So they named the one death from the shooting the other day but the leftists are getting antsy something’s up that they’re not naming the resident (and running him as “a homeowner”)

After ventilating the traffic blockers with a .45 he was shot by a rifle (presumably an AR). Which means that some of the protestors were, in fact, armed, even organized into armed roles. And while “bringing a gun to confront some old lady leftists” sounds extreme, “bringing a gun to confront an organized, armed antigovernment band” might be more sympathetic even in Portland, and in the world beyond “the reason we have guns is to shoot pinkos if they try to take over the neighborhood” is a pretty basic rightist theme.

So my guess at how this gets used in the current Portland environment is it gets used to power an effort against armed political activity. When you march around with guns to claim the streets for cursing the established order people who live established lives along those streets take it as a hostile act against them and resist you – with guns – and people end up shot.

This’ll also get spun as usable against rightist “chuds”, the establishment saying “actually no you don’t protect you, we protect you”.

The left will of course be split by the triune possibilities:

• People who insist on maintaining armed operations – I know exactly who’s gonna end up on this side, it’s “investigative journalist” Robert Evans. The thing is, 2 years on and reduced from the 2020 Justice Center protests only to the most hardcore lifestylers, after 2 years of the public opinion pendulum being pushed back to “order”, if you insist on showily mounting armed radical displays as a thumb in the eye that’s on you, they don’t even have to use “less-lethal” tools against you
• Continuing compliantly unarmed, in an environment where being armed has been established as insufficient to ward off lethal attacks. The Indian independence movement and mid-20th century American racial “civil rights movement” employed strategies of nonviolent resistance that accepted some casualties would be taken unavenged. I think this required broad support bases drawing on wrap-around communities of distinct identities with high morale and a reasonable expectation of eventual triumph, and do not expect that can be replicated here
• Seeking police protection, turning to permitted marches and events and operating within government constraints whose permissibility is determined within a formal and nominally precedent-bound system of law

Portland’s still-taking-to-the-streets leftists were staging for an Amir Locke protest march last night when there was a confrontation with a local resident and shooting that sent five, possibly including the resident, to the hospital and one to the morgue

Remembering how early when I arrived in Portland I was a little lost driving around and came upon the Burnside Skatepark and was like “oh, I recognize this, I know where we are… no, wait, that’s a Tony Hawk memory”

Environmental storytelling out here at the U-Haul lot

::realizes that my feelings re: enchanted crystals has a lot to do with my feelings re: Jeff Vogel and the ‘90s::

Thunderbird

SE Foster Rd.

No, you dipshit, the trolleys that started out horse-drawn in the 19th century

The frontier of Portland’s eastside renaissance gentrification has finally pushed past the limits of the old streetcar network, but only yet to automotive neighborhoods where the nearest arterial was still a streetcar route, though, and where residential roads became significant through streets that could be retrofitted for commerce

Walked around the neighborhood last night cause I could, picking up the subtleties of the thing, realized you can pinpoint the blocks where shitty housing several blocks from the streetcar line gives way to houses in a decent location for automotive development. Woke up paying for it in soreness, though.

Been ordering things from Amazon lately and gosh, for things where you know what you want (or can find an ideal on Wirecutter or something) it’s a lot more convenient than checking stores. It helps that despite having motor vehicles stolen from my driveway multiple times “porch piracy” hasn’t been an issue; I suspect that was related to a pretty blind side street people used to strip cars and do drug deals on that had a good sightline and has actually been gentrified a bit by some guys living in RVs

You know I’ve abortively sketched it out elsewhere but here let’s fill out

The Portland Suburbs Cardinal Direction Representation Scheme

In which each quadrant of the suburbs around Portland, Oregon, takes on the physical form, character, and even similar history to those characteristic of regions elsewhere across America. Let’s explore:

West (Hillsboro, Beaverton) – The Northeast

As the streetcar suburbs stretched east across the river, the more established yet green residences of the Southwest quadrant (Portland has five quadrants centered on the rivershore in Downtown, the river cuts what would be “Northwest” in half radial-diagonally so that the half on the far bank from downtown, contiguous with Northeast and Southeast, is “North”) started making an automobile-enabled stretch up over the hills and into the far valley. Commerce and industry followed, in successive waves of residue-leaving modernization. The abundant hydro and power of the Columbia River, and a comfortable area to attract college-educated executives, scientists, and engineers to promoted chemical and chipmaking industry, and the area is now the “favored quarter” of the region, with best schools and incomes. (The regeneration of the city over the 1990s-2020s first started substantially as a dining/nightlife/culture destination for these types and then lured them to buy fixer-ups) This area greatly reminds me of the northern suburbs of Philadelphia.

East (Gresham, Troutdale) – Florida

The streetcar suburbs made it out east around to Mt. Arleta at about 50th, stretching past in patches. When, post-WWII, the built-up hunger for new housing met the automotive Mass Middle Claas this working-class area (I’m pretty sure The Simpsons “Evergreen Terrace” was Northeast) stretched out past the border of the city at 82nd and kept going until by the 230s they banged into the outlying towns of Gresham and Troutdale where the foothills to Mt. Hood start making the Gorge part of the Columbia River Gorge obvious. The area was built out on an uninterrupted shopping center/minimall road grid with less attention to amenities like parks or sidewalks, but the city had to annex it in in the 70s after the feds required sewage system improvements they couldn’t afford.

Some of the most Cascadian suburbs (traditional Oregon culture isn’t farmers, it’s forest laborers). When the Oregon timber industry fell apart in the later 80s and the city emptied out it got cheap, methy and criminal now increasingly brown and immigrant.

South (Oregon City, Clackamas County) – The Sunbelt

In range to the farming-based Willamette Valley, and having the most “country”-as-defined-since-the-1980s culture. Clackamas is where the guys driving lifted pickups to their construction jobs live. Oregon City is the first capital of Oregon, along waterfalls that required portage but also offered rapids for water power, and apparently a major center of white power for a few decades. Expanding in recent years, development tends to be commuter stuff built around freeway exits with first shopping centers with big box stores and restaurant chains, and “drive til you buy” housing developments beyond.

North (Vancouver, State of Washington) – The Northern Plains

You have to take a tedious route to get there and then they do stretch on, though you’ve never heard of anyone from there. Navigated by freeways for any distance though within a locality the existing farm roads do fine as arterials between some mix of cul-de-sac developments and old-fashioned “someone subdivides a plot into street lots”. Vancouver is a town, cause they did that once. Substantially puffed out by the kind of business park guy who would move anywhere if it gave him a few percent edge on a spreadsheet (WA has lower income tax and makes up for it with a sales tax Oregon lacks).

Again, walking around and admittedly am manic rn, but am astoundingly heartened by the changes in the neighborhood, before it used to kinda be at the border of “Felony Flats” and “inner suburbanites who watch COPS”, the types staying inside with bars on the windows, and and at first the last few years the new arrivals seemed to be people that would’ve lived in like Gresham 10 years ago but now it’s polished up enough for the shorter commute — y'know, like that but with even less tolerance for urban living – but suddenly oh no, the Portland I liked but was fading where I found it is just shifting this way

I repeatedly emphasize but cannot emphasize enough what a critical success (on the defense) the last decade was, all the bad stuff rearing up and gathering forces to nominate themselves for defeat, it was like one of those JRPG “seal the evil away for another generation” things (you know that’s how Chinese authors talked about bad emperors and dynastic succession, to not draw the displeasure of the current ones?)

There’s a rock band living and practicing in the old Victorian down the street that used to be a steampunk boudoir photography studio, in some kind of Conservation of That Sort of Thing

Walking around the neighborhood rn, and admittedly I am manic, but it’s fuckin’ perfect. Stuff has churned on through the last few years and it’s gonna be ready to bloom; the stuff that was getting overheated and poncy fell through though, houses have been redecorated with all the right affiliation signifiers

We went through a rough patch there! The city had riots! I caught the fucking plague! The makes-you-crazy plague! Twice!

But we’re on the other side now!

I just asked about the sign at the bar in Portland asking for proof of vaccination to sit at the bar and the bartender (who had pulled up his mask when he saw me coming) didn’t ask and just wiped off a spot for me

fruityyamenrunner:

toolusingmammalgirl:

I love how O’Hare’s abbreviation is “ORD” since it was “Orchard Place” once upon a time, and since it’s surely a huge pain in the ass to change the code for an airport this huge and busy, Chicago is forever locked out of having a cool, snappy name for its airport a la ATL, LAX, JFK, etc.

“I’m flying in tomorrow through The Ord”

airport codes are another thing, like state abbreviations, that Americans expect everyone to know implicitly

worse they extend it to airports in europe too

Portland as a whole identifies as PDX

Damn, isn’t til you go away and come back you realize how dark Portland streets are

At the San Diego airport they occasionally played a recording that wheeled gizmos were prohibited– bikes, scooters, hoverboards, wheely shoes. I was like “who the hell rides a scooter in the airport?”

Guess the first thing I saw coming off the jetway at PDX

So because this actually seems to vary a lot:

Portland shut down pretty fully for a month early in the plague, then as things trickled back normalized masking in stores, which it’s maintained pretty consistently since with the exception of like two weeks of false dawn after the vaccine but before the variants

Restaurants were restricted to outdoor seating until I think summer 2021, a lot built some replacing parking, even street parking, there were a few street shutdowns to create restaurant-dense dining streets

Indoor dining and bars (unmasked, obv) have been a thing since then but it’s still normal to put on a mask going to the bartender or playing pool, I pick up the sense this isn’t the case in Eugene

There’ve been a few venues I hear demanding vaccination, but no consensus or passports and sometimes the kinda thing (“…to sit at the bar”) that’ll obv fatigue and fall away with time

There was an eviction moratorium that honestly I don’t know how resolved, I think maybe Multnomah County extended theirs past the state’s?

We’ve had reasonably good vax takeup, vocal opposition is mostly an eastern Oregon (dryland, rural, conservative) thing, in the SW that’s largely based on tourism and hospitality small business there’s friction with restrictions on that basis

“Rapid tests” are not, as far as I can tell, a thing here as I get the sense they are in the urban northeast from all the references on Twitter

This is an absurd street layout. I love it.

jiskblr:

raginrayguns:

partitionis:

raginrayguns:

ansixilus:

c-ptsdrecovery:

For those who have overactive guilt complexes like me…

[Image ID: a series of tweets from author Ursula Vernon, @UrsulaV

If you’re ever feeling guilty about not cooking a fresh home-cooked meal, a reminder that people in cities historically either had cooks or ate at food stalls, going back to Ancient Greece. Ancient Egypt, too, although since everybody ate bread, beer, and onions, less of a thing.

It’s a weird quirk of our obsession with nuclear families that everybody is expected to have time, skill, and equipment to cook daily and that if you’re a woman, particularly, you are a lesser person if you aren’t casually able to cook every day with random fresh ingredients.

Don’t buy into that. People since forever have hired cooks, gone to inns, lived in extended families where it wasn’t always your turn to cook, or ate such simplified diets that it was less of an issue.

You haven’t failed at a normal human task, you have been sold an unrealistic expectation and told it was a normal human task. Go get takeout. Or beer, bread, and onions. Eat cheese and some dates. Relax.

/End ID]

also just going to other countries makes me suspicious of US takeout prices.

This is a conflict between T and her boyfriend. T grew up in Taiwan and thinks takeout is a routine part of life, her boyfriend grew up in a poor Chinese immigrant family in the USA and thinks takeout is an extravagant luxury reserved for special occasions.

Takeout really is more expensive in the US, but why? Taiwan has half the GDP per capita, is that all there is to it?

Anyway I’m pretty sure takeout in the US could be cheap. Like this isn’t just “a quirk of our obsession with the nuclear family”, it’s economics and policy.

My assumption has always been that it’s a minimum wage issue— in Taiwan it’s 160NT/hr ($5.77 US although it’s slightly variable), but I guess that’s not actually a huge difference when compared to US federal minimum.

My only other theory is that most cheap Taiwanese take out is something that can be made in large batches with relatively little effort. Most take out places have just a few menu items, and most stuff can be prepared in advance, so maybe with high volume and quick turnaround it works out?

Taco trucks work the same way, and pizzarias in NYC make whole pizzas and sell individual slices (most pizzarias didn’t work that way in Houston). I’ve seen a dollar taco truck in Houston and dollar pizza places in NYC, so these can get very cheap. Cafeteria style places like Chipotle also work like this, and so do buffets. But the really cheap places are rare (the dollar taco truck raised their prices and eventually shut down, and only expensive ones were left in that area), and chipotle or a lunch buffet is pretty expensive, although cheaper than other options.

Volume is definitely an issue, and I figure thats why Houston didnt have NYC-style slice shops, there’s not enough people coming in to quickly sell all the slices from a pie.

None of these things should be taken for granted as if they’re things like climate. Population density is affected by zoning and immigration law. Minimum wage is set by law but it’s not just that, a living wage in the US depends heavily on rent, which again is affected by zoning, and other restrictions on development, and also on transportation options since that affects where you can live while still working in the city. Transportation also affects the number of customers and potential employees in a given area. Everything could be different, and may soon be different, depending on people’s choices.

Minimum wage probably matters, but real estate matters more. Food trucks aren’t a big thing in most places - Portlandia used to go in hard on them, but I don’t know if that’s held up as it’s gotten more expensive since I left - and if you’re not a food truck, it’s basically unheard of to have a restaurant without sit-down or at least a pretty large order counter/line space, which makes them more expensive than somewhere that can be pure kitchen.

I’m not sure that gap is caused by regulatory issues, but it’s a pretty good bet. And we definitely have much less efficient use of space than any of the major East Asian cities. (Maybe excepting mainland China? I don’t know how the big PRC cities work, it wouldn’t surprise me if they’re substantially different.) So some combination of “poor use of space > expensive square footage costs” and “it’s illegal to operate a cheap takeout place” is probably the main cause.

They’re still a thing in Portland, largely because setting up a food court-like" pod" of several of them is a productive use of an undeveloped lot or subprime commercial property with a lot of asphalt out front that adds amenities to a neighborhood and makes nearby residential more valuable, like a lot of Portland lately it’s really a property play

Now when I was back in LA in the late 2000s, food trucks were mobile, and different ones would pull by your workplace each day, it was an early productive use of Twitter for them to announce where they were that day