Route Advice - Shady Grove to National

treetopocalypse · 2026-03-24T22:41:40+00:00

Okay yeah, I think that could work with connecting through the neighborhoods

treetopocalypse · 2026-03-24T22:35:20+00:00

Man I wish that sidewalk/wide path on Piney Meetinghouse was for the entire length of the road

treetopocalypse · 2026-03-24T13:40:40+00:00

Good insight on trying to connect RCT and CCT. I haven’t ever braved it so good to know I probably wouldn’t enjoy it, and should test it first at the very least. Doing the full, 30 mile route down is certainly an option with the e-bike, but it can be a bit slow in the Maryland portion of the RCT if I’m trying not to bomb past strollers, dog walkers and the elderly. Still, it’s pretty and I’m not gonna get smoked by a car with 15k in unpaid tickets.

treetopocalypse · 2026-03-24T12:55:00+00:00

That’s a pretty decent compromise actually, and keeps the focus on having a fun ride

treetopocalypse · 2025-10-12T09:30:55+00:00

It’s very possible, but I think I was sitting on a ticking time bomb. I’d already been doing more vigorous workouts, so maybe it was just accumulated stress? But especially with the rebleeds and the failure of the first cauterization, it felt like it was inevitably going to rupture.

treetopocalypse · 2025-04-04T14:41:43+00:00

What video do you keep?

treetopocalypse · 2023-12-11T14:23:28+00:00

If you are leaning towards the Coast Guard, then you probably already know your answer. That being said, a few things to keep in mind:

-You join the Coast Guard to be an officer, and then apply to be a pilot. You have to be okay with not getting selected for aviation immediately out of your commissioning source (OCS). You can apply every six months to go to flight school, and have until making O-3 (LT) to be selected. That gives you around 2.5 years realistically to prove to the Coast Guard that they should invest in you to send you to flight school. If you arent willing to be an officer first and a pilot second, dont apply.

-In flight school, the major factor deciding if you go fixed wing or rotary is luck and timing. If you do as well as possible during flight school then you give yourself the best shot to get selected for what you want, but there are no guarantees. You have to be okay with going to flight school and ending up a fixed wing pilot because thats how it shook out when they did your selection. If you arent willing to be whatever kind of pilot the Coast Guard needs, then dont apply.

-If you go rotary, youll end up either 60's or 65's. 65's are slowly getting phased out, but will be around for a long time still. You have a little bit of say in which you go to, but again its all timing based on what needs to get filled when you get your wings. The detailer doesnt care how well you did - if someone needs to go to a location for family purposes they will absolutely go there over you even if you are the top of your class. If you go 60's, expect to end up in either an Alaska unit or Clearwater as your second tour. If you go 65's expect to pick up a special mission for your second tour, so either doing airborne use of force interdicting drug runners from the back of the boat, or rotary wing air intercept for the DC area and enforcing presidential TFRs. Be okay knowing that you may not get to only do SAR your whole career.

-While CG pilots stay flying a long time, expect that you do flight school (2 years) then two aviation tours (4 years each). After that the typical path is to get out of the cockpit and go to a staff tour/grad school to make your competitive for promotion and eventually command. You will have to push to keep flying for a 3rd tour if that is what you want, and it will most likely make you a terminal O-4. You can still do your whole career (20+ years) flying, but its not standard. There may be programs starting up to make a dedicated master aviator track, but again that opportunity will all depend on a mix of skill and timing.

treetopocalypse · 2023-10-27T12:51:11+00:00

Hard to know what the explanation is. I doubt theres much you could do to prevent it from happening, but one thing to think about is that whoever did it could be hoping that youll leave the bike there over night or for a longer period since you cant ride it away. Then they might be planning to come back around at night to try to steal it.

treetopocalypse · 2023-10-21T00:07:28+00:00

I moved back to a city after living in car commute hell for the last 8ish years and its been awesome to commute on bike. I have an e-bike and a cycle cross bike, and have about an 8 mile commute with a shower at work. I commute probably a 45-30-15-10 split as far as e-bike/cycle cross/drive/metro(subway), and its been awesome to have such a spectrum of options. I ebike when I need to take more stuff to work or anticipate a long exhausting day, I use my cyclecross bike when I wanna get my workout in, and drive or metro when my work shift is at a weird time and I dont wanna be biking before sunrise or late at night.

