Pluralistic: 23 Aug 2021


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Pluralistic: 26 Jul 2021


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Now you’ve got two problems (Part III)

Amusement parks, crowd control and load-balancing

Jeremy Thomson, CC BY

This is Part III in this series. In Part I, I opened the with news that Disneyland Paris is getting rid of its Fastpasses in favor of a per-ride, per-person premium to skip the line, and explored the history of Disney themeparks and what they meant to Walt Disney. In Part II, I explored Disneyland’s changing business-model and the pressures that shifted it from selling ticket-books to selling all-you-can-eat passes, and the resulting queuing problems.

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Boredom and its discontents (Part II)

Amusement parks, crowd control and load-balancing

Queue for Walt Disney World’s ‘it’s a small world.’ Image by Michael Gray: https://www.flickr.com/photos/kathika/2601484170. CC BY-SA: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/
Michael Gray, CC BY-SA 2.0

In Part I, I opened the with news that Disneyland Paris is getting rid of its Fastpasses in favor of a per-ride, per-person premium to skip the line, and explored the history of Disney themeparks and what they meant to Walt Disney.

Continue reading "Boredom and its discontents (Part II)"

Are we having fun yet?

Amusement parks, crowd control, and load-balancing

Group photo in front of the castle at Disneyland’s goth day, “Bat’s Day in the Fun Park,” August 2006.

Pay for play

The news that Disneyland Paris is now selling Fast Passes — a skip-the-line ticket — for about $10 per person per ride has theme park watchers debating whether this is the destiny of all Disney parks and, if so, what it means for the future of theme parks.

You may not care about this, but the creation, maintenance, and operation of immersive built environments is an old art form with enormous cultural significance and few practitioners. The curious pleasures of an immersive built environment go back at least as far as the Sun King’s palace at Versailles and the winding path of built environments from elite follies to mass entertainment runs in parallel to the changing currents in populism, commodification, and participation.

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Pluralistic: 15 Jan 2021


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Pluralistic: 08 Jul 2020


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Pluralistic: 08 May 2020


exposure notification,contact tracing,apis,epidemiology,shoe leather,late-stage capitalism,stimulus,snitchlines,shared microbial destiny,class war,guillotine watch,aoc,animal crossing,haunted mansion,disney,disneyland,themepunks


US public health officials on apps: "Meh"; Volcano gods demand workers; Animal Crossing Haunted Mansion


Pluralistic: 08 May 2020 volcano-gods



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Pluralistic: 24 Apr 2020


nyc,crowdfunding,comics,sf,bookselling,guillotine watch,hhs,alex azar,administrative incompetence, vaccines,brian harrison,poison,trumpism,media theory,emptywheel,both sides-ism,medicare for all,sicko,slate star codex,science,scholarship,masks,net neutrality,cable company fuckery,ajit pai,ajit fucking pai,opportunism,content moderation at scale,ad targeting,themepunks,minecraft,imagineering,disney,disneyland,california adventure,imagineering fun,wdi

Save Forbidden Planet NYC; Which guillotine is right for you; A labradoodle breeder is in charge of America's vaccines; "Inject disinfectant" vs both sides-ism; US healthcare fails insured people too; Masks work; US telcoms sector isn't doing better than Europe's; Amazon uses its sellers' data to figure out which products to clone; Facebook let advertisers target "pseudoscience" and "conspiracy"; Security expert conned out of $10,000; California Adventure, Minecraft edition

Pluralistic: 24 Apr 2020 slicey-boi



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