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[personal profile] draconis
Progress is... well... progressing!

I just finished my first set for the day.

This past week I've been doing one "fast" set of 60 in the mornings, then a much slower set of 30 in the afternoon, and another slow set of 30 in the evenings. I've just started adding the slow sets, using them for what I've heard referred to as "greasing the skids" for the main set.

With the progression schedule I've drawn up, I'll be adding 5 reps to the main set every 4 weeks. That first increase will be one week from today, and will bring me to 100 just in time for Midwinter's. I don't have a progression schedule drawn up for the slower sets, but I'm going to add 5 more to those today and however often I feel like I can. As the reps for the slower sets gets closer to the main set, I'll be slowing down the main set until they're all the same speed.

Politics

Jun. 7th, 2026 11:45 am
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[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
Council of the EU begins official preparations for start of talks on Ukraine’s accession

"Today the Cyprus Presidency initiated the preparation for the formal opening of Cluster one in the accession negotiations of Ukraine and Moldova," the post says.

Birdfeeding

Jun. 7th, 2026 11:35 am
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[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
Today is partly sunny, humid, and hot.

I did a bit of work around the patio.















.
 
raven: [hello my name is] and a silhouette image of a raven (Default)
[personal profile] raven
I’ve been feeling some kind of a way about this story! I’m reluctant to say I Am Writing Again, because this felt like a huge struggle and would’ve been impossible without the week on Shetland. But here it is, and I’m glad I’ve written it.

Also, if you’re not familiar, I really think you could read this one as an original m/m short story, no canon required. The tiny bit of backstory goes like thisgoes like this )

No spoilers for the show here.

slung from the mast, a lantern (6075 words) by raven
Fandom: Shetland (TV)
Relationships: Duncan Hunter/Jimmy Perez, Alison McIntosh & Jimmy Perez
Characters: Jimmy Perez, Duncan Hunter, Sandy Wilson, Alison McIntosh, Cassie Perez (Shetland)
Additional Tags: Slow Burn, why is "co-parents to lovers" not a canonical tag

Every few minutes Jimmy’s feet leave the ground, and it’s only Duncan’s weight that keeps him down. It’s terrifying, every time it happens. All of this, suddenly, is terrifying.

(Or––Jimmy grieves, Duncan loves him, things work out okay in the end)

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[personal profile] mmcirvin
I knew I wasn't going to be able to sustain a pace like the one I'd maintained for my first full day at Hersheypark. That was why I scheduled two days. Hersheypark is really two parks for me: It's one of the wildest coaster parks in the United States, but it's also the park I probably loved most as a kid in the 1970s and 1980s. My family's most common summer vacation was a yearly road trip from northern Virginia up into the Poconos, to visit my mother's family who lived there. Hersheypark was along the way and on some, though not all, of these trips, we'd stop there. I think once we even did two days, like I was doing on this trip.

In those days, Hersheypark had a lot that wasn't super intense: many transportation and observation rides, some of which are gone now. They had two very different skyrides: a Von Roll bucket ride that went from what is now Founder's Way to what was then the back of the park, now Kissing Tower Hill; and a little chairlift-style ride over Spring Creek that the other one passed directly over. There was a spectacular Waagner-Biro double Ferris wheel called the Giant Wheel, in the former Carrousel Circle around where Balloon Flite and Starship America are now. This had two wheels on the ends of a seesaw-like beam, so that one could be going high in the air while the other was loading and unloading on the ground. Those three were easily my favorite childhood rides in the park, but they're all gone. I think they auctioned off the cars from the little skyride on eBay, in case you want one in your garden. My sister remembers losing a sandal on it.

Other big, mild rides are still there, and I wanted to revisit some of them. But my first order of business was to ride Skyrush, the last tick mark on my Hersheypark cred-crawl agenda. Refreshed by a night's sleep, I was game for it, and the park seemed to be filling up with school field-trip groups so I needed to hurry. Here's XtremeCoasters Network's POV, which is recent enough to show the current look of the ride, and shows the whole of the insanely fast cable lift:



Skyrush does not mess around. It's an Intamin hypercoaster with a layout similar to Intimidator 305/Pantherian at Kings Dominion, though not as large or as notorious for making riders black out. Still, it's probably too intense for a lot of the general public who are generally OK with big coasters. The whole point of the layout, with a gigantic first drop leading into a tangle of relatively low hills (and no inversions), is to absolutely hurl you with the most intense ejector airtime you will ever feel. There's also a famous "kink" in the first drop where the radius of curvature seems to tighten a bit, just to start with the negative-G hurling before you're even all the way through that drop.

