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slasherscream · 5 years

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Oh, can I get headcanons for either Tiffany or Billy Loomis and Stu with a fem! s/o who is super ambitious and 100% rule the world if they wanted to?

(A/N): But why not .... both?

Tiffany Valentine:

Uhm ..... same hat! much?

Tiffany loves a woman with a strong head on her shoulders who won't let a damn thing stand in her way.

Like her Mother always said "a girl's best friend is actually a good sense of self worth" and Tiffany took that absolutely to heart for herself but to see you strutting around....%100 large and in charge? Oh no.... her heart... it was found full of love.

You two love to give each other the smuggest glances when you're suffering through listening to someone (usually a man) drone on about something because you need something from them and are thus tolerating them™ all the while knowing that Tiff is totally gonna stab them for you later so it doesn't even matter.

Tiffany has a very clear life plan for herself so she can appreciate a girlfriend who also has a vision or goals for herself. Sure most of Tiffany's are about a ring on her finger or hearing the pitter patter of little feet but feminism is about choices so she'll help you take over the world and you'll give her your last name and a big, beautiful wedding? Sound good? Great!

She is such a high class lady who has never been with someone who is also high class. Please make lots of money and support her lavish lifestyle she'll die if you spoil her.

Just wants to be someone's doted on trophy wife (don't we all?)

But make no mistake you guys are partners and if you need someone to have your back she'll always be there for you no matter what you need done. All you have to do is be grateful and sweet to her and she'd literally murder for you. Maybe even murder just for a laugh.

Would love if she was your go to for advice because she's got a lot of ideas floating around in her head! She's not just a pretty face and fantastic body... her brain can be downright deadly!

You two can often be found drinking wine and plotting the downfall of anyone who pissed you two off this week.

Come home from a long day of calling the shots? Tiffany has dinner ready and the bath running and she intends to pamper you! Loves how you seem to melt when you close the door to your home together...it's like you leave the outside world behind and are always happy to indulge her in domesticated bliss.

Billy Loomis and Stu Macher:

Stu is, as a general rule, always just along for the ride. He tends to be drawn to ambitious people or just anyone who's got an aura of "don't fuck with me" around them. He has a hidden gift for finding these people and attaching himself to them like a barnacle to a ship.

Billy??? ....same hat! Sure his ambitions are chaotic (and murderous) but to be fair he had a plan and stuck to the plan and achieved all his goals. His resume for dating you is fucking...fantastic by these standards.

Stu is ready to 1. love you and support you unconditionally and 2. brutALLY kill anyone in your way. Please tell him that if everyone who has ever been a problem for you winds up dead it will look bad for you because he will get caught up in the high of doing something for you and not think about ....consequences.

It's a showing of devotion. Like cats bringing home dead things.

Billy likes to think he is less wrapped around your finger but it's not fucking true if you bat your eyes at him you can get anything you want done.

The only difference is you have to use honey to get what you want out of Billy and you do not have to always do so with Stu. Stu is used to Billy being a bitch mean and so he can tolerate quite a bit of sharpness.

They believe firmly that teamwork makes the dream work! They need to be your confidants.....your most trusted advisers...the keeper of all your secrets...the attendants to your every whim....or they will proceed to throw a fucking fit :)))))

They do not want Anyone At All to ever be of a greater service to you than they are. They will do everything for you....including dirty work! Can't take over the world without a few (literal) skeletons in the closet.

Not gonna lie they're pretty good at getting you whatever you want/need at any given time. Also Stu is from old money so please use any and all of his wealth and resources to achieve your dreams.

Billy is the most manipulative human being on earth and he is happy to help manipulate people for and with you. Bonding? Is your couple activity manipulation? ...Perhaps.

Anything you achieve is a group achievement. They're so proud of you and always ready to brag about you. A girl in need of a strong support system could not find a better (deadlier) set of boyfriends.

#tiffany valentine x reader #billy loomis x reader #stu macher x reader #poly ghostface x reader #billy loomis x reader x stu macher #slasher x imagine #we do in fact ...stan!#hope you like this nonny!

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the-light-followed · 4 years

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THE COLOUR OF MAGIC (1983) [DISC. #1; RINCEWIND #1]

Rating: 5/10

Standalone Okay: Yes

Read First: NO.

Discworld Books Masterpost: [x]

* * * * * * * * * *

Ask any Discworld fan, and we’ll all pretty much universally agree that The Colour of Magic isn’t the pinnacle of the Discworld experience. Nobody really recommends that new readers should start here, even if it is the first book in the series chronologically. I’m pretty much a writing-order-equals-reading-order purist, for reasons best discussed elsewhere, and even I would absolutely never start people off with this one. (I tend to go for Going Postal or Wee Free Men—again, for reasons best discussed elsewhere.)

It’s not Pratchett’s best work. It’s not even his tenth best work. If I have to rate it (and I do, because that’s kind of the point, here), compared to the rest of Discworld, it’s down at the bottom of my list.

It’s pretty damn good, though, for what it is.

For me, it’s a genuine joy to read the early Rincewind books. This is because, in my head at least, it makes total sense that everything involved in them is baffling and strange when compared to the settled absurdism you get from other Discworld novels. Further into the series, it all feels a lot more comfortable and fleshed-out: yes, the things Pratchett writes about are often genuinely ridiculous, but usually the setting explains those things and packages them up neatly enough to make them acceptable. And the characters treat everything as perfectly normal, business as usual, so the reader is gently encouraged to do the same.

Thinking about it, I would argue that a lot of the Discworld shenanigans aren’t all that different from a lot of the real-world nonsense that we all just accept as totally normal. Discworld nonsense and our nonsense just come from different places. For us, it’s stuff like the fact that some cops still ride horses for absolutely no good reason, or that tipping is part of a server’s pay in an American restaurant, or that water is usually free but we all let movie theaters charge us like $5 for a bottle, and what’s that even about? In the Discworld, the thieves and assassins have unionized, and if you slip up, it’s entirely possible to just fall right off the edge of the world. It’s weird, and it’s not exactly fine, but it’s not about to kill us right this second, so we all just let it happen. We accept it.

