I'm running the maximum size you can with mudguards on this frame, they're 650bx48. And I am in love with the ride of larger tires. I'd thought the 38s I run on my Volpé were nice, but these are in another league for long distance comfort.

Yeah this setup's not going to win any races unless they're downhill, but it really tickles my semi-retro-grouch fancy with its lugged frame, support for downtube shifters, and old style geometry married to disk brakes and support for larger tires. It's super comfortable for those long touring days in the saddle of 70-90 miles.

Joking aside, it all depends one where I am. Right now only one has water; it's just easiest to store the empties on the bike where I won't lose track of them.

But three liters hasn't actually been enough when touring through the emptiness of the Dakotas, crossing the Ozarks in a heatwave, or traveling through the Deep South in July.

Thank you, I'm glad too.

The crankset's a Dia Compe ENE Ciclo I picked up for that lovely three arm spider. How easy it will be to replace the chainrings when the time comes, I'm unsure. Like the crankset, I'll probably have to source them through a Japanese merchant. At least it's Dia Compe, so unlikely to be impossible.

More like $6 a gallon here in Seattle.

I see the enshittification of Plex continues apace. Makes me more pleased than ever I made the effort to set up my Jellyfin server when they started down this path.

It's not that my taxes are too high. It's that the hyper-rich don't pay enough.

I don't mind taxes! As I've said repeatedly, civilization is expensive and can only be paid for on the installment plan. I'm happy to contribute my bit to keep things running. But when the rich won't pay their fair share…well that just fuckin' pisses me off.

The stupid! It burns!

JFC but I am so goddam tired of uttering the words “What a fuckin’ moron,” every time I read about him.

Though amusing, I feel it's worth noting this image had to go back over a decade—eleven years—to find an iPhone without a camera bump of some kind, and would have to go back 6 years to get a pro-level camera without a plateau of some kind.

I agree that a dual measurement should be included, body thickness and camera plateau, but it never has been, so here we are.

And to give credit where it's due, I have no desire to own an iPhone Air, but it IS a bit of astonishing engineering. They've used the plateau to provide a place for the logic board, and turned basically the entire body into a battery to preserve decent battery life. Love 'em or hate 'em, Apple has a world-class engineering team.

I'd much rather drive the Miata. There's a reason that when I was forced to purchase a car after almost 20 years without one, I opted for a Miini Cooper. Sure, they're cute, but I was ecstatic to look it up and find it was only about an inch larger than my first car, a 1983 Renault Alliance MT.

Small cars rule.

"Alpha" as in alpha software: buggy, not fit for release, a poor first approximation of useful, error-prone, almost certain to fail at the desired task, etc…

While I wouldn't say that's right, I also wouldn't come right out and call it wrong either. This very much engages with the "Selfish Gene", an heuristic model of thinking about evolution from the perspective of the gene itself instead of populations.

As an added amusement, the book "The Selfish Gene" came out in 1976, and is the source of the word "meme," used somewhat differently than it is now, naturally.