Being that I had a weekend off from work I went for a hike. And I found a busted up old reservoir that resembled with some accuracy varying set pieces in Half-Life 2. Did I know my town was dying? Yes. Did I think it would ever look fitting for combine? No.

The hike started at some old railroad tracks.


I have no idea what the W is for. Maybe west? I didn't see any signs coming back east though.


The only thing missing from this picture is combine rapelling down the bridge. And lost of explosive barrels.


I found an old service road that was decrepit and led to some weird concrete structure.


It had some sort of dam attached to it.


This hatch reminds me of something from LOST. I think it would be fitting if someone marked the numbers on there.


The water made a really shallow fall.


I climbed up on the wall and snapped a few shots down the catwalk area, where you can see that the guardrails were falling down.


I put this picture here because the color is drastically different, despite the same lighting conditions. Weird.


This is the view from the ledge, where the fall is. There's a lot of concrete down there to divert the water.



I guess the whole thing used to be a big reservoir and now it's all decrepit. However, the service road has seen some use lately and you could tell that some large machinery had been down there recently, as well as some surveying teams due to a few poles placed around and some orange flags. I have no idea what they are planning to do down there, since nothing is really functional anymore and I haven't read anything in the paper. What I didn't take any picture of was the backside of the wall. It was a lot of swampland with a lot of dead trees. I did scare off two mallards when I walked up on the catwalk, which was a pretty cool visual. I didn't snap a photo because I didn't have my camera ready though.

This past episode was scathing, on multiple levels. Superficially it mocked Family Guy, and I'm sure that is all 8th graders got out of it. But it ragged hard on fundamentalists, both Muslim and Scientologist. Under all the censorship attributed to Denmark and Muslim fundamentalists, there were deep-seeded attacks at Comedy Central for backing down to Scientologists and pulling an episode. It makes for hilarious television.

I've been consistently surprised by South Park on a political level. In my mind it was strange that some of the best political commentary came from a cartoon. But then I realized - that's almost always been what the cartoon was used for.