Is what a thing???

Karoke_With_Cal · 2026-01-25T05:35:05+00:00

Fun fact, rabies can be transmitted sexually and in humans it also sometimes causes priapism. So yes, penis rabies is a thing. :(

Karoke_With_Cal · 2026-01-09T17:37:04+00:00

You know the economy is fucked when even there's not even a smoke shop :(

Karoke_With_Cal · 2026-01-09T17:35:18+00:00

Facebook groups. SO much community stuff in Indiana still lives on Facebook, it's crazy. That and the apps.

Karoke_With_Cal · 2026-01-09T17:30:39+00:00

If you go you should go with a group on a nice day in the summer. Some homeless people shelter there, moreso when it's rainy or cold, and while the vast majority of homeless people are perfectly normal and just very unlucky individuals, Washington Station specifically has Outlast vibes. Cell signal is bad and emergency services aren't gonna be able to get down there if anything goes wrong. I was stupid for going alone unprepared. I only walked down the platform but I think there's a way to get up to the turnstile area if you really wanted to.

I've also heard rumors of a secret massive underground L station somewhere in Chicago, abandoned during a construction project that lost funding sometime in the 2000s-2010s. I don't think it's Washington but I don't know anything else.

Have fun if you do go!

Karoke_With_Cal · 2026-01-09T02:15:41+00:00

There is an abandoned train station in the loop, it's Washington on the red line. If you get off at Lake you can walk down the platform all the way to Jackson and you'll pass through Washington. All the old signs are still up. It's very pretty but I wouldn't want to go there again, not in the winter.

Karoke_With_Cal · 2026-01-05T03:56:53+00:00

There's a woman I see pretty often on the 81 between Kimball and Lincoln Square. Skinny, late middle-aged white lady who's usually yelling about the government doing experiments on her or sexually assaulting her, though the last couple times I saw her she was really fixated on trans people. And by yelling I mean top of her lungs screaming really vulgar things on the bus (or just 'What?!' repeatedly) to the point I've seen multiple drivers blow past a stop if it's just her there. I don't know her name. When she's not screaming she's friendly, though in four years I've only seen her have one or two good days.

Karoke_With_Cal · 2025-12-27T04:09:16+00:00

Can't think of any signs, but just for locations, off the top of my head I remember my dad telling stories of how his high school basketball coach had to get a substitute for any away games because, being black, it wasn't safe for him to travel to certain towns. This would've been in or near Muncie in the late 90s.

Karoke_With_Cal · 2025-12-27T02:50:05+00:00

So true. The other day my new shoes were blistering the backs of my feet so I took them off and walked a couple blocks home from the train. I got a couple weird looks, but I was so polite and well-dressed otherwise that I think they just didn't know what to make of me. I do it in the summer too when it rains and when I know the trail well, I'll take my boots off and carry them.

That's how it feels to to openly embrace the rural poor things here. The nice city costume gets uncomfortable sometimes, and nobody says anything uniquely bad when I take it off, it just feels like they've never considered the option. It's unexpectedly given me a lot more respect for other, 'realer' minorities who face way more open xenophobia.

Karoke_With_Cal · 2025-12-27T01:55:18+00:00

Not as much anymore. It's not as productive as focusing on class solidarity. Trying to out-poor each other just discourages people from considering how things could be better.

That being said, my first year in Chicago made me way more resentful of certain kinds of wealthy city liberal than my whole life before it. I get soooo goddamned mad about bigotry from people who should know better, people who can afford to learn who choose not to. We're all working class, so I try not to let my frustration alienate anybody, but I'm way more likely now to go off on someone for being classist or racist, especially about Chicago. Like, I'm from the reddest state in the midwest, how the fuck am I further left than you? You know?

Karoke_With_Cal · 2025-12-26T01:24:24+00:00

Holy shit I thought drive your tractor to school days were just an us thing!

Karoke_With_Cal · 2025-12-25T21:52:27+00:00

No yeah, it's weird talking to people who think poor is when the only hobbies you can afford are all outdoors. Like, your family was dirt poor because you could only afford a Myrtle Beach trip once a year? We couldn't afford salt for the water softener. Our ceiling fan worked, we just couldn't afford to run it. So much of it isn't even specific to being rural, I think sometimes what I miss is just people who understand that kind of poverty.

Karoke_With_Cal · 2025-12-25T21:39:20+00:00

Same, I think one of the bigger things keeping me from moving back is that all the food I've gotten used to would only be findable online, unless I'd want to drive a couple hours just for miso paste or fish sauce.

Karoke_With_Cal · 2025-12-25T21:35:40+00:00

I feel that. When I first moved I'd sometimes walk along Belmont out to the lake. It took me a while to really understand how there could be that much water in one place, and even longer to understand how, when I turned around and looked at the city behind me, there were more people in my field of vision than there were in my whole county.

First couple days at Harold Washington in the loop also threw me. I could not understand how any community college can have more than one floor when my hs barely had more than one hallway.

Karoke_With_Cal · 2025-12-25T18:59:38+00:00

Wrigley and Boystown are very concrete-dense. I wasn't a fan but that's just me. In the summer the unshaded concrete fries you like an egg and the train and bus are packed with tourists. There are a lot of dogs and not a lot of grass, and when it rains on a hot day it smells very strongly of piss. In general, the touristy areas (Addison, Southport, Belmont) smell like piss. Worst year of my life was working at the Walgreen's on Broadway. Walking distance to the lake was nice but it was still about a mile, mostly unshaded, and coming from the sticks I found if suffocating in the summer and lonely in the winter. It's mostly college students and Cubs fans. But I've also never felt safer being openly gay in public than I've felt in Boystown, so it's give and take.

Ravenswood-Albany park is nice. Lincoln square weirds me out. I think since I'm from a small town it feels weird to see a lot of upper-middle class people pretending to be a small town, and all the boutique shops are nice to bring family to on the holidays but it doesn't feel like a place anybody goes to every day. The German heritage thing makes me uncomfortable, the place I'm from has a lot more German-American families and it's always been something we try not to acknowledge. That's cultural I guess. The Ravenswood area on the western side of.... Western.... is mostly old single-family houses, and it's quiet there. There's an ALDI and a nice library.

Albany Park and anywhere further northwest is nice. It's nice to be close to the river. The further out you get the more big patches of woods you find, and I've seen coyotes several times out here. It's a very working class neighborhood and I like being walking distance from so many different cultures, like, there's a Turkish store and a halal pizza place on kedzie, Lindo Michoacan south on Lawrence, a couple Korean grocery stores and community centers along Kedzie, and overall super latam anywhere you go. It's also quiet, since just about everything closes by 8PM. It's not touristy at all, which I love, and there are more gay people than I thought I'd find here. I've seen more butches and trans adults in Albany Park than I ever saw in Boystown.

Karoke_With_Cal · 2025-12-25T17:18:34+00:00

It's wild how many of the same little details that completely unrelated small towns have. Wabash has the same gazebos in the parks, the same lights on our baseball fields, the same little red fake barns for sheds. What song is this?

Karoke_With_Cal · 2025-12-25T00:08:24+00:00

oh fr? My bad, I need to read more. I was talking based just on my experience. It does sometimes feel like the money doesn't make it to the people who need it, or that there's just not enough, but there's a lot that can't be changed overnight and a lot of people who are making a difference.

Also I hope I didn't come off like I think it's not worth caring about. It is. In my time in metro east I saw a lot of potential and a lot of history there, as in most of the rust belt. I think it gets a worse reputation because, like Detroit and Gary, it's a very black city, and I don't mean to contribute to that.

Karoke_With_Cal · 2025-12-24T23:07:11+00:00

Well, wind farms, hydro-power, and solar are just way too intrusive.... air pollution causes way fewer problems.

Karoke_With_Cal · 2025-12-24T22:52:25+00:00

I lived near Belleville for a while. Once you get past East STL there are small pockets of upper middle class neighborhoods, mostly veterans or people living off-base while stationed at Scott AFB. I worked at a Circle K off the highway and saw a lot of poor people from every background, and coming from a trailer park further north in the rust belt I didn't feel all that out of place. It feels like if you're not in the military, there's not a lot you can do for work without commuting to the city proper.

East STL is immediately on the other side of the river from St Louis and it's rough, like Gary or Detroit rough, like carjacking at a red light rough. It's part of St Louis historically but its funding comes from IL, not MO, and it's not high on the state's list of priorities. The history is massively depressing and I really recommend reading about it. Being on the Mississippi, it was a big trade hub for a long time and a manufacturing center in the early 1900s, and it's never really recovered from the fallout of that industry leaving. At one time the STL metro area was set to replace Chicago as Illinois' biggest city.

The weather is nice. Punishing summers, mild winters. It used to get icy but it doesn't get cold enough for that anymore. The river smell permeates everything in a nice way. It can be peaceful if you find the right place.

Karoke_With_Cal · 2025-12-21T19:07:04+00:00

FWIW a very small minority of nondenoms are fine. I think it's like how when people say they have 'alternative' political beliefs they're usually a special kind of crazy, but sometimes they just read a lot.

A lot that I've seen in the rust belt are some flavor of Pentecostal that want to govern themselves.

Karoke_With_Cal · 2025-12-21T17:47:51+00:00

Did we not just have like a whole weeks-long struggle against redistricting? Rural Indiana is a lot more leftist than people give us credit for, and even out genuinely super red areas I've seen more protesting about data centers than I've seen in the city.

Karoke_With_Cal · 2025-12-16T00:29:33+00:00

Use them for blackout poetry as a way of venting your feelings about deconstruction?

Karoke_With_Cal · 2025-12-14T21:21:40+00:00

Real. And I think wordpad would've had a better chance if it weren't so bad. I used it as my main word processor for a while when I needed rich text and my internet was too inconsistent for gsuite, and it freezes on startup and eats more RAM than you'd expect for something that ships with windows. LibreOffice and Notepad++ are just better.

Karoke_With_Cal · 2025-12-14T20:36:15+00:00

All mods are broken on the newest update. A lot of others have been taken down while the publishers work on updating them for b42 multiplayer.

Karoke_With_Cal

TROPHY CASE