I am where the mountains erupt from the flat high desert floor, surging, reaching for the clouds but never quite reaching, the clouds casting dark shadows across them, as if to mock, or maybe to comfort them in their failure. Because you do not have to be something bigger than what you are. And so the mountains—or are they hills—dapple themselves in trees and snow and shrubs and brush, and let the sun hit their rocks and dry grasses.
But I am only here for fleeting hours. The high desert is like nothing else. I pass through it often, but it feels like a place one must stay a while to understand. The sky is closer here.
— 20:43
On March 28, my step mother, Amy, passed. I’ve been back in San Francisco with family since March 13. The pace of life has been slow, death even more so. I’m keeping myself surrounded by community, family, and dogs.
It’s cliche to say, but death gives perspective, and I’ve been appreciating having it. I’ve been spending time with friends, savoring sunsets, finding the best rocks to watch the dusk from, slowly eating my burritos.
Music
- Lots of Cassandra Jenkins, especially An Overview on Phenomenal Nature. Jenkins’ music has been a soundtrack and a guide to grief for me. An Overview the first period, My Light, My Destroyer a how-to in picking up the pieces and returning to life as normal while holding on to the memories
- Courtney Barnett’s new record Creature of Habit
- Path of Totality by The Montvales
- Hours and hours of underscores’ U, because metered hedonism has its place in grief
Music has been a both a reprieve and a place for feeling things. Thanks, music.
Puppies
The dogs have been extra sweet. I’m really thankful to have both of them as companions, especially right now. Cookie especially has been by my side all the time. I give her the option of sleeping in her crate or on the bed with me, and she often choses the bed. I make her a pillow fort, but she snuggles up next to me most nights.
Tattoos
In memory of my step mom, I got a small goldfish cracker tattoo. Ask me about the story behind it some time. I also finally got the Muni worm, which I’ve been wanting for a long time. Of course, the “wants” part of the tattoo list grows faster than the “have” parts. Anne (flip flop) at Mirage in SF did both and was wonderful.
Reading
I’m reading Tony Horwitz’ Confederates in the Attic for school. It’s a fascinating narrative look into the lost causism and how it continues to manifest in southern ideology and culture. Such foreign stuff to me. Also reading Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott, and For Now, It Is Night by Hari Krishna Kaul.
I’m also reading up on the Kotlin language as I attempt to teach it to myself.
— 18:29
I recently scrolled past a video on YouTube where a woman complained about Goodreads. Her complaints seemed to boil down to it being old, ugly, and uninnovative. To me, those are the only good parts of Goodreads.
Increasingly, I want lower tech ways of tracking and sharing things. After trying Goodreads and a couple of the offerings marketing themselves as Goodreads replacements, I realized I don’t need a social media site about books. I get book recommendations by talking to people, at bookstores, out and about, through book clubs—Goodreads recommendations were garbage for me, anyway. I recently stopped adding numerical ratings to books I’ve read, because I don’t think it’s a very useful measure. Often times, I don’t agree with my own ratings!
My “to be read” list takes the form of a pile in my bedroom. My reading log is my blog.
The one advantage Goodreads has over my system is that I can write and publish thoughts on a book from my phone. This isn’t something I care about, though. If I finish a book while out, I write my thoughts on the back cover or in a note in my writing software, and post it later.
This is kind of an aimless essay. I think the lesson here is that, for a lot of people, these social media platforms with a listing function tacked on are not actually catering to their needs profile. You don’t need fancy software or an account or even a computer to keep a list. I find that walking to the bookstore and talking with friends provides me with more than enough (too much) to read, anyway. The same goes for restaurants, movies, music.
Ask your friends what they’re reading, watching, eating and listening to, you’ll probably find something great—or that you have boring friends, either way, an important discovery!
— 16:50
This Bluesky post from AC Transit board member Jean Walsh caught my eye: I’ve always heard (and suspected) that AC Transit’s callout rates are high, but this post gives numbers—and they’re alarming.
