Hey! So Before I Begin I Got This Information From Vsauce my Favorite Science Youtuber! He’s Great,

ok im gonna need every pennsylvanian on tumblr to start charging up your JO crystals NOW. were gonna need a state wide resonance powerful enough to topple GOD if Senator Xehanort is going to stand a chance against Dr Oz in the 2022 pennsylvania senate elections

Elkmont Region Great Smoky Mountains, Sevier County, Tennessee

Tucked away in the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee lies Elkmont, formerly a pioneer Appalachian community, then a temporary logging town, and finally, a resort community. 

The first known permanent residents of what is now known as Elkmont settled here in 1840. The small community that developed was known simply as “Little River”, and, like the majority of Appalachian communities, residents developed a subsistence agriculture economy; most residents grew corn and apples, and kept bees for honey. Multiple gristmills (for grinding grain into flour) popped up along the the creek, Jakes Creek, that ran through the area. Unfortunately, only two structures from the pioneer era of Elkmont remain standing. 

In the 1880s, a Knoxville businessman by the name of John L. English began a small-scale logging project along Jakes Creek but his venture folded in 1900, likely due to a disastrous flooding of the creek in 1899. In 1901, Colonel Wilson B. Townsend purchased 86,000 acres of land along Little River and established the Little River Lumber Company. In 1926, Townsend sold most of the tract of land he purchased to the newly formed Great Smoky Mountains Park Commission, although he’d been given permission to continue logging for most of the next decade. The company ultimately ceased operations in 1939 and by then had produced 750 million board feet (1.8 million m³) of lumber.

In the logging company’s early days, Townsend allowed fishermen and hunters to use the Little River railroad to access the deep, game-rich forests of the Smokies. As the valley was stripped of most of its valuable timber, Townsend began advertising the area as a mountain getaway. In 1910, an affluent group of Knoxville gaming enthusiasts formed the Appalachian Club, built the Appalachian Clubhouse to use as a lodge, and many clubmembers began building cottages, making the club a getaway for Knoxville’s elite. Membership was difficult to obtain, so many rejected Knoxville residents purchased the Wonderland Hotel site in 1919.

Eventually, the U.S. government agreed to establish a national park in the area if the states of Tennessee and North Carolina purchased the land; this process was completed in 1926. Lifetime leases on the Wonderland Hotel and rustic cottages expired in 1992 and ownership reverted to the National Park Service. The park’s general management plan of 1982 called for all remaining structures to be removed to allow nature to reclaim the affected areas. However, in 1994, the Wonderland Hotel and many surrounding cottages were placed on the National Register of Historic Places, giving them a “special status.” 

Sadly, in 2005, the Wonderland Hotel collapsed due to a structural failure. Parts of the hotel deemed to have historical value were removed and the rest cleared, leaving only the annex and a chimney fall (pictured above). In 2009, the National Park Service announced plans to restore the Appalachian Clubhouse and many cabins in the area. The remaining structures are to be carefully documented then removed. 

[Image stills courtesy of Jordan Liles]

SAG-AFTRA approving a no-promotional strike right before SDCC 

These strange holes have been appearing in some Russian forests. They seem almost endless.

They appear in the dense forest, in the places you can’t reach in a car or truck to bring any equipment to drill the ground. There is no soil nearby that could have been taken from such deep hole. When people are brave enough to venture into the holes, they find that they end abruptly in the darkness. There are no reasonable ideas on how these holes appear and what they are being used for. No one knows who or what is digging these holes or why.

Movie Review: Silent Hill: Revelation (2012)

Title: Silent Hill: Revelation

Release Date: October 26, 2012

Driector: Michael J Bassett

Run Time: 94 Minutes

Quick Hits:  Set several years after the original Silent Hill (2006), we find that Sharron (now known as Heather) escaped the clutches of Silent Hill and is living with her father.  She is forced to face the terrors of Silent Hill once more to try and save her father from The Order whom only want to be freed from the clutches of Alessa.

Review: Set on the eve of Heather's (aka Sharron) eighteenth birthday, we open in a nightmarish carnival setting in which she is being chased by men in gas masks and many other creepy things that we would expect from the realm of Silent Hill (which I will be referring to from here on out by SH).  Lo and behold that is exactly what this is as Heather wakes from her dream being comforted by her father, Harry, who is then attacked by another SH monster in the same way that Freddy, Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, would do using a dream within a dream scenario; Heather actually wakes up this time and everything seems to be fine.  It is revealed to us that Heather and her father have been on the run because Harry had killed a man in "self-defense."  While at school Heather "falls" back into the SH "reality" without actually returning to SH, as she starts to see the walls rust away along with seeing young children in classrooms teasing a single girl saying "burn the witch," along with another monster coming towards her.  She snaps out of it as a fellow student, Vince, bumps into her.  Feeling as though she is being followed, Heather calls her father to come meet her at the mall; as he attempts to leave the house he is attacked and kidnapped by an unknown group.  Aided by Vince, Heather travels back to SH to try and save her father.  While in SH Heather learns of her origins, being the good portion of Alessa, and the scheme that The Order has developed to free themselves from the hell that they are in.  In the end she thwarts their plan by joining back with Alessa and a little help from everybody's favorite SH monster, Pyramid Head, dispelling the fog that had consumed SH.  The movie closes with Heather and Vince catching a ride with a trucker away from SH as a police convoy transporting prisoners drives into town as the fog and ash begin to rain down once again.

