Does anybody know what time it is?

It's time for the Fremont Solstice Parade!

. . . I would add "and Fair," but Laney and I skipped that this year. After the parade, which lasted barely more than an hour—from where we sat, anyway, right at the start of the parade on NW 39th St and Leary Way NW—we walked toward the Fair, looking first for port-a-potties. We found a rather long line for a line of 10 of them, which moved fairly quickly. Then, looking to bypass food trucks we had no interest in, we walked around the block to the east. But, when we saw the thickness of the crowd, Laney decided she wasn't up for it. That was fine. I can spend more time at the Fremont Fair next time.

Anyway, I need to get back to that photo at the top of this post. I loved his body paint design, and attempted to include the photo in my post to socials with 16 shots from the event—and Facebook's algorithm immediately removed just that shot. Dammit! It "violates community guidelines," it says, because nudity is not allowed for us to share.

Of course, 10 of the other photos I shared technically feature nudity. But, I could get away with posting it because the algorithm clearly can't tell there's nudity when large amounts of body paint patterns are involved. And here's the thing: in the above shot, Facebook's algorithm clearly identified the tip of the man's penis, which is not covered in paint. Had he painted over his penis with red, it probably would have also gone through.

This even complicated my ability to share the photo here—not because of Squarespace, but because of Flickr. Flickr allows a lot more, but you have to set "safety" levels on each photo depending on the type of nudity. No nudity at all? That can stay "safe," the moderation level at which photo uploads default. Bare butts or bare breasts? These have to be marked "moderate," and when other people (whp are not Fllickr members) see those photos on Flickr they first come up as a static box, but when you click it then you get a warning that it contains nudity and a choice as to whether you want to see it. Full frontal nudity, or anything sexual, requires the safely level of "restricted," which means only other logged-in Flickr members can see it. It also means that, as in the case of the above photo, Flickr blocks the "share" feature where it provides the html commands to copy and paste so you can embed photos, as I have done with all the shots below.

Here's how I got around it: Flickr also lets you view multiple sizes of each shot, and with the size I wanted, I just right-clicked to get the image address of the shot, and wrote up the html commands to embed the image myself. Whew! Aren't you glad I did the work so you could see Clock Man's cock? Seriously, though: the cock is immaterial—something stupid social networking sites don't understand, like nuance or context. What I love about the photo is the spiral clock design.

Facebook can be so annoying.

Anyway! Shobhit had an evening shift at work today, otherwise he almost certainly would have come. In fact, he has only ever been able to join me four times, and not since 2019 (the other times being 2015, 2007 and 2006, although he missed the actual parade in 2006). I actually went by myself three years in a row between 2012 and 2014, and likely would have again today if I'd had to—but Laney was available, and even willing to deal with a multi-bus transit route to get there. Nice!

It was her first time, which really amazed me, as the Fremont Solstice Parade and Fair is a longtime Seattle institution, and Laney's been around for decades. I suspect a lot of it just had to do with her schedule in the past, and now that she's retired, it's super easy for her to make time for all sorts of shit.

The parade is scheduled to start at 1:00, and I had suggested we aim to get to Fremont by noon—a very good suggestion, as it turned out, given their changed parade route this year, and our joint decision to walk to where the parade route started so it wouldn't be as crowded. And even there, it got pretty crowded. Just nothing like down by the Lenin statue, where people were like 8 deep along the route. (That may be an exaggeration. 4 probably isn't though. You get the idea.) Anyway, in order to do this, we needed to catch the #49 bus downtown at 11:21. I suggested to Laney that we meet at the bus stop at 11:15, and that's what we did.

Also at my suggestion, Laney brought her two collapsible lawn chairs. This made all the difference in the world, and they weren't even difficult to transport, being fairly light and easy to carry in their bags with a strap on them that we could swing over a shoulder. However, the bus we finally got on was about ten minutes late, clearly because of backed up traffic on Capitol Hill due to maintenance needs shutting down Light Rail stations between Westlake and SoDo Stations. There were Link Shuttle buses from Capitol Hill Station to Westlake, and also, probably due to the "Capitol Hill Pride" that is for the first time scheduled the Saturday before Pride Weekend (not to be confused with Capitol Hill PrideFest, put on with actual success by Seattle Pride, on Broadway the Saturday of Pride Weekend), which presumably would have been why the #8 and #10 were getting rerouted also through the intersection at Broadway and Pine.

In any event, we finally got on a bus, and once we got downtown, we were too late for the #40 bus that was supposed to be our connection to Fremont. I remembered from last year, though, that there are three buses that go from downtown to Fremont (just different destinations beyond that in all three cases), and I just figured out what the other two were, and we decided we'd get on whichever of the three was the next to come to our stop, at 3rd and Pine. Within minutes, that happened to be the #62.

That bus was very crowded when we got on it, and only got more so as we got closer to Fremont, in the end having to wait like three light cycles at the Fremont Bridge, the first of them because the drawbridge had to come up to let a boat pass. Once we finally got off the bridge and to the stop just past 34th St, we then set about walking the roughly half mile to to spot we found to set up our chairs, on the corner of 39th and Leary Way.

