Somebody linked to Bleed Out recently, which is a novel-length murder mystery/casefile Naruto fic that I enjoyed greatly, so now I'm on AO3 (re-)reading all the Kakashi/Iruka fic. My life is hard sometimes.

This is one of those pairings where I was never really in the fandom but it makes really good comfort reading for me, so I come back to it every once in awhile and it's still good. (I would give you some recs but I'm in "go on AO3, sort by bookmarks, filter on "-sasuke" to get rid of the ones where it's a background pairing or where canon plot is actually relevant, read everything" mode, so it would be an unhelpful recs list.)

( let me attempt to explain kakashi/iruka fic to you )


Oh! And speaking of ninja training, the weather has been really really springlike the last couple days, so today I went on a walk to the park for the first time this year, and sometime over the winter they replaced the kind of sad monkey-bars based playground with what appears to be a ninja training facility. There's a mini climbing wall! And a bunch of actually kind of scary spinny things that make you work on strength and balance or die! I am totally going to walk down there and become a super ninja by the end of the year.

It intrigues me though, because of the ways in which it's so different in, like, intent? From the playgrounds they were putting up through my childhood.

First that it's so clearly based on "adult" equipment - this was designed by someone who had been to rock-climbing gyms and parkour training and stuff; it amuses me that we've come full-cicrle already from adults asserting their right to play on jungle gyms to kids' playgrounds being built to call to mind the adult version.

But also - that it's being aimed at different kids. The playgrounds I grew up with, unless you were lucky enough to find one that still had swings, were pretty boring by the time you were nine or ten, because you were too tall for a lot of the stuff (like the slides and ladders) and a lot of the rest wasn't good for much except just running around like a wild thing. They were clearly designed for a peak age of about four. This one, on the other hand, has a recommended age of 5-12, and all the equipment - while I could see it was designed to also work for smaller people - was fine for an adult-sized person too.

And - everything could be played with if you were the only person there. Again, that's different from what I remember - a lot of the stuff we had was really only fun as part of imaginative play with a group, or the kinetic things needed people to push and people to ride in order to make it go. All of this stuff is carefully balanced so one person can make it spin all by themself. And I totally support building teamwork, but as someone who was sometimes the only kid on the playground, I appreciate that they are acknowledging that we are not in the middle of a baby boom in this area, and also we are a suburb that is designed to make it hard to make friends with the neighbors, so kids often are the only kid their age in the park.

Anyway. Ninjas.