So that people do not die from this process, the ride's lap restraints have to be pretty secure and a bit tight. This has made Skyrush a polarizing ride. For the first decade and change of its existence, it had restraints that were reported to be quite painful and got it the nickname "Thighcrush". Now it has new ones that are not so painful... but some people complain that the ride was somehow made less intense by them. You can't win. Anyway, I only know the new ones.

Hilariously, before they gave Skyrush the new restraints, they modified it to give you a little break from the lap bar tightness: when you're on the brake run waiting to return to the station (the two trains often stack), all the lap restraints suddenly loosen a click, with an audible bang. They kept that with the new trains and I think it's because it's frickin' terrifying, one last little jump scare.

It also has an unusual seating arrangement: the seats are four across, wider than Pantherian, and the outside seats are floorless, mounted in a wing arrangement lower down than the middle ones. I've heard complaints about excessive vibration in these wing seats. I rode in a right-side wing seat, and to me this shake was barely detectable and silly to complain about. This ride absolutely wowed me and at most other parks, even big packed ones, it would be far and away the 800-pound gorilla of the park. But Skyrush is at Hersheypark, and this level of intensity only makes it the third craziest ride in the park, behind Wildcat's Revenge and Storm Runner. Still, I think it's great and has an oddball quality to it that makes it worth seeking out.

Low-energy day

Having done that, for the rest of my day, I didn't really have a detailed agenda. I wanted some free time to just bum around and explore, and get to the parts of the park I remembered from childhood that I hadn't gotten to on my 2011 visit. One of these was Kissing Tower Hill (formerly Tower Plaza), the former back of the park and maybe the most unchanged corner of it since the 1970s. QuietPlaces has a Kissing Tower POV that shows the vibe:



This is an observation tower, with a cylindrical deck that slowly rises and descends while rotating, with Hershey's Kiss-shaped windows. Regrettably the only person I'd do any kissing with was not with me on this trip, but the views were good. I rode this when it was pretty new, and it's the same a half-century later, though there are more rides down there to gawk at. This area is also where the Twin Turnpikes cars depart from, another classic ride that I didn't do on this day but did see running.

Not far away is Coal Cracker, Hersheypark's flume, which has the distinction of being the first ride with any kind of thrill aspect at all that I ever rode. Hersheypark's official POV for once doesn't cover the audio with music:



This is an Arrow flume, with most of the course high up in the air. The main drop of about 50 feet doesn't actually get you all that wet, and instead concentrates on thrills: there's a little airtime hump at the bottom of the drop, so you sort of ride high in the water when you hit the bottom.

For some reason, I loved Coal Cracker when I was a kid even though I was terrified to go on anything else with comparable intensity. Riding it now, I think that part of it is the psychological lulling effect of its peculiar loading station. It's a giant, very slow-moving turntable, similar to the one used by the dark ride over at Chocolate World; you descend into the middle of it via staircase and get in the boats as they creep around the edges. The design of it hides any thrilling element of the ride and makes Coal Cracker seem like the slowest boat ride in the world.

Annoyingly, it also makes it impossible for there to be any kind of bag drop in the station, so for me, riding this involved a long trek to stash my stuff in the locker I'd rented way back by the waterpark--though, honestly, with the chin strap on my hat I'd have been fine at least wearing it with my sunglasses.

Loose items

Which reminds me that Hersheypark merits an aside on loose-article policies. Coal Cracker is unusual for a major ride: for the most part, they're really good about this. All the roller coasters I rode have bag drops on the platform, and, for several of them, there are *free* single-use lockers near the entrance that you can use for the duration of your ride. These work by having you enter a PIN and remember your locker number. They'll give you 2 hours of use for free, which end immediately when you open the locker, so the point is for you to use this for the duration of a ride.

