Average artist and writer. He/him. Bi. BLM, ACAB, trans rights, anti-crypto, and all that jazz.


Campster
@Campster

So tonight I found out about the proposed right wing Disneyland in Oklahoma. Sorta.


lily-detrick
@lily-detrick

Oh my GOD I'm putting this thing in my fucking video game. Are you fucking KIDDING me I already have a fucking Route 66 motif going on in-between all of my games Oh My Fucking God oh my fucking god. Holy shit thank you so much for bringing this stupid piece of shit nightmare theme park to my attention. This is like. SO FUCKING PERFECT. It's like, SO FUCKING CLOSE to Afton, Oklahoma, too, which is where the finale of my last game was set. 17 minute drive. I mean what the fuck.


johnnemann
@johnnemann

Because sorry, but the first part undersells it

"The minimal connection to where one lives, to ones' community, that used to exist and now basically doesn't. The last remnants of even theoretically being able to feel connected to the place you live that were, eventually, wiped the fuck out by corporatization and now your community looks like everyone else's community and even the businesses are owned by the same nine corporations. And Route 66 is a powerful symbol of that corporatization and they're building corporate nostalgia-bait for the times before corporate nostalgia-bait nothing-places, a stupid self-consuming paradox of a location."

And

"The problem isn't that "people aren't patriotic", it's that there's nothing to be patriotic about! What the fuck is there in this country that I'm supposed to love? The fucking Denny's? The ten thousand Wal-Mart stores? Seventy quadrillion square miles of fucking asphalt & corn? What have we built that I should fucking love? We let capitalism eat the entire goddamn country & now there's nothing, and it hasn't even brought anyone any fucking benefit! Now people don't have access to the shit they need, and they could! And what, I'm supposed to be fucking patriotic? That's the fucking problem? Seventy thousand miles of asphalt & people don't have food & we're at war always & insulin is too goddamn expensive & I can't even get fucking estrogen & for goddamn what? Infinite fucking Little Caesars' locations copy-pasted across a desolate fucking landscape?

And they don't get that. They don't. You don't build a theme park called "American Heartland" if you know what people are actually nostalgic for."

"What the fuck is there in this country that I'm supposed to love?" really captures it for me


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in reply to @Campster's post:

to be fair, a high budget Immersive Fascist Theme Park already exists, in kentucky, its called "Arc Encounter", and the ammount of lore worldbuilding and pseudoscientific mental gymnastics they did for it is honestly impressive, i say as a worldbuilder myself.

it is a enormous 1:1 full scale "replica" of noah's ark (if you can build a replica of a mythical object existing only in sacred texts), featuring intricate and desperate justifications as to why noah's ark would have been possible to Literally Exist In Real Life And Not Just As A Myth Or Metaphor, animitronics, a whole fake branch of science they and their friends made up caled bereminology which is like "well phylogenists did all the work but we don't agree with their conclusions so we're just going to take everything they've done and twist it to match our story", movies, restaurants.

the people who run it really do consider themselves the "good american christian values" alternative to disney, and having heard someone describe going there, it certainly sounds like they succeeded at the "immersive theme park" thing by making the bible as their IP their customers care about, and expanding all their biblical blorbos into full characters.

it sounds kind of horrifying! lmao

i think the government helped fund it as well

seeing someone mention the Ark Encounter and I felt compelled to add some Further Reading:

this video is probably the best and most comprehensive overview I've found of just. everything with YEC nonsense, especially as it pertains to the dual whammy of the Ark + Creation Museum. These two """attractions""" form what is effectively the holy land for YECs.

It occurs to me that, while conservatives are pretty much wrong about basically everything, they're never more wrong than when they try to prove that people love them every bit as fun and popular as people who don't bother to build their entire identities around hatred. They spend enormous amounts of money on their figurative anti-anti-proms and associated parallel infrastructure. It never occurs to them to analyze the failure of the last time their peers tried essentially the same things. And then they need to invent a new version of (what's currently) "cancel culture" to explain to each other why nobody wants to hang out with them.

And they just refuse to believe that not being an actively hateful jerk takes almost no effort.

in reply to @lily-detrick's post:

in reply to @johnnemann's post: