2316 Naughtical Miles Away

B R

02 Aug 2024 — 4 min read

The start of my trip back to visit Seattle did not start off well! Half way through a painfully long drive to the airport I realized I had forgotten my passport. My partner had to take another car to drop it off to me.

Turns out I was still early, and the flight was delayed, so I watched women's golf at the bar and somehow stumbled into the best name I've seen in a while. And I am something of a connoisseur.

The trip was a whirlwind of activity. I met up with dozens of friends that will not be pictured so as to preserve privacy, so instead you get stuff like this where they are awkwardly cropped right out of frame.

In reverse order - the first anniversary of a running group a friend helps lead, a delightful American greasy spoon, and a entirely unremarkable image of a end table *à chez amis*.

Seattle Pride/(fest) was last month, but a lot of Pride stuff for specific places and activities go the full summer. Par exemple, a queer history bike tour hosted by a friend-of-some-friends [[1]]

It was this day I learned the first LGBTQ community center in Capitol Hill, largely unwelcome in the neighborhood at the time, was destroyed by arson and it's unclear precisely where it was at.

New, as of this year, senior housing for queer people called Pride Place. As anyone with passing familiarity with trying to build anything in Seattle would expect, making this place happen naturally involved a four-party land swap deal and the retention of the wholly-out-of-place facade (a "historic" tire change place).

The return trip through Interlaken Park - a beautiful set of trails following a natural ravine right in the middle of Seattle that reminds you that you are in the Pacific Northwest. Is it blocked of to cars? Parts of it! That's cool.

I was a special guest at a friend's DnD table. Other friends that visited earlier in the summer had also been guests, and the DM wanted the characters to be related. So I made an extremely normal half-orc called "Caster"

Now going by the stage name “Anaconda Montana”, and sporting the accent of a southern belle, Caster ran away from her tribe to the nearest city and was adopted by the esteemed House of Incomparable Texture. The Madame of the House, Naughtical Miles, took Caster under her wing as an apprentice and...

It went great and was a completely normal experience for that couple that I had never met before.

Shout-out to Mox Boarding house, which was as always a fine place to play DnD.

This game is a good example of when someone (this studio) suggests they support open borders, you really should ask the question "but what kind of open-borders supporter *are you*?"

Another thing definitely worth hitting up any given Seattle Summer is one of the many beaches, the crowd favorite tending to be Golden Gardens.

If only the average Seattle citizen had this kind of "fuck the police" attitude on, like, the budget or the insane responses to protests rather than just the right to swim in contaminated water.

I biked there, which was hilarious because they massively restricted where you could park the rental bikes so like half a dozen of them are jammed up an embankment on a shoulderless road that large cars speed down.