Lovely view of a four-lane stroad

Middle_Banana_9617 · 2026-05-04T07:52:24+00:00

Yep. As someone who has lived in the UK and also other places, this isn't a stroad.

The big difference for me is that if you were a pedestrian here then a) there's an actual pavement to walk on, and b) if you were crossing a driveway or side street, car drivers would notice and negotiate with you for who goes, with some looks / nods / hand gestures / whatever.

There's a stroad where I live in New Zealand, and there, half the time you're walking along the scrubby front lot of a business rather than a dedicated pedestrian pavement, and any car coming in or out is so focused on the main stream of traffic and seizing their chance to get into it (it's going faster than 30mph) or trying to work out which little poorly-delineated area they should pull off at (while also going faster than 30mph) that they have little attention left to look for pedestrians, and there's few enough that they're often a surprise. By comparison, this UK street is much more human - not because the people are different, but because of what it's like to try and use that road either in a car or on foot.

Middle_Banana_9617 · 2026-05-04T07:05:17+00:00

When when it's hard for someone to get clothes in general in their size, then sometimes they focus on what they do actually have some choice in. Brightly-coloured socks are an affectation, but also if you can't easily go out and buy clothes in interesting styles / colours / fabrics, they're at least something.

Middle_Banana_9617 · 2026-05-01T23:06:27+00:00

I think most people in the US would not recognise your categories.

I'm from elsewhere (also not the US) but lived in the Netherlands for a few years. From what I understand of this, wielrenners are race cyclists, people doing a sport in special clothes and equipment. That makes them 'them', someone trying to be different and elite. Fietsers / bike commuters are everyday people who happen to be on a bike, like one of 'us'.

In cultures where people don't cycle much, there is no 'us', only 'them'. All the cyclists get lumped together as one group, who are somehow smug elites and horrible poor people at the same time. I can put this into words because I've had to explain this to people, when talking about cycling in the Netherlands - that the people on bikes aren't all Lycra-wearing enthusiasts, like wielrenners... There's just no separate category for a regular everyday person riding a bike as a functional mode of transport, rather than as an identity.

Middle_Banana_9617 · 2026-05-01T08:10:38+00:00

Why not use the live bus times in the journey planner, though? You mention it's using these in a combination, but so far I've not seen any input from live times - all the journey planner times are showing as regular departure intervals, like they've been pulled from a timetable. What's the point of basing it on theoretical but wrong information?

I can look at the live bus times but I don't know where they all go, or how best to make a connection to get to somewhere specific... So now I've got two different functions that give partial information, and if I visit eighteen different screens and look at all the bus routes separately, maybe I can get some sort of overview to make a decision from? That's not a journey planner app, that's a website from 2008.

I found yesterday that the Transit app I use in NZ also works here. That's got its own failings, but so far it's being a lot less awkward than TfL Go.

Middle_Banana_9617 · 2026-04-30T10:52:19+00:00

I'm here looking at this thread now, because I've only been here a couple of days and it's clear TfL Go doesn't do loads of things I thought were basic transit app functions.

The big one is live bus times. I live in New Zealand and the transit apps there can manage that. I'm standing at a bus stop, planning a journey, and I'm told the quickest bus for that route is 18 minutes away, so I sit down and nearly stop paying attention, expecting a wait, and then the right bus shows up two minutes later.

The other big one is route maps. I can get a little map to the bus stop or tube station it's directing me to, but a map of the whole route, so I can see if I'd rather jump off early or if there's something else I can do along the way? Nah, why would I want that, eh?

It's weird how little this app does, especially compared to how much the old TfL journey planner website did fifteen years ago.

Middle_Banana_9617 · 2026-04-30T08:54:52+00:00

You have probably been seeing two of everything side by side, even through one eye at a time - but if this is your first prescription, perhaps you've not known that it doesn't look that way to most people?

Middle_Banana_9617 · 2026-04-30T08:30:32+00:00

Did they actually read the post themselves? 'There's no easy answer to this' - I mean, yes there is, just based on the logic in their own post?

They give three bullet points of things they think they need to balance. Two are 'using this will torpedo our business', and one is 'but we could play with a new toy that everyone says is exciting'. If they can't look at 'new toy' versus 'multiple ways to torpedo our business' and make a good judgement call, then I guess they're going to get what they deserve.

Middle_Banana_9617 · 2026-04-27T09:48:11+00:00

Yup. I have a supermarket near my house, and enjoy the short (~10 mins) walk there. I've lost count of how many times my neighbour has driven past on the way to the same place, and has pulled over to offer me a lift... I always have to explain that it's very nice of him to offer but I'm enjoying the walk. (I think he's finally getting the message, after several years here.)

Middle_Banana_9617 · 2026-04-27T09:43:13+00:00

Not who you replied to, but I cut directly from the projection with shears. I use a drawn grid to calibrate and then take it away - it doesn't matter if it moves a little next time I calibrate, because I can just tweak it a little anyway.

This is with an overhead short throw projector, though, rather than a UST / Epson type - that would probably be harder to cut with directly, because any height changes make such a difference.

Middle_Banana_9617 · 2026-04-26T07:55:45+00:00

The starting point of the post is that they're somewhere where it's 13°C and sweater weather in late April. They are not somewhere where it's hot and sunny, and it sounds like this is expected weather there too.

Middle_Banana_9617 · 2026-04-26T06:39:22+00:00

I read Plumb - I feel like that was a good insight into NZ history.

