Folks if you are tired of anti-growth advocacy in Albemarle hamstringing new developments, come hang out & plan with like-minded neighbors (including me) at Bar Botanical in Crozet this Thursday between 5 and 7. We can do better!

Teaching my dog about Sneakers

The Democrat who adopts this platform wholeheartedly will rise up like a great wave and wash the fascists into the sea

[tearily] hark upon the gale

Take a few minutes to read this. It’s quite good.

one of the poems I think about the most is Yeats' Easter, 1916. in particular the end of the first stanza: Being certain that they and I But lived where motley is worn: All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born. www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43289/...

it would appear that the Western Albemarle High School chapter of TPUSA is holding a vigil for charlie kirk at Pro Re Nata Brewery on Sunday.

Lowering the flags on 9/11 at the Guantanamo Bay McDonald's for Charlie Kirk is the most dril tweet thing that's ever happened

Over and above everything else, Gretchen Felker-Martin keeps getting suspended on here because she's a great writer, and when a great writer decides they've had enough of some bullshit, the words always sting, and sometimes draw blood. The slap-fighters don't even get noticed.

that feel when

also on the subject of political violence

I keep coming back to MLK’s “Letter From A Birmingham Jail” whenever I try to organize my thoughts around how Charlottesville should address hard issues. I find it clarifying every time. letterfromjail.com

I'm receiving reports that the president is delayed due to what experts are calling "a sort of winnie the pooh the situation"

If you're a neighbor of mine in Albemarle County and aren't quite sure how to help: first off, don't hesitate to speak up! We're all one community, we're all neighbors, and I mean that in the most Mr. Rogers sense possible.

We created an Action Alert Guide you can use to speak up! This is time sensitive, as the city essentially only gave the public a holiday weekend to respond to this dramatic shift in city policy. Below is a thread summarizing what you can do. docs.google.com/document/d/1...

ACTION ALERT: Tell city council to reject the ordinance to ban camping on city property! On Tuesday, September 2nd (tomorrow!), City Council will be considering an ordinance that would make it illegal to sleep on city property or to leave personal property unattended on city land. 🧵

This is super interesting, and there's a lot to think about, but this does give me an excuse to post about one of my favorite bugaboos: we gotta stop tying "affordability" to Area Median Income.

pro tip: in Crozet for lunch? Skip Crozet pizza, sals, smoked, all those. Instead, get yourself The Michael Special over at great valu: the real crab sushi rolls and one of their big bags of movie theater popcorn. a diabolical combination.

every trump voter i know is capable of pivoting on a dime from saying the most hateful evil stuff to just being a smol bean who really wishes we could all just along and why are you overreacting so much :(((((((

The great Eye rises in the west. Beware the walkin dude.

You know how people want raw economic data? As a CSV file. Some folks might want it as an Excel file. Maybe a few as a SQLite file, if it's a really big collection of data. In every case, they want it on a webpage at a stable URL, retrieved by HTTP. That's it. This is very easy.

I was the executive director of U.S. Open Data, a non-profit that I created at the behest of the Obama White House. I worked as one of the nation's leading experts in open data. Putting open data on the blockchain is a profoundly stupid idea that fails nearly every test of good open data.

NIMBYism is rooted in a fear of change, which is just another shade of xenophobia

I need Democratic online types to understand that because of this, Newsom is dead to me. Dead. I'd sooner vote for an actual corpse. There is no hope, none, that he'll win me over, *because he has established he is a bad person*. There's no coming back from this. Take my advice and move the fuck on.

cool cool cool

im not like the world's biggest critical role stan or whatever but i'm actually kinda stoked to watch their new West Marches style campaign. always thought CR would be a perfect format for this kind of thing.

i didn't realize until now but it looks like Habitat is hoping to turn this lot in Crozet into a duplex through an R2-->R4 rezoning. that's great news!

Hello. I wrote a nice long essay about AI and this very strange moment where we're constantly told we're living in the dawn of a strange new future but the only thing that's actually clear is that everyone feels pretty unmoored and uncertain. I hope you'll read it

This exact point is why I've never been particularly interested in the argument i hear from other Crozetians that the land use buildout analysis for Albemarle shows sufficient land to meet expected population growth. Solving for projected pop. growth is not the only reason to build housing!

had our monthly neighborhood folk song get-together this past weekend, sharing the playlist for those interested in knowing things like this exist which-side-are-you-on.ghost.io/folk-song-pl...

just finished SALEMS LOT, a book i haven't read since...high school, i think? my memory was this book scared the living bejesus out of me. as an adult, i'd say it still gave me the heebie-jeebies. but man is stephen king just my exact flavor of writing.

respect to cbs19 for not revealing spiderman's secret identity

For fun, I looked at the certificate of occupancy reports from Albemarle County to see what kind of nuggets might be hidden in this particular data. I think it's both interesting and not surprising. F'rinstance - the tail of the pandemic has slowed new home COs. Makes sense!

There were about as many people in the meeting room at the library to decry this development as there would hypothetically be moving in. Increasing Crozet's population by a conference room's worth of people was too much for some Crozetians.

Uhhh @bsky.app what the hell.

utterly stymied on a thing i was working on because the albemarle county dev area shapefiles are still down www.albemarle.org/government/i...

turns out our foster dog has an inbreeding coefficient of .53, which is like 1.5 times as inbred as Daenerys Targaryen.

We just sent out our August newsletter. It includes updates on the city’s zoning code, an opportunity to support Community Bikes, a helpful explanation of “affordable housing” by @mmonaco.bsky.social, multiple opportunities to advocate for better transit, and more! mailchi.mp/livablecvill...

Analysts show that capital expenditures on AI were so big over the last 6 months they added more to the GDP than *all consumer spending*. That growth is offsetting pain from the tariffs and slow job growth. So the AI bubble may be propping up the whole US economy. What happens if and when it pops?

On the one hand, fostering a big goofball while our dog is in heat has been an absolute trial on my sleep, mental health,etc, and I'm getting very little done on my hobbies/data interests/writing. On the other hand: he a good boy, he so goofy, he sweet good boy

Our friends at The Haven have put out a request for supplies. Please take a minute to see what they need and consider supporting The Haven and our neighbors experiencing homelessness. mailchi.mp/thehaven/sto...

My last living musical hero is still my hero but unfortunately no longer living. RIP to the great, great Mr. Tom Lehrer.

RIP Tom Lehrer. When i was a kid, my dad had me practice cursive by writing the lyrics to Poisoning Pigeons in the Park a bunch of times. I had a Tom Lehrer cd i listened to over and over and over. Deeply cool funny inspiring guy.

Oh, hell. It seems to be true after all.

You know what time it is

Hey look at that they're over in richmond