Month: March 2023

The trackless vehicle has revolutionized Disneyland. One thing that struck me on this last trip was how we didn’t get to ride Temple of the Forbidden Eye, because the Indiana Jones attraction is constantly breaking down and has finally been subjected to long-deferred maintenance. But if there’s no track, all that can break down is the vehicle, and then you just pull it off the grid and carry on. In theory. But everything from Luigi’s Rollicking Roadsters to Rise of the Resistance to Mickey and Minnie’s Runaway Railway is trackless now, and that seems like a significant nodal point.

World of Avatar was the first pass – and a safe one given that nobody cares about Avatar as an intellectual property – and then Galaxy’s Edge was the realization of the next stage: immersive. Batuu, Avengers Campus – those are meant to make you feel like you are there, more so even than World Showcase. Obviously it’s tough to make Batuu feel like Batuu when you’re surrounded by a bunch of yahoos from Arizona, but first thing on a cool June morning before it’s overrun…yeah. It feels like the real thing. And that’s clearly the direction for things (especially for the Harry Potter fans over at Universal), so what else is needed?

Interactivity. That’s a huge thing. It started with stuff like Astro Blasters and Midway Mania, then Web Slingers (which is really just a very advanced Midway Mania) and hit its peak with Smuggler’s Run, which is a very simple video game that you just happen to be inside. That whole “you’re inside it” thing really hits even harder with Rise of the Resistance, and even with Runaway Railway – the closest thing ever to being inside a cartoon. It’s a transformative experience, even before you realize that the voice of Mickey Mouse is the actor who played Rus Hanneman on Silicon Valley.

But now we come to the real trick, the thing that changes everything: variability. Luigi’s Roadsters gives you a different song each time and a slightly different “dance.” Mission:Breakout mixes and matches six different songs. Star Tours is a virtual slot machine with fifty-four different payout combinations and growing (I’ve seen at least five different people tell me we have to deliver the rebel spy alone).

The magic is really going to max out once you can add variability to the immersion and interaction. When Smuggler’s Run can send you to different planets with different objectives. When some notional future Avengers Quinjet ride can have you taking on different missions while you blast away at Chitauri or Necro-craft or Ultron clones or whatever. And part of that is going to depend on phones or magic bands or something so that what you do in one space carries over to another – something that may already be happening with the bounty hunting exercises in Black Spire Outpost.

The future of Disney Parks – and everything like them – is the ability to lose yourself in them in a unique way every time. Crack that and you own the future of theme park entertainment. I just hope some part of it lands in a free state and not in Redneck Hungary.

Mastodon has not adequately replaced Twitter. I don’t know if it can. I would need various minor league sports teams to adopt it, along with certain online personalities who are not really celebrities as such but whose fame is entirely on Twitter (thinking of you, Scafe, hope you’re well), and Mastodon as I have it constructed has not really become the place where you go when things happen, the way Twitter was for March Madness or the Oscars or whatever.

This is not a dealbreaker. Twitter first emerged in 2007, and yet I don’t think we really had a sense of what it was *for* until 2009 at the earliest and maybe longer. Similarly. Even though Mastodon has been around for many years, it has only really emerged onto the public radar in the last twelve months and has just crossed 10 million users, so we are still in early days of figuring out what it’s for – not least because it is not emerging in a vacuum. Mastodon exists in a world where Twitter exists, has existed, and where we know what was wrong and needed fixing even before Phony Stark shat all over it.

The funny thing is that a couple more blasts from the past have resurfaced. Unsurprisingly, Gowalla made its grand re-entrance at SXSW, fourteen years after Foursquare stormed to the lead of location-based social networking. Back then, no one knew quite what those apps were for, only that they might surpass Twitter or Foursquare, and as such they were of their time: free at point of use with the promise that ad revenue would somehow make it all worthwhile. Then Foursquare split into two apps and sank beneath the waves, while Gowalla was acquired by Facebook who promptly did naff all with it.