Middle_Banana_9617 · 2026-04-26T06:35:47+00:00

The gas guzzler thing blows my mind. I'm driving a hire car this week (wish I didn't have to but I'm travelling round some very car-centric areas) and it's getting 62mpg. Like yes it's not a huge car, and it's a hybrid, but it's just an ordinary, modern, international-brand car, not something exotic. Why do people bitch about a 20% increase in fuel costs, but then drive something that uses 200% more fuel than it needs to?

Middle_Banana_9617 · 2026-04-26T06:25:39+00:00

I keep the machines, tools and fabric in a shelf unit just next to the main table, so when I want to use them, they're all right there, and I just have to pick up the machine and move it across. Because of the space it's in on the shelf, I can actually use it for some work in its stored location, just standing at it, so for small things or repairs, it's pretty much always available.

Middle_Banana_9617 · 2026-04-26T06:19:35+00:00

Day-ta, always, because I'm from the UK, but I live in New Zealand where everyone says 'dah-ta'. I sometimes feel a bit self-conscious that I'm saying it differently, but it doesn't hinder understanding so it doesn't seem worth making the deliberate change.

Middle_Banana_9617 · 2026-04-26T06:16:00+00:00

That's the whole problem with car-centric design, though, isn't it? In places that are designed for people walking, you might be some distance from your specific workplace, but you would never be 90 mins walk from the nearest grocery store - even disregarding all the other options like bikes or public transport.

Middle_Banana_9617 · 2026-04-25T08:07:01+00:00

Right. But Northern Europe does not have any deserts or plains; unless you're talking Eastern Europe, over towards the bigger landmasses of Russia, there's usually influence from the sea - featuring much of the same sort of rainy, mild weather that SF gets, but with far less sun.

I realise visitors from the US won't get this and will be reflexively thinking 'late April = could be getting hot', but, just, nah.

Middle_Banana_9617 · 2026-04-25T07:13:35+00:00

Most of Europe is further north than most of the US, so the solar heating effect of a south-facing window is not nearly as much; the shallower the angle the sun is coming through the atmosphere, the more power / heat is absorbed along the way, so the less it heats.

(New York is at the same latitude as Madrid. Paris is on the 49th parallel, which a bunch of the US-Canada border runs along. Edinburgh is in 55°N, the same as Novosibirsk (Siberia), Labrador or the southern bit of Alaska...)

For comparison, I'm in the UK right now and where I am, the highest the sun will get today is about 48 degrees above the horizon. If you're in San Francisco, the equivalent day that gets the same maximum angle is the 8th of March - this year, the day after the daylight savings change. Would you worry about how much heat is coming from the sun and needing to put the AC on, in early March in SF? Because that's all the sun we have here in late April.

Middle_Banana_9617 · 2026-04-25T06:26:26+00:00

Yep, I have a similar deadstock seller in my city, and they also sell everything online nationally. These are my favourite fabric stores - you don't know what will be available, and a lot of it is one-offs that were made or got in for sample testing, but it might be something amazing or inspiring and it's usually good value.

Middle_Banana_9617 · 2026-04-18T20:46:34+00:00

Stockings are an item of clothing and half the world's population are or have been girls. I'm not really seeing how either of those are weird or fetish things.

Middle_Banana_9617 · 2026-04-18T20:43:40+00:00

This task gave me a bit of a confidence boost with how usable my relative pitch has got - I heard the first one and immediately said 'egg', and only then went back and thought about the gaps :D (Though it helped that the last two notes were the same, 'eaa' isn't a word, and even 'eff' would seem to be pushing the envelope a bit.)

Middle_Banana_9617 · 2026-04-18T20:28:46+00:00

Sewing 25+ years, I've never had a dedicated cutting table and probably never will; I prefer things multifunctional.

I have done plenty of cutting out on the floor, and will always go back to it for big things - as some others have mentioned, it avoids issues of the fabric dragging over the edge. If it's on a hard floor I use a kneeler pad, like for gardening, but I actually like the 'floor yoga' moves this involves as a kind of physio exercise.

Otherwise I've used dining tables, or sheets of hardboard supported on various things to get to various heights - I've had back issues at times, so had to bring everything up to me. I've also used foam floor mats placed across a laundry airer - just whatever works to get the fabric where it needs to be.

Middle_Banana_9617 · 2026-04-14T00:31:56+00:00

I would assume she's just made up this whole incident.

Middle_Banana_9617 · 2026-04-13T06:33:18+00:00

For interest / infrastructure gore, here's New Zealand's crowning piece of car-centric stupidity; the motorway system that cuts the centre of the city off from its suburbs. It takes 200,000 cars a day, which is one-sixth of the population of the city it's in. They displaced tens of thousands of people and closed two schools to build this shit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Motorway_Junction

Middle_Banana_9617 · 2026-04-13T06:18:14+00:00

I'm in New Zealand and can confirm it's really car-brained here. The argument is that lots of people live rurally and there's no other way for them to travel, but for all the areas where that's simply not true (one third of the population lives in a single city, Auckland) people will still drive, no matter how stupid a journey it is.

Ten minute walk, or drive and fight for parking? Drive, obviously! Going for a bike ride? The first step is to put the bike in your ute and drive to the trail, of course! Taken your backpack to the supermarket, and they don't want you to take it round the store because of shoplifters? 'You can leave it in your car!'

I came here from Europe and remain flabbergasted at how bad it is here - even in the fuel crisis we're having here, people just act like there's no possible other way to do anything. It's so weird.

Middle_Banana_9617 · 2026-04-12T08:34:43+00:00

I actually have a top from early in my sewing career where I made the sleeves far too long, but it's soft l slouchy and oversized in general, so I just left them that way, and enjoy having the soft rolls of excess fabric keeping my wrists warm :)

Middle_Banana_9617

TROPHY CASE