#ptc

Photo Sources: All photos are mine

Swamp Fox at Family Kingdom!

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Opened: 1966 Manufacturer: Philadelphia Toboggan Company Height: 75 ft (23 m) Speed: 50 mph (80 kph) Length: 2,400 ft (730 m) My most recent ride: 2019

From what I see online at least, not a whole lot of people talk about this ride. That's understandable, as Family Kingdom is kind of out there down in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, away from most major parks people hit on road trips. I believe Carowinds would be the closest major park, and that's still about 3 and a half hours away.

But maybe it's for the better that not too many people have experienced Swamp Fox though, because based on my rides from my visits to this park in 2019, this thing was BRUTALLY rough. There was jack-hammering (bouncing up and down in your seat) through pretty much the entire layout to the point that I got off the ride with a killer headache that lasted me a good half hour afterwards. This was easily the roughest coaster I've ever ridden. It goes above Corkscrew and Nighthawk because those rides beat you up in a number of different ways (mainly due to the restraints on both), where as Swamp Fox just bounces your brains out, but it's not a lot keeping this one above those two.

From reviews I've seen online that have come out more recently than when I rode Swamp Fox, it's running better now, so hopefully that means the park is taking care of it or even did some re-tracking. I sincerely hope it's running better because it's a classic beachside wooden coaster and it's always sad to lose one of those. I'd be interested to try the ride again to see if it's running better now, because those reviews also said the ride had strong airtime pops, which I do remember, but not very clearly because I was focused on not getting rattled to death.

I do really hope the best for Swamp Fox, because it's clear the ride has good bones. It's just a matter of maintaining the ride properly, as is the case with all wooden coasters really. It looks fantastic in its park with it's classic white and red color scheme and just captures that classic boardwalk feel. So I do hope it sticks around and that it's running better now for more people to experience in the future.

So, Promethean: The Created, huh? God, what a fascinating game. One that really merges some very compelling themes with an already intriguing setting, and then gives you all kinds of fun character options to play around with. Also one that no one really knows about…

For those not up to speed, Promethean is a game about beings— Prometheans— created by humans to be human, or close to it, for one reason or another. Some people who create Prometheans do so by stitching together corpses and animating them just like Frankenstein, others create golems and other constructs, and some Prometheans don’t seem to have a creator other than the whims of the Divine Fire, which is the force that animates all of the Created.

Here’s the thing: Creating human life through magic is actually pretty tricky, and so the resulting Prometheans are invariably off, somehow. It’s a little different for each Promethean, some of them are just really disturbing and creepy in their movements and occasionally mannerisms, others are uncannily graceful, and some are just kinda vaguely alien. It doesn’t even just come down to most humans having an irrational fear and hatred of Prometheans (which is called Disquiet), nature itself seems to recoil from the Divine Fire— the weather twists and the air and water is tainted, until the area becomes a Wasteland.

So the goal of the game is simple: Find out how to become human, in a process called the New Dawn, so your Promethean player character can transcend their limits.

And god, what to say about this game! It’s about interrogating what it is to be human, or perhaps more accurately a person, and how “trying to be a person” is both inherently kind of silly— you’re already a person!— and also kind of the only thing any of us can ever do.

Prometheans complete their journeys through understanding the ways humans act, sure, but they only get there by finding the human that’s already in them. And yet, at the same time, they really are transforming— physically, mentally, and spiritually. To be human is to change, to grow, to wither, really.

This is a game about asking player characters some of the hardest questions— What does it mean to live? What is the purpose of being? What would you sacrifice to find out? Is it worth pursuing at all, anyway?— and then just letting them go on a metaphysical road trip where they struggle to answer them, making mistakes all the while, and maybe learning that being able to ask the questions at all is what matters.

I don’t know, I just wish more people knew about Promethean! It’s a painful game to play, really, what with every character being a rootless wanderer instinctually hated by most humans, so I understand why it’s a hard sell.

Steve Brodner

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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

July 24, 2025

Heather Cox Richardson

Jul 25, 2025

The Epstein list made it into last night’s premiere of the twenty-seventh season of the television series South Park when Satan, in bed with Trump, commented, “It’s weird that whenever it comes up, you just tell everyone to relax.”

The episode hit the president’s lawsuit against the parent company of CBS News, Paramount Global, which paid Trump $16 million to settle his complaint that it had edited an interview with then–Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris misleadingly. Paramount also said it would not renew comedian Stephen Colbert’s contract just days after the deal was announced. Paramount and Skydance Media are in the midst of an $8 billion merger, and they needed the approval of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to complete the deal. Today, Skydance Media promised to eliminate Paramount’s diversity, equity, and inclusion practices and to root out the “bias” at CBS News in order to win the administration's support for the merger. This afternoon, the FCC approved the deal.

Charlotte Clymer of Charlotte’s Web Thoughts notes that on Monday, South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone signed a $1.5 billion, five-year deal with Paramount for global streaming rights to the show. This new episode skewered Paramount’s cozying up to Trump.

Clymer points out that the South Park writers go on to portray Trump exactly as they once did Saddam Hussein, not only putting him in bed with Satan as they did Saddam, but also giving Trump the ‘“[s]ame mannerisms. Same voice inflections. Same love affair with Satan. Same dictatorial chaos. In fact, Satan references this by telling Trump he reminds him of a guy he used to date.” Clymer notes that the writers of one of the country’s hottest shows are “communicating that they think Trump is a bullsh*t, two-bit dictator.”

The Bulwark’s Joe Perticone reported today that in a decade of reporting on Congress, he has never seen such a level of panic among Republican lawmakers. In the past, he notes, Trump could weather crises because Republicans closed ranks around him. The Epstein issue, though, has driven a wedge through the Republicans themselves, some of whom are turning against Trump just as the House of Representatives is headed back home. There, Republican members will hear directly from constituents who are angry over the administration’s about-face on releasing more information about Epstein and his associates.