Well, Gowalla is back, and this time relying on a model of “a small number of power users pays for extra features which in turn fund the app as a whole for the free users.” Which seems more sustainable and privacy-friendly than advertising, for sure, who knows. My problem was that I was ten years too old for these apps the first time, and in a world without the prospect of seeing “hey, they’re down on Castro, I should go by”, I don’t know what it’s useful for in my life. You kind of need local friends to make location-based social networking happen.

On the other hand, Hipstamatic became a sensation as it used vintage retro filter effects to disguise the generally shitty quality of early-Obama-era phone cameras – and then was passed quickly by Instagram, which had a social network attached. Well, lo and behold, Hipstamatic has added a social feature, and we now have a known brand behind a product that is exactly what we all claim to want: original Instagram the way it used to be. It will be interesting to see how much uptake there is.

See, the problem is, we all say we want social media the way it was in 2009-11 before it all went wrong, and maybe we do. But we’re also pig-committed to our existing social graph, and you can’t get anyone to move off Twitter, Insta and Facebook until *everyone* does. It’s the same problem I have with Signal – I have plenty of folks willing to use it for text and group chat, but no one seems to have adopted Stories despite it being a cryptologically sound and privacy-protective alternative to Insta, because everyone’s already on Instagram. I am trying to be the energy of activation, but it’s the same problem we had with Path, with Peach, with micro.blog, with Cocoon – too much inertia, too many things to have to check.

Which is sad. Between Gowalla, Hipstamatic, Mastodon and Signal, the 2011 social media experience is right there to be seized. All the pieces are in place, it’s a lighter lift than it has been in years or is likely to be. And yet, at this point, the only thing that might so it would be for Apple to officially suture together Messages, iCloud Photo Sharing and Find My into one app and call it Pal Around.

Hint, hint, hint.

There’s a lot of postmortem going around this week about the twentieth anniversary of the second invasion of Iraq, which by any definition was absolutely catastrophic. It crippled American power in ways both real and perceived. It squandered the moral high ground of September 11 and shredded the international support for attempting to thwart Al=Qaeda and its affiliates. It marked the final collapse of mainstream American media into a fetal position begging not to be called liberal or unpatriotic (never forget, Maddow fans: MSNBC fired Phil Donahue for being insufficiently enthusiastic about war in Iraq). And it marked the ascent of bullshit worship to the highest ranks of the GOP. From that moment on, if asked who they were going to believe, the Republican Party pledged to choose its leader over its own lying eyes.

Bullshit worship really began a decade earlier, though, when any and all manner of conspiracy and calumny against the Clintons was uncritically accepted as true, or at least as worthy of chin-stroking mournful-sounding “just asking questions.” Members of Congress shooting watermelons in their yard to disprove Vince Foster’s suicide should have been a sign that we were off the rails, and anyone with a lick of sense could have said “wait, this is getting crazy,” but between Rush Limbaugh (nay he writhe in Hell) and Roger Ailes (dittos!), a media ecosystem had emerged into which bullshit could thrive and flourish and eventually drown out rational thought and the evidence of one’s own eyes.

Thing is, if you can say whatever you want, believe whatever you want, and no one can force you to acknowledge anything you don’t want to be true, what you end up with is the cult of the Asshole. The Asshole is the embodiment of self-regard, of “I got mine fuck you”, of being able to shit on anyone else you like. That’s why there is a fundamental underlying substrate that connects Wall Street, the VCs of Silly Con Valley and the cult of the Founder, the Neo-Confederates in search of their next untermensch, and the army of car dealers and realtors and small business owners with a seventy-year inferiority complex that fueled the rise of the pre-Goldwater conservatism in the first place.

But what we have gotten in the last 20 years is a full subculture, an ersatz ethnic group of Whiteness that steers hard into green-beer Irishness and performative redneckery and loudly trumpeted how oppressed it is – because for the first time, it’s a genuine minority. You only have to look at California to see how powerless it is when the rules aren’t rigged in its favor with an Electoral College or a filibuster-armed Senate or complete gerrymandering – or when the identity of Whiteness is the basis of politics the way it is in the South.