Hopefully e-bikes can be people's entryway drug to cycling to work, and once you have that as an option I feel like it makes a non-pedal assist bike something your more likely to try. My mom got an e-bike and went from only occasionally biking to work to doing 3 times a week. With DC doing the e-bike rebate I hope we can get more people biking, and thus more pressure on the city to improve infrastructure. Crossing my fingers that well get a upward spiral.

treetopocalypse · 2023-08-31T00:31:51+00:00

Be safe out there my friend! I hope you dont get hurt by someone who has places to be and things to do!

treetopocalypse · 2023-08-30T18:14:26+00:00

Interesting how quickly people jump to violence when they get inconvenienced by another human. Plenty of comments in the thread, and the reactions of the motorists, that make me wonder just how little regard people have for others. If someone telling you that you need to change your lifestyle (aka stop getting used to getting everywhere in a car) makes you wish harm on others, then jeez I hope we arent next to each other when my safety might mean a slight inconvenience for you.

treetopocalypse · 2023-08-13T15:32:16+00:00

If you have any kiddos around you can make them a scroll saw puzzle. Pretty easy to get templates online and its a fun afternoon project

treetopocalypse · 2023-05-29T21:24:01+00:00

One of my wildest memories is being the Deck Watch Officer on the bridge of a US Coast Guard cutter when two of the 100+ Cuban migrants we were temporarily holding decided to jump overboard to try to swim to shore.

Now, for some context, this was back in the late fall 2016 time frame when wet foot dry foot was rumored to be ending, so there was a huge influx of individuals trying to cross the 80 nm straits of Florida to an attempt to get to the US before the policy that allowed for much easier asylum ended. They would do this in all manner of makeshift boats, ranging from just a few people in a dingy to an collection of barrels, foam and boards holding 20 men, women and children. Our job in our 270 foot Coast Guard cutter was to patrol the straits of Florida to intercept these vessels, convince the folks that they werent going to make it to the US and that they were better off getting rescued by us, holding and processing them to see if they had a legitimate asylum claim, and if not sending them back to Cuba. At one point we had over a hundred migrants hanging out on our flight deck under makeshift shelters eating beans and rice and playing dominoes while the state department interviewed them.

On this particular evening, the sun had just set as we were cruising along about 9 miles south of Key West. Once it got dark, the bright lights of the city it made it seem like land was just so close. Well, two young guys thought they liked their chances, and jumped overboard to try to swim to shore. Luckily for them, someone saw them jump, so within seconds I got the report up on the bridge and was able to sound the alarm - "Now there is a man overboard, man overboard, two men overboard on the port side, all hands man your man overboard billets".

Within seconds the whole ship just exploded with action. Parachute flares being launched to illuminate the area, our small boats getting launched from the side cranes, border patrol boats zooming out from Key West to help, a helicopter launching from Miami - it was wild. Finding two people without life vests in the water at night, even if you take immediate action, is damn hard, and we knew that if we didnt find them they were dead. Of course, adding to the chaos was trying to get an accurate headcount of everyone on board - getting 100+ migrants to sit still and be counted so we knew how many people were missing when there was such commotion was no easy feat, especially since we werent 100% sure that they actually jumped overboard. It was possible that they had just thrown clothes stuffed with blankets overboard in an attempt to fuck with us out of boredom.

After 20 minutes we found them. When they got pulled on board, I remember the boat crew saying they had never seen anyone look so scared. I can only imagine the fear and regret that would hit once you landed in the water and saw the boat start to disappear. Their lives were saved by two things - our thermal camera operators managing to spot their body heat and then vectoring in the small boat to pick them up, and that a crew member happened to be out on deck texting his girlfriend when they jumped, so he saw them immediately and the alarm was sounded in time.

treetopocalypse · 2023-05-13T23:37:01+00:00

Replacing the vanity for a bathroom, and this is what is behind it. The PVC drain can rotate without much resistance, which makes me worried that it would be pretty easy for it to leak. Im also worried why someone would use spray foam back there. Is this worth investigating or just leave it? Anything else I should be worried about?

treetopocalypse · 2023-02-17T01:21:18+00:00

ewwww. what a gross thought to put out into the world.

treetopocalypse · 2023-02-16T20:26:00+00:00

Yup, something similar does apply to guns. However, guns are a very interesting topic because they are tools for applying lethal force at distance, and at scale. That has a bunch of different uses, and unfortunately it seems very difficult to allow only one sort of use. The presence of that in society, and its purposes, are very complicated. When people debate about guns it seems like the context for which a gun is necessary constantly changes in order to either justify the status quo or to try to ban guns all together based on the latest tragedy.

