The boundary waters area is really great, but maybe not for a family. Honestly, I don’t think any of these areas are going to compare to Yellowstone in terms of the purely sublime combined with ease of access with children.
New River Gorge is nice, but, like a lot of these options, it’s “take your kids for a weekend” kind of nice, not “my mom is paying for a multi-generational meeting at a national park visit” kind of nice.
It’s all what you make if it though. Were I you, I would figure out how to go to Yellowstone. Especially considering it’s the preference of the person, you know, paying for it.
OP, just bite the bullet and go to Yellowstone. I live in Illinois and have been to several of these other parks / areas. Yellowstone is on a completely different level and it’s not even close. It is one of the best, if not the best, parks in the world. This is not an exaggeration.
It’s been a long time, but I used to work at a corporate dining place that did a lot of take out business. I once had a man ask for “as much thousand island dressing as possible”.
I was going to just give him two portions, but my coworker convinced me to fill a large soda cup instead. Why not? We worked for tips after all.
The customer was pretty bewildered. He clearly didn’t really want that much dressing.
It certainly creates an incentive to act in ways that please the customer at the expense of the business. But the restaurant controls your access to the customer, so it’s best to tread lightly.
I doubt you or anyone here will disagree with me, but it still needs to be said: that man was 100% in the wrong.
Asking for a bunch of extra dressing is one thing, but asking for “as much as possible” means when they actually go out of their way to accommodate you, you better show you’re ecstatic, thank them, and tip them well. I don’t care if you have to lug a bucket of dressing home, maybe you’ll learn that words have meanings…
I agree! And I like to think that, as he looked over his several bottles worth of dressing in a beverage cup, he did learn to consider his words more carefully.
But I didn’t mind the whole experience. It’s not my dressing and it made for a pretty funny story.
If you’re willing to go as far as Kentucky or West Virginia anyway, you should consider the Red River Gorge area in Daniel Boone in KY, or the Spruce Knob/Seneca Rocks area in WV. Neither are national parks – they’re both national forests.
Both will be considerably less touristy and less crowded than (at least the popular) national parks, and you don’t have to pay just to get in, either. These two areas have some of the most bodacious geology on display on the East Coast, in my opinion, and if you’re into that sort of thing it’s well worth checking out.
The heyday of the Seneca Rocks region seems to have passed and getting accommodation there that’s not camping is trickier than it was a few decades ago, since most of the motels and hotels around the region have folded. But you can rent cabins if you plan in advance from various outfits, and there are two quite nice national forest camp sites there plus oodles of commercial/independent ones. Seneca Rocks itself is a quite striking geological feature you can hike up and stand on top of, and Spruce Knob is just a hop, skip, and a jump away and is the highest point in WV with some great and very easily accessible views from the top. Don’t forget to stop by Yocum’s general store and pet the cats when you’re there.
Dispersed camping is no longer allowed within the Seneca Rocks/Spruce Knob sphere of influence, but it is in the rest of the adjacent greater Monongahela National Forest, including in the Dolly Sods wilderness if you’re into that sort of thing. Backpacking in Dolly Sods is quite possibly the best way to see the most varied terrain anywhere east of the Mississippi within the span of a weekend and without owning a private jet. The north, east, south, and west extremities of it may as well be on different continents; it’s pretty wild.
Dispersed camping is allowed in Daniel Boone if you go there. You have to buy a permit to leave your car anywhere overnight to go backpacking but it’s only a couple of bucks. The Red River Gorge area in Daniel Boone has some incredible sandstone formations including massive arches (some of which you can climb), shelter caves, cliffs, and overlooks. It’s also home to the Nada Tunnel which is pretty cool but maybe not so appealing to people who are afraid of caves because it’s basically a cave with a one lane road you can drive straight through. (It was actually originally a railway tunnel. I cannot possibly conceive of what it must have been like to cram a coal burning steam locomotive through that tiny passage, and if you see it you’ll know why. But that’s what they did back in the day.)
