Sidders

You could always look at it from the perspective that now they'll anticipate your arrival more? It's okay, I know I'm crap at this whole positive outlook thing... But to be perfectly honest, I'd say that was a pretty damn good reason for not being able to turn up!

Where's the sauce?

Edited

Interesting post. It's odd to see a reply like this to a Rant topic post. Even I've been guilty of replying to such a topic's posts only to vent my own problems, and it seems like that's how most of this thread as panned out. That's not to say we're all bad people for not trying to counsel everyone else (srsly ppl), but its just nice to see support for others members here.

I lose track of what spoiler topics are and where they are these days. Wasn't there a Fright Nights spoiler topic? Who's idea was that? But either way, woo SW7.

Shrinking violets of the pop scene One Direction shocked the world to the sound of a million swoons upon the release of the lyric video for their new single 'Little Things'. And in a completely unexpected turn of events, the second single from their second album strips back the tuneless walls of sound and multi-layered vocals that made them sound like the posterboys for Jim Steinman's perverse dreams of starring in Glee, and instead we see a barely-there guitar backing to some overly-observed and fairly superficial trivialities about a loved one's image. Oh be sure of it, whilst we see the usual teenybopper antics subsided in favour of 'maturity' and simplicity, they're still just as annoying as before. You can also be sure, that there is very little to this song musically, all the focus is one the lyrics for this one - it's very clear from the minute you hear the first line. And so examining the lyrics a little further, the boys at least say all the right things in all the right ways, if you are in fact deeply self-centered and vain about your not-so-insecure insecurities. That isn't to say though, that up until you realise this is a song written by Ed Sheeran it isn't a promising change of direction for them. The melodic structure is evenly balanced, the musical phrasing fits the song well, the guitar refrain is stupidly simple and the stripped-back appeal will send a million of their fans squealing as if the song serves some sort of proof of musical diversity. Once Ed Sheeran is added to the mix you begin to realise 'Little Things' really isn't that special at all, and the twee simpering from the boys on lines like "You can't go to bed without a cup of tea/And maybe that's the reason that you talk in your sleep", reek of Sheeran's unassuming balladry and generally underlines how little sense his lyrics make, with almost no cohesion carried between those two lines. The chorus is similarly hopeless: "I won't let these little things slip out my mouth/But if I do/It's you, it's you they add up to", which gives the impression they're just a touch incompetent or avoiding the topic altogether by dowsing more declarations of perfection onto their beloved. It sounds exactly like that grisly Match.com advert in which a berk with an acoustic guitar in a dinky little music shop woos a berkette over their mutual love of The Godfather Part III, or that one with the guy and his ukulele and the girl who wasn't a natural blonde. So instead of any real progressive impulse giving a suggestive wink at the plausibility of One Direction ever branching away from the style of music that fattens out trite melodies with cacophonous, tuneless guitars, we've got a thoroughly unspectacular affair combining the most gently disappointing toils and insipidly pleasant lyrics of Sheeran and the aimless, wandering ambition of a group of boys who appear to initially make 'Little Things' fairly listenable purely because of who they are and how different it is to their usual fanfare. Upon waking up to the fact it's just one dweeb helping out five others, the reality of the fallacy of the lyrics becomes apparent. The lyrics mean nothing, and will probably retreat to the unconscious the minute they're wheezed over by the next line. There's a touching sentiment, be sure, but unless your part of the minute demographic this is aimed at, you're going to see straight through the act and simply wince at the thought of someone "joining up the dots with the freckles on your cheek".

QFT. Him and Socha (Kelly) made it for me. Kelly was pure class.

Whilst I agree with the fact that later openings may not actually help the ride (the ride may be closed but the queue will begin to fill regardless, resulting in many shorter cycles in a shorter space of time than the normal queue time:cycle time ratio and exerting an equally if not more stress on the ride hardware), surely the recent renovation/maintenance the ride received has been helping it with it's somewhat troublesome behaviour? I understand the main reason for the maintenance was the zeroing difficulties, after one such incident could've ended in disaster for the guests and the park, so surely Samurai shouldn't be struggling with these anymore?

