Tanks4me05

^My guess is that it's not on the list of rides for Spring Time in the Park because they're waiting for the new trains.

Challenge accepted. 1: maple 2: plus 3: us 4: mule 5: plum 6: pear 7: rue 8: ample 9: rum 10: rem 11: ream 12: reams 13: smear 14: pea 15: reap 16: rape 17: par 18: slap 19: super 20: ram 21: mar 22: mare 23: lame 24: lam 25: alp 26: lap 27: pas (it's a ballet term apparently) 28: Ur (old Sumerian city) 29: sap 30: mu (the Greek letter) 31: rue 32: sum 33: rues 34: sue 35: spam 36: map 37: Pam 38: Sam 39: slam 40: use 41: user the meaning of life: ruse 43: Sumer 44: sea 45: rams 46: maples 47: plea 48: pleas 49: Sal 50: pal 51: pals 52: sure 53: usurp 54: purse 55: rap 56: same 57: Lea 58: as 59: muse 60: ear 61: ears 62: laser 63: pale 64: sale 65: seal I excluded 3. EDIT: Oh, there's a V. 66: veal 67: vase 67: save 68: rave 69: raves 70: lav 71: Val 72: vale (a valley) 73: vales (plural of vale) 74: Vars (a region in southeastern France) EDIT 2: But seriously, what the turkey baster is with that level naming?

To all those who have had bad experiences on Predator prior to 2010 or have not gone on it yet: remember that it got Voyage's old trains in 2010. The trains have helped monstrously. It is still rough, but it's not "painful" rough, but instead a "very bouncy" rough, what a wooden coaster should be. And it's actually a pretty exciting ride. The bunny hop run leaves a little bit to be desired, but the rest of the ride is actually pretty airtime-filled.

I agree. You can't really tell how old a person is unless you have everyone bring a copy of their birth certificate into the park, which obviously is kinda stupid. And the real issues are with people who are in their teens and twenties who end up doing the most stupid crap.

^^That is something for which I am quite happy. Over the years, I have begun to appreciate older stuff more, coasters included, and seeing as there are very few four bench cars remaining, I am very happy that they are staying. I haven't been on it since 2005, and I am strangely looking forward to it for the NYC add-on, despite the fact that it hurt more than a little. (Well, that, the pizza, and that Zamperla Air Race.)

^^^I think it will be the opposite. SheiKra isn't advertised to show off its wide trains, it is advertised to show off how big it is, and that it goes straight down. I've gone on SheiKra probably eight times, and I've never heard anyone talking about how they are out off the sides of the track. I hear many more people talking about how the ride stops at the top. And remember, how many GP'ers in Pennsylvania and NYC know of SFMM or BGA? (They might know BGE, but I'm not sure many of them will make the connection that Skyrush is similar in that manner.) When I thought that B:TE was going to be built at DL, I was talking to my non enthusiast friends about it, and most of them thought that the fact that you stood up on the roller coaster was the craziest thing in the world.

