when they get tired of making new cars look like gundam sneakers what happens
are they just exploring how far they can push it before legislation/resource collapse eliminates the entire species
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So it’s actually cheaper for them to make and sell these SUVs, that’s why there are so many. This NJB video gets into some of it but the fact that they are large, the fact that they suck, is what allows them to be made so available to the public. The industry would prefer to make and sell these cars than smaller cars, for cost saving reasons. The only thing that will save us from SUVs is an overhaul of the “light truck” vehicle classification
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is there a patreon for the kids who go around deflating suv tires, i’d like to help
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you can send me money and I’ll gladly shove lentils into the little tire spigots of these child-killer trucks
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The fucking squat truck trend is making these EVEN MORE dangerous. It’s ridiculous and the entire thing needs to just stop.
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speaking of this bullshit have you noticed how there is literally 100% consensus about how someone needs to do something about the fucking brightness of headlights these days
they’re literally eye damaging
i googled like three separate news articles and the comments were unanimously against these LED laser beam bullshits. and yet they persist. how
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i know someone who makes banner ads for car dealerships (it’s a living), and she hates making ads for these kinds of trucks. her clients are so picky about the exact color, trim, model, style, etc that sourcing the right photograph is a pain (easier to photoshop it in many cases). she struggles to think of any mass-produced product marketed towards women that has comparable levels of customization (purses, maybe?)
just giant hulking monoliths dedicated to male vanity and suburban fragility
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having done extensive research into the tyre extinguishers myself… you can become your own cell. Everything you need is here.
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I shaved one second off the 9% grade hill climb behind my house this morning which makes me The 23rd Fastest Woman On Strava In History to climb that particular hill.
I pushed myself so hard my throat hurt from huffing and puffing!!
I completed sewing elastic buckle straps onto a felt triangle panel that I plan to put in my bike the next time I go to Critical Mass. I fully expect it to be destroyed by one long ride but I’m pretty proud of it!
I do not have a pic of it fitted to the bike, I forgot, but this is what it looked like half-finished when I was testing the fit
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We can also honor the Hero Rocks 
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Got a flat today while trying to complete the biggest westside loop I’ve ever done in LA… Culver City down the creek bike path to Playa del Rey, then up the coast past the marina and Venice to Santa Monica, then east to Sawtelle’s Japanese food strip and south along Sawtelle to my starting point.
Would have been around 25 miles but my flat hit me at about 22.5. Was able to get a ride home, then I spent the rest of the evening at home fixing it. I know generally what I’m doing but am very inexpert and I learned most of this shit from my dad two decades ago, so the disc breaks on my current bike really mess me up. And I sure as hell wasn’t practicing the basics over the last two decades. Covered myself in grease!!
I am getting stronger but I get totally wiped out after rides this long. I am having a hard time telling whether this is because of my muscles and weakness only, or because of my diabetes. I have type 1 and use an insulin pump so I can adjust my rates on the fly if I am about to go do a lot of exercise. But as an adult with a busy schedule, I can’t wait for my blood sugar to be perfect, so sometimes I start a trip with elevated blood sugar and get wary of reducing my insulin until it’s lowered more toward normal. And then the math and guesswork gets too much for me and sometimes I just guess wrong about everything and end the day kind of spacey and low, sitting at home covered in grease stuffing glucose tablets and spoonfuls of peanut butter into my mouth. Fixing my tire was harder because my muscles were weak like baby muscles and I kept having to stop to cram another food object into my mouth.
After my diagnosis during the summer between third and fourth grade my attitude toward exercise changed dramatically. I went from a pretty active kid to a kid who had to be very neurotic and careful about exercise and I’m trying to avoid becoming that kid again. I always stop on rides like these to buy a bagel or something but today that wasn’t even enough. Oh well!!
It was foggy as hell at the coast, and I had the great delight of biking through Venice beach while visible gusts of cloud were flowing into town from the ocean. Hundreds of tourists in town for Easter were gamely trying to enjoy themselves in the middle of a fogbank cold enough to pass for Los Angeles midwinter. I found a crew of weird drum circle types deep in the clouds on the sand who were flying a massive American flag and playing in a very cowbell-heavy style. A DJ was playing funk music a few blocks south for a sparse collection of rollerblading dancers who looked completely miserable. Despite the flat and the low blood sugar evening I am glad I went.
Tomorrow I am doing a group ride to Culver City town hall to protest thier considered removal of all the new bike infrastructure downtown. A real week of highs and lows!!
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i saw a video recently about culver city’s bike lanes and proposed removal. messed up
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Yep that video is what kicked off the protesting afaik. I use the infrastructure depicted in the video on a weekly basis because the metro station it connects to is the easiest to get to from my house (even though I am still 4+ miles away from it)
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literally I am considering moving to culver city in significant part because I don’t want to give up having a bike route to the beach the way I do now, so I really hope they keep that shit
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it’s infuriating! the bike infrastructure there is so good and what’s more, they can’t even fully remove much of the infrastructure nearby, since a lot of it was installed by the LADOT… Venice (the street) for example is getting an overhaul with bike lanes completely out of the control of most of the neighborhoods it passes through, and that’s only like 2 blocks away from some of the infrastructure Culver is considering removing.
No matter what because of this stuff you would have at least 2 arterial roads with bike lanes either all or part of the way to the beach, and one bike path along Ballona Creek, so you wouldn’t lose beach access if you lived here. But you would lose a bunch of bike and bus lanes running through downtown Culver that help to safely connect these several routes to one another on a north-south axis.
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keep me posted lol
is it protected the whole way down Venice to the E these days?
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Was at city hall for three hours tonight. Got to talk in public comment so a friend of a friend screenshotted me on the livestream and sent the pictures to my group, haha.
Most of the speakers were pro bike/bus lane but there were a couple anti bike lane folks, most calling in remotely. I was really shocked at how poor they were at expressing themselves. It was pretty wild to have to listen to some of them try and justify their side’s anger because so much of it is so obviously ignorant. There is a guy on the change dot org petition against the bike/bus lane who is mad that it has affected his one mile commute by car, lmao. He lives and works entirely within the transit corridor with all the fancy mobility services and he’s still driving. Dude could get an electric six seater micro mobility golf cart thing literally come pick him up and take him to work and he’s still driving. Those are the kinds of people against the bike and bus lanes around here, and you can tell the speakers were a little aware of it. They kept undercutting their own arguments in thier public comment, even, admitting that maybe they’d settle for a tweak to the plan or whatever. Wild!!
Met some cool folks whom I hope to see at future events. Apparently there is a biker happy hour event some weekends at a taco place nearby. I am gonna have to hit that up.
One of the public advocacy groups interviewed me “for a tiktok” so I gotta look that up too and make sure I didn’t embarrass myself. The guy who interviewed me is a hero… at the end of public comment he got up and told the city council “if you reduce the transit plan to satisfy these complainers who aren’t even using it, we will sue the shit out of you” (paraphrased) which was fantastic.
Bikes! Bikes!! Bikes!!!
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that’s so cool! i gotta get involved in my local bike advocacy groups - there are a ton of them and they all seem much much more active than the ones i found in the bay and i have the time now
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snorting and guffawing
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been threatening to build an ebike for a while, traffic is turning me into a goblin, and going by car is only gonna get worse as amazon switches back to working from the office. i will probably get an ebike kit to use on this old mountainbike i have and swap the dirt tires out for commuters. the commute is 26 miles there and back, with hills and stuff. by some freak accident the trail system goes a block from my house right up to my office. so this seems super doable.
someone in the office has an ebike and its 15 miles each way, someone who used to work here built an ebike to go basically the same route i do. its time i guess
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