Spectre Collie

Category: Disney

  • Tropical Depression

    Polynesian ResortWhen I’ve been to Disney World before, the trips have never been quite long enough, and I’ve wondered how long it would take for me to get tired of all of it. It turns out the answer is two and a half weeks.

    Entering week three here, I can say that this is the most surreal business trip I’ve ever been on. Last week I took off a couple of hours in the middle of the day to get my hair cut. That involved taking a monorail and boat ride to the Magic Kingdom, going to the barber shop on Main Street to find a long line of little girls waiting to get their hair done up like princesses, riding Pirates of the Caribbean until the crowds died down, then having two children stare directly at me the entire time I had my own hair cut. (I opted out of the princess glitter or colored hair gel).

    Today as I was eating lunch, a fife and drum corps marched through the restaurant. Most days during my lunch break I stroll around to see lute players or taiko drummers or belly dancers. Breakfast meetings are interrupted by Minnie Mouse or Goofy coming out of nowhere and patting you on the shoulder. I’ve picked up a bad cookie-sandwich-a-day ice cream habit, and I’ve got the gut to show for it.

    Yesterday I got off work a little early to come back to the hotel and do laundry. On the way in, I saw the hotel’s waterslide, which I’ve seen for years but never had the guts to try (I’m not that strong a swimmer — I wasn’t afraid of drowning, just of looking like a total idiot flaling around in a kiddie pool). So I went and tried it, and it was a blast. And I fell asleep as soon as I got back to the room, then ended up having to stay up until 2 AM to get all my laundry done. (With temperatures and humidity in the high 90s, I’m going through laundry really quickly).

    I get the feeling the entire remainder of the trip is going to be like that — struggling to get the most mundane tasks done, being pulled in opposite directions by my innate impulse to always get my life into the most boring routine possible versus my brain’s built-in short-circuit that keeps freaking out that I’m in a theme park and not riding more stuff. The end result is that all the people on vacation are the normal ones, and I’m some alien floating through them trapped halfway in some dimensional rift.

    Hurricane Ernesto is supposed to come through tomorrow, and try as I might I can’t seem to work it into a metaphor. I’m homesick and desperately want to sleep in my own bed and see my friends and eat some non-theme-park-or-fast-food, but that doesn’t quite count as “depression.” And I am wondering exactly what I’m going to do when this project finishes in a couple of weeks, but I can’t say that’s “a storm brewing” or anything that dramatic. I guess my mood is hitting central Florida and fizzling out into general surliness.

    I put up pictures from the second half of the game, that’s pretty much it except for the finale and prologue. Be forewarned that if you were planning on coming to Disney World and playing the game, you shouldn’t look at the pictures, because they give away the whole thing.

    Last week, a former coworker from LucasArts came down with his girlfriend to visit the other programmer on this project, and they all invited me to tag along to stuff after work. It was a lot of fun; it makes all the difference going to the parks with people who just seem to get why Disney is cool. You can read about their trip and see a lot of great pictures of the Polynesian Resort on her blog.

    And although I’m definitely on the tail end of this trip, there’s still some stuff here I want to try. I haven’t been to either of the water parks yet, and I’m hoping to get some time in before I go. My kiddie pool water slide experience has given me false courage to go to a water park without fear of looking like a total spaz. Plus, I’ve got a savage farmer’s tan going on, and I really want to even it out.

    And someday further out, I want to save up enough money to come back and stay at the Polynesian. I’d dropped by before but never appreciated it; now I see that it’s as if they took Disneyland’s Tiki Room and built a huge hotel out of it. It’s still got just enough of the early-70s vibe around it, too, with the Atari 2600-esque colored stripes around the wooden roof. Also, the pool has a volcano water slide. The place ain’t cheap, but ever since I started going to Disney World 35 years ago, I would look at the Contemporary or the Polynesian and say, “someday we’re going to have enough money to stay there.”

  • You Know What I Did Last Summer

    KimmunicatorIt looks like it’s finally safe to talk about what I’ve been working on for the past year. (With the reminder that this is a personal blog and neither I nor this website is a representative of the Disney company. I don’t speak for them, they don’t speak for me, etc.)

