Aaay, met another reader coming through town who got the first real exhibition of Karafuto, and then had enough local context to unlimber all my years of thoughts on neighborhood development, Portland urban politics and Cascadian cultural quirks on.

There might come a point where accessibility to random readers becomes less of a positive but for now I’ve really been appreciating talking with strangers preselected for finding the shit I say worth hearing.

No topsoil today but I think I’ll do a full 3 yards tomorrow, and time permitting get a third bedload for when the yard’s closed on Sunday.

The Idaho potato industry is actually an offshoot of Mormonism; the desert-exiled tribe set up farms in the irrigated borderlands to grow the nutritious root vegetables to cater their funerals.

rendakuenthusiast:

kontextmaschine:

mapsontheweb:

Global antineutrinos emitted from nuclear power stations

Did we never build any in Greenland and just ship in fuel?

After all those Øs in Tom Clancy novels!

Noticeably fewer nuclear power stations in western north america, compared to the east.

Western North America’s divided between the states/provinces with no people, the states/provinces with a lot of hydro, and California, which puts signs on everything saying it’ll give you cancer.

kontextmaschine:

The bar that was showing The Good Guys (2016) last time I was in is showing Freeway (1996), different bartender I guess they’ve just cultivated a neo-noir sensibility for movie night.

Which knowing this bar (it’s where I captained a Sunday league pinball team for several years!) is a big change, they’re updating to keep up with the neighborhood and clientele by investing in staff, which is wise

A character is “the I-5 Killer”, and I bet the other people in the bar don’t realize that the really serial-killer part of I-5 in the 80s-90s was the segment between Portland and Seattle.

Well, even as bad as it got yesterday with anxiety attacks inflicting, ah, let’s say psychic damage, the basic mood effects were still normal, not disordered anxiety, just VERY.

And so my mind’s turning to Portland, with my more balanced projective/evaluative sense. And what if it continues developing as a great city to live but just never particularly realizes the promise of the early 2010s.

Like, when I was first here it felt like most everyone in a bar was a potential friend and/or lover. Among the new crowd, who’s not suburban normie as I was fearing but still not really “keeping it weird”, there’s some promise if you go looking but like you have to look for them.

It really seems that the Portland I came to was filled with the quality people from other cities who looked around, saw that was no place for a quality life, and all came here for a personality-enriched environment.

Well, that and Oregonians who came through the 1980s collapse of the timber industry and much of the traditional… well, not “redneck”, but a PNW-equivalent small town and rural white outdoorsy good-time laboring class. And not just that group entire but a selection of the most “urbany” among that – the ones who left their collapsing hometowns in the woods for Portland and often food service, not the ones who left for other outdoors manual and vehicular work in oil fields or the service.

And they are not in fact making more people with memories of 1988, and even a purely equivalent “looking to get out of town as a 20-year-old prep cook”, economically I’m not sure that Portland would make sense as a destination even if it and his hometown elect the same governor.

heraldic-thunderbolt:

kontextmaschine:

kontextmaschine:

caesarsaladinn:

rugratfairy:

rugratfairy:

if i ever write something set in the united states im just going to do zero research whatsoever and make stuff up to sound cool it’s equality

the lush impenetrable jungles of massachusetts

try driving through the historic part of Boston and you’ll see that this is true

New England was heavily forested, its major utility on behalf of Britain was producing wood (incl. large old-growth trees for unspliced masts) and sap-derived tar for sealing ships (also ashes for lye production!) it was essentially a EUIV Naval Supplies province.

Like, we chalk “Mongols knew how to tap and drink the blood of horses to sustain themselves in desolate terrain” up to Mongols just being a very horse-centric culture, have you ever thought about what it means that New Englanders make maple syrup by tapping and drinking the blood of trees in snowbound winter?

northern tier tree flag solidarity

dopescissorscashwagon:

By #hoffshots : Trying to capture a scene when flying by at 500 mph isn’t always easy. But sometime the skies open up, the routing is perfect, and it all comes together. This was one of those times flying by mount rainier with the elusive cap cloud perched on top.

So thanks to its Progressive Era western state heritage, Oregon has particularly strict and toothsome balanced budget requirements.

Oregon also has a decade-old Democratic legislative lock, teetering on supermajority. But Oregon also has a two-thirds state Senate quorum requirement, which means that a coordinated mere third of the body can go truant and render the body null – not quite an exploding Diet (the case there was a failed vote voided the entire legislative session, including matters already passed), but close.

And the Republicans have so coordinated; they may lack leverage under regular order, but thus they have established that Oregon can legislate – and budget – on terms acceptable to the Republican Party or not at all.

There’s those toothsome requirements though, it seems state operations would not continue even to the degree federal ones do under “shutdown”, the state might be closer to a federal post-“fiscal cliff”; the reference point I think of is when in the 90s the Portland school district ran out of money one year and the school year just ended a few months early

kontextmaschine:

kontextmaschine:

Kindergarten Cop opens with such an early-90s mall sequence

Ahnold doing the trenchcoat-shotgun-little black sunglasses SNES Shadowrun thing

Also the explicit Astoria, Oregon setting and shots of that jet in the Alaska livery make for a surprising level of Cascadianness

Remember when my parents came and we were scraping the barrel for local destinations so we went to the local air & space museum, and we looked at the outside exhibits and then went into the hangar and it was like oh wow, that’s the actual Spruce Goose, huh?

A Blackbird, too. This is at the airport home to a CIA-linked contractor that’s essentially an intelligence community airbase. And waterpark.

kontextmaschine:

You know, the Shadowrun notion of the “Mr. Johnson”, the cyber future using trivially thin pseudonymity to allow the same actors to use lightside and darkside capabilities… that didn’t really pan out, did it?

