I left reddit because I was apparently too anti car for /r/fuckcars. If this community becomes like the reddit diluted sub where people were making car apology and justifying their use, I’m going to be very disappointed.

I would really love that all cars in existence be crushed into a heap. It’s a fantasy and I know it won’t happen. I can compromise. But if most could be crushed in a heap, that would be very great too.

Smaller cars will continue to kill a few billion animals yearly. They will also continue to kill around a million of humans every year, or about one human every 30 seconds.

The area covered by parking lots is mostly impervious and contributes to flooding as well as heat islands. Cars and parking lots make cities hotter and are worsening climate change. They also contribute to noise pollution. And no, electric cars are not better for noise because at highway speed they are as noisy as fossil fuel cars, and at low speed, their pedestrian warning system is also louder than fossil fuel cars.

I can be nuanced and understand that some people will always need a car, but most people in the world live in a town, a suburb, or a city, and the existence of the vast majority of those cars cannot be justified, whatever their size. Of course smaller cars are desirable. Electric cars are desirable A mix of electric and smaller would be better than status quo. But fewer cars is even more desirable.

SSH in first place. No explanation needed.

But also MATE and Pulseaudio (yes). I really like paprefs, pasystray, and how easy it is to send audio over the network. To the point where I reinstall Pulseaudio instead of Pipewire, because Pipewire requires long command lines for what was easily done in a few clicks with Pulseaudio.

I dread the day where I will be forced to “progress” to Pipewire and lose that easy feature.

There’s one thing that would certainly stop me from cycling in Australia, and it’s the helmet laws. We don’t have those here and I’m used to decide if I wear a helmet or not. Sometimes I like to live dangerously and have the wind in my hair at 20 km/h.

If my country had laws like this I would not cycle.

In the end though, it’s not making much of a difference aside from nostalgic value. There’s a minimal maintenance to it too. My parents still have the cassettes and the Betamax VCR stored somewhere. Physical photo albums also have to be stored. We don’t want to get rid of them but they’re kind of useless now. It’s around 200 GBs of files to be kept.

It’s also a bit cringe to see yourself being a stupid kid on video. Or read what you wrote in a journal on a floppy disk in the mid 90ies. I went to watch a few minutes because we mentioned it but it’s not something any of my family members return to regularly. It’s just stuff that now sits there. Nice and nostalgic to watch every few years or decade, but not healthy to keep returning to it.

Lots. I was born in the 80ies and my parents took lots of pictures when I was a baby. My sister was born a few years later, and there was also lots of pictures. We have albums full of pictures that I ended up scanning and digitizing. My father was also somewhat of an enthusiast for video cameras and he bought a BetaCam by the end of the 80ies, and a few other ones until the beginning of the 2000s.

So I have videos of my childhood from my first years of school to being a teenager. He was filming at Christmas, at birthdays, and sometimes at random events. He often just set the camera in a corner and filmed for the length of a Beta tape.

I digitized all of the Beta cassettes into mp4s during the pandemic and now I offer USB drives to people of the family that don’t have any videos of when my grandparents were alive.

Plus, my maternal grandfather also filmed some gatherings and events. So I also have digitized videos of them in the 60ies and 70ies.

Ironically most of us never liked to be taken in photos, or filmed, but I’m kind of glad we still have them. If I compare to my friends, apparently, I have a “treasure trove” of videos and pictures.

Once translated: “ugh, those fucking idiots”.

In my native language: “ah les osti d’épais”.

A few years ago I would have said they are useless but I ended up buying one for my off grid cabin in winter and I like it.

I have solar panels and batteries with a small 500w inverter in the cabin and the setup works very well in summer for my usage. However temperature averages in January here are around -10C and the batteries get too cold to charge them. Also there is generally not much sun in winter anyway.

So I bought a small generic power station to bring there and it’s excellent for my needs. It lights up the place and charges my laptop and phone.

To be fair it’s kind of overkill because my laptop and phone can be charged from a hefty power bank using PD.

Cycling on rail trails and long isolated bike paths. Getting from A to B without burning any fossil fuel. I live in an archipelago and pull my inflatable kayak to the river and the lakes nearby using a bike trailer.

I’m in Montreal and I hate this so much. We have no emergency corridors, cars are taking all the space. I’m sitting in my apartment and those loud as fuck emergency vehicles are honking and blasting their sirens while stuck behind a row of cars, that everyone just expects to magically disappear if they just honk a bit louder.

