Just hanging out in my daughter's backyard

Rainbow chard skirt at the Missoula Pride parade

Sigh - c'mon America. It's a real flex to have a Confederate flag at your picnic at the park on Juneteenth. (Missoula, Montana)

New PDX is gorgeous. And yet there's a noticeable lack of drinking fountains & those that do exist are tucked around corners & under stairs. It's noticable & annoying.

The correct analogy is in Alice: "Why, the fact is, you see, Miss, this here ought to have been a red rose-tree, and we put a white one in by mistake; and, if the Queen was to find it out, we should all have our heads cut off, you know. So you see, Miss, we're doing our best, afore she comes, to—"

A seasonal burn ban is in effect for Portland (and surrounding counties), and is anticipated to remain in effect throughout the summer:  www.portland.gov/fire/burn-ba... If your ride was planning to have a fire, please skip it. We keep us safe! #pdxBikes #bikeFun #PedalpaloozaPDX #BikeSummerPDX

Inflation up as the mad king has cage fights on the White House lawn while helicopters are shot down and gas prices surge. No notes.

This reminder is what I needed to read this morning

You want more protests, more resistance, you don't focus on the mushroom. You can HOPE for the mushroom, you can cheer for the mushroom, you can delight in the existence of the mushroom. But the mushroom is the fruit. You don't cultivate the mushroom, anymore than you cultivate an apple.

I've been observing the bars & restaurants near me. In a city with amazing food. The only lines I see anymore are at Happy hour or Sunday discount oyster night. Meant prior here still have enough to go out for a meal, but only 1x/ month or week instead of double that. & this is "disposable" income

Remember the current NIH director going on about protecting researchers from government censorship? Today his people called the police in to forcibly remove my colleagues from their own society meeting for sharing an editorial published in their flagship journal that was critical of him. Gift link

It's super that every country in the world now has their own specific Trump-related reason to hate the USA.

Oh look, NSF is sending out job ads to list servs in at least the Earth Sciences that are looking for Trump flunkies, more or less, to serve as program directors. This has gone out to multiple mailing lists from multiple NSF accounts.

Won't anyone think of the AirBnB hosts!

Welcome to the Resistance, @holdenthorp.bsky.social!

Just like the weather isn't important to people, food, business so 'they' dismantled pay of the NWS observing system. This isn't 'just' research infrastructure (if I can pick one thing off this horrible, terrible situation to gripe at)

My god, Octavia Butler, just miss ONCE

Two days ago, retired border patrol Nazi Greg Bovino promised “a twist” related to Delaney Hall. He said “they won’t see this coming”, and that standing up “citizen militias” is a good idea. Today, the Proud Boys arrived on scene.

I keep looking for mitigating factors, or ways the impact of these new policies (which are already being applied, at least in part, per recent anecdotes/reporting) might have been overstated. And I have found none. This is a genuinely extreme, extraordinarily, and immensely dangerous development.

"women can be perfectly capable of using this technology and simply choose not to" we did in fact need data backing up this incredibly obvious claim bc a LOT of companies will insist Susan from Accounting is refusing to use AI to do the books because IT needs to come explain how it works to her

Thinking about why women might not want to use a product that has forced itself into every software interface to confidently shout things that are wrong

Guess I should share that I'm leading a @bike-summer.org ride Tuesday evening. There is a fee for the yoga class & pre-registration is required because of limited space at the farm www.shift2bikes.org/calendar/eve...

Sign of the times: the coffee shop has a tip jar, a dog treat jar, and a jar of whistles.

Converting to Catholicism so I can tell my bosses using unregulated AI is against my religion and I will sue them like that cake lady who hated gay people if they make me use it

This is actually a good argument for pro-bike/pro-transit/pro-public space mayors to really double down on their policies. If they're going to accuse you of waging a war on cars if you take a small handful of parking spaces to improve your city, you might as well take a whole lot more.

I'm a car-owning Chicagoan, and I want 90% of our streets to be pedestrian-priority spaces, and many of them should be entirely car-free w/ specific delivery access windows. The other 10% is the boulevard network, which will be the only space that somewhat prioritizes cars; speed limit 20mph.

Saturday

So just chill about helmets, and worry about the driver that just crashed into the 7-11 AGAIN instead

There's a close family resemblance between "We'd be much less productive if we actually had to check every paper we cited" and "We'd not be able to deport nearly as many people if we had to give all of them due process."

Also I love the audacity of ALL the roses

Something about groups of 11ish year olds playing on their own brings me such joy. And hope.

Claude constantly wanted to give me advice. Mentioned a lot that it could you know, talk with me about things, offer advice or maybe just another perspective. Because I wasn't doing that with it *at all* initially. And that's what hooks people on this crap.

It's been years, but I slapped the side of a car today who's driver was parked in the two way cycle track with their hazards on.

JFC we need lots of people who regularly walk and bike and have kids and have disabilities and are old and are under 15 years old working at these tech-bro companies.

Boom.

But fund that Blazers billionaire owner behind closed doors. Because that’s going to help the folks regularly ‘camping’ on the blocks near my house.

What is the right number of books to take on a 3 day camping trip?

As a government employee myself, I HATE THIS. We do our friggin jobs and it's not a funding issue if we just refuse to do the fundamentals.

I don't even have a good quip to frame that we are planning on camping near Sisters this weekend to get ahead of fire season and may already be too late.

Yes, forcing people to have babies is always a popular strategy. Geez. Also my reproductive prime child is leaving Montana because he's stuck in a [well paying] service job and does actually aspire to at least a service job in a city. LoL.

In the "small things that bug me but don't matter in comparison to MAGA", I'm getting more and more annoyed with biketown bikes and scooters taking up parking spots at municipal bike racks. Feels like private use of a public space. On the flip side yes all those parked cars....

Having all the cards is, famously, not the goal in Uno.

"Bluesky will never be Twitter." Then how come I look at it every morning and it makes me sad, hmm? Explain that.

Why the heck have helicopters been circling over SE PDX for at least the past hour?

I keep thinking about the ease with which they cancelled elections over the last 24 hours

When 3 on hold library books come in at the same time at least I have a reason to sit in the sun for hours this weekend

This war alone, if we somehow stopped now, is still going to saddle all of us with debt for at least a decade. Probably longer. Which will make it even harder to bring back all we've lost, as the excess we had as a country is funneled to so very few. How you all doing this morning?

so if i get this straight, Waymo hired lobbyists to legalize self-driving cars in the legislature this spring, the bill failed, and today Waymo puts out a press release breathlessly repeated by all the local media saying they are planing to eventually do it anyway, and the mayor cheered it on?