Buses in San Francisco now say FARE REQUIRED on the LED displays on the front and side where they used to only indicate the line number and final stop street name or something like that. For a few seconds that is replaced with what it used to say, which is helpful.
It’s an LED display because buses aren’t fixed to a line and might be used on one line on day and another line some other day.
Anyway, this implies that FARE REQUIRED is also a temporary situation that might change, which is nice.
In the interim between now and it going away, I just accumulate 5 seconds or less of vitriolic hatred for the bureaucrat who is imposing this useless delay on my life while I stare at a thing I already know waiting to find out if the bus is going to be one I’m waiting for or not.
I add this to the 2 seconds of my life the new BART gates take to open when the old ones were instant and when I collect enough I convert these seconds to Camel Cash™ which it turns out is still a thing.
"Well, it’s complicated, they are doing that because—“
Let me stop you right there. Enjoying and knowing complications is gross and I want no part of it and do not truck with those who do. No. Absolutely not. It sucks and I’m right that it sucks. Thank you.
Figure 1. Macro photograph of a rose in peak bloom. I don’t know the name of this variety of rose but it is a very pale pink with yellow and white highlights that make it seem almost iridescent in the morning shade. Stunning enough that I stopped the take a picture, and I pass lots of blooming roses on my walk to and from school drop off in the mornings.Figure 2. Selfie at home in the mirror by the door. I’m wearing a black 501s and a black chore coat with my handle, Gravely, chain stitched on the right breast in goldenrod thread, over a black and white plaid flannel over a light pink t-shirt. I’m wearing a new-to-me Twitch Unity Guild baseball hat in light pink with the twitch glitch logo with stacked unity pride flag drop shadows. A blurred print of Booty-Boop, my old avatar, by Joan Cornella is behind me on the wall over one shoulder and a rainbow Eames ball coat rack on the wall over the other shoulder.
I made baguettes for the first time yesterday, purely on a lark, out of the pantry, because I was making coq au vin for dinner and my copy of the Tartine book on the shelf happened to catch my eye.
Bread is always a side quest challenge and not a destination for me, where the main course pairing and some time to kill is more motivating than actually having the bread.
Figure 1. Three loaves of shaped baguette dough, about fifteen inches by four inches, slid on rice flour onto a wooden pizza peel and just before being launched into the oven. Each has been slashed with a razor at a sharp angle, the farthest five times, the middle three times, and the nearest twice.
As in, when I’m on a cut (a fat, protein, carb, and fiber oriented caloric deficit practice using scales and calculators), I pretty easily fall into carb deficiency and have to force myself to bother to eat enough carbs, usually as rice, to sleep comfortably.
That said, I maintain a nameless from-scratch starter and have a large deli container of SAF instant yeast on hand, and a pantry full of various types of flour, so I kinda lay this trap for myself.
I would have preferred a longer, skinnier loaf but this is how big my baking steel is. The slashes should also have been deeper, and my shaping leaves a lot to be desired. I cannot use my ample sized neapolitan-style pizza oven for bread like this because bread like this springs best in steam.
Figure 2. A man (the poster, me) in glasses leaning over, head cocked to one side, putting his ear to three baguettes on a cooling rack on a cutting board. The loaves are fresh from the oven and making ticking, hissing, and cracking noises as they cool.
I have no idea which setting on my fancy kitchen oven is best for this kind of thing. Aero bake? Bake? The rear loaf got darker on the top than the loaf in the front. My razor slashes were definitely too shallow, and I think I degassed the dough too much in my clumsy shaping, and so the crumb was tight.
All that nonsense aside, this recipe (and I guess most modern ones) calls for using both a from-nature starter in a levain, and a from-commercial-yeast starter in a poolish, which is just cute as a snapshot of industrialization.
I’ve overheard bakers and pizza makers at IRL places I enjoy explain to questioners that is their proven approach as well, and I really need to get down to firming up pizza dough recipes that build on the same approach to get my dough to the next level.
It is funny to make all of these observations to myself when someone tries my baking or cooking, and only to hear “oh don’t be hard on yourself, this is great" or something like that.
