advice/thoughts on local cycling

Oct. 22nd, 2025 08:53 am
gingicat: (oops - Agatha Heterodyne)
[personal profile] gingicat posting in [community profile] davis_square
I am seeking anecdotal advice about cycling in the Somerville-Medford-Malden area. Even the amazing Susan McLucas could not teach me to ride a bicycle (I can't keep myself from looking down on a turn) so I am considering investing in an adult tricycle with or without power assist. (I can fall down and bang myself up while walking with something in my hands that throws my balance off-center, too.)

My issue is that as a motorist, I have noticed that I often don't have room to pass a cyclist. I keep pace with the cyclist until I can safely pass with two or more feet between the side of the car and the cyclist. I very much appreciate the roads painted with the indication that cyclists are allowed to ride down the middle of the car lane!

How well is this honored? Am I a typical motorist when it comes to cyclist safety?
[syndicated profile] gallusrostromegalus_feed

prokopetz:

Hero derisively refers to the villain’s henchperson as their “lapdog”; villain immediately gets annoyed at the lack of precision, starts lecturing the hero about different working dog roles and constructing complex parallels for what specific kind of working dog the henchperson would be in the analogy the hero has introduced.

[syndicated profile] gallusrostromegalus_feed

wizardarchetypes:

sagaspell:

wizardarchetypes:

wizardarchetypes:

wizardarchetypes:

i used to tell my parents as a toddler that i would die at sea which was ofc weird bc we lived in a landlocked state but u can imagine my mom’s opinion when i became a marine biologist and moved to an island

being told the landlocked thing was less weird than a toddler portending his death. sure ig

[Image Id: Text reads: “ #story I'm so sorry for what I'm about to do but #percy shelley” End ID]ALT

you can’t do this to me because my sister was told by a random psychic one time that they were Lord Byron in a past life and our whole friend group decided to believe it’s possible to have been Lord Byron in a past life just to make fun of them. But if your Percy Shelley me I’ll be throwing rocks in a glass house

I think we should hear them out

STAY OUT OF THIS BYRON

[syndicated profile] gallusrostromegalus_feed

elodieunderglass:

gallusrostromegalus:

Fucked-Up Horsey can have a little violence, as a treat:)

Doing my Two-year old AEIWAM Drawtober for funsies.
Sorta.
Here’s one that’s not exactly on the list, lol.

I don’t have a name for this character yet but:

During the course of the story, the hyperdimesnional slice of spacetime that includes Reverse London from Burn The Witch starts to connect DIRECTLY to Soul Society. If it was *just* Reverse London that would be OK, but the diemensional slice includes a whole lot more than that, and the places connected to Soul Society are the parts OUTSIDE the heavily warded Reverse London.

You know.
Faeries.
…And worse.

This Gentleman is an “And Worse” that is actually here to help our protagonists! I don’t have a name for him because while faeries are much weaker than Shinigami, they’re also Much, MUCH better at manipulating Rules-Based Magic systems, including doing things like “If I can’t keep my True Name a secret, I can at least make it a Pain-in-the-Ass to actually use”. Hence this individual’s Name is The Entirety Of This Song. HE can sing it just fine if he to use it himself, but anyone else trying to use that name on him would have to put together a band and play it or write out the sheet music for every instance, and even then that’s not Guaranteed to actually get him to do what you want.

…I suppose the nickname they allow people to call him could be whatever “Mist-Covered Mountain” is in Japanese, since he’s the one visiting the Shingami.
…Or if he says his name in his native Irish Gaelic, the Shinigami will hear approximately the syllables “Shi-yao Kyo-Ku-Di-he”, Whatever THAT might mean. Yeah, yeah, they’d write it out in the phonetic alphaet, but consider: SOMEONE is going to hear that out-of-context and come up with a wildly inaccurate idea about what his name is, which is Very Funny.

(edit: Link to song fixed)

I love it when Gallus draws horses, I think we should have some kind of grant or fund so that they can just draw horses

So actually I do have a patreon that (which has many of my Family Lore stories) as well as a Ko-Fi, so if any of y'all wanted to contribute my husband got laid off so those are kind of the only income for the household rn, I’d be very grateful.

