advice/thoughts on local cycling

Oct. 22nd, 2025 08:53 am
gingicat: (oops - Agatha Heterodyne)
[personal profile] gingicat posting in [community profile] davis_square
I am seeking anecdotal advice about cycling in the Somerville-Medford-Malden area. Even the amazing Susan McLucas could not teach me to ride a bicycle (I can't keep myself from looking down on a turn) so I am considering investing in an adult tricycle with or without power assist. (I can fall down and bang myself up while walking with something in my hands that throws my balance off-center, too.)

My issue is that as a motorist, I have noticed that I often don't have room to pass a cyclist. I keep pace with the cyclist until I can safely pass with two or more feet between the side of the car and the cyclist. I very much appreciate the roads painted with the indication that cyclists are allowed to ride down the middle of the car lane!

How well is this honored? Am I a typical motorist when it comes to cyclist safety?

no. 107: a roof on posts

Oct. 21st, 2025 10:42 am
[syndicated profile] letthemeatcake_feed

Posted by TW Lim

The first char kway teow I really remember came from my primary school canteen. Smoky and dark, with a single egg and three tiny cubes of rendered fatback in each plate. The egg was always speckled black: the wok had a crust, and hawker auntie was enthusiastic with her scraper. The char made it declarative, ambitious, the lardons made it feel like a sin. The wok hei wasn’t as pure as Hill Street’s, the noodles were maybe cooked a little drier, the memory of that char kway teow has stayed with me for thirty years. It’s rare to hear Singaporeans agree about hawker food, but my classmates all swear it was the best char kway teow they’ve ever had. I ate it nearly every day of primary school, because it was so good I almost never wanted to eat anything else. It’s nice to have an audience of 8 year olds.

If this doesn’t sound like a school canteen, you’re probably not from Southeast Asia (Substack tells me less than 1 in 10 of you are).

I discovered the school cafeterias of the west when I started university. To me, it looked like prison food, catering as violence, wilting food attacking from steam tables. Schools in Singapore had canteens – hawker centers in miniature. This seemed an altogether more sensible and humane arrangement. It’s a genius bit of socialization. You learn Singapore’s priorities – cheap food, orderly queues, the habit of clearing your own table. And of course, because the food was coming from actual hawker stalls, it was actually good. We might not have been much for freedom of speech or thought, but we believed in the freedom to choose your own damn lunch.

I’m thinking about all this because the government of Singapore just announced that a number of schools will have their canteens replaced with cafeterias run by central kitchens. In other words, we’ll be serving primary school students army food. The Ministry of Education asserts that this change is necessary because canteen operators are basically hawkers, and not enough of them can be found.

Since this is Singapore, and everything has to be shellacked with technology, students will order their food through an app, and pick it up from machines or lockers. Spokesfolks bemoan the long wait times at canteens, the schools with shuttered stalls, the sheer inefficiency of it all. “Principal Chen Ziyang told CNA that the model has “significantly reduced” wait times compared to traditional canteen queues,” – I can picture his little shudder of delight. Meanwhile, “existing stallholders may be referred to other schools or recommended to central kitchen operators for employment.” Singapore is short of cooks.

The canteen I grew up with was inefficient. It was in fact a little rough, even by the standards of the 1980s. The hawker centres were shiny and new then, government-built and government-approved temples to hygiene, with running water and electricity in every stall. My canteen was a roof on posts. I don’t think the stalls had plumbing. They certainly didn’t have refrigeration. Facilities for both were shared, in a large, tiled room that doubled as the drinks stall. The stalls were basically street carts without wheels, the hawkers set propane burners on collapsible stands. On weekends, they pushed everything together and wrapped it in tarp, and inverted their stools on top. This could’ve been anywhere people sold food on the street, but this was Singapore the orderly.