This is not at all the case for our unwilling protagonist, the original Discworld hero-who-is-absolutely-not-a-hero, Rincewind. He’s scared of everything. He is a genuine, bona fide coward. Absolutely everything that happens leaves him baffled, terrified, and/or dismayed, and to tell the truth I unconditionally respect all of this about him, because most of the absolute bullshit nonsense going down around him is baffling, terrifying, and/or simply Not Good, and he and the reader have to learn to live with that together.

Over the course of this one novel, failed-wizard-slash-reluctant-guide Rincewind is:

Involved in burning down large parts of the city of Ankh-Morpork, because he left his friend unsupervised and the city really wasn’t ready for the invention of ‘insurance’ without the accompanying understanding of ‘insurance fraud.’

Chased, threatened, and variously menaced by a sentient suitcase known as the Luggage, which canonically has huge teeth, a mahogany tongue, hundreds of little legs, and an insatiable hunger for the flesh of its owner’s enemies. Also, it does your laundry if you leave it inside. Isn’t that nice?

Forced into a duel by dragon riders, where he must fight upside-down while wearing boots that basically Velcro-attach their wearers to the ceiling.

Captured, imprisoned, and scheduled to be sacrificed to the anthropomorphic personification of Fate in exchange for success in a scientific endeavor—specifically, checking the biological sex of the giant turtle carrying the Discworld on its back through the universe.

Dropped over the Rimfall, the waterfall at the edge of the Disc, which in Roundworld terminology is something like tripping and falling off the surface of the Earth and flying into the abyss of space.

Repeatedly almost forced to speak one of the Eight Great Spells that created the universe, which will do…something, possibly catastrophic, when spoken. No one knows exactly what it does. Rincewind certainly doesn’t. This spell attached itself parasitically to his brain years ago, and, in the meantime, has shoved all the other wizard-y type things he could have been doing right on out of there.

So, basically, he’s going through a lot. And this list isn’t everything, just the bits I pulled out by opening my book at random spots and reading a couple of lines. It kind of makes sense, in my opinion, that things feel a little topsy-turvy. Shit’s wild.

On top of that, I’d also argue that Pratchett is playing pretty fast and loose with plot and story structure in this book. It can feel sloppy at times, more like a bunch of little vignettes that have been strung together than a single, coherent storyline. The plot loosely wobbles along the tightrope strung between Rincewind’s uncanny luck, good and bad, and cheerfully-blockheaded-tourist Twoflower’s unstoppable ability to trample through the middle of every single situation that could possibly try to kill him. Very bad things happen, but somehow, they miraculously fail to die, and so Rincewind is still stuck shepherding Twoflower along through the next incident of someone or something trying to brutally murder them both. There’s no real greater plot or driving need, just Twoflower with his little camera, wanting to take pictures of every beautiful and dangerous part of the Disc.

If a rabid wolf the size of a bus came up and tried to eat him, Twoflower would take pictures of the inside of its mouth and say, “Oh, wow, I’ve never seen teeth that big before! Rincewind, won’t you take a picture of me with this magnificent beast?” And Rincewind wouldn’t answer, because he’d be half a mile away already and still moving fast, with nothing but a cartoon cloud of dust left behind to mark where he’d been.

[Here’s the boys, Rincewind and Twoflower, just doing their best. From the BBC two-part miniseries called The Colour of Magic, which actually spans the plot of both The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic. Yes, that is Samwise Gamgee playing Twoflower, and yes, I did get distracted by that a lot while watching. Twoflower has all of Sam’s earnest faith and absolutely none of his common sense.]

Fun!

The whole thing actually is pretty fun, though. It’s witty. It’s got something to say, even if that something is just “hey, aren’t all these identical High Fantasy Adventure books all overdramatic and ridiculous in the exact same ways?” Pratchett is writing this book as one massive joke he’s telling about the genre, the tropes, and the archetypes, and he does a pretty decent job even by today’s cultural standards, let alone the standards of 1983. Chances are that any point he’s making here in The Colour of Magic is something he’s going to make again, better, in a later book, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have the seeds of something here.

As a main example, I’ll point out Liessa Dragonlady, who has arguably the biggest role in one of the major conflicts of this book. Liessa is initially presented as the quintessential High Fantasy barbarian warrior lady, which would typically be more about sex appeal than any actual skill—except that Liessa is actually highly intelligent, 110% more talented and qualified as a leader and warrior than her brothers or literally anyone on the protagonists’ team, and is aware the whole time that she’s struggling against the patriarchy and her society (and the tropes) in trying to take what should be her rightful place as leader of the Wyrmberg. The sexism exists in the Discworld, not in the writing.

[Liessa from the BBC’s The Colour of Magic, wearing—no joke—a crop top armor chest piece. Actually, I think it’s technically a bikini, based on the bottom half of the armor. Or should I say the lack thereof? Classic.]

Liessa is a decent example of Pratchett’s ability to look at the tropes and the reader’s expectations, and then go and take his writing somewhere else. But even so, I’d absolutely point to Monstrous Regiment or even Equal Rites first for anyone wanting to read a really solid exploration of femininity and what it means to be a woman in a traditionally ‘masculine’ field. Or I’d suggest just about any book starring the senior witches or Tiffany Aching for examples of well-rounded female characters that demand respect in a world specifically designed to not want to give it to them.

But that’s just one example. The Colour of Magic has the seeds of quite a few really good ideas that Pratchett will explore in more depth later on.

I think those seeds are part of what makes The Colour of Magic worth a read at some point, even if it’s never going to be anyone’s favorite Discworld book. I love seeing the foundations of Future-Discworld, that settled absurdism I was talking about earlier, in this. We’ve got our proto-Vetinari, long before he had a name, being generically threatening and Machiavellian and as close to ‘cackling evil overlord’ as it’s possible to get without actually cackling, or at least without some sort of thunderstorm rumbling in the background. Ankh-Morpork is a wonderfully scum-filled cesspit of depravity and immorality. There’s no effective City Watch to kick things into a rickety and leaking approximation of ship-shape, so it’s probably a good thing that the river Ankh is so thick with pollution that you don’t need a ship to cross it—you can just walk.

