Twice a car has come into the bike lane while I was in it and I swear my heart was in my throat. I was fine both times, but people get distracted and I'm all for barriers
Less traffic routes is usually my strategy as well. Annoying to lose the time, but so much less stressful having less cars around
How Los Angeles Makes Biking in Paradise a Nightmare
Visited L.A. recently and was not impressed. One of the thoughts I had there was, "I would hate to bike here." I commute via bike in Montana despite the lack of infrastructure, nice to see some are still Biking in LA. Hopefully they can improve. Very entertaining video as well!
I live in Montana in a city that is extremely bike friendly relative to nearby states. Still the little bits of friction make choosing to bike difficult. My work commute is 3 miles with a bike path most of the way, and then a bike lane for most of the rest. I biked to work every day this last year (even through the snow) and I loved it, but it made me bitter to how much cars are preferred.
Some of the crosswalks I use are parallel to a 45MPH stroad and I hate crossing them. Cars barely have to slow down to take the huge turns and they never are looking for pedestrians/bikes. I always stop and wait for a gap in cars because the chances I'm seen are just too low. Not Just Bikes has a good video on making crosswalks safer and I wish my city would take notes. One of my friends has been hit by a car 3 times because he's more reckless on crosswalks than me - I hate saying reckless because it should be a place that's safe for him to cross - no injuries ever.
In winter the bike paths were sometimes plowed, other times they'd just wait until the next storm. Snow drifts never were plowed. Studded tires are a must. The unreliability was a huge pain. I remember one snow storm came in while I was working and I had to walk my bike most of the way home.
Some of the lights make pedestrians wait an entire light cycle to cross so I'll leave the bike path to ride in the road just to save time. I know they do it in the name of safety so that bikes cross right when the light is green and are more visible, but it's hugely punishing to bike commute times, and I would argue that it's no safer. Cars aren't going to see bikes either way. I've complained to my city twice about one particularly dangerous intersection on the bike path and was told they have a 7 year plan to make it safer. No details how. I hope for once it involves slowing down cars.
Also, for the small section of my commute in the painted bike lane, I've been pushed off the road twice by cars. Both times on their cellphones. So I don't see painted bike lanes as offering any protection at all.
Why does the sun heat the Earth if space is a vacuum?
If you enjoy science fiction, Ready Player One is super great. Do not judge it based off the movie. Quite different plots. Do skip Ready Player Two though.
Thanks! I don't think I realized tempo during our game, but it's obvious now. The video was super helpful as well. Gonna pummel my wife tonight (just kidding, I'll share what I learned).
Really glad to hear that there isn't really a "bad match-up" problem, but you just need to learn how to play against different heroes. In MTG we've discovered quite a few bad match-up decks. We have the most fun when it feels like skill is involved, and no player pulls too far ahead. I've even made some decks with the intention of them playing against each other. So FaB not suffering as much from this excites me!!
This weekend I'll try and get a few more games in but my wife is studying for a big test so we'll see. I might try out Fai vs Katsu for the first game to teach my brother in law. I'm hoping having more, cheap attacks means less planning during blocking so maybe the game starts to click earlier. Then we'll hopefully move on to try other heroes.
The 8 decks I got from ebay didn't have all the equipments for each hero. Just a pool of generics, and a few specialized. But Azalea had a bow that I don't think the official precon has, this one lets you pay 1 to put a card from hand face up in your arsenal. I'm pretty excited to try and pick out some good equipment for each hero! Really wishing my LGS sold FaB so I didn't have to order online.
How are they doing this though? They just black list any traffic coming from all VPNs they know about?
What if someone in the US were to use a VPN?
Or are they getting location data from the phone itself?
Update: Played Fai vs Azalea last night. It was fun but on my (Fai's) first turn I had a huge chain and did a bunch of damage. Took a bit for my wife to figure out Azalea but the game ended up being close.