So where's the part they put the bag on your head?

Always good to question, but as someone once pointed out to me, there are some members who can be more trusted than others with information like this. I'd say Diesel is very reliable, personally.

Girls Aloud have a new single out. It's called 'Something New' and it's a whizz-bang poppers o'clock femme-fest about mastering the holy grail of all feminist endeavours - control. (Natalia Kills has sealed herself away in her bondage basement, weeping into her handcuffs.) 'Something New' is/was/has been produced by Xenomania, so on the pop spectrum of lamazing to balls-out fandango fantasticality, it's bound to end up somewhere near the top of the list, isn't it? First off, 'Something New' isn't something new, at least in the grand scheme of pop music. Let's keep that in mind, please - we are talking about pop music, not music as a whole. And in the world of pop music, it's not a sound we've not heard before and the lyrics aren't all that new and innovative either, but whether this hinders your ability to enjoy this song boils down to whether or not you hold innovation and originality in staunchly high regard when considering what makes a certifiably 'good' pop song. And if you find yourself scoffing at the thought of a pop artist not being new and innovative then a great way of solving this is to type out all that you hold dear about innovative pop music, every little detail (with examples of these mystically precious songs), email it to yourself, print it out, fold it in four and write "My pleasure" on it, and then pop it up your bottom. So yes, 'Something New' is ground re-trodden. So what? What catapults the song into the lofty height it proudly sits at, sneering down at the asthmatic anemia of synth-stabbing lightweights like Calvin Harris and LMFAO and their brand of euro(trash)pop is a number of precautionary measures one can reliably expect to hear in a Xenomania poptastic fanfare, such as how there's no breakdown. Western pop has taken on the recent belief that all club songs need a breakdown, but we have Adele and Ed Sheeran for those times when we feel the need for a good sit-down and a cry, so this logic is bollocks. Hearing every remotely energetic song diluted by a sudden drop-out of sound, followed by a build-up and then, if you're Calvin Harris, a big gun-shot before everything 'goes off' again, just kills momentum and it's sort of like getting ready to cum and then your lover turning into a boiled egg. More than one breakdown in a song is an even more heinous crime and you might as well not be bothering, because who's going to listen to a song where half the time there's nothing happening and to dance like you would at the 'big' parts makes you look like a complete goon? Songs like 'Gangnam Style' and 'Bad Romance' evade this sort of gentle disappointment, the former because of how adorably stupid and slightly perverse the whole thing is and the latter because if you don't dance to music in Lady GaGaland you could find yourself impaled on a spike of human hair while getting bummed flat by gay Nazis. So when you see Calvin Harris nodding along to a song like 'We'll Be Coming Back' or 'You Used To Hold Me' with a stern moodface put on, taking it all relatively seriously and having as much fun as listening to paint dry, you begin to wonder why he bothers to fatten out his two-bar, four-note refrains with expensive but cheap-sounding whooshes of air. Quite cleverly, Xenomania have done away with that, and they've added an audible bass injection to the main refrain, meaning that the melody isn't so slight it becomes impossible to define or elaborate on for fear of it being lost amidst any form of singing above featherweight. In fact, that chorus refrain is like watching a sledgehammer being swung at your face in slow-motion, before it shatters you like a mirror. As well as the above, the song's verses actually fit, and give the impression - unlike so many other Best Of... releases - that the song was actually formed with care, rather than squashing in a few verses after finding a good chorus hook. Just look at the way those verses spring up on you before you even know it. One minute there's a big skyflying chorus and then the next it's dirty and intimate with five femme fatales. The girls could be doing twenty seconds of farting in that time and it'd still be more interesting than pretty robots, The Saturdays. While everyone's obsessed with trying to find reason to invest praise in groups like Little Mix and StooShe for their harmonic seamlessness, it's actually pretty easy to see how on 'Something New' the collective forces of Cheryl, Nadine, Sarah, Nicola and t'other one with the round face actually combine together and work not in unison, but in collaboration, feeding off each other's energy to the point where the lacklustre chorus lyrics can feel reinvigorated. You may have noticed recent efforts from The Saturdays (e.g. - 30 Days (To Love)') where you've got five singers and one voice being heard; 'Something New' doesn't do that - it feels like a group with better harmony than any of the recent girls groups to come crawling out of the bargain bin. The verses naturally, are the best part, wobbling along to a pulsating bassline and staying true to what Girls Aloud are about instead of chasing expiry-dated trends like adding a bit of unnecessary gloom-wobble dub into the little (big) mix (see what I did there?). It's easy to be swamped by influences, but really, 'Something New' is influenced only by Girls Aloud. It doesn't try to look back into the past at a time when handbag house thought itself rather good and try to market it as the latest in chart trends. Nor does it pilfer an underground genre/influence and blusteringly pretend they're the ones who brought it to the mainstream (hey Britney!). What it is, is damn good pop music as pop music. However - the lyrics do need changing. The reference to "boys" in the song should be changed to "girls". A winking kick up the arse to the **** crop of girl groups we have fostering spots on the radio airwaves. Imagine how much more sense it would make as their first single in over three years and they come out with "Girls you better watch your back/'Cause we're the leaders of the pack/Tell me can you handle that?". Just an observation. So is it any good? I don't know really. I like some parts and I hate others. Sarah's bit is the best bit and that's not negotiable. Nadine's "Go girls g-g-go go go" is annoying. I've pointed out approximately five things about a song by a group of artists I don't usually like, so if you're one of those people who decides a song's quality on the singer's likability then maybe you don't deserve to listen to music. And more importantly, if need me to tell you which songs you should listen to and why then maybe you should just tear your ears off too. Fool.