There’s even some early conceptualization of Pratchett’s special brand of everyday magic, the kind that will show up over and over again in the Discworld: the idea that even with a reality full of gods and wizards and hyper-powerful, monstrous things, there’s still a lot of power in everyday, ordinary people.

Pratchett is all about belief. He preaches the importance of the self, in terms of making reality into the place we think it should be. In Pratchett’s world, the things we believe in matter, and not just in a philosophical sense. Belief is a real, tangible form of magic—in this book, specifically, Twoflower manages to summon an entire dragon out of nothing, just because he believes strongly enough that dragons should exist the way he’s always dreamed them to be. In later books, sheer belief and willpower are shown to create and fuel gods and spirits, to contain quasi-demonic entities of vengeance and darkness, and to form the backbone of every other more ‘traditional’ type of magic.

It’s nice to see the early forms of it here. I’m not going to get too into it, because it’s going to show up a lot in later books in more significant ways (I’m thinking Hogfather, Small Gods, and even Pyramids) and I don’t want to beat that horse to death just yet, but it’s one of the foundation stones of the Discworld. It’s somehow comforting to know that it’s been here since the very beginning.

It’s also funny as hell to see the stuff that Pratchett will eventually change, soften, or drop entirely as he settles into the way the Discworld will work. Did you know there are eight seasons on the Discworld? And that in my 1985 edition of the book, the footnote where he explains these eight seasons takes up the bottom half of two entire pages?

That’s one single footnote there. The first ever footnote, even, and it’s almost a full page long and utterly ridiculous. It’s incredible, and I love it a lot. I also love that almost none of the details here are ever mentioned again, and if they are, it’s never in a significant or memorable way—and Pratchett certainly doesn’t waste a whole page on any of them ever again. Well, except for Hogswatch, because Pratchett knows when he’s got a real winner. It might have taken him thirteen years, but he wrote a whole damn book about it, and we all can agree that Hogfather is a joy and a delight.

Not so much “Autumn Prime,” “Crueltide,” “Winter Secundus,” and blah blah blah etcetera whatever. I’m not ashamed to admit that I forgot them while I was literally still in the middle of reading them. And what the hell is “Reforgule of Krull”? No clue. It’s total nonsense, never seen again, and I think we can all agree we are fine with this.

On second thought, I think Pratchett does end up using Hubward and Rimward pretty regularly as directions. But without this info-dump, when reading other books, I think that even I figured out how “Hubward” and “Rimward” work on a flat plate of a world with a Hub in the center and a Rim along the outside. And I am so bad with maps and directions that I literally get confused trying to give people directions to the parking lot outside my work.

I’m no good at wrapping these things up, so I’m ending this post the same way that Pratchett ends the book: with Rincewind abruptly falling off the edge of the Disc.

[Originally, I was going to go hunt down some fanart or something, but I don’t have permission to use any of that, so instead you get my doodles off the scrap paper I steal from work. Luckily for everyone, I’m an artistic genius. The dot representing Rincewind obviously isn’t to scale, since one human person would be much smaller than that, but if it represents the size of his body and the size of his scream, then it’s basically accurate.]

* * * * * * * * * *

Side Notes:

Rincewind’s insane luck, good and bad, is because he’s a favorite of the goddess referred to only as ‘the Lady,’ since invoking her true name means she has to leave. She’s the anthropomorphic personification of Luck itself, and she’s the reason Rincewind always survives whatever terrible situation he finds himself in—but also the reason he’s stuck in that situation in the first place.

Everything that goes wrong, and the dramatic escape that inevitably follows, is because the Lady likes to play dice games with Fate, using normal people on the Disc as game pieces.

Rincewind, it turns out, is the human equivalent of her favorite Monopoly token. (The iron, maybe? It has the same sort of Looney Tunes cartoon-anvil vibe as Rincewind’s whole, well, everything.)

Death as a character makes his first appearance in The Colour of Magic. However, here it’s implied he actually is involved somehow in the killing process, and his role can be filled in by apparently random low-level demons on their days off, whereas later books make it clear he just collects and shepherds the dead onward, and actually the issue of his replacement is a big deal, cosmically speaking.

Pratchett sort of avoids this issue by claiming that Rincewind’s life timer is so complicated and convoluted (because of all the weird accidents and magical incidents) that Death just can’t tell when he’s actually supposed to die.

I guess Death shows up every time it looks like Rincewind might kick the bucket, just in case? And in that case, all the threatening stuff he says to Rincewind in these early books must be because he’s so irritated that he has to keep coming out for no reason, only to find that Rincewind has, once again, managed to survive. And maybe the low-level demon showing up instead was just, uh, Death trying to scare him into actually beefing it, this time…?

Although the Unseen University Librarian exists and is human for the entirety of this book and only this book, he does not appear at any point. He’s briefly referenced—or, at least, a librarian is referenced, but this is referring back when Rincewind was young and read the grimoire that left one of the Eight Great Spells parasitically attached to his mind. There’s no guarantee it’s the same librarian, and based on the turnover (read: murder) rate of University wizards at the time, I don’t think it’s likely that anyone managed to hold onto their job that long. On Google, I did find a thing where someone cut together some shots of him in human form from The Colour of Magic BBC show, so that’s pretty fun:

Once he’s changed into an orangutan in The Light Fantastic, he’s described as still looking a bit like the human Librarian: with that beard and hair combo, I think they nailed it.

* * * * * * * * * *

Favorite Quotes:

“Inn-sewer-ants-polly-sea.”

“She was the Goddess Who Must Not Be Named; those who sought her never found her, yet she was known to come to the aid of those in greatest need. And, then again, sometimes she didn’t. She was like that.”

“It was all very well going on about pure logic and how the universe was ruled by logic and the harmony of numbers, but the plain fact of the matter was that the Disc was manifestly traversing space on the back of a giant turtle and the gods had a habit of going round to atheists’ houses and smashing their windows.”

“Some pirates achieved immortality by great deeds of cruelty or derring-do. Some achieved immortality by amassing great wealth. But the captain had long ago decided that he would, on the whole, prefer to achieve immortality by not dying.”

