#thematic park

[lifewithaview]

Jimmi Simpson and Evan Rachel Wood in Westworld (2016) Contrapasso

S1E5

Logan, William, Dolores and Slim head to Pariah, a dangerous and wild town of outcasts, to meet El Lazo. They team up and El Lazo tells that there is a shipment of nitroglycerin that he wants. They ambush a wagon to steal the explosive for the army, but Slim is killed. William shoots and kills the escort team and they return to Pariah to party in a brothel, where William and Logan have an argument. Dolores sees El Lazo stealing the nitroglycerin and she asks William to flee with her. Meanwhile, the Man in Black is riding with Lawrence and Teddy; out of the blue, he kills Lawrence to use his blood to save Teddy to force him to lead him to Wyatt. Elsie finds that someone is transmitting data out of the park and decides to investigate.

*This is the first episode that doesn't open with Dolores at the very first frame.

[andrewckeeper]

LIDMF AI + PHOTOSHOP "Australien"

[shroomerr]

Finally, my design for Mysterion!! this boy gave me so much heartache in the process of making this but its ok its all worth it for him <3

I also couldn't choose between the version with hair or without hair, so here's the one without under the cut (+ my initial drafts for his design):

[schrondingers-dumbass]

Something incredible happening in the way Mahōtsukai works with liminal spaces between modern and tradition, as well as just the characters at the start of their arc being stuck between conceptually two worlds and being themselves in liminal spaces

[zytes]

ozone

[stewykablooey]

would kill for the defunctland videos about the waystar parks in the succverse

[kr1g]

I love anomalocaris but I also think they woukld have tasted good as fuuuuck deep fried and topped with mayo and ponzu

[imminent-danger-came]

first of all, hopping onto the Linkin park train that Numb by Linkin Park is definitely a MK song SECOND OF ALL The fucking. Werewolf narratives wifh MK it’s the REPRESSIONS THE FEAR OUHJ THE HORROR THE HORROR

LOOK. LOOK. LISTEN.

MK WORKS AS A WEREWOLF CHARACTER. HE DOES. HE'S JUST A LITTLE TO THE LEFT

Like you're right, the repression? Not wanting to hurt those close to you? Wondering what you are? Wondering if you're destined to cause pain and suffering? Giving in and fighting back? Like you understand me more than most. You get it. Look me in my eyes and tell me it's not there:

Truly here's where I come in with my hot take: werewolves are fate vs freewill/identity themes the monster. You know. "Of one thing I am certain—fate has plans for you! Great plans, or foul? Time will tell." "I can't be, I'm just MK!" COME ON. COME ON

[gutsfics]

sssshould Lake Harper become a marine biologist post series.

or.

should he go into theme parks bc he had a childhood Experience with the Wiggles Big Red Car darkride at Dreamworld that pissed him off so bad that he decided he Had to design theme park ride design

[frisk-and-kenny-doodles-daily]

[45] “you wanna SAVE me like you SAVED everyone else you met? you think it’s that easy?! well, go ahead and fucking SAVE me then. try to FUCKING SAVE ME FROM THE HORRIFIC CURSE OF FATE BUILT INTO MY SOUL THAT I’VE DEALT WITH MY WHOLE LIFE!! I’D LOVE TO SEE YOU TRY!!!”

[galaxseacreature]

I truly believe that genres are constructed categories that cannot be defined to universal satisfaction without overlap and attempts to do so are generally misguided and often serve to hamper discourse

At the same time, book group saying the next read would be a scifi book only to choose a technothriller makes me want to commit great violence

[mag200]

rot & regrowth

made from painted cardboard // ko-fi

[summermonths]

linkin park is forever warrior cats core to me /pos

[jungwildeandfree]

YES. And not only as an excuse--this is also a deepening of the book's central theme about the dangers of meddling with unproven and untested technology. Crichton wrote about many different topics but "casual use of untested technology is unethical at best and dangerous at worst" is a theme across much of his work (the Jurassic Park series, Prey, and of course Next).

In Jurassic Park, it's made EXTREMELY CLEAR that whatever the technicians at Hammond's park have made, they are not dinosaurs. But Hammond is so caught up in the dream of having brought dinosaurs to life that he CONSTANTLY talks about them as if they are real. He hires paleontologists as consultants, not animal behaviorists. He asserts that the cloning tech used to make them is a known quantity, and that the "dinosaurs" will do nothing outside the realm of their known behavior. He is so sure of this that it guides his vision of the park, and the implementations of his security policies.

And he is, of course, wrong. He doesn't understand the dinosaurs' behavior--even the experts he brings in are learning on the fly trying to reconstruct how they act. He doesn't realize how intelligent they are. By downplaying the influence of frog and reptile DNA in the creatures he creates, he leans into the legend of "dinosaurs"--and also lays the groundwork for a potential ecological catastrophe when they turn out to be capable of reproducing asexually, a trait which is very strongly hinted to have been acquired from frogs.

Yes I totally agree--from the perspective of a scifi author, Crichton does an awesome job of giving himself lots of room to play in. In my opinion the real masterstroke of his work is the way that worldbuilding/suspension of disbelief work plays directly into the themes of the work. "Technological hubris leads to ruin" isn't just a vibe Ian Malcom lays out. It's an objective description of the events taking place in Jurassic Park. And it's a fact of the world in which the book takes place.

My favorite detail about Jurassic Park is that it has a baked-in justification for any and all retcons it might need to make due to paleontology advancing forwards.

Because there is not a single dinosaur that has ever appeared in Jurassic Park.

Not one. Not in the books. Not in the movies. Not ever.

"Now what John Hammond and InGen did at Jurassic Park was to create genetically engineered theme park monsters." ~Alan Grant

Grant says that in a moment of cynicism. It's part of his arc for the film. But it's not inaccurate. What Jurassic Park has, what it's always had since the very first novel, are "Mostly Dinosaurs".