OMG MAIRÉAD? Not ****ting you now, I have a twin sister called Mairéad. Mairéad must just mean awesomeness in Irish...

1:36... 2:34: SHE'S BACK!

It's Halloween soon, so...

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA "SAW". "ME." AS IN, SAW YOU. AS IN, SAW THE RIDE. I GEDDIT NOW AHA.

Fair point Mark, but in Jamal's defense it can be disputed that when in a maze based on the SAW traps you would expect to find people in said traps, dying. Instead we've got a maze with the SAW scenes inhabited by performing arts students coated with cheap-looking white face paint, overindulged eyeliner and Halloween FX blood as they jump out at you thinking they're in The Asylum.

Lol at this thread. Just gonna ask TPP if she really thinks Merlin doesn't have a clue here... Because they do.

An excellent point, but as stated in the question above, Thorpe also aim for families and business visits with regards to the demographics the Snoozeboxes are aimed at. And not to mention, Thorpe state that the Snoozebox is a sustainable alternative to test the market for the demand for the hotel before they build the thing, meaning that they went for this option because it was cheaper. I'm either too tired to think or just being plain ass dumb but why not invest more in Thorpe seeing as Alton already have a hotel?

Warning: This post contains memes. So Alton gets this with their £20M coaster...: And Forp get this:

Omg slammer

My lovely little sister Dearbhla (four years old) made this picture of a heart for me for my birthday. It now sits proudly on my wall at Uni and Picasso himself couldn't do a better job. Love my little sister so much. Cheeky madam

Well waddaya know - two years on and Depth Charge is still standing! Wonder for how much longer though... I love reading old posts.

Just type the text you wish to place inside the spoiler box, and then write [ s p oi l e r ] and [ / s p oi l e r ] around said text, cutting out the spaces between the letters in those tags. EDIT: I put the O and I together because otherwise the I is capitalised and looks like an l. herp.

So tempting to just skip out the open day and go with you guys... But I get paid for the open day so maybe naaat

Brilliant Ian - that's don the trick. I must've accidentally switched the rich text off some time in the past. Much love.