uh...

There are people mad at it because we didnt work specifically with the special needs therapist that we worked with last time. They think we sacrificed accessibility for aesthetic.

The old playground had a lot of very tall structures that a lot of people liked. It did have some things that were considered 'inclusive' in that they had some sound-based play structures for people who wanted to play but couldn't climb or run.

But they were secluded from the other kids. They were also electronic and were difficult to service. If a kid with mobility problems or a bulky mobility aid wanted to play with other kids, there were areas that they couldn't access.

And the fact of the matter is that you're supposed to update or completely replace your playground equipment as a city every 10 years to keep up with compliance codes. We entered a recycle program where our old equipment gets sent to areas that are behind on their updates (which has its issues certainly, but i think its nice to not be contributing to a landfill.)

We didnt work with a special needs therapist but we did outsource to someone who specializes in inclusive design.

So people might be upset that it isn't as appealing to able-bodied kids but...

Slide big enough that an adult can use with a larger child that may need assistance.

Sound-based games that can take a beating. (Metal pipes with different tones vs an electric button game)

A wheelchair can navigate this.

And of course the chair-accessible merry-go-round.

Like im sure it still has some things that could improve on, and they still haven't installed the swings yet. But like... im so frustrated that people look at accessibility measures as downgrades and then claim we didnt actually try.

It can also be found on Google Drive here and on Bluesky here.

This month people have been tearing Flock cameras off their poles. Perched above public streets, they are birdlike things, weatherproof, and they photograph every passing car and file it in a searchable national database. Somebody cut two of them in half at Washington Avenue and Westcott in Houston, spray-painted the wreckage, and left an American flag on one of them. Police were notified on the morning of the Fourth of July. Somebody severed a camera in Rutherfordton, North Carolina. The police department posted the photograph itself and collected more than twenty thousand comments. “Not all heroes wear capes.” “Give them a medal.” Here is what the cameras do when nobody cuts them down. Cops use them to hunt immigrants and to follow ICE targets across state lines and to find women who ended pregnancies in states where that is a crime and to watch exes and to watch women they want, without a warrant and without a judge. A cop types a reason in a box and the box does not check. A man in Burleson, Texas, told deputies his girlfriend had taken abortion pills. He showed them the photographs, the FedEx envelope, the instructions. Deputies opened a death investigation into a non-viable fetus, and the district attorney told them the state could not charge her, and they searched anyway: 83,345 cameras across 6,809 networks, a month of everywhere she had been. The reason they typed was had an abortion, search for female. The search reached Illinois and Washington, where what she did was legal. They found her in Dallas. She came into the sheriff’s office a week later, and they thought she had come to explain the fetus, and she had come to report that the man who called them had put a gun to her head. A sheriff in Jerome County, Idaho ran his wife’s plate more than seven hundred times in three months. He typed the same reason every time. Test. The attorney general found nothing to charge him with. He retired in April. The Institute for Justice counts at least twenty-two officers who used the system to track people they were romantically interested in, and calls that almost certainly an undercount. And the cameras keep falling.

Looks inside: