Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

After we got to the Trash Animals panel --- despite having missed the SpinDizzy wizard --- things did start to pick up. The session had by that time broken up into a couple of groups of people talking, really just hanging out with people, some of them in raccoon fursuits, one in a rat suit, and a couple people in other suits or costumes. bunnyhugger brought her squirrel puppet Chitter, but ended up talking more with Ed Hyena than anyone else. I gravitated that way too.

Also there was a somewhat long kerfuffle in trying to get a photograph of all the participants. The photographer had the idea everyone should gather around a trash bin, which pushed us all out of the adequate-sized meeting room into the narrow corridor of the walkway from the hotel's center ring to the conference room, there to gather around the small trash bin that never stood a chance of dominating the scene. We'd probably have been better off moving the trash bin into the room --- we'd at least have the chance for people not to be stacked five deep across a too-narrow walkway --- but that's a lesson for next time.

The hanging out merged imperceptibly into getting ready for the next panel, Show Me Your Camera, which was just what you'd imagine from the label. Lot of neat camera gear shown off, ranging from the stuff familiar from my youth --- remember those Kodak short but fat rectangles with the tower of flash cubes plugged in? --- or early digital cameras that record on 3.5" floppies. Some was quirkier stuff, like the Argus cameras once made in Ann Arbor. There were more than one century-old camera, and more than one person with so many lenses and lens extensions it was terrifying to stand too near all this expensive glass.

bunnyhugger was excited for the chance to show off her cameras, collected from estate sales and thrift stores and the like. But when the panel host stopped about midway through saying they were going to just pause showing off cameras to take a group photo, she correctly forecast that the showing-off would never resume. Instead it broke up into a general chat session, and she was able to talk with individuals about their cameras and about hers but never to show the whole bunch off to anyone. Also to people testing out their gear on shots of a couple volunteer fursuiters.

We did get to see a demonstration of someone who'd got a couple portable LED spotlights --- these were actually held by hand --- wirelessly connected to his main camera so that when he snapped there would be a bright flash short enough that the eye --- my eye, anyway --- couldn't even see it. But the picture came out with the spotlight colored as per the spotlights, with a dark background, just as if he were photographing in a studio. Astounding feat of photography; he explained something to the effect of when you have the right gear, everywhere is your studio now.

Following this was a bit of time with nothing particular on the schedule. We did an orbit of the dealer's den where we didn't really spot anything all that interesting --- it felt weirdly smaller than last year's, despite the hotel being so much larger --- and also a dip into artists alley though there wasn't any chance of getting a sketchbook commission. I think bunnyhugger got a couple stickers, though not of what she really wanted, Animal Crossing's lovable jock Bam.

After that, we went back to Hospitality, in my case mostly to get a couple Faygos and to sit a while. We needed to recover our energy somewhere and this would do it. The next thing we had to face was, and it's hard to think it came this soon, Closing Ceremonies.

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We're also coming up on the close of our full day at Six Flags America, if you can imagine.

I mentioned in passing a Johnny Rocket's at Six Flags America. There are several reasons we didn't eat there, but one of them was that it was closed due to as the sign says, ``HVAC complications''. This sign being there implies they were getting enough questions about Johnny Rocket's that just not opening the place wouldn't have addressed.

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The Tea Cups ride had pretty ordinary decoration but it's always nice seeing one. Little odd none of the parks nearest us have one.

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That lake that's over by the carousel (seen in the background) where that squirrel appeared earlier, but here seen from where you can also tell there was a wooden suspension bridge alongside.

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Heritage House Food Court is that spot that had all the signs about the park's history and grammatical catastrophes, by the way. We spent a lot of time in here waiting out the rain.

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Oh yeah, and checking in on the clocks, well, the analog clocks are at different wrong times and Ye Olde Digital Clock is missing.

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It's coincidence that my first picture after the rain included the Cyclone (a Scrambler) but it's at least a little bit funny too.

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Trivia: When Louis Blériot made the first airplane crossing of the English Channel from Calais to Dover in 1909 he was accompanied by a French destroyer, monitoring his flight and ready to rescue him should he have to ditch. Most of the flight was at an altitude of about 250 feet. Source: Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms, and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories, Simon Winchester.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 85: Dragon or Overgrown Lizard?, Ralph Stein, Bill Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

Because I do not wish this to be my third consecutive Friday without writing my words (with one bonus missed Sunday, siiiigh)¹, I better get these done before getting *too* cozy on the couch. That way, we know from experience, lies sleepiness.

I rounded out my reasonably good-but-exhausting week with a third day that was good-but-weird. I was worried that I was going to be slightly late to school --I ran into Clayton on the path and we walked the back half together, quickly since we knew we were brushing against our contractual start time. Striding around the corner at 7:47 (two minutes after first bell, but still well before final bell), we were startled to find...everyone. Turns out a fire alarm had gone off right around the time of first bell, and so *no one* got into class before about 8:10. Well then.

A couple hours later, I watched in horror as my clock spontaneously fell off the wall and missed hitting a student on the head by 8-10 inches or so. I think that's when I declared that the day had pretty serious Friday-the-thirteenth vibes, despite being a Friday-the-not.

I was able to finish the day without too many hours of distractions, and determined that I would reward myself for a Productive Week with a trip to Make and Mend to poke around. It's the closest I've ever had two visits there (about two weeks), and I was pleasantly surprised by how much churn had occurred, and how many new things were out. My secret plan to obtain every possible knitting needle is going extremely well.

I walked home while chatting on the phone with Veronica, which meant I got to learn her youngest child has the same favourite dinosaur as me (Triceratops, which I decided was my favourite when I was probably pretty close to the age he is now: almost four). I really appreciate that she has initiated an every-other-week or so Friday afternoon call while she's doing daycare pickup. It's always so good to get to know what's going on in her life!

At home I did some important documentation of knitting supplies (so far I have managed to not duplicate any needle sizes, which is _excellent_) and then sat on the bed and listened to music and worked a bit on some of my projects. Hearing voices downstairs, I went down to hang with Rey and her lovely friend Al, who I'd met a few weeks ago and quite hit it off with.

Now they're off to watch the telly downstairs, and I have, as established at the beginning of this post, curled myself up very comfortably on the couch. I have a warm blanket, I have three different knitting projects in reach, I have good conversations going with my sweeties, all is good!

It's still not guaranteed (my brain has been piss of late), but I'm really hoping I make it out to bells tomorrow, since it's been an age. And then I can spend the rest of the day being lazy and quiet and maybe grading and maybe playing video games and maybe knitting. It's a good plan, bront.

I hope you have good plans for this weekend, be they restful or active.

~Sor
MOOP!

1: I don't think I've talked about it. I feel awful. My streak was 1271 days. But right now it is 6 days, and if I finish today it'll be 7, and the way you get to 1271 is by doing 6 or 7 or 8 days in a row, lots of times all strung together. So yeah, "feel awful" but also sanguine.

 I have things that I should write about in more detail but I'm having about three weeks of bonkerscrazytimeclownshoes, so have a brief recommendation for Tech Won't Save Us's episode "What’s Driving the Push For Humanoid Robots ft. James Vincent."

Now that I know lots more about robots than I used to, I can tell you that humanoid is maybe the worst shape for a robot. If you don't believe me, watch some videos from the Consumer Electronics Show. They fall down all the time. Sometimes, as with Elon Musk's robots, they are just guys in suits and not robots at all. Humanoid is a bad shape for a human (this observation brought to you by how much my back is currently killing me) so why not make a robot that is shaped like basically anything else?

(I mean you know the answer is slavery, right? It's always slavery.)

Anyway this episode is weirdly fun to listen to because we're talking about something that is basically impossible and can't replace people, vs. AI which is basically impossible but will replace people because of all the middle managers who've had frontal lobotomies.

As a small good thing, I ordered two more skirts from Maya Kern while they were having a sale. I was worried the thistles one would be a colour I don't actually like, but it turns out to be a little more muted than the photos, in a way that I really enjoy! So that's lovely, and I am pleased to add a couple more very pockety skirts to my Pinewoods rotation.

I've been having a rough first half of the year at work. It's the fact that It's 2026 fucking me up, but I've also just like...not been as good of a teacher as I would like to be. I am maybe finding new energy and doing a better job these past couple weeks, which is very good, but also extremely frustrating because boy howdy, past me did not do any favours. Recovering from that is gonna keep being rough.

Case in point: Yesterday was 9.5 hours of active work, today was 9. Both with additional 2 hour zoom meetings after I got home. This is me _barely_ keeping up. It remains really _really_ frustrating that the better I do at my job the more time it takes --there is so little that I am able to optimize.

But I have a decent piece of differentiation/extra challenge for my ninth graders tomorrow (since some of them are definitely already finished with the activity that I expect the other half of the class to finish tomorrow). I found all the old reference sheets and made good (filled in!) copies for the special-ed tenth graders taking the midterm next week. I wrote a thoughtful circle activity (with help/inspiration from my coteacher!) for class 2 to do some community building with their extra classtime due to snow day shenanigans. I printed a couple early copies of the midterm for any tenth graders who want to start the midterm early since they won't be here Monday. I emailed the students and parents of every 9th grader who failed the midterm to begin making a tutoring and retake plan. I sorted the papers to return for one (of three, sigh) class so that I can just drop a pile at each person's desk instead of endlessly running around the room.

(to be fair, that last one is explicitly a "goddamn, recovering from being less good the first half of the year sucks" problem, since it's returning basically every paper I'd collected since, I dunno, October? This is very much something I could've been doing better on. Like. Returning things more frequently, yanno?)

((And to be unfair, I still have more grading and things to return, but that's all quarter 3 work at least.))

And while both yesterday and today I did take breaks after my contractual work day ended, they were only 45-60 minutes total. That's a lot better than getting stuck playing shitty phone games for three hours after the last bell and having to suddenly rush my copies so I can go the fuck home. I'm proud of myself for that.

Still though. "Excuse me while I teach your child but first I must" remains _barely_ satire. Rereading it, the phrase "time-wasting professional development" especially stings this week. Also the depressing reminder that this was in 2018 which is the only reason "attend a training for how to best protect my immigrant students from being targeted, deported, or killed by the government that should be supporting them" isn't anywhere on there. You know. Hypothetically.

So I'm flopping now, wearing a cute new skirt, and debating what to do for the last hour or so before I have to go to bed. It's such a delight to have any damn time to myself, maybe I'll waste it by fucking around with unsatisfying video games.

Maybe this weekend I'll have time and energy to make a dint on my grading pile. Or I could try going to bells for the first time in months? Both are good options, I suppose.

I wish you time and energy to do all the beautiful things that excite you.

~Sor
MOOP!

Posted by Paul Taylor

https://wapsisquare.com/comic/mental-break-2/

https://wapsisquare.com/?post_type=comic&p=20667

Hey folks, I’m just needing to take a mental break into the weekend. Wapsi will be back on Monday, March 2nd. I’m okay, just mentally overwhelmed. I’m still working on some of the stop motion stuff I want to share as short (maybe spooky) short vignettes of odd things. I want to be mixing stop motion, mixed media filming, with atmospheric field recordings and soundscapes. I’m still in the process of putting together some modular synth things, so if you’re in a comfortable place to contribute some money for sound design, please know that it’s greatly appreciated, goes towards the production of indie art projects, and any monetary donation of $50 and up will get your name in the “special thanks” section of the credits for those animated shorts. I’ve been finding other indie creators who design the sound equipment, so I try to use as much of the money to help fund other indie artists. ^_^ Please use the link below if you can donate any money towards these projects. =D

https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/pablowapsi

https://wapsisquare.com/comic/mental-break-2/

https://wapsisquare.com/?post_type=comic&p=20667

In my humor blog this week, I finally got around to mentioning how Ripley's Believe It Or Not had been in unexplained reruns for weeks and right away the strip came out of reruns with an explanation. And what was that? You can find out by reading below.

• MiSTed: FX Down To Mobius, Part 5: Freddy Gets a Message
• Nobody Knows Why _Ripley’s Believe It or Not_ Is in Reruns, Nor Why These Reruns
• Statistics Saturday: Some Theories of History
• Robert Benchley: Eat More Worry
• So It Turns Out Kieran Castaño Quitfired _Ripley’s Believe It or Not_
• What’s Going On In The Phantom (Sundays)? Is this an anniversary retrospective story? November 2025 – February 2026
• I Was Sincerely Angry at This Dream for Like an Hour After I Woke
• MiSTed: FX Down to Mobius, Part 6: Freddy Finds a Meteorite

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That entered, let's now enjoy some Six Flags America pictures as some weather rolls in on our extremely hot and muggy day.

Supermain train ready to dispatch. We waited for a front-seat ride and naturally wouldn't regret that when a heavy storm rolled in and shut down the train.

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Batwing: a roller coaster we only ever saw closed, and that was only erratically up all season. But we felt encouraged because --- well, computer, enhance.

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See? That's definitely a crew there, which wouldn't be if they figured there was no hope of getting the ride up. We would not see it up.

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Ride of Steel's entrance and dramatic lift hill, seen as we walked back from the storm-closed ride.

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The area has a gift shop with a Metropolis theme, thus the Daily Planet labelling of the floor.

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The skies look fitting for the Gotham City area, though.

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Storm clouds rolling in on The Wild One.

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Oh, but I did get a peek behind the construction fence at that no-longer-there ride by that fountain earlier. As you can see it's ... nothing discernible there.

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Another spot near The Wild One that looks like it might have once held a ride but now doesn't have anything recognizable. Given the small footprint I wonder if it wasn't a maintenance shed or something.

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The clouds continue rolling in on The Wild One.

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Oh yeah, you maybe saw a tower that wasn't the Wonder Woman Lasso of Truth in that picture of The Wild One a couple pictures ago. It's a drop tower, called Voodoo Drop, that doesn't feel at all like maybe we should be thinking about our use of a religion as a comical spooky-scary playful fun thing.

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Exiting the Mardis Gras area gets us to this sign with the Lakeside Park-esque ``Revenir'' message.

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Trivia: The images of microscopic phenomena Antoni van Leeuwenhoek included in the written texts of his letters to the Royal Society were not drawn by him, but by a series of Delft artists and draftsmen, drawing what they and he agreed they had seen. Source: Ingenious Pursuits: Building the Scientific Revolution, Lisa Jardine.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 85: Dragon or Overgrown Lizard?, Ralph Stein, Bill Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

From the Daily Mail Feb 24, 2026:

"It wasn't just the blanket left behind on a plane that got Homeland Security senior adviser Corey Lewandowski so riled up that he fired Kristi Noem's pilot.

It was, according to three DHS insiders, another item Noem left on that flight last spring: her bag.

No one knows for certain what was inside the bag - or at least no one was saying - but it was enough to stir up a hornet's nest with a firing, a rehiring, a promotion and even a medal."

Right. The Bag was so important that Lenandowski came into the cockpit in the middle of the critical climb to altitude - with the seat belt light still one - to chew out the pilot. Then they fired him after they landed. Then they realized there was no one to fly them out of the airport so they rehired him.

What's in the bag, b**ch?

If it was Important Papers and Documents of a Security Type, you DON'T make a noisy fuss about it - you send an air marshal to discretely pick up the bag and have it securely delivered back to you. You don't take off your seat belt and berate the pilot who is FLYING THE AIRCRAFT.

Oh by the way? The pilot was black. Funny about that.

And when were pilots supposed to be baggage handlers?

What's in the bag, b**ch?

Canonical link: https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1897060.html

[Content Advisory: info that may be US government classified and controlled unclassified info leaked to news outlets, within. Actual status is unclear to me.]



Cuba has been effectively under siege by the US since at least January.

The US has cut off all Cuba's access to fuel imports. The situation is getting increasingly desperate. And a bunch of things just happened today. Yesterday, by the time I post this.

The US seized Venezuela January 3. Venezuela had been one of Cuba's two primary sources of oil, and once the US had control of Venezuela, the US halted shipments of Venezuelan oil to Cuba. Cuba's other main supplier of oil was Mexico, and on Jan 27, Mexico announced it was suspending oil shipments to Cuba. The Mexican president was evasive when asked point blank if the Trump administration was pressuring them into it, but Mexico has a critical trade deal with the US coming due for renegotiating, and dare not antagonize Trump.

Two days later, Jan 29, Trump issued an EO threatening any country that ships oil to Cuba with tariffs.

Apparently, there has been, since around that time, an undeclared US naval blockade of Cuba, to prevent oil shipments from getting through. The Trump administration hasn't admitted it, but Jan 23, Politico published a report that three anonymous sources in the Trump administration said that the administration was considering a "total blockade on oil imports" to Cuba, and a few days ago the NY Times published an analysis of ship movements in the Carribean indicating that there was indeed a naval blockade.

Cuba has received no foreign oil since its last shipment from Mexico Jan 9th.

As of Feb 3, the Financial Times was reporting that a consultancy was reporting that Cuba had "15 to 20 days" of oil left. Feb 5, the UN Secretary-General spokesperson issued a statement about a humanitarian disaster looming in Cuba.

Cuba of course did what it could to ration oil, but without enough of it, things began to fall apart. They started running out of fuel for cars, public transit, trucks to ship in food, garbage trucks to take the trash, and tractors to harvest crops. Cuba primarily generates electricity from oil-burning power plants so the electrical grid started failing and they started having blackouts. People have been cooking with whatever they can burn in the streets; there is no reliable refrigeration. Of course, they are also running out of food, and have difficulty accessing water. All elective surgeries have been canceled.

Feb 8, Mexico sent a delivery of humanitarian aid – 814 tons of food and hygeine supplies – to Cuba, to arrive later that week. This doesn't violate the US sanctions. Probably.

Feb 9, Cuba notifies all airlines that fly to Cuba that Cuban airports are running out of fuel and they will no longer be able to refuel in Cuba; Air Canada announces it's suspending flights to Cuba and sending empty flights to rescue Canadians in Cuba. Canada has been the largest source of tourists to Cuba, and the tourism industry is one of Cuba's main sources of foreign currency, without which it basically can't engage in international trade.

Also Feb 9, Mexican president Sheinbaum publically called the US's sanctions on Cuba "unjust" ["muy injusto"] for how they impacted the people of Cuba and pledged to keep finding a diplomatic solution with the US to get to ship Cuba oil.

Feb 13, the Ñico López oil refinery in Havana, Cuba, had a fire. The Cuban government reports that it was swiftly contained, and that the refinery continues to function, but that an investigation was opened into its cause.

Feb 22, shipping analysis firm Windward announced that they'd detected a Russian tanker (subsequently identified as The Sea Horse by Kplr) headed from the Mediterranean to Havana, likely carrying oil, putting it on a track to directly challenge the US Navy's blockade. It is due to reach Cuba in early March.

Feb 23, Canada announced it would be sending some sort of relief supplies to Cuba, but was cagey about just of what those supplies would consist.

Today, Feb 25:

• Trump announced a plan to allow US companies to sell Venezuelan oil to Cuban businesses, but not the government.


• It has emerged that Marco Rubio (US Sect of State) is in talks of some sort with Raúl Castro’s grandson, Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro.


• There was an exchange of gunfire between Cuban border forces and 10 heavily armed people in a speedboat with Florida tags who opened fire on them when discovered just off the shore. According to the Cuban government, the assailants were all Cuban residents of the US; four were killed, six wounded and taken for medical care. Cuban authorities have accused them of being terrorists. The commander of the Cuban vessel was also wounded in the initial attack from the speedboat.

The commenter VisualEconomik EN on YT argued today that Russia is unlikely to go to the mat for Cuba, for a variety of reasons, including that Russia is economically over-extended by its war in Ukraine; he also contends that Russia and China have no more patience for Cuban mismanagement and despite the tactical military advantage having turf within 100 miles of the US coastline, they're kind of done with dealing with Cuba's government. As to whether this is true, I can't say, but it sounded reasonable. This is good news if true, because otherwise, if either wanted to back Cuba against the US, this could be the match that sets off the powderkeg.

( News sources and further reading below, in chronological order of publication [6,690 words] )

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Friday evening from the discovery of the lost hat through to early Sunday pretty well sucked, so let's see how much of this I can rush through without lingering.

We discovered the hat was lost just as we were in our hotel room getting ready for karaoke. I don't know if or what I'd have sung then, but we spent enough time in the failed search for the hat that we missed karaoke, and couldn't do much of anything besides go to bed late and sad. (There was no Friday night dance, I assume because of the same events-squeezing that crushed nearly all the panels out of the schedule.)

Saturday morning at least we didn't have to get up and get downstairs for the fursuit parade since there wasn't one. There was a photo session at 11 am to make up for some of that, but we got to bed too late an in too miserable a mood to even consider it. (There was also a red panda meetup that I might have gone to, on the strength of my kigurumi, but it was at 9 am and no. The model trains meetup was also interesting but an even worse 8 am.)