    It’s a playtest for an adventure game in Epcot’s World Showcase based on the Kim Possible series, using wireless devices to give you the next clue to solve your mission. This Disney fan site has a description of the game with pictures (and yes, the creepy guy standing in front of the Kim Possible logo is yours truly). I’ve taken my own pictures of the first half of the game; the next half will come whenever I get a chance to play through it as a guest again.

    As a fan of the Disney parks (and, yes, of the Kim Possible show), I think it’s just a brilliant idea, and I was sold as soon as I first heard the concept. The playtest is going on for the next two and a half weeks, and the results are still being analyzed by all the different divisions of the company. But on a personal note, I think it turned out pretty cool, the work that the guys at Imagineering R&D put into it is amazing, and it’s one of the two projects I’m proudest to have worked on.

    The coolest is seeing kids around the park playing it and getting excited about it. And the family who was leaving the finale, and the dad came back upstairs to give the whole team the thumbs-up sign. Working in “normal” videogames, you never get that kind of instant feedback, and wherever the project goes after the playtest ends, it’s just cool seeing something in the park and working and seeing people enjoy it.

  • The Brave Little Barfly

    Today was the first day I’ve had off in a couple of weeks. I spent the bulk of it napping, interspersed with rides on the Tower of Terror.

    After being awakened (awoken?) by fireworks, I headed to Downtown Disney to the Adventurers Club. Full disclosure: this was my second night in a row there, and I went alone, and I did get a little tipsy. Still, I can be smug and sanctimonious enough to point out the people there who were messed up.

    I’ve never been consistent enough in my bar-going to spot the regulars, but I know they’re out there. They have their routine, and their regular drinks, and their awkward conversations with the barstaff, and in the most uncomfortable of situations, they prey on younger bar-goers. Combine the sadness of the barfly with the loneliness of the Disney “That Guy,” and you end up with the Disney Drunk, a sight so melancholy it’s like the saddest song played on the black keys of the world’s most depressing piano.

    The Adventurers Club, in case you don’t know, is on Pleasure Island at Downtown Disney, and is actually an extremely cool concept. It’s kind of a dinner theater thing without the dinner, set in an adventurer’s club in the 1930s. The cast of characters roams throughout interacting with the drunk guests, and there’s lots of stuff on the walls that talks. Disney plus improv comedians means some of the corniest innuendo you’d ever want to hear, but somehow it all ends up working. Tonight during one of the bits the guys launched into a rendition of “Puttin’ on the Ritz” from Young Frankenstein that was pretty hilarious.

    The place has its own slogans and in-jokes and cheers and such, so you get a lot of repeat guests. In addition to the hairy guy wearing the tropical shirt (me, who was referred to as “mustache man” for much of the night), there was:

    • A good-looking and very well-dressed man in a suit with Adventurers’ Club pins in his lapel. He did all the cheers and would go from group to group, chatting with anyone who made eye contact.
    • An older gentleman in a black T-shirt and shorts, who went from room to room just before the show would start, like clockwork, and occasionally chatted with
    • A young woman dressed in black, wearing make-up much like a woman who learned to wear make-up when she was in her Goth phase in high school and outgrew that but never had anything to fall back on.

    The latter two told me to avoid sitting in a corner seat I’d picked out, because I’d be hit when the door of a cabinet flew open during the show. (I did, and I almost was). They chatted amongst themselves about which actor was playing which part this evening, calling both by name and referring to the club’s different shows in some kind of code (e.g. “Bob’s doing Hathaway tonight in the 11:50 Mask Room.”) In other words, they’re insiders.

    It was all fascinating, and became even more fascinating the more I drank. It was like its own little ecosystem in the middle of the gigantic entertainment megalopolis of Walt Disney World. The only barfly I’ve encountered at Disneyland — the “Velvet Misery” — was a lot more depressing, because it seemed more personal. Everything at Disney World is on a much grander scale, which makes it all seem like a giant social studies experiment. Including the absolutely shitfaced young woman who kept telling the cast that it was her boyfriend’s birthday, and how they ended up with several members of the cast giving him a spanking with a tennis racket while onlookers laughed somewhat nervously, and how we all knew that they deal with this kind of thing every night and that there’s probably some Operations Manual written down somewhere telling them that spanking a young drunk man with a tennis racket is acceptable behavior and where exactly that line is drawn.