Sorry to everyone trying to catch an AC Transit bus last night. Did you know we have an “unscheduled unavailability” rate of 23%? Almost 1/4 of the people scheduled to work don’t come in. —@therealjeanwalsh.bsky.social
With agency wide callout rates that hover around 23%, AC Transit is missing a quarter of its drivers on any given day, meaning a little under a quarter of trips will be dropped. For reference, Muni has only ever approached this level of operator unavailability during the Omicron surge in 2022, when COVID-19 positive and exposed drivers were forced to quarantine. Barring an act of god (used in the insurance-sense. ie a pandemic or natural disaster), operator unavailability should never be this high. Though it’s not a direct comparison, a certain large northeast transit agency cancels about 2% of subway trips due to crew unavailability.1
There are a number of exacerbating factors at AC Transit that magnify both the causes and effects of this problem, hurting impacting riders.
AC Transit is an incredibly schedule-focused agency. That might seem like a ridiculous thing to say, of course the transit agency is schedule focused, but AC Transit takes it to another level. In this way, AC Transit acts as a perfect example of what happens when on time performance (% of runs that reach their terminal within some fixed number of minutes of their scheduled time) is taken to the extreme.
When the only metric used to measure success is a scheduling compliance metric, this places huge pressure on planners and drivers. Planners write schedules with bizarre padding (or extra time), all concentrated at “time points”, stops where drivers arriving early must wait until their scheduled departure time. This uneven placement of padding is frustrating for riders, and costs a lot of money. Because the district is in perpetual austerity mode, there is pressure to make schedules as lean as possible, which means reducing total runtimes in order to consume less buses and operators to run a given service.
This means that planners write inflexible, fast, unrealistic schedules. These schedules have little resiliency built in. Drivers are punished for falling behind schedule, and in turn passengers are passed up, yelled at, waved on, kicked off, or made to sit at timepoints, all so the driver can keep to their strict, unrealistic schedule.
This makes every day suck, for drivers and for riders. Because of the rigidity of AC Transit schedules, there is very little flexibility in the operation, which becomes apparent when an operator calls out—which they’re more likely to do, because their job is stressful.
Because deviations from the schedule are so discouraged at every level, departures are not adjusted to minimize gaps, and the bus behind a canceled trip is not given extra time to handle extra—and possibly angry—passengers. As a result, they fall behind, making their runs more stressful and creating even more gaps.
The result? Drivers are more likely to call out because their job sucks. Drivers calling out makes things even harder on the remaining drivers, exacerbated by a lack of operational flexibility, making them more likely to call out. Repeat.
I hope to flesh this out more, bring in more data and case studies, and make this into a full blog post.
https://www.mta.info/document/199231 ↩︎
— 02:18
I’m working on adding syntax highlighting to code blocks on here. Not quite working yet! There’s also a little teeny tiny bit of client-side JavaScript now. It randomizes the hit after my name on the homepage.
for i in range(10):
print('Hello World')
— 21:00
I’m trying on-site microblogging again, we’ll see how it goes. I want to try to capture as much of my original thoughts and writing here, and then distribute outward to social media. We’ll see how it goes!
Look, I can even have a paragraph, and it can get suuuuper long, use formatting, and get silly. I’ve been noodling on a site refresh for a couple weeks, and figured I’d throw this in too. Debt is very much owed to Tom MacWright for his website’s wonderful design, much of which I have aped.
I haven’t written on this in a while, and some of what I’ve said in the past is really annoying! Also, timezones are still broken. I’ll look into it soon, I promise!
— SF
Just played Wake Word after reading about it in an article about Twine for class. Strangely fun.
— 14:54
I finally bought running shoes after years of wanting to get back into running, and I seem to have minorly injured myself on the first run. The Hokas are great though. I’m doing my very best to resist the urge to run today so I don’t make it worse, even though it’s feeling a little better. btw if you have good blogs or websites about running, email me
— 16:50
Marx predicted email in 2024: The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.
— 08:47
I keep seeing people complain about their computers not being powerful enough, and there’s some truth to that: devs are becoming more and more wasteful. But also stop trying to do so many things at once. You dont need to watch something on netflix while listening to spotify while photoshopping with premiere in the background talking to your friends on discord while asking chatgpt for advice. this is the computer equivalent of always having a zyn in. youre frying your brain and your computer and datacenters and the planet. remember, the ‘cloud’ is a carbon intensive operation.
— 19:14
‘The Power Broker’ is 50. Its latest fans are much younger., WaPo. I’m interviewed in this! archive
— 17:38
I’ve been thinking about what it would be like to really embrace thinking in the open by publishing allmost of my notes online. I think it would be a really interesting experiment, and I’m wondering what kind of effects it would have on the notes I take and how I think. I’ve been finding myself thinking through writing even more lately.
