#southwestern pennsylvania

[beckinkk]

"It's 5 O'Clock in Pittsburgh"

Beck Inkk (myself), acrylic on wrapped canvas, 2023

Two skeleton pals enjoying a night at a hole-in-the-wall bar. Sharing stories, memories, stogies, and some Rolling Rock beer and whiskey.

Available - $1,200

[rjmbaboonbooks]

Daily Comic Journal: February 18, 2022: "If I Was Drawing These Comics 39 Years Ago..."

Like I say in the comic, after thinking about drawing these comics for twelve years I really do wish I had started years and years ago. I have so many stories I’d like to tell, and then I remembered about one of my favorite TV shows, “The Dick Van Dyke Show”. On “The Dick Van Dyke Show” they’d often have flashback episodes. Carl Reiner wanted to tell stories of how Rob (Dick Van Dyke) and Laura…

[adancedivasmom]

[onenicebugperday]

@iam-the-wild submitted: Do you know what kind of spider this is? It's in southwestern Pennsylvania

Not a spider! It's a harvestman. They are arachnids just like spiders but belong to a different order. And unlike spiders they do not spin webs and they don't have venom.

[eddy25960]

The iconic Fallingwater or the Kaufmann Residence, a house American architect, interior designer, writer, and educator Frank Lloyd Wright (8 June , 1867 - 9 April , 1959), famed for his concept of "organic architecture", designed in 1935 in rural southwestern Pennsylvania, 43 miles southeast of Pittsburgh.

[beguines]

Concerns over safety were not confined to mineworkers. On May 6, 1949, sixty-​two thousand Ford Rouge workers, for example, wildcatted over speedup and safety issues. On the same date, the continuous miner was introduced at Bethlehem Steel's Carolina-​Idamay captive mine in Marion County, West Virginia. The amount of dust and heat generated by this new machinery was so extreme that it could no longer be controlled by the existing sprinkler systems, and miners saw their health and safety conditions deteriorating. Meanwhile, a number of National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) decisions challenged the union. The Taft-​Hartley Act of 1947 mandated that union shops could be achieved only by a workplace vote run by the NLRB. Since the coal miners had refused, however, to sign the anti-communist pledges of Taft-​Hartley, they were not eligible for NLRB elections. The union shop provisions of their contracts were ruled illegal. Then questions were raised about whether the health and welfare royalty payments to the union were legal contractual issues. Companies began to refrain from making their contractual contributions, and the union health care system approached insolvency.

On September 19, 1950, the largest captive mine in West Virginia, Barrackville, and largest commercial mine, Grant Town, voted to strike until companies paid into the health and welfare fund. The rest of West Virginia and southwestern Pennsylvania miners immediately followed; roving pickets covered the whole region, including many "small unorganized mines." Most scab operators immediately closed their mines when they saw union pickets.

On October 1, 1950, steelworkers also went out on strike, followed shortly by workers at Ford, Chrysler, and General Motors. These strikes together almost certainly stalled efforts to repeal the Taft-​Hartley Act, creating an anti-​union public opinion backlash. John L. Lewis then ordered the West Virginia miners back to work, but they refused to comply. Finally, district officials called a meeting on January 19, 1950 to try to get the miners back. Two thousand showed up and chased the international reps from the stage; Lewis's name was booed from the floor. The coal miners again had support from the rest of the labor movement. Autoworkers in Detroit donated money and food. Tommy Thompson, president of UAW Local 600, came to Pursglove, West Virginia, with a food caravan and relief money, pledging the support of the sixty thousand auto workers at his Ford local. The 1950 strike, however, was the last one that Lewis was to lead.

