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Top 25 swimming activities I like to do, in no particular order. Depending on the place I like to do all of these things, if possible

Fetch items. Big rings and other plastic trinkets

Crawl on the tiles of a shallow pool like a reptile or amphibian or perhaps an ancient lobe-finned fish

Locate fish. Observe fish. Chase after fish

Dive diagonally down into the water and then when you hit the bottom use your hands to propel yourself back to the top. Or if it gets too dark and scary just swim back up normally

Dive into the deepest part of the pool. Repeat until bored

Blow out all the air in your lungs and then sit at the bottom for a bit

Look at the surface of the water from below. Look at the shapes move. Blow bubbles and look at them slowly climbing upwards

Dive right under the surface of the water horizontally, watch as the light dances around, watch your hands when they make powerful strokes to pull you forward

Swim to the end of the pier or the pool, swim back (The First Feat of Strength)

Watch the surface of the water move while swimming, watch the horizon, watch the sky and the clouds

Find a good position and float. Listen to the silence

Dive vertically, watch the colour of the water shift when you get further or closer to the surface

Dive near the bottom and make the dirt and sand form clouds by shooting water at it (via waving your hands)

Follow mussel trails. Locate mussel. Look at the beauty of the mussel <3

Just dive along the bottom in general. I love to rapidly dive forwards along the bottom into deeper water until I hit the thermocline #benthicorganism

Locate swimming companion. Grab swimming companion‘s ankle

Feel the bubbles on your skin when they go past you. Can be done if you blow bubbles or slam your arms into the water yourself, or if you jump into the water from a higher place. You can also opportunistically wait for someone else to jump into the water and then you can strike

Freedive the distance you always dive every time you go to the pool to show you’ve still got it (The Second Feat of Strength)

Splash the water, move the water around with your hands, feel as it clings to you via surface tension

When it’s time to go, crawl in the water as long as possible #crocodilemode

Alternatively immediately straighten out and run to the shore like the beast you are

Locate aquatic plant. Observe aquatic plant

Swim against the current (river) like crazy and then float along with it

Playfight with your friends over a single floating mattress

Wade in shallow water. Watch the warm orange and brown shades of the gravel and sand and mud when they are lit by the caustics (the sand and gravel and mud is also allowed to be other colours)

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The virgin post-Disney theme parks sanitizing the past to push revisionist imagery

The chad old timey amusement parks making spoopy dark rides and haunted houses about how cartoonishly horrible heavy industry and the past were

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Black Diamond at Knoebels is underrated as an edutainment ride, emphasizing how dirty and dangerous romanticized industries are keeps people from forgetting why regulations exist.

You could get so much mileage out of “Tom and Jerry meet Upton Sinclair” to kill the stupid and dangerous romantic ideas of industry people who haven’t worked in it have

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My seething rage at how egregious conservative revisionism is just normal, accepted, even defended if it’s trains only grows. People cry “let people enjoy things” over characters that slap a paper-thin progressive veneer over “capitalism and fossil fuels are victims of the system!” conservative DARVOing where the system is VERY justified regulation, and call you unhinged for having the gall to tell them they should maybe, just maybe read wikipedia once for context and be more critical of media in this day and age because do they know how they sound spouting thought-terminating cliches and anti-intellectualism to defend the lie they were sold?

Whenever I see twee sanitized cliches of steam engines stripped of all inconvenience, filth, and danger crying about good ol days that never existed I want to personally chop them up and turn them into bean cans for obscuring the tragic absolute idiocy of actual US rail history and paving the road to fascism

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working in actual steam preservation makes you the 52 Hz whale of living machine people because you get shown a very different perspective from modern day consumerism but also end up just turning into Awdry writing the Railway Series again. Which is also often weird and confusing to modern audiences because it’s written in deeply train-brained ways, like being aggressive about realism because rail rules are always written in blood and exist for specific reasons. Or rail wanting to constantly rebuild and repurpose things vs throw them away. It’s a mindset alien to almost anyone who isn’t involved with heavy industry.

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Funny to think that the real-life counterpart to “Grand Vizier” type scheming villains are just bitchy middle aged men who work factory/mechanical jobs who embrace being a terror to other staff (especially business higher ups) because oh no, they actually care about the rules.

(and my Magnum XL-200 gijinka is just that before I really knew many of them irl lol)

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”I don’t believe in infohazards, even learning about how terrible things happen prevents them”

“hey, why do these ancient rituals just sound like factories described in bronze age terms, are we actually in the simulation or did we make time machines to seed these ideas to lead to their creation? How deep does this go… what does it mean…”

At least I finally feel like the universe isn’t malicious, frustration comes from it blocking something off and is meant to direct you in another direction. Anger comes from being set on imposing your own rules and rhythm to an outside one that wants to resolve and flow with it. The natural order is just resolution, equality, and education btw. Not any shitty oppressive “natural order” forced on people, just learning to ride the wave.

