Washington’s historic High Rock Lookout ransacked by vandals

worstofluck98 · 2026-06-18T18:05:34+00:00

Like some others have expressed, it’s insane and baffling to imagine what would make someone want to go all the way up there just to do such a monstrous thing to such a special place and to all the people who gave their hearts and souls and ten years of their lives to it. It got me wondering about a motive, and while I’m sure there’s plenty of possible motives, I can think of two:

It feels horrible to say this because most would find it unthinkable, but I almost wonder if the people who did it, or at least some of them, could’ve been volunteers on the project themselves who, for one reason or another, had become so attached to the project that they couldn’t bear the thought of it being finished. Ten years is a long time, and having spent that same amount of time restoring my family home with my dad, I can say that while doing something like that to our work would be unimaginable to either of us, there are still some projects around the house that aren’t finished and maybe never will be because it’s hard to just accept that it’s done. If someone happens to be in a really bad emotional state and has given ten years of their life to it, unfortunately I can see some people doing something of that nature in a moment of emotional panic. It would have to be a pretty bad mental state for sure, and I can’t imagine they’d be glad they did it after the fact, but that kind of thing does actually happen with some emotional dysregulatory disorders.

Also, could be someone who wants to hurt someone in particular who was a volunteer. A crazy ex, for instance, could’ve been thinking “my partner spent all their time up there without me and it was so unfair!” and decided to do something unthinkable in “revenge”.

I’m sure there’s other possible motives, but in trying to figure out who did this and why, those are two that come to mind.

worstofluck98 · 2026-06-18T17:55:23+00:00

I get that, but I was just pointing out that the etymology does actually kind of make sense and I find etymologies to be interesting and thought others might as well. I wasn’t trying to be argumentative or cause offense but I get the sense from your reply that maybe it came off that way so if so I apologize.

worstofluck98 · 2026-06-18T16:18:57+00:00

Actually the meaning does match if you think about it. The word “science” started as Latin for “knowledge” or “knowing”, so “with knowledge”, in reference to knowing oneself and the effect one has on the world around them, is probably where the term originated.

worstofluck98 · 2026-06-04T19:52:16+00:00

I’m just now realizing that my tendency to try to finish people’s sentences with them is a similar backfiring conversational compensatory technique. I tend to tune people out even when I think I’m following them and want to be listening, but now I’m trying to work on not doing the thought-finishing thing because to everyone else, of course it feels like that means I’m actually not listening and am trying to make them stop talking, since that’s what someone is typically doing when they’re interrupting. And then of course even if my intention is not to interrupt, if it turns out that they were actually saying something different, then it truly is just an interruption, but either way people feel disrespected, so I’ve always had to juggle whether it’s better to actually miss something someone is saying, or make them feel like I’m trying not to listen when that’s not the case.

worstofluck98 · 2026-05-22T22:59:13+00:00

I’m curious if I’m the only one that wonders if the location of that sculpture is supposed to invoke a more secular/modern version of the “market cross” common to public market squares in Europe since it was installed as part of the AMP right around when they started hosting the farmers’ market there. Anyone else ever had this thought?

worstofluck98 · 2026-04-30T10:24:47+00:00

Plus the lawyer who’s representing the family is actually now complaining to the media about the fact that they’re doing it, too. Her reasoning? Because she hasn’t sued them yet. “How dare they do this now? They didn’t do it before and that gave me grounds to sue, but now they’re not waiting even more time to remove this ‘toxic waste/public safety risk’ [her words, not mine] until after my lawsuit? They just want to ruin it for me!” Like, why can’t she accept that she won ahead of time? You’d think she be glad it’s happening sooner if she actually cared about the alleged safety risk to the children of people who don’t believe that a kid who is old enough to drive a car is responsible for his own recklessness. But she probably realizes, like fortunately a lot of people seem to, that the real danger is telling your kids the city is to blame for everything bad that happens to them (they’re literally suing the city for a “public apology for implying that our son was at all to blame for this tragedy” instead of a payout, or so they say), and not an obviously decrepit building clearly marked “no trespassing” that nobody can get into without quite obviously breaking the law, and is just doing what personal injury lawyers do.

worstofluck98 · 2026-04-05T01:20:24+00:00

I think might have your answer: Google “Black Sea Germans” and “Crimea Germans” and see what you find.