Michael Goldfield, The Southern Key: Class, Race, and Radicalism in the 1930s and 1940s

[lichenlad]

List of bat live cams to give you extra serotonin : ) 🦇

Bat world sanctuary batcams including fruit bats and insect bats

Lubee Bat Conservancy flying fox batcam

Charter group birdcams at Tel Aviv University Egyptian fruit batcam

Cluff Ranch Arizona game and fish department batcam

PA Bat box in southwestern pennsylvania batcam

Explore.org flying fox batcam

Explore.org giant flying fox batcam

Devon wildlife trust horseshoe bat batcam

Woodland park zoo batcam (currently out of order)

edit: two have been added at the famous Braken cave by bat conservation international! This is the largest bat colony on Earth!!

Inside Bracken cave

entrance view of Bracken cave

best times to watch according to BCI are 8pm and 7am central US/American time

[vandaliatraveler]

The High Rocks Trail along the Highland Scenic Highway offers an easy, 3 mile out-and-back hike featuring one of the best views in the Central Appalachians. Perched on a sandstone outcropping at over 4,000 feet (1,219 m) above sea level, the overlook provides sweeping views toward Virginia to the east and the Greenbrier River Valley to the south. I imagine this would be an ideal spot to do some stargazing, as there is very little light obstruction from the valley below.

From top: views from the High Rocks overlook at the end of the trail; false Solomon's seal (Maianthemum racemosum), whose plume of white flowers gives way to a cluster of waxy, gold and red-speckled berries in late summer; two of the most impressive speckled wood lilies (Clintonia umbellulata) I've ever come across in my travels; American lily-of-the-valley (Convallaria majuscula), a more robust and less densely-colonizing cousin of the more familiar European species, native to the Appalachian mountains from Southwestern Pennsylvania to North Carolina and Tennessee; the gorgeous mountain angelica (Angelica triquinata), also known as filmy angelica, an Appalachian endemic that produces the most impressive compound umbels of greenish-white flowers in late summer; and a gregarious woodland fungi, perhaps sulphur tuft (Hypholoma fasciculare)?

[yama-bato]

Peter Hurd

 PETER HURD (New Mexico/Pennsylvania, 1904-1984), Southwestern landscape in spring

[intertexts]

Oh wait

You like fucked up towns?

Do you perhaps have any thoughts on towns and how to make them more fucked up? :]

(^^ words of something trying to make a small town map that’s fucked up)

OH. HUH. FUN QUESTION. i feel like. i am a terrible person to ask for thoughts on things like this because the extent of my writing is like, gay ass character studies & shit. but. i do have a ton of thoughts on fucked up towns.

the most important thing, i personally think, is having your town be grounded in a real regional place and it has to be a place you love. it's so difficult to make that shit up from scratch and still carry a real weight. and the horror or strangeness or sadness of the town should come from the reality of it.

picking a few of the easiest examples: welcome to night vale, night in the woods, h.p. lovecraft's miskatonic county. the fucked-up-ness of all of them springs from the nature of the place itself. they're not interchangeable, and they all have different emotions linked with them.

night vale is, very loosely, a satire of unbothered american suburbia in the face of-- well. all the horrific shit that post-9/11 unbothered americana ignores! and the strangeness and beauty of the setting comes from the easy and pleasant and mundane way that its citizens interact with the horror. it's day-to-day, it's chill, it's normal. yeah the faceless old lady who lives in your home is running for mayor. yeah the angels who work the community garden and live with josie finally won the case for their existence we can acknowledge them now cool. (& also of course night vale is a southwestern desert town & it doesn't let u forget that!! it's hot and sunny in the day and cold at night and there's sand dunes out by the edge of town and beaches with no lakes and it is very grounded in its setting!!)

possum falls from nitw, on the other hand, is a love letter to to those old, death spiraling pennsylvania rust belt mining towns. it isn't as heavily supernatural of a setting (outside of the old god in the mines the elders are sacrificing the most vulnerable members of the community to for nothing but the continued hollow, wheezing survival of something that should be allowed to die) but it's very grounded in the reality of those places-- the omnipresent forest, the dinky grocery store, your old high school classmate sitting out on her apartment steps at sunset, the feeling of being out in the autumn cold at dusk and the empty subway station and the weathered, half-hearted historical remnants of local pride and the ghost of the closed mine over it all. the type of dead-end, black hole, potholed main street town that you know you're gonna live and die in because it's what your parents did and what their parents did and god knows how you'd even make it out.

