Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

When I first heard of the mass shooting in Minneapolis my first thought was a sarcastic, "Gee I hope no GUNS were hurt."

Apparently, these were GUNS that were bought legally. Pistol, rifle, shotgun. A manifesto was posted. Rude sayings were marked on the magazines. This all shows intent - TO USE GUNS.

Mass shooting are all about USING GUNS. GET RID OF THE GUNS.

I know the NRA Nut Jobs are going to scream about how GUNS don't kill people but people kill people.

Yeah buddy, PEOPLE WITH GUNS.

Thoughts and prayers? THEY WERE IN A G*DD*AMN CHURCH. God doesn't care. GET RID OF THE GUNS.




Epstein Files. Just in case you forgot.

After finally riding Fahrenheit and taking a needed bathroom break we headed, fast as we could, for the front of the park and the Carrousel. It would be exaggeration to say everyone in the freaking world was in our way --- the parking lot, rumor was, would be a great spot to see the fireworks from if you found a good spot --- and yet there we were. Our plan had been to turn back if we didn't get to the ride by 9:30 and time, you know ...

Well, I saw the carousel, slightly obstructed by other things, at a time when my phone still said it was not yet 9:31 and at that point it seemed foolish to give up on the ride over a matter of sixty seconds' more walk. The carousel was again (still?) playing the Beatles-and-Beach-Boys songs we remembered from our first trip the day before. My recollection is also we missed a ride cycle and had to get on the next one, eating up even more precious time. But we got our ride in, and our pictures, and now we just had to get to Lightning Racer.

We started off well, with me having the advantage of long legs and a fast stride. But you know my great sense of direction? That mental map I have of a place I've visited only briefly? It failed me here; I never got the hang of where stuff was in HersheyPark and I was left stumped for what way to go. The park signs weren't good; they would point toward a couple of attractions --- with good signs, showing the full logo, mind --- and Lightning Racer was not consistently one of them. And posted maps would only give some local features, not stuff way on the other end of the park. So I got the attention of a guy working carnival games --- annoying someone who thought I was trying to cut in on their game --- to ask what way to go. Turn off that way and go through The Hollow, sounds good.

The employee steered me wrong. So did another employee I asked a few minutes later when we didn't seem to be getting anywhere. I don't know how. Maybe they were as vague on the park directions as I was, especially if they get rotated around games and might forget just where they're facing. Maybe they were thinking rightly but we'd have to follow a path obvious to people familiar with the park and opaque to newbies.

But the nightmare was, we weren't getting anywhere near Lightning Racer, and we were getting near the end of the night. I describe it as a nightmare and that was the feeling; it was almost exactly what would happen if we were dreaming about missing a roller coaster. We would fail to get a night ride on this coaster, and I blame myself. If we'd waited for bunnyhugger to load an online park map we would have had a chance. Heck, if we'd figured out the route while we were becalmed waiting for Fahrenheit, we'd have made it. But we didn't, and we settled for a ride on the nearest coaster instead, the Great Bear, a good ride but only an okay consolation.

But the park was closed, except for the people sticking around for fireworks. The question is where they'd come from and it turned out ``right over the fence from where we were'' was, if not right, at least close enough. We --- and a crowd of several dozen --- ended up standing by a little nothing part of the park, near one of the emergency exits used by ambulances, watching the Fourth of July show.

It was a good show. It was a big show, going on for maybe a half-hour. There was a moment about twenty minutes in that I thought was building into the climax and no, it was not. The false climax was just the new level of activity and it seemed like the show might never end. Then the true climax came and you'd think that would be the end of the show, right?

Of course, there are always a couple stragglers, fireworks that didn't go off during the show that are fired afterward to clear them out. There were a lot of stragglers, enough to seem like the show had decided to start over again. Like not just a couple fireworks but a dozen or so, some fired simultaneously. Ah, but then that was the end of the show, right?

No, because there was another round of stragglers, and most of the crowd we'd been watching with gathered again to catch another dozen fireworks. And that was the end of the show ... except that a minute later another round started, drawing more applause and laughter.

I lost track of how many times the show started back up again. At one point I called out, after a minute's silence, ``Was there anything else?'' and on cue, there were a couple more fireworks. I nearly fell over laughing at this. bunnyhugger tells me some kids tried the same line and were rewarded with another short round. But eventually, finally, we saw what surely must have been the final fireworks, and if there were any more we didn't see it. We walked back to the front of the park, and the car, figuring to take our time and linger in the gift shop because the traffic jam to get out was enormous and slow-moving.

We had got past the front gate and diverted to our car when we heard a chilling cry: ``Does anyone know CPR?'' Neither of us do, but I now and then feel guilty that I don't. Someone had collapsed near a car and there was a moderate-sized, confused crowd around. Someone from another section of lot came running, moving like a superhero cartoon and jumping over a small fence, racing to the rescue. So we felt like we had no business sticking around any longer and ... well, goodness. We later on saw ambulance lights flashing, so we can hope there was a good ending there, and go on with our disappointment about Lightning Racer smacked hard back into perspective.

And this closed our Hershey visit. Saturday we looked forward to nothing but the long drive back across Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan to home, with nothing to do but stop in Cedar Point as a waypoint. But then we also had planned on a night ride on Lightning Racer, so how good were we at executing our plans?

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Back now to Halloweekends, on Thursday, as we dive into the night.

Here's a sunset picture behind Maverick that I think came out pretty well.

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Here's the same sunset only in portrait.

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And then here's Maverick's braking area, on the left, with a couple trains of riders. The queue is to the right and you can see the darkness settling on Frontier Town.

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Looking up above the Frontier Trail bathrooms, once upon a time the receiving station for the other sky ride, at the setting sun and just a bit of a vapor trail.

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bunnyhugger sitting down to rest near the Celebration stage; we were probably watching a bit of the show while having a snack.

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Here we're peering up into Rougarou.

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Trivia: Flying STS-41D in 1984, McDonnell Douglass payload specialist Charles D Walker used an electrophoresis experiment to purify a gram of hormone, drug purification being a big promise of spaceflight. On return to Earth, it turned out the sample was contaminated by pseudomonas microorganisms. Source: Shattered Dreams: The Lost and Cancelled Space Missions, Colin Burgess. Pseudomonas is a family of microorganisms that turn out to be responsible for a lot of hospital-acquired infections.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 70: Deucedly Odd Goings-On, Ralph Stein, Bill Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

For years I've had garymcgath.com hosted on HostGator. Its support has gotten less and less satisfactory, and I need to either renew or migrate soon. I've had mcgath.com on DreamHost for some time, and it's been satisfactory, so I'm moving garymcgath.com.

Originally mcgath.com was my personal website, and garymcgath.com was my professional one. The distinction has increasingly blurred. Currently mcgath.com is for older stuff and some filk-related things, such as the filk history Tomorrow's Songs Today and my filk songs Garymcgath.com has my blog and information about my books and silent film stuff.

Garymcgath.com is a Wordpress site, which makes it a little tricky to migrate, but DreamHost provides tools. The new site would ideally be indistinguishable from the old one except by IP address, but we'll see how close I can get to it. I'll try to keep downtime to a minimum.

Just finished; Nothing, my life has been clown shoes lately.

Currently reading: Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by Sarah Wynn-Williams. This is so horrifying. Obviously, the genocide and destruction of the political process is the most horrifying thing about it, but the neat thing about evil is that it's fractal, and the interpersonal stuff is much more visceral. Like Joel Kaplan sexually harassing Sarah shortly after she's almost died in childbirth (because, yeah, you can be one of the top people at Facebook at the height of its success and almost die in childbirth. America!). Or the weird obsession Sheryl Sandberg has with getting women to nap with their heads in her lap on her private jet. These people are so creepy and awful, and nightmarish as you think Mark Zuckerberg is, this memoir depicts him as much worse than that.

Which isn't to say that Sarah is great—she paints herself as a naïve idealist, but the scale of awful at this company is such that after a certain point, you kind of roll your eyes every time she notices that it's bad. But that's storytelling for you. Highly recommended.

The heck of a ride being down is that the ride operator will never, ever give you any information about it. Not why it's down, not how long it's going to be down, not whether they expect it to be up in ten minutes or ten hours. I guess in a few cases if something is clearly down the rest of the day they'll say that but otherwise, no. They'll just offer you the chance to continue waiting if you wish but you might consider other attractions at Amusement Park.

So that's where we were stuck with Fahrenheit, once the trains stopped moving. They would sometimes play a recording about how we were welcome to wait, but ... and meanwhile people ahead of us gave up, offering the prospect of a wait-free ride if there would be a ride, apart from all the waiting. One or two people joined the line behind us but for the most part, people were more sensible than to spend their dwindling time at HersheyPark waiting for the ride. And yet we waited.

We still wanted to get to the Carrousel, near the front of the park, for another ride. And we wanted to get back to the back of the park for Lightning Racer before the park closed and fireworks began. I finally offered this as a plan: if we could get to the Carrousel by 9:30, we'd ride that; if not, we'd turn around and find Lightning Racer. A half-hour should be enough to navigate a park that size even if we didn't have a paper map, and the park only had some partial maps or signs posted around the place. We'd been there just hours earlier; we just had to retrace our steps.

Eventually, mechanics came, and spent time around the ride, and eventually they started to run test cycles and I thought for sure we were going to be riding in minutes. It was, although more minutes than I was hoping for. In all, we must have spent more time waiting for Fahrenheit than we would have for Jolly Rancher Remix. And it's a nice ride but its big gimmick is the more-than-vertical drop and that's not that novel, even if it's not common.

My stubbornness had kept us at Fahrenheit rather than going off to the Carrousel; now, we had to find out, did we have time to get there and back to Lightning Racer before 10:00? Navigating through the crowds of --- you know, nobody was in line for any rides all day, basically. Why were they all on the midway now? ... Besides scouting out spots for the fireworks, I mean.

(And it doesn't really fit anywhere but we did run across a kiddie carousel, probably a Herschell or Spillman or Herschell-Spillman. We did stop to admire that, though we were too tall to ride. Near it was also a pony cart ride that I thought bunnyhugger had noticed. She had not, and so didn't get photographs like she'd have wanted. I realize also that I don't have any particular photographs so maybe I'm just imagining that I noticed?)

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Continuing my Thursday pictures of our four-day Halloweekends trip last year believe it or not but I'm trying to stick to just the visually striking ones and skip the ones that are the same photo I take every year. Please consider these:

The turnaround for Snake River Falls looks great in this light. Also like part of a bobsled or other ride kind we'd be into. Blood On The Bayou is a walk-through haunted area that used to open near Top Thrill Dragster and was relocated when that coaster went into repair.

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SkyHawk seen from nearly on its side, with the Snake River Falls in the foreground.

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These trees are around the restaurant that used to be one of the antique autos rides.

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And hey, here's a kiosk that's in Trial Mode and broken, for whatever it is! The server URL is invalid; if you know a correct URL, hurry over there.

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Here's a view from the Maverick queue, looking out over Steel Vengeance and its lift hill.

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Look at all the people gathered in line safely behind us, there.

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Trivia: In the 1910s Britain's August Bank Holiday was popularly known as ``St Lubbock's Day'', after Sir John Lubbock, proposer of the 1871 act that suspended regular banking for one day each season to give tellers a rest. Source: A Nation of Deadbeats: An Uncommon History of America's Financial Disasters, Scott Reynolds Nelson.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 70: Deucedly Odd Goings-On, Ralph Stein, Bill Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

Another collection of comments to other people’s journals:

elise was asking about "ways to learn to wanna when you're gonna hafta"

I said:

Sometimes I get things done by reminding myself that I don't have to want to do them, as long as they get done. Meaning that I'm not going to enjoy the task, but maybe I want to have done it, or maybe I'm leaning on bits of habit. That mostly works for small things: it's easier to think "don't have to like it, as long as it gets done" about relatively short things, like brushing my teeth, than about anything longer or more complicated.

Typing this, I realize that this is something I mostly do/need to do late in the day. Even with meds, I run out of executive function well before I run out of day (or evening).

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cosmolinguist posted about feeling like everyone else hasn't just stopped talking about the pandemic, they're not thinking about it, and he quoted his manager saying "something like 'You're the only one who remembers covid.' Not in an accusing way or anything, just making an ob. Clearly based on the fact that I'm still masking and I've never seen any of my colleagues wear a mask at in-person gatherings."

My comment was:
As I said [on Mastodon], it reminds me of something Siderea posted about in 2018-19: a hundred years ago, in the 1920s, people didn't mention the Spanish Flu epidemic, even though flu was still killing a significant number of people every year (as it still is today). People did write about World War I, and men who died there, and there were novels about the young women who were never going to marry because of the gender imbalance, but it looked from 2018 as though there was an agreement or decision not to talk about the pandemic.

Six years ago, that seemed odd; four years ago, I was deliberately posting almost every day just so I would have a record of what those first months of the covid pandemic had been like.

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A comment to buhrger, who lives in Alberta, about finding a new doctor:

It's not just your area, or province, that is short on doctors who are accepting new patients. A couple of months ago, we were talking to a friend of Adrian's, Ruth; they are both dissatisfied with their current doctor, but Ruth has had trouble finding another that she can get to reasonably. Oddly, I am seeing a nurse practitioner in that practice, and am entirely happy to keep seeing her, and not just because I don't want to roll the dice on someone else taking me and my combination of medical things seriously while still taking as given that I am a competent adult.

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Comment to ambyr’s post about characters with an annoying sort of genre-awareness:

I haven’t read any Moreno-Garcia, but that shape of genre-awareness feels all wrong to me. I'm fine with characters having no idea they're in a horror novel, or a detective story, or whatever. And I'm fine with characters being aware if it's something like "if he's really a vampire, we should make sure all the doors are locked, buy some garlic, and not invite anyone inside," or with "there's no such thing as a vampire, what is this person really hiding?"

For example, I'm amused by the Terry Pratchett books where the characters know that million-to-one shots often work, so they're carefully trying to contrive those long odds against themselves before trying to do something like shoot a dragon. For me, that works in part because it's a given that the Discworld runs partly on Narrativium, and is out at the far end of some sort of probability curve.

"Don't separate the party" is a fiction-flavored way of saying :don't wander off" or "we should stay together" that doesn't require us to think we're actually in a work of fiction--but I would be annoyed by a book where the characters routinely said thet, and then someone ran off without saying anything or taking useful equipment entirely because the plot required it.

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#burger and I were talking about (not) carrying cash:

If I’m out and about (not just going for a walk in the neighborhood) it’s usually for some sort of errand, and even if the main goal is to pick up a library book I’ll be passing shops and it often makes sense to go inside: maybe this branch of CVS has the specific earplugs I’m looking for, maybe the supermarket will have good berries.

That’s separate from the fact that I carry cash and credit card in the same wallet as my ID and other useful cards including my transit pass. Some of that is just-in-case planning: if one kind of thing goes wrong, I may need ny health insurance card. If I’m picking up certain prescriptions, they want me to show ID.

But mostly, having enough cash to get home in case I lose, or someone steals, my wallet is an old, ingrained habit. Once upon a time, that meant always having a subway token and a coin for a pay phone. Now, I keep a $5 bill in my daypack, and one in each of my coats that has a zipper pocket. It’s a firm enough habit that the daypack also has a Canadian $5 bill, just in case. (I didn't put a five-pound note in my pack when we were in London. Maybe I should have.)

Via NY Times:

"The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts named Stephen Nakagawa, a former dancer with the Washington Ballet, as its director of dance programming on Monday, shortly after firing the department’s previous leader and declaring that its programming would be moving in a new direction."

"Mr. Nakagawa had written a letter.... in which he noted his support for the Trump administration and complained about “radical leftist ideologies in ballet,”" "

Hubba what?

"Mr. Grenell had urged them to come up with programming that was more “broadly appealing,” providing as an example the TV show “So You Think You Can Dance.”"

Hmmm, so it won't be all goose stepping, polkas and waltzes? In tRump's next move, the symphony orchestra will be replaced by Kid Rock and an Oompa band.

I got a call that my younger brother was in the hospital so I left work early and trotted down to see him. When I walked into his room I got a shock at the stranger in the bed. I haven't seen my brother in almost a year and he's been treated for cancer - now in remission - and was presently in to have two more stents put in him. He was heavier, paler and completely bald. It took me a moment to realize he was the splitting image of my Uncle Frank who was always bald.

I never saw any family resemblance in my younger brother until that point. It was remarkable. I look like my mom, my older brother is like my dad but my younger brother? I puzzled for years where in the family tree he came from.

He's recovering and going home today. My older brother showed up after a time and we all yucked it up for about an hour and a half. So, I guess all is well for the moemnt.

No, nobody died.

My elderly aunt -- who is the youngest and only remaining member of my father's generation, his little sister -- said something in an email that indicated that she, treasured and pampered last child, did not know the full story about her father's travels around the world. I grew up hearing stories of Grampa's travels from Dad and from his brother; I know all the details about what it was like to sail in a four-masted barque from Bremen to Cape Town to Sydney through the Straits of Magellan (in winter!) to Rio de Janiero to Genoa, a two-year voyage.

She took my offer as an insult; of course she'd been told everything (her version was "Nobody can know what happened."). And called me a liar, and worse. She said I was making it all up, or Dad had invented it, because nobody who wasn't there could know. (This is the woman who had a free ride to Purdue but dropped out after 1 semester because she couldn't be that far away from her mother. She has no idea about studying anything, let alone history, or about research. I'm amazed she got out of high school.)

I let out some of the head of steam this built in me (that has always been the worst insult for me, as a writer and journalist). Then I told her I was not a liar, nor did I invent family history. All that I knew had been verified not only by my father but by one of his brothers, and was truth. It was known, just not to her. All the family stories were softened when they were told to the baby of the family.

And just as I wasn't around in the 30s, she wasn't around at the turn of the century when Grandpa was on that trip.

She had also called me by my birth name, which is now an insult in the world; who wants to be a Karen these days? I told her my name has been Kit for more than 50 years, and signed the note that way.

I have never been one of her cherished nieces; they got all the attention long before I was born, and by the time I came around she had no room for anyone else.

So, if I am lucky, she will no longer leave snarky notes in my FB comment if I mention family history on that side of the family. She cannot put me 'in my place' as she sees it; I am far and away out of her range.

It is more of a relief than anything else, the thought that I probably will not have to deal with her. And, as I said in the header, I still have a cousin on that side of the family whom I get along with well, and several on the other side. None of them within 400 miles or so, but that's how it goes.

I do miss the departed members of that generation, that family, ones who accepted me as I am, who listened and to whom I listened, and who I know loved me. They're gone, but never forgotten.

I'll start with the tl;dr summary to make sure everyone sees it and then explain further: As of September 1, we will temporarily be forced to block access to Dreamwidth from all IP addresses that geolocate to Mississippi for legal reasons. This block will need to continue until we either win the legal case entirely, or the district court issues another injunction preventing Mississippi from enforcing their social media age verification and parental consent law against us.

Mississippi residents, we are so, so sorry. We really don't want to do this, but the legal fight we and Netchoice have been fighting for you had a temporary setback last week. We genuinely and honestly believe that we're going to win it in the end, but the Fifth Circuit appellate court said that the district judge was wrong to issue the preliminary injunction back in June that would have maintained the status quo and prevented the state from enforcing the law requiring any social media website (which is very broadly defined, and which we definitely qualify as) to deanonymize and age-verify all users and obtain parental permission from the parent of anyone under 18 who wants to open an account.

Netchoice took that appellate ruling up to the Supreme Court, who declined to overrule the Fifth Circuit with no explanation -- except for Justice Kavanaugh agreeing that we are likely to win the fight in the end, but saying that it's no big deal to let the state enforce the law in the meantime.

Needless to say, it's a big deal to let the state enforce the law in the meantime. The Mississippi law is a breathtaking state overreach: it forces us to verify the identity and age of every person who accesses Dreamwidth from the state of Mississippi and determine who's under the age of 18 by collecting identity documents, to save that highly personal and sensitive information, and then to obtain a permission slip from those users' parents to allow them to finish creating an account. It also forces us to change our moderation policies and stop anyone under 18 from accessing a wide variety of legal and beneficial speech because the state of Mississippi doesn't like it -- which, given the way Dreamwidth works, would mean blocking people from talking about those things at all. (And if you think you know exactly what kind of content the state of Mississippi doesn't like, you're absolutely right.)

Needless to say, we don't want to do that, either. Even if we wanted to, though, we can't: the resources it would take for us to build the systems that would let us do it are well beyond our capacity. You can read the sworn declaration I provided to the court for some examples of how unworkable these requirements are in practice. (That isn't even everything! The lawyers gave me a page limit!)

Unfortunately, the penalties for failing to comply with the Mississippi law are incredibly steep: fines of $10,000 per user from Mississippi who we don't have identity documents verifying age for, per incident -- which means every time someone from Mississippi loaded Dreamwidth, we'd potentially owe Mississippi $10,000. Even a single $10,000 fine would be rough for us, but the per-user, per-incident nature of the actual fine structure is an existential threat. And because we're part of the organization suing Mississippi over it, and were explicitly named in the now-overturned preliminary injunction, we think the risk of the state deciding to engage in retaliatory prosecution while the full legal challenge continues to work its way through the courts is a lot higher than we're comfortable with. Mississippi has been itching to issue those fines for a while, and while normally we wouldn't worry much because we're a small and obscure site, the fact that we've been yelling at them in court about the law being unconstitutional means the chance of them lumping us in with the big social media giants and trying to fine us is just too high for us to want to risk it. (The excellent lawyers we've been working with are Netchoice's lawyers, not ours!)

All of this means we've made the extremely painful decision that our only possible option for the time being is to block Mississippi IP addresses from accessing Dreamwidth, until we win the case. (And I repeat: I am absolutely incredibly confident we'll win the case. And apparently Justice Kavanaugh agrees!) I repeat: I am so, so sorry. This is the last thing we wanted to do, and I've been fighting my ass off for the last three years to prevent it. But, as everyone who follows the legal system knows, the Fifth Circuit is gonna do what it's gonna do, whether or not what they want to do has any relationship to the actual law.

We don't collect geolocation information ourselves, and we have no idea which of our users are residents of Mississippi. (We also don't want to know that, unless you choose to tell us.) Because of that, and because access to highly accurate geolocation databases is extremely expensive, our only option is to use our network provider's geolocation-based blocking to prevent connections from IP addresses they identify as being from Mississippi from even reaching Dreamwidth in the first place. I have no idea how accurate their geolocation is, and it's possible that some people not in Mississippi might also be affected by this block. (The inaccuracy of geolocation is only, like, the 27th most important reason on the list of "why this law is practically impossible for any site to comply with, much less a tiny site like us".)

If your IP address is identified as coming from Mississippi, beginning on September 1, you'll see a shorter, simpler version of this message and be unable to proceed to the site itself. If you would otherwise be affected, but you have a VPN or proxy service that masks your IP address and changes where your connection appears to come from, you won't get the block message, and you can keep using Dreamwidth the way you usually would.

On a completely unrelated note while I have you all here, have I mentioned lately that I really like ProtonVPN's service, privacy practices, and pricing? They also have a free tier available that, although limited to one device, has no ads or data caps and doesn't log your activity, unlike most of the free VPN services out there. VPNs are an excellent privacy and security tool that every user of the internet should be familiar with! We aren't affiliated with Proton and we don't get any kickbacks if you sign up with them, but I'm a satisfied customer and I wanted to take this chance to let you know that.

Again, we're so incredibly sorry to have to make this announcement, and I personally promise you that I will continue to fight this law, and all of the others like it that various states are passing, with every inch of the New Jersey-bred stubborn fightiness you've come to know and love over the last 16 years. The instant we think it's less legally risky for us to allow connections from Mississippi IP addresses, we'll undo the block and let you know.

After getting back into HersheyPark bunnyhugger took her half-hour walk --- yes, added up she did far more than a half-hour walking in a day at the park like this, but she likes to have a continuous specific block for her exercise --- and I got on a ride she absolutely would not. This is the Hershey Kissing Tower, fifty years old this season. The tower's 330 feet, although riders only go up 250 feet, much like the Star Tower at California's Great America (which I rode while she took her walk, back in 2023) or Space Spiral that used to be at Cedar Point. It's got some lovely views of the park and the landscape outside, and yes, the windows are Hershey Kiss-shaped.

Reunited we together rode another 1970s ride and one you don't hardly see anymore. This is Coal Cracker --- it's in the western-themed section --- and it is a log flume. Not just that, though, it's that model of Arrow log flume ride where the launch station is a big rotating platform that you descend stairs to. A model of this was one of my favorite things at Great Adventure as a kid, maybe just for the relativistic thrill of stepping between the rotating and non-rotating sections. I believe it also has this little hill at the bottom of the big drop so that while you splash a photogenic bunch of water around it doesn't land back on you, making for a thrilling but not soaking ride.

After this, back to more roller coasters. Trailblazer, a mine ride a year older than the log flume (and equal in age to the mine ride at Great Adventure, also a childhood favorite). And looking over Jolly Rancher Remix, which up to 2021 had been known as Sidewinder. This is yet another Boomerang coaster, like The Bat at Canada's Wonderland, Boomerangs at Six Flags Mexico, Darien Lake, and Elitch Gardens, Sea Serpent at Morey's Piers, Zoomerang at Lake Compounce, and bunnyhugger does not enjoy the back-and-forth shuttle motion of any of them. We rode it in 2011, but since then it was re-themed from 'western' to 'candy'. Part of the gimmick is a tunnel that reports have it spray Jolly Rancher scents and weird scent mixes into, which must admit is interesting a concept. But the line was long (and it can't run a second train because of that whole 'collision' thing) and since we'd ridden it before it sank to the bottom of our informal schedule. And, dear reader, I regret to tell you that we never did get to it. However, it would be the only roller coaster we missed.

Somewhere around this time we ate, lured to a place that promised walking tacos made with a plant-based meat substitute. We had doubts, justified after several people in front of us had extremely long interactions trying to navigate the menu of a window that offered two different things with your choice of four toppings. Anyway they did not have the plant-based meat and looked suspicious of us for trying to claim such a thing ever existed. We got the meat- and plant-meat-free walking tacos which is also how I learned that Fritos makes bags specifically for walking taco preparation. Who knew?

More HersheyPark roller coasters. One that we rode near the log flume was Great Bear, this nice long ride that spends a good bit of its time over the water, and gets you nice views of the whole of The [Comet] Hollow. The ride has theming of Ursa Major and a neat ride sign of the constellation. And this got bunnyhugger to wonder: is this name a subtle joke? Because many roller coasters have been named Big Dipper, to the point that it's been British English terminology to say ``big dipper'' for a roller coaster. (You hear this in Peter Gabriel's ``Sledgehammer'' where a big dipper is going up and down.) This is also why kiddie coasters are called Little Dipper so often. To go from Big Dipper to Great Bear is not far. Wikipedia offers that the name also references the Hershey Bears minor-league hockey team, but nothing of a Big Dipper reference. If HersheyPark ever used to have a Big Dipper (or Little Dipper) the Roller Coaster Database doesn't know of it.

Night was setting in and we had a couple things yet to do. One was riding Fahrenheit, which had been the newest roller coaster in our 2011 visit. It has a vertical drop of, you guessed it, 97 degrees. (I suppose the extra 1.6 degrees would have been a little too much.) Others were Jolly Rancher Remix if we could get the chance, and another ride on the carousel so bunnyhugger could get pictures with her better camera, and then a night ride on Lightning Racer. I voted for Fahrenheit and it was looking like a good choice, another suspiciously-short-line for the ride.

Then the ride came to a halt.

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Carrying on with Thursday of our big Halloweekends trip last year here:

The Giant Wheel, seen from on end. I also liek that it's nearly got the change in cabin colors balanced top-to-bottom.

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Here's the late-afternoon sun and leaf colors and the track of ValRavn.

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More of ValRavn and the diversity of autumn colors beneath it.

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People walking off down the Iron Dragon midway, toward Millennium Force and the Frontier Trail and beyond that, Maverick.

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Rougarou's coming into its own around the lagoon trees like this, too.

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And past here is the Frontier Trail, more or less. Again, love the way the trees have turned here.

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Trivia: The Hotel Hershey offered for high-end spa visitors [ as of the early 2000s when this book was written ] a whipped cocoa bath or a chocolate fondue body wrap. Source: Sweets: A History of Temptation, Tim Richardson.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 70: Deucedly Odd Goings-On, Ralph Stein, Bill Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

First day of school!

Here are some patterns that I did today that I really like:

*Got out of bed at the first hit of my alarm.

*Got the dishes out of the dishwasher before eating breakfast

*Read book on the bus to and from work

*Zeroed my work email inbox for the day

*Dealt with any dishes hanging out (including the handwash stuff) when I got home from work

Here are some things that aren't patterns but also got done today:

*Hung out with Clayton, my work-bestie, for a goodly chunk of time

*Had very productive Geometry work-group, which is especially nice because it's basically the same people as last year, but was a WAY less contentious first meeting

*Spent over an hour chatting with my new mentee, who is _shiny_ new to teaching and I really hope continues to maintain their optimism and enthusiasm and stuff. I think they will, they're excitable but also in their late twenties so not quite as naïve as some.

*Did some of the HR paperwork which is especially fun because I ignored it all last year. This includes watching the entire Conflict of Interest training, which is an hour of unskillable, un-speedable modules which must be watched in order and if you leave one in the middle you have to restart it from the beginning. I also read the ten minute summary which I'm pretty sure sufficed to do the thing, but I have strong feelings about actually reading the shit work makes me sign.

*To be clear, I read the summary first and watched the video at home while playing Stardew Valley, I'm not paid enough to give _that_ my full attention.