1: I'm pursuing the engineering end of amusement ride design, can't help you. 2: Same as 1. 3: I may not be in the industry (yet) but throughout my pursuits so far, I have learned a good deal. Email park executives with your questions. If you can't get them or their secretaries, try and email the "lower tier" Q&A persons and ask to be "transferred" so to speak to a higher-authority person with more relevant knowledge. And don't stop talking to them once your question is finished. Try to keep in touch with them, and ask questions or send an email or general updates or whatever (I know, kinda vague, but you're going to have to decide the content for yourself) because one of the most important parts of getting into the industry is to get connections. Go down to IAAPA in your senior year of college before you're about to get your degree to talk to even more park execs and to send out your resume. Unfortunately, contacting them will be more difficult for you than I seeing as the engineering firms are incredibly small compared to the actual park corporations (massive) and it may be harder for you to come up with a better resume than I because as an Engineering student, I can put my undergrad research accolades on the paper (which I am starting to do right now even though I am just a freshman.) I also HIGHLY recommend that you get an entry level job at the parks you are interested in, because in all the park executive interviews that I have seen, the overwhelming majority of them started out as a ride operator, food stand clerk, ride mechanic, etc. and gradually rose through the ranks over the decades. That will probably actually make it a bit easier for you to form connections than what I am trying to do because you can be directly hired by the company you wish to head in a much easier fashion than I. All you have to do is be 18 years old, deal with people, and press a few buttons for twelve hours a day. I have to make prototypical mechanical devices and amusement ride prototypes to even get a second glance (though doing such research is/will be a butt load of fun.) And, if this is truly what you want to do, do NOT give up. You will invariably have naysayers pop up in this thread, laughing at you for thinking of going into this field. Just remember: Somebody has to manage those parks, you might as well be one of them. EDIT: I have an idea; let's see if this will work... *climbs up onto soapbox.* I'd like to make a request from all of those who read these threads that happen to be of high standing in the amusement industry from a business perspective to provide their own advice, because I know you guys read these threads. At the very least, it'll probably make IStillPlayRCT2's day that a celebrity responded to him personally and openly. At the very most, you might just be talking to a future management candidate. *climbs off of soapbox.*

^I assume that you mean that the goldfish is still alive. Being a human, and being flushed down a toilet (one that's big enough, of course) because we're more aware of what's in the sewer. What's worse than having your pair of male reproductive organs chopped in half? (Not off, in HALF, because otherwise they aren't injured, just the stuff attaching them to your body.)

Humans...we should be eating more of them.

Yo mama's so fat, when she got pregnant with you, people thought she lost weight.

Losing your manhood about ten minutes before you were about to lose your virginity. What's worse than having five false fire alarms in one week, one of them at 5 AM, a beer pong party in the dorm next to you, and catching a lazy drug dealer having sex with a girl as a discount for weed? (All true, but thankfully it was my friend who spied the two, unfortunately, it was on the kitchen counter that she used.)

^IIRC, that was done because they found out there would be a clearance issue when the train went over the station between the reduction and the main brakes (block brakes? brake run? Main brake run? Which term is properly used in this case?)

...took out the rest of his hairs and threw them in the air like confetti. Afterwards, he donned a chicken suit covered in honey and plastic bags in order to...

^Fahrenheit has a single riders line. It's the wheelchair entrance.

Crap: Barq's Root Beer. No flavor. Amazing: Squirt, Saranac & IBC root beer, pretty much anything from Jones Soda. Non-carbonated: Loganberry. It's a Buffalo NY thing. Awesome stuff.

Voodoo (I don't care. I like Voodoo more than Possessed.)

^Memorial Day Weekend.

Holy crap. That's what happens when I forget to follow this thing for a couple of months when I'm distracted with Skyrush. I was hoping to make a three week Germany tour within five years. I'd love to do it within five minutes right about now.

This looks absolutely ridiculous. I'm surprised at how much they constructed in such a short time. Hey, Ccron10, would you please be so kind as to do top view photoshop of the blueprints that shows how many track pieces are left?

^^ There was this one quote from the recent movie "We Bought a Zoo" that would be relevant to you (and me as well) -- "Sometimes, all you need is twenty seconds of insane courage." --Matt Damon. You're just going to be kicking yourself knowing that you had the opportunity but didn't take it, and it will hurt even more when some other guy moves in and makes out with her in front of you instead of the other way around. It's going to be hard. You're probably going to be more nervous than while you'd be in line for a coaster with rusted holes in the rails every six feet smack dab in the middle of a heavily armed gang's territory that hates Americans, and that you can't even say "help" in the native language. But when you get cold feet, just think to yourself "%$#@ it, I'm going in anyway" and do what you feel is appropriate.