If you’re would like to fund me drawing fucked up horses, here’s a preview of the reference images my next monstrosities:

Autumn Miscellany

Oct. 21st, 2025 08:20 pm
[syndicated profile] sumana_feed

Posted by Sumana Harihareswara

Autumn consistently gets me into this mood, where I want to jot down a constellation of memories and feelings that gesture toward a theme without ever quite defining it.It's Deepavali, as I learned to say …

no. 107: a roof on posts

Oct. 21st, 2025 10:42 am
[syndicated profile] letthemeatcake_feed

Posted by TW Lim

The first char kway teow I really remember came from my primary school canteen. Smoky and dark, with a single egg and three tiny cubes of rendered fatback in each plate. The egg was always speckled black: the wok had a crust, and hawker auntie was enthusiastic with her scraper. The char made it declarative, ambitious, the lardons made it feel like a sin. The wok hei wasn’t as pure as Hill Street’s, the noodles were maybe cooked a little drier, the memory of that char kway teow has stayed with me for thirty years. It’s rare to hear Singaporeans agree about hawker food, but my classmates all swear it was the best char kway teow they’ve ever had. I ate it nearly every day of primary school, because it was so good I almost never wanted to eat anything else. It’s nice to have an audience of 8 year olds.

If this doesn’t sound like a school canteen, you’re probably not from Southeast Asia (Substack tells me less than 1 in 10 of you are).

I discovered the school cafeterias of the west when I started university. To me, it looked like prison food, catering as violence, wilting food attacking from steam tables. Schools in Singapore had canteens – hawker centers in miniature. This seemed an altogether more sensible and humane arrangement. It’s a genius bit of socialization. You learn Singapore’s priorities – cheap food, orderly queues, the habit of clearing your own table. And of course, because the food was coming from actual hawker stalls, it was actually good. We might not have been much for freedom of speech or thought, but we believed in the freedom to choose your own damn lunch.

I’m thinking about all this because the government of Singapore just announced that a number of schools will have their canteens replaced with cafeterias run by central kitchens. In other words, we’ll be serving primary school students army food. The Ministry of Education asserts that this change is necessary because canteen operators are basically hawkers, and not enough of them can be found.

Since this is Singapore, and everything has to be shellacked with technology, students will order their food through an app, and pick it up from machines or lockers. Spokesfolks bemoan the long wait times at canteens, the schools with shuttered stalls, the sheer inefficiency of it all. “Principal Chen Ziyang told CNA that the model has “significantly reduced” wait times compared to traditional canteen queues,” – I can picture his little shudder of delight. Meanwhile, “existing stallholders may be referred to other schools or recommended to central kitchen operators for employment.” Singapore is short of cooks.

The canteen I grew up with was inefficient. It was in fact a little rough, even by the standards of the 1980s. The hawker centres were shiny and new then, government-built and government-approved temples to hygiene, with running water and electricity in every stall. My canteen was a roof on posts. I don’t think the stalls had plumbing. They certainly didn’t have refrigeration. Facilities for both were shared, in a large, tiled room that doubled as the drinks stall. The stalls were basically street carts without wheels, the hawkers set propane burners on collapsible stands. On weekends, they pushed everything together and wrapped it in tarp, and inverted their stools on top. This could’ve been anywhere people sold food on the street, but this was Singapore the orderly.

The auntie frying the char kway teow seemed just as unruly. Her wok had a blast radius, marked by noodles and soy sauce. You could see the miasma around her from across the canteen and smell it from across the yard. Her fluency, to my 8 year old eyes, bordered on magic. She cracked eggs with one hand, chattering with her neighbors and the line of schoolboys in front of her. If I came to think that the work of cooking is worth something, she had something to do with it. I never learned her name.

School canteens might offer the only affordable F&B rents in Singapore – a stall runs between 5 and 15 Singapore dollars a month. The problem is, there’s also something of a cap on revenue. Prices are effectively set in consultation with the school – you have to list menu prices when you apply for the stall. Your catchment is limited: outsiders generally aren’t allowed on school grounds, and schools operate only 5 days a week, 40 weeks of the year. If the administration prioritizes affordability for the students, they can quickly and unintentionally squeeze operators’ earnings to unsustainable levels.

Everyone is clearly in a bind. The rents are already nominal, and schools are obviously not about to change access rules or hours. It’s hard to see how to balance the books except via some form of subsidy or income guarantee for canteen operators – but the Singaporean government has long been reluctant to institute anything that remotely resembles a handout. The solution looks inarguably superior on paper – economies of scale! Technology! Centrally planned nutrition! The only sacrifices are intangible.

It’s not that Singaporean school canteens are a culinary paradise. The char kway teow auntie, I think, was a bit of an outlier. But at the very least, canteens reflected the distribution of hawker quality, and therefore, the quality of food in Singapore. For two years of middle school, I ate the exact same canteen meal every day, and even then, I knew it was mostly crap. Char siu from a factory, a deep fried something from another factory, and an exemplary wok-fried egg. But I chose it, it was a moment of agency and bliss, and I remember the sensation of pressing $1.40 into the auntie’s hand, and the weight of the plate she placed in mine.