*Attended a bunch of meetings and stuff, mostly fine-to-good. As I have previously observed, the fewer people in the meeting the more useful and interesting it gets.

So it's a pretty good first day! I am feeling cautiously optimistic about the fact that the school has not introduced dozens of all new structures that will definitely fix everything, and instead is working to improve and refine the existing structures. (Okay, there is one new structure, but it is to replace an old one that stopped existing, so it should be the same ideas within a slightly different workflow. And even that, the principal was like "yeah, I expect it to be good this year and awesome three years from now" so she at least claims to understand change takes time.)

Being temporarily disabled is a drag, but having the cane felt both good as a visual indicator, and genuinely useful for any of the standing around. My boss absolutely fished for details and got as much as "yep, it was something I needed and it will heal soon". (Clayton on the other hand got "my gyno wouldn't let me keep my uterus once it was out but he took pictures for me!" and this is part of the difference between Real Friend and Boss).

It was nice to see all my coworkers, including some unexpected heart-lifting delights. It turns out I do like the adults I work with and not just the kids!

First day with kids is Wednesday (one class for two hours of orientation) and then Thursday I see all five of my classes bang-in-a-row. I can live with the exhausting Thursdays because they mean I have a prep last block again, which is so deeply superior to having a prep penultimate block like I did last year (and therefore having a short time to rest before having to go back and teach more which is so hard to drag yourself to).

For now, I am going to get some ice cream with Austin, and then continue to take it easy for the rest of the evening. Maybe I'll even get to bed at early-bedtime instead of late.

I hope the things you do bring you joy as well.

~Sor
MOOP!

Across a minor highway from a far corner of HersheyPark is ZooAmerica. It's been there almost since HersheyPark opened. Admission to the amusement park gets you into the zoo, or you can buy a separate admission and go just to the zoo. It's AZA-accredited, so that meets our standards for feeling not terribly wrong about animals-in-amusement-parks. And, on our 2011 visit we discovered --- and it happens a friend confirmed this was still true a couple months ago --- that they have coatis.

So we went to the bridge from park to zoo, and got our hands ink-stamped for our return, and went in. The zoo has a bunch of older buildings --- almost all of them have signs showing what they looked like in the 1930s or such, and how the enclosures have been mostly enlarged and opened up --- and arranged into recognizable enough regions. Southern Swamps. Big Sky Country. Northlands. Eastern Woodlands, that is, Pennsylvania. The Great Southwest. We'd follow the trail that seemed obvious to us. Somehow we must have gone at it differently last time, though, because I remember, for example, the coatis being one of the first things we saw in the relevant building while here it was among the last. Maybe the signs out front of buildings led us on a different path before.

But we got to their coati, Jasper, fairly early on in the Great Southwest enclosure. And, as before, for some reason in the wing of nocturnal animals. This even though coatis are day-active, as even their web site points out. We did wonder, given that coatis in captivity could live fifteen years or so, whether this might be a coati we saw last time. Jasper, it turns out, is old enough --- born in April 2011 --- but he only arrived at the park in June 2012, around our wedding. And, having been an exotic pet, he's declawed, which is as bad for coatis as it is for cats. Maybe worse.

Jasper was mostly hanging out on a tree branch set up in the enclosure, curled over to sort of be standing on his head. Great pose. But between the darkness of the hall, and the enclosure, and the thick glass protecting him from us, and that we had nothing but ourselves and a tiny bit of wall to stabilize the camera I got one okay-ish picture and not much else. bunnyhugger, with a better camera and better control over her settings, got a couple more pictures.

She also got some pictures of the black-footed ferrets, in a nearby enclosure. I tried to too, but challenging as the coati was, the ferrets had even darker light and were more prone to suddenly moving a lot the moment they sensed a shutter opening. Wasn't much hope for us, no. The hallway also claimed to have ringtails, but we couldn't spot them. Maybe they were in a private room.

Back on the outside were some large, open animal enclosures, such as for black and brown bears. Hanging around there were also prairie dogs; I'm not sure whether they were in the same enclosure or adjacent ones. Also there in great abundance were black vultures, present in such numbers all over that we supposed they were another exhibit. And a great one; we kept spotting great photos with them and I believe bunnyhugger entered a couple in county fairs this year. Turns out no, these handome birds were not just wild, animals who found this a low-stress hangout, but were abundant enough that ZooAmerica was trying to shoo them off. This included, said one sign, hanging vulture effigies in the hopes of getting them to disperse. I see no evidence that this even slightly worked.

Further along the open areas were some nice attractions like pronghorn sheep. Also, bunnies! A bunch of Eastern cottontail rabbits, so we could feel confident these were local wildlife who found a comfortable place to hang out rather than zoo exhibits. These the zoo did not feel the need to try scaring off.

ZooAmerica made for a nice, calm interlude through the day, and after two hours of seeing favorite animals like a coati, black-footed ferrets, porcupines and the like we were ready for the park again.

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With pumpkins looked at let's now get to our big Halloweekends visit, a Thursday-to-Sunday trip. First up, Thursday, and let's just see how many of these pictures are identical to ones you've seen as long ago as earlier this month.

Here's the Hotel Breakers lobby back in its Halloweekend livery. Someday we'll see it in normal dress.

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More of the lobby. Look how long the check-in line is! But it tends to move tolerably well as they have all the counters open this time of day, and usually only one person at a time will be having a weirdly complicated problem checking in.

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Stepping into the park on a Thursday afternoon, just late enough that I could get a lot of low-sun-angle photos.

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The Boardwalk, or Bonewalk, area, by the Wild Mouse.

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Oh yeah, here's the mouse name signs but with face masks on. So Phantom Mazey, Chase, and Larry.

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And here's Phantom Ziggy, Zaggy, and Dizzy. Looking at the picture above and this one I am amazed that I managed to center them both and align them correctly. Try opening both pictures in new tabs and flickering between them, they're uncannily close for my having just eyeballed it.

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Trivia: Milton Hershey's plan for his factory town included a 150-acre park at the center, plus five eighteen-hole golf courses, a 23-acre public garden, and a zoo. Source: The Emperors of Chocolate: Inside the Secret World of Hershey and Mars, Joël Glenn Brenner.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 70: Deucedly Odd Goings-On, Ralph Stein, Bill Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

I joined adrian_turtle this afternoon for a One Million Rising gathering/training session on zoom, led by one of her comrades from Talmud study. This was 90 minutes, distilling or summarizin six hours of training Aliza did recently.

There was less new information and ideas than I'd hoped for, but I'm glad I did it. I had nothing else specific to do with that chunk of time, and it didn't take away energy from some other form of activism. (In fact, I had called my congresswoman and senators half an hour earlier, while Adrian and cattitude were out shopping.)

Aliza presented some of the material from a specifically Jewish viewpoint/context, including that this organizing and resistance work could be part of preparing for the High Holidays. I'm not observant, but introspection is a useful activity.

I am now on the One Million Rising email list, and will see if anything interesting comes of that.

Judgments are pondered by various parties.

( Read more... )

So... Apparently my mid-life crisis is playing bass in my friend's punk band. What can I say, I volunteered without knowing what I was getting myself into. Which is very on brand for me.

I last played about 15 years ago. Since that time, in no particular order, I've gone through menopause, broken my fretting pinky, worked from my dining room table with terrible ergonomics and worse posture (and occasional kittens), and messed up both of my shoulders (not at the same time (yet)).

I do love me some fast, loud, 80s and 90s covers. But oh my dog, I can NOT keep up. The lead guitarist is my age(*) so I can't exactly bitch about being old, damn kids, lawn, yada yada.

I don't even know where to begin. My posture sucks. My endurance sucks. My upper body strength sucks. I have an "ergonomic" wide strap but I have it adjusted pretty short and the adjustment buckle(**) digs into my shoulder something rotten.

I am considering posting the above paragraph to about 5 different subreddits. How do I fix my posture for long sets? What exercises are good - both in the gym and on the instrument? What should I wear?

Jamming is loads of fun but I'm also exhausted just thinking about it.


(*) For any aspiring groupies, WE ARE BOTH 41.

(**) What do you even call the slidy thing that adjusts the strap?

Yall, the bowed musical instruments have finally made it to the electronica party. This is the coolest damn thing. Audio required, video also extremely worth it if accessible. 3 min 17 sec.

2025 Aug 11: Open Reel Ensemble: "Tape Bowing Ensemble - Open Reel Ensemble":

磁気テープを竹に張って演奏する民族楽器「磁楽弓（じがっきゅう）」三重奏による調べです

This is a trio performance on the “JIGAKKYU,” a traditional folk instrument made by stretching magnetic tape across bamboo.

ETA: I want to state for the record, contrary to what a lot of commenters on YT are saying, it is not that what is cool here is just how wackily innovative it is to use a reel-to-reel this way. The only reason this is going viral is because of how musically good it is; nobody would care about it otherwise, and I submit for evidence the half century plus of prior art of abusing reel-to-reel recorders in the name of music-making you have probably never heard of, because a lot of it wasn't very compelling as music so nobody ever brought it to your attention. What's most shocking here is how musical it is, and how they use the innovation to do something new in music recognizable as such. It isn't good because it's innovative; it's innovative because it's good.

As far as I am concerned, the great problem for electronic music has always been what I think of as the Piano Problem: the music is made by operating a machine, so there's a machine between the performer and the music. Great pianists master operating the machine so beautifully they make the machine disappear. But this is what makes piano playing hard. So much of what we love in music is its organicness, the aspects of it which are so beautifully expressive because of how intimately the performer's body interacts with the instrument.

Heretofore, the only ways to bring that kind of sound to electronic instruments were to use breath controlled midi controllers (electronic woodwinds), use an electromagnetic interface (e.g. theremin), or get really fantastic on keys. Or give up and embrace the mechanical nature of the instrument and use it for repertoire the excellence of which does not rest in expressiveness (q.v. Wendy Carlos' Bach recordings).

This instrument conclusively brings the organicness of bowing and all its delicate expressiveness to electronica. The result is simply gorgeous and I hope this creative vein is further mined.

