#ThursdayIsKiteDay
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Discussion of survey results from last week, on why people don't fly kites. Unrelated pictures from Longbeach Kite festival of 2 weeks ago.

Reasons people don't fly kites now, Survey Analysis (in order of most common reason):

#1, 44%, I have other hobbies, that looks more boring.

Fair enough. I have other hobbies too, about a 1/2 dozen, maybe 3 I try to enjoy daily. Kite flying isn't like playing video games on my phone, or gardening, or cooking, you can't do it daily..

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#ThursdayIsKiteDay (kite pictures on page 2)

Survey! Why do you not own or are not interested in flying kites? Check all that apply. Add your unlisted reasons or story in the comments and boost for visibility, please. Discussion next week.

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Second page, just to add more kite pictures.

Be sure and check the Alt-Text for more details.

Follow and boost #ThursdayIsKiteDay and #HappyKiteDay. In dark times, share the joy! Also, your kite pictures and thoughts. Happiness is better shared.

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Sorry. Due to battery issues on my phone I will have to edit this update, which is late, down to 3 pages. More kites tomorrow. Also a regularly scheduled #ThursdayIsKiteDay post will have to be rescheduled until next week. Sorry for the inconvenience and multiple edits.

#ThursdayIsKiteDay is cancelled this week while I continue to live blog from the Washington State Int'l Kite Festival. To be honest, I planned a serious discussion of economic & cultural bias in the kite community (an anti Chinese manufacturing & anti store bought bias?), but the people here are literally the best and nicest people of their generation, any bias is inadvertent, and they are just having fun and visiting with friends. No negativity in such an

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#Kites
Supplemental pictures from Wednesday. My alt-text includes extra details.

Be sure and follow #ThursdayIsKiteDay for weekly posts on the world of kiting, and #HappyKiteDay for random day kite pictures. Share the joy! Share your pictures! 3 months of timeless content waiting for you now! I'm live blogging here this week from the 7 day Washington State International Kite Festival. The theme of tomorrow is hand crafted kites.

#ThursdayIsKiteDay
1/6
I mentioned last week the Washington State International Kite Festival. It is a one week celebration of everything kites, next week will be its 42nd year, I'll be going most days, and you are invited too, particularly Friday or Saturday which are the good general spectator days.

There wasn't much point in telling you about it earlier because all $250/night hotel rooms and all camping sites within miles are usually booked a year in advance. If you were the type of person..

#ThursdayIsKiteDay
1/6
Picture #1 below is my two cell, rectangular box kite with wings, known as a Picture Box, from HQ. And picture #2 is my kite train of 6 Picture Boxes, because today's topic is kite trains.

We are covering kite trains today because the Washington State International Kite Festival, a one week celebration of everything kites, is less than 2 weeks away and the theme of day one, Monday, is always kite trains and arches.

So what is a kite train? A kite train is any series of..

@weaselx86 @HaruEb @Mrfunkedude
Totally. I have considered moving to a server with a longer character limit, but all the ones I have found are very small, the major servers stick to 500 characters. For #ThursdayIsKiteDay I do now prewrite the long posts and copy and paste them into my Tusky app, but I have to write the multiple Alt-text for pictures on the fly as I add them.

#ThursdayIsKiteDay
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Today's kite is a type that I have been looking forward to telling you all about for months. Unfortunately, I have only one example of this kite, and it does not perform like it should. That kite form is the Pearson Roller, one of 3 kite types, that if well made, can out perform a Delta in the only engineering criteria that matters to measure a good kite by, LIFT, in light wind.

The purple and blue kite you see below is my Vertical Visuals Pearson Roller, manufactured...

#ThursdayIsKiteDay
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Here's a cute little kite that I own. It is colorful, can be flown in medium to high wind, and if it comes down in turbulence it can frequently be relaunched with some careful tugging. It is called a Nova Cell, from a company called Air Creations, that seems to have been absorbed by the toy company Jakks Pacific, but I can't find any evidence that they are currently making any kites any more. This kite is really not my style, as I like large soaring kites, and this...

