"It’s this basic error of thinking that because most worthwhile things are difficult, that it’s wrong and almost morally illegitimate to make a worthwhile thing easier." NIMBYism and gatekeeping on a topic that has nothing to do with housing thedeletedscenes.substack.com/p/things-tha...

Ask yourself whether you’re seeing some thing in the real world, and then interpreting it or inferring from it something that feels to you like it follows naturally, but actually has nothing to do with the thing you’re literally looking at it. thedeletedscenes.substack.com/p/how-do-you...

Wow. At that point I'd take my chances with a real motel or a more recently built actual budget chain. Hilton has a "hip budget" chain too now, Tru. I wonder if those are any better

Another bit of evidence that *scale* matters. As things get bigger and more centralized, the humanity and the charm become liabilities. www.businessinsider.com/starbucks-po...

I think there is probably some truth in the idea that conservatives don't think of people they're unfamiliar with as really existing. It's all abstract to them. "Disruptive to Asian American families" sounds *political.* Some of them truly don't get it is a straightforward description.

Man some folks never learned the difference between a customer service complaint/seller feedback, and a product review

15 years ago you could trust that off-brand products would be almost as good as brand names because retailers had buyers who stocked good stuff. This is no longer the case. Thanks to the internet’s disintermediation of retail, you have to buy the brand name or take a real risk of getting garbage.

Wrote about how California needs to get serious about the urban disorder our failure to build housing has created.

This explains a lot. I absolutely encountered this tone online having grown up in a mostly white suburban right-leaning environment and was kind of shocked, and then did the "this is how liberals are!" thing, which was so natural to me I didn't even think I was making a leap/inference

Google Maps is so funny sometimes

Being slightly too old to experience the golden age of arcades, I don't think I ever quite appreciate how subtly, yet how much, home consoles changed what a video game *was* thedeletedscenes.substack.com/p/home-conso...

"You can kind of see these things as things that will happen, or you can try to identify blame: *If not for those drunken 20-somethings and rich foreigners, we could still have free wine tastings!* But that doesn’t capture the reality." thedeletedscenes.substack.com/p/san-franci...

"'Society for the Amelioration of Abusive Treatment of Outdated but Pleasant Antiquities.' I mean, I would not want to live in a world that impulse/mindset is not a factor in what gets done/not done/saved/replaced." thedeletedscenes.substack.com/p/san-franci...

"All sorts of things change all the time, and it’s a kind of false reality to imagine that nothing would ever change except for the machinations of malign actors." thedeletedscenes.substack.com/p/san-franci...

The arcade was an amusement-hall/carnival kind of experience. The games were attractions or challenges, not meticulously designed, cohesive entertainment experiences the way we think of them today. thedeletedscenes.substack.com/p/home-conso...

To gamers today, it might seem almost like a kind of scam to pay $50 for a game that doesn’t have a mode easy enough for the average player to see the end. Don’t I have a right to see what I paid for? thedeletedscenes.substack.com/p/home-conso...

WOW. I can't even read from a mile away in broad daylight!

It’s fascinating to me how the same thing can become different just because the world around that thing has changed thedeletedscenes.substack.com/p/home-conso...

As big and well produced as today’s AAA games are, on some level they feel kind of hollow. Slick. A little too much of a Disneyfied brand management exercise, an element of a giant corporate portfolio, than an actual standalone knockout video game. thedeletedscenes.substack.com/p/home-conso...

Some long thoughts on how video games have changed over the years, and what a lighter, simpler, maybe even more engaging playing experience "retro" games offered thedeletedscenes.substack.com/p/home-conso...

so much of this discourse around missing middle in the DC area has revolved around "what ifs," but here is a real-life example of what can get built if we allow it: new family-sized homes, in desirable locations, at lower prices than what's already there. it's a start

San Francisco is interesting in that so much of the modern world was invented there, yet the city itself feels almost like it's in a time warp. In a good way, aesthetically/historically, but that's obviously also a side effect of NIMBYism.

San Francisco has some of the best architecture I've ever seen, taken collectively. Very sort of retro-futurist along with the charm of the workaday smaller buildings

My analogy is that lots of suburbanites are NIMBYs the same way lots of Republicans are neocons. They never really had an *opinion* on foreign policy; that was just the opinion you had if you were a Republican. Likewise a lot of folks who hold NIMBYish views have no real *opinion* on housing.

