The Sports World Water Park in Izu is a well-hidden gem in the crown of Japan’s abandoned theme parks. Tucked away from the main theme park down a slim passage over-awed by rabid weeds, it gallops down the adjoining valley’s steep side in a furious rush, its brilliant blue umbilical water-slides snaking and inter-twining through the verdant green jungle canopy. Around its circumference the huge oval water-flume meanders bleached-white through pathways furred over with prickly weeds. Jutting up from its center and half-eaten by scraggly brush, the five-story speed-slide stands like a silent sentinel over the withered park, its roller-flumes …
Cyborgization – Extra Senses
Cyborgs will have access to a much more massive range of sensory input data than we do. Just as we think nothing now of putting on our clothes to go outside, or getting in our cars to travel long distances, or turning on the TV to expand our direct input streams, they will think nothing of spreading their sense of touch out through the Internet, their sense of vision up through the infra-red or telescopically out into space, their sense of smell into degrees of precision down to the molecule, their sense of hearing spread throughout their whole home or …
Cyborgization
Cyborgization is the next step forward in the evolution of humankind. Evolution as we have come to understand it, the blind watchmaker slotting together increasingly complex genetic structures at random, pushed ahead by unwitting external forces, the odds of survival, and success of procreation, is an outmoded and impossibly slow model for further advancement. Any change to the status quo will be responded to far more quickly by our technology than by our own genes. Technology and the realm of ideas are the new playing field, where idea battles idea for favor, under the pressure of an Earth with finite …
Kentucky, USA
Kentucky- the land of Abraham Lincoln, Bluegrass music, Bourbon whiskey, the Kentucky Derby, some of the biggest losses in the Civil War, and all the family on my mother`s side. I`m British because my Dad is British and my mother ceded American citizenship when I was a kid- but I`ve always felt my soul was American: Kentucky American, and to a very small degree: Native American American. I`m talking about this because I just got back from a 10-day vacation with my family in Kentucky. I haven`t been back to visit my grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins in Kentucky for …
Japan’s abandoned Russian Village theme park
Japan’s Russian Village Theme Park sprawls empty and forlorn atop a small hill set back from the main road, shrouded by a thick raft of cedar trees that hide its embarassing failed extravangance from the world. Built 2002 and abandoned after just 6 months, the endeavour was ill-fated from the start: a theme park in the middle of nowhere with no rides. Russian church in Japanese mountains. Now its giant fake mammoths rest unseen in their dark and musty show hall, the vibrant blue onion-domes of its vaulting ‘Russian’ church slowly tarnish to white, and the shops once filled with …
Shimoda Beachites
Shimoda has some of the most beautiful and pristine yellow-sand blue-ocean beaches in all of Japan. Commodore Perry certainly picked a choice spot to roll up at in his black ships- further up the coast other trade envoys were met by steel-toting Samurai’s stood on the grey-sand grey-ocean cock-roach infested trash-havens of Enoshima and Kamakura. Not for Perry though, and not in Shimoda. Shirahama, Tatadohama, and Ohama beaches are gorgeous, sun-kissed, and every time I’ve visited them- about 50% empty.
Null-space Tunnels under Yokosuka Navy Base
Deep within the solid rock of the Negishi Plateau in Yokohama, spreading beneath the old race-course Grandstand and Yokosuka Naval Base, lies a twisting warren of hidden World War 2-era caverns. Once filled with ancient munitions, bustling troops, and rooms full of military dossiers, they now rest in lonely silence, unexplored for up to 20 years, their secrets stopped up behind entrances back-filled with avalanche scree and trash, overgrown by thick vines in loamy earth, and walled off with sheets of blast-concrete.
The Mistman @ Byzarium
My story the Mistman just went live at Byzarium! “There was a village in the mountains at the top of the world that was always shrouded in mist. Its name was Ballahee, and in it lived a small community of people, good people, who tended to their crops on the mountainsides, and looked after their sheep and their hardy goats. The villagers had many problems, such as the cold winters and the wolves in the scrub-woods, but by far their biggest problem was the mist. The mist had always been there, and the villagers knew there was nothing they could …
Snake Cat
Snake Cat lives in the city’s gutters and drain-pipes, crawling along on his side, hunting Snark and weevils, distending his jaw to swallow them whole. He is lithe and lissome like freshly steamed yew, he can contort into the shape of the letter ‘O’ or even the letter ‘A’. His tail is prehensile like a monkey’s and he uses it to slide down power-lines and into the homes of unsuspecting Wombles- whom he also eats. This was a rare day-time sighting of Snake Cat. Crawl, Snake Cat, crawl! Video after the break.
Japanese Space Food
You’re in space. The trip up took 8 hours- most of which involved you sitting sideways strapped into a second-hand shuttle waiting for air traffic control to give you the all-clear, with no option to get up and go the bathroom (yep, adult diaper). Now you’re on board a creaking old Russian hybrid rust-bucket where everything stinks of Ozone, you’re losing bone mass on a constant and permanent basis, the weather outside sucks, you can’t relax for a second without strapping yourself to a wall because your limbs float off randomly in zero-G, you can’t go to the bathroom without …