#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.

[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):

[zytes]

ozone

[littlenimart]

i wish we’d gotten actual flashbacks of this relationship from Y5 because you know it was sooooooo Fucked, like joker and harley quinn-type toxic…

just going off how Mirei described her past to Haruka and what one can assume about Majima’s mental state at the time… vivid image of two abused people disastrously desperate for any kind of human affection, one of them being an acutely insecure teenaged idol and the other one an adult man who spent most of his 20’s in the torment nexus. Woof. the fact the game doesn’t talk about it after the car scene is imo a huge waste of juicy character stuff

[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

[skelskeleton]

same, however i would also accept if his character development leads him to just becoming a park ranger or smth

I hope tom dies in the 3rd movie

[weaselle]

i want to talk about real life villains

Not someone who mugs you, or kills someone while driving drunk, those are just criminals. I mean VILLAINS.

Not like trump or musk, who are... cartoonishly evil. And not sexy villains, not grandiose villains, not even satisfyingly two dimensional villains it is easy to hate unconditionally. The real villains.

I had a client who was a retired executive for one of the big oil companies, i think it was Shell or Chevron. Had a home just outside of San Francisco that was wall to wall floor to ceiling full of expensive art. Literally. I once accidentally knocked a painting off the wall because it was hanging at knee height at the corner of the stairs, and it had a little brass plaque on it, and i looked up the name of the artist and it was Monet's apprentice and son-in-law, who was apparently also a famous painter. He had an original Andy Warhol, which should have been a prize piece for anyone to showcase -- it was hanging in the bathroom. I swear to god this guy was using a Chihuly (famous glass sculptor) as a fruit bowl. And he was like, "idk my wife was the one who liked art"

I was intrigued by this guy, because in the circles i run this dude is The Enemy. right? Wealthy oil executive? But as my client, he was... like a sweet grandpa. A poor widower, a nice old man, anyone who knew him would have called him a sweetheart. He had a slightly bewildered air, a sort of gentle bumbling nature.

And the fact that he was both of these things, a Sweet Little Old Man and The Enemy, at the same time, seemed important and fascinating to me.

He reminded me of some antagonist from fiction, but i couldn't put my finger on who. And when i did it all made sense.

John Hammond.

probably one of the most realistic bad guys ever written.

If you've only ever seen the movie, this will need some explaining.

Michael Crichton wrote Jurassic Park in 1990, and i read it shortly thereafter. In the movie, the dinosaurs are the antagonists, which imo erases 50% of the point of the story.

book spoilers below.

In the book, John Hammond is the villain but it takes the reader like half the book to figure that out. Just like my client, John is a sweet old man who wants lovely things for people. He's a very sympathetic character. But as the book progresses, you start to see something about him.

He has an idea, and he's sure it's a good one. When someone else dies in pursuit of his dream, he doesn't think anything of it. When other people turn out to care about that, he brings in experts to evaluate the safety of his idea, and when they quickly tell him his idea is dangerous and needs to be put on hold, he ignores his own experts that he himself hired, because they are telling him that he is wrong, and he is sure he is right.

In his mind, he's a visionary, and nobody understands his vision. He is surrounded by naysayers. Several things have proven too difficult to do the best and safest way, so he has cut corners and taken shortcuts so he can keep moving forward with his plans, but he's sure it's fine. He refuses to hear any word of caution, because he believes he is being cautious enough, and he knows best, even though he has no background in any of the sciences or professions involved. He sends his own grandchildren out into a life-threatening situation because he is willfully ignorant of the danger he is creating.

THIS is like the real villains of the world. He doesn't want anyone to die. Far from it, he only wants good things for people! He's a sweet old man who loves his grandchildren. But he has money and power and refuses to hear that what he is doing is dangerous for everyone, even his own family.

I think he's possibly one of the most important villains ever written in popular fiction.

In the book, he is killed by a pack of the smallest, cutest, "least dangerous" dinosaurs, because a big part of why we read fiction is to see the villains face thematic justice. But like a cigarette CEO dying of lung cancer, his death does not stop his creation from spreading out into the world to continue to endanger everyone else.

I think it is really important to see and understand this kind of villainy in fiction, so you can recognize it in real life.

Sweetheart of a grandfather. Wanted the best for everyone. Right up until what was best for everyone inconvenienced the pursuit of his own interests.

And my client was like that too. His wife had died, and his dog was now the love of his life, and she was this little old dog with silky hair in a hair cut that left long wispy bits on her lower legs. Certain plant materials were easily entangled in this hair and impossible to get out without pulling her hair which clearly hurt her. When i suggested he ask his groomer to trim her lower leg hair short to avoid this, he refused, saying he really liked her usual hair cut.

I emphasized that she was in pain after every walk due to the plant debris getting caught in her leg hair, and a simple trim could put an end to her daily painful removal of it, and he just frowned like i'd recommended he take a bath in pig shit and said "But she'll be ugly" and refused to talk about it anymore.

Sweet old man though. Everyone loved him.

[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