And thus we come to a discomforting truth being borne out across the pond at the same time. The DUP has declared that it will not support the Windsor Agreement – thus opening the door to sandbag the Stormont assembly, in which they would presently be obligated to share power with Sinn Fein, who got more votes. Just as in America, it is an effort to throw on the brakes and halt a process that they could not stop at the ballot box. The DUP never supported the Good Friday Agreement, and is now holding it hostage in the name of hardening a Brexit that Northern Ireland did not vote for.

It is very hard not to feel like my people – the Scotch-Irish – are in fact history’s useful idiots, the ones who the wealthy of England or Wall Street or Fox News can always rely on to hate whoever The Man tells them to. The people whose lives were wrecked by corporate globalization, pointless endless wars and runaway for-profit health companies have turned their fiery wrath on…transgender people. Gay people were plentiful and affluent enough to push back, their precious self-starter small businesses depended too much on undocumented labor, their daughters were women, but by damn, they could sure go after that 0.3% of the population without fear of pushback!

My people aren’t inherently scared of anything different. But they don’t flinch from being taught to fear what is different, Never have. The best you can hope for is for them to learn it imperfectly in the first place, the easier to pull them away from it once they’re exposed to the wider world. But if we want the same kind of broadly centrist world of the 1950s that everyone seems fixated on, it’s going to require two things: 1) the acceptance that everyone is free and equal before the law and entitled to mind their business and live their life, and 2) the containment of boomers and bullshit-worshippers and a refusal to let them influence the political process any longer.

That’s it, ultimately. When you’ve spent twenty years fucking up, you don’t get to play any more, and you need to go stand in the corner and sit with the consequences of your wrongness while others clean it up. And that is what the GOP needs: the same kind of forty-years-in-the-wilderness exclusion that lasted from LBJ to Clinton. Every Republican needs to be made to disavow Trump, to disavow Bush, to regret the Iraq war and protest that they don’t just do whatever Fox tells them.

You’re not a Trumpist? Prove it. Beyond a shadow of doubt. And this had better be amazing. And until you do, your fitness for political and moral life is less than zero. And that has to stand up until they’re all gone. It’s the only way to get to something approximating normal.

And it’s never going to happen.

So thanks to a certain individual whose actions were either incredibly selfish or incredibly clueless (¿por que no los dos?), we returned from Disneyland to have my wife sick on Saturday and test positive for Covid on Sunday for the first time in the three years of t he pandemic. At that point, it was more or less inevitable that I would test positive as well, which I did on Tuesday…four hours after our house lost power due to wind. That’s right, high winds under a clear and sunny sky knocked our neighborhood completely off the grid along with 275,000 of our closest friends up and down the Peninsula.

We were down for a little over 48 hours, which frankly would have been a doddle if it hadn’t been for Covid. Alternately, a C19 positive test would be okay if you could just collapse on the couch and watch BritBox for a couple of days while ordering DoorDash. Instead, we were faced with the conundrum of “you have no electricity and you can’t be around people.” Which made things exceptionally tricky, as within a few hours, the cellular coverage at the house ceased to function altogether, only coming back sporadically in the middle of the night.

So in the grand scheme of things, this was a very good test of our 72 Hours readiness, and in the wake of having mucked out the fridge and plugged everything back in, these are my preliminary conclusions:

* We had gas and water uninterrupted throughout. If we had not had gas, we would have been cooking on the side burner of the new Weber grill – but at any given time we have four propane tanks in various states of readiness, so that probably could have held for a day or three.

* Water…well, we need to have more in stock than we have. It was nice to be able to shower, but that could be foregone in a pinch. As for the bathroom…well, that’s why they call it pea gravel, isn’t it? We probably could stand to have an Apocalypse Bucket in case of trafficking with Duce Staley. Speaking of which:

* The next town over was mostly OK, and we were able to drive over there to get cell signal and certain extra provisions. I would not count on that when the Big One comes. The flip side is that after The Big One we probably will not be obligated to report straight to work for a few days. The absence of internet access is going to be tougher to work around, because unless one has a Starlink system or similar, it’s a big ask to find a connection.

