...m...

…sleeve of saltines and a block of grated cheddar were my go-to lunch as a kid; no regrets…

(these days i’m more into triscuits and cheddar slices, the pricey aged cheeses rather than big orange store-brand bricks)

…when i turned thirty, i was a grownup, and people started treating me like one: grownups are f*cking old and their lives are over…

…here’s the thing most folks don’t realise: as a metropolitan area, austin skews far more conservative than san antonio…

_{(we actually meet in the basement of the alamo)}

As a European, the whole registering to vote thing is honestly one of the wildest parts of the US elections to me. It’s so unnecessary complicated and prone to errors/manipulation.

…what the electorate consider a bug the politicians consider a feature…

…i don’t know that i shouldn’t’ve seen it, but the 1978 invasion of the body snatchers was my introduction to existential horror at the ripe age of seven years…

…what shouldn’t i have seen?..about a year earlier, a family friend handed-down a big brown grocery bag stacked to the rim with pre-code EC horror comics: that was some teeth-gnashingly gruesome stuff…

…we have a couple of industrial fans but the sound’s not quite right by comparison to cross-flow impellers…

…at some level i secretly suspect that sleeping under omnipresent white noise has only made my tinnitus worse over time, but that could also be a natural consequence of my ears aging-out…

(could also come from driving a convertible at speed while blasting music on a three-hour commute every day, if i’m honest)

…white noise drowns out the ringing in my ears and calms the voices in my head…

…my fan broke earlier this year; i’m shopping for a mechanical white-noise generator…

…when our central air conditioner failed during this summer’s hundred-degree spell, i installed a temporary window-box unit and sleeping was BLISS: tinnitus gang needs fans…

…finesteride works, not a placebo…

…not entirely sure; possibly a proxy for snapping in real life?..

OSI - Stockholm

…i’ve been carrying a lot of pent-up rage…

…that’d take a deep dive into obsolete building codes to identify exactly when the concept was first introduced: BOCA, southern/standard, and uniform building codes all merged into IBC about twenty-five years ago so we’re talking about old paper code books from twentieth century…

…areas of refuge are closely tied to modern accessibility standards which arose from the ADA in 1990; i’m guessing they were widely introduced sometime in that decade, possibly earlier for high-rises or hazardous occupancies, but they were definitely part of 1997 UBC (which most of california enforced) and 2000 IBC…

(i started working professionally in 1993 and every project i worked on was fully accessible, but adoption varied across different jurisdictions and when i worked in california a decade later they were waaaay less accessible than texas)

…we used unpowered dollies of similar design for moving large appliances back when i was a groundskeeper…

…exit slides were common fire escapes in the 1950s and you can still find abandoned hatches in some older buildings, but in my experiences renovating aged facilities they’ve all been sealed-off (and signs removed) during life-safety modernisations over the past seventy years…

…they’re pretty dangerous by modern standards so alternatives are always preferred, similar to old abandoned exterior fire escapes…

…architect here: we design protected areas of refuge where mobilty-impared occupants can shelter in place until emergency services arrive to evacuate them from the facility…

…you’ll often see areas of refuge identified near elevator lobbies and equipped with hardened callboxes for emergency communication, or marked on the evacuation plan if they’re in a remote location…sometimes areas of refuge are pretty subtle if you don’t know to look for them: we design protected firewalls, structure, and building systems integrated into the facility so the biggest tells are usually callboxes, magnetic door hold-opens, or tracks for automatic fire curtains…

…when renovating older facilities, we do the best we can to modernise life safety within the limitations of existing infrastructure, but the general rule of thumb is that as long as you’ve improved upon what originally previously existed, you’ve satisfied your obligation even if it’s not at parity with new construction…

(it’s not uncommon for old facilities to have gone through a dozen or more life-safety modernisations since the advent of modern building codes, just palimpsested one-over-the-other as standards progressed)

fear leads to anger.
anger leads to hate.
hate leads to fascism, i guess.

Baah Weep Granah Weep Nini-bong.

(it’s actually three teaspoons per tablespoon)

nincompoop