The tree was put under arrest in 1898, when a British army officer, James Squid, under the influence of alcohol, thought that the tree was moving towards him. Threatened by the tree’s movement, the officer decided to teach a lesson to the offender and issued arrest warrants of the tree.
You don’t understand, you haven’t been inside this thing. It’s like walking into a parallel dimension made up of camouflage and taxidermy. The thing has a huge waterway running through the whole shop that contains live catfish, ducks and (in one section) alligators. The largest free standing elevator in the us is in this pyramid. It contains a bowling alley, hotel and restaurant. They have a huge aquarium that scuba divers go into to feed the fish and have keeper talks in.
The pyramid actually predates the bass pro. If I’m not mistaken it used to hold a museum. It’s such a central part of Memphis’s skyline that it’s on our postcards. And it’s been turned into a Bass Pro Shop.
Like, the more I talk about it the more I agree with my roommate that a glittering glass pyramid on the horizon that is actually a Bass Pro Shop sounds like one of those overly long Night Vale bits that turns into an ad.
The Pyramid used to be an amphitheater. When I was a kid, I saw Janet Jackson, N*SYNC, and hilariously, Sisqo, LFO, and Eve6 here. However, the Pyramid was the biggest waste of city money because, as it turns out, a fucking pyramid is awful for acoustics! It also had direct competition with The Coliseum amphitheater, ironically.
Anyways, it was pretty short lived and while it was inactive, it was passed around as various things. The King Tut traveling museum showcase came to it, which was cool as all hell, but other than the occasional flea market and temporary skating rink, it was abandoned.
What would happen with the Pyramid was always a hot topic of debate in Memphis. Bass Pro had been gunning for it for a while, but people were really opposed to it for Obvious Reasons. The Pyramid was such an icon on Memphis’ skyline at this point that they didn’t want it to be a huge retail outlet. There were plans to turn it into a theme park of some sort, or maybe an aquarium, but what it came down to was money. Bass Pro had the money and Memphis kind of has a shit government when it comes to things like arts, public works, and culture lmao
anyways, yeah. its a fucking bass pro shop. it has the tallest free-standing elevator in the world and has a steam punk bar on top.
¯_(ツ)_/¯
Archaeologists of the future are going to have a field day with this.
“the boy cries you a sweater of tears and you kill him” sounds like a richard siken poem but so does squidward’s subsequent line “this time there’s gonna be love. so much that he’s going to drown in it”
Im taking a break from playing video games and that gave me allot of free time to finally do some Steven Universe fanart that I have had on my mind for a few months now.
I tried my best to come up with poses that reflect each character, and I tried to mix the style of the show with my style I even used most of the official color schemes. I think Amethyst and Pearl are my faves out of the four pics i drew.
Now I must get back to work on commissions and class work
My drawing of Steven is being used to sell Churros, and that is hilarious. It sucks having your art stolen and used for this kind of stuff but its still pretty funny.
The thing about emo (as a musical genre and a cultural phenomenon) is, I think, that it was a response to the September 11, 2001 terror attacks and the Bush administration’s painful mishandling thereof.
No, I’m serious. My Chemical Romance was formed as a direct result of Gerard Way witnessing the towers fall. Green Day’s ‘American Idiot’ (an album that, at least as far as I can tell from having been a teenager in Canada at the time, was seminal in influencing the look and sound of emo) is all about the Bush administration – all the lyrics are about life under a democratic dystopia and many reference current events from the time – and it came out in 2004, halfway through the Bush presidency. A bunch of Linkin Park’s stuff makes reference to it also, especially their album ‘Minutes to Midnight’, where they first started moving out of the nu-metal/rap sound they’d been working with before and into a more mainstream emo-rock sound. That album came out in 2007. All of the really big bands with that kind of sound – and most of the smaller ones with more of a punk/hardcore sound but similar themes – were active in the mainstream from around 2001-2010. Many of them didn’t survive past 2009, and those that did either totally reinvented themselves (Fall Out Boy, Panic! At The Disco, MCR for the five minutes it took to produce Danger Days, Linkin Park) or became near-totally irrelevant (Paramore dropped an album sometime in the last two years; did any of you know that? And Green Day haven’t mattered since 21st Century Breakdown, which was released in 2009).
Why? Well, many of you are probably too young to remember this, but the 2001 terror attacks were what really made ‘Islamic terrorism’ a real threat in the minds of most Westerners. We’d never experienced an attack of that scale on American soil, and it was just as the internet was really becoming a mainstay in every house and my generation was getting online. As a result, it was not only a major political event, but it was hugely personal – the coverage was everywhere, in everybody’s home, all the time, and there were a lot of kids being exposed to the coverage in such a way that they often had no good way to process it. I’m not exaggerating when I say it changed the way we live. I’m Canadian and I felt this shit. Before, we could fly to America domestic, without a passport. Now? Half the draconian, ridiculous rules that hold you up at the TSA today were initiated in September and October of 2001. It was the only thing anyone could think of to do – lock down, protect your own. People were scared, on a continental scale.
And to make matters worse, George W. Bush’s government, which had to somehow respond to and take point in the response to this unprecedented event, didn’t seem to have the first foggiest clue what they were doing. This was a government that not only didn’t seem to listen to its people, not only lied blatantly to its people, but did it badly. They made hugely unpopular decisions, including starting a war in the Middle East that dragged in multiple countries and completely failed to achieve its stated goal of catching Osama bin Laden or proving that he had in his control weapons of mass destruction (the whole war was predicated on the fact that these so-called weapons of mass destruction existed, that the Bush administration had good reason to believe that they existed, were under the control of the Taliban, and were going to be used against Western targets, none of which was ever proven to be true).