"And since the DNA is so old, it's full of holes! Now, that's where our geneticists take over!" ~Mr. DNA

It's impossible to recover a fully intact gene sequence from an ancient amber mosquito. Cloning a pure dinosaur would have been completely impossible, and so the park filled in the gene sequence with whatever works. Frog. Lizard. Bird. Whatever they need to get the result they are trying to get.

Every single dinosaur is a chimeric beast made up of mostly dinosaur and a bunch of other stuff that some scientists thought would achieve the appropriate dinosaur-like result.

"Nothing in Jurassic World is natural! We have always filled gaps in the genome with the DNA of other animals. And if the genetic code was pure, many of them would look quite different." ~Dr. Henry Wu

Which, from a writing perspective, is fucking genius. Because now you have a preset excuse for each and every plot hole your movie has.

Like. Why don't the raptors have feathers? Because of the chimera DNA.

Why do dilophosaurs spit venom? Because of the chimera DNA.

Why do T-Rexes have movement based vision? Oh, they don't. But Rexy does. Because of her chimera DNA.

Why is the Spinosaurus so fucking big? Because of the chimera DNA.

Why are the velociraptors mislabeled? Because Hammond's a dipshit.

Like. I've always marveled at the way Jurassic Park started out by giving itself a blanket excuse to be wrong about every single thing it ever said about the central attraction of its franchise. It's honestly beautiful, and allows the series a degree of immortality well into the era where we know better about its animals.

[mcmansionhell]

we've found it folks: mcmansion heaven

Hello everyone. It is my pleasure to bring you the greatest house I have ever seen. The house of a true visionary. A real ad-hocist. A genuine pioneer of fenestration. This house is in Alabama. It was built in 1980 and costs around $5 million. It is worth every penny. Perhaps more.

Now, I know what you're thinking: "Come on, Kate, that's a little kooky, but certainly it's not McMansion Heaven. This is very much a house in the earthly realm. Purgatory. McMansion Purgatory." Well, let me now play Beatrice to your Dante, young Pilgrim. Welcome. Welcome, welcome, welcome.

It is rare to find a house that has everything. A house that wills itself into Postmodernism yet remains unable to let go of the kookiest moments of the prior zeitgeist, the Bruce Goffs and Earthships, the commune houses built from car windshields, the seventies moments of psychedelic hippie fracture. It is everything. It has everything. It is theme park, it is High Tech. It is Renaissance (in the San Antonio Riverwalk sense of the word.) It is medieval. It is maybe the greatest pastiche to sucker itself to the side of a mountain, perilously overlooking a large body of water. Look at it. Just look.

The inside is white. This makes it dreamlike, almost benevolent. It is bright because this is McMansion Heaven and Gray is for McMansion Hell. There is an overbearing sheen of 80s optimism. In this house, the credit default swap has not yet been invented, but could be.

It takes a lot for me to drop the cocaine word because I think it's a cheap joke. But there's something about this example that makes it plausible, not in a derogatory way, but in a liberatory one, a sensuous one. Someone created this house to have a particular experience, a particular feeling. It possesses an element of true fantasy, the thematic. Its rooms are not meant to be one cohesive composition, but rather a series of scenes, of vastly different spatial moments, compressed, expanded, bright, close.

And then there's this kitchen for some reason. Or so you think. Everything the interior design tries to hide, namely how unceasingly peculiar the house is, it is not entirely able to because the choices made here remain decadent, indulgent, albeit in a more familiar way.

Rare is it to discover an interior wherein one truly must wear sunglasses. The environment created in service to transparency has to somewhat prevent the elements from penetrating too deep while retaining their desirable qualities. I don't think an architect designed this house. An architect would have had access to specifically engineered products for this purpose. Whoever built this house had certain access to architectural catalogues but not those used in the highest end or most structurally complex projects. The customization here lies in the assemblage of materials and in doing so stretches them to the height of their imaginative capacity. To borrow from Charles Jencks, ad-hoc is a perfect description. It is an architecture of availability and of adventure.

A small interlude. We are outside. There is no rear exterior view of this house because it would be impossible to get one from the scrawny lawn that lies at its depths. This space is intended to serve the same purpose, which is to look upon the house itself as much as gaze from the house to the world beyond.

Living in a city, I often think about exhibitionism. Living in a city is inherently exhibitionist. A house is a permeable visible surface; it is entirely possible that someone will catch a glimpse of me they're not supposed to when I rush to the living room in only a t-shirt to turn out the light before bed. But this is a space that is only exhibitionist in the sense that it is an architecture of exposure, and yet this exposure would not be possible without the protection of the site, of the distance from every other pair of eyes. In this respect, a double freedom is secured. The window intimates the potential of seeing. But no one sees.

At the heart of this house lies a strange mix of concepts. Postmodern classicist columns of the Disney World set. The unpolished edge of the vernacular. There is also an organicist bent to the whole thing, something more Goff than Gaudí, and here we see some of the house's most organic forms, the monolith- or shell-like vanity mixed with the luminous artifice of mirrors and white. A backlit cave, primitive and performative at the same time, which is, in essence, the dialectic of the luxury bathroom.

And yet our McMansion Heaven is still a McMansion. It is still an accumulation of deliberate signifiers of wealth, very much a construction with the secondary purpose of invoking envy, a palatial residence designed without much cohesion. The presence of golf, of wood, of masculine and patriarchal symbolism with an undercurrent of luxury drives that point home. The McMansion can aspire to an art form, but there are still many levels to ascend before one gets to where God's sitting.

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[hauntingblue]

NOT gonna live post Invincible but the animation on their expressions is BAD like damn