Interesting, because the European campaigns seemed to reflect some knowledge of the period antifascism that serves as precedent to modern partisan doxxing.

The main stuff is so Cascadian though, not even just Seattle as default setting, just the UCAS, CAS, Pueblo, Sioux Nation, and Aztlan basically ARE the northeast, south, midwest, and Mexico as seen from 90s Amerindian-adjacent (thinks they’re neat!) Cascadia. (They themselves are divided into that-but-it-me Salish-Sidhe, and Tir Taingire as basically Ren Faire State of Jefferson-tinted Oregon, which fair.)

Meanwhile the Chicago campaigns are a 50s drive-in movie.

Oregon increased the amount of uh… weed drugs you can put in edibles a bit back, and with the cannabis market not yet federalized and Oregon dealing with a surplus of input it’s real cheap, so you can just buy $6 fun packs to Be On Drugs a bit now.

This in the context of all drugs being fundamentally decriminalized in Oregon, they did eventually shut down the downtown Portland storefront magic mushroom place that had a huge line out front, but they’re spinning up their official state shrooms system now

From last year when I was doing yard work all year long I have a pretty good sense of local micro-seasons and know the rain stops after May.

So, I’ll want to start tamping down any loose soil on the rammed-earth ramp sloping up to the backyard gate so I can get a few cycles to compress it to water- (and plant-) impermeable hardpack before it dries too much. Most of the pulled weeds and dirt this year I dumped to build a slope down a bit into the shell of Blueberry Hill.

So I want to use that ramp to get down and smash all of Blueberry Hill and refill it with new compost by late April to get wet some and start decay processes, maybe break wood apart in Strawberry Ridge too, also I want the grass to be a bit past medium-length then to trap moisture by the ground so I’ll cut it tight in a week or so and throw that in to get rained on and paste things together.

When it gets dry weeds stop sprouting, last year pulling them was full-time by now and afterwards I used the time to trim all the trees, it’ll still free up some this year I guess I’ll use to get the renovation started.

teathattast:

mapsontheweb:

The Safest 10% of U.S. Counties in Terms of Climate Change, Projected 2040-2060

Hm, coastal Oregon. Awkward how we know that’ll be smashed by a mega-tsunami sooner or later.

Oh I don’t really have a ground-up sense of the business environment at all. My internet tech friends still seem employed but the new arrivals to Portland don’t feel like Seattle overflow yet like Seattle feels like SF overflow, that’s the level I hook in on.

Catching up with state government for the first time since an election with a front page neighborhood journal article that the State of Oregon Office of Tripping On Shrooms has been established

shabbytigers:

shabbytigers:

Updated Anti-trans Legislative Risk Assessment Map

update: utah perpetrated a legislative atrocity last week and is now in the worst category.

Portland used to be where the State of Deseret ran away to, still was when I showed up but is anywhere affordable to run away to these days?

rustingbridges:

kontextmaschine:

fruityyamenrunner:

fruityyamenrunner:

joerojasburke:

River flow volumes, as visualized by some guys at Pacific Institute, who explain:

Major rivers of the 48 contiguous United States, scaled by average flow where river symbols are proportional to the “gage-adjusted flow.” The symbols drawn here have widths proportional to the square root of the rivers’ estimated average annual discharge. Only rivers with discharge above 1,000 cfs are shown. Data from NHDPlus v2. Background map by ESRI. 

http://pacinst.org/american-rivers-a-graphic/

idk what the Pacific Northwest river is called. probably either Washington or Vancouver though?

snake - colombia? idk, PNW people are big blood and soil ppl. how come i never hear them talk about these rivers. sounds fake.

Yeah, that’s the Columbia, drains snowmelt from the Rockies.

huh didn’t know it had that much flow

altho I guess what makes the mississippi so valuable is not that it has a lot of water but that it has a huge navigable network, which is correlated but not the same. the columbia is apparently navigable all the way to idaho which is further than I might have expected. seems like a solid regional waterway

It’s only been navigable (by barge) to Idaho since 1975, part of the psychosocial stuff around it was a lot of the damming (which rendered it smoothly navigable and controlled flooding but also interrupted mighty salmon runs) didn’t happen until after the development of modern environmentalism

fruityyamenrunner:

kontextmaschine:

fruityyamenrunner:

fruityyamenrunner:

joerojasburke:

River flow volumes, as visualized by some guys at Pacific Institute, who explain:

Major rivers of the 48 contiguous United States, scaled by average flow where river symbols are proportional to the “gage-adjusted flow.” The symbols drawn here have widths proportional to the square root of the rivers’ estimated average annual discharge. Only rivers with discharge above 1,000 cfs are shown. Data from NHDPlus v2. Background map by ESRI. 

http://pacinst.org/american-rivers-a-graphic/

idk what the Pacific Northwest river is called. probably either Washington or Vancouver though?

snake - colombia? idk, PNW people are big blood and soil ppl. how come i never hear them talk about these rivers. sounds fake.

Yeah, that’s the Columbia, drains snowmelt from the Rockies.

shouldn’t you be personifying her as a wet t-shirt babe more

Because the coastline is essentially mountains in the PNW, there’s no lazy delta at the Pacific mouth, it bursts through a gap carved out with such force it’s constantly carving and recarving channels through all the sediment it drops, making the approach (Portland is an inland port where the Columbia meets the Willamette, which drains the first-in-from-the-coast timber valley between the Coast and Cascade ranges) one of the more difficult in international shipping, there are locally knowledgeable pilots that’re helicoptered out to vessels to guide them through.

So, maybe more of a squirter?