Home ›
Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
If you have an email ending in @hotmail.com, @live.com or @outlook.com (or any other Microsoft-related domain), please consider changing it to another email provider; Microsoft decided to instantly block the server's IP, so emails can't be sent to these addresses.
If you use an @yahoo.com email or any related Yahoo services, they have blocked us also due to "user complaints"
-UE
If you use an @yahoo.com email or any related Yahoo services, they have blocked us also due to "user complaints"
-UE
Comments
Also I'm now in my thirties.
Congrats~!
I encountered that error too. I don't think UE can fix that though.
(Happy Birthday, @Stormtroper!)
^ None that I know of, but the environment looks American enough.
Or Canada.
I'm surprised there aren't more horror movies set in Europe, but there are very few Hollywood movies set in Europe to start with. I mean, Monte Carlo was so sure it was the only movie set in Monte Carlo ever it was called Monte Carlo.
The only horror movie I can think of set in Europe is that one with Nicole Kidman that I haven't seen (which is set in Spain I think?), The Spirit Trap (a British movie and therefore set in Britain even though it was shot in Romania) and Chernobyl Diaries (obvious enough why that was set there).
Now, I wanted to put the next sentence in ( ), say it's presumably shot somewhere else, but it's too good for any parentheses (or how do you call them), so I'll state it outright. It's ridiculous.
I mean, the film is your typical B or C fare about American teenagers getting axed by vampires or rednecks, though with a surprisingly thoughtful twist about the evil natives doing this out of cruel necessity as the only means to prevent greater evil. That's what it is to a non-Polish person. But if you have any, hmmmm, first-hand experience... the Polish redneck from the movie is a piece of hunk that looks like Brad Pitt had a night with a local lady some twenty or thirty years before (now try and imagine this in Deliverance and you will see what I mean), and while they speak the language, their pronunciation can be compared to an Indian guy taught proper English by a drunken Scot. Also, everyone overacts in the most DRAMATIC way I've heard apart from deliberate hamming-up. As a side note I might add that the incantation uttered during a human sacrifice to ward against the Greater Evil is what you say when making the sign of the Cross. One would expect something more, I dunno, pagan or blasphemous or at least in Latin, but it seems that in this universe simplest solutions are the best.
(Sounds like we're channeling the Film Thread, not that I complain.)
Electro Blevy
https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2016/10/downtown-miami-future-walkability-development/505085/
my thought: is it just that we haven't been hit with a major hurricane in a while now, or is it that our buildings nowadays are rather resilient? still though, irma was basically a category 1 or tropical storm. i shudder to imagine what the impacts of a category 5 storm will be here...
http://www.businessinsider.com/chipotles-menu-is-driving-customers-away-2016-5
if only more people were like me and actually enjoyed a consistent menu
crazy fucking movie, that is
So when we stopped by Ketchikan, there were just some conveniently flying overhead over a small parking lot off a hilly road at the side of town (by which I mean 3rd Avenue). We heard that there were a bunch gathered at a fish-packing plant down the hill to the southeast, but we couldn't find the plant (though we did find a supermarket and a McDonald's).
When I went on a hike in Juneau, the guides pointed out a field where a bunch of them hung around, due to its proximity to a local dump. (They were around in the morning but they were gone by afternoon, most likely due to the angle of the sun.) The guides mentioned that they were basically the "trash chickens" of the area, frequently gathering at dumpsters and fish-packing plants. The guides also remarked that mentioning this fact pisses off Texans. (Pointing out that Alaska is bigger than Texas also pisses off Texans.)
quote of the day
So, back in 1964, there was a HUGE earthquake in south central Alaska. 9.2 magnitude; second most powerful earthquake in the world, on record. Happened in the afternoon of Good Friday that year. It had some quite dramatic impacts. Which I'll talk about in a bit, below.