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I still think about how this hostel in Germany had a stylized lion on a mechanical room sign for no apparant reason. It definitely represents the danger of exposed machinery but it’s such a weird abstracted way.

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It’s kind of hard to explain, but if an interest is hidden in plain sight (seen as unglamorous or “boring” but easily accessible) and has nothing to lose from education and equality it’s usually a good sign. Plants (grandmas giving free cuttings vs raer aroids), electric trains, rockhounding, most things that there’s physical societies for.

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Noticing the patterns in how specific models of old Schwarzkopf coasters fail and kill people/start fires is making me want to make a fictional German roller coaster with rancid vibes. This thing just feels wrong. It was designed by a guy uh. Born in the 1920s in Germany with suspiciously little background info online. Or built with steel from a company that absolutely committed war crimes and has an incredibly haunted factory.

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I keep thinking the Six Flags-Cedar Fair merger will become the Penn Central of amusement parks and a weird part of me is thinking “does this mean local public transit systems will take control of the parks and return to the trolley era setup?”

not gonna lie that would be amazing, use the parks to make money for transit systems and promote transit usage on weekends. Amusement parks are purely a luxury vs transit but they’re nearly universally loved and cities seem to be desperately clinging to the ones trying to close, trying to keep them some kind of amusement park

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I laugh at “rock is dead” people because instrumental surf rock is still there, it’s not mainstream but it’s never gone away and I think it’ll become basically unkillable. It’s like the anti-metal, there’s no subgenres, only vibes, basically no gatekeeping and just a vague desire for world peace and and environmentalism because most of the songs are about “the feeling of nature’s power” and/or folk songs from war-torn or misunderstood cultures. It’s one of the most diverse branches of rock, and has always been in terms of cultures involved.

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”deviantart fetishes” are mocked for being detached from reality but also, everything is about x, except x, which is about trains. they just cut out the middle and make it about something more than a physical act. Transformation is one of the absolute oldest mythological tropes and translating between metaphors is part of why theology gets so screwy. But ha ha guy turn into car, why can’t you be into butts like a normal person?

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It’s interesting to think that amusement rides are like the “biblically accurate angels” of heavy machinery, but it’s that charismatic presence combined with inhuman abstraction that’s important. Rides do not look or act externally human, forcing you to understand and characterize them according to their own terms. The economics and design of them is far, far more in line with trains and heavy industry that consumer society alienates people from. If you only know cars and consumer products, train economics are confounding, why do they extensively refurbish vs replace them? But if you know roller coasters, oh, that’s something they do too, even reusing footers saves money and they’re built to last at least 20-40 years. Regulations don’t look stupid and restrictive when it’s something heavily scrutinized and high-reliability that MUST be as safe as possible.

They’re paradoxically an interface with something deeply alien, because they themselves are undeniably alien vs externally humanoid.

It’s the inverse of how people see “AI” as human and not a machine and don’t understand how it actually works. The fact that machines do not run on human logic is something old blue collar workers will emphasize. You treat them like a horse, or alien, or angel, according to THEIR terms.

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Never Too Young To Die sequel where Velvet von Ragnar POISONS THE WATER SUPPLY but because all that drinking water was being sucked up by an AI data center and everyone was stuck drinking bottled water, it destroys it instead

I swear, realizing that the stupidest media accidentally says brilliant things in its stupidity is going to make me revisit that movie/fandom again

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It’s incredibly enlightening realizing that the reason why trains dismissed as “nerd trivia” in the US is partly because the last century of history is truly dominated by nerd trivia since most of it was written by railfans focused on what looks cool to them vs what was impactful. When all complaints about accuracy in media are treated akin to “this steam engine has the wrong number of wheels!” you have people accusing you of “well acktually” when you point out that US electric trains are largely erased outside of subways in media in favor of sci fi alternatives or steam engines (in historical settings) and more people know that “haha stupid tech bros reinventing the train” is a thing than the actual capabilities of electric locomotives (and EMUs-powered cars ala subways and many commuter trains.)

Multiple rail professionals have said “yeah almost nobody outside our field knows or cares how pantographs and overhead wires work which is a shame because they are SO WEIRD and why electric trains are OP and some of the oldest electric vehicles and oh yeah casually shaped modern society”

(PAN UP is good for mainline US electric train history, Garry Keenor has multiple videos in tons of details about how overhead wires work in the UK specifically)