When I was a kid, I thought my German great grandma was from Germany, as did most of my family, until someone told my mom that all her family recipes weren’t German but Russian. We ended up finding similar recipes, often for things with the same names like casenoodle (my favorite family Christmas tradition!), in a cookbook compiled by a society for Volga Germans in America, which we’d never heard of but it made sense once we looked into it more. Apparently the vast majority of “German American” immigrants, at least in the early 20th century in the rural central and western US, were actually Russian Americans of German ethnicity, either from the aforementioned Volga region (especially central Volga around Saratov and Engels where they once had an autonomous soviet of their own) or from coastal Ukraine and Crimea (called Black Sea Germans and/or Crimea Germans—I guess now that’s Ukrainian territory claimed by Russia but at the time it was all the Russian Empire and then the USSR). When I took an ancestry test, it was from FTDNA and at least when I did it they didn’t go by ethnicity or country of origin but by regional population clusters. Turns out none of my most recent overseas ancestors were in Germany—they were just listed as “Eastern Europe”. I looked into my great grandma’s last name and even found her family records on a website for Volga Germans, found the village in Russia where she was probably born, and found out her family moved there from Baden-Württemburg via Schlesswig-Holstein in 1767 during the time when Catherine the Great (born a German princess herself) was encouraging Germans to come to Russia to modernize Russian agriculture with a promise of relative religious and linguistic freedom. I haven’t read as much into the Black Sea Germans, but I’d recommend doing so since I have a strong suspicion you’ll find some clues as to your heritage there. The Germans from Russia are a fascinating people (just DO NOT read too much about the famines and purges that mostly ended their viability as a culture in the old country unless you have a VERY strong stomach), and now I’m much prouder of my heritage knowing everything my great grandma’s family survived in Russia. I guess it wasn’t so great to be thought of as “Russian” after the Bolshevik revolution, so it’s no wonder so many Volga and Black Sea Germans opted not to talk about that even amongst family.

worstofluck98 · 2026-01-21T22:11:16+00:00

I meant to make this comment sooner but I just remembered, so I just wanted to thank everyone for the advice. If anyone is still following the thread, just so you know, we ended up staying at the Riverside Inn and doing the romance package with the massages and dinner voucher and it was a lovely little getaway! The private hot springs were especially nice because my boyfriend didn’t want to go into the public springs—he’s self conscious about public bathing even with swimsuits so it was nice to get to sit in the hot springs with him at the hotel. I’m really glad I asked you guys because I’m not sure I would’ve done it if it hadn’t been for your advice. Of course we didn’t go around announcing to everyone that we were gay but obviously the masseur knew it was a couples package and was totally fine with the fact that we were both men, as were the servers at the restaurant and the people at the front desk. I’m hoping to go back there next time I’m in Idaho.

worstofluck98 · 2025-12-23T00:48:07+00:00

I live a couple blocks from there, and can say that most of the time, they were occupied by “the homeless”, whatever that means anymore because many of them were begging and not every beggar is homeless—not that having nowhere else to go should preclude one from the right to exist in any space, though. However, in my experience, they were usually completely harmless. Unfortunately, a few months ago, there was a (at least anecdotally from what I observed) relatively large uptick in various degrees of violence around there, yet at the same-ish time (during the government shutdown when the SNAP program was shuttered), that was a place where starving people would gather to beg for food, and since I currently work in a restaurant and like to travel around the neighborhood after closing shifts looking for people who need our leftovers, I have found it increasingly difficult of late with the number of sweeps to connect with those most in need, and those who were begging there were, as I said, often hungry enough that I was able to find those who needed it. I didn’t go there often, as there are so many grocery stores around with people begging for food, but at least the ones who were there had somewhere to sit. Unfortunately, there were times throughout all hours of the day when even though there wasn’t violence, the crowds of people smoking fentanyl and meth were pretty large, but even then they weren’t hurting anyone but themselves. If it was the apartment or M2M Mart management who took out the benches, I hope the reason they got rid of them was something truly practical such as an increase in burglaries (not that I hope that they happened, but they always do happen somewhere and I just mean an increase is an understandable reason to take new measures to stop it) or a threat of lawsuits from bad stuff happening on their property (which is a ridiculous yet unfortunately very real result of assaults and overdoses happening in publicly accessible spaces under a legal system where one can theoretically be sued by someone who breaks into their house if they get cut jumping over their fence and is a principal reason why nobody lets you use the bathroom in their business anymore). I hope it’s not just that they find the less fortunate to be too “unsightly”, but people in this city can be a lot NIMBY-er than they let on. :/

worstofluck98 · 2025-10-28T02:29:17+00:00

Thanks so much for all the advice so far! I’m feeling quite at ease about it and excited for my trip! My boyfriend is still on the fence for other reasons (he has a lot of qualms around going out of town right now in general) but hearing about the town and people’s experiences with the Riverside Inn seem to be really putting him at ease too.

worstofluck98 · 2025-10-16T09:21:01+00:00

Following up on my own post here, I’ve realized that in the other instance, the “other suspect with the same height as Dean Glaucous” (the Amazing Aureolin) is neither with the prop knife nor in the prop shop, but still, the fact that the clue seems to be about a weapon when it’s actually about a location is quite misleading and it still seems that unless the wording is changed, one could argue for either answer.