To be super clear, if you find yourself in that kind of conversation: thinking about what to change about next time about some craft and critiquing output the craft is the entire point of doing the craft. It isn’t a self-esteem thing, if anything, is quite the opposite.
I used to make beer all the time. When the last year or so of batches was all, to my mind, commercial quality, I ran out of things to care about and lost all motivation for making the stuff. It became a big chore of doing dishes and collecting ingredients instead of a way to occupy my mind with a simple challenge of one or two things to improve right next time.
In a way very real way, that’s what hobbies are for, to me. I’m just not gonna be explicit about it.
“check it out, I successfully tricked my brain into not being a dick for like six hours today doing this.”
I’m also very jealous of the memorization gang who can put their mind to the gear in every hobby. That probably works really well. I can never remember, and could not care less about gear, parts, model numbers, and attributes.
It’s process or nothing with me.
Anyway, the bread was incredible with dinner and now I’m gonna make french toast with it, which I just wing every single time.
It would be funny if electeds and then other federal workers and then eventually everyone just started wear neck gaiters pulled up over their noses and wrap-around sun glasess all the time like ICE does. Like, not haha funny but, you know.
We’d have to invent new ways to politely eat and drink around each other. Everyone would be shouting all the time through the masks and talking with their hands on account of eye contact and other facial context being out the window.
One of the dumber things about the torment nexus is that a lot of it also gives tree falling in a forrest in the ways that it enables regressive, alienated attribution to things that previously we dealt with attribution free or better, that left no legacy in the material world.
To use pithy examples, I would rather live in a world where graffiti emerges “from nowhere” and trash left after a party is an emergent property of parties and so on.
If we are gonna universalize some idiot’s preference, it should be mine that we universalize and not some rich weirdo’s. But it’s always some rich weirdo’s.
After many stubborn attempts to pass and use various pyrex (hiss) and pyrex-imitator (hiss) measuring cups and various purpose built gravy boats (hiss) I’ve switched to the one thing in the house that can pour hot liquid correctly: my little blue (beep beep beep) hario v60 carafe (snaps).
With it, I can serve gravies and curries at the dinner table quite neatly.
I want to ride my bike to the park and hike a little but I assume my bike won’t be there, or it will be there without a seat when I return to it, if not this time, then next time. I don’t want to ride with a pannier, much less heavy ineffective locks.
How do event operators fund and staff their bike valets and what would it take to build a network of fixed operators?
I assume both the efficacy and land-use and even just the capitol expense of “better racks" is a lost cause.
That this works really well even at the wrong speed is apparently as well known as it is that the Dark Side of the Moon is a great Wizard of Oz companion track.
What a fun pickin’ pattern. I’m gonna finally learn how to play it.
About fifteen years ago some friends and I started signing our posts dictated but not read, or DBNR, as a bit, about how people with power casually make decisions impacting the rest of us with whatever information is on hand and without asking for more beforehand, or particularly caring how things turn out as a result, or, indeed and more literally, reading their own dictation.
So, it is fun as a poster’s defensive opening, “do not reply, I don’t care, I didn’t even read it myself.”
We got bored of the observation and moved on. It looks like the last time I did it, without much enthusiasm, was five years ago?
• Switched from American-style knife and fork with dominant hand swap maneuvering to standard fixed knife in dominant and fork in alternate handed meal consumption. Use napkin to fix fork inaccuracies on non-ambidextrous systems after upgrading. Beta users can also spoon/fork now.
• Posting now requires “command-return” where it used to require “return”. Use command-return a second time or bang on the escape key to un-full-screen every other app this error transfers to.
Trying to find a gd post I know I made and it isn’t this one or the nonsense I boosted moments ago and I’m giving up on finding what I wanted but anyway, imho, this finger wag should be a standard ligature or whatever.
My mom has never acknowledged the times I used to sneak out of the house to do crimes. I’m pretty sure she knew or at least knows now (thanks, Sis) but she sure doesn’t post about it. Respect.
It was fun how everyone rallied around Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains" yesterday. Someone cool in chat suggested Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore’s “Vintage Season” ( https://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20220847) as another great story-about-a-house and I enjoyed it last night.