I think this misses the appeal of Strong Towns; Chuck isn't doing anything to hurt the YIMBY cause. What Strong Towns does is create a pathway for a lot of people to see housing as a real issue. That's worth more than whatever the cost of ST not being complete YIMBY "allies."

wow, when I came across this it was only 4 layers deep. anyways: battle doomscrolling by posting 5 small pleasures in life: 1. when the item(s) you want is in stock at trader joe's 2. touching something that has a nice texture 3. smelling something that has an interesting scent (cont'd in next post)

I see it differently; there are NIMBYs and then there are *NIMBYs.* This kind of insane NIMBY opposition is useful in showing regular NIMBYish folks what the reductio ad absurdam of their impulse looks like, and I think that's actually useful

"A lot of advocates/activists, seem like this: like they secretly *like* the idea of their pet problem being an ongoing catastrophe. Like they find validation and purpose not in its solution, but in its existence." thedeletedscenes.substack.com/p/yimbys-wan...

I don't think YIMBYs/housing advocates would secretly be disappointed or dejected if we fixed housing in America, which I think is part of their success as a movement thedeletedscenes.substack.com/p/yimbys-wan...

The obvious investment in the solution, the practical approach to building coalitions, and the broad appeal of the message, don’t just tell me that these folks are canny and good at what they do. It’s evidence, to me, that the message and goal is true. thedeletedscenes.substack.com/p/yimbys-wan...

Always so cool to learn about the things we used to have

"A great deal of activism feels like this: a kind of secret cheering for the problem to continue or even get worse, or a suppressed glee that things really might be that bad." This is something very notably missing from housing advocacy in my experience. thedeletedscenes.substack.com/p/yimbys-wan...

Maybe Enron, 9/11, and Katrina were sort of the peak—not that everything afterward is collapse, but that you never get that high again. I remember hearing that sort of thing, way back in the 2000s, from mostly old-school economic populist lefty types. thedeletedscenes.substack.com/p/a-museum-t...

Personally my favorite proof of horseshoe theory is that both far right and far left ideologies require you to believe, almost as an article of faith, that the opposition doesn't really exist/is simply paid off/is being brainwashed. Everyone is the same kind of communist/fascist you are, deep down.

"There is something sad about the passing of a world in which “progress” necessarily meant the literal shaping of matter, the small-c creation of building an idea into a manufactured thing." thedeletedscenes.substack.com/p/a-museum-t...

"That often-cited but astounding bit of trivia, that it took only 66 years from the Wright Brothers’ first flight to the first moon landing, feels like an exploit from the history books, like the peak size of the Mongol Empire or the trivia of how the Roman army got fed."

The 4 stages of #bicycle consciousness: 1. Bikes are obstacles (outright bans) 2. Bikes are toys (OK, your kids can ride around their subdivision) 3. Bikes are exercise (paths in parks that you drive to) 4. Bikes are transportation (you can mostly get from A to B without risking death)

Surprising amount of old neon in San Francisco!

The hotel window view does not disappoint

My first rough impression of San Francisco is that it looks very grand, but kind of shabby; a bit of a "This place must have been beautiful once" vibe, a bit of the same feeling I got in Cincinnati

Already two bad Uber experiences in San Francisco and haven't even gotten downtown yet! Is this to make me like the driverless cars?

"It’s not because urban living is some kind of inherent luxury, some naturally scarce resource. It’s because only a handful of the most urban of our urban places survived the automobile revolution more or less intact."

People love to make fun of pumpkin spice—I had an old colleague who pretended to be embarrassed that he liked it, I guess in the same way guys are embarrassed to like Mike’s Hard Lemonade or something, even though they’ll dump rotgut whisky in Coke. thedeletedscenes.substack.com/p/the-spice-...

A coffee recipe plus a few thoughts on how moronic our ironic, online, always-on culture is thedeletedscenes.substack.com/p/the-spice-...

"Who needs to break down and interrogate and ironically or 'unironically' like stuff when you can just, you know, like it? Not unironically, but unselfconsciously. Earnestly." I wrote about my at-home faux pumpkin spice lattes: thedeletedscenes.substack.com/p/the-spice-...

Why is using a safer consumer product or trying to avoid COVID-19 treated as evidence of "softness" or lack of character, but buying insurance is considered responsible? From the archives, @ad-mastro.bsky.social on risk, responsibility, and culture war: plus.thebulwark.com/p/risk-regul...

I've said this before, but the way social media tracks and feeds you what you "like" - i.e., what you stop and gawk at because it's so awful - feels like being stalked by a monster or possessed by a demon. It's like this...thing is drilling its way inside your skill. It's evil.

coffee pot restaurant, lexington, virginia, 1982

Dan Sinker shares some Amazing Art of the Video Game Marquee. “The marquee had to sell the idea of the game, the excitement around the concept and the story because the on-screen graphics alone weren’t going to do it.” [kottke.org]

Long-ish thoughts bouncing off a bunch of folks about the question of how urbanism/YIMBY intersects with or relates to small towns thedeletedscenes.substack.com/p/how-should...