The auntie frying the char kway teow seemed just as unruly. Her wok had a blast radius, marked by noodles and soy sauce. You could see the miasma around her from across the canteen and smell it from across the yard. Her fluency, to my 8 year old eyes, bordered on magic. She cracked eggs with one hand, chattering with her neighbors and the line of schoolboys in front of her. If I came to think that the work of cooking is worth something, she had something to do with it. I never learned her name.

School canteens might offer the only affordable F&B rents in Singapore – a stall runs between 5 and 15 Singapore dollars a month. The problem is, there’s also something of a cap on revenue. Prices are effectively set in consultation with the school – you have to list menu prices when you apply for the stall. Your catchment is limited: outsiders generally aren’t allowed on school grounds, and schools operate only 5 days a week, 40 weeks of the year. If the administration prioritizes affordability for the students, they can quickly and unintentionally squeeze operators’ earnings to unsustainable levels.

Everyone is clearly in a bind. The rents are already nominal, and schools are obviously not about to change access rules or hours. It’s hard to see how to balance the books except via some form of subsidy or income guarantee for canteen operators – but the Singaporean government has long been reluctant to institute anything that remotely resembles a handout. The solution looks inarguably superior on paper – economies of scale! Technology! Centrally planned nutrition! The only sacrifices are intangible.

It’s not that Singaporean school canteens are a culinary paradise. The char kway teow auntie, I think, was a bit of an outlier. But at the very least, canteens reflected the distribution of hawker quality, and therefore, the quality of food in Singapore. For two years of middle school, I ate the exact same canteen meal every day, and even then, I knew it was mostly crap. Char siu from a factory, a deep fried something from another factory, and an exemplary wok-fried egg. But I chose it, it was a moment of agency and bliss, and I remember the sensation of pressing $1.40 into the auntie’s hand, and the weight of the plate she placed in mine.

Even leaving the UNESCO thing and tourism aside, hawker culture really is Singaporean culture. There’s a reason we tell hawker stories over and over – the generation who started the stall around independence, the generation who took over when Singapore was still figuring modernity out, the generation who get out and sometimes return. Hawkers remain the everyfolk every politician in every country claims to serve – even if there are fewer of them each year.

So maybe it’s apt that now opportunities that used to be offered to individual Singaporeans are being offered to large corporations instead. Being Singaporean, it seems, means prioritizing efficiency and corporate profits over some of the basic habits that make life in Singapore what it is. It means learning to form relationships with companies, screens, and lockers, rather than people you can look in the eye. Let that be a lesson in how to be Singaporean.


Related: I Dream of Canteens

Also related: A review of the food central kitchens in Singapore provide, from these pages

In line at Hill Street Fried Kway Teow, May 2022

AWS outage

Oct. 20th, 2025 10:11 am
alierak: (Default)
[personal profile] alierak posting in [site community profile] dw_maintenance
DW is seeing some issues due to today's Amazon outage. For right now it looks like the site is loading, but it may be slow. Some of our processes like notifications and journal search don't appear to be running and can't be started due to rate limiting or capacity issues. DW could go down later if Amazon isn't able to improve things soon, but our services should return to normal when Amazon has cleared up the outage.

Edit: all services are running as of 16:12 CDT, but there is definitely still a backlog of notifications to get through.

Edit 2: and at 18:20 CDT everything's been running normally for about the last hour.

physical update

Oct. 16th, 2025 10:03 am
forgotten_aria: (susu squish)
[personal profile] forgotten_aria
I still haven't full recovered from the COVID I had mid-September. Cardio tends to be rough.

I still have most of my strength though and I'm starting to regain some stuff I lost to the foot and shoulder.

The plantar faciitis still isn't quite healed, but I can now to Olympic lifts again. I'm still not running, jumping, or doing anything that requires bouncing on the ball of my foot. It is healing, just very slowly.

Fast squats are causing my calves to tighten up. Given all the other issues I've had with tendonitis and alike, I think I have weak calves and I should work on that.

I can kick up into a handstand again, which has been nice. I can swing from the bar again too, though my shoulder still hurts at night.