It's all perspective. I've noticed that if the coaster doesn't have a large support structure (like either MF's lift or a wooden coaster) it can look a lot shorter than it is. I keep thinking that SheiKra looks 130 feet because the track and trains are so freaking massive. This is exacerbated especially when you are right next to the coaster and are directly looking up at it. However, once you get on the ride, you will definitely know that it is 200 feet.

You're not the only one. I actually haven't had a girlfriend yet. Here's my track record to prove it: 6TH GRADE (2004): 7th grader liked me. She was hot, but I didn't like her; I could tell she was going to be one of those future scumbags, and I was right. 7TH GRADE (2005): 7th grader liked me. She was HOT, but again, but again, I didn't like her. Even then I knew that I wanted something more than just to make out with. 8TH GRADE (2006): 8th grader liked me. Her little sister told me, but I didn't believe her. She moved during the summer. 9TH GRADE (2007): Tried to make my first move on a girl that I liked for a long time; we were both in marching band (she was a trumpet, I was/am a sousaphone.) Failed miserably. She then went out with another trumpet for a while. I took it HARD, partly because I didn't know how to deal with rejection, partly because I truly felt something, and it really did hurt. A 9TH GRADE (2008): Another girl a year younger than me liked me later in the year. But she tried coming on to me too quickly, so I got freaked out. 10TH GRADE (2008): Tried to make a move on another girl. She was also in the marching band, but she was in the color guard. I tried compensating from my last failure by making a move faster; in short, I didn't have any balls last time. I still didn't know how to do it right, I ended up going in too fast and I screwed up. I didn't take it as hard, because my attachment to her didn't anchor itself in as long as the last one. Since how I got rejected has a bit of a story this time, I'll narrate: (First off, I wasn't obsessed with her compared to the other girls. It's just that this one just happens to have the longest story.) We were going to Baltimore for our yearly out of state competition/trip (I live about 15 minutes northwest of Syracuse, NY) and on the way back from our competitions and stuff, we were going to SFGADV. So, obviously, I went nuts. Especially since I never went to SFGADV before. However, I saw the itinerary and we saw that there we had only six hours in the park. (Yes, this is relevant to me not getting a girlfriend, though not in the conventional sense.) So, in July (we were going the upcoming Columbus Day Weekend, so it was plenty of time for advance notice) I decided I wanted to do the Gold Flash Pass because I knew that I wouldn't get in all the rides any other way. And since they were so expensive, my mom emailed the teacher to request that I were to go alone for the day instead of in a party of 3 (my mom is also a band teacher, as was my dad, and both actually taught my former band director and her brother when they were in middle and junior high school; it's a small world) Since my band teacher understood my love for roller coasters (she liked roller coasters quite a bit as well) she agreed. In August, however, she said that I needed one person to go along with me. I was slightly concerned about finding someone, but I understood. So I got my sousaphone section leader to pay the $70+ for a gold flash pass as well. Fast forward to the day before SFGADV: I got rejected by the girl that I liked. One of her male friends told me that she knew all too well and that she didn't like me and wanted me to stop. I was disheartened yet again, but I wasn't a jerk, so I stopped, and I told him to tell her that "I never meant any harm" because I really didn't. My actions had good intentions, I just had no idea what the crap I was doing. I was really upset (I walked around my floor of the hotel for probably an hour to try to exercise off my misery) but at least I had an awesome day of about a dozen roller coasters, including the best wooden coaster in the world and the world's tallest and fastest coaster, to cheer me up. (THIS is where SFGADV comes into play.) We were driving out, and we were an hour and a half+ late according to the schedule. Apparently it took more time than I thought to get to the park, so we really only had 4.5 hours, so I started getting nervous. I saw KK in the distance, and I was getting so excited. S:UF, GASM, Nitro, B:TR, Medusa, ET, all these legendary rides I've been wanting to get on for years, today was finally my opportunity. As I was stepping off the bus and my band director gave me my ticket, she told me that I had to find a *THIRD* person! So I got desperate, trying scrape up money for a third person, which we couldn't quite do. So, fuming, I said screw it, and went with