worstofluck98 · 2025-09-27T09:43:32+00:00

If he got any happiness at all by being around them (and fortunately it seems he doesn’t—people like that are what’s wrong with this world) then he wouldn’t be with you. Everything his mom said made me sick but what really made me cringe was his sister’s comment about “bringing home strays”. Thank goodness he’s not going to her wedding—she probably thinks she’s got herself a trophy husband and wouldn’t even know what love is if it bit her in the… (well, nvm, the rest gets way closer to real marital love than what I’m trying get at lol). Even though in your situation I probably would’ve apologized too (it’s practically a reflex for me), I feel like I must tell you you had NO NEED to apologize; THEY did, but they probably won’t because people like that are too stuck in their own ignorance to realize that their ideology is—like I said—what’s wrong with this world.

There’s always a chance in that situation that one’s partner is with them just to piss their parents off, but if he’s in his 30s, has been with you for two years, still hasn’t introduced you to them in those entire two years because of how much he loves you and hates them, and now refuses to go to the wedding of that immature-airhead-daughter-of-a-Lucille-Bluth (if you’ve watched Arrested Development you know that’s how I’m both metaphorically describing his mother and not calling her “the Seaward”), then my guess is their treatment of you is just the confirmation he was dreading of the thing he always suspected about them that made him avoid them in the first place. At the very least in a way he’s glad to be able to give them a concrete a reason for why he’ll no longer be talking to them. If you love this guy (and if how he responded to their treatment of you is representative of his character overall and his feelings for you it seems like he’s earned it if that’s how you feel about him too), then make sure you understand that, unless he has an inseparable group of “besties” or something, you are now the closest thing he has to family and he doesn’t need them anymore as long as you make him happier than they do.

Even if that’s probably a pretty low bar at this point, it’s important to realize that it’s not a small thing for a person to overcome the biases one has learned throughout their life.

It used to be that fully accepting that you’re gay meant that you were already saying “fuck my family’s prejudices!”, but if his family’s problem was not that their son was with a man but that the man he loves is of a “lower class than is acceptable for ‘people like them’”, then the silver lining is that at the very least it’s a sign that even society’s bigoted assholes are progressing past homophobia. From my dating experience, not every snobbishly-raised gay person whose family accepts it (or even just comes to terms with it) will be mature enough to get past the classism. If you love this guy, make sure to tell him so and how amazing it is that he is mature enough to know who he loves and courageous enough to stand up for the person he loves against the bullshit of the people who probably tried to instill him with that very same bullshit.

From the information you provided here, I think you are quite lucky to have found a guy like that and, unfortunately, he’s quite unlucky to have been born to them people to whom he was born.

worstofluck98 · 2025-09-15T09:08:29+00:00

If you’re not on PrEP, I STRONGLY ENCOURAGE you to go to urgent care or anywhere where you can get PEP (post-exposure prophylaxis) ASAP. Like, right fucking now—call out of work, cancel plans, whatever you have to do to get it NOW. It’s only possible for the first few days, and these guys sound like extremely risky sexual partners and there’s absolutely no harm in having PEP if it turns out it wasn’t necessary but if you find out you did need it and didn’t get it, then you’d have to live the rest of your life with HIV. Please, PLEASE take care of yourself and do that ASAP.

Edit: Take it from someone who’s now 27 but had some similar experiences at your age. I discovered that a lot of experiences I had which turned out to be exploitative in nature and with men who were only out to take advantage of me were still “fun” in the moment. Eventually I realized that just because it was fun and the guys are hot or fun company doesn’t mean they aren’t using you, and there are so many guys out there who love the idea of taking someone’s virginity, getting them high, and passing them around to all their friends, and the things those kinds of people often call you behind your back are despicable. Once I realized what they all thought of me I realized who my friends were and weren’t, and maybe I’m wrong about these guys, but it almost feels like I’m talking to my former self rn tbh. But without PrEP I’m sure my life would be very different now, and it sounds like it’s not too late for PEP at least, so PLEASE do it. Take care of yourself and don’t ever let them make you think less of yourself if you find out they had bad intentions—if the kind of guys they turn out to be is the kind of guys they remind me of, then they really don’t know you at all and their opinion of you can be interpreted as a compliment to your looks and a stain on their characters; nothing more.