“‘I’m sure you won’t dream of trying to escape from your obligations by fleeing the city…’ ‘I assure you the thought never even crossed my mind, lord.’ ‘Indeed? Then if I were you I’d sue my face for slander.’”

“It was octarine, the colour of magic. It was alive and glowing and vibrant and it was the undisputed pigment of the imagination, because wherever it appeared it was a sign that mere matter was a servant of the powers of the magical mind. It was enchantment itself. But Rincewind always thought it looked a sort of greenish-purple.”

#the colour of magic #discworld #rincewind #I don't know why I'm doing this #and I don't think anyone will actually read this #but if you do come talk to me!!#I'm going to be going through every single discworld book this year and writing up one of these #and I want to hear what people have to say #also tell me when I'm wrong because there's forty one books of material to go through and I'm absolutely going to miss stuff and mess up

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allykat4416 · 5 years

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Trip Report: Canada’s Wonderland

Dates: August 14-15, 2019

ocean man take me by the hand lead me to the land that you understand

Let’s set the scene here:

It is August 18, 2011. It is about 2:30 in the afternoon. Your mother is back at work, but you aren’t back to school. You’ve had massive surgery on your jaw 17 days earlier, and you’re staying with your aunt during the days because your mouth is wired shut and you’re a choking hazard to yourself. You’re finding out a lot of things you like, and one of those are roller coasters. Yes, you really like those. You check your trusty website, Screamscape, and see that a park you’ve only vaguely heard of before has announced something very big and very fast.

Color yourself interested. In your ever-growing quest to know more about these steel (and wooden!) beauties, you click the link to the video. The music begins, the green-tinted footage begins to play, and you are horrified at the thought of being 306 feet above ground. This looks amazing, but you’ll never get to go to Canada anyway and you’re terrified of heights.

This is my park now! It proclaims.

Congratulations, friend! You think. I don’t think our paths will ever cross.

It is July 17, 2013. You have just been 310 feet in the air. It scares you shitless. For the first time, you understand “Roller coaster hype.” It is this day you fall hopelessly and unchangeably in love with Intamin’s finest creation, Millennium Force. You swear that you will meet all the other gigas and you will protect them with your life. (But you won’t love them quite as much as you do Force. She’s special to you.)

It is May 9, 2015, and you remember about halfway up a 325-foot-tall lift hill that 306 used to scare you shitless. It still scares you shitless. It will be many years, but eventually, you will not be scared shitless of being 300+ feet in the air. But regardless of how much shit has been scared out of you, it is this day you fall madly in love with B&M’s finest creation, Fury 325. It is this day, really, when your thirst for Leviathan begins to go into overdrive.

It is August 14, 2019, and you’re riding out of Toronto with a tray of poutine in your lap when you see teal steel on the horizon. You know Kings Island is about to drop a giga that you don’t think you could love unconditionally. You are going to make the absolute most out of your time in Canada and milk every last hour of calling yourself “giga trash” without an asterisk while you still can. You can only choke out two words: Ocean Daddy.

Disclaimer time, I’m going to say it. Canada’s Wonderland is straight up my favorite Cedar Fair park. I am so enamored with this place that it isn’t funny. Everybody is so nice, and while the wait times are hot garbage, I think the park is worth it. I want to try more food there, but the treat we had was delicious! My only complaint with this park is the waits. Even the operations are really good, it’s just mobbed with people constantly.

My first international credit was Mighty Canadian Mine Buster. I was interested in trying this because it’s a clone of Shooting Star at the old Coney Island in Cincinnati. Shooting Star is originally what Beast at KI was meant to be before it became the icon it is today. I personally liked this ride more than I had expected to, and it makes me wish I had a chance to ride the OG Shooting Star. It can be a little bumpy at times, but it had some pretty good air since it had a chance to warm up through the day. Refurb and retrack it, but don’t RMC it. Please.

Behemoth is my second-favorite B&M hyper now, still behind SFOG’s fantastic Goliath. It has a lot of great, sustained floater, and it wasn’t trimmed to death. It’s very smooth and it does everything I like about Diamondback even better. The weird double-helix at the end was a unique finale, and I always like to award individuality in B&M hypers. I had heard that it was running kind of poorly this year, and if this is “poor,” I’d probably die from how good it is at the top of its game. I lost my shit when I saw the CN Tower on the lift as well. We liked it enough to ride it again on our second day back, despite the crappy wait. It’s my second favorite in the park.

From there, we went to Time Warp. This ride sucks, plain and simple. It both looks and feels like a Medieval torture device. I don’t know why this exists, but I’m pretty sure it violates the Geneva Convention by existing. Vortex is probably my favorite suspended coaster that’s still in operation (RIP to the Wolf!!) I enjoyed the part at the top of the lift behind Wonder Mountain. The rest of the ride is a little uncomfortable, but makes up for that with amazing scenery and cool interactions with the new neighbor. I would definitely ride this one again.

Wilde Beast is okay. It’s much rougher than MCMB, I think. The layout was pretty good, but not crazy memorable. If any wooden coaster here gets Schilke’d, I would vote for this one. It still isn’t awful, I just want to keep MCMB as is because of Shooting Star. Dragon Fyre is an inoffensive Arrow looper. Not the worst, not my favorite. My real main drive for this was to pad my count for Leviathan to be a quasi-milestone and to get good views of the ride I’ve been salivating over for the past 4 years.

Let’s flash back to last year, when I rode Cedar Point’s lackluster Valravn. The vest restraints killed my enjoyment of an otherwise-passable ride. Griffon had spoiled me. When Canada’s Wonderland announced their own dive coaster at the end of the 2018 season, we all collectively shrugged, said “lol okay and?”, and went on with our lives. Because Valravn was garbage, and this really couldn’t have been much better. My expectations for Yukon Striker were incredibly low, and we even put off this ride until the next day because we didn’t feel like waiting in line that long for a vested dive coaster.

I underestimated this ride. While I still prefer Griffon because of the old restraints, the vests aren’t nearly as bad on this. If it had the old restraints, Yukon easily would be my favorite dive coaster. The layout is very good---I didn’t think that Son of Beast looking ass loop would work, but it did, surprisingly well---and the ride has an amazing amount of speed that you can feel even when you aren’t in the front. It also feels like you’re hung up at the top longer than Valravn or Griffon.

