I've been old enough to vote for the last two election cycles and I participated but it always felt like choosing between maintaining the current rate of decline or accelerating it.

After following James Talarico's campaign for a while and doing some research on him, I feel like I unlocked a new emotion. This is the first time in my life that I've felt like my vote has the ability to make a positive change in my life and the lives of the people of texas. Is this what politics used to be like? It's so exciting now. I'm gonna go vote on Friday and I can't wait. I've never felt so hopeful and energized at the thought of participating in an election.

Wondering if any other new voters are experiencing this. The options prior to now have almost exclusively been establishment corporate democrats that will fold to PAC donations or culture war-obsessed republicans that will also fold to PAC donations. Maybe the low voter turnout among gen Z has been at least partially due to a crushing feeling of hopelessness that I didn't even know was there until it was lifted off my chest. I just thought that was normal. It's been that way since I showed up.

Just wanted to talk a bit about it because it's been positive and encouraging for me. Thanks for reading.

Pic for visibility

The manager of the downtown location of White Rhino Coffee recently quit because when concerns were raised about ICE presence in the area the powers that be allegedly said not only were ICE agents welcome they would be eligible for first reponder discounts. People pushed back on White Rhino on IG, who then turned off comments. (Comments still open on FB for now.) Has anyone else heard anything more?

We counted it by household, if someone had 3 Talarico signs in their yard, we counted them as 1 and so on.

Talarico: 13 signs
Paxton: 6 signs
Gina: 1 sign
Abbott: 0 (rip Abbott)

If anyone wants to do this the week before the November election, feel free! I do not believe the news and polls with all the hype of Talarico, it’s giving the same hype Beto had and he lost. We went to Highland Park because they are a republican neighborhood in Dallas.

Mods pls don’t remove, this was an experiment I wanted to see in Highland Park

We did this this morning on 10/3/2026

I’m all for keeping the public informed but this just made me turn off public safety alerts on my phone. Not cool

… where are you hiding? … where do you hang out?

Where does a 36F organically run into people around here who are educated, employed, emotionally intelligent, curious about the world, capable of critical thinking, and actually see women as equals?

The apps are a joke, and I don’t really do social media. I’m reasonably attractive, kind, smart, active, and social, but I’m rarely approached. And when I do develop mutual interest with someone, I weirdly seem to hear some version of “you’re out of my league.” Or it’s their political or moral stances that don’t align with mine.

I’m not looking for matchmaking or a singles event. I’m genuinely curious where this demographic actually spends time in DFW.

And yes, I am fully prepared for Reddit to tell me “Austin.” 😂 But Dallas has gotten noticeably more progressive, so I know y’all are out there somewhere.

It'll still be 100+ in January. The heat dome is here permanently. I know I know, El Niño this and El Niño that. But the heat dome is like nah little niño, this is Texas and I'm not moving.

Seriously - I log on hoping to see everyone being as miserable as me and I don’t see it. Every fucking day - it’s been ruining my day! For a week now! And don’t you dare say the typical thing when people bitch about the weather “this is normal obviously you haven’t lived here very long”. Cause no it’s not! I’ve been here 9 years and it’s not normal it sucks and it’s dusty and shit blowing everywhere!! That is all…

I was a little idiot and tried to get to work at 6AM, spun out about a mile and a half into my 25 mile drive, immediately turned around and am waiting on the chicken pasta I made to heat up in the microwave.

Bit of a rant.

I can't stand this fucking place.

Dallas has some of the kindest, coolest people I've ever met but the entire metroplex feels like a liminal space thrust upon me by a vengeful god. I'm tired of having to drive an hour round trip to do goddamn anything. I'm tired of every strip mall on the interchange clusterfuck highway system being the same 6 restaurants. There's plenty to do and most of it is so far away it's not worth doing. Why the hell would any sane person spend an hour and a half on these suicidal maniac driver ridden highways to hang out with friends for two hours? That's a horrible value proposition.

Every corporate center is the same 10 distribution centers copy pasted in a big grid, with the same lifeless concrete and ugly ass pebble walls that remind me of those bean-shaped pools from the 70's. Are you allergic to windows? What is this, an architects take on what a low budget Bollywood version of Office Space combined with Blade Runner would look like?

