pizza slow (high quality)

posts from 2023 / 04

  1. huh, I think this petard is one I made, I wonder what that’s doing here

  2. the bike infra surrounding UCSF (edit: mission bay) is extremely mid—flex post half-bike lanes (the right half of bike lanes between car lanes and parking lanes are actually door lanes) and sharrows, all of which pick up from and dump you nowhere

    but the stoplights? really pretty bad. long timing, poor sensors, beg buttons etc. might as well be in Redwood City because they ignore me and I ignore them

    #BikeSF

  3. nice, Black Water has “The Monkey’s Paw” in it, ( https://www.owleyes.org/text/monkeys-paw/read/) shortly followed by another wishing tale: Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Bottle Imp”.

    where better to start a story about wish than a hilltop mansion so earned in san francisco https://americanliterature.com/author/robert-louis-stevenson/short-story/the-bottle-imp

  4. me: sir, reporting to discord support for duty, sir

    open source volunteer: what is it now, computer janitor

    me: sir, I’m stuck trying to get this feature to work after performing all of the rituals, sir

    open source volunteer: that feature doesn’t work right now.

    me [quietly, to myself, fist pumping in the air, ‘I knew it! for fuck’s sake’]: sir, thank you very much, sir.

  5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lp_sjTfmJQ “One Moment Please” - Romaal Kultan - the soundtrack of me flipping from chat to tab to chat to tab to email to chat to thinking about dinner looking for my shoes in four places for the third time going back to chat, posting about RSA because it came to mind, hearing this song, that synth line making me anxious as hell, finding my shoes, shazaming the song, posting it, lol gd that line is anxious, I gotta go for a walk

  6. Sitting criss-cross applesauce on a gym mat in my exercise get-up with my eyes closed and my arms raised into broadcast position calming emitting ”I’m not going to RSA" energy to universe.

    Okay, that should work, I think to myself, foolishly.

  7. view from the dentist’s chair

    photograph of an open window with the Transamerica building in the center, through which a mirror on a perpendicular wall shows a view of the top of the salesforce tower (which needs a better name imo)one of those lead blankets they use for x-rays hands on a rack below the mirrormy astro teacher in high school used to lol about those x-ray bibs, apparently the radiation you could get hit with by an xray machine ist like, not even close to what you get hit with taking any airline flight? i should look that up

  8. the last time I yelled at someone doing the same thing at the same intersection, the guys working the oil change spot got on their drive through intercom PA and said [PHSK!] “STOP YELLING”

    (also not trying to be a bike account but this shit happens multiple times a day but we just talked about this spot lolsob)

  9. lmao a driver going south on Valencia turning right on Duboce with the windows all the way down inching into the bike lane was loudly scolded into the open passenger window by two guys ahead of me YOU ARE TURNING RIGHT ON A NO TURN RED while they pointed at the signs as I approached behind them hitting both of my breaks turned turned right on the red

    purpose of a system is what does yes I know it’s 420 but c’mon they had an SF parking sticker on the bumper, they’re a local

    google maps street view of the no turn on red signs, red (cyclists had the green in this case)

  10. everloving wife couldn’t find my wool cardigan to steal so she put on the very moth eaten cashmere pullover that she asks me to get rid of every single time i wear, going on ten years, since the moths were a real problem, and which she had never ever worn before, on account of all the moth holes in it, and said “damn sweater is comfy as hell.”

  11. not my goofy ass sitting on a log reading Italo Calvino’s “The Argentine Ant” only to discover by feel that I am sitting on a damned ant hill as they crawl up my back under my shirt 😬🤣 ( https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6752551)

    a log on the third base line of Rikki Streicher Field on Diamond at 19th covered with little tiny ants

  12. the everloving wife and I made about an eighth of the way around Stow Lake in Golden Gate Park with junior and my dad in the back seat yesterday (so about 650 pounds passenger load) in one of those little peddle boats before my legs said to turn around

    Lovely to be on the water but I’m definitely getting a row boat next time. The “bike seat height” equivalent is bottomed out so my legs barely made it past 90 degrees at extension. I’m about 6’0”.

    Photograph of Stow Lake with four fiberglass 2x2 boards on a small lack moored at a wooden dock, trees surround(photo from duckduckgo images search, but we were in a red one like that)

  13. tenth book, Matt Ruff’s “Lovecraft Country” sequel, “The Destroyer of Worlds” ( https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61190257-the-destroyer-of-worlds)

    I’ve been a huge fan of Ruff since “Sewer, Gas, and Electric" ( https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/71846.Sewer_Gas_and_Electric) and of course the Lovecraft Country show was also p good (although a bit scary for my tastes), so, picking this up after Novel Explosions was a great call.

