GUYS oh my God I'm on hold for a doctor's appointment and the hold music is In The Hall of the Mountain King!

“Eight localities in the district are holding referendums on whether to enact a 1% local sales tax for school construction and renovation” #cville #CharlottesvilleCitySchools #TomPerriello #USPolitics https://cardinalnews.org/2026/10/20/5-things-to-know-about-the-surprisingly-competitive-5th-district-congressional-race/

"I keep coming back to this graph because it’s so eye-popping, almost impossible to believe. As you see in the legend, the blue line is data centers. The grey line is everything else. Everything else. Commercial properties. Rental properties. Single family homes. Multiple family homes. Pick your preferred flavor of development, NIMBY, YIMBY, urban, rural, it’s in there. You basically have rapid data center growth and everything else contracting."

🎁 https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/its-the-ai-economy-were-just-living-in-it/sharetoken/ca52578d-d5d9-4d8b-9789-2c7a019b291f

Data centers on the other hand...

I'm working on a new talk that leans pretty heavily on this report from the Zoning Atlas team about their work on Virginia. No big shocks for me but I suspect many will be surprised just how restrictive the land use regulations here are from an affordable housing perspective #housing #zoning #virginia #ZoningAtlas https://www.zoningatlas.org/zoning-report-virginia-2025

Okay. So. I was diagnosed with early stage uterine cancer. It requires an immediate hysterectomy. However. I had to postpone because finances will not allow me to rest, and layoffs are happening at my music label.

As usual, I refuse to ask for help. It feels horrible. But so many of you have offered.

So. If you’d like to donate to “Project Hysterectomy: Yeet that Uterus and Heal 2026,” I’d be grateful.

PayPal: https://www.paypal.me/ErickaSimone
Venmo: https://venmo.com/u/ErickaSimone
CA: https://cash.app/$ErickaSimone

RE: https://mastodon.social/@AltTextHealthCheck/117467519925188493

Beige has achieved perfection. Beige bless. :bb:

"The effort started as a way to manage solar farms. Data centers have since pushed the issue to the forefront." #WytheCounty #Solar #DataCenters #zoning https://www.wdbj7.com/2026/09/24/wythe-county-seeks-public-feedback-first-zoning-ordinance/

“the pilot’s goal is to measure the impact of lower speed limits on the safety of local roads.” #FairfaxVA #TwentyIsPlenty #SafeStreets #WarOnCars https://www.ffxnow.com/2026/10/16/fairfax-county-testing-20-mph-speed-limits-on-10-roads-this-fall/

"One reason why plastics are so widely used in society is that they’re supposed to be chemically inert under normal circumstances. The researchers’ experiments, however, indicate that this assumption doesn’t hold true once plastics are broken down into the tiny pieces that can enter our bodies. Specifically, they found that microplastics are capable of spontaneously generating unstable molecules known as free radicals when in the presence of water."

https://gizmodo.com/microplastics-are-chemically-alive-and-probably-up-to-no-good-2000827048

#SpookySeason gets a sinister, shadowy visitor. 🦇 In F. W. Murnau’s NOSFERATU (1922), Count Orlok’s long fingers and eerie silhouette make this landmark of horror cinema a study in unease. 🕯️

Watch it and more Spooky Stuff in the Internet Archive collections here ⤵️ https://archive.org/details/@iasocial/lists/22/spooky-season-2026

#PublicDomain #Halloween #DigitalHistory

You can now turn off AI content on Libby under content controls! #bookstodon #reading

That bit at the bottom marked “James River” is the bit we have been working on here in the Charlottesville and Richmond area

“what we are doing is working” #SaveTheBay #ChesapeakeBay #conservation #CleanWater https://virginiamercury.com/2026/10/14/chesapeake-bay-gets-a-c-in-overall-health-va-and-md-leaders-say-work-to-protect-it-must-continue/

Nobody thinks about smallpox.

We ended a disease that killed 300 million people in a century. We're bored by it.

When a miracle fades into the background, the machinery that made it starts to look unnecessary.

https://www.joanwestenberg.com/p/we-live-in-an-age-of-miracles-and

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/politics-news/musk-movie-tiktok-banned-theaters-showtimes-1236734308/ #StreisandEffect #MuskMovie #TikTok #censorship

Instead of just throwing away the seeds from the bottom of a bagel bag, plant them and grow more bagels. #lifehack

Using public data from the Berkeley Rent Board rent registry, the Daily Cal (Berkeley newspaper run by Cal students) has released a map tool that lets you compare rents across the city, with an optional "Rent-O-Meter" function that factors in things such as location and how old the building is. https://data.dailycal.org/2026-10-13-rent-o-meter#map

Wrote an Op-Ed with Gabriel Fadri on the importance of voting Yes on RTM!
https://www.berkeleyside.org/2026/10/16/opinion-vote-yes-on-measure-rtm-to-avoid-dramatic-cuts-to-bart-and-ac-transit-in-berkeley

Inspired by Kat Imhoff, I've checked in on what's happening in preservation planning world here in the United States. The mood is grim #preservation #Section106 https://www.preservation-piedmont.org/