Oh hey it’s this @soseaemerald.bsky.social strip! lol

I like being an uncle for the holidays because: Mom and dad are responsible, and will discipline you. Grandpa and Grandma are indulgent, and will coddle you. But the uncle... the uncle is unpredictable. The niece and nephew cannot know what the uncle will do, because the soul of the uncle is CHAOS

okay!!!

massive attack is misnamed they should really have been called gentle approach thank you I'll be here all week

I see there’s a post about microplastics going around with a photo of drinking straws, so here is my semi-regular reminder that the 3 biggest sources of microplastics are tires (45%), synthetic clothing particles (35%) and paint (~10%). Lay article attached:

Lotta water down here in SoCal 😬

Everything was built in one great spurt in less than a single generation and then to everyone younger the freeway scars became permanent features of the urban landscape lIke craters on the moon.

whoring is just slutting perverted by the edicts of capital

Is Europe buying almost 7x more cars per year than they were in 2019? Like, it's cool that 20% are electric, but doesn't that mean they're adding ~5x more ICE cars to the roads than they were seven years ago?

I know it's pastiche to the nth degree, but I kinda fuck with this building

the total cost of the project (99 km of roadway, 56 km of which was tunnels) was slightly more than the alaskan way viaduct project. tunnel.ita-aites.org/en/cases-his...

Radiating network, just like you asked for, boss (NB: This is a mix of existing rail routes, existing rail routes that would need upgrades for reliable passenger service, old routes that would need rails laid again, and a couple of totally new routes)

Passenger rail services from Portland through Boise and Salt Lake City to Denver would be amazing. Any such service *should* connect to Washington's South Smile (Seattle-Yakima-Kennewick-Spokane) but it would also be a stupid detour to do so. How to connect them?

Pro of working from my mom's home office: ocean view Con of working from my mom's home office: the ergonomics are so bad I should probably report myself to EH&S

Underrated USB-C benefit is that I can once again be a wired headphones person without needing a dongle.

The city has specifically been trying to make the park containing Rose City Golf Course more multi use but the golf people have been losing their minds over recommendations like a walking/biking path along the very edge of the property because it isn't safe. I say fine remove the golf for safety.

Apropos of nothing, time for my annual reminder that Rose City Golf Course and Glendoveer Golf Course should just be regular fucking parks...maaaaybe with driving ranges.

DOJ briefly uploaded this letter from Jeff Epstein to serial child molester Larry Nassar: "Our president shares our love of young, nubile girls. When a young beauty walked by he loved to 'grab snatch,' whereas we ended up snatching grub in the mess halls of the system."

Year 1 data on congestion pricing in Manhattan… * Vehicle traffic: -11% * Foot traffic: +3.4% * Storefront vacancy: -0.9% * Pollution: -22% * Revenue for mass transit: $548M So YES this has been a huge success.

Choose your attachments carefully. Choose your temple of fanaticism with great care.

excuse me?!

You gotta flatten those PDFs folks

Once again asking what happened to the good old days of chilling on your yacht in the Aegean?

I haven't made one of these in a while – here's an animated chronology of the cable car lines in Portland from 1890 to 1904, when the last cable line was replaced by trolley streetcars. *Modern street names in parentheses where appropriate.

The full spiked 60 Minutes CECOT package, clean & subtitled. 1/5

Traffic deaths in Portland are on track this year to fall to the lowest level since the pandemic began. The city recorded 39 traffic deaths — drivers, cyclists and walkers included — through Dec. 22. In all, 58 people died in 2024 and 69 died in 2023.

Former US President Bill Clinton has entered the chat.

Funniest part about watching Weapons on a plane is that they sanitized the language, but not the gore.

They'rrrre baaaaack bikeportland.org/2025/12/22/m...

I think a slightly more useful question is: why is our affordable housing vacancy rate meaningfully higher than most other metros? National affordable housing vacancy rate was 2.7% in Q4 2024. So we are doing something wrong - just unclear what it is. www.moodyscre.com/insights/cre....

Man, San Diegans moving to an island off of Baja is like their dream though. Don't know how I feel about moving Portland to Arcata OTOH 🤔

So we need to greatly increase the speed and simplicity of these applications but also greatly increase subsidies for folks living in these buildings (or trying to).

portland’s residential infill project was a huge step towards ending exclusionary zoning but middle housing improvements are moving so fast in other cities that we’re starting to look conservative in comparison

Bari sit down with Chotiner

Per NY Times’s Michael Grynbaum on X, this is Sharyn Alfonsi’s email to her “60 Minutes” colleagues in full:

Caveat to this: The Tunnel ™️ as conceived would only carry the Red and Blue lines. It absolutely needs to carry the Yellow and Green as well.

It's our most urgent need! It has more potential to transform how our region moves than IBR, Rose Quarter, or even the SW corridor. I wish desperately we were putting money into getting it shovel ready so that one day, if/when we ever have a federal gov again, we're ready to hit the ground running.

That feeling when your entire rapid transit system converges on one easily disrupted segment — like, say, a 123-year old bridge that lifts for tall boats. Portland needs an rail tunnel under downtown. It’s the only megaproject in our region that excites me at this point.

LAX Transit Center is...certainly big, I'll give it that

The Coast Guard wants to hear from a very specific segment of the population.

This makes me wonder: does anybody build new grade-separated transit that *isn’t* driverless anymore? It would be very in-character for us, but it would really suck if IBX ended up as one the last staffed greenfield line on earth.

I have said it before and I will say it again, Debate Kids are the ones actually ruining the country.

Great student reporting on why the Harvard Salient, revived to combat what leaders saw as a decline in “contrarian” thought, was abruptly closed earlier this year. (Hint: It was racism). www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

As a historian I've looked at hundreds of thousands of pages of government documents. And I just have to say that aside from being obviously illegal and clearly suggestive of some major crime, this “redaction” business is not a position in which serious people or serious governments find themselves

Cherry trees are blooming in NW

Centrist Dems have enabled austerity by ceding ground to reactionaries in the state legislature, and we're worse off for it. If you have a plan to win and a vision for a budget that invests in our communities by actually taxing those with the ability to pay, then let's talk about your campaign.

The ambitious Old Town shoe manufacturing campus that secured a risky $7 million loan from Prosper Portland earlier this year has failed to meet the city’s loan requirements.

A n'hood assoc. colleague remarked that "getting more housing downtown will be impossible" as the downtown is "already very built up." I hold a different impression of my community, so I took to Google MyMaps to graphically illustrate just how much land in downtown on which there is left to build.