IC: Ya wanna meet a Sassie? Head on over to "Little Feat", a "country blues revival" bar out in Tarislar, if you can get Silent P approval that is. He's the entertainment on the nights they don't have a live band. Interesting guy and easy to talk to. 'Course, he doesn't talk back, as such, but he's still an interesting conversationalist.

If 'wiz,' short for 'wizard,' is going to be part of the vernacular in 2070, I'm going to kill myself right now

Don't worry about 2070, Larme. You'll have killed yourself in the 50s
The frown's because of Larme's fate, not that I have anything against "wiz."

In pueget sound, just north of Vashion island is Blake Island. While Vashion island is known to be now the home of ultra rich, Blake island has and is a much more laid back space. The far side include Alki point/beach the original settlement in the Seattle by whites 200 years agfo in the late 19th century. Naturly they did not like being called "Alchies" go figure.

In the late 20th early 21st century it was home to nice beachs and places to eat and Tilicum villiage. A faux native american village where tourists could experience a native meal and culture. It was discribed as "A freaking indian luau!"

There was an attempt to keep this charmingly tacky toursit site after the awakening but the SS wanted tourists to hit up their own restaurants, not Salish culture with nuyen going to the Seattle government.

the cute site, stripped of salish workers tried to carry on white pinkskins in redface but it just didn't work and now it has been replaced by a pit BBQ place. In place of native dancers- square dancing. and what has replaced the native artwork, carved totoem poles and painted lodge houses depicting the culture and history of the local indigoneus peoples? I just don't want to say but with god as my witness, and I'm not an oppinionated woman, I cannot call a life sized statue of a bronosaurus cast in empty beer cans to be art!

Heh, for that Bronto's sake, I hope they're imported beer cans.

Hey, wasn't Brontosaurus proved to be not real? I thought some scientist or archeologist chummer got his fossils mixed and the real one was an apatasaurus? Damned high school crap I can hardly remember!

Yep, thats true. No such thing as a Brontosaurus, it had the wrong head.

To be clear, someone found the 'brontosaurus' first and named it apatosaurus. I don't know if the second guy said it was a different species, or just that he found it first, but the scientific community sided with the first fellow.

Well, there's the truth behind the old saying you cannot trust everything you read on the matrix.

Are you suggesting that Snowy not being opinionated is exaggerated a little?

She is a New Yorker. In a good dictionary that is a synonym for "being opinionated."

(She is so going to kick my butt at the gym tonight.)

yes baseball sucks and hockey rocks; but you're completely wrong about the beer. Seattle, and more so Portland, started the whole micro brewing thing back in the late 20th cent. Most any micro brew will kick ass on Kokanee (the schlitz of Canada.) OR Labatts OR Molson. Many of those micro brews have an ETOH content high enough to knock a dwarf on his square little butt.
Down here in dandelion eater territory, we have a bumper sticker "freinds don't let freinds drink at Starfucks." Way way back early this century, we were known as the epicenter of the 4th wave of coffee. the post starbucks, micro coffee era. Later when soycaf became the norm, we were still able to make it into decent, drinkable and palatable stuff.

there, I tried to keep it IC

..it's rumoured that in the Oregon, there are beers so strong they don't need a bottle or glass to hold them up.

...as to the hills in Seattle, this is one of the reasons they actually expanded rather than dismantled their trackless trolley system.

you mean like in San Fran? There is a trolley line along the waterfront that runns upto the international district near the sports stadiums. it turns inland and runs up hill just south of the Archology. It ha a doubious history. at the turn of thecentury it was taken off line for 'restoration' and replaced with buses on the route but the 'restroration ' went on so long rot started to set into the signs. Similarly the monorail was down to just one trian while the other was being 'restored.' but the power crisis of the early century, followedby the lack of petroleum suppies during the Ghost War caused Seattle to bring back these forms of mass transit.