Civilized accommodations are easier to come by there including plenty of cabins and motels, and also hotels you can find near the interstate. If you’re into rock climbing there are also a ton of climbing routes all over the Red River Gorge.
Forget Yellowstone. Yellowstone is so popular and yet so fragile and so dangerous that the entire place is on lockdown. You spend your entire stay there on rails, pretty much literally. Everything is boardwalks and pavement and everything else that isn’t is cordoned off. Yes, this is so dumbasses cannot fall into geothermal features and be boiled alive. But it also has the net effect of causing you to take the exact same route in the exact same way and take the exact same pictures that everyone else already has. So you can have the same experience by just finding some rando’s Flickr album or whatever and looking at their pictures, because they’ll be just the same as yours. Plus the whole place stinks. Sulfur, don’t you know.
Oh, and you get to contend with access roads clogged by all the dimwits from the midwest who stop dead in the middle of everything to try to fit baby bison into their minivans, or whatever the fuck else. I went once and that was enough. I came, I saw, I bought a mug. I have no desire to go back. (Nearby Shoshone National Forest, however, is friggin’ awesome. So is Big Horn. Be sure to check out Shell Falls while you’re there and annoy your nearest creationist.)
As someone that has been to the tops of Cloud Splitter, Grays Arch, Chimney Rock, Half Moon, Indian Staircase, and dozens of others I cannot remember at the moment, Red River Gorge is the single best place in all of Kentucky.
I would go as far as it’s the only reason why Kentucky should continue to exist at all.
Thanks. I’m doing some research now. Daniel Boone we could probably do over a long weekend, so that could be a separate trip. Seneca Rocks looks really beautiful in photos, but I’m not convinced there would be enough to do there to sustain a week’s vacation. As far as a cabin, my daughter always balks at renting one when we’ve suggested in the past for some reason. I don’t know why. We did it at a nearby state park when she was younger and it was fine, so I don’t know what her deal is there.
If you wanted to extend a Red River Gorge trip there's some interesting Civil War era stuff in Winchester and Lexington. Fort Boonesborough was rebuilt as a Civil War fort and they do history presentations and era accurate crafting demonstrations. They have a working blacksmith, a soap maker, that kind of thing. The Henry Clay Estate is interesting and the Cassius Clay Estate (the abolitionist, General, and Diplomat not the boxer) is great. There's also the Kentucky Horse Park and Keeneland. You will also be passing through the Bourbon Trail if you're driving down from Indiana and by Big Bone Lick if you're coming down 65.
A real keyboard and general tactile-oriented inputs. Touchscreens are okay as a supplement like in the DS or Samsung devices that have a pen, but touch-centered everything has never stopped being a frustrating user experience. Even worse is the way companies have embraced it for business use as well. Heavy industrial machinery should not come equipped with unintuitive little interfaces that are clearly an afterthought at best.
The other thing is the general desktop metaphors, and file/folder structure. The way that Android, and so many apps, hide the file system from the end user just leads to more confusion when the user needs to use a file manager to track down where those apps have actually stored data only to (maybe) find them in the most pointlessly obscure locations.
When I accidentally download a file on my phone, I actually have no idea where it went, it just kind of vanishes into the aether after the notification disappears
One thing I always liked about Blackberries aside from the physical keyboard was the scroll wheel. People joke about them but they worked really well and smoothly (before the actual ball got replaced with a bullshit push sensor round about 2009 or so) and you could dial in on a specific pixel easily - something you just can’t do with a touchscreen - which made the tiny screens a lot more practical than they otherwise would have been.
Rootable modable phones, with a 3.5mm headphone jack, SD card slot, and an ultrasonic fingerprint reader cherry on top. Maybe some heart rate monitor sprinkles if you are so inclined. My S10 that I still use checks all of the boxes minus root. It feels like I have a sundae with all the high quality toppings I could want… but no proper ice cream. And I want the whole custom sundae, which these days seems impossible to find.