A happy Canadians-Burn-The-White-House-and-Capitol day to all who observe.

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On HerhseyPark: sometime after lunch, maybe before we discovered bunnyhugger's phone was lost and then found, we discovered in a games area what we always hope to see at a park: pinball! A lone game, a modern Stern Star Wars, sitting in the arcade with a bunch of redemption games. We'd have made time to play it, except that of course you can't just put money in a game machine at an amusement park anymore. They've gone Cashless For Your Convenience, and the only way to get a game is to buy a card. And you can't buy just, like, two dollars' worth of games. You have to buy something preposterous. Maybe only ten dollars, but that's at least five games each and there's no way we're playing that much Star Wars at an amusement park. It's plausible we've never played five games of Star Wars in a single day.

Much as we wanted to support their pinball, then, we did not play. Nor did we play later when we came upon another arcade and with with a bigger array of pinball games. Also of bigger pinball games: HersheyPark would become the fourth venue where we've seen an Atari Hercules, the double-size pinball wonder of 1980. (We've seen two of them at Cedar Point, now removed; also Canobie Lake Park, and the since-closed Pinball Wizard Arcade in New Hampshire. The game was aimed at amusement parks on the supposition bigness was spectacle which would earn coin.) And more! Fireball, 1970s classic. Chicago Coin's Hi-Score Pool, a quirky game where you're trying to roll over concealed targets that represent pool balls. The modern Stern Star Trek. The early-solid-state hockey-themed Ice Fever. Comet, the roller coaster-themed game from Python Anghelo that we've only ever seen on location once (at a pizza parlor in Traverse City). The Pinball Map also says there's a Monopoly, but we didn't see it, and it looks like it had been removed for cleaning when we were there. We would have loved to play the games that were present, but without the ability to buy less than a Brobdingnagian number of credits, we'd play none. bunnyhugger would go on to discover there was a flat-rate play-all-you-want card (maybe valid for only an hour or two or something like that) but its price was even more ridiculous than the cards we could get. So, we can only report the existence of pinball at this amusement park, and shrug at the capitalist brain that makes it unavailable.

Besides this, though, we were having a great day for roller coaster riding. With SkyRush we had ridden the last coaster that hadn't been there in our 2011 visit, and we'd got on that barely past noon, with the park not to close until 10 pm and fireworks thereafter.

The most important to get to was Lighting Racer, a pair of GCI-built wooden coasters -- named Thunder and Lightning --- that dispatch together and follow entwined but not identical tracks. Like, the tracks are the same length but unlike the Racer at Kings Island or Kennywood or Gemini at Cedar Point the courses aren't identical up to a mirror reflection. Each track twists around and through the other, so you don't just have a massive mound of wooden support structure but two mounds intertwined, like you made a mistake placing things in Roller Coaster Tycoon. Plus you come to a stop with an actual properly declared finish that gets announced when you return to the station. It's a great roller coaster/pair of roller coasters.

To our amazement there wasn't any line, so we were able to get on both the Thunder and the Lightning side, our train losing both times. Hm. bunnyhugger had one goal for the rest of the day to meet, and that was: we must ride Lightning Racer at night. We've ridden it before and it's an excellent ride by day, but by night the coaster, near the end of the park, is something else.

We also hopped onto their wild mouse coaster, the Wild Mouse. It's the same model as the Fly at Canada's Wonderland, Dark Knight at Great Adventure, Dark Knight at Six Flags Mexico, Dark Knight at Six Flags Great America (the Chicago one), Apple Zapple at Kings Dominion (I don't know that bunnyhugger rode this but it seems plausible, though she'd have ridden it as Ricochet) and, oh, Descente en Schlitt' at Nigloland. I say 'hopped on' and mean it: despite being a wild mouse, and so having 'trains' of a single car fitting at most four people, the line moved fast and dispatched quickly and there was almost no wait. The secret? They don't stop the trains. They run the ride the way wild mouse rides should, with the car moving slowly through the station and you hopping in, belting up (I can't swear the ride had seat belts, actually), and pulling down the lap bar without stopping. And so there were four or five cars moving through the ride continuously, and there was no wait. Riding a wild mouse that was run correctly might have been the high point of the trip.

(The low point of the high point: the ride was sponsored by a mouse trap company. I appreciate a sick joke but c'mon. But I did like the sign measuring how many mice tall you are.)

After this we finally got onto Comet, and when I say 'finally' consider that it was like 2 pm. I believe we even took the slight extra wait for a front-seat ride. There was a line here but not as long as a couple hours earlier and short enough that we were having a weirdly good riding day. It was something our pinball friend JTK refers to as the Dollywood Effect, based on his own experiences on a packed day at Dollywood: the midways were jammed full of people but somehow none of the rides he wanted to be on had queues worth mentioning. We've had this before at parks, including this trip already (Kennywood and Dutch Wonderland were quite kind to us; Six Flags America never felt packed at least). This was a particularly intense version of that.

So we were on to SooperDooperLooper, their late-70s Corkscrew-class coaster, and I think did walk on to the orange old ride. And then, it being about 3:30, we went and left the park. Sort of.

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With that cliffhanger I think you'd like to see the carving and final reveal of our Halloween pumpkins from last year. Ready?

And now to the pumpkin-carving. bunnyhugger works on one of her fine designs.

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She's having a good time!

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My pumpkin. I turned away from the extremely gentle Harvey Comics-esque jack-o-lanterns of the last couple years for something a bit more mousey. Not scary, but less obviously merry. Yes, on the door in back is a sticker of Aubrey Plaza from the 2012 movie Safety Not Guaranteed, why do you ask?

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bunnyhugger's mother sure she's doing terribly at this, while bunnyhugger admires her own work.

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Lining the pumpkins up outside to get a photo, unlit.

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And here's what bunnyhugger's parents' pumpkins (the left two) and ours (the right two) look like while in service.

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Trivia: After the first night of the British invasion of Washington, Mayor John Peter of Georgetown, D.C., sent a flag of truce and received promises that the British would spare the city. The British Rear Admiral George Cockburn promised the mayor that his troops would give the protection that President Madison had failed to. Source: Union 1812: The Americans Who Fought the Second War of Independence, A J Langguth.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Sundays Supplement, Volume 17: 1955, Tom Sims, Bill Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

Putting the Substack on hold has already had some effects. Since I'm not thinking about politics when I fall asleep, my dreams have returned -- in living color.

Night before last I was dreaming about an enormous library or bookstore that had been made out of a former doctor's office, with all the little office areas being different topics, and the books on the walls looked different colors and styles in each.

Last night I dreamed I was talking with Dolly Parton before she went onstage and noticed that her hair was not only touching the floor, it was long enough to trip her up. I managed to trim off about five inches that was in floor contact. Then after her concert she came back and asked me to go on a trip with her as thanks for keeping her from falling off the stage -- and we started off on a road trip. Somewhere in there she turned into Meryl Streep and wanted me to try a tiny heart-shaped hallucinogen as we drove off on the Southern Tier Expressway (which is not a place to go tripping.). And at that point I woke up.

Thanks for returning, Imagination!

One advantage of my unexpected free month was that I started reading books again. Not a lot but 6 complete novels and a longfic in 6 weeks, which is more than I have for years. Let me catch up with some brief reviews:

Since term properly, properly finished on 6 July, I have read:

• Circe by Madeline Miller 2018, Pub 2018 Bloomsbury, ISBN 9781526612519
  
• Coconut Unlimited by Nikesh Shukla (c) Nikesh Shukla 2010, Pub 2010 Quartet, ISBN 978-0-7043-7204-7
  
• Will Super Villains be on the final? by Naomi Novik, illustrated by Yishan Li (c) Temeraire LLC 2011, Pub 2011 Del Rey, ISBN 978-0-345-51656-5
  
• Some desperate glory by Emily Tesh (c) Emily Tesh 2023, Pub 2023 Orbit, ISBN 978-0-356-51718-6
  
• Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie (c) Ann Leckie 2015, Pub 2015 Orbit, ISBN 978-0-356-50242-7
  
• A free man of color by Barbara Hambly (c) Barbara Hambly 1997, Pub 1998 Bantam, ISBN 0-553-57526-0
  
• I transmigrated into Cordelia Naismith! by Lanna Michaels, 2025

( Circe )

( Coconut Unlimited )

( Will Super Villains be on the final? )

( Some desperate glory )

( Ancillary Mercy )

( A Free Man of Color )

( I transmigrated into Cordelia Naismith! )

The Epstein files are becoming a distraction from the Epstein files.

Ghislaine Maxwell - convicted sex offender and perjurer claims she didn't see any 'bad stuff' by tRump while the DOJ dribbles out sanitized transcripts. Yeah, right. She'll say anything to get out of 30 years of prison. I've heard what other prisoners do to pedophiles in prison, she's lucky to be still alive.

This is bulls**t.

Send in the money people. Send in the folks with the green eye shades and pencils behind their ears, the banking nerds and the forensic accountants. FOLLOW THE MONEY. Epstein was rolling in dough. There were payments, transfers, secret accounts - track them down - attach names to the numbers.

They got Al Capon with tax evasion. We could get the sex offenders that Epstein and Maxwell 'entertained' the same way.

Happy birthday, elisem!

Friday, the 4th of July, we got to HersheyPark pretty close to opening, because we forgot that there would be a long line of traffic ahead of us. It happens. They were directing traffic well, and here's where I learned I had parked in completely the wrong area the night before. No worries.

Our first priority was getting a locker so bunnyhugger could stow her Good Camera for later photos. The renting of all-day lockers is the biggest change we've made in parkgoing the last two years and it has been a stunning difference in ease. Getting souvenir cups is the second-biggest change and only slightly behind that because you can stow a drink cup in a locker when need be.

