Zagorath

Zagorath, 3 hours ago

Light rail is higher capacity. Being separated from the road is an advantage because it makes it more consistent. It costs less to run once it’s built. It’s far more environmentally friendly—even if the buses were electric. It creates a nicer environment for the people living, working, and visiting the area near it (less noise, less inhospitable asphalt, etc.) There are very, very few advantages to buses over light rail.

Zagorath, 2 hours ago

Australia seems to be arguably overenthusiastic about light rail in general

I have no idea where you get that sense. The Gold Coast light rail has so far been a massive success, proving that it was the right decision. It seems to have been very successful in Newcastle despite the route it takes being utterly ludicrous (incredibly short, only in areas that you’d probably have to drive to to begin with, parallel to a fantastic easy walking path), at least for now until the extensions are built. Sydney’s light rail has been an absolute blowout success.

And yet despite every time it’s been done it being enormously successful, we are still hesitant to do more. The Sunshine Coast has just made the myopic decision to not build light rail. Despite the enormous success of stages 1 and 2, stage 3 won’t be finished until nearly a decade after the completion of the previous stage. Brisbane decided it would go for short team ease rather than the long term superior option. And Newcastle doesn’t seem to have any serious plans for its stage 2 over 5 years since it first opened.

We have some good light rail systems in this country, but we are nowhere near “overenthusiastic”. Quite the opposite.

Zagorath, 20 hours ago

I had one of these with a new account recently. I forget what platform it was, but it wasn’t anything from Meta. Didn’t need to move your face in any specific way, but it was obviously doing some checks for signs of life so a simple photo wouldn’t work. I found a video of some random dude on YouTube just staring at the camera, and I pointed my camera my computer screen while that played. Difficult, considering they only allowed the front-facing camera to work.

Zagorath, 18 hours ago

You can see heaps of us over at !australia and the other communities on that instance.

Zagorath, 1 day ago

I’m afraid I don’t get it.

Zagorath, 21 hours ago

And if the answer to that is yes…is it more or less gross than if the centaur borked a human?

Zagorath, 21 hours ago

So if you grossly mispronounce the word, it becomes a pun? I don’t think that’s a very good pun, tbh…

Zagorath, 21 hours ago

RP might use a similar vowel, but even most modern British people don’t seem to pronounce these very similarly based on this pronouncing dictionary’s advice and sample clips. And I can confirm as an Australian that Australian English accents don’t pronounce them remotely similarly.

Zagorath, 20 hours ago

Would a centaur have two navels?

Zagorath, 18 hours ago

Photo showing a white horse stepping on a large keyboard where the keys are large enough to be easily usable by a horse hoof.

Zagorath, 1 day ago

Supposedly it’s to keep motorbikes out.

But when your design also forces bikes to be lifted up, cuts out wheelchairs and even fat people…it’s astonishing to me that any government department could think this was OK.

Zagorath, 1 day ago

Apparently it’s not finished yet and they might end up fencing it off to prevent going around in the dirt.

Zagorath, 21 hours ago

they are pretty skinny

The bit I was worried about is that it looks roughly the right height that the handlebars might hit the narrower top part.

Zagorath, 21 hours ago

Honestly coming from a place where even normal banana bars are being removed from path entrances, I think “they want to keep out motorbikes” is an incredibly lazy reason to have such a terrible and inaccessible design. Police enforcement is the appropriate way to deal with rare cases where someone takes their motorbike onto a clearly illegal path.

As a general guiding principle, even if we ignore the accessibility issues for wheelchairs, fat pedestrians, or more unusual types of bicycles, if your intended design involves expecting cyclists to get off their bike, that is a horrible design. Bike infrastructure should never expect a cyclist to dismount any more than car infrastructure should expect a driver to get out and push.

Zagorath, 1 day ago

Please yes. The Airtrain is such an incredible rip-off, especially if you make the completely rational mistake of assuming tha your Go Card is going to be the cheapest and easiest way to pay. In fact it’s more than twice as expensive as paying online ahead of time, and 5 times as expensive as it would be via regular Go Card prices from the CBD.

And none of this is communicated clearly. You can’t even easily make an educated choice. It’s a system that needs to die.

Zagorath, 18 hours ago

I’m pretty sure it’s just the two airport stops. At the very least you only pay regular Translink fares if you get off anywhere before Eagle Junction.

Zagorath, 1 day ago

It was fucking delicious. I still crave it.

Zagorath, 1 day ago

This worked for me:

web.archive.org/…/8f65afb1ea64b3aa8e294578b4c43e1…

Zagorath, 1 day ago

Hard to disagree, but that’s because it’s very thorough, since carbrains have a tendency to need their hands held to find reason.

Zagorath, 1 day ago

3–6 seconds per reason is not nearly enough to actually explain it.