I still really don’t like the name, but it’s more like a TwiTim or Mystic situation where it’s an ugly name for an otherwise very good ride. So fuck off, Yukon. I really didn’t want to like you as much as I did. You smug little shit. You Tesla-driving prick. You smarmy bastard with your popped collar and sweater vest. I really, really like you. Ugh.

But now it’s time to address the fish in the sea, isn’t it? The driving factor for me getting this damn passport? The most beautiful man in the RailChasers world (aside from maybe SFGAM Goliath)?

I incredibly like Leviathan. I knew I was going to like it a lot because up until the 15th I had a blindingly-strong giga bias, but I really didn’t think I was going to like it this much. While yes, on technicality, it still is my least favorite of the four, it’s better than the majority of coasters that I’ve ridden.

I still can’t tell if I prefer the back or the front with this one. I assumed I would prefer the front because that’s what I like on Fury, and you really do feel the speed so much more up there, but the back has more kick to it. Where Leviathan can’t really fall back on its length, I think I do prefer the kick to make the most of my short time.

And being short truly is Leviathan’s only flaw; while it actually is a few hundred feet longer than 305, Intimidator makes up for that with sheer aggression. You feel like you’ve been on it longer because the ride tousles you around. Leviathan is more like Force and Fury where he’s a very graceful, speedy boy, so it seems like it’s over much faster because the ride focuses on the feeling of “we are going really quickly as we finesse down Weston Road and go down as G-O-D.”

But honestly, aside from that one thing, this ride is fucking amazing and it was everything I hoped it would be and then some. I anticipated it to be my new second favorite B&M over Goliath but under Fury, and I was right. It’s a little closer to Fury than I honestly thought it would be. I’ve always been a little anxious about meeting rides that I’ve been stoked for ever since I was let down so severely by the shitshow that is Steel Vengeance. Thankfully, Leviathan didn’t break my heart like that. There was only happiness, Tim Horton’s coffee, and listening to a lot of Drake while we talked about our feelings.

Yes, I sobbed like a fucking bitch on the brake run. I love him so much. Dammit. Leviathan is so good. It almost (almost) makes me have hopes that Orion won’t be as bad as the layout suggests. And hey, at least all the North American gigas still have awesome names.

It is August 15, 2019. As you leave the park, watching that ride fade out of the rearview, you feel some really weird sense of peace. You realize there’s only two “bucket list” rides you have left in North America: any RMC Raptor you can get your paws on, and Outlaw Run. But you’re not worried about blazing rails or lassoing villains or being the sane Herschend RMC right now. Your only concern is when you get to see the most lovable sea monster you’ve ever met again.

#I love my canadian fish boyfriend and you can all eat shit #update I really don't even mind orion at this point thanks to the GTAs lol #trip reports

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lisetteaman · 5 years

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Sonder

Monday, December 17, 2001

A woman is in labor. She is young and heavily influenced by her parents’ unfolding resentment over her stupidly throwing her life away for a boy and becoming pregnant. He stands guard in the waiting room while his parents stare apathetically at the pages of a Time magazine that is ruminating on the Twin Towers. They sit, indifferent towards the current situation of their son having knocked up a teenager. Her parents barge into the waiting room and start an intense discourse in which each parent is screaming at the other, but no one is listening. Each forcefully playing his own disconnected word as if in a game of Scrabble, borrowing bits of the others’ anecdotes, while trying to see who can increase his score. Amongst all the squabbling, the young woman gives birth to a son, Jack.

Across the hall is a second woman in labor of identical age but antithetical descent. Her parents were extremely loving and unconditionally forgiving, but now deceased, while his are globe trotters who never stopped to watch him grow up. With neither involvement nor surveillance of an upper-hand, they wander into a territory much too young for a couple to embark upon and wind up with a kid, whom they name Olive.

Monday, December 17, 2018 Jack

5:30am His alarm goes off, and he hops into the shower. It’s the only part of his morning routine that he actually enjoys. He takes his showers in complete darkness, the lights off to further exemplify how much his heart craves to slip into the morning air with the steam and melt into the black sky just behind his skylight above his shower head. He looks up and sees the vapor condense to the cold glass of the window-pane. He draws a dick in the fog and goes back to playing with himself. Don’t be fooled: he’s a good kid, even with an immature and slightly inappropriate brain. Don’t blame him; blame his biological sex organ. There’s a pounding in his head. Nope, it’s his father on the other side of the door hammering him to hurry up. Time is always official business in his household. His parents are strict and conservative, of the affluent, conceited type. Jack has no say in this life. It was as though his parents put him in a box once he was born and slapped a label on it, saying: “elite, sophisticated aristocrat” and put no room for failure in with him. They had to. They needed to organize their life somehow, as their parents were hounding them to get their shit together if they wanted some semblance of a successful life. But proof be known, Jack’s parents are now exactly what they wanted to be: rich and famous. It is only fitting that they teach Jack the exact same way to live—with your head up your ass and your ego two sizes too big.

It’s about the hundredth time his father has started this conversation with him. It’s always about the law firm, and how Jack needs to keep his grades above everyone else’s in the class if he wants to get into Yale, like his father, and become the next business partner in the firm. “The board only wants to see Ivy League graduates, Jack…” Jack tunes him out and starts drifting into thoughts that are too conceptual for an early morning without coffee, but that’s how Jack likes it. He likes his brain and all the corners it takes him to. It just never seems tangible enough for Jack to get out of this barricaded city and plan the contours of his life—to go explore the world’s abyss for all it offers in releasing the fantasies that remain dormant inside his head. He’s a hopeless romantic. He has never loved anyone, but his heart, as fragile and malformed as it is, is too gentle and graceful to share with others. He protects it and its sentimental value.

6:45am Although Jack is mostly undisturbed by his parents’ lineage of condescension and economical influence, he does assume the role of a private school boy with wispy, blonde hair and a sophisticated veneer. His driver, Stewart, is parked outside to take Jack to Bradley Preparatory Academy. The limo turns and drives past the Lexington Avenue street subway. Jack turns his head and stares out the window at all the passersby in the subway street car, and thinks of how they all ride around town with their newspapers and their sweaty palms stuck to the subway car poles and their gum shoved under the seats, living in such frustration and haste. He turns his attention back and buries his head in his book, The Catcher in the Rye.

Olive

6:53am She sits smushed between two obese men in overly large, black wool coats, who are clearly failing in their attempt to hide their stress-induced eating habits. She looks at the kid sitting across from her take his gum out and stick it under the seat. She’s sweating and reaches her palm out for the pole to get up and stand somewhere else—not worth the body odor and loss in blood circulation. She hates this route. The Lexington Avenue stop, with all the men who aren’t wealthy enough to drive to work, but just arrogant enough to make her upper lip curl as they eye her up and down before disembarking the subway car. Most people take quick glances at Olive but are too skeptical to trust in how stunningly beautiful she naturally is. She dyes her curly, long hair pink and wears an excessive amount of black eyeliner. She has a septum nose ring in the shape of a butterfly and a pretty bold tattoo of the letter A on the side of her neck below her ear—her mother’s first initial, but some look at it and think of The Scarlet Letter. She’s on her way to work. Her parents passed away last year, and now she lives with her aunt in a tiny apartment in Queens. Her aunt made her a promise that she didn’t have to go to school this year as long as she got a job. So naturally, Olive picked a coffee shop in Midtown. “It’s where all the assholes are, Aunt Grace. The meatheads, the hoodlums, the tourists—they all congregate at my coffee shop.” Aunt Grace is not the biggest fan of having her 17-year-old niece travel right into the raucous of Time Square. She sees through Olive’s chill veneer—her hurt and big brain masked behind makeup and a stellar performance of “I don’t give a shit.” Olive is quintessentially brilliant. She was tested at a young age for an IQ score and found out she was in the top 2 percent of the world at her age. She refuses to get tested again, not for fear that she will have fallen behind, but for just the opposite—for fear that her score will be even more impressive and “they” will sit her in a think tank or ship her off to do long division somewhere until all of her brain cells die. She has read just about everything that has a spine or a library code, and yet, she is rarely amused by any of it. If Olive had it her way, she’d be a starving artist—hitchhiking her way to some rural landscape, finding earthly materials to paint with, and blogging her experiences with people from different cultures around the world.

3:45pm Olive usually walks down to Central Park when she gets off of work. Sometimes she runs, but it’s a cold day out and kind of gloomy. She loves these days—the days when the people seem to be more capricious than normal and she can find a nook somewhere she can sit and watch the melancholy mood dissipate into the grey air. It always seems quieter on these days, more people with their headphones in and their caps on, blinding their focus from the inherit craziness singing in the background. She remembers it’s her birthday. It’s been a whole year since her parents died. She dials her mom’s phone number and listens for the voicemail message: “Hi, you’ve reached Abagail, sorry I can’t come to the phone right now, probably doing something fantastical with Olive right now. I’ll call you back when I get a chance. P.S. if this is Grace, you know where to find me.” Olive is not a crier. She rarely shows her emotions, especially to the people around her. But right now, she sits alone on a park bench, bawling her eyes out, wishing time and memory flowed backwards. What a perfect moment to start questioning everything around her—how time keeps getting faster, how babies are being born but others are dying. How the world seems to be constantly growing, and yet, this city has bolted her down and she can’t escape to see what’s out there and who’s living as vivid and complex a life as she is. She starts getting stuck inside her head, trapping her beautiful, yet damaged mind inside. She feels swallowed in a sea of thoughts and tumbling emotions that are rising like a maverick. She can’t contain it anymore. She erupts—she opens her big mouth and screams. Silence. No one is around her. The world has just stopped—frozen in time and place. She turns her head to see if she can move. Nothing happens, no sounds, just silence. Then, wham! A cab flips over and smashes into a tree.

Jack

4:13pm Jack usually gets picked up by Stewart after school, but he decides to ditch his driver and catch a ride in a cab downtown to Central Park. The clouds are hanging especially low, blanketing the city in its sorrows—these are the kind of days he likes. His driver slams on the breaks. However, the car beside goes flying through the intersection, but it doesn’t make it through the red light in time. The cab is hit by a fast moving semi, is vaulted into the air, and strikes a tree upside down. Jack tells his driver to go ahead and turn around to take him back home. The road would be closed soon, and if he stayed at the park, there would be too much traffic to ever get back home in time for dinner. Dinner’s always at a hard 6:00pm, after indoor lacrosse practice, but he skipped today…didn’t have the heart for it.

Jack’s birthday has always weighed on him, but this year has been especially heavy. His parents have pressured him more, his friends are mostly heroin addicts, and the girl he has been inconveniently crushing on for the past three years is stuck like glue to the hot glow-up from sophomore year. He turns his head out the window and watches as the people dance about the street, always rushing—places to be, people to meet, busy lives to attend to. For the rest of the cab ride home, Jack ponders the irrevocable power of freedom and silently cries in the back of the cab. He wonders if there is a person out there that will make him dance.

Olive

11:34pm Olive walks through the front door. Grace jumps up from the kitchen table and runs to her. “Where have you been? Don’t you do that to me again!” Grace has tears in her eyes. She grabs Olive and holds her in her arms. Olive explains that there was an accident near the park, so she walked for a couple miles before calling a cab the rest of the way home. “Hun. You have to be careful. It’s a zoo out there this time of the year and I HATE the idea of you being alone, especially today.” She plays with Olive’s hair. Olive looks into her eyes and starts sobbing again. She can’t hold it back anymore. It’s been a year since she cried—that’s how tough Olive’s cover-up has become, that’s how much time she has spent packaging all of her emotions into a tiny box and burying them deep into a pit in her soul. No longer, she has freedom from her pain at that exact moment. It’s fleeting though. Olive snaps back to reality and pushes Aunt Grace off of her. She wipes her tears and tells Grace that she isn’t hungry and just wants to be alone, again…a ploy to start hiding her true self from those who get too close to her.