another party of four. No flash pass. I got on B:TR and I was pissed because the line was 45 minutes. It was a really good ride, but the fact that my day was going away too quickly, I wasn't happy. Everyone else just wanted to get to video games and trying on hats, so I was losing patience. We then got in line for KK, and the line was an hour. Ten minutes before I got on the ride, I was kicked out of line because I had to put my camera bag into the fluffy fluffy bunnies filled with medicine and goo, which I didn't know how strictly they took the rule back then; I was just planning on setting the camera down by the ride ops. I thought the line was two hours according to the signs, so I eventually had it and abandoned them and went to GASM on my own. When I met back with the band for dinner (on time; I was new to the park but I was still responsible,) I only went on GASM twice by then. I was hoping that I'd have a kick butt day riding a ton of coasters to cheer me up from being rejected AGAIN, but I couldn't even get that. That was when I started crying. A bunch of people were asking why, and I told them the not girl related part of the story, and since everyone knew my genuine passion for coasters, they really felt sorry for me and agreed. The band staff member that was in charge of finances overheard, (now retired middle school band director, knew my family VERY well as well, and actually was in a garage band with my uncle) and he actually talked to one of the park staff members, and he managed to get an exit pass for me and the party I was with, so that cheered me up a fairly decent amount. I chose S:UF because it was the most unique of all the coasters in the park (I knew El Toro was better, but I've been on woodies before. The only flyer I experienced was Time Warp two months prior, so I wanted to try a full sized flyer.) To this date, I have not had a single weekend that was a crappy as that. 11TH GRADE (2009): I actually got pretty close. She asked me out to the movies via facebook, but it fell apart after that. She kept going out of town. (now that I look back on it, she might have been lying.) Through that process, one of her friends showed an agenda with pen ink saying "Iggy loves JBoss <3" (my nickname was/is JBoss, Iggy was/is the nickname of the girl I liked) saying it was in Iggy's name. I believed it, but in the back of my mind, I realized it was in 3rd person, and Iggy pretty much never talked in 3rd person. I suspected I was being lied to. It turned out that hunch that I pushed to the back of my mind was right. Though it got "kinda" close, there never really was anything. And her "friends" were basically lying to me for three months, saying there was something there. 12TH GRADE (2010): Nothing, though my mom said she noticed a bunch of the younger girls in the marching band were looking at me as if I was cute. That was a little encouraging. I was still trying to recover from Iggy back in 2009. I tried moving on, but it wasn't easy. I was pretty scarred, as I really liked her, I thought there was something, I was lied to, this was my third consecutive failure, I was tantalized by that hollow facebook PM, and a bunch of people wanted me to go out with her. (Forgot to mention that.) 12TH GRADE (2011): Gave up. A girl that was a rookie marching band member in 2010 confessed that she liked me over the summer, but remembering the crap I went through in the past, I didn't want her to live on a lie, so I told her straight out that I didn't like her. I'm still really good friends with her though, but I think she still might like me. FRESHMAN YEAR OF COLLEGE: (2011 - Present) I'm trying again, and I think I finally healed from Iggy. I am now really good friends with all the girls I tried to go after, especially "2008." But fear that my indecision which still haunts me to a degree may be a lasting scar. I fear that I now may have developed a Pavlov's Dog response, that I may be expecting failure on the subconscious level, as I have been switching between the girls that I liked for pretty much since 2010, and I still am doing that to some degree. I've been trying to talk myself out of it. Throughout my string of failures, however scarring it may be, I see that they gave me a lot of insight and it really changed me: 1: I am now a *HUGE* LGBT supporter. I never really thought about the issue and my opinion on the stance was just indifferent because I didn't care. But after my string if failures, I knew how hard I took it, and I wouldn't want anyone to get in my way if my love for a girl was genuine. It would have decimated me and I would have gotten *VERY* mad at those people that objected. I *NEVER* wanted it to happen to anyone else if they had even a slight choice to not go through it. Basically I applied the Golden Rule to sexuality. (Again: I'd like to state that I never was against it; I just never thought about it until I was around fifteen.) 