The Fremont Fair website said the parade kicks off at 3rd and Leary, which is actually a block from where we set up our chairs—and we only did that because, after walking west on 39th to bypass the crowds on 36th, we were suspicious of the fact that no one was sitting on the curbs along Leary on the block to the north. I still thought the parade would come down from there, so we set up our chairs right on the southeast corner of Leary at 39th.

It still worked out, but the parade actually came out on 39th, across the street from us, and turned right onto Leary, so we were literally at the very start after all. This caused a slight challenge as I could not look up the street to see contingents coming, as they turned in front of us right from the street we were on. Thus, when the nude cyclists were the first contingent as is tradition, they did not ride past us, but rather in large circle that curved back around right in front of us.

I still got a lot of shots, though—all combined, 103, including 11 video clips. I also separated them into two sets, one just of the nude cyclists (58 shots, although it appears to be only 22 if you view it as a non-Flickr member, not logged in), and the other of all the other contingents (45 shots, including 10 video clips, most of them of the several really fun marching bands).

Last year, when Gina and her friend Jennifer came up from Olympia to join me, I took 76 shots of the nude cyclists; 33 shots of the other contingents; another 31 shots of the Fair; and 26 of the "Seattle Art Car Blowout" alone. I already noted though that Laney and I left shortly after the parade and did not really do the Fair—she had a blast today though and said she would definitely do it again. Maybe next year I'll at least figure out where the cars are, because those are really fun and I think Laney would enjoy them.

Today, though, once we had each finally gotten to pee and then we decided not to brave the crowd at the Fair, Laney agreed to accompany me to the Apple Store at University Village. Thankfully, once we just walked over to Fremont Ave at 35th, there was a bus stop there for a bus that goes straight there—nice for people in Fremont! I've never understood why there isn't a single transit option straight from even downtown to University Village, a pretty major shopping center—which also has the city's only Apple Store.

Sometime over the past week, my AirPod speakers seem to have blown out. I have AppleCare on three of my Apple devices currently (AirPods; iPhone; MacBook Pro laptop), so I figured I might as well put that to use. Shobhit also got his phone battery replaced not long ago due to his battery life being degraded, so I figured I would ask about that too.

Here are some things I learned at the Apple Store today. First, you can't get assistance on multiple devices with the same store appointment, which is dumb. The young woman who assisted me with the AirPods managed to work their system to my favor, though, and had me first in line for the iPhone discussion as soon as she had me plugged in. She had to run diagnostics on the AirPods, during which another employee, this time a middle-aged guy, came to talk about the phone. This was when I learned the second thing: you're actually supposed to keep your decices plugged into charge overnight every night, even if it's either early or fully charged before you go to bed. The guy said there are too many things that often happen overnight with updates, etc, which will only happen while on wifi and plugged into charge, as otherwise it takes too much power. So, note to self: plug phone in every night. Ditto the MacBook, apparently.

Anyway. The diagnostics confirmed the AirPods were damaged, and they replaced them for me at no charge. That alone made having AppleCare worth it to me, although for that device I only got a couple of years of coverage. I bought the things last fall, though, so there's still some time. The phone battery was a different story—oh, I guess you could say I learned three things at the Apple Store today, because the third one is that they'll only replace the phone battery if it is degraded to 79% of original capacity. Mine is only down to 89%.

The guy looked at my battery usage history to see if he could figure out what was making the battery drain so quickly, and he could not find anything major that jumped out—although he could tell that I use the Facebook app a lot. That was nothing compared to what we knew was the reason my battery drained so quickly today, though: it was because I spent a couple of hours taking photos, and in particular, video. My camera app is also set to take Live Photos, and it only occurs to me now that that's probably also a big contributing factor, as it basically means every photo I take is a two-second video. I won't stop using that feature, though, it has come in wildly useful for months now. The wedding video I made for Gabriel and Lea would not have been at all the same without it.

Laney waited outside most of the time I was in the Apple Store, which wasn't a super long time. She got herself a coffee at another place at U Village, and then was delighted by the public space outside that new Apple Store they expanded into back in 2018. She was sitting on one of the wooden lounge chairs and even invited me to sit with her for a few minutes before we got up to head back home again—winding up on a "U District Station Express" bus that goes straight from that stop on 25th, curving around the south end of the UW campus and up to U District Light Rail Station. Why it doesn't just go straight down 25th to University of Washington Station by Husky Stadium, neither of us could figure out.

But, whatever. This was Laney's first time stepping onto the actual platform and seeing the awesome public art at U District Station, so there's that. And even thought the downtown stations are closed this weekend, we were able to take Light Rail from there, past University of Washington Station and then on to what temporarily ends at Capitol Hill Station. We parted ways there, Laney insisting she could carry both of her chairs home from there (I tried to walk her home so I could carry one of them for her, but she insisted I didn't need to), and then I walked home and set about processing and uploading my photos.

[posted 11:07 pm]