Hitting outher tourist areas, the Space Needle. Yeah it's impressive at 605 feet tall and has amazing views-if you get a clear day. infamously s the 'eye of the needle. the restaurant on the level below the observation dack that rotates slowly so well balanced it runs on a 1.5 hp engine. Before the awakening there was on oneo utside the oturist board who would recommend the place and I must admitt to accpting the axiom that the higher a place is from the ground, the worst the food. What most people miss is that about a 3rd of the way up, just above the base, is another platform. at the turn of the century it was a hall that could be rented out for large meeting or weddings but today it is one of the three restaurants at the needle, the one for people with a lower budget. Eye of the needle is the reborn top flight restaurant. The bar is on the observation deck. At the turn of the century theyre was a wine bar plugging local wines, open only in the eveing. I guess if you're plugging $16/head for a view of sod all they wanted to be sure the people were mellow.

This was expanded on over the decades until by 2060 it was a top flight, dark wood panneled bar. It would be a great place for a meet if you only wanted atmosphere but it's too dangerous because it's so limited in ways out-so save it for celebrations afterward.

Some people said the area around the needle is seedy and a mere ghost of it's glory but I didn't find itso. a few seedy types towards the docks but that was it. With the Arcology taking up the southern oturist sites a lot of the cities legal toursim, as opposed to us, relocated there. Before that the area had several nice restaurants, including the original Mchughes-nothing like the burger joint it is today- as well as a music museum and a sci-fi museum-amusing today for it's kitch value that I think were cases of a man's pasison for his hobbies but either (a) he wanted to share these with Seattle and had the money to fund it. of (b) mansion or not his wife said "get your damn crap out of the basement" Your call depending on your level of cynisism.

there was also there the science museum. very hands on for kids, which is cool. They use to have a great area on insects, real ones, with a few giant animatronic bugs-a mantis to freaking close to mantid I wonder what the designer was influenced by. THAT area now includes bug spirits and is the seague way to their magical theory region.

There's also a plantarium. where they project star patterns on the ceiling. realling inovative and so much a part of Seattle's charm instead of being full of chairs where you will get a crick in your neck looking up, there is maybe half the floor space kept open for people to lie down and look up. In the eveings they do laser shows there, rock music with the light hsow beating out a rhythem. Oldies like Queen and 'Floyd and modern stuff too. It's dark and lots of distractions and if you want to hand off something to a contact-no one will notice, especially if they are grinding you into the floor with the Me-109 show or some of Mercurial's harder stuff.

Wow, planetariums...how quaint. They rebuilt the planetarium in Vancouver (I'm not sure, but I think Pacific Cybernetics funded it in part) so that it was an AR with a full VR option site. Is the Seattle Planetarium the same?

Portland's is magically enhanced with illusion spells. Not only do you see them with your own eyes, but the zoom in effect is enough to make you barf

OOC: Seattleites don't think of Everett or Tacoma as "suburbs" of Seattle. Bellevue, Shoreline/Lake Forest Park/Edmonds, White Center, Mercer Island, Redmond, Renton, Bothell, Kirkland... sure, those are suburbs. But it's about 30 miles from downtown Seattle to Everett or Tacoma, and with traffic at rush hour turning that into a 1-2 hour trip, it's really a commute to a different city. I live in Seattle, and work for an ambulance company that provides EMS in Everett and Tacoma... it's a pretty amusing cross-section.

Scale and occupants certainly differ once you get out there, too. You can drive for *three minutes* out of Everett, not even on I-5, and be in farmland. For a (very) rapidly growing city, you've got an awful lot of pickup trucks and country music playing up there, and I've taken more meth-head patients out of trailers just south of downtown than I can count. It's a lot cheaper to own property there than it is in Seattle... comparable homes in comparable neighborhoods can be nearly twice as expensive in the big city.

Tacoma, on the other hand, is definitely a port town with it's own attitude, seperate of that of Seattle. Very working class, heavily military (Ft. Lewis is just down the road), lots of sprawl and urban blight within walking distance of the city core, with construction reverting (in under a mile) to single-family dwellings on individual lots. Crime is a major issue in Tacoma... it's not uncommon for us to have to move ambulances around multiple times a night as their posts become areas of "increased police activity." Property, however, is in a similar arc to that in Everett... the people who work in the city can frequently actually afford to live there.

