7bicycles

I keep seeing this pop up in comment sections, about how you need to tint your windshield to protect you from the F350 Xenon Eyemelters and if you don't that's your fault. What the fuck? What do you mean tint your windshield, how the fuck do you see at night?

The amount of people just posting evidence of them being entirely unable to drive a car with 0 consequences is insane. Great compilation of you raging out over somebody going 5 below the limit, phone in hand in the drivers seat. Really liked when you got stuck behind a lorry for 20 seconds and were frothing at the mouth over it. You're never getting your license back.

Image via https://velo-gap.de/2020/05/26/duerkopp-kettenlos-1912-kardanantrieb/ who have lovingly restoreded this specimen into a rideable state

Another option for a bicycle drivetrain beyond chain, penny-farthing, the velocipede or lever-driven bicycles is just put a driveshaft on there, like a car.

There's scant information out there as to how good it is, mostly because by 1920 or so everybody stopped doing it. CeramicSpeed has some kind of vaporware around this for the roadbike I have posted about before but they made the error of trying to do this shit high-tech and with gear changes instead of figuring you could just get good at pedalling your singlespeed so it sucks.

The singlespeed driveshaft bike, all enclosed? Yeah, might be onto something

Picture via https://onlinebicyclemuseum.co.uk/1930s-lever-driven-bicycle/ and it has a nice story to it if you care for it. The last quote is very dudes rock. Also this has iron tyres on wooden wheels.

This is a singlespeed. Much like there is more than one way to skin a cat, there is more than one way to convert leg movement into rotational force to go well far on two triangles. Like you could just plonk some levers on the rear and use those to convert some leg motion into going forward via wheel. This, by description, would have had freewheels of some sort, but conceptually you could make this even more low tech as a fixie, one lever fixed at the top, one at the rear of the wheel, off you go.

I don't necessarily mean specific recipes, I mean concepts. A western sandwich is bread, (vegan) meat or cheese, sauce, tomato, something pickled, some salad, mostly, all layered and/or thinly sliced. Cross out maybe some of them for simplicity, like the mayo tomato or the british cheese and cucumber.

A döner kebap is sort of layered but everything but the protein layer is more of a mix up and not like tomato followed by onion or whatever.

A Banh Mi is sort of western of course, but it does a twist. The layers are there-ish, but they don't matter so much. Sort of a hybrid between something like a kebap and a pita if you catch my drift.

What other sandwiches are there, conceptually?

My mind first goes to arabic, falafel and hummus is basically eating beans on beans. Maybe add some bread with a bean stew and you're really just eating a lot of beans.

Or maybe it's something more asian, miso broth, tofu, soy sauce or something? Maybe dumplings with bean fillings? I'm really not well versed on specific asian cuisines here but it feels like you could eat lots and lots of bean on bean on bean.

What other contenders might there be?

Here's one I think not many people think about, factory or industrial cycles, as in, they're used to get people and some goods around factories or industrial sites. In the open world these are often called transport bicycles, sort of like the middle step between your average bicycle and a proper cargo bike.

Transport cycles usually come with some sort of internal gear hub with 7 or 8 gears, mostly using the tried and true Shimano Nexus. Industrial or Factory bicycles tend to be a hell of a lot more utilitarian and built for shorter distances, with many of them being single speeds or maybe a 3 gear nexus in there. They're usually quite heavy, pictured one comes in at 19kg which is a lot for a non-ebike, but do sport some increased carry weights - 25kg for that front basket there, 140kg in total (so 120kg of load capacity including all human and all cargo), allthough I imagine this is often disregarded with very few problems.

There is an incredible amount of conspiracy theories surrounding cars and whenever the discussion or analysis of how in gods name did we get to so many people believing in them so many smart people do a lot of thinking and just entirely blank what, to me, is the most obvious entrypoint for this sort of thing.

I'm not talking about the crank shit that is also car, like the idea that the jewish lizard people are hiding the water based engine that can drive around the earth on 500ml of liquid here, but the explicitly carbrained ones that never seem to be called out as conspiracy theories despite hitting all the marks.

How many people do you know that think whatever the authority on traffic light timings is just making them bad on purpose to annoy every car driver? Like there's a big red "make car traffic flow good" button in the central control unit everybody involved just refuses to press or even talk about despite literally every document around this topic clearly lining out how they're optimizing all this shit for optimal car throughput at every turn?

The idea that there isn't enough parking that goes full steam into being aggrieved about not being able to park in the 4th dimension because you can't park 5 cars directly infront of a storefront that's about one car wide and somehow this is again the doing of the shadowy cabal that runs the municipality to annoy every car driver.

The idea that for some unbeknownst reason every western government is in cahoots to build roads like shit so they deterioate within a year or two, on purpose, to...annoy car drivers, again.

The idea that one more lane will fix it, where there is a magic solution to congestion, despite that having never worked, decades of scientific evidence that it doesn't and also again begs the question as how do you figure every level of government everywhere just refuses to do the one magic thing that fixes it all.

Your average carbrain sits at a traffic light, see's people go the other way and figures the government is gangstalking him, specifically. The reasons entirely unclear, but some sort of entity out there is dead set on making you miserable by making you wait. That's the common thread here, it's being annoyed and then figuring out this is targeting you, specifically, completely ignoring how much the built enviroment you're using is made to serve the cars despite all the very much published evidence around it and instead believing there's some conspiracy going on that hides the magic solution that would make it all better. It's all conspiracy theories, except enough people believe in them that it's just mainstream politics now. Wonder where else we might find this phenomenon.

made the rounds on twitter today and I have to say, christ alive

I know it's a scripted show, none of it being real.

Still, half of the challenges drip a gallon of oil onto the ground because ha ha Hammonds Car has a leak. Or maybe we just drown one in the british coast line, all fluids in there. Or make a car that cannot be driven safely on public roads, then drive it on public roads.

Especially made worse by the fact that Clarkson complains endlessly about health and safety. I assume, it beeing a BBC-Production, they stuck to it. Which poses the questions of why can you drive the least safe car on public motorways or just dump gallons of oil everywhere and still be compliant. Doesn't seem like Health & Safety really does all that much for Health or Safety.

Just realized I never talked about these. I think these are a gods-end for the urban cyclist. They're panniers that can be converted into a backpack. Pictured here is an Ortlieb Vario PS, but other brands make them - some better than others.

I think they're king for urban cyclists with lots of stops as you can convert them in give or take 3 seconds from one to the other (if you've not bought garbage) and have so much more comfortable carrying capacity compared to classic pannier with a single strap and you can take your valuables with you.