Trump boasted to the House Republicans on Tuesday that his poll numbers are the best he’s ever had, but in fact a Gallup poll out today shows his approval rating at its lowest in his second term: just 37% of American adults approve of his performance in office. Journalist Bill Grueskin notes that this puts Trump six points below where Biden was after the final U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. The biggest shift has been among Independents. Only 29% of them say they approve of his job performance, down from 46% at the beginning of his term.

Gallup reports that 60% of American adults disapprove of how Trump is handling immigration, with only 38% approving. That is unlikely to change as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), newly flush with funding from the budget reconciliation bill, ramps up both immigration sweeps and detention. Neither is popular with Americans as they hear stories of overcrowding at ICE facilities and inhumane and unsanitary conditions.

On Tuesday, Nicole Acevedo of NBC News reported that detainees at the detention center in the Florida Everglades spoke of “torturous conditions in cage-like units full of mosquitoes,” with lights on at all times, lack of food and medical treatment, and unsanitary conditions. On June 20, she reported, the U.S. was holding more than 56,000 people in detention centers, the highest number in U.S. history. Nearly 72% of those held had no criminal history.

Just two days after the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Urban Search and Rescue branch, Ken Pagurek, resigned out of frustration with the administration’s work to destroy the agency, and the same day FEMA acting director David Richardson would not commit to the agency’s continued existence, Colleen DeGuzman of the Texas Tribune reported that the U.S. Department of Defense had awarded a $1.26 billion contract to build the largest detention facility in the U.S. at Fort Bliss, an army base in El Paso, Texas. The facility will be designed to hold 5,000 people in tents, and it is expected to open in September 2027. DeGuzman notes that the company that was awarded the contract, Acquisition Logistics, appears not to have experience running detention centers.

On Friday, July 18, the government of El Salvador repatriated more than 250 Venezuelan men who had been held at the notorious CECOT prison after being sent there by the Trump administration. The administration maintained it was not responsible for the men after they left U.S. territory, a claim the government of El Salvador repeatedly refuted. But with the repatriation of the men in exchange for the release of ten U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents held as political prisoners in Venezuela, the State Department claimed the exchange was “thanks to President Trump’s leadership and commitment to the American people.”

The former CECOT prisoners are telling the story of their four-month incarceration, detailing human rights abuses: beatings, being shot with pellets, deprivation of due process, torture.

Today Neiyerver Adrián Leon Rengel filed an administrative claim against Homeland Security for wrongful detention when it sent him to the terrorist CECOT prison in El Salvador. The filing is the first step in a lawsuit. “I want to clear my name,” he told Jazmine Ulloa of the New York Times. “I am not a bad person.”

The Trump administration received a rebuke yesterday in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man wrongly deported to CECOT. The administration brought Abrego back to the U.S. only after it indicted him on charges of human smuggling. Once back, he was imprisoned in Tennessee, and the administration threatened to deport him again if he were released from custody pending trial.

Yesterday, U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis in Maryland prohibited officials from taking Abrego into custody and said the administration must give him at least three days’ notice if it intends to deport him.

Shortly afterward, U.S. District Judge Waverly D. Crenshaw Jr. ordered that Abrego be released from criminal detention, saying the government had not shown that he is a threat. While the administration insists that Abrego is a gang member, Crenshaw wrote that he had seen no evidence that Abrego “has markings or tattoos showing gang affiliation; has working relationships with known MS-13 members; ever told any of the witnesses that he is [an] MS-13 member; or has ever been affiliated with any sort of gang activity.” Jacob Knutson of Democracy Docket noted that Abrego requested to stay his release for 30 days, and a magistrate judge issued that stay yesterday.

The administration is facing rough waters elsewhere, too. On Monday the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released its final score for the budget reconciliation bill that poured money into border security. Although Republicans insisted it would not add to the deficit, the CBO predicts it will in fact increase the federal deficit by $3.4 trillion and push 10 million people off health insurance. Most of the cost for the bill will come from the Republicans' extension of tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefit the wealthy.

In the Washington Post today, Gene Sperling, who served as director of the National Economic Council under presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, noted that while the Republicans insisted that extending the tax cuts should not be counted toward raising the deficit because they were part of “current policy,” they “entirely rejected” the current policy argument when it came to extending the increase in the Affordable Care Act’s premium tax credit (PTC) established under Biden. Unlike the tax cuts for the wealthy, Republicans are letting that tax credit die, a change that will mean a tax increase of $335 billion for working families over the next ten years.

The loss of the PTC will not only drive healthcare up more than $18,000 a year for a typical 60-year-old couple making $82,000 a year, Sperling writes, but will also drive healthier Americans out of the market, making healthcare coverage more expensive for those who remain in it. Sperling notes that unlike many of the cuts in the budget reconciliation bill, the PTC will expire this year, making voters aware of what the Republicans have done before the midterms—a reality that might have been behind the recent calls from some Republican lawmakers to extend the PTC.

Yesterday, Dan Lamothe and John Hudson of the Washington Post reported that the messages Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth sent in a Signal chat came from an email with “SECRET” classification, meaning that disclosing that information could cause serious damage to national security. Senior members of the administration have repeatedly denied that classified information was shared in the chat.

Finally today, cryptocurrency reporter Molly White noted that a memecoin by cryptocurrency billionaire Justin Sun, who has invested about $213 million in cryptocurrency projects connected to Trump, posted a meme showing its mascot, sporting an evil grin, manipulating the White House with the mechanical system of a puppeteer. Over the image, the meme read: “You never truly know who’s pulling the strings.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN