I agree with you but the silliness of the leveling system did have its own charm. As a kid I spent so much time jumping around and putting points into getting those athletics skills high enough that it became a bit game breaking.

There’s a certainly a balance somewhere in there but I don’t think the game was ever difficult enough, playing on medium difficulty, to feel like you’ve fallen too far behind the curve. For context I’m thinking mostly about oblivion.

I probably played through oblivion more times making builds that weren’t optimal and had weird stats than I did trying to min/max my attributes. I think, for me, leaving room for that kind of gameplay is part of what made the older games so special.

Semi private but there’s also the Seattle bike group on discord where I think this was also discussed.

Hollingsworth 36.9% to Hudson 36.5% so super tight coming out of the primary.

Joy Hollingsworth certainly is pumping out fliers but not sure I’ve met anyone who supports her. (Though I’m in pretty liberal circles). I generally cross reference Seattle times, stranger, and progressive voters guide. Get an idea of what policies they support and discuss with a couple friends but not so many of them are interested in local politics.

I’m in WA so unless they’re certain Rainier’s about to blow I don’t think it’s for location specific reasons. I’m seeing some rumblings about it on Reddit too.

Here is a great NPR podcast on it. But basically they tried it in California, people liked it, TurboTax didn’t and lobbied against it. They sent you how much you owed and you could verify it, confirm, and send it back super simple.

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/04/03/709656642/episode-760-tax-hero

I liked it, pretty different from the past ~10 years. Definitely smaller but felt maybe too dense. There wasn’t enough stuff to split the crowd up all the time so in certain time slots it got way to busy at a stage. Overall I like that it wasn’t trying to be a major festival but I don’t think the balance was exactly right. Have my hopes up that the festival was successful and they keep experimenting with the format.

I did the version with two filters and a box fan to make a little triangle and that worked great for me. Even just slapping a filter on a box fan is better than nothing. Last year the smoke wasn’t too bad and by the end of it my filters were pretty brown. Highly recommend it.

Filters are pretty cheap and come in 3 packs at Costco if you’re looking to pick some up.

I think a lot of this is about context too. I don’t think anyone would bat an eye if you used the ok symbol in that context. I still use it pretty regularly, but I’m also not a white dude or using it for no reason in photos and only to my white friends. They probably had some other problematic instances and this was the final straw to kick this guy out.

The French guys bakery, who are at many farmers markets, just opened a location on the north end of Capitol Hill and I’ve really enjoyed their stuff so far!

A lot of the political discussion I’ve read on here has also been pretty well thought out. I feel like people are taking time to explain their perspective more and even if in general it’s been more left leaning there is definitely more nuance. I was surprised by the quality of some of the discussion around the end of affirmative action.

Yes, if all that matters in your life is where you go to school then yes they were held back from achieving that.

For a lot of people higher education is seen as the mantle to climb the socioeconomic ladder and on average the Asian or white kid who was competitive but didn’t get to go to harvard will achieve similar outcomes regardless.

Were they held down though? In California when they eliminated AA at their public universities there wasn’t much change in the economic outcomes for asian and white students. Sure, before maybe they didn’t get to go to the ‘best’ school but on average still had similar outcomes.

This isn’t true for black/Hispanic/native American students whose economic outcome depreciated. These students benefited from being able to break into the social networks provided by elite universities. Something that white/Asian students might already have access to.

So if all that matters is going to elite schools then sure, but there are externalities that are important and not everyone benefits equally from the top echelon of schools. It’s not a perfect system but it’s better than not having it.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/06/27/1184461214/examining-the-impact-of-californias-ban-on-affirmative-action-in-public-schools

I just bought an electric duster which I’ll now be using to dry off my steel bike. I was using a microfiber to give it a quick wipe down before. I bought the duster for other cleaning but now I’m finding so many more uses for it lol.

I read too that going no rules is basically abandoning moderating and giving Reddit more ‘legitimate’ reason to replace the mods.

Another weird example would be r/soccer and r/football where soccer ironically became the defacto.