There weren't many things I was interested in on Saturday's schedule, so I put the time into retracing our steps to the car and back, and all over the first floor of the Renaissance Center, and so on. bunnyhugger passed on the Jackbox games --- she loves Jackbox games but there's never enough slots for players, and the con seems to go for games like the T-shirt design one instead of something that doesn't involve sitting for eighty minutes while other people do stuff on their phones --- in favor of Left Center Right, a sticker-swap event. She had seen it on schedules in past years but never got to play.

It was, I understand, a disappointing game since there wasn't really much game to it. You roll dice and based on that pass stickers to your left, your right, or to the pot at the center --- fine so far --- until someone wins the whole pot. There's no strategy of, like, keeping desired stickers or foisting unwanted ones off on anyone, and there's no partial jackpots, just, everyone ends up giving a sticker to one person. I can see where this is probably fun to do but as a game it's not much, since the only choice you make is whether to play.

Around this time I was emerging from the hat search to text people on my phone. There were several friends also at the con, one a SpinDizzy wizard who'd been there yesterday too. We've met in person before, but a long time ago, and while they're a very recognizable person for many reasons, and were often giving updates where they were, we never spotted them. Another pair, an old friend from FurToonia and their spouse, were also there after a quick accidental drive into Canada and I, getting my communications a little late thanks to the poor Internet and somehow worse cell phone reception, was always a little late for them.

After the disappointment of learning the hospitality dinner turned out to be a glimpse of an appetizer, bunnyhugger and I decided to get some dinner. We went out of the hotel, because we'd seen several restaurants driving in, and we ended up at the promisingly-named Pizza Cat. The place was busy and noisy and we didn't feel like waiting for a table through this.

Fortunately they had a kiosk where we could design a pizza and have it made to order, ready to go as soon as it was done. We put it in, got a seat, reassured the hostess that we were just waiting for the text that our kiosk order was done, and waited. And waited. Many people, some furries, came in. Many people left. Sometimes tables were empty. Sometimes they were full. What did not come was our text.

Obviously, it was a busy night, between it being Valentine's Day and there being a furry convention across the street and down a block. But still, there should have been something, right? After over a half-hour waiting I got up to stand by the hostess station and ask her when she reappeared what happened. She did not reappear. Employees would zip past us to the attached bar, and back again, but nobody asked me what I was doing there.

Finally, finally, I went into the seating area and asked a waitress where the order we'd put in 45 minutes ago was. She said something something something heating locker and she would check something something. The place was loud, I may have adequately explained. If I have not made this point enough then let me tell you: it was loud.

And I looked over to the other end of the restaurant and yeah, there was a glass case there, like a freezer locker only hot, with two cardboard boxes plugged into shelves in the middle. I went over to that and waited a moment for the waitress, whom I infer was busier than I was impatient. Someone in the kitchen asked if I'd been helped and I said, with all my reserve gone, that we'd put an order in almost an hour ago and wanted it. He said something about the heat locker too and I saw, yeah, our food was there, with bunnyhugger's name on it.

I do not know the procedure for this and also did not care. I grabbed our food from it and marched back to the other side of the restaurant, complaining as loudly as I could about spending a freaking hour waiting for this. I think I may have warned someone putting a kiosk order in that we were getting this. We marched back to our hotel room to discover that the ranch dressing and garlic butter or whatever that we'd also ordered was not there. Also, having sat in a heat locker for however long had shriveled it all up to a dry, rubbery mass that was worth eating mostly because it was food there.

By the time we were done our friends who'd visited Canada had gt overwhelmed by how much of everything the convention was, and we missed them, this time at least.

While we had some pleasant times at the Saturday night dance --- I found the earplugs I'd buried in my messenger bag for just this occasion --- that was also an hour or so of the very loud EDM that's always played here, the kind where the DJ will talk about one more song and I have no idea how you tell one song from another.

Sunday morning closed out the general suckiness with the hassle of packing our bags and checking out. That's ordinarily just a chore except that we had to get down the 53 stories of elevator at the same time everyone else is. Do you know how many elevators stopped on our floor before I found one that let me in? Would you believe it was long enough that another woman, who'd also been waiting forever with me, was able to be the lone person squeezing into one elevator to go downstairs, do whatever she was doing, and then get back before I got anywhere but more impatient? And she recognized me?

Finally I had to give up and get on an elevator that was going up --- all the way to the 67th floor (of 69 available to that elevator) --- because contra-flow was the only way to get an elevator at all. There's some point where the elevator traffic is so heavy that your behavior has to change to get anywhere and I thought briefly about the thermodynamics of this phase shift, before remembering I hated hated HATED this whole situation and at that moment would not be sad if a meteor wiped Motor City Furry Con off the planet.

Also, I was anxious that with an 11:00 check-out time my key card might stop letting me go up to the guest room floor 53. I knew there would be some leeway, but how much? It too me 55 minutes to do one pass from room to car to room again.

There was enough leeway that we were able to empty the room out, at least, and a mere fifteen or twenty minutes after the official check-out time the elevators were down to a reasonable load, the kind where you could wait for an elevator going your way. So we had that at least.

The long, long wait for the elevators meant we missed the first half of the Sunday-morning panel, ``Trash Animals Meetup'', and while our SpinDizzy wizard friend went to that panel, they found it too crowded and left, before we got there, and we never met up with them at all.

So, you know what sucked about all that? All of that except I guess the dance and the few minutes we thought we were going to have a fresh-made-to-order pizza.

Things got better from there but again, that sucked.

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Now to admire a bit of The Wild One and other roller coasters at Six Flags America.

Looking here at The Wild One's lift hill (background) and the returning bunny hills.

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You can tell the final helix is extreme because I tilted my camera to make the train rise in the picture as it goes downhill.

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Sign for the Musicial Hall offers Live IAZZ every night, that looks like fun.

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Among the events we missed was whatever they did for Juneteenth, which I'm guessing was ``get a lot of complaints from very white guys asking if they're doing anything for the 4th of July''.

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Way in back of the park is Superman: Ride of Steel, a mirror copy of the same ride at Darien Lake. Here's the lift hill and the gift shop and bathrooms in its shadow.

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And the last leg of the queue going up to the ride.

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Trivia: In the 1980s astronauts who were serving military officers were considered to be on a seven-year tour of duty, with extensions possible, at NASA, per an understanding between NASA and the Department of Defense. Source: NASA's First Space Shuttle Astronaut Selection: Redefining the Right Stuff, David J Shayler, Colin Burgess.

Currently Reading: The Red Planet: A Natural History of Mars, Simon Morden.

My father had an ancient Macbook -- not sure what he used it for, since he had not one but two newer iMacs as well as a couple tablets, but my mother said he did use it. A few months ago she asked me to dispose of it safely. I was eventually able to guess the password so I could look around. I didn't find any recent data on it but I made a backup just in case, then tried to wipe it so I could recycle it.

This laptop was running one of the feline operating systems (Leopard, I think). When I tried to wipe it, it asked for the installation CDs. CDs! How quaint. Uh, I didn't get any of those. I sought wisdom on the Internet but the Internet can be fickle, so I set it aside for a while.

