> “Two young Englishwomen were hitchhiking when the car they were in hit a tree”; “Yvette and Nicole (both twenty years old) were secretly hitchhiking when they died on the way to their vacation spot.”5 In the 1950s and 1960s, at a time when road fatalities were reaching unprecedented heights, sensationalist headlines and brief news items suggested that it might be unwise to entrust one’s life to an unknown driver.

today, specifically women are usually terrorised about travelling alone with stories of rape or rape-murder, especially if they're young and pretty, with the thinly-veiled implication that if you dare to have adventures you're basically asking for it (there's an excellent feminist webcomic about this topic and because all search engines are broken it took me 20 minutes to find it, only by accident because someone reshared a page on facebook, so please go read it: https://homeiswheretheinternetis.blogspot.com/2014/04/dont-let-fear-stop-you-from-traveling.html ).

it's curious to think that in the 50s and 60s, the way they terrorised women was with the threat of *bad drivers*. I guess car accident is a higher threat model than random stranger rapist after all  not the least because like, someone who's driving is in a inherently vulnerable position, as long as you're willing to risk a car crash for both.

This paper questions how breaks of convention, such as those which exist in hitching a lift, impact upon the sensing of place and the encounter with road-scapes. As a method of travel, hitching ruptures normative journeys, whereby destinations are no longer extensions of the present. Hitchers act on a compelling need to move in an intensely free yet highly constrained manner; to seek heights of physical and mental experience and to do so as if travel, perhaps even life itself, were fleeting opportunities.

"Why did the Anthropologist Cross the Road? Hitch-Hiking as a Stochastic Modality of Travel", Patrick Laviolette

> Be good conversation: If you share a language with the driver, it often makes sense to try to engage them in casual conversation. Drivers often pick people up to make their rides more interesting. They are doing you a favor picking you up, you can return the favor in part by keeping them engaged.

r:  
e: ah *now* you want me to front lol

> Avoid dark or military clothes, they do not create a lot of trustfulness. Looking too much like a colorful hippie will possibly scare other drivers off. Take off your hat (unless it's a really funny one), don't wear gloves, open your jacket, even though you might freeze. Also helpful are t-shirts that identify you with something, be it a country, a football team or a band - Zenit has been picked up because of his "Switzerland" t-shirt more than once.

 the problem is that it's cold as fuck. all my windbreaker stuff is black bloc standard issue, I can see how that's a problem but I don't have money for new clothes  I have colourful clothes and fun dresses and whatnot but they're all too light to stay on the side of the road or rest stop parking lot at 5° with drizzle. I guess I could go with the white overcoat and take off the windbreaker when trying to meet people.

and I should probably spend money on a reflective belt or something, statistically *that's* a real actual danger, if you find yourself having to walk besides a highway late at night with no space for pedestrians—you think that's unlikely to happen but it happened to me in Heidelberg.

@elilla you can borrow a reflective harness thing from me
@mirahimage ah gracias!