There's a bank of these ride lockers near the entrances for Skyrush and sooperdooperLooper, so those coasters are listed as having ride lockers--but, really, you could use this same bank easily for Comet and even for Coal Cracker if you can climb the hill fast enough. I only realized this belatedly, but it could have saved me some time. It seemed like a lot of people were just leaving their bags in a big pile near the entrance for Coal Cracker, but I wasn't willing to do that.

There's another bank at the entrance to Candymonium, which I did use, and a third apparently near Reese's Cupfusion, the shooting dark ride, which I think you could feasibly use for Fahrenheit (I didn't ride Reese's or Fahrenheit on this trip; I did get Fahrenheit back in 2011).

Wildcat's Revenge takes it to the next level: it has free double-sided ride lockers in the queue itself, just before you get to the station. These are a great innovation. You define a PIN and put your loose items in before getting on the ride, and then after getting off, you open the other side of the locker from the exit lanes. It helps a lot with crowd flow.

If you're only interested in the big coasters, and aren't doing the waterpark, you could probably get away with not renting an all-day locker. I did, just for convenience, but the for-pay rentals are not moveable and the one I rented was back by the waterpark, where most of them are. So it was some distance from a lot of the rides I rode.

There's a small bank of all-day rental lockers right by the park entrance, but I don't recommend bothering with that one. The all-day rentals work by dispensing a wristband from a special kiosk, with a bar code that you scan to open the locker. At that front bank, there's only one wristband-dispensing kiosk and it gets mobbed at opening with people who are all trying to figure out the system. The lockers back by the waterpark are far more numerous and there are several kiosks you can use.

ZooAmerica

Hersheypark has a little zoo connected to it, called ZooAmerica, which I made a point of checking out on this second day. If you want, you can actually just buy admission to the zoo for a much lower fee, but Hersheypark admission also gets you in via a connecting bridge. They stamp your hand on the way in so you can get back into Hersheypark.

It's devoted to animals of North America, and, frankly, is not a very impressive zoo. There are some nice displays of antelopes and birds particularly, and the guides are enthusiastic. Not many people were in there. I remembered going in there and liking it as a kid, and I think a valuable purpose of it is that it provides a quiet, uncrowded place to bring little kids or people who are overstimulated, for a break from the crowds and cacophony of Hersheypark.

Last ride

I couldn't leave Hersheypark without giving Wildcat's Revenge another go. On my first ride I wasn't even at the point of being able to put my hands in the air. Here's XtremeCoasters Network's POV, which includes a bit of off-ride footage:



Yeah, this is the best ride at the park. This time I was able to commit to enjoying its wildness. It just tosses you around every which way, mixing up extreme airtime with snappy whippy inversions, for a more varied menu of thrills than Skyrush. One thing it does have that my beloved Wicked Cyclone doesn't is a pre-lift section of little hills before you even hit the chain lift. That's always fun, though it's not something RMC invented.

Wildcat's Revenge is definitely better if you loosen up a bit and let yourself get yanked by the airtime, and by this point, I was warmed up to the point that I could do it. I'd momentarily pay for that attitude days later, but that's foreshadowing.

By this point I'd realized that there was a BBQ joint in the park, the Spring Creek Smokehouse, down in the Pioneer Frontier area across from Trailblazer's helix. So I went there for dinner. It was pricey but really good. I saw a discussion on Reddit noting that this spot is only covered by the highest tier of Hersheypark's meal plan, and among season-pass holders it seems to be the main reason to buy that tier.

So that was Hersheypark. I thoroughly enjoyed my couple of days there. I hope they can resolve their labor issues without too much disruption and that they pay their staff what they deserve, because it's a great place to be.

2026.06.07

Jun. 7th, 2026 10:10 am
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[personal profile] lsanderson
Thousands celebrate the 5th giant pencil sharpening on Lake of the Isles
MPR News Staff
https://www.mprnews.org/story/2026/06/06/thousands-celebrate-5th-giant-pencil-sharpening-on-lake-of-the-isles

Pete Hegseth’s D-day speech on immigration condemned as ‘grotesque stupidity’
Historians and campaigners accuse US defence secretary of desecrating memory of soldiers who fell in Normandy
Ashifa Kassam European community affairs correspondent
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jun/07/pete-hegseth-d-day-speech-immigration-grotesque-stupidity Read more... )

News!

