収束ゾーンでのライフ: Life in the Convergence Zone

Holy fucking hell, people are reviving the “the Trump shooting was staged” crap again, fuelled this time by ChatGPT slop.

I refer you to this writeup I posted the last time this was going around. We have a picture of the bullet as it’s going by his head. It wasn’t fucking staged.

jesus fucking christ

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2 Line Eastside Bike Connector updated their map to include the new train stations opening today! If you’re seeing this on May 10th, you can go to the opening events!

Naturally, we’ve picked up the new version, and Greater Northshore Bike Connector and MEGAMAP 1.7 – 10 May 2025 – are now available to download.

Move Redmond have also expanded their core area further north. Online, they’ve started doing the Seattle thing where they have some infrastructure information outside their region.

I’m not including their extended area at all, and I’ve also only extended their core map very slightly further north. There are a few reasons, the biggest of which being that we have features they don’t, and I think those features are important in lower-density infrastructure areas like north Kirkland and north Redmond. Without them, Briar wouldn’t have any markings at all.

They’ve also left me with a bit of a quandary: they’ve changed their map key on me. The markings are different, now. Fortunately, only a little, but it’s still a change.

In their area, fully separate bike paths are now dark green, rather than red. Given that I specifically used their key system – before expanding upon it – for consistency, I should probably go along. But to be honest, I don’t like the change. I think it adds confusion, because before, all bike infrastructure was red. Now most is red, but some is dark green, instead.

All one colour was simpler and easier.

On the other hand, having now three different systems – two of which are only very slightly different to each other – is more confusing than having two, and I could fix that.

Any thoughts on what I should do? Should I move to theirs, despite not liking the change? I’m genuinely uncertain.

Anyway, additions and changes since 1.6.1:

• MAJOR EASTSIDE UPGRADE with the freshly dropped 2 Line Eastide Bike Connector Map. There are several updates, but the biggest are the two light rail stations opening today, 10 May 2025. If you’re reading this on the 10th, there are opening day celebrations and you can go join them.
• Notes about infrastructure continuance off-map now appear on both Greater Northshore and MEGAMAP, with the notes and arrows relocating as appropriate.
• Same for the two major directional notices to Alderwood Mall and City of Snohomish, both of which are too far north for this map.
• Addition (with reservations) of a short section of what are technically bike lanes in Woodinville. I don’t like them and have marked them as undermarked, because they are.
• Construction on NE 132nd has extended bike lanes! And made the crossing of I-405 more confusing and probably slower! But also maybe safer despite that. It’s a tradeoff, and it’s on the maps now.
• NE 116th in Redmond has extended bike lanes now, but without the added complexity of 132nd.

All permalinks continue to work.

If you enjoy these maps and feel like throwing some change at the tip jar, here’s my patreon. Patreon supports get things like pre-sliced printables of the Greater Northshore, and also the completely-uncompressed MEGAMAP, not that the .jpg has much compression in it because it doesn’t. If you have an iPhone, please use the website interface and not the app, because Apple takes 30% if you use the app. I’ll keep doing this regardless, but you know. Thank you! ^_^

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Greater Northshore Bike Connector Map 1.6.1 – 3 May 2025 – is now available on github, as is MEGAMAP 1.6.1.

This release wasn’t supposed to happen yet – arguably at all, the next was supposed to be 1.7 – but I mislabelled a couple of blocks of split sharrow/bike lane in Snohomish County as full both-sides bike lanes and that’s not okay. I had to get that fixed, and I have, so: new maps drop. Corrections are in all latest maps, of course.

Additions and changes since 1.6:

• Correction of errors on 48th West in Snohomish County, where sharrows had been incorrectly shown as full bike lanes across a couple of blocks where only one side has full bike lanes
• Added bike lane markers for Forbes Creek Drive in Kirkland
• Further cleanup of the trail situation in and around Crestwoods Park, Kirkland
• Added Old Market Street Trail in Juanita
• Added continuation notes showing how far infrastructure continues on the MEGAMAP’s northern border

All permalinks continue to work.

If you enjoy these maps and feel like throwing some change at the tip jar, here’s my patreon. Patreon supports get things like pre-sliced printables of the Greater Northshore, and also the completely-uncompressed MEGAMAP, not that the .jpg has much compression in it because it doesn’t. If you have an iPhone, please use the website interface and not the app, because Apple takes 30% if you use the app. I’ll keep doing this regardless, but you know. Thank you! ^_^

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Last night – Tuesday night – Gamers Nexus posted a three hour deep dive on how Trump’s tariff regime is completely fucking one segment of the computer industry: custom computers and components including gaming PCs.

I have now watched all of it.

IT IS WORTH YOUR TIME.

I never say that shit about a video this long but it is a documentary of goddamn note. I haven’t seen anything else close to this, showing not just numbers, but how those numbers compound – 145% isn’t a limit, some of the tariffs are additive on top of each other – and most of all how stupidly complicated they’ve made it.

