Our new Indie Games subforum is now open for business in G&T. Go and check it out, you might land a code for a free game. If you're developing an indie game and want to post about it,
follow these directions. If you don't, he'll break your legs! Hahaha! Seriously though.
Our rules have been updated and given
their own forum. Go and look at them! They are nice, and there may be new ones that you didn't know about! Hooray for rules! Hooray for The System! Hooray for Conforming!
Unique Locations and Strange Places!
Posts
Somebody did get killed and partially buried by a collapsing formwork, but they ended up pulling the body out.
kpop appreciation station i also like to tweet some
Millions were conscripted to assist building the wall, millions may have even died during construction, but as far as is known none are actually buried in the wall [here's a book]. As a bonus, it's also a source that clarifies that the wall is, in fact, not visible from space with the naked eye (and why would it be, it is basically the width of a small river?). That doesn't stop you from seeing it with a camera, though.
Going back to other, cool, unique (geology-based) places:
Hawaii's lava tubes!
The main Hawaiian island has 5 volcanoes. Because Hawaii's magma comes from deep in the mantle instead of plate boundaries, it tends to have low silica content. Having less silica makes the lava more fluid and less explosive, which lets it do all sorts of fancy things - like build lava tubes. The tubes generally form when the surface of flowing lava hardens, insulating the inside. That lava remains hot and can flow farther, but eventually ends up leaving a hollow space behind. Subsequent eruptions may make use of these tubes, but as the volcano grows some may be antiquated and cut off from the rest of the network.
Which is why Hawaii's Volcanoes National Park even has some tubes you can go inside.
(I guess it may be important to note that lava tubes can also form from very hot magma burrowing through the ground).
Hawaii basically exists because a hotspot in the mantle continually allows magma to eek towards the surface. The Pacific plate is slowly moving NW (which is why the Hawaiian islands get progressively smaller in that direction, as the plate over the hotspot has moved, removing the source of magma, killing the volcano and letting the subsequent islands erode). This effectively makes Mauna Loa (Hawaii's primary volcano) the biggest volcano on Earth (and the tallest mountain when measured from the ocean floor). It's basically layers upon layers of lava flows climbing over 9,000m - reaching through to break the ocean's surface (...and continuing high enough to have a snow-capped peak).
Steam Id: Jager2
Up behind Clifton Beach, just north of Cairns. I tried to find it on google earth, but I can't seem to spot it...
I won't show you the mostly NSFW pictures but with a simple Google Image Search, you can see the various statues and figurines of Chinese mythology (Journey to the West for example), including a rather gruesome depiction of the Ten Courts of Hell (basically the Asian version of Dante's Inferno).
I remember going as a kid, thinking that it was going to be like Disneyland. Boy was I mistaken. The journey through hell water ride was basically a hellish version of the Its a small world ride.
Here's a teaser:
NSFW? http://i.imgur.com/Tmia8.jpg
And many more!
I have no idea where it is, or what it is. Anyone know?
SODOMISE INTOLERANCE
Tide goes in. Tide goes out.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil%27s_Peak_(Cape_Town)
Speaking of the First Emperor's insanity, on the non-myth way, the motherfucking Terracotta Army and the rest of his tomb deserves a mention:
Thousands of soldiers, several regiments worth. Chariots, horses, weaponry, fortifications. None identical. In their heyday they were vividly painted as well.
Pyramids are cool but...this guy took an army with him to the afterlife. Seems like he went on the conquer heaven.
Bonus: All of their exhibits were made in China.
Here's their website.
That was a fun afternoon.
Still worth seeing, but more impressive in the "holy shit that emperor dude was crazy" way than anything else.
Where is this? I desperately hope that's a hotel of some kind of at least owned by someone who let's people inside.
Kind of how I felt about Stonehenge. I wanted to go there for years, thinking it would be an amazing sight and everything. When I finally got there, I was really underwhelmed. Not only are the stones not quite as big as I imagined, but you can't even get near them because it's a tourist hotspot. You have to walk around in a line full of people just looking at it from afar. The line barring you from getting any closer is right behind me in this pic:
Ahem.
The trick is to find a University 'class' with a study abroad week over spring break. say one that covers prehistoric England. You take this course, and your professor just happens to be old school buddies with the guy that runs stonehenge.
So, you go to the big stone circle about 7am, roughly 2 hours before its opened to the public. And you walk around inside the circle. Yes, inside the circle. Of course you are escorted around by the only armed guards in all of england, who quite frankly tell you that if you sit, stand, or remove anything from the circle at all, the will shoot you.