Hey, that's pretty cool. Do they make ya feel like you're becoming a crispy critter if you walk into the sun?

...apologies, was responding from the RL POV . Hard to tell at times which perspective this thread is from.

...three...more...years.

But then if those damn Cubs are in position to win the World Series this year, the comet will hit and all will be moot. That fan who interfered in Game 6 of the 2003 NL championship by leaning over the wall and catching that foul ball inches from of Alou's glove doesn't realise that he single handedly saved the earth from an ELE.

Looking at the maps, it looks like there's a fair amount of land-mass in islands out in puget sound. I've never heard what's actually out on the islands. Corp-owned? National Parklands? Can you access them by roads or do you need to be ferried?

IIRC in the past they were all Salish lands, but in recent years they added Outremer and some man-made corporate islands.

call me simple-minded, but them being islands i'd say you need some kind of vehicle able to cross water to reach them O.o
at least, if they did not interconnect every small little island with its own bridge *g*

One of the predone adventures had Vashion island, which is fuirther away from Seattle than Blake Island, was home to luxury homes.

The largest of those islands is Whidbey Island. It was a hot commodity when everything hit the crapper because of the Naval Air Station on the north end, and the fact that there's a bridge connecting the north end to the mainland (actually to another island that's also connected to the mainland, but that's another story). The Salish (OOC: I believe) ended up with it. The south end of the island didn't really notice the hubbub. It tends to be sleepier and more rustic than the north end, and has been something of a hotspot for writers and Hollywood types (not the A-list actors, but the composers and writers and stuff) since the turn of the 21st Century. A ferry still runs from the south end of the island to Mukilteo (between Seattle and Everett), but since it's an international trip now, it's not as frequent, and security's a whole lot tighter.

I think the Olympic penninsula is home to some NAN that are more in your face but you would think they'd want to encourage good relations with Seattlies if only for the nuyen they bring to town. Especially in the more remote areas where the locals do not have to worry about being offended by seeeing pinkskins on their land.

And then there's the night life. Or, well, late afternoon early evening, before we go out as Runners and get shot at, life.

We've got that hooked up and going on in this little burg. The Inferno and the rest are just the club scene people. For those of you who like it quieter we've got great bars here, alla the best of the Boston style neighborhood bars, micro breweries that make some damned good lagers and ales that are sweeeeeeet, heady and full bodied both.

We still host both the Seattle International Film Festival and it's trideo brother the Seattle InternationalTrideo Festival, both of which are well thought of in the industry and not, to paraphrase Cartman, all about homosexual cowboys eating pudding. The Henry Art Gallery, Seattle Art Museum and the Olympic Sculpture park all still exist, as do the Woodland Park Zoo and the Seattle Aquarium, both with some interesting para critters on hand as well the more normal fare.

And for you nostalgia buffs there was once upon a time the great Seatle Hemp Fest yearly.



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Ok my favorite spot in Seattle? Pike Place market. jeez. started around the turn of the 20th century it was supposed to be a public market for fishermen and farmers to sell their produce directly. It has since grown, strathcing for several blocks and levels.

Some have likened it to Bostons Faniul Hall-which is more polished, or Philly's Reading Market- which is more food based, or even Manhattan's Fulton market-which is more wholesalers. If fact I would say the top level is like reading market but the levels below it is like the town of New Hope, pennsylvania or a street fair in Greenwhich village. In all honesty the twisting halls and myriad different shops remind me of nothing so much as a truly weird feaver dream I had once or an astral trip to a meta plane that was really screwed up.

The 'ground' level facing up hill is where most of the produce, fish, meat and flowers are with some trinkets too.
Working DOWN from there, heading towards the harbor are 2, 3 or maybe 4 layers gonig down full of shops, wine shops, bars restaurants, diners and the like. These are not laid out in easy levels like a modern mall. they slope, interconnect at weird angles and except for the top level you cannot walk down the length of any lower level in a straight line without going up or down a level. They are full of polished wood floors and sometimes stairs connecting levels sometimes ramps. There are odd little shops selling everthing from spices to books, clothes, jewelry, talismongers, techie stuff.
A perfect maze of hall ways and slopes even without masses of peopel walking through, there would be no way to get a clear shot at someone and if things go south, it would be easy to slip away.