But after that short errand, delayed only by being confused how the rental system worked (there's one central locker-rental station instead of one in every row of lockers) we went to Candymonium, the big coaster whose construction saw part of the rebuilding of the whole front of the park. It's a 210-foot-tall hypercoaster, much like our Canada's Wonderland friends Leviathan and Behemoth, or Kings Island's Diamondback and Orion. The building's got this nice handsome brick face everywhere, tiled which squares of logos for, just like you think. Jolly Ranchers, Reese's Pieces, Mounds, and so on. This had a wait of something like 40 minutes, but we also figured it was the shortest wait we were liable to see. And the ride is lovely, besides being exciting going out over some water and giving some grand views of the Hershey School (former?) building, on the other side of the highway. As often happens with these hypercoasters it's a grand ride, really giving a good feeling of flying particularly when it makes a long, nearly horizontal, curve, but the line was already far too long to get a reride. Maybe later if, somehow, on a 4th of July and a hot, muggy, but cloudless Friday the big ride up front at the park was under-populated.

We headed back into the park proper and nearly right away saw ... that's right, mascots! HersheyPark's mascots are candy creatures like you'd expect. We both got pictures with the Hershey Chocolate Bar and it only went slightly weird where we might have been stumbling into someone else's picture or been lingering too long for the next party. In our defense, we were waved over by the mascot's handler. Also I had encouraged bunnyhugger to go get her picture alone, and then I went for a picture alone, and I think that confused everyone behind us.

The curious thing about this? With the Hershey Chocolate Bar mascot --- and, a few minutes later, running across Hershey Kisses mascots --- we'd seen and gotten photographs with the mascots for every park we had planned to visit this trip. We almost never see mascots, now that we haven't been to Waldameer in ages, and here we were seeing all of them. If the trip being 90s X-treme then they could have been the theme for the road trip.

Our next big thing was going to Comet, the 1946-built wooden roller coaster down in The Hollow, formerly Comet Hollow. There was an enormous crowd in line, speaking well for the ride's future. There was also a brass band playing just outside the queue. But with the size and slow moving of the line, and how long we'd be standing in the direct sun before we even got to shaded parts of the queue, we decided we should come back later when maybe the line would be less bad. We did, and it was.

Instead we got onto SkyRush, another roller coaster new since our last visit and one that I happened to see doing test runs the night before when Cocoa Cruiser was starting up. This was maybe the last ride they built before making ``candy'' the theme of everything at the park, and the 200-foot-tall coaster has an airplane theme. The ride operators are referred to as attendants, the station is awash in airplane peem-poom noises, and the queue gates promise you're getting a First Class Cabin in your row. It's another nice ride and leaves me wondering why there aren't more airplane-themed roller coasters. Maybe there are and I'm just not thinking of them, but the others that come to mind are Knoebels's Flying Turns and Kentucky Kingdom's Kentucky Flyer. I guess the Flight Decks, formerly Top Guns, at a couple former Paramount parks. Maybe there are plenty of airplane-themed roller coasters after all.

We stopped for lunch after this, notable mostly because at some point bunnyhugger set her phone down beside her and neither of us noticed she hadn't picked it up until nearly an hour later. I insisted we hurry back to where we had eaten on the off chance it was somewhere near where we had been, while she mourned what a great hassle this was going to be to sort out. When we got to the bench we'd sat on there was some other family eating there and nothing on the benches; I prowled around looking behind and underneath until the guy asked if I were looking for a phone. Absolutely! Did he have it? No.

But he pointed to another family at a bench across the path, who was holding the phone up and waving at us. And so bunnyhugger was reunited with her darling and very popular tiny phone. The day was saved!

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Next on my photo roll is an October-themed item, sure. It's pumpkin carving at bunnyhugger's parents, which we did after taking a walk around the park some.

The Victory Park Spring. You know, for water labeled unsafe for drinking and domestic use there sure are a lot of people getting jugs full of it. (We've never known what's non-potable about this water. I would put money on ``lead pipes'' with maybe a side bet on ``bacteria levels''. In any case, RFK jr, take a big ol' jug and share it with all the people you think are friends!)

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It's a good thing when a tree sprouts an orange X at about chest-height, right?

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Here's a little side stream, feeding into the main stream, that was almost as wide and rapid as we ever see it.

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This is the house over the river that got smashed in by a falling tree. It's gotten a tiny bit of cleanup, in that now there's Lowe's brand Tyvek over the damaged section, but the house is still looking like that about ten months later.

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Here's a bunch of ducks in no particular row.

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They were putting in a new telephone pole and I guess the plastic bag is the shopping bag they carried it there in, somehow.

---

Trivia: Sumerian words were mostly single-syllable things, with in the earliest writings a logogram carrying both the word's meaning and its phonetic value. To disambiguate the many words that might be represented with the same symbol, the Sumerians prefixed words with un-vocalized determinatives to indicate the semantic class, eg, the symbol for 'wood' signalling the next symbol was a tree or plant or wooden object, or 'divinity' to signal a god was being discussed. Source: The Greatest Invention: A History of the World in Nine Mysterious Scripts, Silvia Ferrara. I'm trying not to read this as object-oriented-programming-style Class.function() structure and yet ...

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Sundays Supplement, Volume 17: 1955, Tom Sims, Bill Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

Just given up trying to read through a self published cozy romantasy. It has pacing issues, is in dire need of an editor, and uses terms and races directly lifted from D&D such as 'Tabaxi'. But what really broke it for me was when the characters just 'fixed the oven' like it's a modern appliance. And this was important because the setting involves someone trying to bake and cook meals for an inn. All feeling of place just came unmoored as it became clear that the writer just hadn't thought beyond the surface aspects of 'things in a kitchen'.

I can't imagine someone trying to 'fix' an AGA with what ever tools they have laying around. Let alone a wood fired stone oven that's part of the wall.

This past week on my humor blog? If you watch its RSS feed you already know, but for the rest of you, it saw the start of new Arthur Scott Bailey stuff in the world of Fatty Raccoon and some Usenet nostalgia and some prejudging a Terrytoons cartoon I never heard of before and, finally, of course, Gasoline Alley. The proof:

• MiSTed: The Tale of Jimmy Rabbit, Part 1
• This Is Somehow an Independent Thought From That People-Texting-PANTS Thing
• Statistics Saturday: Episodes of _The Astronut Show_ And Whether I Imagine They’re Better Or Worse Than I Imagine, Without Seeing Them
• An Update on How Disappointing Is _the Astronut Show_
• You’d Think They Would Have Labelled Themselves a Type-E Person but …
• I Also Have Questions About the Make and Programming of the Bat-Computer
• What’s Going On In Gasoline Alley? When did Baleen and T-Bone split up? May – August 2025
• MiSTed: The Tale of Jimmy Rabbit, Part 2

---

And now to close off our early-October visit to Cedar Point Halloweekends. Next time? The brutal chilled temperatures of late October Halloweekends when it would be ... like ... in the 70s and sunny, because we let rich bastards break the climate.

Peering over the Siren's Curse construction fence to see the lighting scaffolds around the Celebration Stage or whatever exactly they did call it.

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Wild Mouse's sign by night. We would learn this year that the gray sign mouse there is named Gary; get it?

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Matterhorn ride in motion alongside the Giant Wheel.

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And here's the Scrambler --- sorry, the Atomic Scrambler, one of the oldest rides at the park but recently given a new location and snazzy new name.

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Here's the queue for a night ride on Raptor. Yes, sometimes this whole queue is ... well, half the queue gets filled, during the serious Halloweekends weather. Mostly I like how the track's illuminated in a giant S there.

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Another picture from the Raptor queue of the last surviving picnic pavilion there.

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Lined up here for a closing ride on the Carousel.

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bunnyhugger looks out on the people not so fortunate as to be on the carousel.

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She ponders: is it right that I get on the carousel when other people can't? But what is she supposed to do, not ride?

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A last picture of the carousel. Note the parent on the wrong side of the horse to guard their child, but I like the way they're looking off to someone.

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The gates. We had to leave, ready or not.

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And a last picture of the entry plaza, or as we'll forever know it, the place we saw the eclipse from.

---

Trivia: There are about 200 grams of the explosive sodium azide in a car's airbags to rapidly inflate it when needed. Source: Nature's Building Blocks: An A-Z Guide to the Elements, John Emsley.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Sundays Supplement, Volume 17: 1955, Tom Sims, Bill Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

I mean, it's clearly not that I'm _recovered_ and also if anyone from work asks, I am _absolutely_ going to take every contractual advantage I can vis-a-vis recovery, but I just taught a dance class, from a couch, which I think means my surgery recovery is going Very Well Actually.

Seriously, it turns out hysterectomies are surprisingly trivial for a surgery I have been describing as "got stabbed in the stomach a few times and had some of my organs stolen". Or at least, a laproscopic hysterectomy is surprisingly trivial for me, a person who is in generally good health and apparently had a smaller-than-usual uterus.

(I got to see pictures when I was visiting my doctor, and he was all "oh yeah, they should be available for you in mychart" but then I was looking today and could not find them, so I will have to include that in my follow up visit I do think.)

I'm very very happy that the recovery hasn't been worse. I have slowly been ramping up the amount of "stuff I do" which means today I walked to NESFA very slowly (it took me 2-3 times longer than it normally does and that is correct and good), did not do any of the room setting except the chairs (no moving tables! no moving carts of games!) and was very good and sat on the couch for all of my dance class. I had volunteers to show off the lovely footwork (thank you Rachel and Stephan!) and Stephan even took on a harder dance and it was a lovely time!

I love my dance class so so so fucking much, I love that the Cambridge Day advertises it sometimes and I get random total beginners out of nowhere, I love how lucky I am to be able to make the world work for me, like what the fuck, this is amazing.

And look, I was absolutely willing to last-minute cancel if I had to (although I'm so glad I didn't have to because like I said, I had at least one total beginner tonight and she was lovely!), I wasn't going to force myself to do stuff that was bad for me. This wasn't bad for me! Doing it from the couch was a neat challenge, and I think I did a mostly good job. People certainly seemed to have a nice time. We did five dances, which is one fewer than normal, but the one Stephan did was a bit of a challenge. It was all really lovely!

(regarding neat challenge, I knew I'm a super kinesthetic person, but it was still really startling to realize how hard it is to talk through the pas-de-basque footwork --a patter I've probably done dozens of times-- when I can't do the movements alongside the words. Even as simple as "do I start on the left or the right" took me a minute to grasp.)

So dance class was a delight. Healing is going along swimmingly --I can't twist at the waist, and I can't bend over. I walk much slower than usual. Sitting is real good, but I have to be more reclined than usual. Those are my limitations, but the pain is just...not a going concern. Seriously, my belly is full of stab wounds and I'm out here completely forgetting to grab more pain meds --and I'm just doing the ibuprofen/tylenol alternation, not like anything more intense. Hell yeah.

I'm gonna borrow a cane for the first couple days of school, certainly for the teacher-only days and maybe for the first student days as well. This is honestly a lot less because I think I'll need a cane, and a lot more because I think it would be useful to have a visual signal that you need to be gentle with me or I'll hit you with my stick.

Anyways, ten out of ten, do recommend. You know, if you're into that sort of thing.

~Sor
MOOP!

Intelligence

Life cannot be classified in terms of a simple neurological ladder, with human beings at the top; it is more accurate to talk of different forms of intelligence, each with its strengths and weaknesses. This point was well demonstrated in the minutes before last December's tsunami [2004], when tourists grabbed their digital cameras and ran after the ebbing surf, and all the 'dumb' animals made for the hills.
    ~ B.R. Myers, author (1963- )

    Intelligence - what good is it if not to think things through?

Whelp, it looks like I'm in the market for a cell phone again.

On Saturday night, I noticed something dangling from the corner of my cell phone, which immediately struck me as odd, as there's no aperture in the protective gel case there for something to get stuck. Well, there's not supposed to be. On further inspection, I discovered the corner of the gel case no longer fit over the corner of the phone, and some random shmutzig had gotten wedged... between the back plate of the phone and the rest of the phone, to which it was no longer attached along the bottom. Pressing it back down didn't work: something in the middle of the phone was causing resistance to closing the phone.

Lo, verily, my phone's battery was pregnant.

Some of you who follow me on the fediverse might be thinking, "Wait, didn't you just replace a phone, the battery of which swelled up?" Lol, yes: late April. That was my work phone. This is my personal phone. Lolsob.

So, being a proper nerd, I went right to iFixit to order myself a battery. Whereupon I was stopped by something that did not bode well. I entered my phone's model information and iFixit, instead of telling me what battery to buy, alerted me that it is not possible to determine what kind of battery my phone took from the outside.

It turns out that the OnePlus 9 G5 can take one of two batteries, and which one a given OnePlus 9 G5 takes can only be determined by putting eyes on the battery which is in it.

Well, okay then: I clicked through the helpful link to read instructions on how to pull the battery on a OnePlus 9 G5. I read along with slow dawning horror at exactly how involved it was and how many tools I would have to buy, and made it to step twelve – "Use a Phillips screwdriver to remove the ten 3.8 mm-long screws securing the motherboard cover. One of the motherboard cover screws is covered by a white water ingress sticker. To unfasten the screw you can puncture the sticker with your screwdriver." – of thirty and decided: fuck this, I will hire a professional.

(I think maybe it was a fortunate thing that I went through the prior fiasco with trying to change the battery on the Nuu B20 5G, first, because it softened me to the idea of maybe I don't have to service all my electronics personally myself.)

Alas, it was late on a Saturday night and all the cell phone repair places around me were closed until Monday.

Fortunately, I had a short day Monday and would be getting out of work around 5:30pm. I called ahead to a place that is open to 7pm to ask if I needed an appointment and whether they did OnePlus phones. There was a bit of a language barrier with the guy who answered the phone, but he said no appointment was necessary and whether they could fix my phone would entail putting eyes on it, and please try to come before 6pm to give them time to fix it before they close.

So after work, Mr B took me there, and we presented the phone. Dude got the back of the phone the rest of the way off the phone with rather more dispatch that I would be have been able to, and pretty quickly discovered that he was in over his head. Credit where it's due – "A man's got to know his limitations" – he promptly backed off, and told me to bring it back tomorrow when the more-expert boss was in.

I'm slightly irritated that we made the unnecessary trip instead of him saying, "Oh, a OnePlus, come tomorrow when our OnePlus expert is in", but it did give me the extra time to do more thorough backing-up. I have never managed to get Android File Transfer to work, nor any a number of alternatives; snapdrop.io would only do single files at a time, not whole directories, and, weirdly, Proton Drive, both app and website, doesn't allow uploading whole directories from Android either.

Finally, I saw a mention that the Android app Solid Explorer "does FTP". I wanted to make a local backup to my Mac, but, fuck it, I have servers, I can run FTP somewhere just to get my files backed up off my phone. Imagine my surprise on opening up the "FTP" option on Solid Explorer and discovering it wasn't an FTP client it was an FTP server. Yes, the easiest way I found to exchange files between my Android phone and my MacBook Pro was to put an FTP server on my phone.

Worked fine. My FTP client on my Mac sucks, but I'll solve that another day. (Does Fetch still exist?)

Mr B and I discussed it and decided he'd bring the phone in the next day, Tuesday, to spare me the hike. He returned with the phone, still with the back off, and the news that they had discovered, as I had, you have to get at the battery to even figure out which battery to order. And that he was told that the battery would be in by 3pm the next day (Wednesday). The only surprising thing here is that they could get the battery that fast.

So, today (Wednesday), after 3pm, Mr B took my phone back for a third visit, and they attempted to install my new battery.

It was the wrong battery.

( Hwaet! The saga continues... )

The winds and the smell of rain came on quickly, but they also left quickly, leaving Hershey Park with not much but everything closed for the threat of lightning, and us checking bunny_hugger's phone for weather radar. There were small thunderstorm cells teasing the vicinity of the park, and we worried they might turn and hit us. But they didn't, and we walked around the park looking for things we might ride until something came back up. I think we also looked for something to eat, which was probably fries.

And it wasn't as long as we feared before we started seeing coasters doing test cycles. The one we were nearest when we saw activity going again was Cocoa Cruiser, a small family coaster of the same model as the Great Chase at Six Flags America, something I didn't realize despite having ridden the other one three days earlier. It's also a duplicate of Woodstock Express at Dorney Park, which we might have ridden, and Family Flyer at Rye Playland that we have been on. Also the Li'l Devil Coaster at Great Adventure that's too new for us. This was also our first Hershey Park coaster we hadn't ridden before; it was installed at the park in 2014.

By the time the rides were back up and we could get on this it was nearly 8:00, so we had an hour to go and priorities to pick. Our first one: Wildcat's Revenge, a conversion of the old Wildcat wooden roller coaster to steel track with twists and helixes and such that would be impossible for wood. This ride, which is to the Wildcat we'd ridden in 2011 as Steel Vengeance is to Mean Streak, opened in its current form in 2023. It's a solidly exciting one, like Steel Vengeance inverting the rider four times in a two-and-a-half-minute ride, and looking bold and exciting in the twilight. It had a surprisingly short wait of something like 15 minutes, probably the convergence of how close the park was to closing anyway and how many people left after it sure looked liek a storm would come in.

But that left us only a few minutes for any other ride we might get on, and we leapt for the adjacent Laff Trakk, a spinning steel coaster installed in 2015. It is a twin to Waldameer's Steel Dragon and Seabreeze's Whirlwind and Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk's Undertow in layout. The edge it has on all of those is that it's an indoor coaster, themed, and not to candy the way you'd imagine. Despite the ownership and the name Hershey Park is largely not a candy-themed park, although the candy theme is growing. For the most part it's an amusement park with a couple themed areas and could nearly be owned by anyone. There were always exceptions --- the Kissing Tower, for example, as the observation tower --- but it's really only in the last decade that you start seeing rides with names like Cocoa Cruiser or Jolly Rancher Remix or, to get away from roller coasters a moment, Twizzler Twisted Gravity or Reese's Cupfusion.

A moment for Reese's Cupfusion, a thing we never got on because we didn't have the time for a Sally interactive dark ride. The theme of the ride is that the riders are protecting the Crystal Cup from the League of Misfit Candy led by a villain whose name bunny_hugger correctly predicted I would like, Mint The Merciless. We didn't know any of this until sometime the middle of Friday. All we knew at this point is they had a cartoon figure on signs, like in the bathroom telling you what to do if you found the place needing cleanup, and no idea what it was. Turns out it was Mint The Merciless.

Anyway, Laff Trakk's theme is the funhouse. Not the pinball one with Rudy, but the thing that inspired the pinball game's theme. As a result there's many similar elements, including pointing hands and comic mirrors, plus elements that the game could have used like 'hypnotic' spirals and disembodied eyes and such. We leapt into the building with the queue to make sure they didn't close it on us --- we didn't know if rides closed their queues at 9:00 or just enough ahead that they expected to finish the queue about 9:00 --- and it looked like we'd have the last ride until two young folks came up behind us. They were talking with two people in front of us, though, and we offered to let them go ahead if they wanted to all ride in one car. They took the chance, which is how we secured the coveted Last Ride Of The Night.

So, between the slowness of driving and the storm we didn't have quite the time we'd wanted. But we did get three roller coasters in of the fourteen available, which was a great pace, and three of the five that we hadn't ridden. However busy Friday the 4th of July would be, we could certainly get two coasters in through a whole day.

On our way out we stopped at a shop looking for souvenirs. I got a T-shirt for Hershey Park's 1946-era wooden coaster, Comet, which we hadn't ridden or even seen yet, but that I felt confident would be the ride I wanted something from. So besides the pretty good riding we got our souvenir-shopping done early and could feel ahead of schedule for Friday morning.

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Not quite done with the early-October Cedar Point visit so please enjoy a lot of focus from one single ride.

The gryphon statue looking out over the sunset and the mysteries of what might be behind the construction fence.

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And a twilight view of the Top Thrill 2 towers. The nearby tower is the new one.

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This is Iron Dragon looking out over its lagoon, an angle it feels like I don't photograph much.

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Here's a red dragon waiting for a ride on the iron dragon.

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And here we are coming off the ride, where we can see the gryphon once again and also see that behind that construction fence is: not a thing.

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Different angle on about the same area and yeah, there is an abundance of nothing there that we can see.