Let’s say you’ve got a power supply. Let’s say it’s at 145% as a base unit, ’cause right now it probably is. That’s not the only tariff – that’s just one of them. Percentage aluminium by weight? You’ve got to figure that out, and you need to know where it came from, because that’s an additional tariff. Sometimes. Percentage steel by weight? Same question, same fluctuating situation.

How the fuck do you figure out where the aluminium legs on a resistor came from?

The transparency from Hyte in particular – it’s stunning. They’re just dumping pricing and strategy trade secrets in this video because they literally can’t do business in the US as things stood at time of shooting. They’ve cancelled all shipments to the US and once they’re out of stock already in country, they’re out of stock.

As they say, most people won’t really notice until shelves go empty.

And this is just one industry.

$600 for a PC case, anyone?

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Pretty good turnout in Bothell, counter had over 600 which is a good number given the rain in the morning and the unavoidable timing against Easter. It’s not what we had two weeks ago, but again, conflicts and worse conditions. Still a bit larger than the 2018-era protests, so I’d call that another win.

There were still people on the far downtown bridge, too. There were just gaps in the crowd between us and them.

I’d post pics but I totally forgot my phone, oops. And I actually did, not “lol no phone oops” did.

There was one (1) counter-protestor/heckler on the ground; he didn’t like my “NO KINGS” signs at all and started ranting about how Biden was the real “king” they got rid of. He didn’t have a sign himself and stayed pretty far back; I came across him accidentally while walking around testing our FRS radio range.

(As an aside: FRS handheld radios are f’real, team. Consider getting some and getting practice with them. No license needed, they’re channelised so can’t be used against you as “police scanners,” the range is shockingly good, and even with prices going up they’re super affordable. Ignore the only review on that Best Buy link; those are the exact model we bought. If you want to spend a little more you can get the T30 version, which has a headset and I think is rechargeable, but is otherwise pretty much the same radio and only comes in black. We specifically wanted replaceable batteries for extended-blackout reasons. Just remember: they are NOT private. Just relatively obscure.)

As with every other protest here, we had overwhelming support from the vehicle crowd. Hundreds to one in favour, easily, just like in person. I even got support from a presumably embarrassed Tesla driver.

I don’t know if there were more Bothell PD out this time, or if it just felt like there were. Might’ve been a difference in crowd to cop ratio, might’ve just been the escalating situation, might’ve just been where they were standing. But I wasn’t the only one who noticed.

Keep on your toes. Even here, the cops are Trump’s friends.

Anyway, that’s it for this week’s report, I hope your protests went well. Remember to save the date for May 1st, and to turn out at your local Tesla Takedown or similar before then, too. Momentum is everything, and we need to keep it.

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Okay, so remember when I told everybody to hold April 19th? Here’s where you can search for a 50501 event near you, and there are definitely going to be other events on the same day by other groups.

It will NOT be as big as April 5th. But a good turnout is important – and basically will continue to be important for months and months.

The next really massive turnout day looks like it’s going to be May 1st, though. Reserve the day. Indivisible is cooking something up, 50501 will be in on it, so will a lot of other people, or so I hear. Put it on your calendar now, so you’re ready.

Here are some other April 19 events in the Seattle area, compiled by Indivisible. I’m sure you can find something to do.

See you out there, and as always – good hunting.

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I’ve got an alpha of the Greater Northshore Bike Connector Map posted in a temporary location. [EDIT: There’s now a Beta. Use that instead!] It extends the map northward to Lynnwood City Centre, tho’ not all the way up to Alderwood Mall.

If you have any knowledge of southwestern Snohomish County biking, give it a look? I’ll get up to Mountlake Terrace to catch a train and I’ve biked the Interurban and North Creek trails pretty far up, but that’s it, and is nothing like on-the-ground knowledge.

The uploaded version had to be trimmed at the bottom a little to stay on 11×17 paper with one-quarter-inch margins. Here’s what the full thing looks like; I’m honestly a bit up in the air about what to do about this. Staying on a single row of tiled 11×17 strikes me as kind of important.

(Just because I happen to have some 11×17.625″ paper for reasons doesn’t mean most people do, because ALMOST NOBODY DOES lol)

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April 5th went really well. Here’s Shoreline News coverage, here’s the Seattle Times front page, here’s Seattle’s KING-5 coverage. I posted a bunch of photos here, here, here, here, here, and here. Also, it was loud, in a good way.

Now we need to build on the momentum. The next national protest – the next April 5th – is weekend after next, April 19th. ETA: 50501 were calling for a national, but watch for local efforts and join up with them – this one may end up being regionally variant.

Local groups are starting to fill out their data, particularly in New England. (It’s the 250th anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord in the American Revolution.) But be as ready as possible, and go ahead and reserve the day now.

And if you can make a Tesla Takedown protest before then, do it.