lovecraft-- i mean, mandatory disclaimer on his insane racism of course. up to u if u wanna read of his work, a lot of his short stories r very short etc. but crucially, for what we're talking about here, lovecraft was fucking in love with new england in the way that people who r born and raised in new england r insane about it. his lovecraft country/miskatonic county/arkham county is set in massachusetts, and he's very clear about why everything's set in mass: bleak, lonely, ancient, haunted by the sea and the lingering ghosts of twisted puritan ideology. his fucked up towns are the dark hidden backwoods, the port towns, the wretched things brought by settlers who have been a parasite upon the woods and the rocks and the fields for hundreds of years, etc, the feeling that something has gone wrong and perverted here and it's far too late to fix it.

so like, tl;dr-- don't try and make somewherw generically weird. figure out what place makes YOU go crazy go stupid. pinpoint Why it specifically makes u go crazy go stupid, as opposed to everywhere else. crank that shit up to 100!!!!

[undescribed1mage]

Every March-April RTC Production that I know of !! (If you go to any of these, please get an audio !!)

Apex Theatre Studio, St Augustine, Florida — March 3rd — March 5th, then again March 9th — 10th.

Fed's Backyard Theatre, Bradenton, Florida — March 10th — 12th (Sold out in person tickets — $5 Streaming tickets !!)

Bridges Theater Co, Point Park University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania — March 24th — 26th

College Of The Holy Cross, Worcester, Massachusetts — March 30th — April 2nd.

The Playhouse Collective, Toronto, Ontario — March 29th — April 1st.

RGC Theatre, Portsmouth, New Hampshire — April 14th — April 16th (Revival performance, also being livestreamed !!)

Emerson College, Boston, Massachusetts — April 14th — 16th

Roxy's Downtown LLC, Wichita, Kansas — April 6th — April 29th (according to the rights website — dates may be off).

Phoenix College, Phoenix, Arizona — April 20th — April 23rd.

The Hill School, Pottstown, Pennsylvania — April 21st — April 23rd.

Framingham State University, Framingham, Massachusetts — April 21st — April 22nd !!

Southwestern University, Georgetown, Texas — April 21st — April 30th.

Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana — April 28th — 30th

[intheholler]

hey there! i’m from pennsylvania and i’m just starting to learn and appreciate how amazing it is out here, i went to a private school all my life only because my mom worked there so we got a discount + financial aid, so i was the ‘poor country kid’ and everyone always looked down on me for that so i grew to be ashamed of where i was from and my house not being fancy and all that but now i realize that that was so stupid! anyways your blog has really helped me reconnect with my true home and realize that being from the rural country parts doesn’t make you any less, so thank you for that and ive never been happier in my identity thanks to this! idk if im actually from appalachia but i live like 20 minutes from the mountains so if that counts then great

i'm so happy to know you've come to love yourself for your roots and not in spite of them!!

i think most of us go through this feeling of wanting to 'other' ourselves from our rural upbringings, especially in environments where our impoverished lives are so obviously contrasted against wealthy ones like that. but we definitely don't deserve to feel that shame, and if my blog in any way helped you arrive at that realization, it means so much to me <33

as an aside, folks will gatekeep our hills til they go blue, but ur not gonna find that here. 20 minutes from the mtns in PA sounds like the appalachian plateau (well if you're in southwestern PA, i guess lol) and the rest sounds like the piedmont, all of which is appalachia to me c;

take care family <3

[ahedderick]

K came home from college this weekend, and we went out for a good hike in the watershed reservoir for our city. There are some wonderful trails out there (southwestern Pennsylvania).

