Current Location: 30045
Current Mood:  tired
 Its been a very, very long day. For those of you who haven't been following along with the home-game, the 19th was my hatchday.  Heather was good enough to send me swag of a textual sort, helping me survive the coming robot and zombie apocalypses while making sure my superheroic persona stays in tune with government regulations, and for such things I am eternally grateful. As well as for the Zyrtec. Grateful trebly so. But that was the 19th. Today, nyxsis, Morgasm and I decided to hit Six Flags Over Georgia like a typhoon of horrific proportions. Take into consideration I've been trying to have an after-hatchday gathering at SFoG for years, and its been rained out or some such every year. This year, I tromped in bearing a pocket full of hatchday money, a cavalier attitude, and looking particularly good with two hot chicks, one on either arm. One might say I'm "living the dream." Of course, others are gouging their eyes out and screaming like wolves at the image. I like that. Regardless, I made attendance and acquired a Season Pass. The long and short of SFoG is: It was a good day. A strangely good day. The sun was bright, but not unbearable, the sunblock flowed freely so I'm not horribly sunburned (unlike the after-effects of the Atlanta Steeplechase), and the acquisition of a Q-Bot Gold made sure that we could actually ride as much, and as many, rides as we wanted, when we wanted, as we wanted. It was worth the investment and then some to be able to simply stroll up and get on pretty much any ride in the park with no waiting beyond that necessary to get through the loading gate. Believe you me, we exploited that. We exploited the Hell out of that. There is a certain malefic satisfaction in being able to stroll, casually, arm-in-arm past a 45min waiting queue, up the back way, waving like the Queen to the lessers. It's a glorious, glorious sensation. Given that the longest wait we had was for the park's newest coaster, the Goliath, and that said wait was only 12 minutes, thus we turned around three rides on the monster in under an hour ... well, the pleasure goes without saying, n'est pas? Speaking of the Goliath ... Dear Hell below! Its a terrifying giant monster of a coaster. And the scariest part is that there is simply no front to the carts; the only thing holding you in is a lap-bar central-spar design. This coupled with the fact that the first drop is actually mildly inverted, ie. the curve actually dips inward toward the core of the hill (and a fact unmentioned by the Roller Coaster Database) means that if your lap bar isn't really tightly pushed down at launch, you will spend a good 75% of the 4480ft long, 200ft high, 70mph ride roughly 3in from actually touching your seat with nothing to actually hang on to. Like my first ride. The problem is, of course, that facing down a pseudo-invert 90+ degree drop without anything to hang onto in the first cart of a coaster means that for about 0.75 seconds, you're dangling perilously upside down supported only by your crotch and hips, and while my crotch is pythonic and tentacled, and the suction created by my suddenly puckered rectum was vast, it was still deeply uncomfortable. The rest of the ride was only mildly less so, and I dare say the impression of my left claw was left in the plastic of the side of the seat, the only place I could find mild purchase. Thrilling tales of derring-do aside, it did, in fact, take a bit to convince me to get back on the thing, whereupon I was not shy about stating my desire for the lap-restraint to be clamped down tight enough to stop arterial blood flow in my thighs.  At which point I could actually relax, unclench, and learn to enjoy the ride for the glorious thing it is.
Ride three, like any good coaster enthusiast pursuit, was in the back row, which was much floatier over the camel-backs and hills, and predictably provided a better, if not overtly terrifying, ride. After SFoG, Morgasm was good enough to take me out to dinner at my favourite restaurant, Sal Grosso. Sal Grosso is all about stuffing yourself with all the meat you can eat, the best deserts around, and generally being an absolutely self-indulgent pig while an excellent wait-staff takes such good care of you, you'll know they're not your family. Oh dear Hell, I'm still stuffed. This is what we call in the parlance of the era, "damn fine entertainment." Of course, obsessively, I did have nyxsis going shutterbug-crazy with my camera, the results of which have been cropped and edited, rotated, mangled, put on on Flickr, geotagged, actually tagged, and sorted into their own photo set. Yes, yes I am horribly obsessive about photo organization. At least I'm cute. | 