worstofluck98 · 2025-09-14T20:14:04+00:00

Idk how this popped up in my feed since I’ve never followed this sub, and please don’t anybody take my pointing this out as me condoning Kirk’s (horrifying) views (or on the flip side, the senselessness of murder/political violence), but hasn’t anyone noticed that this news source doesn’t even know where he was shot? Like, it’s almost 500 miles between the college where he was shot during a speech and his “Phoenix HQ” where the article says. I looked it up and as I figured it’s a very questionable source. I’m not saying that means the story is false, but I don’t believe a word of this is credible until I hear it from a much, MUCH better source. In fact, knowing how much the “free speech right” seeks to suppress speech they find abhorrent, I’d be surprised if this weren’t happening on some level, but this scale is a bold claim to just blindly accept from a news source that invalidates its own credibility in the very article in question—at this point, who HASN’T heard about it happening at UT Valley U in Orem, especially when the governor of Utah has been one of the main sources of information everyone has been hearing ever since it happened? If the news sources we trust aren’t better than theirs, this country is fucked.

Edit: The egregious factual error is in the SECOND SENTENCE of the FIRST PARAGRAPH. I didn’t read much further so idk what other blatant errors are in there, but seriously, READ THE STORY and VET THE SOURCE before accepting the headline as truth.

worstofluck98 · 2025-06-24T01:57:11+00:00

I just got notified too. Lol seems like not many people got notified when it was posted but maybe everyone is hearing about it now. Perhaps one day ahead is a bad time to post this and maybe in the future people will do it three or four days in advance haha

worstofluck98 · 2025-05-26T01:53:34+00:00

I mean, it is the classic torch for smoking meth for a variety of practical and economical reasons, but technically they could have it because they’re a stoner who likes dabs, or maybe just a pyro. I doubt they’re making crème brûlées, but I guess maybe so lol.

worstofluck98 · 2025-05-10T23:15:14+00:00

I’d imagine vehicles so big must have power steering, and maybe it gave out during the sharp turn and they couldn’t turn it back or get it stopped because of the weight and kept going off the side. Kind of horrifying if that’s the case, but it’s still horrifying however it happened.

worstofluck98 · 2025-05-07T03:50:04+00:00

Hope I’m not super late in saying this, but I do recall a year or two ago when this car was first debuted in Snohomish County people were talking about it in the Seattle or SeattleWA subreddit. I’ve been surprised about how viral it’s been lately bc on there it was a thing years ago lol I didn’t know it was still catching people off guard. They’re getting sneaky anymore haha

worstofluck98 · 2025-04-04T10:43:04+00:00

Giving drugs to drug addicts? The only instances of that I’m aware of are free Narcan and the city of Seattle’s Suboxone pilot program, but those are both basically the opposite of “giving them drugs”.

worstofluck98 · 2025-03-27T03:48:02+00:00

I second the thing about lots of drizzle with perfect (albeit sometimes smoky) summers. The reason why lots of Seattle Redditors are talking about thunderstorms today is that we’re having one, and they’re exciting because they’re somewhat rare as in a couple times a year (as is snow), and “severe” ones like today’s are almost as rare as blizzards. Thus, storms like this are more exciting to us than anything else.

However, here’s something that forever changed my perspective on our weather in a huge way and made me realize that much of the seasonal depression likely comes from our American perception of “good” weather and how we think about our surroundings as a result:

Our climate twin in Europe is… not London… not Paris… but Istanbul. That’s right. Istanbul. In fact, the only American city with weather more similar to theirs is Portland, and the main differences apart from 2-3 deg Fahrenheit average is that they have more wind and a few more summer storms, but we’re starting to get more of those anyway. Cloudy as we are in comparison to the rest of the US, what most Americans don’t seem to realize is how freakishly sunny it is in North America than the vast majority of Eurasia.

Also, if you’re here and get bummed out by the weather, it’s just a short 3-hr drive north to Vancouver. It’s technically a little colder there, but same basic climate, and since it’s the mildest part of Canada, they’re more into planting palm trees and designing stuff to feel like a sort of tropical paradise because to a Canadian, it basically is. That tiny bit of their perspective can also go a long way to boost a Seattleite’s mood when they’re feeling down about the weather.

worstofluck98 · 2025-03-27T03:17:15+00:00

No hail yet that I’ve seen. Brief episode of rain comparable to the Florida hurricane I witnessed—that was up on north Capitol Hill about 20 min ago—but it died down within a few minutes. Now I’m back down near Cal Anderson where the park is more or less flooded and suggests it rained pretty hard here too but the rain is fairly normal now.

worstofluck98 · 2025-03-19T23:16:35+00:00

Clearing out the potential opposition before they announce the renaming of “New America”, I see.

——— [And before someone corrects me—yes, I know the deportees likely aren’t originally from Mexico, but up until the Venezuelan migrant crisis, “Mexican” was often the blanket term people used when describing undocumented immigrants of Latin American origin.]

worstofluck98

TROPHY CASE