Well then let’s invite them to run a C-Tran train over the bridge to the Expo Center then, whatever gets us local rail over the Columbia. Also we shouldn’t confuse county and city up there, same as we shouldn’t down here.

Yeah, this panic over the imagination of trains exporting cars full of unwashed masses into your social flight suburb is a tension in literally every regional rail rollout in the west, or at least in North America. The facts of the matter is that TriMet does already police Max ridership (I’d know, they’ve ticketed me), and commuting either by car on a traffic jammed highway over a century-old earthquake-vulnerable bridge or by rail while sitting across a passenger car from a potentially homeless person is a decision that remains securely in the hands of Washingtonian suburbanites, they need not fear that decision being taken from them and they will ultimately get whichever choice they deserve.

But for the time being, Washington is importing thousands of gas belching lifted pickup trucks into my Portland neighborhood every weekday morning, and I don’t personally get much of a say in that matter.

It’s not necessarily that they hate transit, it’s that they have a mypopic and outdated department mission. They can only build and maintain highways. The state desperately needs to tweak the department’s priorities.

Now Vancouver city government… There’s an institution that genuinely hates and fears transit.

NYTimes headline style is a toxic influence on journalism.

Lol I know like a dozen eagle scouts and today 100% of them are gay or trans. Trying to keep the BSA conservative while every uncomfortable father is enrolling their pansy son is a game of entropy that the right cannot win.

No like textual headers of windows and settings sections. Shit like “My Settings”.

Yes, Win95 called it My Computer, but at the time it was maybe the only GUI to do that. I remember the trend really kicked off in the early aughts with MySimon and their advertising campaign. Then all of a sudden every header in the OS got the word “My” tacked on.

We can’t even decide what the fuck democracy is. Ask 100 Americans and they’ll give you 100 answers. It’s a meaningless emotion word for us.

Except it’s actually a telescreen

Yeah this is something I had to hammer out of myself. Force myself to enjoy a videogame for an hour instead of “being productive” on a personal project.

I actually always thought that the mid-aughts trend of putting “My” in front of everything to make it feel personalized was really bizarre, considering that you weren’t ever the person labeling it that. Some developer or marketer you never met named it that. It always annoyed me when my icons started getting relabeled with names that a boomer grandpa might put on them, felt really pandery. Prior to the “My” trend, “My Computer” was just “Computer”.

Nothing too crazy, was only there for a few months between paid gigs and it’s my only animation credit ever. Augenblick Studios is a surprisingly small operation, Aaron himself was in the room most days reviewing scripts and boards. You could tell that he and the senior staff were burned out from Superjail and were looking for a more chill production vibe on the start of UA. We were in a big industrial building on the DUMBO (Brooklyn) waterfront but the studio itself was a smallish carpeted room where they kept the lights dim, but blinds open so you could watch the snow fall in front of the Brooklyn Bridge. Every animator got a big shelved wooden desk to themselves where they could adjust their own lighting, put on whatever music they wanted in their headphones, and just draw for hours. It was an incredibly stress-free vibe but I learned that I’d go stir crazy if I did it as a career, after 4 hours in front of the Cintiq I was usually ready to jump out of my skin. Oh, I remember that when Obama won the presidency Aaron called off work for the rest of the day and took the whole studio out for lunch. Nice dude, ran into him a few years later at a Bill Plimpton screening and he remembered me, also wrote me a recommendation for a later job.

Almost all of my work was on the pilot. In the opening scene where Mark is left tied to the bed and Randall breaks down his door you’re seeing like a week’s worth of my brush strokes. The shot of Randall’s hand coming through the door of course had key frames but they gave me lots of leeway so a bunch of the flesh and veins and chunks are infinitesunrise originals :P

Historically it’s been WA that shoots down Interstate Bridge replacements (Check out the history of this bridge, various Washington State governments have torpedoed OR-WA upgrade partnerships like a dozen times throughout history, they even backed out of the original construction and left the city of Portland to step in and cover costs, imagine if the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey was exclusively funded by New York), but this time around it will probably be ODOT that fucks it up by insisting against all local opposition and traffic wisdom that the bridge work be arbitrarily packaged with an expansion of I-5 for miles south of the bridge. This proposed extra work has balloned the expected ODOT budget to the point where taxes have to go up, triggering a tax revolt by Republicans down in the state capitol. But it’s not just rural Republicans who don’t like it, urban Democrats don’t want more highway lanes polluting their neighborhoods. The upgrade won’t happen because ODOTs singlular need to build more highway lanes undermines it all.

In it’s heyday nerds like us fucking hated it because it was a proprietary plugin that broke sites on an otherwise open web. We remember it fondly because it made animation accessible for young creatives. In Winter 08/09 I was interning on the first season of Ugly Americans and they were still animating in an old version of Flash MX, even though like CS6 was out by that point. Today though there are creative apps where you can still do Flash-style vector animation, and the modern internet has no problem serving up rendered videos of the final output without the need for a plugin.

It would be funny if they didn’t actually have any of it and were just pestering the industry. But they did release all the metadata, and spotify seems to think it’s legit…

One of my favorite memories is inviting both my best friends and coworkers to a metal show at Saint Vitus, both groups hitting it off and making new friends, chatting with the bands at the merch table, and eating enough pizza to vomit on the sidewalk the moment I stepped outside.

Try out manual music discovery, it’s dope!

Old man yells at cloud

I don’t buy the “testing makes it so expensive” rationale unless I see the actual source numbers. Every bicycle made in Europe, the US, or Taiwan goes through an extensive ISO-defined testing process that is every bit as rigorous as that of a hearing aid yet somehow they all arrive in shops with reasonable sticker prices, and they often have production runs with smaller numbers than those implants. Yes testing will obviously increase cost, but show me the paperwork for the process that brings a single hearing aid part to $23K. It doesn’t exist. The goldfish is merely growing to fill the bowl, and the bowl is private insurance.

Seems pretty reasonable to an able-bodied person who can pull an income. A ton of disabled people cannot, and US medicaid often has disgustingly low limits.