If you like the SH game franchise and have seen the first movie then you pretty much know the main players and the back story leading up to this point.  As a sequel to the first movie this one kind of falls on its face.  The way that Rose, Heather's adoptive mother, is able to get Heather out of SH (if you haven't seen the first movie they are stuck there at the end and not able to leave, sorry for the spoiler) is kind of a cop-out in my opinion and is feels like it was thrown into the script just to clear up confusion haphazardly; "I just happened to find a talisman that can only get one of us out of here so I gave it to her," come on now that is kind of weak.  Speaking of weak, that pretty much sums up the whole of the story for me.  At no point are we really given anything new to pull our attention and say "wow" to like in the first SH movie.  Other than the weak story I can say that the transitions that were used to move from reality to "SH reality" were very well done, they weren't forced and were very subtle.  Whether it was just walking through a doorway or using a cutaway so that a seemingly normal person could be SH-ified.  However this is the only uplifting point of the film that I can point out.  The movie was made during the "re-introduction," if you will, of 3-D movies during the summer/fall season of 2012 and thus is has several 3-D shots that I feel distract and detract from the movie.  I am sure that the effect looks good in 3-D, but in 2-D they just look god awful.  If you want closure on the story of Silent Hill I would suggest watching it, other than that I would can only give you the advice that Harry gave to Heather at the beginning of the movie: "I want you to promise me, no matter what happens, you will never go there."

Overall Rating: 1/5

Movie Review: Paranormal Asylum: The Revenge of Typhoid Mary (2013)

Title: Paranormal Asylum: The Revenge of Typhoid Mary

Release Date: September 17,2013

Director: Nimrod Zalmanowitz

Run Time: 88 Minutes

Quick Hits: Two former college roommates, turned best friends, reconnect after sometime to put together a documentary about a local psychiatric hospital which is the supposed last resting place of the infamous Typhoid Mary.  

Review: Before we get into what the movie was about let's look at some facts about the actual "Typhoid Mary."  Mary Mallon (aka Typhoid Mary) was an immigrant to the United States from Northern Ireland in 1884.  Mary worked as a cook for families for the majority of her life, unfortunately wherever she would find work several members of the family would come down with typhoid fever and she would move onto the next household.  Upon her first quarantine Mary was found to be an asymptomatic carrier of the disease, which in lay man's terms means that she had the disease but never showed any sign nor did she suffer from it.  She was released from quarantine only to be brought back in permanently after she was found to be cooking again at a hospital.  It was during this second quarantine that she suffered a stroke which paralyzed her.  Mary died at the age of 69 in November 1938.

  We open with one of the main characters, Mark, heading back to New York to meet up with his former college roommate Dan to shoot a documentary that he believes can put them on the fast track to Hollywood.  Dan gives Mark more information on the hospital that they are planning on shooting in by telling about the legend that Typhoid Mary was secretly moved to.  Over the course of the next four days or so we see, through their cameras, a couple of ghostly silhouettes and some odd happenings within the hospital.  Michelle, Dan's Fiance, holds a seance to try and evoke a greater reaction from the spirits still roaming the halls and gets herself possessed by Mary herself.  Fast forward to the end we find out that the one person that seemed like she wanted to help the gang actually led them into the whole thing just to perpetuate her own youth.  

    Right from the get go you can tell that this is a low budget movie which works against itself the entire way.   I am not saying that all low budget films are bad, but this one is awful from start to finish.  As I said this movie works against itself from start to finish between the acting that is not one bit believable nor relate-able to the lighting throughout.  talking more on the lighting, it honestly looks as if the director thought it would be cool to put a gray filter for every shot.  However there are some shots where the gray filter has been taken off only to have pitch black shadows put into shots and around characters.  Getting away from the production flaws in this movie we can try and grab onto something positive in the story right? Wrong.  The back story given for Mary alone is awful, twisting what happened to her and her final days to try and make it conducive to the idea that the movie is trying, so desperately, to portray is atrocious.  One of the tags on this movie is that it is "inspired by true events," well the only true event that is shown is that Mary existed and she had typhoid.  The rest of it is a complete fabrication. Normally I could think of some reason that a movie could be watched, whether for enjoyment or a time kill, but I just have to advise against this one entirely.

Rating: 0/5

Abandoned coal factory

A new set for an apocalypse movie?  No. The riots in Kiev. This is happening right now.

Those breathtaking pictures were taken by the young and usually happy tumblarian girl RedMisa during her volunteer work at Kiev.

"I never thought that I would cry for my native country. I’m not particularly patriotic, I do not like politics, large gatherings of people, meetings and inspirational slogans. but I still go to the central street of Kyiv almost every day, doing volunteer work, doing all I can to help. two months of no change for the better, things were getting worse and worse. but when the killings began, catching the protesters in the streets and beating them up…that was the last straw for me. I do not know what to expect next."

- RedMisa, http://redmisa.tumblr.com/ The Ukraine probably won’t have access to the internet soon. Read more about it here.