She lies flat on her back on her bed and stares at the ceiling. Her mom was a fantastic artist and used to paint with Olive all the time. When her parents passed, she went digging under their bed for the boxes of old school supplies and random crafts until she found these paintings. She had stapled them to the ceiling. Aunt Grace was against Olive putting holes in the ceiling, but it didn’t bother Olive one bit. “What’s it like up there, mom? Is it colorful and just all that you hoped it would be?” Olive has the particular feeling that no matter what she does, everything will always go wrong. It’s like everyone around her is just living such a normal and simple life, but she has these powers to see the future and know that something—her passions, her love life, her job, her cares, her worries—will always go wrong. She’s coped this past year in her own silent, painful way. She wears threaded friendship bracelets and rubber bands over her wrists to hide the pain from the naked eye, but what the eye can’t see is that she is secretly scabulous. She is proud of her scars, of the character and the meaning behind where they are and how they got there. She plays with them like autographs on her body that she doesn’t share with the world. They remind her of her identity and how she got to this particular place of hell in her life. They speak of her brilliancy, of her broken mind and damaged heart. She gets out her phone and dials her mom’s number again. She can hear it ring in the box that she keeps it in, tucked away on the top shelf of her closet. It’s her namesake, and she must never let anyone take it away from her. Aunt Grace doesn’t know she has it for fear she would rip it away from her on a forced path of closure and acceptance. But, Aunt Grace, how the FUCK ARE YOU SUPPOSED TO ACCEPT THAT YOUR MOTHER WAS FUCKING KILLED?

Aunt Grace knocks on the door, and Olive lets her in. Grace apologizes, but Olive knows it’s not her fault. She pats the bed for Grace to come and lie down with her. They stare at the ceiling while Aunt Grace tells old stories of Abagail and the crazy, stupid adventures they would have as kids. How Abagail fell in love so young and then had Olive. How Olive was such a tiny baby, born 3 months early, yet grew up to a be such a feisty, resilient, and brilliant young woman. The world seems to be spinning slower tonight with Aunt Grace sharing her memories about Olive’s mother. This whole year has seemed, to Olive, to be growing faster in time, as though the moon has been gravitating farther from this earth, and so she was spinning faster and faster until now. Now, it finally stops. The moon returns, and there is a brief moment of clarity for Olive. “Aunt Grace, do you ever feel like you’re stuck in one body, occupying just one space and it will never change? That people around you will continue to live freely but you will essentially never grow up to understand the world and what it has to offer? That you’re just a gawky kid from Queens who has lived the same day over and over again and nothing about it will ever change… “And that maybe you’re supposed to meet someone who will change your world? That there is somebody perfect out there, just for you and you’re supposed to spend eternity together, because he is the cosmic balance to your failures?” Aunt Grace doesn’t have an answer for her. So for the remainder of her 17th birthday, they lie together, with Olive’s head resting on her aunt’s shoulder. Olive feels safe for the first time in what seems like ages. She likes it and holds on to that feeling for as long as she can.

Tuesday, December 18, 2018 Jack

10:00am There’s a school trip to the Met to see the new exhibit on Art and Conspiracy, how everything is connected—public policy and the expression of artists who explored the hidden operations of power and the symbiotic suspicions between government and its citizens. However, Jack’s class is comprised of kids who spend their time vacationing in the Hampton’s and whose parents are politically powerful in the Republican party. Therefore, they aren’t interested in artists who unveil how the government is hidden in webs of deceit.

Olive

9:00am Aunt Grace wakes Olive. “Let’s go to the art museum today. C’mon girly, call off work this one time. We didn’t get to do anything for your birthday yesterday, and it’s the perfect day to go. It’s raining and you looove the Met. You can’t deny it.” Olive smiles and already knows the answer. All Aunt Grace had to do was say the word “Met” and Olive would be snapping on her shoes and out the door.

10:00am They arrive with a huge crowd of prep boys from the Academy down the street. Olive looks at them with disgust. “Look at them with their perfect hair and pocket squares in their suit jackets, so precise and perfect. Their lives so plain and planned—destined for wealth and authoritative power.”

Jack

10:38am Jack is drawn to the stunning expression of freed meaning and colorful revelations. He approaches an especially extraordinary depiction of Gerald Ford being pulled by a puppeteer behind the stock mark exchange. It’s exactly how he feels. Someone is pulling on him, his heart, and he can’t see who. He walks towards the art piece. There’s a tall white wall separating the room into two sides. He leans his right shoulder against the wall as he looks at the picture. He stops and feels the wall with his hand.

10:41am The hopeless romantic questions, “Is it her?” The woman who is tugging on his heart and pulling him along. The woman who has been dragging him around the city, pushing him to think that there is more of the world out there than what his school has taught him and his parent have preached to him. More than the uniform thought that people live such boring, regular lives, but that there are people who claim a dynamic life of excitement, complication, and vividness. These thoughts come flooding in; he can’t imagine anything else but that there is someone with just as beautiful a heart and complex a mind as him. A woman who will flip him upside down and change his world.

Olive

10:41am She stands with a white wall on her left side as she stares up at two black and white paintings. One is an alien, and she knows that’s exactly how she feels. An out of body experience occurs. She is lifted up out of her body. She feels pulled along, with increasing thoughts that there is more to this world, to this universe than this one place that she has stayed all her life. There is more out there, a reason her parents were killed by a drunk driver. A reason they left this earth and flew into the sky. There is a person who lives at this exact moment who is drawing her in, her heart, her mind. Then…

The Meantime

10:42am Nothing. A moment of tangency flees from the mind; the simple sample size of the original thought that the people of this world stand still and their lives are of no real meaning, just random commotion, comes back into focus. Jack turns to his left and walks away. Olive turns right and tells Aunt Grace she should leave.

10:43am A failed occhiolism: they never became aware of the smallness of their perspectives, in which they could never draw a meaningful conclusion about their worlds, and how they could have crossed paths and added to the complexities of the world’s great culture. A moment so innocuous, but with a chance for it marking the diversion in a new era of life. Like they just missed their cue. Two people who share a parallel story, harmonizing in what could have been a wilder experiment if she just turned the corner and crossed his path. But life is an unrepeatable anecdote. A universal flaw that the epiphanies of Jack and Olive were imperceptive and fleeting, until nothing was left but the echo of what might have been.