I had the smoothest set of wall balls in a very long time yesterday. These challenge my knees, ankles, shoulders, back, and a few other things, so having a good set means a lot of things are working well.
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[personal profile] siderea
Canonical link: https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1885137.html


Content Advisory: US government classified and controlled unclassified info leaked to news outlets, within.

[Previously: The Essequibo (Buddy-ta-na-na, We Are Somebody, Oh): Part 1]

Now, when looking at these strikes being carried out in the Caribbean, shockingly, I think there's not been a ton of coverage on this. CNN, for one, their Pentagon reporters, have been some of the only ones consistently covering what's happening in Venezuela. CNN and the New York Times right now, I would say, are the two that are kind of all over this and have been for a while. I don't know why it's getting so little coverage elsewhere, but it is. So, normally I would like to look at these, uh, these reports and source them from multiple different outlets and we just don't have that because there's so limited coverage around US military operations in SOUTHCOM right now.

— Preston Stewart [PrestonStewart on YT], 2025 Oct 15, "American Bombers Send A Message To Venezuela"


[...] I know that the people of the United States are attentive observers and the people of the United States are very aware of what is being attempted against Venezuela is armed aggression to impose regime change.

— Nicolás Maduro, 2025 Oct 3, via Times of India via AP via VTV, "Venezuela Deploys Army & Tanks After Another Deadly U.S Attack, Fighter Jet action"


I am still desperately trying to pull together Part 2 of this series, but in the meanwhile, more things keep happening. I keep checking in with my focus group, aka, Mr. Bostoniensis, about what he is seeing in the news, because my own algorithms are, uh, rather peculiarly trained at this point, and the answer seems "rock all", so I thought I'd post a news round-up of some of the developments over the last couple of weeks. (Holy crap it's been two weeks.)

October 2nd


It comes out that the Trump administration has literalized the 'War on Drugs'. [CW: 'controlled but unclassified'] )

US terminates diplomatic relations with Venezuela )

October 3rd


Fourth US strike on a boat in Venezuelan waters is announced by Trump admin )

October 6th


Venezuela announces it foiled a false-flag plot against the US Embassy in Venezuela )

October 8th


Democrats in Senate try to limit Trump's war powers but fail )

October 9th


The Venezuelan opposition leader wins the Nobel Peace prize )

Venezuela requests emergency intervention from the UN Security Council )

The US asks Grenada, 100 miles off Venezuela's coast, to allow US military installation )

October 10th


The Nobel Peace Prize winner dedicates the prize to Trump, confusing a lot of people who haven't been keeping score )

It comes out that Maduro had been trying to negotiate his way out of US demands for his outster by offering up 'a dominant stake in Venezuela's oil' )

UN Security Council has emergency meeting per Venezuela's request )

October 13th


Maduro closes Venezuela's embassies in Norway and Australia )

Venezuelan activist and political consultant in exile in Colombia were shot )

October 14th


US bombs fifth boat off Venezuela, six killed )

US announces Admiral in charge of US SOUTHCOM visiting Antigua and Barbuda and Grenada )

Which brings us to today. (Well, it was today when I started writing this.)

October 15th


Trump has authorized covert CIA operations in Venezuela [CW: 'highly classified'] )

Three US Air Force B-52 bombers buzzed Venezuela for four hours; Venezeula scrambles an F-16 in response )

It comes out that the boat of Colombians bombed in September was not bombed by mistake, but was deliberate )

Nobel Laureate Machado exhorts Trump to rescue Venezuela from Maduro )

Trump is musing aloud to the press about airstrikes on Venezuela )

This post brought to you by the 220 readers who funded my writing it – thank you all so much! You can see who they are at my Patreon page. If you're not one
of them, and would be willing to chip in so I can write more things like this, please do so there.


Please leave comments on the Comment Catcher comment, instead of the main body of the post – unless you are commenting to get a copy of the post sent to you in email through the notification system, then go ahead and comment on it directly. Thanks!

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