Something I’ve been thinking about is how there is kind of a divide in education between making knowing things seem easy, and making knowing things seem hard, and that we probably don’t value the second one as much as we should.

Something I find interesting is how film/tv/commercials still use the Volvo 240 as the stock “used car for teens.” They stopped making those 33 years ago! Why are you driving that!

I think I had the least interesting dream of my life last night.

bobby fijan please help my family is dying

Incidentally, one of the greatest collections dwarf conifers in the horticultural trade were introduced by Sidney Waxman, a professor at UConn who used to drive around New England shooting witches brooms off trees with a .22 rifle.

I was flipping through this book the other day, and while it’s awesome, it also felt in a weird way like a missed opportunity—so for no reason at all here’s a (probably long) thread on plant morphology:

my most profound condolences to zohran kwame mamdani on becoming mayor of new york city: the job where everyone gets mad at you until you go insane

they hate winning so much

thinking of kamala 💔

whenever I see threads wondering why buildings today aren’t covered by *Beautiful Ornament* I just think of the objectively correct answer put forward by @jamestaite.bsky.social on the old site: people just don’t want it that bad.

Something I’ve been feeling more and more is that the version of the architectural profession so often bemoaned by academia and high design practitioners (architect as managerial consultant) is much closer to the historic norm…

The AIA was founded around one simple goal: to ensure that America’s most important civic buildings were designed by men who had travelled to Italy and not, for the love of god, by anyone born there.

For 125 years, the preservation of the White House has functioned as an agreement between the influential and the powerful, with no accountability. When Donald Trump demolished the East Wing, he showed once again how unconstrained the Presidency really is.

“Oh man, such cute costumes! Anyway, happy Halloween, take two each!”

Lmao

not to platnerpost but: I am convinced that the really moveable swing vote in the united states is not "centrists" but people with a constellation of more radical, shifting, and often kind of incoherent anti-establishment sentiments...

can any transit nerds on here provide an eli5 for why transit nerds seem not to be big fans of “light rail?”

who can guess my halloween costume this year

landscape architecture is cooler than architecture because it’s like what if we came up with the idea of architecture but everyone could still kind of tell it was made up

a weird thing I noticed is that every map of the emerald necklace is oriented with north to the right which kind of undercuts the metaphor of a chain hanging on the “neck” of the peninsula with franklin park as the center stone

something I’ve noticed is that older central business districts with lots of class b office space also tend to have lots of smoke/vape shops?

judging a band competition: has anyone noticed how musical these noises have been lately?

this is basically an exact replica of where I watched the 2004 ALCS with a dude actively on the run from boston cops for shit he did during SJP protests at BU

crazy to consider that the time between cleopatra’s reign and the construction of the great pyramids is actually greater than wilford brimley’s age during the filming of cocoon

there is a very specific kind of native plant person who exists solely on tumblr and reddit, is 16 years old, and has never grown, or possibly seen, a plant in their life

the main problem with vertical farming is the high cost associated with building special growing facilities, but as innovations in 3d printing lower construction costs… (crushed by dumptruck while crossing the road, mercifully ending my dumb existence)

in/out, landscape, 2026: Out: swoopy precast bench planters, carex pennsylvanica, low contrast gray paver blends, meadows, corten edging, cercis canadensis In: oversized timbers, carex woodii, glazed terracotta tile, thickets, belgian block, cercis canadendis var. alba

getting a cool new job designing greenways and multimodal transportation projects, then realizing too late this means all my projects use DOT documentation standards

curious what people think is the “shrinkage rate” on contract documents. As in, if you deliver a client a 100% bid set and they sit on those documents for 12 months, what is that “100%” now the equivalent to, in terms of work required to get it out the door again.

just saw one battle after another, benicio del toro is our greatest living actor

I feel like there’s six different jokes you could make here

Called it, I guess

I have no evidence but I kind of suspect that the tylenol=autism thing isn’t going to have legs in the alternative health crowd the way RFK might hope.

Does anyone have recommendations for critical/scholarly writing on the interplay between individual and collective or systemic action on environmental issues? Stuff that looks at the pitfalls and potential of frameworks like personal carbon footprints or individual consumer choice?

I agree, but would also say this isn't just a swing state thing. 36% of Massachusetts voted for Trump in 2024! Honestly, if you conceive of your political opponents as some alien, unknowable race of irrational rubes you're basically just telling me you don't talk to people outside your own house.

I don’t think I’ve ever been to a bookstore with a smoking section before?

I think this kind of 4chan nihilism does exist outside of a conventional left/right binary but it also exists very squarely in the present moment where the primary engine for all politics is the desire to epically own your opponents (mainly online).

Extremely sad news—I think Yu was pretty inarguably the most influential landscape architect of the 21st century.

It’s probably ferns tbh

I might actual amend this—Helleborus may be less of a pervert plant than I previously thought. I think the key to a real sicko genus is that is possible to clonally reproduce (allowing for the preservation of rare and heirloom cultivars) without the use of tissue culture (still seen as gauche).

I said once on the old site that I was getting more into dahlias but that I suspected the real sickos were into peonies, but I want to amend that to say that I think the REAL real sickos are into hellebores.

just got a cool new job

I’m a RETVRN guy for exactly one thing: we gotta teach American pop stars how to dance again.

It always struck me as odd that we had these intense existential debates over “squash the bug” campaigns that had basically zero chance of impacting the spread of the lanternfly.

I can only imagine the challenges involved in building a giant tower directly on top of South Station and overall I think the new concourse is an improvement, but god is this all awkward

This is a long shot but does anyone have recommendations for online sources of medieval manuscripts in English translation? A while back I found a translation of Pietro de’ Crescenzi’s Ruralia Commoda online and now I can’t find it anywhere.

I appreciate that “brutalist cube built directly on top of an interstate highway” is going to be a hard sell for a lot of people but I think the Fall River city hall is pretty neat