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dingoes8myrp · 6 years

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Buffyverse Ships: Top 5′s

Okay. So, I’ve sworn off OTP’ing because I just can’t limit myself to one “true” pairing. However, I do prefer some ships over others. I’m going to rank three sets of top 5’s below.

Canon: A relationship that has been seen on either Angel the Series or Buffy the Vampire Slayer in which the two characters are an established couple.

Semi-Canon: A relationship that was eluded to, hinted at, or an “almost, but not quite” in either of the shows. This includes one-night stands, flirtations, and flings.

Non-Canon: A relationship that never happened and was never eluded to in the shows.

I haven’t read the comics, so I’m not including those ships here, as I don’t know enough about them to rank them. If there’s a ship not listed and you’d like to know where it ranks, let me know.

Note: I’m always up for hearing alternate points of view on ships! Feel free to try to change my mind about a ship, particularly if it’s one you really enjoy that I’ve ranked too low for your liking (or haven’t ranked at all). It has been known to happen (see Fuffy, Spuffy, and Spander). If you want to point out some unhealthy/problematic things about a ship, please respect those with a differing opinion and try to avoid straight up ship bashing. I welcome all shippers to follow/comment on my blog and I’d like to keep things respectful for everyone in the comments. If Tumblr had a better moderating system I wouldn’t have to say that.

Canon

One: Buffy & Angel

These two are one of my top ships ever. The story arc has everything: a giddy school girl crush, forbidden love, murder, Hell, death, redemption, and teamwork. My favorite thing about Buffy and Angel is their ability to work as a team even when they’re not a couple. They compliment each other so well in terms of occult knowledge and strength. From a storytelling standpoint, this was my favorite ship to watch. It was layered, complicated, and heartbreaking. It’s the one that got me right in the feels the most.

Two: Willow & Oz

I’m so into these two. Oz is my favorite and he and Willow were so cute together in the early stages of their relationship. They’re two nerdy, smart kids who bonded over their nerdiness. And I related so hard to Willow when I was in high school, so they were a bit of a vicarious ship for me, which is why it’s one I’m particularly fond of in general.

Three: Willow & Tara

If I could tie Tillow with Willoz I would, but that’s cheating. The only reason Willoz got the edge was because of my personal relation to it. But, I love Tillow! They started with a friendship that naturally progressed into something more. We see an entirely different side to both women when they’re together. They bring out hidden skills and talents in one another through their mutual strength and encouragement.

Four: Fred & Gunn

This was such an unexpected relationship, but a pleasant surprise. Fred was so sweet and Gunn was so tough, but Fred brought out this sweet side to him I don’t think we would’ve seen otherwise. These two were just adorable. Maybe a little mismatched, but that was one of the things that made it awesome.

Five: Wesley & Lilah

Out of left field came Wesley and Lilah! But, it made so much sense in the context of their storylines as characters. On the surface of this relationship, Wesley and Lilah were born out of convenience where each of them needed the other one. But, as the relationship developed further more layers were revealed and they genuinely had warmth and passion for one another. The blurred lines of morality were great here.

Semi-Canon

One: Faith & Buffy

This relationship is under the surface for most of season three. It’s not only subtext, it’s very nearly text. They had a Single White Female thing going on where they were both envious of one another for different reasons. The fact that they’re both slayers gives them a bond and an understanding of one another hard to find elsewhere.

Two: Cordelia & Doyle

These two brought out some lovely aspects of one another as friends. Cordelia made Doyle more introspective and self-aware. Doyle made Cordelia more humble (unfortunately most of that development occurred because of/after his demise). So much groundwork was laid for this relationship only for it to never happen. It had a lot of potential.

Three: Angel & Cordelia

Both Angel and Cordelia evolved so much over the course of Angel and alongside one another. Cordelia gained a lot of humility and became a hero in her own right. Angel continued his redemption arc and found a new purpose outside of Sunnydale. These two were a very good team, always picking each other up and keeping each other going. That’s the heart of a good relationship, isn’t it?

Four: Angel & Spike

The bromance with these two is so strong. They’re like a bickering married couple and I love it. I can’t find the actual evidence to site, but I know there’s context in the shows eluding to a romantic/sexual past with these two. I definitely buy that it happened. Their chemistry is fantastic. Two old, bitter vampires both trying to redeem themselves and never quite feeling like they do.

Five: Faith & Angel

There’s so much Faith and Angel have in common. They both crossed moral lines that can’t be uncrossed, and they understand important aspects of one another (and forgive them). They have so much chemistry and they support one another. They’re each that person for one another where they could call and ask for any favor. “Hey, I gotta dump a body.” “Damn, alright. Let me get my shovel, but we’re gonna have a talk about this later.”

Non-Canon

One: Buffy & Xander

At any point post-season four I would’ve bought these two as a couple. Mature Xander and Owning-Her-Slayerness Buffy were so ride or die for each other. They’re each other’s heart, strength, and discipline when needed. Again, excellent teamwork always.

Two: Faith & Gunn

These two were gritty and edgy and I think they would’ve complemented each other wonderfully. They would’ve been a badass fighting duo, probably would’ve argued like hell, but they would’ve been hot.

Three: Connor & Dawn

Connor and Dawn are both mystically constructed beings who weren’t meant to exist, but they do, and they have issues as a result. They’d probably connect over this aspect of their lives no one else shares. Connor could train Dawn to fight and defend herself (and feel needed, which is helpful). Dawn could give Connor lots of spirited pep talks and be the little ray of sunshine he desperately needs.

Four: Spike & Dawn

This is a little taboo because Spike became almost like a paternal figure for Dawn, but I do love their dynamic. He’s protective of Dawn and he stands by her unconditionally. Dawn trusts and looks up to Spike, but doesn’t take his crap. This would be an interesting romance.

Five: Xander & Oz

These two always had a great, low-key bromance. There’s a mutual respect there and a cute friendship. I’m not gonna lie, I saw a Tumblr post pointing out they sometimes wear the same shirt but never at the same time, implying these two secretly hooked up here and there and, if they hadn’t been dating other people most of the time, I totally would’ve bought it.

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