and crush on a chick named Beatrice

Rank hath privilege

Elon Musk: “I only date models”

50.4% against a candidate supported by the Republicans, most of the Democrat establishment and deep-pocketed billionaires, and backed by social-media algorithms.

Well, in a socialist society, the purpose of romantic and sexual relationships is to bring into being the next generation of workers to build socialism, and relationships which don’t do this are bourgeois decadence.

Lovecraft is dead, and the royalties for his remaining in-copyright books don’t appear to go to anyone reprehensible. Buying his books won’t affect the overall level of racism (though some of his writing has aged less well than other parts).

The sharing is better than nothing. For the first/last mile of accessing central stations, that is the norm in countries like Germany, and a Sydney-Melbourne Shinkansen turning into a XPT somewhere around Wagga Wagga where it rejoins the legacy line is also doable, and better than the status quo. And gauge seems to be a settled issue everywhere except for Queensland north of Brisbane and the Victorian suburban/regional networks, whose interstate-reaching routes have all been regauged.

Trickier details would be electrification (you’d want 25kV AC to deliver enough power to accelerate fast, but in Melbourne/Sydney, you may need to either make do with lower legacy voltages, necessitating multi-system capabilities as in Europe, or have a dedicated road).

Neither did Japan until the Shinkansen. (In fact, aren’t both Cape-gauge?)

Any interstate HSR link to Brisbane would be standard gauge, as the XPT is. An intrastate link going north towards Cairns/Townsville may be classic-compatible Cape gauge if done incrementally, though given that one would typically break one’s journey in Brisbane, this is not catastrophic. Unless suddenly funds become available to build a new Shinkansen-style network from scratch, in which case standard-gauge would be the way to go.

Surely Sydney-Canberra would be better for a prestige generation-defining nation-building project than what any other country would call a regional line. It’d actually make sense as a federal project, in a way that a purely intrastate line in NSW would not, it would all but kill a busy aviation corridor that only exists because the existing link is pathetically slow, and (especially if you terminate it at a new station in/under central Canberra with a through connection) would form the start of a link to Melbourne, joining Australia’s two most populous cities via the capital.

That’s if you think of these things as once-in-a-generation Snowy Mountains-style prestige projects that the country can only do one of at once. If we’re building high-speed rail as a utility rather than just to be able to say that we’ve joined the HSR big boys’ club just like Algeria and Indonesia, we should parallelise. Establish national standards for high-speed rail, in a way that is classic-compatible, so that trains can run slowly on legacy lines (once they’re relatively cheaply electrified, at least) until faster lines replace them, electrify lines and pick the low-hanging fruit of the particularly slow, winding sections. Build a showcase HSR line to Canberra whilst quietly upgrading the rest of the network. Get Melbourne-Sydney down to 8 hours and increase train frequency from 2 a day to 4, while upgrading the trains with modern amenities like fast WiFi and power sockets do that the time isn’t dead time. Then, once Canberra HSR is up and connecting Sydney and Canberra within an hour, punch through and connect to the legacy Melbourne line, bringing the time down further, and then gradually replace legacy segments with high-speed bypasses.

She’s in her ancestral environment, or at least a good approximation of it.

Because that’s his nature, presumably

If you write it backwards, you become an Islamic Satanist, like those underground black-metal bands in Indonesia.

And then there’s “blackamoor”, for when you want to focus on the negritude part of the supposed Moorishness.

See also, the “Black Irish”, who were just Irish people with dark hair.

Neither are celebrity tabloids or brunch bars (or pop music or fashion boutiques or bike lanes or football leagues or a lot of other things), but people in the west look at these things as signifiers of modernity and familiarity. The Russians are just like us because they also pay for car insurance and play Clash Of Clans on their phones.

No, he hopes that she divorces him so that he can marry Leatherpants Fashmilf.

“slop” seems to be the 4chan inanimate-substance suffix, in the same way that “fag” is the suffix for any person

3…2…1…

On one hand, yes. OTOH, if there’s one thing the Russian state has proven itself capable of doing is shambling on zombie-fashion when people in functioning countries and economies would expect it to have collapsed. It’s as if the things we take for granted as the underpinnings of a state/economy/society have only ever been Potemkin-village-style decoration in Russia (“see, we have parliaments and stock markets and safety standards and celebrity tabloids and brunch bars with fashionable decor, just like you!”), while the real load-bearing elements buried beneath them are something far older and grimmer.

Looks more like an Adonis to me