7bicycles [he/him]

I reformated that so much I forgot to include my dissatisfaction was mostly with e-bikes and the associated electronics lmao

But yeah, bottom brackets are ridicolous. Only reason we ever moved away from BSA was cost cutting and now that everyone and their grandma has creaky high end bikes people just return to BSA anyways.

I tell you, if I ever become emperor of a country it will have the world largest bicycle industry and everything is in absolutely standardized parts

yeah the whole dang teenagers and their bluetooth boxes always struck me as odd. I mean not that it’s not dick behaviour but considering we allow sports cars to annoy everyone in like a 1 mile radius when the owner decides to compensate for whatever it feels odd that there’s this focus on people listening to music

I feel like every new comfort feature on a car is solved legally by still having the person at the wheel responsible and since now the computer does it (well enough maybe 60% of the time) you see way more of an increase in stuff like too bright lights, missing lights cause the rain detector isn’t working and things of that nature because people just assume the car will take care of it

To add to this, I feel this with recent updated road laws here to make them more “cycling friendly”, a trend that laws keep getting written that are either impossible to enforce the way they’re written or nobody gives a shit either. Basically just making the question of liablity easier after the fact. Which seems sort of like a very shit proposition for road laws to me

I work in IT and you can basically track enthusiasm about self driving cars along the lines of technical knowledge

have you considered my spontaneous daily shopping trip for my family of 8 that includes either a washing machine or large furniture

The propietary shit around bicycles was never good, especially drivetrains, but on the other hand most of it was some sort of standard easy enough to machine with modern technology that you got at least 1 factory in china still cranking out the most esoteric shit possible because ehh it costs them $2 to make or something and they can sell it for $25 or something, why not. It’s just pipes and diameters and threading.

Bit late to the party so I don’t have much to offer that hasn’t been said already, except: if you don’t want to buy a specialty tool like a chainwhip you can jury rig it with an old chain and a pipe wrench or similar to clamp them together - just gotta stop the gears from turning

Just be reaaaaaaaaal careful and think about how you’re applying force and which way your hand goes if you slip, I’ve got a scar from slicing my hand open on the sprockets lol

Depending on your location if you want better front brake than normal V-Brake or maybe Cantis, Magura makes hydraulic rim brakes and they just slot on the existing infrastructure. I can find them here for about 20€ / brake on the craigslist equivalent, but then this is germany where they hail from. Also depending on location maybe there’s something like a self help repair workshop or a bike kitchen near you that could help you out.

One last tip that helped me greatly in all things bike maintenance is to spend a bit of time understanding how it works. Sure you can follow a set of directions, but especially for say, rear derailleur adjustment it’s a much easier time if you actually understand what the fuck the H and L screws do and why to troubleshoot any mistakes. Most guides presuppose you’re wrenching on showroom floor type bikes, hardly the case in the real world.

what if concorde but more technology

No, definitely on the list though, I hardly find time to game these days

It’s a sort of you know it when you see it (play it) thing. Something along the lines of becoming more than the sum of their parts and also using the interactivity that the medium provides.

When I played TLOU I enjoyed it but I kept thinking “this might as well be a TV show and lose nothing for it”. It’s a well made story, presented with technical prowess in an interesting setting, then it’s also a sort of well made stealth cover shooter but it just doesn’t come together. That’s not to denigrate the individual efforts and art made there, I’m not saying it’s shit, but there’s just so much potential left on the table there. If you can 1:1 translate your game into a TV Show, like TLOU, why was it ever a video game to begin with, if you come at it from an art standpoint.

I don’t know if you played Gothic or S.T.A.L.K.E.R., those are quite similar in how it’s a great setting, well made (well, bar eurojank), the story is serviceable at best and for stalker especially veers off into nonsense at the end but crucially neither games would work as a book, or a film, or a visual novel. You could use the setting, sure, the art design and lore and stuff is solid enough to carry lots of interesting stories and have been used as such but it’d lose such a tremendous amount of what makes it great that it just doesn’t work. The first episode of Gothic (TV Show) is a man who walks into a city after pullign some beets and buying his way in. Or possibly sneaking in. Or maybe he murders someone and steals the uniform. Sure, that can be well made, but the point of Gothic is that you have all these options, go nuts. Fuck, transform into a raptor and cause mayhem then revert to human in the confusion, game will let you, but that’s the sort of thing that can’t be translated to other mediums well.

I’m currently playing through Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor, that certainly goes more the indie artsy route, and I love it because again, doesn’t work in another medium. What makes it great is that it hits the line between the trash collection being tedious and frustrating, but still engaging enough, that it conveys the feeling the little sanidrone would have through interactivity. It sucks, but it is your only hope. And then the rest of it is also just very well made.

Current mood is a toss up between

“I dream of a society where I would be guillotined as a conservative.” - Proudhon / “I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member” - Marx (Groucho)

Another contender for greatest quote (george lucas subcategory)

I genuinely like to engage with video games as an art form and I think some of them are among the actual best works of art there is.

It lands like absolutely nowhere. EIther people see you as a capital G gamer, but even the capital G gamers hate you because they want to enjoy product, not art

laughs in Dutch… we don’t do crap like that. Just buy a bike you use daily, and fix the parts that brake. (stadsfiets)

yeah except of course when y’all invent something like the now defunct VanMoof

pick targeted crime instead of wanton crime then

So much shit around bicycles is a scam because barring some major inventions like shocks for mountainbikes or maybe carbon frames it’s very much a solved problem, but it doesn’t fit into a capitalist economy if everybody just buys one bicycle and then occasionally parts for it to fix it.

Hold on dearly to any leverage you might have over your employer

OTOH Running with Scissors sucks major ass

Bicycles

I’m not proposing nobody knows about bicycles or anything but it’s sort of odd how often I come across some type of [scenario perfect for bicycle] post that asks whatever they should do