I've never lived in a place where anyone gives a shit what irrelevant tiny town you live in. Oh you're in Flower Mound? Frisco? Grapevine? Irving? Little Elm? Waxahachie? Why the hell would I care, if I walk 30 feet in any direction I'm in a different town. No, I don't want to hear about how your "historic downtown" with 8 buildings in it is better than the other 30 historic downtowns. No, I don't want to drive 40 minutes each way to go to some random brewery where I can drink $10/cup piss water and pass 6 identical strips of BJ's, Portillo's, and Chick-Fil-A's in the process. Fucking hell.

Don't get me started on the "wow, great food scene!" people either. The food scene here is great if and only if you're willing to go on quests that rival the journeys taken in Tolkien books to get there and pay $20-30 for the experience. Stupendous. If you're working a miserable dead end job you hate with no time on your hands your options are the same 10 places every time. Fucking BOGO corporate slop bowls from Chipotle and Velvet Taco paired with $15 "artisanal" burgers and $40/pound BBQ meats that taste like they were made by someone with long-COVID who lost tastebud function a decade ago and never noticed.

Lastly, good jobs? Good work? Where?! I moved here expecting opportunity in my field. It was never true and especially isn't now that tariff scares have completely fucking killed my industry. How exactly is $16-20/hr office work "good" when I can be a cashier at fucking Buccees in bumfuck nowhere and earn more than that? I managed half a billion dollars in inventory for a Fortune 500 company and the only opportunities relegated here are dead-end entry level bullshit jobs with no career advancement opportunities unless you want to be an underpaid, dead-eyed middle manager until you retire at 65 70 75. I could make more money delivering Xanax and granny's heart pills as a medical courier in Iowa than I can working for any of the companies that have bothered to call back here.

So, where's the opportunity? Where's the low cost of living? Where are people finding these high 5 figure low 6 figure jobs? How do you handle getting to the things you actually do like without the absurd commute time making you want to be committed to a facility?

First, thank you. Unlike the cavalry of cowards in Uvalde, you arrived expediently and moved in without hesitation. You killed the terrorist (yeah I said it) and spared many lives.

Of course it’s never fast enough when a terrorist launches a surprise attack on innocent, unarmed civilians. All gathered in a public shopping mall on a Saturday afternoon. Which is no fault of the Allen PD.

We used to live our lives with a basic presumption of public safety. After all, what is the law designed to do? To protect those who cannot protect themselves. And yet that veneer of safety gets shattered by the day. But I digress…

Now I want to ask you a question. As career LEOs who took this job. Aren’t you sick of this? Did you ever sign up expecting to rush to a mass shooting on a regular basis? Arriving to find countless dead and mortally wounded Americans lying bloodied on the ground? Whether it’s a mall, a school, a movie theater, a concert hall or a public square. Did you really expect to see dead children and adults as part of the job description?

I’ll bet my bottom dollar the answer is NO. You did NOT sign up to rush into such carnage. You NEVER wanted to risk your life having to neutralize a mass shooter carrying an AR.

Call me crazy. But maybe you’ll consider joining us Democrats on this issue. For nothing more than making your jobs safer and easier. The solution is staring us all in the face. Ban the sale of a war weapons to deranged, psychopathic cowards. You shouldn’t have to be the ones to clean this shit up. Nor risk your life in (what could be) a very preventable situation.

Think it over. And thank you again. What better way to show gratitude than ensuring you never have to see this again.

Sincerely, Texas Citizen

Driving around this city after a long, hot, dry summer, it is absolutely ridiculous how horrible the Bermuda grass we have everywhere looks. Dead, dry, and yellow.

Once the boomers are gone, we have got to start replacing the vegetation across this city with natural plants native to the state. Not only would they survive better, they LOOK better!

I absolutely think people should be able to do whatever they want with their lawns, but especially across commercial corridors and around businesses, the city would be better served rethinking the vegetation allowed vs just planting suburban lawn grass that’s going to look like sh*t very quickly.

**Photos show what we should have

More residential, more density, more walkability. Any other solution is just band aid

I saw on the news that people are going to the hospital with diarrhea from fruits and veggies. I tried to make a salad using a recipe I stole from hello fresh last week and today I'm having a hard time being hydrated and I am worried about if I need to go to hospital soon. my ribs hurt from vomiting but I think it could also just be the flu. I have not eaten at taco bell which they are saying is where people are getting sick from. i am embarassed to talk about this but I just wanted to ask if anyone else is not isnot feeling well. thank you.
edit: recipie was for salad that involved big chunk of arugula lettuce and goat cheese and then chicken I think. any insight would help me thank you edit jul 19 - i went urgent care and it cost money. I am not really as sick any more. healing up. they did not have a fast test like with corona virus. they just gave me an IV. taking it easy. now I am afraid of lettuce in bags

I feel like shit this morning. Im probably gonna go buy some flowers later. My heart breaks for anyone who can not see their loved ones just one more time, I can not fathom.

