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.

kaijuno:

Kitty pick-up test with the local kitties

I was like wait, is that Portland? Architecture looks plausible, street design looks plausible, yellowed grass looks plausible, angle and quality of light in long sleeve weather looks plausible, lots of outdoor cats…

Then at 1:30 there’s a realtor’s sign with a 253 area code, so… Tacoma. Fair. Cascadia!

When I was first riding Blue Bitch up from LA circa the Occupy movement I took the chance to head on to Seattle and stay with a friend of my dad’s for a while, my impression was “if I hadn’t first encountered Portland I might settle here”, but since then all the Amazon and the Bay Area tech overflow and I was like “that only decreases the appeal”

That and the Portland pinball scene was in communication with the Seattle scene and the sense (especially from people who went up for tournaments) was “they’re cool but my is cocaine a thing there”.

And since then you hear about The Greater Seattle Polycule, but actually that sounds more in my direction – personal investment aside I primally associate poly with my middle school renn faire and college arts dorm scene as signal of good weirdos – and if Portland is changing hope it ends up cycling to that

Seen at least 2 mutuals marvel at how anyone could vote no on the Oregon resolution to amend the constitution to prohibit slavery. Well, I did, so here goes:

Like, no one’s legally holding chattel, I understood the question as “should we change up systems of prison labor and subject them to general wage labor laws intended for the circumstances of the outside” and had not been convinced that would usefully create a better world.

Had a friend who payed for midwife school by going there to provide rural healthcare service on the reservation for 2 years or something

Something funny about Oregon is they built out the coast with summer resort towns like the East Coast (or Great Lakes!), hotels and timeshares and boardwalks, but because the clockwise water patterns bring water down from Alaska rather than up from the Caribbean, and because the Appalachians are much older eroded than the Coastal Range, the beach is rocky and the sea is freezing

That might be a concern if a straight-line projection of current trends that worry you is realized and comes into being at a flat general level, but from a thorough grounding in American history I don’t expect that! Even without specifics in mind I know I have a sense of how long things take and how long you get between phases of the cycle and how things get traded off against each other

To set aside the fact that we are talking about fucking Oregon, and to even reestablish themselves as a party that sometimes gets power the Republicans have to take this opportunity to prove and accommodate themselves to the state. I honestly don’t even see the state banning youth transition unless we’re in a position the country is already.

They might let school boards in traditionalist-as-in-1986 areas be unaccomodating.

And if any of my trans friends were like, 14 living in Southern Oregon I might be more concerned, but they aren’t! Also I don’t have trans family!

Also since the personality change where COVID wiped out my anxiety I’m physically incapable of getting worried about things! That’s not hyperbole!

cop-disliker69:

kontextmaschine:

So with the 2022 election putting up the offices that weren’t up in the direct aftermath of the 2020 street unrest, it’s looking like the trend will continue and the result of all those lefties’ efforts to challenge the status quo of local government power might be that not only does Portland City government complete purging itself but that Oregon elects a Republican governor for the first time in decades

Isn’t the Republican gubernatorial candidate only viable because some centrist Dem is running a spoiler campaign as an independent?

Yes, Betsy Johnson is indeed running a “non-Portland Oregon Democrat from the good old days like the ‘90s, with a base of rural extractive industry and workers” campaign, the fact that this represents a real voter and donor base that is defecting from a state Democratic Party increasingly aligned with national issues and trends and becoming a sub/urban professionals’ party with postmaterial interests is in fact a factor but that’s not exactly an “only because” caveat, if anything the 2020 mess was the realignment trigger there

So with the 2022 election putting up the offices that weren’t up in the direct aftermath of the 2020 street unrest, it’s looking like the trend will continue and the result of all those lefties’ efforts to challenge the status quo of local government power might be that not only does Portland city government complete purging itself but that Oregon elects a Republican governor for the first time in decades

It’s being at a bar with 70s-born Oregonians and hearing them laughing comparing the teachers their friends were fucking in high school. Hearing a table of teachers at another bar laughing about how it’s always the gym and music teachers getting caught.

It’s reading, in the Gen X alt-weekly when I first came to Portland, about how mayor/governor Neil Goldschmidt had been fucking one of his employees’ teenage daughters in the 70s and “Neil and the babysitter” was an amusing open secret among the city elite. And then about how then-mayor Sam Adams fucking his (male) high school intern might get the boobs worked up but the real scandal was how his budgeting overemphasized capital outlays instead of operating costs.

It’s thinking about the profusion of strip clubs Portland is so proud of and how before the ‘90s takeoff of porn chic, sex workers were regularly attributed to being abused by their dads

(and kind of having a sense of hypersexuality and how that would work, and picking up how some aspects of the locals’ culture made most sense if there had been more hypersexual kids in the social economy growing up)

and honestly, how “oh and there’s a big downtown scene of angry runaway street kids” was taken for granted and anyone living east enough in “Felony Flats” is assumed to be a methhead and Portland’s sense of the default citizen was basically as a functioning alcoholic

Well just you live pretty much in the middle of the forest, there’s not really any authority structure around above you that’s not your brohood (and the PNW’s historic labor culture was very much brohood)

And marinating in the culture you realize your sense of thinly populated rural areas as upright and god-fearing and obsessed with placing restrictions upon themselves really was about small farmers as freeholding petit bourgeois, and a culture of laborers – without the para-aristocratic planter class of the south – is very much not that. It’s like cowboys or oil workers, except there’s not really a “rotate into civilization to splurge” phase, they live there year-round. In the woods. With their families.

Genuinely up in the air. Ballots have already arrived (we’re a vote-by-mail state), do the lingering 11% of Betsy supporters go back to their ancestral Democratic home? Do they use her as a stepping-stone to not voting blue no matter who and supporting Drazan as a Massachusetts-style R governor in a D state? I’m not even sure who I’ll vote for myself!

So like, Oregon was settled for lumberjackiing, like a very physical male working class pursuit out in the woods where the work band is the basic unit of society and that backwoods experience really resonates with 60s hippies

And coming from elsewhere you really notice what a thick culture Oregon has, and you notice all these little weirdnesses, and you can’t help but notice how they would all make sense if you posited that one of Oregon’s values was Sexual Access To Our Daughters, either like “the village maidens” or “your literal offspring, in your household”

I think about pon farr-originator Theodore Sturgeon’s (then in Northern California, to die in Oregon) Dangerous Visions story, If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?, sometimes, about how there’s this perfect planet out there on the fringes of known space, which actually produces a big share of scientific and cultural advances but is kept quiet cause people just can’t handle how they’ve totally normalized incest

I think about it a lot

Even the mainstream Democratic gubernatorial candidate Tina Kotek’s ads are shit-talking predecessor Kate Brown, first openly bisexual governor in America and the lowest-polling one in the country.

Which is pretty much because Oregon is so white that the Civil Rights Movement never led to a realignment so a lot of the state Democratic Party was still on a “white working class from rural areas with extractive economies” basis that are getting restive with an state party that’s increasingly nationally-aligned in service to a Portland-based professional class that more and more didn’t even come from Oregon

Which creates the situation where I say “even the mainstream Democrat” ‘cause there’s a third party “Democrat Like The Old Times” (like Bill Clinton in Arkansas!) in this race, Betsy Johnson

Recent polling suggests she’s in 3rd, from a respectable short-of-30% down to 11%, but the defection of her constituency could leave the Republican in 1st. I have sensed a more conservative vibe from her lately, which I don’t read as “mask off” so much as appealing to Republicans as a way to license herself to Democrats as not a spoiler

Even so, Phil Knight, head of Oregon’s flagship corporation Nike, who underwrote much of her campaign, has switched to Republican Christine Drazan, as well as backing Republican state legislators to “bring balance” to the Salem statehouse, which was evenly split when I arrived merely a decade ago. Oregon has no political contribution limits, and between him and timber money it’s clear if the Dems continue their pivot away from being resource-state backslappers there’s a war chest for realignment.

plum-soup:

Okay how cheap is it to live in rural southern Oregon realistically like it just doesn’t make sense to offer ppl 16$/hour even if you’re in the middle of nowhere. Like how do you even rent an apartment or something in a place like that? Like it’s one thing if you already live there I guess but like that’s the fundamental barrier I come up against when looking forward farm jobs: even the best paying ones still will never give you the salary of a “skilled worker” as if farming isn’t incredibly skilled work lol. Like it’s a cool seed company but at this point in my life I’m willing to accept that maybe the farm work side of farming is not for me because it’s impossible to make any money doing it. Obviously I’m not talking about being rich but like. If I can’t afford a decent place to live that isn’t like somebody’s guest room I’m paying half my wages to live in then what the fuck is the point of trying to work at places like this like it’s a dead end in terms of having a career which I know is dumb theoretically speaking but like capitalism is real and I want to live a comfortable life and have savings in case I need to use them for something!! And like. Maybe be able to rent my own place of even *gasp* own a house….like the fact that these things are so distant from me shows how fucked up the consent producing machine is, it’s why we have all these young ppl opening their eyes to some form of leftism in droves. Like you can only justify the horrors of capitalism if you keep the masses complacent with a Good Economy with like available jobs that pay well and prices that are at least somewhat on track with wages like there’s a reason the left movements of the post-WWII (well really post-New Deal) era all fell flat on their face and failed to gain popular support. Labor was kept placated by giving in to certain concessions. This was no longer viewed as necessary in the modern neoliberal era, and we are in some senses starting to reach the tipping point where the capitalists are either going to have to pull some new deal-like stunt again or they are going to have to face a rising tide of discontent and labor unrest that will eventually devolve into physical violence between the two. Sorry I’m just now realizing how much of a tangent I went on lol.

Southern Oregon is still kinda overbuilt from the collapse of the timber economy, but that means the infrastructure isn’t necessarily anywhere that makes sense for farming and people have abandoned villages and reconcentrated in the few towns on I-5 that still have an economy, so the few places you might want to be aren’t as empty and cheap as you’d expect

plum-soup:

Idk @kontextmaschine you’re an Oregon person right. What is your opinion of Corvallis/Oregon state

Only stopped by briefly. Was like a town, there were several streets of shops and eateries, it wasn’t snoozeville, but you could take in the whole thing a lot easier than Eugene. Didn’t see the campus.

Oregon, the name

It is not known, incidentally, where the name “Oregon” originally came from.

Downstream of how the one Blockbuster Video store left in the world is in Oregon, our local retro gaming expo’s tournament is now officially the Blockbuster World Video Game Championship III

Every time I go by PSU I’m reminded how well Infamous: Second Sun got Seattle, that’s just what the juxtaposition of Victorian PNW, Prewar PNW, ‘60s-'70s PNW, and '90s-'00s PNW architecture looks like