Hebben jullie in het mooiste postkantoortje van Nederland al een kaartje verstuurd?

#efteling #postnl #themeparks #sneeuw #post #brabant

📍 Efteling

The Dutch version of the BBC (very simply put) has started consistently stating in every article about Trump that he has a history of lying and saying nonsense. It's really satisfying.

"President Trump, who often lies, said that..."

It's a small thing, but it cheers me up.

Midnight in the Garden of Evel Knievel

#TrivialBooksOrPlays
#HashTagGames

RE: https://flipboard.com/@kpbspublicmedia/podcasts-a8519fk1z/-/a-u-dTduKvR_mfIxpEeNwV_g%3Aa%3A3137301314-%2F0

get rid of every fucker calling for reforming nazis. purge the party of fascist bootlickers.

[When we could have spent all that money on four films about Lancelot Link, Mata Hairi, Bananas Marmoset, and Sweetwater Gibbons.]

https://www.motionpictures.org/2026/01/sam-mendes-four-film-beatles-biopic-reveals-first-look-at-the-fab-four/

Thomas Benjamin Wild Esq: "Why Do You Have To Go And Get Political?"

https://youtu.be/8hgyUOFlIR0

#Ukulele

So here's something cool that the Efteling, a theme park in the Netherlands, has been trialling for quite a while now and seems to have finally declared 'ready': automatic transcriptions and translations in their mobile app.

The Efteling heavily relies on storytelling; rides and exhibits throughout the park are built around fairytales and (often very local) myths and folklore. You'll often find spoken storytelling in ride pre-shows or in show buildings. In Dutch, of course. There were heavily abbreviated (multi-lingual) summaries already on display on a physical storybook prop, but it certainly doesn't give you the full experience of the story.

So they've added a feature to their mobile app. It uses your microphone to detect not just where in the park you are, but also what show you are currently listening to (as a lot of them use very old technology that's very much not network-connected, much of this was built before 2000), and more importantly, what point in the show you are at. That is, it synchronizes with the show from audio recognition.

Then it shows you a running transcription or, if you set a different language, a translation of the transcription, in sync with the show so that you can follow the entire show in real-time, even if you don't speak the language or have auditory disabilities! It also includes captions for the sound effects, and indicates the speaking voices.

It currently covers 18 different rides and displays, and I expect that more will be added over time.

There's an older video showing the feature in action here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kqwy6tBThVY

(To my knowledge, all transcriptions and translations were hand-written, and no "AI" was used for any of this. Unless you consider sound recognition to be AI, but it's certainly not of the slop machine generation.)

#accessibility #efteling #ThemeParks