---

Trivia: On Opening Day of 1884 the Cincinnati Reds' new ``American Park'' ballpark, hastily assembled after the team had been evicted from the Bank Street Grounds by a rival team in the Union Association, collapsed as fans were filing out after the game. Dozens were injured and many sued. The Reds would remain playing at the site until 1970 (two successor ballparks would be built at the same location). Source: The Beer and Whiskey League: The Illustrated History of the American Association --- Baseball's Renegade Major League, David Nemec. I assure you it is only by reading Nemec's words that I came close to spelling the Queen City's name.

Currently Reading: Threads of Life: A History of the World Through the Eye of a Needle, Clare Hunter.

Just finished: Signal to Noise by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. This held up on re-read—it's still my favourite of her work (admittedly I haven't read her latest) and is just this perfect exploration how it feels to be 15 and simultaneously enraged with and in love with the world.

Thyme Travellers: An Anthology of Palestinian Speculative Fiction, edited by Sonia Sulaiman. Somehow I missed this coming out last year despite—I thought, anyway—being on some kind of list from the editor. Anyway. It's quite excellent. Stories range from the hauntingly beautiful "The Third or Fourth Casualty" by Ziyad Saadi, about a group of children swimming and drowning, to the gorgeously defiant "Gaza Luna" by Samah Serour Fadil, to the absolute ugly-cry of "The Generation Chip" by Nadia Afifi. It's hard to pick a favourite—there are a lot of bangers in this collection. Anyway, you should read it.

Currently reading: Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by Sarah Wynn-Williams. I would probably never read this if Mark Zuckerberg hadn't tried to have it banned, so good job with the Streisand Effect. It's pretty entertaining, though. The author pitches a job that doesn't exist to Facebook because she's naïvely convinced that the company is going to change the world in a good way (ha. ha. ha.) and then gets progressively more disillusioned when it turns out she works for the worst people. Also she almost got eaten by a shark when she was 13, which is a metaphor. But also she almost did get eaten by a shark when she was 13.

Yall. I am so tired.

Last thing first. Investigating the other thing, I discovered this. I'll just cut and paste what I submitted as a ticket to Patreon:

I took a break of a few months, and when I came back my fees spiked. What gives?

I just did a month (July 2025) that extremely similar to last January (2025): similar revenues (466.19 vs 458.50), similar patrons (160 vs 162). According to my "Insights > Earnings" page, my total fees went up from 11.4% to the astounding 14.6%. Drilling down, most of that is an eye-watering 3% increase of the payment fees (5.8% to 8.8%). There was also a minor increase of Patreon's platform fee from 5.6% to 5.8%.

That represents a FIFTY-TWO PERCENT INCREASE in processing fees, and a 28% increase in fees over all.

Care to explain? Was there some announced change in payment structure or payment processor fees I missed?

I have received no response.

But the other thing is this: Patreon has dropped my business model.

Apparently by accident.

When I went to Patreon to create the Patreon post for my latest Siderea Post at the end of July, I was confronted with a recent UI update. In and of itself it wouldn't have been a problem, but, as usual, they screwed something up.

They removed the affordance for a post to Patreon to both be public and paid. The new UI conflated access and payment, such that it was no longer possible to post something world-accessible and still charge patrons for it.

I found a kludge to get around it so I could get paid at all, and I fired off a support ticket asking if it was possible but unobvious, or just not possible, and if it was not possible, whether that was a policy or a mistake. I have received very apologetic reply back from Patreon support which seemed to suggest (but not actually affirm) it was an unintentional:

From what we've seen so far, the option to make a post publicly accessible while still charging members for it isn't possible in the new editor. Content within a paid post will only be available to those with paid access, and it won't show up for the public.

Other creators have reported this same issue, and I want to reassure you that I've already shared this feedback with our team. If anything changes or if this feature is brought back, I'll be sure to keep you in mind and let you know right away.

So it's not like the reply was, "Oh, yes, it was announced that we wouldn't be supporting that feature any more," suggesting, contrarily, they didn't realize they were removing a feature at all.

The support person I was corresponding with encouraged me to write back with any further questions or issues, so I did:

Hi, [REDACTED], thanks for getting back to me. I have both some more questions and feedback.

1) Question: Am I understanding correctly, that the new UI's failure to support having publicly accessible paid posts was an oversight, and not a policy decision to no longer support that business model? Like, there's not an announcement this was going away that I missed? As a blogger who often writes about Patreon itself, I'd like to be able to clarify the situation for my readers.

2) Question: Do you have any news to share whether Patreon intends to restore this functionality? Is fixing this being put on a development roadmap, or should those of us who relied on this functionality just start making other plans? Again: my readers want to know, too.

3) Suggestion: If Patreon intends to restore this functionality, given the way the new UI is organized, the way to add the functionality back in is under "Free Access > More options" there should also be a "charge for this post" button, which then ungrays more options for charging a subset of patrons, defaulting to "charge all patrons".

4) Feedback: The affordance that was removed, of being able to charge patrons for world-accessible content, was my whole business model. I'm not the only one, as I gather you already have discovered. In case Patreon were corporately unaware, this is the business model of creators using Patreon to fund public goods, such as journalism, activism, and open source software. My patrons aren't paying me to give them something; my patrons are paying me to give something to the world. Please pass this along to whomever it's news.

5) Feedback: This is the sort of gaffe which suggests to creators that Patreon is out of touch with its users and doesn't appreciate the full breadth of how creators use Patreon. It is the latest in a long line of incidents that suggests to creators that Patreon is not a platform for creators, Patreon is a platform for music video creators, and everybody else is a red-headed stepchild whom Patreon corporately feels should be grateful they are allowed to use the platform at all. It makes those of us who are not music video creators feel unwelcome on Patreon.

6) Feedback: Being able to charge patrons for world-accessible content is one of a small and dwindling list of features that differentiated Patreon from cheaper competitors. Just sayin'.

7) Feedback: I thought you should know: my user experience has become that when I open Patreon to make a post, I have no idea whether I will be able to. I have to schedule an hour to engage with the Patreon new post workflow because I won't know what will be changed, what will be broken, etc. It would be nice if Patreon worked reliably. My experience as a creator-user of your site is NOT, "Oh, I don't like the choices available to me", it's that the site is unstable, flaky, unpredictable, unreliable.

I got this response:

Hi Siderea,

Thank you so much for your thoughtful follow-up and for sharing your questions and feedback in such detail.

To address your first question, I can’t speak to whether this change was an oversight or a deliberate policy decision, but I can confirm there hasn’t been any official announcement about removing the ability to charge members for world-accessible posts. If anything changes or if we receive more clarity from our product team, I’ll be sure to keep you updated.

At this time, I also don’t have any news to share about whether this functionality will be restored or if it’s on the development roadmap.

I know that’s not the most satisfying answer, but I want to reassure you that your feedback and suggestions are being shared directly with the relevant teams. The more we can highlight how important this feature is for creators like you, the better.

Thank you as well for your suggestion about how this could be reintroduced in the UI—I’ll make sure to pass that along, along with your broader feedback about the impact on creators who fund public goods. Your perspective is incredibly valuable, and I just want to truly thank you for taking the time to lay it all out so clearly.

If you have any more thoughts, questions, or ideas, please let me know, and I’ll be happy to take a further look. I appreciate your patience and your willingness to advocate for the creator community.

All the best,
[REDACTED]

Several observations:

0) Whoa.

1) That is the best customer service response letter I've ever gotten, for reasons I will perhaps break down at some other junction. But it both does and does not read like it was written by an AI. I didn't quite know what to make of it, until someone mentioned to me the phenomenon of customer service agents at another org using AI to generate letters, and then I was like, oooooooh, maybe that's what this is. Or maybe not. Hard to say.

2) Though [REDACTED] could not confirm or deny, it sure sounds like an accident, but one that impacts such an uninteresting-to-Patreon set of creators that they can't be arsed to fix it, either in a timely way or at all.

3) "The more we can highlight how important this feature is for creators like you, the better." is a hell of a sentence. Especially in conjunction with "...along with your broader feedback about the impact on creators who fund public goods.". Reading between the lines, it sure sounds like the support people have been inundated by a little wave of outraged/anguished public-good posters, and the support people, or at least this support person, is entirely on the creators' side against higher ups brushing them off. Could be a pose, of course, but, dayum.

So that's what I know from Patreon's side.

The kludge I came up with for the post I made at the end of July is that I used another new feature – the ability to drop a cut line across a Patreon post where above it is world readable and below it is paid access only – to make a paid-access only post where 100% of the post contents are above the cut line.

Please let me know if it's not working as intended. This unfortunately has the gross effect of putting a button on my new post saying "Join to unlock".

So.

In any event, I strongly encourage those of you following me as unpaid subscribers over on Patreon to make sure you're following me, instead, here on Dreamwidth, because Patreon is flaky.

I will make a separate post with instructions as to all the ways to do that. You can get email notifications of my posts (either all or just the Siderea Posts), follow RSS and Atom feeds, get DM inbox notifications, and, of course, just follow me on your DW reading page, all on/through Dreamwidth, anonymously and completely free.

I'm putting the Substack column aside for a while. It's just too wearing, looking at the cruelties and misbehavior and idiocy and outright lawlessness of the current regime and writing commentary about it that essentially mirrors what others write.

I need some time not spending up to four days a week writing two columns for no money, columns that are at best depressing.

If I were still at a newspaper doing this, I'd have people who were in the business to bounce ideas off, and some support for the research needed. I am not Robert Reich, who has paid staff. I have me and a computer and occasionally a bookshelf.

And I want to do some lifegiving things for myself, like making more music and creating art and (as long as ICE is not present anywhere near me) going out into the park and breathing the green air of trees. I want to not have the heaviness of the column hanging over my head. I would rather play my flutes, and guitar, and maybe try harp. We have one that belongs to my husband, but he doesn't play often.

And I want to write things like poetry and fiction that don't require me to wear my reductive Inverted-Pyramid-style brain.

So I will notify people, later this week, that it will be more occasional and probably less political.