And worse, the fucking fire department is stopping bike lanes, pedestrianized streets and fighting against modal filters because “it slows them down and could be dangerous for the lives of the citizens”.

I can tell who is driving the ambulance by the style of siren chosen. Because somehow some ambulance drivers think that turning the siren on and off rapidly will make them move faster through gridlock.

Emergency vehicles here are seriously annoying, and apparently the solution is to make them even noisier and annoying rather than make some rules and infrastructure. It’s high on my list of things that makes me want to move back to the countryside.

Apparently Trek has a pretty long list of recalls.

Except that it will take much more than this to ‘motivate’ any car brain here to actually stop. Those stopping for pedestrian crossings here are the exception. So much so that some towns “don’t know what to do” about it and ask pedestrians to wave orange flags to cross busy streets.

Yes but I’m not living near an expressway (anymore). Most people also don’t. AFAIK most people living in an urban environment will be near a low speed street. So as mentioned, I’m in my apartment with the windows open and can now hear the the noises of electric cars’ pedestrian warning systems when they pass in front. Or I’m walking along a slow street to go to the grocery and of all the cars on that street, only the electric one can be heard. Even when I have my headphones on.

Sure, electric cars are as noisy as cars with internal combustion engines at high speed. But what I’m specifically concerned about is how much more noisy those things make in an urban environment when at low speed.

Electric car advocates are often saying those are much quieter than cars with internal combustion engines, and that it’s a positive. That electric cars will make our urban environments much more relaxed and quiet. However, because of all those pedestrian warning systems making different types of noises at different volumes and frequencies, they often end up noisier than cars burning gas.

I never had the displeasure to hear one yet. But as my country just opened up to Chinese electric cars, I guess it won’t be long before there’s one more annoying sound in our urban environment.

To me this is defending motonormativity.

I also walk and bike at night, sometimes on multiuse paths with pedestrians, dog walkers and cyclists. Dogs don’t have lights and are sometimes unpredictable. You know what I do when I’m cycling on a shared path, instead of expecting everyone to flash like a christmas tree? I slow down! This way I can react before hitting a pedestrian or a dog. I’m the one going much faster than them. I’m the one that has to be careful.

Once I nearly got hit by a truck passing me on a countryside road. It was day time but it was also raining. I was wearing a bright orange t-shirt. But apparently I wasn’t visible enough?! In all the cases. I’m sure it was my fault for existing and not taking all the necessary precautions to make sure I can be seen from space and avoid getting hit.

I don’t carry reflective hardware and flashing lights with me just in case I have to walk somewhere in the dark. Sometimes I’m walking a few km in my sister’s town in the dark or in the rain. Sometimes I’m walking in another city, or country. I’m not carrying “safety equipment” with me everywhere I go just because some idiot motorists wants to go the speed limit in the dark without regard to other road users, or animals. Whatever happens, it will always be my fault for being there outside of a car anyway. Did I have headphones on? Maybe I was wearing dark makeup? I came out of nowhere! Or maybe I was not walking or cycling at the right place or at the right time.

Motorists are the one that drive a multi ton lethal vehicle, sometimes in the dark, and everyone not in one is expected to take precautions against them.

Motonormativity.

EDIT: Wear reflective gear if you want to. It’s not a bad idea. But it SHOULD NOT be expected.

Deer, raccoons, and the billion animals killed every year should also do more to be visible.

Just like the middle ages but televised. It would show just how evolved and civilized we are now.

EDIT: I hope you’re gonna be the executioner. After all, killing bad people is a reason why good people are killing bad people. Good people don’t kill other good people. They’re not killers; they only kill bad people.

Best is suggestive. It’s a weird movie but I wish there was more of David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ. Maybe a sequel since the movie ended on that possibility. But it’s probably going to end up repetitive, if not recursive.

And its an idea that has been explored in different other movies and series anyway. So as much as I liked the style of that movie, upon reflection, maybe it should just stay where it was left.

Yes, but it’s also the nature of how those platforms work. It would be hard to get new subscribers without popular and active posts. If mods of small communities are removing posts and comments from people that diverge from the main opinion there, growth will be difficult.

It is something I try to keep in mind before commenting on a random thing I see when browsing all communities instead of just what I’m subscribed to. Check the community before making a comment, to make sure I’m not insulting fans of something I don’t like.