2: I have finally learned to just grow some balls and that once I've discovered that I liked someone to just go for it, because I always ended up kicking myself for not doing so and I paid the price for being a wuss. I have applied this to many other parts of my life, and such drive and initiative has helped me monstrously; I actually talked with some guys at Mondial for quite a while and pretty in depth about the concepts of one of my ride ideas from a mechanical standpoint and how to improve it (I wanted to build roller coasters since I was nine; and I strategically let loose that one ride idea to show them what I could do at only sixteen. Yes, I was talking to them at sixteen.) What seems to be my last remaining foreseeable hurdle is just trying to find out who I like, but that seems to just be dealing with my negative Pavlov's Dog response that I acquired in 2009. 3: Through my being a fly on the wall of countless relationships from all of my friends and witnessing the problems that they were going through, I was able to learn a lot of lessons from astute observation that I would otherwise be rather behind in when my first relationship actually comes to fruition. Unfortunately, it's general common sense that I can't quite put together into concrete sentences to help anyone else out with their problems. Basically, it all boils down to applying the Golden Rule as much as possible. 4: Through my failures, I have noticed that I found out the type of girl that I tend to go after: Intelligent, bubbly, and with common interests in any combination of engineering, music, marching band, or roller coasters. I'm not closing my mind off to anything else, but I've noticed that I have gravitated towards those people in the past. 5: Just because she said no or you got friendzoned, don't stop being friends. You can still be really good friends otherwise as time progresses and the awkwardness fades. 6: (Basically a reprise of #1): Don't worry about being friendzoned, or going in too fast or too slow, because in this manner, getting a girlfriend is like driving a car: You have to make a decision when you're trying to move, and just commit to it. You are going to cause FAR more harm if you are too hesitant. Also, don't worry that much as to whether or not you will make her feel uncomfortable by moving in too fast (within reason, of course, like asking her out or whatever) because that's just unavoidable and you have to learn how to approach girls properly and you basically have to mess up in order to get it right. They'll feel uncomfortable, but everyone does and everyone has it happen to them at one time or another, so take comfort in the ubiquity of it. And if you have tried to get a girlfriend but have failed, it will still teach you a *LOT.* Just don't freaking give up, because there are billions of girls out there, and there will be someone that is right for you. Because when it does happen and she is genuine, all the pain of the past, (but not the lessons learned; hang on to those) will melt away, and happiness will finally be achieved. Unfortunately I can't speak from first hand experience, but I've been dreaming of that day, and that's what's keeping me going.

I find high school relationships to be semi-pointless. IMO, they cause more harm than good. People get all twisted up about them, and even those couples that have "successful" relationships in high school end up breaking up after high school anyway. So many other things to worry about in high school and even college than that! And those guys who are sad that the girls friend-zone them... sooner or later, those girls are going to get sick of being used by the "bad boys" that they generally go after. I've been there, seen many friends that have been there. If you're the guy friend who's always been there through thick and thin, hopefully one day they'll realize that you're the sort of guy they should go after, not the losers who don't care about them. So keep the hope! No one has to be forever alone just because high school/college doesn't produce! Incorrect. They are learning experiences to discover what you want or don't want, and a few can still be very successful: my best friend/roommate has been dating his girlfriend for over a year. Even though we are freshman in college and she's still a junior and our university is halfway across the state, he still calls her every night for a good hour or an hour and a half.

After seeing ads for this company's (Polin; it's a Turkish-based waterslide company) I've always been wondering why we haven't had any slides from them stateside; they looked quite the unique addition to any park. I'm happy that not only is this coming to a park stateside, but we're going to the park for New Hotness!

How do you create roofs out of the catwalk pieces? I could never figure it out.