We walked about three miles in all. This trail doesn't look like it's about to get very, very steep, but it fooled us. Had to help old man Chance get over a downed log. Jeez I HATE dogs getting old. Lady was ecstatic; it was her second very long walk in two days and she made the most of it. I got to hear all the college stories, which made it even better.

[fuukonomiko]

Why do I like w40k?

In response to @sesh-static (I can see your reply to the sticker post by @rowscara but I think I should answer it separately).

My love for 40k was a slowburn that took two years to come to fruition. I first learned about it from my longtime buddy @the-new-mandalor who shared it with me, via the story of Magnus the Red. A tale to keep me from nodding off while driving to work in Southwestern Pennsylvania at the most ungodly hour. The lore piqued my interest. Then the aesthetics. Though the grim darkness was a little off-putting, as is the lack of hope, something about the over-the-top shenanigans and hot beefcakes invited me in. In this fandom I learned to roleplay, to visualize my OCs and show them to people (I've been making them since I was 7 but I never shared them with anyone other than close friends and family), to not be ashamed of writing debauchery, and to create without reservations. I normally don't last very long in fandoms, but here I am, will celebrate 7 years in November. Its mostly because I have met so many wonderful, amazing people here who I am proud to call friends. While 40k is what drew us together, we share other fandoms as well.

[onenicebugperday]

@geneer-gebubu submitted: This fellow came to keep me company at work in southwestern Pennsylvania today, who are they?

Looks like a very cute and friendly robber fly!

[einsteinsugly]

Steven James Hyde (born November 28, 1959), the Familial Lore.

WB's family hails from Detroit. His paternal grandmother Ruby was born and raised in Detroit, but his paternal grandfather William "Willie" abruptly moved to Detroit at thirteen after his family lost everything in the Tulsa race riots.

WB is the eldest of two children. He grew up close to his brother Henry. They never had much, but they made it work. His dad typically worked for GM, but he and Ruby ran a little music shop and jazz club on the side.

By the late 50s, WB had just lost his first wife Marion in a car crash, and had a young daughter to raise on his own (Angie). He was around during the founding of Motown Records, and had to live in Chicago for a bit to promote the new record label, with his best friends Francis "French" Owens and Jerome Clark. There he met Edna, and they had a relationship for a bit, but Edna's brother Tag was a massive racist. So they broke it off, but not before conceiving Hyde.

Edna had also met Bud for the first time at around the same time, but didn't become romantic with him until a bit later, after WB left the picture. She masqueraded Hyde as Bud's (Bud knows, too) to placate her racist brother, and they moved to Point Place, where Bud was born and raised (on a literal pig farm).

*****

His mom's family is peppered with tragedy. Edna O'Brien was born to teenage parents in northern Appalachia/southwestern Pennsylvania, and she was initially raised with love and care by her paternal grandparents, until her parents decided to take her back when she was four. By then, they had two more children, Terry "Tag" and Clifford "Cliff."*

They were never in the same place for long. Her dad Edwin took a bunch of menial jobs and was also a truck driver, and they often lived in rundown motels. Edwin consistently physically, verbally, and sexually abused his wife Daisy, and started to do the same to Edna when she was nine. A firmly closeted bisexual, he also sexually abused both Tag and Cliff.

When Edna was sixteen, it was clear that Edwin was beginning to groom their youngest sister Marlene, but Daisy refused to leave. So the kids split, with Marlene in tow, and tried to make things work. They lived in Chicago for a few years, and Edna dabbled in sex work, waitressing, bartending, and the drug trade to make ends meet. She also discovered a love for water skiing, and she spent summers in the Dells, which was dashed when she found out she was pregnant with Hyde. She was only partially relieved when Hyde was born, since he was white (so the masquerade described above worked), but he also emerged with her father's ice-blue eyes. The same eyes she despised.

*Cliff is the only good uncle in Hyde's life. He doesn't have much, but he tries to help out Hyde when he can.