This fiddle leaf we inherited from friends leaving california came to us with a three braided trunks and a healthy tight dome of branches and leaves. It grew and grew and grew and then one day a few years later with consistent care, seemed to have exhausted the soil and dropped nearly every leaf.
Heartbreaking.
I pruned a lot of the branches back to the trunk, including one of the three all the way down to nothing but a dead stump. Or so I thought.
Figure 1. Camera phone shot of a potted fiddle leave ficus tree about 4 feet tall with three trunks braided a few feet up. One of the trunks ends in a trimmed of stump, the other two are also trimmed off stumps but have branches extending a foot or two that terminate in normal fiddle leaf clusters. When healthy, this tree had a dozen such branches with deep leaf coverage, but as with these finicky trees, at least in my care, that didn’t last. Near the bottom, just above the soil line, two new branches are emerging from the stump! Eureka!Figure 2. camera phone top down view of the stump branch and trade. The new growth is in the bottom of the frame and out of focus.Figure 3. camera shot close up of two new branches, each with leaf clusters. the leaves are about a quarter of their eventual full size, say thumb sized, but already in rings of three or five and growing strong right out of the trunk.
We also had a monstera that was just out of control so we split it off to a new pot and left nothing but a stump of the repotted original.
It returned strongly and that was how we learned that new growth leaves don’t have the characteristic finger-length fringe that mature growth has. Neat!
A worker at the garden center we go to took one look at picuters of our struggle before this and explained that house plants are generally ground growth in forests and prefer shade.
Well I’d been blasting ours with direct sunlight, which explains the scorched leaves I worried about but had no idea how to fix. We have shears in the windows, so now we use them.
I also think that plants know seasons by day length and temperature so I stopped closing the curtains at night and open the ones I do close as early as possible so that they get the maximum duration of daylight, first through shears and then in “direct” shadow. Seems to help?
I think I need to tackle soil chemicals and fertilizer next and don’t really know where to start.
Feeling emboldened with a pair of gardening shears, I took about 2/3rds of the height off of our stalky, spindly rubber plant and put the strongest bit in some water for two months, which I changed whenever I watered the rest of the plants.
As foretold by people who know, the bit in the water started to root so I planted it. Meanwhile the now-shorter planted plant began to bush out like I wanted it to. Huzzah!
None of these are, I think, difficult to care for plants in California, and this thread is very much "area man follows basic advice after 20 years of repeatedly disregarded exposure.” Alas and nevertheless.
We saw Y La Bamba ( https://ylabambamusic.com/music ) at SF MOMA (part of this year’s Noise Pop Festival) with no expectations beyond it being a rooftop party because I live under a rock and am deep into “I don’t recognize any artist on that festival line-up” years old.
I did not know that both Hay, the furniture designer, and Mikkeller, the beer brewer, were specifically Copenhagen based before we got there, so it was a surprise and delight to to able to visit both Hay House ( https://www.hay.com/functions/hay-stores/hay-stores-denmark ) and Mikkeller’s “War Pigs” BBQ place ( https://www.warpigs.dk/).
On the walk to War Pigs we passed but did not enter this other bar that seemed to have every conceivable kind of live music? Ambitious.
Figure 3. The doorway entrance to a brick building: a steel door fully glazed with a single piece of glass, frame painted green, propped open using a cobblestone, surrounded by wide open wooden shutter doors painted the same green. To the right of the shutters is a chalkboard listing bar specials.A piece of cardboard is taped to the left shutter with masking tape that says “Jazz & Not Jazz.” Smaller pieces taped to the right shutter do that thing bars love to do which, is point out that you can get drinks there (both in Danish and English, “FADØL!”, “DRINKS!”)JAZZNOT JAZZSSADFADØL!ORINKSBARBEERSHANCOCK PILSMER osCAMA FUSEDKOMBUCANAO PREMIUM SERLING E222H4M60, STERWINE:REDIAHITEDRINKS:GIN& TONGDARK M'STURNILSHOTSCHANCOCA.
I also just noticed that the other door proclaims “Drinks!” (in Danish and English) and “WC!”, which I guess is a sort of Drinks & Not Drinks.
I’m going to deploy my own mastodon instance on gravely.pizza where the only thing I change (initially, ha ha, he chuckled) will be to leave leading white space in posts alone.
I was never able to suspend disbelief that “part of a balanced breakfast” pictured in 1990s cereal commercials with eggs, bacon, a green vegetable, tomatoes, a coffee, juice, glass of water and so on was in any way plausible.
Well, every bowl of cereal I’ve had my entire life was three to six servings and four or five portions of milk. A balanced breakfast is good, actually (although I’ll pass on the bacon).
I keep a screenshot of a post here saved in photos.app of @scott posting about the “bernal wiggle” so that one day I will remember I have it and type “wiggle” into the photos search box and find it and try it, and yesterday after work, I got on the bike and remembered it and finally tried it for the first time.
The post is three years old (jeeze!) and not the first time he mentioned it, just the time I thought to save it.
Anyway, it’s a thing! It works!
Figure 1. screenshot of a strata post of an afternoon ride up about 2 miles and back, just over 455 ft of climbing in about 30 minutes taking a zig-zag route up the north-east corner of bernal heights kind of following the same ridges that cesar chavez (dolores huerta?) ave and 101 follow in order to avoid going straight up Folsom or any of the piles of other routes.Figure 2. a screenshot from Ivory.app of scott f posting about the bernal wiggle w/ a map of the area and the path to take marked> @burritojustice @annaleen @TheArtDontStop ohare we talking about bikes now? it doesn't quite get you to Cortland, but if you're going to the park, the North Bernal Wiggle gets you there without breaking down! moderate and low traffic. (for best results bring a copy ofAnnalee's book)22nd StValenciaShotwellFolsomHarrisonCesarAlabamaMullenRutledgeasor uesBernal HeightsLIONCrescentAlemany.
I hit that next goal a few weeks ago and never thought to post about it.
What I came here to post, as I approach dropping 5 more not on purpose but as just, whatever, was that while it was fun and cool to buy all new pants, none of my god damned belts fit anymore.
I just took one, traced the end, stenciled that back on, and cut a few inches off with kitchen shears, then drilled three new holes in it with my cordless drill. Just fine.
I have this old cherner-style (but unmarked) bent ply chair that we bought in terrible condition 20 years ago and used as a side chair until one of the legs snapped. We had it repaired (glued) and then it broke again a few years later beyond repair.
I want to put the seat on legs, but searching high and low, I have no idea where to even start.
An Eames H-base (DSX) narrow-mount would still be too wide as the screw holes are 5" apart on center side-to-side and 5 1/1" front-to-back.
Figure 1. the one-piece bent ply seat and back, resting on a pink eames shell chair on an H-base next to our kitchen table to the right and a Hay side table to the left.A bunch of potted plants are on the credenza on the back wall.Figure 2. the ruins of the base, wood from the veneer still glued in places, screw hardware remains in three, the top right corner is stripped completely.
I like to pretend the fugazi’s “do you like me” is a song from my homunculus to me and the first 45 seconds is it’s leitmotif that I hear as I approach. i don’t really listen to lyrics much so I can’t really explain the middle bit about virginia prisons or w/e, not my problem tbh.
precisely x minutes later: yes in this scenario, “birthday pony” is a reprise
After a month or two up on craigslist and only the kegs selling, someone who saw the post asked if I’d be up for simply donating all of my home brewing gear to a makerspace in Livermore.
Buddy, I sure am. I’ve been hauling and storing this stuff unused for ten years at this point, you do me a huge favor even picking it all up, much less putting it to such a great use.
Figure 1. about 20 feet of sidewalk street side utility pole dirt that is currently lush with a full rainbow of wildflower blooms atop a door or so of free leggy stalks and bushing.
followed an allmusic ‘related’ link from Nala Sinephro earlier this week and well I’ve never listened to much harp music but, that was clearly a mistake.
