Three Flats Bettcher

Doing the top of this diagram but twenty stories tall just makes twenty times the number of car trips

People watching the performance

Same place at night

U-District is really a nice place for street parties. The k-pop (demon hunter) dance party brought lot of families to the U District Station Park

very grateful I got to live in a time when computers were fun and cool

Bicycle infrastructure is sooo much cheaper to build and maintain than car infrastructure. Also, why doesn't anybody ever mention how we're all subsidizing cars and the fossil fuel industry?

The continuing 510 service all the way into Seattle instead of terminating at Lynnwood seems similar - functionally, they still need some kind of express routes for a lot of this

*ancient Italian engineer* “why yes, our roads will last for thousands of years.”

“wait, the carts in the future are *how big*? And go *how fast*? How many donkeys do they need for that size and speed??!”

“Sorry, I’m not designing for an horde of inconceivable demons.”

gonna guess at least some of these design and policy decisions were made by people who spoke Latin as a first language

It will be interesting to see the dollars per vote. In a town the size of Woodinville, at some point you just need to knock on your neighbors’ doors and say hi. I don’t know how tsunamis of money can substitute for that here.

geez, why even run a campaign when you can just take every single human soul in town out to a mid-range lunch and chat with them

Enough people want to downsize into “starter” homes at various points in life that it’s a strange concept.

We should have “starter homes” like sourdough starter, where you can just add more to the home until it divides into multiple homes

New VIP DART prototype probably

I often think about how a nearby anti-growth suburb chose the “does not exist” option by voting down the tax increase they would have needed to avoid bankruptcy and de-incorporation.

Choosing not to exist is an option apparently!

Proposal

We re-boot the entire internet. The only form of communication now available is MUDs.

adults get those sad pull-up bar stations every so often along running trails, does this count?

I wonder how much of this existed when this show first went on the air in 1989/90

We don’t talk enough about how racists and authoritarians are the ones who actually genuinely hate this country.

One of the wildest things is if you spend any time in these cities, it’s like Portland ah look tattooed hippies reading books in independent bookshops, LA ah yes the Korean-Mexican fusion on rollerblades you always dreamed of, D.C. this place was gentrified so long ago what are they talking about.

I don’t think this was ever real for many students. Undergrad a few decades ago was basically this, but with shopping cart jousting. I guess maybe someone threw a party every so often?

a group of people riding bicycles in front of a sign that says " keep portland weird " ALT: a group of people riding bicycles in front of a sign that says " keep portland weird "

It didn't burn, it was just these guys.

YouTube video by Interstellar1977 Adam Conover - Driving cars is insane

You know, when you really think about it, does all that driving and car dependency really make sense? @adamconover.net weighed in.

Pike Place Market without cars

Central Library in the sun

Smith Tower hiding behind old building covered in ivy

Someone on a bike in front of Rainier Tower

I love this city.

In discussion with a computer scientist from the University of Cambridge last night:

Me: "you've described some of the things that AI is good at. How would you describe the category of things it's not good at?

**pause**

Him: "Anything where it has to be right".

I went to the Greenwood Fred Meyer for the first time in forever. Cameras EVERYWHERE. Everything locked up. At the self-checkout the associate had to review a video of me scanning things before I could pay. And that's in addition to the security staff and receipt-checking that's been around awhile.

MLT QFC is benign for a Kroger, with a parking lot camera and at least one camera in the shelves. A trip to Freddy Kroger’s in Lynnwood is much more filmed and gated, as are that area’s big boxes. Ash Way Wal-Mart has the most prison vibes in South Snoho. National retailers seem particularly bad.

Kroger-owned stores seem to be especially bad. Edmonds Winco is open 24 hours on Highway 99 and doesn’t have any of the prison-vibes monitoring infrastructure that Mountlake Terrace QFC, in the middle of nothing and closes at like 10, has.

TV is a pain. You can’t just look up what you want to watch and then watch it. You must remember which number goes with what you want to watch (they have dashes!), and *wait for a specific time* for it to even play. And the ads, good god! Boycott because of fascism *and* a sucky experience.

nice, but 99% of the audience in this symphony hall is an idiot behind the keys and I bet they don’t even tune it. why don’t they play more like me, the best pianist?

this would actually be a significant improvement because two mandatory piano niches per dwelling unit takes up way less space than two parking spaces, to say nothing of the comparative ease of moving pianos around through human sized doors and halls

oh, you like piano, tickling the ivories once in a while? Well, now you must play piano hours a day to live. You can’t even hear yourself over all the other pianos. Cartoon characters drop ‘em on 40,000 people a year as a gag. Want silence or drums? Tough shit, society revolves around pianos now.

@neal.fun gives me hope that the Internet can still be interesting and fun