So, from 2001-2009, the two (TWO) full terms of the Bush presidency, there were a whole lot of people who couldn’t vote (be they under the age of majority, like most of the emo kids I knew, or Canadians unhappily dragged along with the US’ boneheaded foreign policy decisions because we’re allies, also like most of the emo kids I knew) and therefore felt, not only scared of basically the impending end of their world in a way that they hadn’t previously had to feel, and not only angry about being clearly lied to and clumsily manipulated when the truth was obvious to anyone with eyes, but also powerless to do anything to change anything about that. And meanwhile, people kept dying in this pointless war and the president kept trying to hold together the illusion that everything was hunky-dory.
And what was popular with teenagers from about 2001-2009? Yep. Emo.
Emo as a genre was very personal, very focused on the individual (with the exception of the albums I noted above), but lyrically and musically, it fit right with the cultural atmosphere of the time. People were scared of the impending end of their world/their lives? Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge and The Black Parade. People were angry about things they felt powerless to change? From Under The Cork Tree and Decemberunderground. Emo captured what kids were feeling about trying to fit into a world that was so clearly fucked up and broken and pretending to be okay, putting on a strong face to Show The Terrorists They Didn’t Win. Emo was about stripping away the mask, exposing the messy, angry, frightened, sad, true underbelly of American society at the time, and exposing hypocrisy – in individuals as much as in politicians. The hatred of ‘preps’ and ‘posers’? Totally not just a My Immortal thing. Emo was about wearing your heart on your sleeve, about it being okay to mourn, to rage, to be afraid for your life beyond this – and to keep moving forward regardless, step by slow step.
So what changed in 2009 that made the phenomenon fade without so much as a whimper? Simple. Hope. The Audacity of Hope, to be exact.
Barack Obama won his presidency largely because young people supported him. Those were the young people who suffered through feeling helpless and powerless under Bush, who wanted things to change but felt they had no chance of making it so. Barack Obama was a chance. One of his first campaign promises was to end the Iraq war, a promise he followed through on. And even if his presidency hasn’t been perfect, it has never been the Bush administration, with the feeling that the will of the people was being entirely and quietly ignored by those in power to further their own agendas.
What I am saying, then, I guess, is that it’s time to buy stocks in Hot Topic, because whatever happens in the upcoming US presidential election, there are a lot of young people who may soon be needing black, white, and red graphic band tees and Manic Panic hair dye.
From someone who was in American high school in 2001, we were also incredibly terrified for at least the early Bush years. We were all pretty sure that the draft could possibly be reinstated and we could get sucked into the war. Some of my friends and I had plans on how best to get Don’t Ask, Don’t Telled out of the draft. We were all absolutely terrified of the prospect.
On the Cracked podcast they were talking about why we get so much crazy news from Florida. Apparently most states have laws that conceal details about crimes from the media, but not Florida. In any other state they would only know that an assault occurred, but in Florida they have instant access to the crazy details. Stuff like this probably happens everywhere, but we’ll never hear about it.
It took me longer than I’d like to admit to realize Manatee is a city name.
i thought this was a dwarf fortress bug report for a moment
Having lived in Florida though, I can absolutely confirm that people act weirder and more hostile there.
It’s the most “tropical” mainland U.S. state and you’re never more than an hour away from a beach or a day’s drive from Disney, so it attracts people from all walks of life and all parts of the world. It’s a year-round melting pot of wealthy snowbirds, retirees, low-income tourists and a jumbled-up mix of classes. Where we lived, we could walk to both a pawn shop that was constantly robbed and the illuminated towering headquarters of a plastic surgeon. The rich and poor aren’t separated in Florida like they are most other places and everywhere you go are people who feel entitled because they’re there for a vacation or escape.Add to that the stickiest, most miserably humid heat all year round, a thousand things that can sting you and of course the alligators and you’ve got a perfect storm of non-stop stress, confusion and conflict.
does anyone else feel like they aged 5 years in the first 6 months of 2016
Patch Notes, Earth, version 2016 (August Update): Known Issues
* A bug has been discovered where the Rapid Aging Field, previously localized to the Oval Office chamber in the POTUS Predicament Non-Combat Instance, was mistakenly applied globally in the January Update. We are working on a fix that does not involve a server rollback and we hope to have it implemented before the November Update.
* The Rapid Aging Field bug also influenced a separate but related bug causing player characters with Fame statistics higher than 512 to have an increased chance of death. Due to the data structure underlying Earth, characters affected by this bug are not able to be restored, even in the event of a server rollback. We apologize for this inconvenience.
* There is a bug within the Rio de Janeiro zone that can cause incorrect loading of the zone data for the Favela Frenzy Survival-Mode Instance raid when attempting the Rio Summer Games Non-Combat Instance. This was caused by placeholder data not being replaced by the final version of the Rio maps in time before the Rio Summer Games event began.
* Due to unanticipated disruptive player behavior, the US Election Server-Wide Story event is progressing in a way that the Lore Team did not properly code for. There are significant exploits within the event script that are putting the story event into states which should normally be impossible (for example, a candidate receiving the Nominated status despite overwhelmingly high Disapproval scores). Players are reminded that they must live with the consequences of their actions within Earth, especially in Server-Wide Story events. The Lore Team is working to correct the event script going forward.