May try another game with these decks since we liked the themes, but my first impression was that Fai "forces" Azalea to block and without enough cards in hand Azalea might only get one arrow shot. Meanwhile Fai could block once or twice and still get in quite a few swings. I'm guessing blitz is more swingy since it's such a short game. I was wondering if Katsu vs Fai might be fun since they're both ninjas
Sorry meant to comment on @[email protected]'s comment. Moved there. I'd definitely use this as well!
I’m pretty sure this is satire, right? Haha, it’s got to be. Will upvote once confirmed
I'm pretty sure this is satire, right? Haha, it's got to be. Will upvote once confirmed
Linux would be best for reliability. Nothing's better than untimely windows updates. Also, less power usage. If you do decide to go with Linux you should look into running jellyfin via docker. Makes it super portable and best of all makes it simple to run other docker services from the same machine (nextcloud, trillium, pihole).
You can set up duckdns for free domain names (with a docker service for dynamic IP) and use nginx as a reverse proxy to all your services (if you plan on streaming outside your house)
Blitz deck recommendations for beginners?
Got the MTG blues due to Wizards acting so crumby lately.
Gonna visit my brother in law (we usually play Magic (and ignore my sister)) this weekend, so wanted to try FAB.
So I ordered 8 blitz decks off eBay for super cheap; my local game store doesn't sell FAB. I also bought official Dromai and Fai blitz decks because I heard they're a good match up.
I noticed the oficial decks came with a card ranking their difficulty to play. Dromai is 4.5 stars difficult I guess, and Fai is 2 stars.
Played a game with my wife and it was challenging to get the hang of defending, and knowing what to pitch, and realizing you don't have another action point.
Anyways I'm hoping to get some suggestions on which decks we should start playing with, that hopefully also will be fun to play against each other. Just by reading some heroes, I feel they'd be hard for a beginner. The decks I have are:
- Azalea
- Dorinthia
- Bravo
- Katsu
- Rhinar
- Viserai
- Kano
- Dash
- Fai
- Dromai
Wife and I played Bravo v Dorinthia and she really struggled trying to get two attacks with her weapon each turn, and I don't think I ever used my weapon. Azalea seems like she might be straightforward.
Super excited to play another game.
Maybe the game just takes time to comprehend, but the difficulty ratings made me wonder. Thanks for any help!!
Rouge-likes and wave based shooters.
Love risk of rain 2, and have played years of zombies. Just discovered vampire survivors
This video gives me hope!! Wild how much push back trains and busses get in the U.S...
I sometimes buy a physical book but end up pirating a copy to my ereader so I can read in bed easier and use the dyslexic font. Makes me a bit sad that the books don't get those creases in the spine from being read. Just looks like I own a bunch of books I didn't read
Europe sounds great. Hard to image being able to take rail between major cities/countries! There's just nothing like that in the US. Extremely limited passenger trains.
It's definitely on our bucket list to tour Europe. Hard to get a large chunk of time off work though.
Turns out I had pictures of the two bus stops that looked identical to us at the large hub - I posted them in another comment
Found the pictures I took of the two similar bus stops in the same hub that tricked us up. We were looking for the "Metro Silver J 950" stop and thought we found it... Not sure how Bays work, but it seems like that has potential to clear up confusion and even make it easier to walk straight to your correct stop
Visited L.A. This Weekend... Our experience with the public transportation
Normally a lurker (from Reddit) but I wanna do my part to improve this community!
So my wife and I met a friend in L.A. over a long weekend and we decided to try and get around exclusively via public transportation. At times it was fine, but mostly it was a nightmare.
Long post because of the many issues we ran into...
We heard LA was investing heavily in public transportation for the 2028 Olympics that they're hosting. I wont lie, I was a bit excited, we're from a small town so I've never been on a metro. Our research told us we'd be able to get a public transportation card and get almost anywhere. In the end we spent nearly $400 on Uber in just 3 days... (we did go to tons of places though).
Admittedly, much of our issues were our own fault, but some things just weren't clear enough for people not to be expected to make mistakes.