Jun. 7th, 2026 09:30 am
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[personal profile] marthawells
* I did a podcast interview with Smart Bitches, Trashy Books about Murderbot and Platform Decay (warning: spoilers) https://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/podcast/721-exploring-platform-decay-with-martha-wells/

* I stumbled on a really great review of Witch King from back in 2023. I don't think I saw it at the time, but because of the cancer diagnosis and all the travel when the book came out, that time is mostly a blur. https://everybookadoorway.com/intimate-majesty-witch-king-by-martha-wells/?referrer-analytics=1

* Murderbot Season 1 won the Ray Bradbury Award For Outstanding Dramatic Presentation last night at the SFWA Nebula Awards! Congrats to Paul and Chris Weitz and everyone on the Murderbot cast and crew!!!

* Also N.K. Jemisin was made the SFWA 42nd Damon Knight Memorial Grandmaster at the same ceremony, and her speech was awesome! You can see it on YouTube here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nmAxXj7-xxA&ra=m It's the first speech after Tananarive Due's toastmaster address.

parking mandates: restaurants

Jun. 7th, 2026 10:05 pm
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[personal profile] mindstalk

As I've discussed in the past, US zoning laws tend to require huge amounts of parking. For offices a common ratio is 3 or 4 spaces per 1000 sqft of office; since parking lots use 330 sqft per parking space, that's 1000-1300 sqft parking per 1000 sqft office. Thus suburban office parks, of a one-story building surrounded by somewhat more parking.

Restaurant mandates are often wonkier so I've tended to pass over them, but for reasons I was doing some reading about restaurant sizes which led me back. Sometimes zoning does use floor space, like 1 parking space per 100 (hundred) sqft of gross area, or 1 per 50 sqft of dining area. Others go by number of seats, or legal customer capacity, and how much space did those take? I didn't know, but now I do.

Read more... )

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[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


Scoundrel “Slippery Jim” DiGriz AKA the Stainless Steel Rat, so cunning he has two criminal nicknames, has never been outwitted, outmanoeuvred, captured or executed.

Until now.

The Stainless Steel Rat (The Stainless Steel Rat, volume 1) by Harry Harrison
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[personal profile] jazzy_dave
Linda Dahl "Stormy Weather" (Quartet)




This hardback book that I found on one of my charity shop visits is fantastic and full of information. Sadly, it is mainly only the female jazz singers who gain any sort of fame while other talented musicians fall by the wayside. However, Stormy Weather does not leave out the many talented females in jazz history and clearly explains their importance and how much we miss if we leave these women out of the spotlight. (Don't worry, it does not leave out great singers either) Women musicians played with and even mentored the more familiar male names that mark the pages of most jazz histories but are paid little attention.

Many jazz standards were composed and arranged by women. This book not only tells you the importance of the women but many the colourful details of their experiences in the jazz scene and the wonderful stories bring these women, and the men they played with to life, with all the depth of real people, not just distant gods of jazz.

The book is as fascinating as it is educational. I must say it served as the perfect starting off point as I delved into the lives of many amazing Jazzwomen, but it also was the standard I kept coming back to in writing my report. It is written with a wonderful clarity that is too seldom found in any history texts. It aids understanding as to what happened when and the ways the various movements in Jazz evolved. This is a great introduction to some amazing women and also aided my understanding of one of the main music genres that I love - Jazz - in a more general sense. However, the best part of this book was how much life is brought to the page and the personal details that are so often left out of histories
elf: Life's a die, and then you bitch. (Gamer Geek)
[personal profile] elf
There's a solo TTRPG: Cage of Sand, "A time loop horror TTRPG for one or more players." I got it in the Racial Justice Bundle back in 2020 and promptly ignored it for several years (like most of the 12,000+ games I've picked up in game bundles).

Recently, I picked up a tarot deck specifically for solo TTRPGs: the Calandra Tarot (it's pretty but not one I'd want to use for divination), and went looking through my archives for a tarot-based solo game that wasn't a hack of Anamnesis. Not that there's anything wrong with Anamnesis - I like it very much; I've tried it; I've made my own hack of it. But I wanted to try something else, and after some sorting of the Big Spreadsheet o Game Bundles, I found this one.