    The current hardback edition cover of Destroyer of Worlds, designed to look like a distressed pulp paperback printed directly on the cover rather than using a dust jacket (yay, I hate futzing with dust jackets)

  14. it usually drives me crazy when writers (borrowing another afterword word) peacock how well-read or at least broadly-read they are, or explode every scene into a McMaster-Carr order, but the half-a-dozen fields expanded in Novel Explosives and the etymology there-in kept my attention.

  15. ninth book, a real (borrowing from the afterword) wrist-punishing, discursive, door-stopper: “Novel Explosives" by Jim Gauer ( https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29363276-novel-explosives)

    I looked for a review that resonated: https://books.substack.com/p/review-joy-williams-on-jim-gauer

    The 2022 paperback cover of Novel Explosives, a frozen stellar explosion over a shattering black flower of flat glass centered in a field of sky blue with the title over the top and author’s name over the bottom in cream all-caps san serif.

  16. eponymous peaks

    picture of Twin Peaks next to Sutro Tower from McKinley Square, from which the side by side paid actually look like twins

  17. so clearly the goal isn’t zero deaths, and the city should drop the vision zero pretense, it is absolutely stollen valor at this point

    I’m also pretty unsatisfied w/ the SF Bike Coalition line on this. They’ve never, in the history of the organization, been radical, but c’mon y’all “centering merchants voices?” sounds like something london breed would say.

    I probably won’t renew my membership #BicyclingInSanFrancisco

  18. if your goal is zero deaths, this ain’t it. if your goal is zero injuries, this definitely ain’t it.

    We already have this pattern northbound on Valencia at 14th (at Zeitgeist). I always assume I’m going to be killed here and take the car lane before the intersection if I can, I’ve seen too many rights on red bearing down on other cyclists here

    it isn’t the driver’s fault, it’s simply a design failure with band-aides. it relies on signs, paint, and enforcement.

    #BicyclingInSanFrancisco

    google street view of valenca northbound at 14th in the car right-turn-lane, the bike lane to it’s right

    google street view of valenca northbound at 14th in the car right-turn-lane, the bike lane to it’s right, close up of Zeitgeit and the multiple redundant signs SFMTA put up, after I assume the first few failed?

    ECU the signs, google street view of valenca northbound at 14th in the car right-turn-lane, the bike lane to it’s rightleft most, a standard reflective paint metal sign on a light post over the street: no right turn on red except for bikescenter: a stoplight with a red arrow indicating that cars need to stop and wait for the green signalright: a back-lit LED version of same sign on the leftright-most a green/red stoplight for bicyclists that you should definitely ignore if you are one, and instead assume a car is about to turn right on red into you

  19. what really grinds my gears about the design is the repeated references to paint, signs, and enforcement: no left turn, no turn on red, and so on: imaginary safe places to be next to actually unsafe places to be

    maybe it’s my stupid vulgar marxism, or engineer-brain but that smacks of liberal metaphysics to me: deeply unserious magical thinking that inherently tolerates failure for the insanely shitty reason that its credulous to other unserious critics

    #BicyclingInSanFrancisco

  20. so anyway, with an upside down muni track painted green, I’ll have to pretty much stop my bike to enter an unobstructed travel lane mid-block when the curbed bike lane is obstructed, so I will probably try to look farther up ahead and do it at intersections. it’s gonna be dumb but I’ll cope #BicyclingInSanFrancisco

  21. I immediately take the car lane for the full block as soon as I see a car in the current bike lanes. “I got us a lane, come on in fellow riders, I think to myself”, and maybe I’m imaging it but I usually get a vibe of relief when the see another cyclist stuck in the bike lane realize that they can join me safely

    (while on bad days I’ll also mentally add, to myself, ”the people in cars will never respect you for following their rules, look out for yourself first”)

    #BicyclingInSanFrancisco

  22. here’s a tag you can mute, no hard feelings, ok cya later: #BicyclingInSanFrancisco

    the new valencia bicycle lane design is effectively an upside down muni track painted green down the center. I expect cyclists to eat shit when they try to enter or exit it mid-block just like we already eat shit when we have to ride parallel to them.

  23. That afternoon, walking in the garden, the prince came face to face with Death. “Why,” he asked, “did you make a threatening gesture at my gardener this morning?” “It wasn’t a threatening gesture,” answered Death. “It was a gesture of surprise. I saw him far from Ispahan this morning and I knew I must take him in Ispahan tonight.”

  24. another one! “Death and the Gardener” by Jean Cocteau, fits in two posts:

    A young gardener said to his prince, “Save me! I met Death in the garden this morning and he made a menacing gesture. Tonight I wish by some miracle I could be far away, in Ispahan”. The prince lent him his swiftest horse.

  25. going back for more Black Water, “Enoch Soames: A Memory of the Eighteen-Nineties” ( https://www.fulltextarchive.com/book/Enoch-Soames/) is fun both as a story and as motivation for silly nonsense (cw: spoiler,: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1997/11/a-memory-of-the-nineteen-nineties/376995/)