For reference, by "south central Alaska" I'm thinking of Anchorage, the most populous city (with about 300,000 people, almost half the state's population), and surrounding areas.
Specifically, our ship docked in Whittier, which is on the western side of a large ocean inlet from the Pacific Ocean called Prince William Sound, and on the northeastern edge of a landform called the Kenai Peninsula. Cruise ships dock there because that's a deep water port (Anchorage's port is shallower I think), and presumably because that area means that you don't have to sail all the way across to Anchorage, which is on the western side of the Kenai Peninsula and a darn lot farther away by sea. (Everything with regards to geography in Alaska is large. Like, for real, not just Texan-bragging large.)
As was expected, "the weather in Whittier is prettier." Sheets of rain blowing across your face. "Prettier" is of course the euphemism for a city that gets rain most of the year; locals are also fond of a less euphemistic rhyme for their city name.
At this point, I'm probably one of the top ten Floridians not working in the tourism industry to be talking about Whittier, so I'll move onto other locations. Basically, there's a road that goes northwest from Whittier, travels through the tunnel I talked about in another post, and then goes down this highway (the Seward Highway) bordering the Turnagain Arm, a body of water that comes in from the Cook Inlet to the west, which comes in from the Pacific. (They call it the "Turnagain Arm" because apparently Captain Cook (the famous seafaring explorer) thought this way was part of the "northwest passage" to get around the Americas but then kept on turning around and around here.)
Along the road from Whittier to Anchorage are:
1. the aforementioned tunnel.
2. a visitor center, which was closed when we went there. located on Portage Lake, you used to be able to see Portage Glacier from there. The glacier has since receded.
3. the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center. This place used to be a town called Portage. Portage is now a ghost town, or alternatively, Portage basically now IS the AWCC, since they basically bought up the land that was left (and I wonder if they might have fixed up some old buildings or something) and set up shop there. FYI the ruins shown on the Portage Wikipedia page are still there. (FYI, Portage, Alaska should not be confused with Portage Creek, Alaska, which is far away.)
4. The trees in the area here, apparently all got immediately killed when the earthquake caused the area to subside and caused salty seawater to rush in. However, the saltwater also preserved the trees. There's a bunch of dead-looking trees that have apparently been standing looking exactly like they did since the earthquake.
5. Further down the road there used to be another town, called Girdwood. This town also got smashed by the earthquake, but instead of up and leaving altogether, they decided to rebuild further inland (and on higher ground). The new Girdwood is now a ski resort town, as I mentioned before.
6. And even further down the road is Anchorage itself. Pretty big city, complete with suburbs, self-storage places visible from the highway, and other stuff that you'd find in any other major US city. Anchorage was also smashed hard by the earthquake, and over time they gradually covered up the "scars" of the quake on the land by putting grass on, paving over, putting stairways down, putting sloped roads down, etc. parts of the city that experienced dramatic elevation changes. Like, the northern side of the city, around 3rd Avenue and northward, where the railroad station and Ship Creek are, that area is actually where Anchorage started out, and it's now noticeably lower, like 10 or 20 feet lower, because of that earthquake. (Old earthquake photos. Obviously the city doesn't look like this anymore; here's a better view of the Alaska Railroad station/museum from the top of the hill (let me know if this photo doesn't work). You can also find other recent photos just using Google Maps's street view, of course.)
BTW, Anchorage has two different convention centers. Don't confuse the two when figuring out which one your hotel shuttle has dropped you off at.
Also, amusingly, our hotel shuttle driver remarked about the local anime convention. Said that it was basically like Halloween had happened, and you had someone dressing in a nun's habit, and everything just generally looked weird for a while. Given he works at a hotel in midtown (which is a couple miles from downtown, I'm not surprised that some cosplayers stayed there and took a ride on the shuttle to downtown). (FWIW, the hotel we stayed at was Springhill Suites by Marriott which has a pretty nice floorplan to their suites. Also free breakfast, a priority for my dad.)