lizardtitties:

elodieunderglass:

bemusedlybespectacled:

center-for-chthonic-studies:

mapsontheweb:

The Magic Roundabout: Swindon, England.

This is hell

why am i reminded of that bit in good omens where crowley deliberately makes a road into a satanic sigil to generate more sin

It’s honestly not that bad. It’s a traffic circle, but instead of having traffic lights or stop signs to separate the chunks, it has roundabouts – the big difference is that you YIELD at each chunk rather than STOPPING. You approach it knowing that you want to go straight across, left, right or back the way you came. If you want to go straight, then you just treat it like a series of stop signs. Everyone goes really slowly, and you do one crossing at a time. If you have to, you can kind of find a little island and huddle in it, dithering, while you have a Moment. You will probably fuck it up on the way back, and a mildly surprised man in a Mini will yield right of way, and he will gesture at you to go ahead in a sarcastic way. You will survive this.

Like, if you want to know that Hell is empty and all the devils are here, specifically in order to make your life worse, then try driving to Boston Logan Airport from the North. At one point, you will go under the Charles, right? And so you’re trapped in this horrible dark tunnel under a river, full of people who absolutely hate you – Massachusetts drivers, aka Massholes, are extremely violent, which is odd because people from Mass are lovely – and are trying to force you into the wall, especially if you don’t have Mass plates. There are two lanes, in each direction, there’s someone up your ass and you can’t change lanes for most of it and you have to go about 40 mph for some reason. The cars are packed bumper-to-bumper, nose to tail, and if you try to change lanes, they simply won’t let you in. They loathe you with every fiber of their being. You can put your blinker on and nudge hopefully, and the other cars will literally close ranks against you – they’ll speed up to close any gaps. You will have to muscle your way over with sheer brute strength, like a lioness trying to save herself while being trampled by wildebeests in the belly of a sinking submarine. Wild-eyed and wet, clawing across the backs of a dozen malicious shifting forms.

And the exit for the airport is suddenly, irrevocably in the other lane. There is no warning, and the ramp is about 6 inches long. The tunnel just goes AIRPORT!!!! WHOOSH and separates at a 90 degree angle. If you miss the exit, you are trapped under the river with no recourse, until you are abruptly spat out in the middle of Boston, where everyone hates you even more, and there is NO WAY TO GET BACK and they are still. Doing. The Big Dig. They say they finished it in 2007 but they didn’t. It is still under construction, and it hates you, and then a black Hummer with Mass plates puts on its left blinker and casually swings to the right and crushes you into paste. 

Don’t even think about trying to use a GPS or a google maps app on your phone to help with the Anxiety – the device won’t work under the river, and the roads are nebulous and ever-changing and under construction. If you’ve been relying on it, it will suddenly go silent – there is also a malicious force field that kills it, and makes your icon look like you are driving your car into the Atlantic – and you will definitely miss the exit. And then when you get out of the tunnel on the wrong side, the device will suddenly start yelling at you in the middle of the city, barking useless orders like “MAKE A U-TURN”, or suggesting that you take a left onto an ENTIRELY fictional road, and you’re like “are you LITERALLY shitting me right now.” 

So, as someone who is utterly sick to the back teeth of that airport: go in with your Murder Eyes already blazing, and claw your way to that exit, regardless of the wildebeests. If you destroy another car, then you win that car, and you can strip its accessories and add them to your own. If it has Mass plates, take them off and use them. If you get enough you can declare yourself the Transient Queen of Hell and wear shoulder armor with spikes.

The only reason that people pick on the Swindon Magic Roundabout is because British people make fun of Swindon because they don’t have a New Jersey.

The M25, which Crowley designed, is just the big orbital road that goes around London. It’s mildly hellish, but only because of the density of traffic. The true Power of the M25 is that it keeps London contained. Dark Powers are constantly conspiring to break the seal, and release London on the surrounding countryside like a cancer, but everyone knows that if you do this, we will all be devoured. 

If we had done the same thing to Boston earlier, the seaboard could have been saved.

Plus there’s all those urban legends that the Krays and similar firms were involved in the construction of the M25 or at least dumped bodies under there…