Since this site is linked from my bio on Twitter, I'll mention that I'm taking some time off from it. The election had already been making me have to keep it at arm's length, and the acquisition worries the hell out of me. For the moment, I'm planning to be off for about two weeks.
It's been the best place to get breaking news, but has always been a firehose, too. It's easy to spend 3-4 hours there per day, but it also keeps my brain in a jumble all the time with the randomness of what I see. I'm not sure if I'll return to blogging, but getting away from Twitter for a while would help me get back to longer-form thinking, rather than trying to fit things into 280 characters.
I hate to have to explicitly say it, but I hope anyone reading this will be voting for Democrats or the most progressive candidates that they can during this election cycle. The aim of this site had originally been to look forward to a renewed future of rail travel from funding put forth in 2008-2009, but unfortunately the Republican backlash of 2010 stopped a great deal of that forward momentum from happening, and it took me years to realize how much things had gotten stymied.
Building an effective and efficient transportation system requires looking past color boundaries and political differences to work to serve everyone. I do not wish to punish people who vote differently than me or who have a different background, but it's clear there are far too many people largely congregating on the Republican side who do feel that way. That has to be stopped, or only tragedy will ensue.
As for a possibly post-Twitter world, I'm not sure where I may end up. I'd like to post here again, and I hope to return to being more active on Flickr. The local UrbanMSP forum and Streets.mn blog may get more traffic from me too. I also have some long-lingering electronics projects I'd like to get back to, such as ever-present ideas for cheap real-time transit departure displays. And I need to do something that lets me see people in the real world, as we live with the effects of the pandemic that caused so much isolation.
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