And no, they were not joking. I'm pretty sure they would have shot us. It's not all that much more impressive inside the circle, other than all the people with their fancy schmancy digital cameras that stopped working. and my little disposable kodak camera was the only one that worked. But other than that, it's kinda what you see.
You have to fight through some bad days, to earn the best days of your life.
That's why, when I was vacationing over there, I found Avebury much more interesting.
Edit:: Yesss Avesbury was fantastic! There is one of the stones called, I think, The Devil's Seat, that actually has something like a seat carved out in it. So cool.
I really wish I had a scanner so I could upload all my pictures from that trip. Avesbury, Maiden Castle, the old Burial Mounds, the White Horse, Cerne Giant.
You have to fight through some bad days, to earn the best days of your life.
This was pre 9/11 that I went. Spring of 2001, so..
You have to fight through some bad days, to earn the best days of your life.
I went to Laycock and it was amazing. I want to go back and check out places like that and spend more time hiking in Scotland.
These guys are at Windsor Castle:
Haha, yeah, the video is a little over dramatic.
But I bet you could make a really good horror video game based there, filled with leftover soviet bioweapons and mutated chimps. mutated SOVIET chimps. led by a mutated soviet chimp stalin!
edit: I just realized I posted without refreshing and accidentally skipped a page of content, sorry guys >_<
edit2: I'm gonna put together something about Lurray Caverns soon, we need some more caves in this thread.
Fun fact: supposedly the part where the guy and his kid "experienced" the organ-like sound of a stalactite being tapped is when the guy's kid walked into a stalactite and bonked his head.
Next up is the largest pool of water in the cavern, named Dream Lake.
The water is so still it reflects the ceiling perfectly. The water doesn't even reach 2 feet deep at the deepest point, but it looks like a cluttered pit of stalagmites. It's a really cool optical illusion to see in person. The horizontal bit of light reflects on the surface of the water, and everything below/in front of that in the photo is the water surface.
Another amazing part of the caverns is the "drapery" formations. The most impressive is Saracen's Tent.
The pictures don't really do it justice, but it really looks like the rock is a draped sheet that was petrified somehow.
so cool.
You have to fight through some bad days, to earn the best days of your life.
I also remember a place in the caverns where there are crystal formations that looks like white moss. But I'm pretty sure that's a photo restricted area and thus there aren't any photographs (at least not that I can find).
Spring of 2001 makes it more impressive since everything was shit-hard to get in to due to Mad Cow scare.
We don't really have mountains very much in Australia, but here in Queensland we have these for some reason.
You have to fight through some bad days, to earn the best days of your life.
Also, that place is green as hell.
StarCraft II User Name: DeadMenRise
I have no idea what the hell they are, but, probably. Also Southeast Queensland is a very green sort of place. It comes with being subtropical.
Here is the fantastically named Mt Tibrogargan.
http://www.themeparkreview.com/japan2004/nara1.htm
Yeah, Wikipedia says they are volcanic plugs (also called volcanic necks). They're formed when a volcano weathers away through the millenia and only the hard core or "throat" is left standing. We have a few in Colorado, although they're mostly barren things.
Here's one of ours (the thing in the foreground, not the mountains):
StarCraft II User Name: DeadMenRise
So, as a former resident of Trinity Beach (the place you can see over in the last photo) and avid mountain biker in those hills throughout my youth I can give a little more background on that place.
It was council approved, but the driveway was too steep and the hairpins too tight to get trucks up there with building supplies. Hence, the owner elected to get the building supplies helicoptered in and ran out of money, meaning the structure was never finished. It is not and was not to my knowledge, ever inhabited. The gate can be opened and the driveway is / was driveable, if memory serves me correctly.
Re the Glasshouses, they were subsurface magma intrusions into the surrounding sandstone, which has since worn away. Not all of them were actually volcanic necks, although there's enough leftover basalt flows on the nearby plateaux to indicate that some would have to have been. There's all sorts of interesting volcanic remnants around SEQ.
The gentleman is a location scout in NYC and has (legal) access to all manner of buildings and locations a regular person will never be able to visit.
The entry from today is Scouting An Abandoned Mental Asylum: A Visit To The Rockland Psychiatric Center, Part 1
There was something else found in the Qin Shuang’s mausoleum. Swords. But these are special. The mausoleum was build 210 BC. But the swords are still sharp.
Mr Zhang Tao, a museologist at the Museum of Terracotta Warriors notes that the swords have been heat-treated and are chromium plated. Indeed there is a very fine 10 – 15 micron rust proof chromium oxide coating on the swords and this consists of .6 – 2% chromium. Incredibly, chromium plating was not used in the West until the 1900s, although chromium was discovered in Paris in 1797.