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Here’s a page with a bunch of Hands Off!-specific protest signs for this weekend. If you don’t have one you can print those and paste them onto foamcore or similar to have some signs to carry around.

Signs are good, I recommend them.

Here are a couple I made – I was thinking I might just use one of the two I already had, but the ones that weren’t super-specific to Musk are kinda small, so. Honestly they’re not really my best work, but if you don’t like the Hands Off! ones you might give them a look. I do like the Trump-as-Disney’s-Prince-John cartoon, I must say.

If you haven’t found a protest near you yet, here’s where you can find them. Go to the web site, find a protest – and for the gods’ sakes, show up.

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I feel like I should talk about why declaring yourself a Nazi is very specifically different to declaring yourself almost anything else seen as political. Because there is a difference, and it’s really important, and I don’t think people get that, and it has real-world ramifications.

Walk with me.

There are a lot of terrible things you can declare yourself, politically and otherwise. But we’ll stick to politics for the moment.

You can declare yourself as Stalinist, for example. That’s real fuckin’ bad, bad to the point that a lot of people would say that there’s no difference between declaring yourself a Stalinist and declaring yourself a Nazi.

And I can see why they say that. The death counts are pretty similar, historically. The oppression and evil are both truly remarkable. The misery, as well.

But even between these, there is a real difference that sets Nazism apart.

Stalin murdered millions, just like Hitler, but that was never the theory. The idea. The goal. The goal was a material paradise for everyone, at least on paper. The real goal was an economically powerful industrial society, but even that was in service to the idea of a society of abundance. It may’ve been “if people would just” writ monstrous, but it was there.

Nazism kinda promises that… but only for some. And not many. Just members of the Master Race. For everyone else, Nazism promises either slavery or genocide. Explicitly. It says so, right on that label, right on the tin.

And that’s what makes Nazism distinct. It’s not the only political movement which makes that promise – White Nationalism, I see you drooling in the corner, pissing yourself – but it’s the most famous, the best known of them.

(There are reasons so many White Nationalists are fond of Hitler. It’s because the core idea – enslave and murder millions of people – overlaps.)

Are there other ideas besides genocide in Nazism, and in the other fascism variants? Sure. They have names, too – names which aren’t “fascist” or “Nazi.”

For example, there are people who have interest in the economic theories of the Italian fascists. If you’re into that, you can call yourself a Syndicalist in clear conscience. Mussolini followed a branch of syndicalism, which actually predates fascism entirely. The Italian version was intended to solve class struggle. It doesn’t, but as goals go, there are worse.

And modern followers of these ideas don’t call themselves Nazis, because they aren’t interested in the thing which sets Nazis specifically apart, which isn’t even just a threat of violence against entire peoples, it’s a promise of murder against entire peoples. It’s an explicit and specific statement:

If we take power, we will kill you and everyone like you solely for the crime of your existence. Your original sin was being born, your criminality is existing at all. And there is nothing you can do to change that other than die.

We will kill you when and if we can.

We have laws against that, you know. You threaten someone with violence – particularly murder – and you mean it? That’s called terroristic threatening, and it’s a crime. You don’t have to be specific about when, or where, or how, or anything like that – it just has to be credible. It’s not real easy to get convictions, but it is an undisputed crime.

If someone calls themselves a Nazi, if they specifically invoke Nazi symbolism, if they specifically parrot the Nazi salute, Elon, if they’re out there saying Hitler had some good ideas, they are making not just a threat but a promise of mass murder.

Their targets are both specific and clear, and they’re doing it on purpose.

They don’t have to label themselves a “Nazi” to support syndicalism. They don’t have to label themselves a “fascist” even to be a nationalist or even an outright imperialist. They don’t have to praise Hitler to hate people. None of that’s necessary. At all.

So when someone does do that that, they are making a choice. They are choosing to make a promise of mass violence and mass death.

And what’s the point of all this, you might ask?

Because that promise is what makes it okay to punch Nazis.

I still see people having qualms about punching Nazis. I don’t. Not at all. Not even just because of all of the above, but also because we – as a society – have decided that people have a right to self-defence. In some states, that applies even a right to use potentially lethal force against perceived credible threat to property or life.

If you are any of their targets, they have promised to murder you. They have said if they can, they will. They have – by donning that uniform, by taking on that label, by throwing that salute – threatened your life with a violent and brutal end at their hands.

History shows that their threats are entirely credible. They will do it, if they can. They promised to kill you; they meant it; it’s only a matter of time and opportunity.

And what’s that do?

It makes punching Nazis into reasonable and proportional self-defence.

Yeah. It does. Maybe not from a legal standpoint, no. I’m not arguing that. You won’t have the law on your side.

But from an ethical and moral standpoint?

A punch to the face in response to an explicit, repeated, and credible threat of murder?

Yeah. That seems fine.

Hell, as far as I’m concerned… that’s getting off light.

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