Geektool, unfortunately, in the last few releases of OSX, doesn’t recover from monitor count or resolution changes and I’ve been patiently, manually correcting x and y from origin from time to time but forgot last week and was late to every meeting for two days in a row.
Canceled my tunein premium, which I always resented and only ever signed up for so that sonos radio wouldn’t have ads, and yet “some stations will still have ads even with TuneIn Premium", which never made any sense to me.
I’m now down to my sonos gear just being hardware on the LAN.
I mostly used TuneIn on bike commutes to work or taking the kid to pre-school but I don’t commute anymore and we walk to elementary school now.
For all other bike rides, I have [star trek jargon tone] a vanity domain hostname cnamed to tailscale tailnet hostnames that are a tls’d by caddy and webauthn’d by authelia to Music Assistant as a Safari “add to home screen” + “open as web app” situation. Phew. But it just works.
Now that I don’t buy Philz Tesora beans for the drip machine at home, I also don’t put cream in my coffee.
Weird and unexpected to change both at once but either because of how much I’ve cut fat out of my diet everywhere else or because other beans are just better black, I’m finally hip to black coffee, after 30 years of half and half (and 15 of those w/ Tesora).
I switched from myfitnesspal to macrofactor in December after mfp’s barcode scanner stopped working (probably an iOS issue? whatever) and told it I wanted to lose 15lbs. It turns out mf is way, way better.
After only sorta taking it seriously and blowing through targets at least one day a week, I just hit my -15lb goal, so I told it I want to lose another 10 over the next two months.
Never have I ever used a single-character slack message-highlight keyboard-shortcut on purpose; never to React to a post, never to reply to a post in a Thread, never to Forward a post, not sAve a post for later, never to add a post to a list (V?).
never have I ever attempted to bookmark a meeting in chrome only to find that I accidentally toggled my microphone settings.
Rookie mistake but on my first ride on metro in mexico city a cop saw us on the platform and suggested we ride in a different car further down.
ok?
went walked down the platform as the train was approaching but hit a fence and couldn’t go further so got on. the cop followed and suggested the same, we were like ???.
Thankfully someone on the train spoke english and let us know my mistake.
“He’s saying that this is the women’s car and you need to get off and back on."
As soon as she said it, I remembered that people have talked about adopting a similar system in the bay area on BART and recognized my error. If the cop had simply said “women only" that would have helped!
Completely unrelated to why I posted the O.P. originally but I’m pretty sure this cognitive error also contributes to a lot of boss gaslighting.
it is akin to universalizing your experiences and the preferences they inform, to universalize one experience you had as the norm. such a bummer when not used for love or other reproductive labors.
The dairy we buy milk from now features an identical promotion on the rear panel and top closure (rear panel) of all of their gable-top cartons.
Given where the pour side of the gable is, and the fridge door side we keep our milk, and our family handedness, this creates an illusion where it appears that we have three identical open cartons in the fridge door when in fact we have half & half, whole milk, and 2% milk.
As a result, I feel insane every morning for about fifteen seconds.
I’ve considered using painters tape and sharpies, which are ready to hand in junior’s craft bin four feet away.
I’ve considered moving the milk from the fridge’s right-side french door to the left-side french door.
I’ve mostly just been frustrated though.
"I should post about how frustrated I get coping with this situation”, I think to myself, and then fail to remember to do, until just now.
plucked this off a best jazz albums of ‘24 list and it is beautifully mellow spriitual jazz that reminds me instrumentation wise — synth, string ensemble, keys, sax, ( https://www.allmusic.com/album/endlessness-mw0004339978) — of Pharaoh Sanders’ record w/ Floating Points.
As per, my smooth brain just filters out lyrics so that’s lost on me but the band (which allmusic points out include members of the Dap-Kings, Antibalas, and El Michels Affair) really swings and the guitar parts are funky as hell. If the vocals aren’t your thing, look for the digital-only instrumental version, "Seahorse & The Storyteller Instrumentals & Echoes Of Avramina EP”, which qobuz has, so I assume other places do too.