* As for things that take power, we have enough flashlights and cellphone battery packs to easily get through three days even before recharging things in one of the cars. It would be even nicer to have two-way charging in the ID.4, but that was a model year too late for us. As it is, we had the loan of a Jackery battery pack with a couple of solar panels, and that might provide enough power for rudimentary use of my wife’s CPAP and maybe to charge a laptop in a pinch as long as you have all day to move the solar panels for recharging. We’ll look into that. Without an actual generator, the refrigerator is probably toast anyway – but the freezer compartment of the kitchen fridge and the chest freezer in the garage both came through with flying colors. The rickety old beer fridge, less so – but we probably shouldn’t have had that much in its freezer as it is. (The beer is fine, as far as I can tell.)

* While power is back up, the AT&T internet access is not, nor is there a timetable for its return. We can tether off our phones for now, but that’s not a long term solution especially given the limits of our cell coverage, and while we could always drive to Starbucks, that is no more an option in an actual Big One than going into Starbucks with Covid and just camping out for two hours.

* In the finest traditions of the University of California Marching Band, I dare say we managed to adapt and perform.

In The Imagineering Story, a six part documentary on Disney+, someone says that Disneyland makes you feel young, because it’s like you remember, but it makes you feel better about getting older, because it’s gotten better with age. It’s got new attractions, new features, new cool stuff. And that dichotomy is in the service of making you feel like it’s going to be all right, that this is a step out of the real world and into the best world.

I suppose it’s no wonder that I thought of Disney parks as I was in London at this time last year. That was also a trip into a different reality, complete with rides and attractions and posh themed sleeping arrangements. And this year, a quick park jaunt took care of multiple things: birthday celebration, family obligation, flex of my own independence, the beginning of a badly needed month off. After having hit the park four times since the Covid restrictions were lifted, I have thoughts.

I absolutely agree about the aging. The two foundational experiences of Disney for me were 1989 and 2011. The first time, I was with friends, on property at the Contemporary, no grown-ups, in a world of endless possibility. And in 2011, I was doing the same thing, with different friends, in an all new hotel and park at California Adventure, and reliving an experience I didn’t think I could have again. And there’s a little of that in every visit – most notably in 2019, the opening week of Galaxy’s Edge, staying at the Disneyland Hotel for the first time and experiencing Black Spire Outpost for the first time, but there’s always that frisson of “I have escaped.”

If I’m the head of Disney Parks, the thing that keeps me up at night is that six of my twelve parks are now in places where I’m in partnership with an unreliable and totalitarian government, and China or Florida could screw me at any moment. Japan and Paris seem to be mostly all right, I guess, and then there’s Anaheim. Where the problem is…there’s nowhere left to go. You’re out of space, and they aren’t making any more Orange County. Which to me brings up the biggest question of them all…what are we gonna do about Tomorrowland?

See, in Florida, you at least have space to add a TRON Lightcycles. In Anaheim, your only hope is to retheme something, to change Tower of Terror to a Marvel ride or shrink Bugs Land down for Avengers Campus or turn Splash Mountain into Princess and the Frog and never mind where the mountain fits in a Louisiana swamp. And Tomorrowland is a giant field of two-cycle lawnmower engines surrounding huge blocks of asbestos. Look, I know it’s an original attraction, but Autopia has to go, because the juice ain’t worth the squeeze any more. And then there’s the existing show boxes, which have been turned into…what? Astro Blasters, which is better as Midway Mania across the plaza? An exhibition hall? What the Hell is in Captain EO’s old space now?

If I’m head of Imagineering, my entire legacy right now rests on finding some way to gracefully wind up an area that’s as dated and out of touch with reality as Frontierland and come up with a way of fitting something that matches the original aspiration into the available space without causing a billion dollars of environmental remediation. It is honestly an impossible challenge, but that’s what you go into Imagineering for, isn’t it?

Meanwhile, the number one attraction for me won’t open for another ten years at least. But California High Speed Rail, and a cheaper alternative to flying down and faster alternative to driving or Amtrak, would mean that it would be easier to get the Magic Key and then spend the morning at the park, the afternoon working from the hotel and the evening soaking up the vibes. Because I’ve reached a point where the park itself is the immersive attraction. Just being there is the sort of thing that we’ve had our fill of by day three, and yet after being home four days, we’re thinking about the next visit.

There’s something there. I just need to figure out how much of it I can replicate here.