It’s important to remember that even if a company did that and the customers who said they wanted it all went and bought one it would still likely be a tremendous waste of the manufacturer’s money. And then there are all the people that say it’s important to them while they only use it to point at while shouting at iPhone users despite not using their phones any differently.
These still exist, for now at least. Just not any flagship phones. My Oneplus nord n30 has all of this (well idk if the fingerprint sensor is ultrasonic, it’s on the side and fast though). And I’m pretty sure a lot of Motorola phones have these as well. Only downside is not the best processors or cameras, but are good enough for me at least.
I use SearXNG. It is a meta search engine so it use results from various other search engines and you can specify which with !. It does the job for me.
I was a bit wary when I first spun up an instance, but it’s very low maintenance and mostly just works.
Does it choke in some edge cases? Yeah, but far less often than I had expected. For my own use case it’s low resource and does exactly what it says on the tin - nothing more, nothing less.
It’s my default across a variety of devices, and is perfectly happy behind basic auth and a minimal nginx conf.
Occasionally I’ve even surfaced some oddball results that give me unexpected perspective on a topic.
Honestly I feel like searxng is way better than it gets credit for. It clearly isn’t as powerful as google but it isn’t drowning in SEO crap so that difference is entirely negated and then some.
Less of a feature and more of a design, but I miss phones being small. The iPhone 4S was the perfect physical size IMO and that thing looks tiny compared to my fuckhuge S23U. The physical bloat of the past 5 Galaxys is why I’ve decided not to go with Samsung for my next mobile
Seconding this. I can appreciate a large screen but it has limits, if I can’t use my phone with one hand because my fingers can’t reach half the screen while palm holding it the design sucks. Sent from my unwieldy modern smart phone force using both hands.
I’m on an iPhone 13 Mini — probably the last Mini model ever.
I like the form factor, but you really do notice the smaller battery. Most days, I’m at 20% by bedtime. If I run anything even semi-intensive throughout the day, I need a pit stop. I miss not worrying about it.
Main reason I stopped buying Motorola was the ever increasing screen size. I have bad elbows and extended phone use causes pain. A few ounces really does make a difference. A sub-5-inch phone with decent specs would be awesome.
Yep. I’ve been looking for my next phone for when my pixel 5 eventually goes and looking at Asus as it’s the only current high end phone that’s not bigger that 5".
I do not want a 6"-7" display. I want a 4"-5" display I can easy get in and out of my pocket, and be able to hold and use with one hand. Even a 5" screen is to big for my thumb to reach about 1/4 of the screen without moving my hand.
If you have access to an iPhone 4S, then try to use it for as couple of minutes, and then see if you still consider that 3.5 inch screen perfect size.
If you want a tiny phone, then why use the biggest one available? It’s like saying I wish I could get a small economic car, and then drive a Humvee.
Apparently when it comes down to it, you don’t really want a tiny phone.
Because the biggest are often the top models and at the time that I bought this one, my job required a powerful mobile. The battery bypass feature, exclusive to the S23U, alone made it a non-choice.
You’re making a lot of assumptions in your comment about me, what my workload on a mobile is, and my own tastes.
Try to read it again, I make zero assumptions, apart from the 2 you have stated yourself. You want a phone the size of an iPhone 4s but use a S23 Ultra. I’m just pointing out that those two are contradictory.
If I were to make an assumption, it would be that it seems you want a flagship phone the size of an iPhone 4s. Which you kind of can with a foldable.
Battery bypass is not exclusive to the S23 Ultra, the entire S22 and S23 series have it:
Battery bypass is not exclusive to the S23U, it’s on other recent Samsungs and it wasn’t even first introduced on Samsung phones, it’s been on multiple Sony and Asus phones. So yeah, people are gonna make assumptions when you’re complaining about how big phones have gotten while owning one of the largest phones on the market.
Kinda surprised that no one has mentioned the FM tuner. For reasons I never really understood, a lot of companies continued to build the hardware into phones but then wall it off with firmware.
My first MP3 player had one, my TV had one, there were even watches and lots of other devices that had one. People still listen to radio, so why don’t they give us a tuner?
Are you sure the hardware is still there? I only ask because given the number of hackers out there, I’m surprised someone hasn’t come out with a patch or something to make it more ubiquitous.
It’s not strictly there as a separate feature. Modern radio chips in phones are universal programmable radios, they can catch and process any wavelengths if you install correct code into them and plug a correct antenna. The same radio chip processes your 5G, Bluetooth, WiFi and everything else.
What phones are missing are FM antennas and radio firmware with FM support. This FM support is a paid feature for phone makers, so they don’t add it.
i think I recall that the Bluetooth hardware is essentially an FM tuner. Just needed a wired headphone to use as an antenna. My Moto Stylus 2022 still has it.
Mostly because they needed a wired headset to act as the FM antenna since it needs a decent length to capture FM compared to the much higher UHF and GHz frequencies that the mobile network uses.
Mostly because they needed a wired headset to act as the FM antenna since it needs a decent length to capture FM compared to the much higher UHF and GHz frequencies that the mobile network uses.
My point is that any sort of radio would be immediately drowned out by the massive amounts of EM interference as soon as you tried to charge.
In fact, professional audio devices often have to take extra precautions to avoid their power cables from becoming accidental antennas; Anyone who used a cheap set of computer speakers back in the 2000’s and 2010’s will know the distinct buzzing pattern that preceded a text message or phone call. That’s because cheap speakers would use unshielded power sources, and simple circuitry which didn’t bother to isolate the amplifier from the power.
Hunger Games works in quite a dystopian setting that politicians in US wouldn’t allow; so I can see Trump being impeached immediately after this suggestion.
However, assuming that this isn’t implemented as a life-in stakes Battle Royale and instead as a sports event improved with Augmented Reality (all weapons are simulated, no real deaths); it could be a fun event to watch. I could see myself betting on athletic people.
I think the whole premise of the question is: trump somehow seized power and become the “supreme leader for life”, democracy is now dead, elections are a sham just like (russia/china/iran/your favorite autocratic nation), so this is exactly the kind of dystopian future where Hunger Games were set. He just made Trump be the ruler.
I mean it’s a movie. Who knows how you will enjoy it in the first place and who knows how a future version of the movie will turn out compared to the original?
Unless it’s an obvious dumpster fire with 0% reviews go and see it for yourself and form your own opinion.
The current version is not a good movie at all. It’s a Stat Wars knockoff with a boring story and the visual effects that aren’t that great.
I’ve read that Snyder claims the directors cut is completely different, it’ll be R-rated, extra violent, etc etc. I really don’t see how making it R-rated is going to fix the problems it has. I’m not much of a fan of Snyder though, so I guess you should take my opinion with a grain of salt.
It’s just a setup for the second movie. Personally I enjoyed it but I came in with low expectations. I agree with others CG was weak and too much slow mo but w/e I want sci-fi.
Despite his appearance and delivery, i always thought Norm was the most “punk rock” comedian. He actually stood for something, stood by his friends and was true to himself. I did not always agree with his bits… But i never thought he was outright hateful. I think he tried to touch on the humorous or more absurd elements of society, with his commentary. Which was mostly the stuff i liked least… However, i believe that while Norm may not have understood some of these things, he wasn’t intolerant of them.
Norm was about as big of an anti-celebrity, celebrity as i can think of. He always seemed eager to be silly and to laugh, and to love his small group of friends. I’m fairly cemented as being left of center, and i adored Norm.
There’s a comedian I get pushed on YouTube sometimes, and I feel this way about him. I’m not always on board, but he’s at least writing and delivering jokes.
So many “edgy” comedians just given up and bitch about being canceled for two hours… To a sold out stadium.
asklemmy
Active
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.