#ThursdayIsKiteDay
If the video below seems to have little to do with kites just imagine:
=> The breadboard on the left (with finger on pushbutton) is a packet radio sender on the ground.
=>The breadboard in the middle is a packet radio receiver mounted beneath a kite.
=>The breadboard on the left is also on the kite connected to the center breadboard via wired serial.
=>The servo is tripping a release mechanism that allows something wonderful to happen. I.e. launch a parachuting Teddy Bear.

#ThursdayIsKiteDay on a Saturday?

Yes, ThursdayIsKiteDay is delayed this week because I went camping Tuesday through Friday, and this episode will be short and off the top of my head because I am still recovering from bad sunburn and dehydration. How was camping you say? Like all camping it had moments of transcendent glory followed by hours of "this is totally not worth this". But those bad moments are riddled with personal mistakes like trying to pack and break camp, do one more 4 hour...

Hey, I am going on vacation in the mountains for a few days and will be out of touch. I will give a late update to #ThursdayIsKiteDay on Saturday.

Last thought, people who stress you out, particularly at work, are acting out their dominance instinct and can't help it. It has been slightly more socially acceptable, for the last 10k years, than punching each other in the face. Try a compliment, like acknowledging their role or something they do well instead of striking back. Good luck.

#ThursdayIsKiteDay
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I have flown a kite twice this year that has attracted enough attention that two people have come up to me to talk about it. That kite is the Canard kite, designed in the early 2000s by famous German kite designer Carsten Domman. I am glad to say that it is still intermittently available online, so if you would like one you might be able to get it, although the original manufacturer, Premier Kites, is currently listing it as out of stock.

I was also surprised that both...

#ThursdayIsKiteDay
1/13
No pictures today. I'm going to tell you'll about a bad experience, about the difference between a kite show and a kite festival, and how I went to one that was masquerading as the other. And an open invitation to change my mind, please.

So you probably didn't notice, but there was no #ThursdayIsKiteDay last week. I went to a biannual regional kite festival with a 38 year history, took a lot of pictures, but sat down to write about it and found that I couldn't say...

#ThursdayIsKiteDay
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Buy a kite, keep it in your car, for when the wind moves you.

This week's kite is a Fled. I like it, it has an unusual look that is actually a combination of two earlier kite forms: a flare kite and a sled. If I said that it was a keeled sled with added wings and a positive dihedral (sleds are arched and have negative dihedral) that would be entirely accurate. It is a very modern kite. I can't find an exact date, but the oldest pictures I can find are from 2007. This...

@Homoevolutis0
#ThursdayIsKiteDay is where I review a specific kite, or kite form with some history, or explain a kite concept, every week. I do it because I have a large collection that I enjoy flying, but kiting as a sport has dropped off and people forget how much fun it would be to fly a kite when they haven't seen one in a while. I hope #HappyKiteDay will be a place people can post any related pictures, any day of the week.

We've got to keep remembering how wonderful it is to be alive.

#ThursdayIsKiteDay
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Buy a kite, keep it in your car, for when the wind moves you.

So, last week I briefly mentioned the words “line laundry”. That deserves a definition. Line Laundry is anything flown from a kite flying line that doesn't contribute lift, it is strictly for decoration. Multiple kites flown from the same line are not line laundry, they are a kite train. Things flown from the end of a kite are kite tails, and will operate as tails even if they were designed as something else.

#ThursdayIsKiteDay
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Buy a kite, keep it in your car, for when the wind moves you.

Okay, so what is the earliest kite in Europe?

We are confining ourselves to Europe because we can get some pretty good dates. Kites were developed so far back in Asian cultures that they predate historical texts. They are generally considered to have originated in China, and while that is certainly true of paper kites, there are woven leaf kites in Polynesian cultures that suggest that kites are as old as...