Even leaving the UNESCO thing and tourism aside, hawker culture really is Singaporean culture. There’s a reason we tell hawker stories over and over – the generation who started the stall around independence, the generation who took over when Singapore was still figuring modernity out, the generation who get out and sometimes return. Hawkers remain the everyfolk every politician in every country claims to serve – even if there are fewer of them each year.

So maybe it’s apt that now opportunities that used to be offered to individual Singaporeans are being offered to large corporations instead. Being Singaporean, it seems, means prioritizing efficiency and corporate profits over some of the basic habits that make life in Singapore what it is. It means learning to form relationships with companies, screens, and lockers, rather than people you can look in the eye. Let that be a lesson in how to be Singaporean.


Related: I Dream of Canteens

Also related: A review of the food central kitchens in Singapore provide, from these pages

In line at Hill Street Fried Kway Teow, May 2022
[syndicated profile] gallusrostromegalus_feed

whatacartouchebag:

Crawling out of my hole to remind people that with this current update to Firefox (version 144) they’ve gone and dumped in their lot with a buncha lil AI tools, namely Perplexity as a new search engine.

So if the sound of that leaves your mouth tasting of tar, here’s what you want to do:

In the url bar, type in about:config

It’ll give you a big scary warning page that you might poke holes in your browser. Good. You want to do that. Click continue.

One by one, you’re going to need to put each of these into the search bar in the page, not up top:

browser.ml.enable
browser.ml.chat.enabled
extensions.ml.enabled
browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled
browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled
browser.tabs.groups.smart.userEnabled

Each of these are gonna have a lil toggle icon on the right hand side that looks like a funky double-ended arrow. Click that and the value next to it should change to false. It all auto saves as you go. Some of these might already be set to false by default and that’s peachy.

The next best thing you can do for yourself is to set your default search engine to udm14 or Qwant, but for now, we’re just tidying the garden a lil bit.

[syndicated profile] gallusrostromegalus_feed

Fucked-Up Horsey can have a little violence, as a treat:)

Doing my Two-year old AEIWAM Drawtober for funsies.
Sorta.
Here’s one that’s not exactly on the list, lol.

I don’t have a name for this character yet but:

During the course of the story, the hyperdimesnional slice of spacetime that includes Reverse London from Burn The Witch starts to connect DIRECTLY to Soul Society. If it was *just* Reverse London that would be OK, but the diemensional slice includes a whole lot more than that, and the places connected to Soul Society are the parts OUTSIDE the heavily warded Reverse London.

You know.
Faeries.
…And worse.

This Gentleman is an “And Worse” that is actually here to help our protagonists! I don’t have a name for him because while faeries are much weaker than Shinigami, they’re also Much, MUCH better at manipulating Rules-Based Magic systems, including doing things like “If I can’t keep my True Name a secret, I can at least make it a Pain-in-the-Ass to actually use”. Hence this individual’s Name is The Entirety Of This Song. HE can sing it just fine if he to use it himself, but anyone else trying to use that name on him would have to put together a band and play it or write out the sheet music for every instance, and even then that’s not Guaranteed to actually get him to do what you want.

…I suppose the nickname they allow people to call him could be whatever “Mist-Covered Mountain” is in Japanese, since he’s the one visiting the Shingami.
…Or if he says his name in his native Irish Gaelic, the Shinigami will hear approximately the syllables “Shi-yao Kyo-Ku-Di-he”, Whatever THAT might mean. Yeah, yeah, they’d write it out in the phonetic alphaet, but consider: SOMEONE is going to hear that out-of-context and come up with a wildly inaccurate idea about what his name is, which is Very Funny.

(edit: Link to song fixed)

[syndicated profile] gallusrostromegalus_feed

actualized-animal:

honestly it seems really unfair that if you have a shitty childhood you have to deal with all these extra problems once you’re older. i think that you should get to have some kind of beam attack and a double jump instead

(no subject)

Oct. 20th, 2025 12:50 pm
[syndicated profile] gallusrostromegalus_feed

gossamermouse:

huewrite:

chatblancofficial:

spacefinch:

cecilsrandomeverything:

transmascmarypoppins:

why is this post completely broken in every way imaginable

Broken notes… deactivated account… removed image….

Finally, we have them all.

In addition: OP’s name is just… gone. No “[insert username]-deactivated[insert a bunch of numbers]” as is the standard for deactivated blogs.

Just the world “deactivated.” Look upon their post, ye mighty, and despair.

It’ll be almost impossible to find this post unless it wanders across your dash.

It wandered across mine. I shall help it travel forward.

this is not a place of honor

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