Alright. It's been fun y'all, but @elonmusk's reinstatement of Trump based on a poll of his followers is the proverbial straw. I'm out. Vox populi, vox dei.

I think I know where all this is headed...

Update: The Twitter wildfire is at 44 billion acres and 0% contained.

Think it might be time for me to say goodbye to @Twitter. My feed is generally pretty wholesome today, just nerd stuff (space, alexa, games). But I disagree with Elon's fundamental assertion that anything that is technically legal should be on Twitter. How are others feeling?

As a note - the choice of Tacoma, Washington (my hometown) as one of the targets here is a clear and sadistic nod to "The Tacoma Method": https://t.co/VHIgZUq5jf As if the act by itself wasn't bad enough, they tacked on an open brag about the racist facet of it.

There's a callousness to today's GOP for which my only reference point is the mean girls and jocks in teenage movies from the 80s - ruining someone's life and then having a good laugh about it.

Imagine you travelled thousands of miles to apply for asylum in what is supposed to be the greatest country in the world, but instead of open arms, or even an antagonistic bureaucrat, you're met with cartoon villainy.

IMO @Venmo's app is full of anti-patterns and I'm angry at you - the broader internet - for making them a de facto standard. People pay me, then that money gets sequestered where I can't use it to pay my friends nor transfer it out because of their dumb policies and broken UX.

I hate the intentional anti-pattern where online shopping sites purposely provide no mechanism for you to go from cart back to site. Like "whoops, I messed up my order, guess I just have to live with the consequences and pay for the wrong things".

As an addendum (which seems appropriate): I enjoy board games, but I don't think I've ever played a game that made me so consistently chuckle. @TychoBrahe's writing shines above all and is delightful. For a group emerging from isolation in 2021 it was just what we needed. 🙏

This week a group of friends and I finished the #ClankLegacy campaign we've been playing for 9 months. Our group was mixed re: legacy games, Clank!, and AcqInc, but everyone was absolutely enamored with it. Highly recommend. Thanks for the ride, @TychoBrahe @cwgabriel @direwolf

Because the effect of not solving it is setting back our city's transit oriented design by years or even decades, and permanently making downtown a place that less people want to go. I wish @kcmetrobus and @SeattleCouncil (@CMDanStrauss) would come up with a solution. End rant.

How much more funding would it take to hire enough substitute drivers to bring the average number of daily cancellations down by an order of magnitude? Or to solve the notification problem? It can't be that much, right?

Instead we get a Twitter account (@kcmetroalerts) that may or may not have timely info, and a bunch of web and mobile tools that definitely do not. Terrible UX, and a clear step back from 3 years ago

Like, if I had a big, visible banner saying "we dropped the ball today, take a different bus" I could've avoided melting in the sun for half an hour. I would've still been annoyed - it's a worse bus - but not exasperated.

They used to be shining beacons of route status and arrival times. Now they're covered up and hidden away. The problem of people repeatedly smashing their screens was apparently too much. In a system without reliability, real-time info would be a nice consolation prize.

And the problems downtown do have some legitimate impact on the transit question. Consider the OneBusAway plinths. If you were new to Seattle, you might think these were just utility cabinets at the bus stops. Those of us from the before times know, though.

I know a lot of people who have bought into the hysteria about downtown or the buses being unsafe. It's dumb, and I've usually had to be the voice of reason. Unsafe, no, but unpleasant sure. I'm looking at a pile of discarded medical waste while I type this up on my phone.

Other people, like me, don't have the option to "just drive". I do, however, have the option to set my team's hybrid schedule. If the cost of being downtown is the risk of being stranded in 90 degree (or, most of the year, 45 degree windy) weather that outweighs most any benefit.

Most people will just replace bus trips with solo car trips. This will ruin all of the great progress we had been making as a city towards climate goals, pedestrian/bicyclist well-being, and mitigating our traffic nightmare.