blinry ✨ @blinry@chaos.social

Ever feel like your morning routine is a hassle? Here's how to take a shower on Skylab, a NASA-operated space station launched in 1973:

"Please maintain a velocity of 17500 mi/h to remain in a stable low Earth orbit!"

This, on the other hand, actually is a piece of the moon! It's a basalt that formed there 3.8 billion years ago, and was collected in 1972 during the Apollo 17 mission.

That's no moon... it's flight spare of Telstar 1, an experimental communications satellite launched in 1962!

Update: I now have *four* scooter sharing apps installed, because availability fluctuates a lot during the day! :P

When locking it again, the app makes sure you park the scooter in an "allowed zone" (basically everything but the National Mall). My first ride replaced a 30-minute walk with a 15-minute fun ride for a bit over $3. I'm gonna want to do that again! :)

I already had tried electric scooters before, so I knew what to expect. Riding is fun! :) You're encouraged to use the bike lanes available, and speed seemed to be limited to about 20 km/h (12 mi/h) – I often wanted to go faster.

Here's how pricing works: You pay $1 for unlocking the scooter, and then 15 cents per minute of using it. You scan an attached QR code with your phone, get a short safety instructions, then you can use it.

I also didn't find the second-nearest one (even though you can ring its bell using the app), but the next one wasn't far. Its bell had been vandalized, but the brakes seemed fine, so I decided to go for it!

... or so I thought! After downloading the app, adding my credit card data, and heading outside, I couldn't find the scooter in the position it was displayed on the map. Maybe it was inside of a home, charging? (They pay people to do that overnight. Sharing economy at it's best.)

There are at least four competing scooter providers. I couldn't find good ressources or reasons why you should prefer one over the other, so I just went with the one that had a scooter parked conveniently outside of the place I stay at.

Washington, DC is one of these cities with an excellent scooter infrastructure! As I've got blisters on my feet from walking around all day yesterday, I decided to try it!

Now the presidential candidate has started singing birthday songs, because, oh shit!! It's the baby's birthday today!

In direct proximity: an evangelist presidential candidate singing about Jesus, a person with bunny ears continuously shouting "Trump's a dick" into a megaphone, a small hippie tent commune advocating for human rights and peace, and an obligatory Jehovah's Witnesses stand.

Found this pacifier on my way here. I wonder who might have lost it?

Today, @SequentialChaos@twitter.com and I made another animation! This one is based on an optical illusion called "contrast asynchrony":

And I met, talked and worked with so many lovely new people! It's amazing to watch a bunch of strangers grow into a network of friends, and I'm deeply humbled and grateful to be part of that. 💚 One more month to go!