    Also, I overheard one of the cast talking to a group of people about the project I’m working on. That was cool.

  • Living at Disney World

    Is she still there?Today I moved into what’s going to be my new home for the next month. It’s one of Disney’s timeshares, with a nice tree-obstructed view of Spaceship Earth at Epcot and fireworks visible from my balcony. Even though I didn’t get to sleep last night until around 2, I suddenly woke up at 7am — even if it’s for work and not vacation, I’m hard-wired to wake up early the morning of a Disney trip.

    When I got off at the airport, my bag came out almost immediately. At the rental car place, I managed to snag a Volkswagen Beetle convertible that someone had just returned; driving around Disney World in the sunshine in a convertible bug is like the world’s biggest autopia. Tonight I had a chili dog and a hot fudge sundae for dinner.

    I’m not going to lie; it’s pretty sweet. If I were here with Kim Deal and had flown in on the Millenium Falcon, I could’ve taken care of about 98% of my lifelong fantasies all in one go.

    But since it’s in my nature to find the dark side of everything, there are some downsides:

    1. Damn is it ever hot. Who’d’ve thunkit, Florida in August and it’s hot and humid. I wasn’t even outside all that much today, all things considered, and still by the time I got back to the hotel I was ripe. Luckily, the hotel has a laundromat.

    2. And while we’re on the subject of heat and my personal hygiene, I’ll tell you right now that the beard’s not going to survive to the end of the month. And I was hoping to hit one of the water parks on this long trip, but I’m concerned I’ll set off a panic and frighten the children, making them think the Yeti escaped from Expedition Everest.

    3. It hasn’t been a full day yet and I’m already wanting to strangle Stacy (pictured). She’s the chirpy hellbeast who hosts the “Top 7 Things To See at Walt Disney World” that runs on an infinite loop on the hotel TVs. She was abrasive the first time I came on vacation and she was there yammering on about the Rock’n’Roller Coaster in their faux Travel Channel advertising, but that was like 4 visits ago. Now I want her dead. There’s not much else on the TV, unless you like 45 variants of ABC, the Disney Channel, ESPN, and advertising for Disney’s Vacation Club.

    4. I’m starting to realize that a 35-year-old man, especially one with a history of digestive problems, shouldn’t be having chili dogs and ice cream sundaes for dinner at 10pm. I’m not that interested in becoming the next Morgan Spurlock, so I’m going to have to find some way to go the next 30 days with something other than theme park food.

    5. I could take advantage of the current lull for me and just goof off, but there’s this dark cloud of insanely busy crunch mode just a day or two away hanging over everything, sapping the fun out of it. (Don’t get me wrong, I’m still going to goof off at every available opportunity, I just have to schedule it so that I work some Protestant guilt in there.) Plus it’s tough to get into the spirit of Disney Magic when I know the rest of my family’s pretty miserable at the moment.

    There, that’s a pretty good block of negativity. Things already feel like they’re getting back to normal. Fact is, though, that this is just a really really cool opportunity to be at a place I love for a good long while, to see stuff I’ve never seen even after 35 years of coming here, and to get a look at what goes on behind the scenes. And to add something to it that I think is going to be pretty cool.

    Whether or not it’s crazy busy, or things go bad, or people hate it, it’s one of those once-in-a-lifetime opportunities. And I’m excited as hell about it.

  • Speaking of Marketing

    Photo from Gasoline Alley Antiques
    Speaking of the ineffable genius of marketing types:

    By way of The Disney Blog, here’s Kroger’s press release for Old Yeller Chunk Style Dog Food.

    You can go ahead and read that press release without fear of spoilers; for some reason, they don’t mention how the movie ends.

    So look forward to a long life with your dog thanks to Old Yeller Chunk Style Dog Food. And when it comes time to put your faithful companion down, why not try Bambi’s Mom brand bullets? They’re in your local Kroger right next to Grave of the Fireflies brand fruit candies.

  • Walt Disney’s Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass

    from Amazon.comI must be all kinds of dense, because I’m having a hell of a time making it through The Odyssey. I was meaning to be reading it for pleasure but I can’t tell one name from the next and it just feels like homework.

    So I switched to The Once and Future King. And it only took me 40 pages of deja vu before I realized I had seen all of it before, as The Sword in the Stone. According to Amazon, the book is actually a compilation of short stories by T.H. White, the first of which was made directly into the Disney Version (what with its being about an orphan who proves himself and all).

    The reason I thought this story was interesting: the Sword in the Stone was always one of my least favorite Disney movies. I thought it was slight and pretty forgettable, like an unfinished chunk of a larger story. But what really stood out and bugged me were all the anachronisms — Merlin wearing a Hawaiian shirt and all that. Contemporary Disney movies like Jungle Book and Robin Hood handled it better. King Louie was genuinely cool (although the British Invasion vultures were kind of annoying). And I still say that having the depiction of the merry men in Robin Hood exploit all the country & western stuff that was popular at the time (with Smokey and the Bandit) was a genius move.

    At the time, though, I assumed that The Sword in the Stone was an original invention. I’m not dense enough to think that Disney invented King Arthur, of course, but I just always assumed they’d done their own take on Le Morte D’Arthur or something — like they did with Mulan. And the anachronisms were just annoying Disney formula, like the Genie in Aladdin. (That wasn’t based on a re-telling, was it?)

    What’s particularly odd is that in the book, I love it. I think it’s great hearing Merlin talk about electricity, and reading the narrator describe everything in contemporary terms and dialect while explaining that that’s exactly what he’s doing. It’s integral to the whole character of the book and the way it’s told, and it’s a genius move for an adaptation/re-telling.

    So this is one of the rare cases where reading the original makes me appreciate the Disney version more. (While at the same time, being a little disappointed that it wasn’t as original as I’d always assumed). It also leaves me wondering if there are any other Disney movies that aren’t direct translations of a book; the only ones I can think of now are two of the most recent, Lilo & Stitch and Atlantis.

  • Decompression

    The day after crunch mode ends on a project is like a bullet train hitting a concrete mammoth. “Brick wall” seemed too mundane. You’d think I’d be used to it by now, instead of finding myself sitting in a hotel room with nothing to do and too bored even to nap.

    There’s still plenty to do, of course, but the key point is that I didn’t have to do anything today. I’m torn between halfway feeling guilty about goofing off today and then realizing that I don’t feel guilty about goofing off today and feeling guilty about that. Luckily things will get crazy busy again within a couple of days, and all that nonsense will stop.

    I ended up going to Hollywood Boulevard to see Pirates of the Caribbean at The The El Capitan Theater. A while ago I complained about the El Capitan having too much of the Disney Regimented Whimsy vibe going on. That was a perfect example of what happens when Disney goes horribly awry; today was a great example of what happens when Disney gets it right.

    The theater has piratey stuff over the sign, all through the lobby, and in the balcony. In the basement there’s a museum with props and costumes from the movie. If you pre-ordered your ticket, you got a bucket of popcorn and soda included (the tickets are ridiculously expensive, but a) that’s Disney, and 2) it was worth it). They had the organist going as usual, which is always cool; a drawing for tickets to Disneyland; and before the show started they did a flaming pirate skull/dungeon effect behind the screen, which was really well-done and great for getting geared up for the movie. It was pretty much exactly the promise of the theater — the Disney thing combined with the Great Movie House thing.

    As for the movie itself: not bad. I’d been reading reviews panning it, and hearing people say they didn’t like it, but I don’t think it deserves the negativity. As far as movie-trilogy-franchise-building goes, it was suitably entertaining. And it worked all right as a movie in spite of being the Jan Brady of the trilogy — unlike The Two Towers (a better movie), Pirates had an arc to it.

    What it needed was an editor. And a few more script revisions. In the first, stuff happened because it kind of made sense to happen. It was still as formulaic as a big Disney action franchise requires, but there was motivation for everything. The second just seems as if they threw everything they could think of up on the screen. I’m sure there was a thread through the whole thing that made it vaguely story-like, and I’ll bet that it was explained in one of the hundreds of lines of dialogue I couldn’t comprehend at all. Plus the thing could’ve stood to lose an hour or so.