Today I took it to my local Apple store to see if they could help. I asked if they could either wipe the disk or remove it so that I could recycle the rest of the hardware. While the friendly tech who was helping me tried to wipe it, she commented that she hadn't seen a Blackbook in such good condition for a long time. (I had not previously heard the name "Blackbook". Cute.) She wasn't able to wipe it either and asked if she could take it in back to extract the drive. Apparently she attracted some onlookers who also hadn't seen a Blackbook in a while (or maybe ever, judging by the ages of some of the people I saw).

She came back a few minutes later with the now-separated laptop and hard drive, and told me that if I was getting rid of it anyway, the store could recycle it for me. I was happy to save myself a trip to the e-waste folks, and if doing it this way helps even a small bit of it be reused rather than dumped in a landfill, that's a nice bonus.

A sticker on the hard drive indicated that it was manufactured in 2007. (That tracks with what I got from the OS.) Aside from being old, slow, and unable to run a modern operating system, the machine worked fine, which is pretty good for hardware that's old enough to drink. I'm on my third Mac Mini, and each replacement has been due to obsolescence, not hardware failure -- unlike the string of PCs I had before switching from Windows. I wonder how long my father's iPad (which I now have) will last.

We've seen some questions lately about AI and how it relates to Dreamwidth, especially around scraping and training. Rather than answer piecemeal, I wanted to talk through how denise and I are thinking about this and try to be explicit about some things.

Dreamwidth is a user-supported service. We don't build the service around monetizing user data, and that informs how we approach AI just like it informs everything else we do.

Your content and AI training

Dreamwidth does not and will not sell, license, or otherwise provide user content for AI training. We have not and will not enter into data-access agreements for AI training purposes.

We will continue taking reasonable technical steps to discourage large-scale automated scraping, including known AI crawlers, where it is practical to do so. No public website can prevent scraping with absolute certainty, but we will keep doing what we reasonably can on our side.

AI features on Dreamwidth

Dreamwidth will not introduce AI features (and we have no current intention of doing so) that use or process user content without a public discussion with the community first.

We're only phrasing it like this because we can't predict the future and who knows what will be possible and available in five or ten years, but right now there's nothing we can see wanting to add.

If that ever changed, the conversation would happen openly before any decisions were made.

Site admin uses of AI

Keeping Dreamwidth usable means dealing with things like spam and abuse, and that sometimes requires automated admin tools to be more efficient or effective.

We are not currently using AI-driven systems for moderation or similar decisions.

If we ever decide that an AI-based tool would help address a site admin problem like spam, we will explain what we are doing and how it works (and ask for feedback!) before putting it into use. Any such tools would exist only to make it easier and more efficient for us to do the work of running the site.

AI and code contributions

Dreamwidth is an open-source project, and contributors use a variety of tools and workflows.

Contributors may choose whether or not to use AI-assisted tools when writing or reviewing code. Dreamwidth will not require contributors to use AI tools, and we will not reject contributions solely because AI-assisted tools were used.

For developers: if you use any AI-assisted development tools for generating a pull request or code contribution, we expect you to thoroughly and carefully review the output of those tools before including them in a pull request. We would ask the community not to submit pull requests from automated agents with no human intervention in the submission process.

I think it's important and I want to be able to review, understand, and maintain any contributions effectively, and that means humans are involved and making sure we're writing code for humans to work with, even if AI was involved.

Important note: this applies to code only. We expect any submitted images or artwork (such as for styles, mood themes, or anything else) to be the work of a human artist.

And to be very explicit, any AI-assisted development does not involve access to Dreamwidth posts or personal content.

In short summary

• Dreamwidth does not and will not provide user content for AI training
• Dreamwidth have not and will not enter data-sharing agreements for AI training and we will do what we can to prevent/discourage automated scraping by AI companies
• Dreamwidth will not introduce AI features without a public discussion first
• Any site admin use of AI tools will be explained openly and part of a public conversation
• Contributors can choose their own development tools for code, but we do not accept images or artwork generated by AI

Oh, and we'll probably mention this (or a subset of this that isn't code related) in an upcoming dw_news post, but will defer to denise on that!

Just finished: Nothing.

Currently reading: A Drop Of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett. This continues to be really fun. I wish there was more Ana, but her more distant presence in this is balanced by just how weird and gross the worldbuilding is. All magic in this world is drawn from the blood of leviathans, giant eldritch horrors that live in the sea and during the wet season, come on shore to try to kill everyone, and the murder plot revolves much more around the technicalities of this than the first book did. I'm here for weird body horror and squishy stuff so this works for me.

I am a wee bit confused over Din's motivations; he wants to join the Legion, which is the division of the military that blows up leviathans, rather than investigating crimes with Ana, which is a fairly major switch from the first book. But he can't do it because he's deep in debt to an insurer who covered his now-dead father's medical bills, and the job is so dangerous that the insurer would never be able to collect. Which, do not get me wrong, is a cool motivation! But it does seem like a break from the way his character is initially presented, and so far the only reason for the switch seems to be that he hooked up with a soldier at the end of the first book.

Anyway I just got to the part where he goes inside the Shroud, which is a giant cyst in the water where they extract leviathan blood, inhabited by augurs, who are altered to be incredibly good at working with vast amounts of data but go insane after three years and can only communicate by tapping. It's super cool.

Oh, hi, everybody! It's been a little bit since we did a code tour, hasn't it? But never fear, we're here to walk you through the changes that have happened since the last time we took a tour through the code changes in Dreamwidth.

Let's dive in, shall we?

( Your code tour, with some attempts at arrangement by topic. )

There we go! Another year's worth of code commits, issues resolved, and attempts to make Dreamwidth a greater and cooler place to be. And to have it continue working into the future.

(We should do these more often, but volunteers and, well…*gestures broadly around*. So it may be a while before someone has the spoons to do this again, but we're always trying to be more consistent about it.)

Here are the totals for this code tour:

104 total issues resolved.
Contributors in this code tour: Copilot, alierak, cmho, dependabot, jjbarr, kareila, l1n, momijizukamori, pauamma, sirilyan, zorkian

After our pinball tournament wrapped up we went looking for food. The easy spot was Hospitality, which had promised to have some hot food over the weekend. What they had were a handful of hors d'oeuvres, served at about 8 pm or so, and eaten within seconds. We wouldn't see that Friday, but Saturday we hung around to get something and were disappointed to learn we were to take one (1) samosa and one (1) egg roll and one (1) mini chicken apple salad and one (1) I forget what the other was because it wasn't at all vegetarian each. It's actually an amount of food worse than serving nothing at all. They had evidence of bags of snacks but whenever we were around all that were left were unpleasant mini hard pretzels. They didn't even have the popcorn machine that'd been a staple in years past. I trust this is all the hotel being weird at them and that as they get to know the con they'll loosen up, if there's a Motor City Furry Con in the Renaissance Center again.