At street level across from the market there are more shops and places to grab fast food. several restaurants that can be reached only from the street and some deep within the market. one brew pub on a split level with a real lower look but a surprisingly up market menu. Behind the back is a small cheap theatre that claims to have been doing comedy reviews since the start of the century. skip it. the places is really dingy and looks like it's been decades since it was mopped, never mind refurbished.

One thing I loved was a doughnut stand just inside the main entrance. for about 4 you can get a sack of fresh made doughnuts and a cup of soycaf. Once the tourists start to show it has a long line in front of it but get in early and you get immediate service. It was my regular breakfast in town.

The only down side to the market is that it's only really open during daylight hours, say about 7am to 6pm. After that except for the bars it pretty well shuts down.

I been there. It's actually pretty neat. All rustic an' stuff, though I bet lots of it has been rebuilt with more up to date materials yet made to fit into that rustic look. I forget the name of the place 'cause I only been there once, but one o' the little shops had real hot chocolate! Oh, that was good!

I think the current section was built in the 1960's and has just been maintained.
In front of the main section is Rachel- a life sized brass pig with a lsit for small coins and a register for cret sticks. Charity to Rachel is used for local children's charities. She's very popular with tourists for photos.

Oddly on the roof of the market, hidden away-and don't ask how I was in a position to see them(yeah and I mean that for RL don't ask), there are half a dozen more brass pigs. What they are for I have no idea. if they are replacements fro ehen rachel wears out it makes not sense because they're more exposed tothe elements than she is.

From Rachel-behind her and just to the right is the fmaous stall of the fish throwers. To the right and round the corner is the doughnut place. stretching to the right is the long gallery with more fish, produce, birckabrack, talismongers and some amazingly beuatifuyl flowers.

Restaurrants in the market include places for seafood sandwiches, oyster bar the brewery, french crepes a deli/wine shop, irish pub, a greasy spoon, coffe shacks and a polinesian place. and those are just the ones I can remember easily.

I should point out that particularly near Pike's Place, resteraunts and clubs are not stand alone buildings so much as hidden away nuggets of whatever in a basement or 'upper story' of a greater building. Almost always there will be stairs involved.

I looked back at the notes I had before my run. someone discribed the levels of the PikesPlace Market at 'catacombs" and that really is a great discription. Maze and labrynth work but truly catacomb really does give a better feel, even though one side is exposed to the sea and has windows.

I stayed away from the Archology but I was wondering. the street level at what use to be called "Pioneer Square" was only 10 feet above sea level, but the archology goes DOWN several levels in basements and subasements and parking, but I've never seen mentioned how/where the water pumps are to beat back the water table?

Before the streets were regarded in the 1890's they had problems with flush toilets from the hills-40% grade- and pressure from the sound at high tide pushing back up the pipes. Apparently ithe conflict of gravity feed and tide pressure met under pioneer square and if you flushed a toilet at high tide, the sudden opening in the sytem meant the toilets would shoot raw sewage 4 feet into the air!

Now that give an idea of the water problems at sea level, how great must it be below sea level?

they manage at submarines, they will manage on the land too i think O.o

submarines do not have to worry about seepage from the ground table. They are supposed to be sealed and have considerably less mass than an arcology to support.

but they have considerably more pressure on their toilet . . there was a novel of shadowrun in which the runners managed to shanghai a submarine, and the rigger freaked out about the possibility of one of the runners(the trol, go figure) not opening and closing the toilet-valves in the right order . . and i've been told by my buddy from the sea faring military forces of germany, that that is pretty much the way it is on real ones too . .

Yes in the Submarine Service opening the Head Ball Valve while the waste tanks are being flushed/purged at greater pressure than the subs depth, has caused many incidents of such, like waste showers and other bad things.

Many never noticed the Purging Sign hanging in the Head Door, to their regret.

WMS

Maybe, but they only ever do it once. Because their buddies usually make it clear that a repeat performance will end up with them as part of the purge.

Because there's another thing that submarines are good at... retaining odors.


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