I love you all, I want you to all be safe, I want you to all make sure your loved ones know they are loved.

edit, a few days later:

Y'all are wonderful people. Our politicians are not. That is all.

Hey y’all. I tried to talk to some family and friends about what I saw but they don’t seem to understand. “Yeah it’s sad. So sorry. Just gotta be aware of your surroundings.” None of them seem to be upset or angry like I am.

I made the mistake of looking for updates on Twitter while it was still an active shooter situation. Honestly I thought I was pretty desensitized. I grew up on the internet. I saw journalists die on Live Leak when I was a teenager. But seeing the victims yesterday has deeply traumatized me. Maybe because it’s so close to home, maybe because of the child victim(s)…

I needed groceries for the week. Because I get to go on living, go to work, make a stupid salad for lunch while other innocent people are lying cold in a morgue. So I decided to buck up and go to Tom Thumb. Maybe it was my own mental state but the store just felt off. There was hardly anyone there on a normally busy grocery shopping day. The parking lot and the inside of the store were so quiet. No chit-chat, no laughter from kids a few aisles over, everyone had their heads down.

I don’t know why I’m making this post. I guess I feel like y’all are my community. We’ve been through a lot together. The ice-pocolypse, etc. I guess I want to hear someone else say that I’m not crazy for being heartbroken by this. I do NOT know anyone directly impacted by this tragedy. I absolutely do not want to compare what I’m feeling to the pain the families of the victims are going through right now. I just want these actions to be so unacceptable to our country that we will do whatever we can to never see another child laying dead in a puddle of blood and the bodies of their family in front of a fucking h&m store.

I guess that’s all. Hope y’all are all managing well enough tonight. Thanks for listening friends.

The Fort Worth subreddit has been almost entirely overrun by just 2-3 prolific users that exclusively post political content. Each user posts 5-10 times per day. I actually agree with their politics, but I think it's starting to get annoying.

A lot of the non-political Fort Worth related content has been drowned out. It's still posted, but the responses are very little if any. It's almost like the Fort Worth subreddit userbase has been swapped out for a userbase that exclusively wants political content.

One of the users appears to be a bot of some sort because they keep spamming the same comments and links, and almost nothing else. There also seems to be a coordinated effort to boost content with upvotes, morning submissions can have hundreds of upvotes in just 15-30 minutes, which is not normal for a subreddit of that size.

The default position that people take is to just block the few accounts that are posting all of this. I've already done that. The problem is that the original userbase seems to have been driven away from the subreddit, it's effectively a dead subreddit after blocking the accounts.

Fire whoever is in charge of sending out alerts. Public safety alert are for incidents that affect the public’s safety like a person that injures a cop, an active shooter, or like a toxic chemical spill. An emergency alert is for things like tornado warnings or a virus that causes a toilet paper shortage.

The public has now become desensitized to these alerts and will turn all of them off. Nice job government! Next thing they’re gonna do is make it so you can’t turn them off like National/Presidential Alerts.

Also any federal politician will not actively fight to end changing the clocks twice a year should be voted out of office. Completely off topic but completely on my mind lol.

why can’t we have NORMAL and COLD winter holidays. i give up. 🫩

Ross Ave, Cedar Springs, San Jacinto St, Elm St, Lemmon Ave, etc all looks like this. The roads downtown, uptown, and in old east Dallas are literally destroying my car. You can’t even go over 20mph on Ross Ave without needing an alignment. What are our taxes going to? Shithole Arkansas has dirt roads in better condition than Ross Ave.

How do we make complaints about this? It’s every single street besides the highways 😭

I have a good job that pays well and the job market in DFW is really good in case I ever want to switch companies, but I don't enjoy living here. My life feels too much like Office Space. Sit in a car looking at concrete highways during my commute, end up at a boring corporate building where I spend most of my day, and on the weekend drive some more while on concrete highways to run errands.

I would move somewhere else to change things up but I don't know if I want to pick up and move somewhere and not even sure where I would go.

The customer for life schtick seems extra thick in this year's ad campaign on local broadcasts. It's sounding less like a car dealership and more like a cult.