🏁 what I’m considering Portola, bound by 280, San Bruno Ave (or 101 I guess?), Mansell St, McLaren Park, and uh, the Excelsior? The north ridge of Visitacion Knob?
Poor winter weather, always a two-bus transfer to get there and to get back, and strava glitching out by 101 more than once made this take a long time to complete.
I also started biking weekdays for cardio instead of walking, so I had to put off the far corner for weekends.
Figure 1. A San Francisco street map centering the area bound by 280, 101, Mansell St, the Excelsior. with a purple GPS path of walks I’ve logged on it, generally completing every street in the Portola neighborhood.
It’s important that bits that only one in a thousand or fewer people will get are also funny on their own merits but some days, not important enough to send to drafts.
“new incident response leitmotif” I thought to myself when the rhythm section joins in on the Sunflower Slow Drag with what makes me think of cartoon bubble-popping or spittoon spitting foley effects? holy moly https://ragger.bandcamp.com/album/euphonic-sounds
I push open the swinging half doors to the e-saloon. A clanker is supposedly playing the gameboy in the corner but we all know it’s a mod file on an unlicensed cartridge.
I spit e-tobacco juice into the trash can that has the words Recycling Bin hovering under it by the doors and a “ppoint!" effect plays. The label rotates to face me as I proceed to bar. That I don’t miss the can here tells me the “no aim bots" promise out front is phonier than an $3 NFT but at least mine’s workin’ again.
[antiques roadshow clarinet ditty] We’re in historic Dead Ox Flat in Malheur County, Oregon, where today folks are brining in all kinds of goodies to be valued by our team of expert appraisers [L-cut] “This workwear would fetch a pretty high price on todays auction market, and even in that condition, I would insure it for $1,000.”
After finding a banana in the smaller pocket of Junior’s backpack Monday morning that had probably been there since the school handed him breakfast Friday morning, Mom asked, “Why is this banana in your backpack?”
I mistakenly ignored the Wachowskis’s Speed Racer ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_Racer_(film)) on release and now junior has asked to (and so I also get to) watch it a second time (with Mom this time) this year, and it is really pretty incredible. Wildly underrated.
Snuck in 30 minutes on the picket line w/ UESF at Flynn, my kid’s school, this morning. Parent turnout seems up from Monday’s picket and Wednesday in Dolores but maybe my timing was just more aligned w/ other parents today and it has been great all week? Also we had a killer marching-band style bass drum player this morning!
Having the picket right along Cesar Chavez morning commute traffic is great for solidarity honks and I have to imagine the vibe is totally different (and great in other ways) at schools deeper in the neighborhoods. Also nice to see DSASF turned someone out too (who is probably also a Flynn parent, nevertheless, wtg DSA).
Walked the UESF picket at Flynn for about an hour this morning. Junior was stoked to make his sign and to wear red but kinda panicked once we got there so he stayed across the street with mom.
Children have an uncanny sense, as if imprinted in the womb, for when one of their parents try to immerse themselves in any hobby that predates themselves.
The construction of “used to” that some but not all use sometimes to describe outlier instances is so weird to me. I see other people do it and think how implausible it is but, and then I find myself doing it too, and like, it serves a purpose and is fine?
“oh yeah like we used like ____" where the blank is some kind of outrageous or funny or cool thing that happened exactly one time, presented as if it was at least twice or in fact, annual or even seasonal for years in a row.
Ah, yes, Garfbert, one of my favorite remix Tumblrs (swept up in moving to insta and now who knows, best wishes to J.J.) https://garfbertcomic.tumblr.com/.
Hi are you a registered San Francisco Voter? We’re gathering signatures for a ballot measure for a bond that will fund the construction in Sunset Dunes Park of a colossal Sancho Panza facing the dutch windmill in Golden Gate Park asking a collosul Don Quixote “Which giants?” Yes we are doing it to make fun of car-brained sunset voters. I know right? Idiots. Oh, no it’s not a baseball team reference but that is funny too. Anyway thank you for signing, have a great day.
You’re absolutely right, you asked for a to go box for the rest of your meal and I just scraped food and paper straw wrappers off of the unfinished plates in the bus bin into one for you.