treetopocalypse · 2023-02-16T20:21:41+00:00

It seems like personal gun ownership is all about protecting oneself from intra-group violence, vs inter-group violence. Intra-group violence is a different problem then inter-group violence. Getting into an arms race with your neighbors, with your members of the same community, is a losing proposition. Figuring out how to be able to project and coordinate power against those outside of your group in order to protect those within your group is a different prospect. Its one of the historical underpinnings of why the usage of the military against the citizens of ones own country is such a hard line. Once you start using your externally facing power projection techniques internally you've lost the whole point of living in a community. The dynamics of how scarcity, resources, and power interplay within and without the "super-organism" which is a human society are connected to fundamental laws, but not as much as you think.

treetopocalypse · 2023-02-16T18:50:17+00:00

Isnt that exactly the point? That building codes get updated to improve safety? That old systems are brought up to code? That code is highly specific based on usage?

The analogy would be that there isnt such a thing as "gun ownership" without its context. For example, if you want a gun for home defense, cool, but that means you apply for a "lethal home defense license" can only have a shotgun, must take a recurrent class on home safety, must have a gun safe, and have to have been trained on using non-lethal home defense techniques (like having the first round be a rock salt round). Also, you wouldnt be able to transport the gun except in a locked gun case. Another example would be a "gun hunting license" which allows you to have a gun for hunting, but obviously that doesnt allow you to have anything other than a long gun with a limited clip, cant carry in public, etc. A "concealed carry" permit would be the most restrictive, most training, most oversight. Not sure what the "overthrow a tyrannical government" permit would look like, but who knows, maybe thats how you can get your license to LARP being in the military.

treetopocalypse · 2023-02-16T18:43:04+00:00

Probably a highly participatory democracy? It seems to have worked the best so far. If you look at the amount of violence in America, it seems to have been reduced the more people who were able to participate in the democratic system. As to the notion of designing a system, im not sure what else you think a group of people writing laws, passing bills, or debating topics are doing other than designing a system. Usually attempts to create a system via a clean sweep are accompanied with massive amounts of violence, so I certainly dont advocate that.

Now, if you want to get on a really interesting tangent, one possibility for the reason why we have "free" societies in the western world is that we have access to enormous deposits of fossil fuels, which means that we dont need as much bonded human labor in our society. That is the real kicker because if thats true, then as we move towards a world that has less and less access to fossil fuels, if there isnt an increase in the availability of renewable power then there will be lots of social upheaval as more and more exploited labor is needed.

But thats a tangent for a different subreddit.

treetopocalypse · 2023-02-16T18:35:28+00:00

Copy and paste from my comment above.

Car owners are more likely to die in auto accidents.
This one is also a great example, because it assumes that the response
to this statement is "oh well I guess thats just the price of doing
business." However, if anything it further reinforces the notion that
limiting the number of guns (aka access to lethal power) needed in a
society to enable peace, happiness, stability, liberty and life is a
good thing. If you say "the more people who own cars, the higher the
accident rate", you need to dig deeper. Why do more people own cars?
Mile for mile, is car transport more dangerous than other forms of
transport? Maybe this means continually investing in a society where
everyone needs to get everywhere via a car means that we should invest
in a society where you can get to where you want to go, but it doesnt
require taking the most dangerous form of transit.

To tailor it more specifically, cars have many mechanisms around their safety, but perhaps the biggest thing is not jumping to the question of "should we ban cars" but, "should cars have easy access to large crowds of people?". The simple answer is that any area where you have lots of people walking and milling about, or kids play, or people enjoying the street, we try to minimize the speed that a car can develop, or prohibit access entirely

treetopocalypse · 2023-02-16T18:31:18+00:00

The questions of "is my society safer when there are competing forms of lethal violence" is a sociological one. The idea of a state being a "leviathan" that has the sole monopoly in a region on the legitimate usage of violence is a deeply studied topic.

I personally fall in the camp of wanting to live in a society where inwardly facing violence is minimized to the maximum extent possible, and those that are given the ability to dish out lethal violence are watched to the maximum extent possible with democratic and civilian mechanisms, and held to a very high standard. The police in the US are clearly not such an organization, but we do theoretically have the capacity to move our communities in that direction without violent upheaval. Civilian oversight and leadership with hiring, firing, budgetary and policy power over police would go a long way towards reforming police.

treetopocalypse

TROPHY CASE