— 16:06
I’m wondering if a typewriter would be something I would enjoy using. My handwriting isn’t good enough to handwrite documents, but I think I might really enjoy typing them in a more physical way. The idea of a full paper workflow is really appealing to me.
— 13:47
Just watched Union Square Partnership security completely fail to deescalate a situation and assault an angry man in front of his daughter. They only stopped because a passerby de-escalated. You would think the people charged with being security for a busy childrens playground in the center of a busy park in a busy city would at least be trained in de-escalation, but the security guards were actively antagonizing.
— 18:06
This piece from my friend on carfree.city toys with a transition to a fossil-fuelless future in a nice approachable but rational way in a way I haven’t encountered before. Link
— 17:45
Found this list of used bookstores in nyc from Passerby Magazine: link
— 17:44
from Hell Gate: Why Don’t New Yorkers Want to Pay for the Insanely Slow Bus?. nice piece countering the dominant fare skipping narratives
— 13:48
Ren and I are reading The Power Broker! I’m so excited to be reading it again. Also I have COVID. Also On Palestine is really good!
— 14:26
Just picked up On Palestine from Mast Books in the LES while on a walk. Excited to read it, hoping it will help build foundation and complicate my understanding of the genocide in Palestine. Going to try to take notes on the book on the book’s page on this site.
— 22:36
muji sells a six day pill container. i bought it thinking it was seven because why would anyone ever think a pill case would come with six slots.
— 10:56
i’m really frustrated with my fuji fx 18-55mm lens. since day 1, it hasn’t worked. every time i try to use it, i get a couple minutes (max) of shooting before the camera shows a “turn off camera then turn on again” error, that does not go away until a different lens is mounted. i’ve been using my 35mm 7artisans prime for months (the entire time i’ve had the camera) because of this. cleaning the body and lens contacts doesn’t fix it, firmware updates dont fix it, full camera resets dont fix it. i love shooting on my prime, but my $300+ lens needs to work. other people are having the same problem on forums, so i’m hoping i can get fuji to repair or replace the lens, or B&H to take back the whole kit. only being able to shoot manual has cost me a lot of shots this trip, since trains move fast (mostly).
— 16:40
really excited to have my Fuji in NYC.
— 14:41
just solved (hopefully) a long time bug with date rendering. there is zero documentation for this, but cloudflare pages’ build environment timezone can be set using TZ=America/Los_Angeles in your environment variables. There is zero mention of this on the Cloudflare docs site, I only found this forum discussion.
— 21:05
i really wish arc was gecko-based instead of using chromium. it’s a bummer, especially considering how attached i am to arc, and google’s plans to kill adblockers
— 20:54
til that if you’re in a sleeper for the first leg of your trip, but not the second, you still get access to the metropolitan lounge in chicago, in 24 hours i’ll be in nyc!
— 19:19
hi from amtrak. i’ve left the bay for school, and i won’t be back until november. it’s extremely bittersweet. i’ve cried most nights and the idea of not seeing most of my friends for months is pretty terrifying. it ebbs and flows but right now, as my train passes through grass valley, i feel okay. to everyone that makes the bay such a special place, i love u ❤️
— 14:24
some fun-poking at people who moralize about helmets and body armor(??) from bike snob nyc
— 13:59
i really want to read this piece about passing the Darién Gap.
— 13:46
fredy visited a buc-ee’s in exurban houston by transit and wrote a really cute post about it!
— 19:30
I have a Tidbyt and love it, but I want more functionality and customization out of it, so I’m thinking about building my own. I think I would follow in this person’s footsteps. I already have the LED matrix, and at school I’ll have access to workshops to build a nice casing for it. I really like Allen’s software architecture and UX design, and I think I’ll probably copy it pretty closely. I also imagine it’ll be way more useful in NYC than its been in the Bay, since I’ll have a class schedule and be using transit a lot more.
— 16:13
coming to realize one my biggest areas of growth in the past ~year had been learning to accept ideas from people who i find annoying or disagreeable. i find the tones of jane jacobs and david sarris difficult and at times irking, but i have still been able to take their ideas and use them to complicate my own. i’m pretty proud of this. i think it’s part of a larger pattern of more readily seeking out and embracing things that go against my own beliefs about the world.
— 15:44
it’s a real bummer that I can’t seem to figure out how to make dates always render correctly. i wish the
— 20:18