So we land at LAX and the first thing we do is order an Uber to go to a store to buy a bus/transit card (tap card). After the fact, I wondered if there was somewhere in the airport/transit hub that would sell the cards, but my wife used their website to find a store and I don't think it was listed. Anecdotally, the Uber/Lift/Cab staging area is wild at LAX. A bit of a shame to waste so much space on something so unsustainable.
So we get to the store and the guy tells us he doesn't sell tap cards anymore, and hasn't for a long time. Bummer, we take another Uber to the next closest store, they don't as well. I start calling places but it was already 7PM so places were closing, or didn't sell anymore. We order another Uber to our hotel.
The next morning I call 6 or so tap card vendors before someone actually sells them. For real. We Uber there and it took them 20+ minutes to figure out how to activate the cards for a week. No big deal. We use google maps to find a bus to meet our friend, and ended up having to walk just under a mile. Fortunately, it was fun, we got donuts from a little shop and the lady gave us 3 free donuts and a free coffee. Wishing I took note of the place so I could give a shout out... A couple connections and we were only a block or so from our friend.
Our friend had a tap card because she frequents LA for work, but I guess she usually Ubers because she has the money and it's far more convenient. I didn't like hearing that, but now I understand why.
The first issue we had with the metro was that "metro" means rail, AND bus, in LA. So at one point google tells us our connection is a metro line and we were wildly confused until a bus showed up with the same number and the driver confirmed that he was what we were looking for.
The next issue was that not all busses are free with the tap card. I guess you have to load extra money onto the tap card for these busses. So that was embarrassing when the driver told us. Google maps didn't make it clear at all. The driver let us on anyways though which was a relief.
So my wife spends the next hour trying to load our cards with money from the app and it never works. Eventually we go into a store to do it, but until the money was loaded, we were stressed every bus connection would need the extra fee.
The next hardship was bus stops on opposite sides of the road. We find our bus stop, which matches exactly what google says, and then watch our bus on the other side of a large road leave without us. Another Uber (which we took all the way to our final destination, instead of the next transit connection).
Every stop after that we tried guessing which way our bus would come from based on the map. We were wrong this one time, but the next bus was in 10 minutes so we crossed the street and got on, but we didn't notice it was the wrong bus. Google didn't notice either. Eventually we figured out that the stop names weren't matching and we got off and re-loaded google maps but were too far from reasonable travel times so took an Uber.
One other time we guessed the side of the street wrong and Ubered. I was pretty mad with us, but it really isn't simple to do.
The next missed bus was at a large bus hub with many stops. We found our sign and the bus drove right past us and away. Google tracks the busses so we knew it was ours. We guessed maybe the driver was done for the day or something. The next one was in 20 minutes so we walked around and found another sign that matched ours. Confused, we compared them and they did differ with a third tier of information (a road name) that wasn't obvious on google. Before the next bus came I noticed someone else at the stop we tried the first time and I let him know our mistake and turns out he was about to make the exact same one.
The next challenge we faced was at another large transit hub. We walked around 2 times looking for our stop and couldn't find it. It was super large so we missed the bus once already and weren't sure how it'd affect our connections later so we were panicking a bit. A security guard stopped us and asked if we needed help. We told him the stop we were looking for and he had no idea. After a few seconds though he said, "oh, that must be the rail, head upstairs." And it was. Finally got to ride a rail! But yeah naming busses and rails "metro" caused us confusion in both directions of interpretation... The rail was great and fast, but did smell terrible. It was bike friendly, but I don't think I'd ever risk my life biking in LA. Maybe some parts are better than others, but generally there was no shoulder, and a lot of very fast cars.
In a very busy area, we missed a bus that I think just seemed to drive past because there were already 2 other busses parked in the loading spot.
Late at night once, a bus driver just announced it was the last stop, everyone off, even though we weren't where we needed to be. I'm not sure what happened but that was another Uber.
