Your butt moves with your legs so the padding in the shorts moves with you. Padding on the seat chafes and rubs against you. A padded seat can get you pretty far but a proper chamois is important for long distance. And often even more important is bike fit.

It’s important that we save the Pacific Northwest tree octopus. zapatopi.net/treeoctopus/

There’s also the difference in how the word is used more as an adjective than a noun. In the same way calling someone a disabled is a lot more dehumanizing than saying they are a person with a disability.

What will happen first Ballard link or missing link? If either happen in the next ten years I’ll be happily surprised. But regardless it’s important that we continue to push forward these plans.

Maybe you’ve already made a decision on this but in general I run one helmet that tests well on the Virginia tech tests helmet.beam.vt.edu/bicycle-helmet-ratings.html

Then I use a buff/hat under the helmet on colder days. This is usually good for me down to freezing temps, generally I don’t ride much below that since I don’t have studded tires at the moment.

Wow! Thanks for putting up this super informative post and following through so many comments. I love using a waxed chain and I think it’s definitely hard for people to jump to when their bike maintenance is essentially zero. I run wet lube on one bike for wet weather riding (like >50% of the year) so I know both sides pretty well. The wax chain is so much easier to clean and maintain it’s crazy.

It’ll be hard to convert anyone that just lets their bike run into the ground before they start taking care of it, but they’re also probably on bikes that are sub $500 and aren’t looking for efficiencies or endurance performance.

I agree with you but the silliness of the leveling system did have its own charm. As a kid I spent so much time jumping around and putting points into getting those athletics skills high enough that it became a bit game breaking.

There’s a certainly a balance somewhere in there but I don’t think the game was ever difficult enough, playing on medium difficulty, to feel like you’ve fallen too far behind the curve. For context I’m thinking mostly about oblivion.

I probably played through oblivion more times making builds that weren’t optimal and had weird stats than I did trying to min/max my attributes. I think, for me, leaving room for that kind of gameplay is part of what made the older games so special.

Semi private but there’s also the Seattle bike group on discord where I think this was also discussed.