people who bias them from the USA, but far as I can tell, Jimin has the most dedicated fans in the US, UK and Korea + Japan; Jungkook in the US, India, France and Japan; and Taehyung in China, SEA, and to a lesser degree, Japan and the US. I recall I've seen a few surveys here and there a few years ago (before 2019) that showed popularity rankings in various regions, but those rankings are no longer reliable as they've been gamed to hell by akgaes (usually Taehyung solos based on the instances and call-outs I've seen).

So, coupled with the fact not a lot of people care to constantly stream V's sleepy, vibey, but admittedly tasteful album because it's not their taste, it's also possible Taehyung has fewer heavily-biased fans in the US to compulsively stream his album, compared to Jimin or Jungkook. The fact any of the members show up on the charts at all is because of OT7 ARMYs, who have the absolute numbers to place the members high enough to chart even if each ARMY only contributes a handful of streams. Any group of akgaes who have been trying and failing to rechart on the most exclusive charts will tell you the same thing. It's literally a numbers game and ARMYs simply have the numbers.

Those who are biased generally push for the members they bias more, other factors like the genre and listenability of the song influences how the wider fandom responds, and the core of the fandom remains OT7 ARMYs who push each project in any case, and are the reason any of these projects can get those sort of recognitions to begin with.

These aren't comparisons that matter to me for any member, not for my biases and not for the maknae-line, because I do think they're unhelpful, generally very reductive, and only serve the purpose of inflating the egos of various akgaes who weaponize this data to show other members in the group are less deserving of their accomplishments and/or any support those members receive.

It's not like Tae's doing bad either lol.

#I sometimes get asks from various solo stans asking why they can't rechart this or that member on various charts #And I'm just like.... #How do these people find me #bts chapter 2 #taehyung #jimin #jungkook #bts maknae line #bts fandom #fandom behaviour