We went to the observatory which had bad traffic that only had a small section as a bus lane. Anyways we stayed until it closed which was a mistake because the next bus wasn't until the morning. We try ordering an Uber but no one would take us. Literally hundreds of people are trying. A park ranger comes by and explains that we have to walk out of the park because Ubers won't be allowed in. It was kinda a long walk, over a mile I would guess. We had fun and some solo individuals joined our group for "safety" and they were fun to chat with. But still, I couldn't imagine if someone with a disability was told they have to walk down a mountain. There was literally hundreds of people walking. there definitely should have been warning signs, or a shuttle. The sun barely set so I feel like that's when the most people would want to be at the observatory. Eventually, at the bottom, an Uber drive accepted us.
Multiple times our destination would take 1.5 hours+ so we would just take a 30 minute Uber. It felt bad, but we didn't want to use up too much of our limited time. Some times we would take a bus part of the way if we thought the Uber would be cheaper from the connection.
One cool thing was the freeway busses. The bus stop would be below a freeway and some stairs would take you to a stop on the left side of travel so the freeway bus could stay in one lane (the HOV lane) and avoid exits for stops. It felt pretty fast and efficient, but at that point doesn't a rail make more sense? This infrastructure was for elevated freeways and clearly a lot of elevated platforms were added for it. And holy crap, it was loud. The upper stop was between two many-lane freeways and it was loud to the point where I was covering my ears.
One very busy downtown street had tons of people walking and vendors, and a 4 lane 35MPH road with a small shoulder. What a failure of design. There was an outdoor mall off the road which was great. People obviously love the walk-ability, but I'd bet there'd be a city civil war if they tried to remove the cars from there.
On the way back to the airport to leave, we got to ride the rail again which was fun. It blew past some freeway traffic at one point. I was just thinking how much more convenient it was than dealing with airport drop off and parking and such, when we realized the rail didn't actually make it to the airport. We had to get off and take a bus, this bus appeared to be completely free, and I think they're just still working on the last mile of rail, but it was disappointing that the only time public transporting in LA might have been distinctly more convenient than driving, there was still a confusing connection. Also, the bus still was stuck in airport traffic so yay.
In the end, I feel like the main things LA should do is:
- Eliminate confusion (different bus stop identifiers on different sides of the road, clear labeling on if the connection is a bus or rail, and no two signs in large hubs should use the same bus numbers)
- Make it so all the busses use the standard tap card. No additional fees.
- Sell tap cards at the airport and at all major bus/rail hubs
- Maybe no tap card? just QR codes/NFC and an app. Or better yet, free
- Cleaner transit that didn't literally smell like piss would be nice and probably bring in more users
- Add more rails. They're more reliable and less confusing. I see that more are being worked on, but I don't know to what extent.
I think right now, the public transportation is more or less only usable by locals with some familiarity. Maybe if a route conveniently goes to your work. But Just trying to get around the city on a whim was a nightmare.
I hope they get things together before the Olympics as I can't image if all the visitors drove. The roads were crowded as is. One thing Uber drivers kept repeating to us was, "no matter where you want to go in LA, it's always an hour away" Because that's how long it takes to get on and off a few freeways, and if you're close enough to not need a freeway, the roads are still backed up enough to take an hour to go just a few miles.
Another interesting thing an Uber driver said to us was that the rails were all added during covid and that he heard it was a man made virus so that the streets would be empty so they could do the work. I don't wanna judge, but this man must think the world revolves around LA. But clearly there isn't great public opinion on their public transport and that's a bummer because they could benefit so much from it.
Overall, I hope to never visit LA again. We had tons of fun, but more from the company than the many things to do. I do think seamless transportation would influence my opinion. Anything you wanted to do came with the added frustration of just trying to get there, and even if we rented a car, I don't think the frustration would go away. I think we might try and go to the 2028 Olympics so it'll be fun to see if things improve.
We want to try and travel somewhere yearly, anyone have public transportation friendly destination suggestions? Would love to try somewhere with better infrastructure.