So I decided to try it )

MacGyver

Jun. 7th, 2026 01:00 am
[syndicated profile] merriamwebster_feed

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for June 7, 2026 is:

MacGyver • \muh-GHYE-ver\  • verb

To MacGyver something is to make, form, or repair it with materials that are conveniently on hand.

// Social media websites are full of videos that show people MacGyvering everything from a life jacket out of a pair of pants to a stove using three metal cans and some dirt.

See the entry >

Examples:

“Maybe your shovel broke the first time you tried to clear wet, heavy snow off your sidewalk and you never replaced it. ... Of course, before you start MacGyvering a shovel from spare parts in your garage, you can ask a neighbor for assistance or make a few phone calls and pay for a service to clear your driveway or sidewalks.” — Caroline Anschutz, SlashGear.com, 28 Jan. 2026

Did you know?

Angus MacGyver, as portrayed by actor Richard Dean Anderson in the titular, action-packed television series MacGyver, was many things—including a secret agent, a Swiss Army knife enthusiast, and a convert to vegetarianism—but he was no MacGuffin (a character that keeps the plot in motion despite lacking intrinsic importance). In fact, so memorable was this man, his mullet, and his ability to use whatever was available to him—often simple things, such as a paper clip, chewing gum, or a rubber band—to escape a sticky situation or to make a device to help him complete a mission, that people began associating his name with making quick fixes or finding innovative solutions to immediate problems. Hence the verb MacGyver, a slang term meaning to “make, form, or repair (something) with what is conveniently on hand.” After years of steadily increasing and increasingly varied usage following the show’s run from 1985 to 1992 (tracked in some detail here), MacGyver was added to our online dictionary in 2022.



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[personal profile] rimrunner


It’s been very sad to read about the death of Marjane Satrapi this week, at the age of only 56. She was a remarkable writer and thinker, and for me her most famous work, Persepolis, has some personal resonance. My sixth-grade teacher, whom I adored, was an Iranian refugee following the revolution. At the time, I didn’t really understand what that meant, being pretty young still and with no direct experience of revolutions. Reading Persepolis many years later helped me understand some of what it must have been like.

Much of the commentary I’ve seen concerning the lawsuit of Patagonia™, the clothing company, against Pattie Gonia, the drag performer, has argued that Patagonia, the region, is beside the point. Based on my own understanding of trademark law (I am not a lawyer), that’s true. But Heated’s Emily Atkin wonders whether the question is worth asking from a broader perspective. After all, it’s hard to argue that Patagonia, the corporation, wasn’t relying on people’s impressions of Patagonia, the place, in choosing its name.

From 2024, an interesting article in Slate by Bill Pruitt, former producer on The Apprentice who reveals some of what really went on on the set of one of the most popular reality TV shows ever made—a show that arguably set Donald Trump up for his successful run at the White House.

I’ve never watched The Apprentice, and never wanted to. I’ve known what Trump is since 1989, and it still appalls me that he was elected.

That Slate article references “A Pickpocket’s Tale,” a 2013 New Yorker profile of Apollo Robbins, who made the kind of career out of pickpocketing that doesn’t land you in jail. It’s worth reading; if you hit a paywall, see if you can get to the article through your public library.

What does a professional pickpocket have to do with Donald Trump? The joke kind of writes itself, but it’s more complicated than that: at the heart of what Robbins does is the manipulation of attention. So too did the producers of The Apprentice.

Speaking of manipulation of attention, Vanessa Irena’s “magic is real if you want it” surfaces some insights similar to what I’ve had brewing under the surface of my own consciousness for quite some time. I’ll freely admit that I never quite got Disney, and was always indifferent at best to Harry Potter. Conversely, as I touched on in this post after my most recent return from Namibia, the reciprocal relationship to both human community and the rest of the natural world is something I’ve been trying to build for awhile, and one of the reasons I visited the Ju/’hoansi community in Namibia twice was to learn in a cultural context so different from my own that it allowed me to perceive those relationships more easily—also because in that community, they are inextricable and omnipresent.

I’ll have more to write in relation to Irena’s essay, which as I said tugs on several threads that I’ve also been working through.

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