There was a snack stand in the hotel lobby that promised hot food, but we were well past the time they offered that and the cold sandwiches didn't get any better (or more vegetarian) than peanut butter and jelly Uncrustables. We peeked at the hotel restaurant --- called Fuell, with the second L smaller and tucked onto the 'seat' of the first L --- and decided to go for that. We thought we might do okay if we got a plate of truffle fries and some quesadillas and yes, this was a good amount of food and we were really happy with how it all tasted. Also how much there was of it. The one drawback is by some misunderstanding we didn't get serving plates for the two appetizers so a lot of topping ended up falling on the table. Well, we tried to be good.

And I may as well wrap up the rest of eating here. Saturday morning we roused ourselves from despair about the hat and found that the snack stand was open and serving hot food. This included Beyond Meat burgers, which were not on sale at the hot-food stand set up for the con despite being part of the con's menu. Instead we ordered at the register, paid, and waited for them to make it, all the while trying to find any spot anywhere in there that people wouldn't take to be us waiting in line. At this we failed. The burgers finally came, along with a condiments package that included mustard, catsup, and little glass bottles of mayonnaise, a choice adorable and baffling. Also served with bamboo-wood silverware, including straws, that we're supposing is probably better than plastic because of how fast bamboo grows? I don't know, lifecycle accounting is hard. I guess at least this once-used stuff won't exist for thousands of years. What we did not get was relish or onions or anything and we realized afterward that those were at the hot-dish stand where people getting normal burgers, or chicken-and-mac-and-cheese, or the like were getting stuff. Yes, that table also had the mayo bottles.

Leaving aside Saturday dinner --- I have my narrative reasons --- Sunday lunch we went back to the place and instead of getting burgers again, found that they had broken off selling the chicken from the mac-and-cheese. I got a plate of that for myself and it was pretty good baked macaroni and cheese. bunnyhugger got an Uncrustable, a comfort food. I never got into them myself so don't have any associations with them besides ``people who don't eat the crusts are serious?''. Sunday evening we were in time to get a samosa and a small vegetable roll from hospitaly; Sunday night, Taco Bell on the disappointed drive home.

So now you know we didn't go hungry, despite the food court at the base of the Renaissance Center having lost its last tenant --- a Burger King --- back in November.

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Let's get back on The Wild One, or at least into its vicinity, now.

Historical plaque on The Wild One exploring a bit of its history and mentioning one of the big changes that could make you ask whether this is truly a century-old roller coaster.

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And another plaque explaining more reasons that you might ask whether it's the same roller coaster. Retracking is normal enough, of course, although speeding the ride up by ten percent is starting to make the sort of dramatic change that makes people question the continuity of identity.

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bunnyhugger waiting for a front seat ride. ... Yeah, we never really had to wait for anything which I guess makes the choice to close the park make more sense. On the other hand it was extremely hot and muggy and midweek so I can understand people figuring they could go into the water park and never be seen again instead.

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View of the dispatch end of the station, after our ride. As you see it's another gangbusters crowd getting into the car.

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The exit hopes that we enjoyed the ride. Yes, we did.

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Looking close-up at a train rolling past, and at the wooden track underneath that makes this a wooden coaster.

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Trivia: In 1985 the United States Olympic Committee announced it was invoking ownership of the Olympic Rings as a United States trademark, as permitted by the 1978 Amateur Sports Act, claiming compensation from the 1988 Olympics broadcasters from advertising sales to companies that planned to use the Olympic logo in their commercials. The USOC argued that its own domestic sponsorship program was compromised by networks sublicensing the use of the Olympic rings to commercial advertisers. Source: Encyclopedia of the Modern Olympic Movement, Editors John E Findling, Kimberly D Pelle. So the appendix about Olympics-inspired movies lists that, but not Animalympics. Fursecution is real!

Currently Reading: The Red Planet: A Natural History of Mars, Simon Morden.

2026 Jan 20: ApasheOfficial on YT [music video]: Kyiv by Apashe & Alina Pash

Linux is Too Big To Survive,
Or How the Bazar built a Cathedral.

Recently I had that regular occurrence for any sysadmin of needing to rebuild and migrate a disk array. And during that I decided to see if vanilla[1] Linux's LVM and BTRFS raid solutions were fit for use. I eventually found they are not, and had to rebuild the array once again. A combination of poor performance, no RAID5/6 consistency guarantee, and over complex management needs and ability to eat all the data in the entire array if you reboot during a disk migration.

And yet, somehow BTRFS and LVM are used by Amazon and Synology in production and consumer systems. So how does that work? Well, it's because they use their own customised versions of Linux with special sauce added that fix up the problems extant in the vanilla Linux kernel. If you've ever pulled the disks from a Synology NAS, you'll find that the on disk format is almost but not quite identical to that used in vanilla Linux, and different enough to cause problems recovering data from them. And importantly, there's no real interest from Synology and Amazon to get their special sauce into the vanilla source. It's a nice competitive advantage to have their proprietary system that works well and no one else has. It's very hard to work out from what Synology publish, how to apply their changes back to the to Linux. And Amazon don't have to distribute their internal changes at all because they keep it entirely in-house and don't let others use it. And other companies do the same with so many other parts of Linux, and some of them[2] do so with inscrutable compiled binary[3] distributions that go against the whole idea of open source development.

So how did we get here? Two reasons. The first is that in the old days of open source operating systems, hardware manufacturers had no interest in developing device specific system software (device drivers) for niche hobbyist operating systems. The expectation was that at most you might get the technical specifications of the devices, or you might have to reverse engineer the device to work out how the operating system needs to talk to it. This lead to Device Drivers being developed in and bundled with the Open Source Operating System Kernels, or developed by what ever niche interest group needed them. This was, for a long time, how the Linux Kernel operated having inherited this from previous open source operating system projects. There would be the "in-tree" developed hardware drivers managed by the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML), then there would be other "out-of-tree" developed hardware drivers managed by the likes of Linux-TV and V4L groups that had a niche interest in broadcast media and CCTV hardware. And the occasional hardware producer that wanted to have a free embedded OS on their device.

And that last one is where things went a bit screwy. A company called Tivo created one of the first Set Top Boxes that could record, replay, pause and rewind LiveTV. And it ran Linux inside the box. But they only published the bare minimum on how the OS ran, and had controls to prevent the device's operating system being directly accessed or altered.

For many LKML developers this was viewed as an Existential Threat. And one that coincided with the introduction of secure-boot[4] methods, intended to lock down things such as public terminals and office desktops from third parties trying to interfere with the OS. The LKML named this "Tivoization" and declared it something to be combated. First they started to argue that these were violations of the 'GPL2'[5] document used as a license to distribute Linux. It should be noted that these arguments came from software engineers, not lawyers. In addition they encouraged out-of-kernel developers to merge their organisations into the LKML, eventually resulting in official policy that the LKML would not take into account any issues their changes might make to out-of-kernel drivers.

This led to the current situation, Linux has a policy that it does everything possible to avoid breaking the applications that run on Linux. It has no such policy for out-of-tree developed drivers, and those can not only be broken by changes between major versions of Linux, but can sometimes also be broken by changes to the 'Long Term Support' versions. But more importantly, it did nothing to stop "Tivoization". There are now plenty of small embedded devices running Linux that include binary blobs and boot time intrusion prevention. Your TV might be one of them, your home router almost certainly is.

The result of this is that now the vast bulk of the LKML distributed Linux Kernel is Device Drivers. And all of this code is in variable states of maintenance and quality. Occasionally they will prune some of the drivers after deciding that no one running a current version of Linux needs them. Sometimes they just sit there for ever. Sometimes they unintentionally became support structures for other drivers and can't be removed without massive restructuring. In the world of computer systems this is called "technical debt", old decisions that cause problems for future development. And if you want to get your driver into the vanilla kernel and be a sanctioned in-tree kernel driver, you need to abide by the design and conduct choices and social structure of the LKML. Suffice to say that discussion of what that means is out of scope for this article.

There are now very few major out-of-tree but still open source Kernel Drivers. Returning to the original paragraphs of this article, one of them is OpenZFS. OpenZFS is a high performance file system intended for use with disk arrays and gives a highly functional and robust RAID and disk recovery implementation. It also inherited a software licence from it's original project that while still fully open source, is considered legally incompatible with the GPL2 by the LKML developers, so it can never become an in-tree driver. This is despite the licence actually being a stronger open source protection, as it prevents any of the code submitted being patented by the submitter. OpenZFS is a substantially better disk array file system than BTRFS and LVM on Linux. And it has major industrial backing, because the ZFS file system is deployed heavily throughout enterprise systems. But if you want to use it on Linux, it means you have to use OpenZFS's out-of-tree drivers. Which means you can only use the specific versions of the Linux Kernel known to safely work with OpenZFS. Try to replace your Linux Kernel with a new one that has an incompatibility, and you lose access to the disk array. The consequences are the same for smaller niche hardware that doesn't have the backing to get through the LKML gauntlet to become an in-tree driver.

The proponents and supporters of the GPL2 supported it as being an alternative to giant corporate close-source monolithic development. That instead of a Single Software Cathedral, you could have a bazar marketplace of smaller developers each contributing to individual, joint or distributed projects. But the irony of the LKML interpretation of GPL2 and the organisation practices of the LKML has been to create a new Cathedral. One that is accruing vast amounts of technical debt.

So what is the future of Linux with all this technical debt hanging over it?

First possibility is that it gets hard forked. Which means someone steps in, takes a copy all the public code (called forking the source tree), creates a new organisation, and starts developing a new Linux with different policies. And this could happen multiple times, with all different interested groups making their own Linux. And the thing about this is that it's the one that is already happening. Android is a hard fork of Linux sponsored and organised by the Alphabet corporation to run on phones and TVs. The majority of corporate Linux distributes manage a soft fork of the Linux kernel with patches and maintenance reviews of their own. Ubuntu and Red Hat ship their own versions of the Linux Kernel Source Code. It's quite possible that eventually this turns into a hard fork. If this progresses, then eventually the LKML lose relevance as they become more and more detached from where Linux is used.

Second possibility is that the LKML slims down. That they abandon the policy against supporting out-of-kernel development, and spin off the device drivers to independent projects. In some cases this would be spinning them off when they had been independent projects in the first place. Development by 'Special Interest Groups' is actually the way almost all major standard hardware systems get developed. Combinations of corporate, government and academic interests combine to work together on a project researching and developing a new technology. The LKML actually has very little sway on hardware development, because it simply isn't organised to recognise that special interest groups exist outside the LKML. Currently hardware is near universally developed without any regard to the LKML[6]. By divesting of driver development to special interest groups, open source operating development would actually get a stronger voice on hardware development. In a sense, this too also happens in that some parts of driver development are allowed their own soft-fork that is managed under the LKML organisation, with changes back-ported. One example is the DRM-Next source tree, which handles Graphics Drivers where a powerful enough group of special interest exists. Out of kernel development of drivers that can be packaged alongside a kernel used to work in the past, it can work again now. It just needs the LKML to decentralise and spin off, and start to get a handle on dismantling the technical debt.

Or maybe something in the middle happens. And we end up with semi-soft forks of the Linux Kernel, organising Special Interest Groups. But in that situation the LKML will struggle on under the technical debt of trying to include as many in-tree drivers as possible while not supporting out-of-tree special interest developments.

What I hope is that Linux doesn't collapse under completely unmanageable technical debt. And it fracturing into corporate owned distributions of their secret special sauce versions.

--
[1] A Linux kernel compiled from the publicly distributed source code release from the Linux Kernel Mailing List operated kernel.org repository. For reasons discussed, this is not the same as the Kernel that is actually used by anything other than hobbyist distributions.
[2] The notable example being Nvidia.
[3] For non-technical readers, a compiled binary is the raw machine level instructions. They are generated from the computer program's 'source code' designs that developers create, and binaries can be hard if not impossible to deconstruct back to their original design work. Think of it like trying to identify the ingredients in a can of soup without the label. To even start, you need a special tool to open the can.
[4] Opposition to Secure Boot was based on some faulty assumptions about the intent behind it, and ignoring the clear needs when you have devices that are publicly physically accessible but need to handle confidential data such s payment processing. Eventually, and with a push from third party vendors, Secure Boot was embraced by the LKML.
[5] GPL2 can be read so as to imply that you can not distribute incompatibly licensed software that 'links' to a binary API because that makes it 'part' of the licensed software. Even where the license is also an open source licence. This is disputed, and it is in my view not something the licence can legally establish as a binding term. However, LKML developers have taken to marking certain API calls to be accessed by GPL2 software only. This is of course only obeyed by people trying to respect the LKML developers opinion on this.
[6] There has been a fair amount of antagonism between Hardware standards development and the LKML, due to a tendency to make public statements decrying flaws in hardware designs after those hardware designs had been set in silicon for years and are now hard to change. At one time it was a common refrain on the LKML that users should 'fix their hardware'.

I have just been out for a walk, a day after the blizzard: bright blue sky, temperature around freezing, and most but not all of the sidewalks have been cleared, so I walked down the middle of the street for a bit. The turkey flock that hangs out on Egremont Road is now up to at least 12 birds, two of which were sitting on a railing. [We got 16-18 inches of snow, I think--the official number from the airport is 16.5, which is significant, but a lot less than this storm dumped on some places.]

The first thing we hoped to get to Friday at Motor City Furry Con was the roller coaster furries meetup. It was labelled ``Furry Thoosies'', ``thoosies'' being modern Internet slang for ``roller coaster enthusiasts'' that bunny_hugger hates. I'm not sure I have an opinion yet myself.

I had assumed we got there when it was still setting up but, no, it was as set up as it would get. The projector wasn't working so there wouldn't be any showing of on-ride videos which is probably fine, since picking out and showing videos is the least interesting part of the discussion. Instead the host was throwing out a series of questions and taking one, in rare cases two, answers from the audience before moving on. It was hard to escape the feeling that bunny_hugger and I and this one other guy were monopolizing the discussion, although after about a half-hour two other people warmed up to answering things.

We never quite got a good cross-discussion going, though, and we didn't get to talk much about our most interesting roller coaster riding of the past year --- The Ride To Happiness in Plopsaland de Panne, and The Wild One at Six Flags America. We weren't even able to offer our knowledge that Kentucky Kingdom was now owned by the same company that owns Dollywood; the park's ownership was discussed by several people none of whom would stand aside for the people who knew. (Also it's weird to get into opinions about who owns it when it's a reasonably easy-to-look-up fact, except that Internet in the Ren Cen was very minimally available.) Well, it wasn't our panel and it's not our responsibility to correct people even on matters of fact.

We had to leave it before the panel was quite done, though, because while we weren't able to hold any panels we were able to oversee an event. Last year someone had brought a Surfers pinball game to the convention, and a couple weeks ago we got confirmation they were bringing it again. So I got permission to hold a pinball tournament on it. This wouldn't be a sanctioned tournament, in case anyone cared about that, but it could be fun anyway. We picked Friday evening for it, as we could see two hours with nothing particularly interesting to us and, based on past years when machines were brought in, we weren't sure it would survive if we held the event on Sunday.

What we failed to do was make up signs before hand. Also to contact the person bringing the game or running the game room the moment we arrived that we were ready to go. We got to the game room and the people keeping watch had no idea what we were talking about, and we didn't have anything but a cute little trophy bunny_hugger had made to show off.

So there wasn't anything to do but lunge at anyone taking even a long glance at Surfers and tell them there was a tournament going on, would you like to be part of it? And most people were a little confused, as if suspecting a trick --- the trophy, in its comic smallness, did much to convey our sincerity --- but went along with it. It helped that we pared the rules down as much as possible: play up to two games, better score counting. The four people with the best finishes at 8:30 would be invited to play one game each, highest score getting the trophy.

In the ninety minutes or so of this we got a healthy fifteen or so putting up games --- it'd be hard to fit many more games in, even for as short-playing a game as Surfers --- and we even got many of the players following instructions and getting back at 8:30. Only one of the top four finishers didn't appear, and fortunately the fifth-place finisher did, so we could have a four-person playoff.

The lone drawback is that Surfers is a one-player game, so everyone had to play their games sequentially. It turned out the pinball guy had brought another game, the four-player Bow And Arrow, but it had some scoring problems with player three that would have made it inappropriate for four-player games. I mean, experienced pinball players could have rolled with it, but for what we supposed tobe novices playing their first tournament-like thing ever? No, keep it simple. Simpler than that.

So Rock 'n' Roll Dragon, the top seed, started out, and put up a decent but not impressive 1,376. bunny_hugger, second second, went second --- she likes going as soon as she can in one-player games --- and had a slightly better 1,678. This was almost a thousand points behind her qualifying score, but it was still better than anything I ever put up, which is why I wasn't in finals. Next, Moki --- fourth seed --- started out with a killer first ball and while the rest was not as good, it was still worth 2,490 points, third-best score anyone put up in qualifying or finals. And then, Akira, the third seed, came up and threatened to break the everyone-does-a-little-better with three lousy and one okay ball. But then on the fifth ball, suddenly, everything starts coming together. They get the ball up and into the valuable candycane scoop, they get the ball back up into the pop bumpers, they just keep on going, passing Rock 'n' Roll Dragon, and bunny_hugger, and closing in on Moki ...

And then the ball drained, at a mere 2,231 points. Moki took the trophy and we did our best to announce to the world --- and, for me, to the Motor City Furry Con Telegram group --- but if anyone besides our half-dozen players and onlookers noticed, I don't know.

We hope to do this again next year, though, and with the experience gained in this we should be better prepared. If we know for sure they'll have pinball machines in enough time, for example, we could even do sanctioned tournaments. We might yet make it into something too complicated to be fun.

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And for some plain, simple fun? Motor City Furry Con pictures. Enjoy.

Journeying from the Looney Tunes area to what lies past the miniature railroad ride.

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That's right, it's Mardis Gras! Although we already passed Ragin' Cajun before this. Mardis Gras: not just for go-karts, though.

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It's the section that held The Wild One, which we certainly weren't going to visit the park without riding a bunch.

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Cute little hill in The Wild One's infield. Not sure why they put one there; maybe it was useful before the roller coaster was moved.

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The ramp up is your nice classic slow incline, like we know from older parks and coasters like Conneaut Lake Parks's Blue Streak (RSVP).

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bunny_hugger pauses to get a picture of the coaster coming back.

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Trivia: The 1977 movie 2076 Olympiad tells the story of the Olympic Games that year being sponsored and broadcast on an erotic cable network, with the Games therefore focusing not on athletic skills but sexual performance. Source: Encyclopedia of the Modern Olympic Movement, Editors John E Findling, Kimberly D Pelle. So the appendix about Olympics-inspired movies lists that, but not Animalympics. Fursecution is real!

Currently Reading: The Red Planet: A Natural History of Mars, Simon Morden.

Today while driving to meet someone for talmud study, I came to some road construction. The road was reduced to one lane, with flaggers [1] at each end. As is usual, cars accumulate at the "waiting" side until there's a backlog and then they switch directions. Today the traffic seemed to be moving very slowly (even for construction zones).

When I got to the middle of the stretch I saw why: there was a large opening in the middle of the road. Even in my Honda Fit, I went slightly onto the sidewalk to get through. It would have been much worse for larger vehicles.

Naturally, I found myself wondering about the halacha. The torah (Mishpatim, Exodus 21) tells us that if one opens a pit in the public thoroughfare and an animal falls in, the one who dug the pit is liable for the damage. The talmud (Bava Kamma 49b and nearby) has some discussion of this, including the case where the pit is covered which is deemed to be safe. But I saw nothing about pits that have active watchers like the construction workers. And while it might be there somewhere, I didn't see discussion about people falling in, and that might be different because people have more agency than oxen.

I wonder how Jewish law would handle the case where a driver, despite best efforts, took damage while driving around this pit, particularly if traffic behind precludes backing out of the situation. Would the Jewish court rule that the diggers of the pit were insufficiently cautious and are liable for the damage? Perhaps they would argue that the workers could have closed the road entirely for that block to avert the problem. Or would they rule that there was an active warning and the driver is responsible, even though there was no cover? Would it be different if the workers had taken a lunch break and put up a "caution" sign? Does it matter that it was a public-works project (like the wells discussed in the talmud) rather than something for private gain?

As a practical matter, of course, the driver submits an insurance claim and nobody sues the government for damages. But I'm curious about the rabbinic answer, not the modern practical answer. I mentioned it to the rabbi I was studying with at the end of our session but we didn't dig into it. Maybe I'll ask on the Judaism community on Codidact.

[1] Not actually flags, but people holding the signs that say "stop" on one side and "slow" on the other to regulate flow through the zone. Is there a name for that role?

Well, that sure is 33 inches (84 cm) of snow out there, goodness gracious. (We beat the record from 1978! Wow.)

So far my power is fine, I have baked a loaf of bread and spent the day working my way through the manuscript for crit group tomorrow, which is another snow day. I don't think I've ever had two consecutive snow days?

The windows are completely blocked by snow, I tried to take a peek outside this morning and couldn't open the front door, it is still snowing. Hope everyone else in the path of this nor'easter is safe and warm!

ETA: Ducked out during a lull in the wind and threw some snowballs!

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