    Speaking of bad editing and meandering purposelessness, here’s a video I made from Hollywood Boulevard. I got myself a video camera for my birthday and was playing around with it and iMovie. But if you’re into that kind of thing, the internet makes it possible. Let me reiterate that this is a home movie, so don’t watch it expecting something interesting to happen.

  • Crimes Against the Internets: The Re-Imagineering Blog

    Mickey's not going down with the shipThe internet is full-to-bursting with self-important nerds who are simultaneously obsessed beyond reason with the minutiae of their chosen hobby and convinced that they could do a better job than the people currently in charge of that hobby.

    This isn’t breaking news. It happens with movies, comic books, television series (somehow, Joss Whedon remains exempt), and I imagine it happens with stuff I’m not a nerdy fan of myself. I’ll bet that the world of Civil War re-enactments has its own little dramas playing out, with people resentful at the ego-maniac glory hound who insists on playing Grant with copper buttons on his uniform although any real devotee of history knows that Grant insisted on bronze buttons because of an incident in a copper mine when he was three.

    So if this behavior is all just part of the natural gestalt of the internets, why does reading The Re-Imagineering Blog make me want to hit the writers of that site repeatedly over the head with a manure-filled sock?

    Because, as we’ve learned from Robert Louis Stevenson and countless Lifetime TV movies, we fear the darkness that lives within us all. And I hate the Walt Disney World version of the Enchanted Tiki Room, and I think that the WDW version of The Tower of Terror is infinitely better than Disneyland’s.

    I just don’t think you’ve got to be such a damn douche about it.

    These guys call their blog “Re-Imagineering,” but they don’t do much other than bitch and moan, and parrot back public-relations quotes from Walt Disney about magic and imagination as if they’d just won some kind of argument. You could make a pretty convincing argument that the greatest talent of Disney (the man) was in selling himself and his ideas. As much as we like to believe otherwise, the real world doesn’t reward you with such a long-lasting legacy and reputation based on talent alone — you can be the greatest visionary the world’s ever seen, but it’s not worth anything if no one listens to you.

    So all the Disney quotes and truisms that get passed around do have some genuine value. It’s just not so much value for making a theme park, but selling it. Of course, that’s not all that Disney did — he had great ideas and very importantly, knew how to find the guys who knew how to make those ideas work, and get them on his side. Any idiot can just say, “Disney theme parks should be magical.”

    And they do, repeatedly, all over the internets. There’s all kinds of moaning and hand-wringing and people saying, completely without irony, “What would Walt think?!?” But if the guys on this blog are putting themselves forward as “Pixar and Disney professionals,” it’s not enough to just complain about how things just ain’t like they used to be. They need to put up or shut up.

    And, incidentally, stop being so long-winded, pompous, and sanctimonious. Everything I read from the writers of that site reminds me of the Achewood strip where they prank call Garfield.
    (more…)

  • A Brief Layover

    Cinderella's CastleDisney magic has transformed a week-long business trip into a two-week-long business trip, since I’ve got to leave Monday morning for a week down in LA. On the plus side, I’m… well, saving on groceries, I guess.

    Of course, it’s hard to feel too sorry for myself when last week ended up being as nice a “business trip” as you can get while still calling it that. That was the kind of thing I was imagining when I was thinking of some day working for Disney — getting stuff done, seeing enough of the behind-the-scenes stuff to be cool but not so much as to ruin it. And getting time to just goof off and enjoy it, to be reminded of the point of working for Imagineering in the first place (it’s not to make tons of money and climb up the management hierarchy, contrary to what the LA mentality may suggest).

    This was my first real trip to Disney World as an adult. Going with the family doesn’t really count, since I’m stuck in perpetual 16-years-old-ness whenever I’m around my family, and also we end up just going around doing the same stuff we always do for nostalgia value more than anything else. And the last trip for work didn’t count, since I only had a couple hours here and there to rush into a park on my own and try (unsuccessfully) to treat it like a working vacation.

    This time I got to see it as an adult would see it, and it’s pretty damn impressive. Disneyland is still more fun in a lot of ways, and there are a lot of things it gets right that Disney World just doesn’t master (Pirates of the Caribbean, for instance, and the Magic Kingdom at WDW just feels a lot more cold and empty and imposing, somehow). I guess the corny comparison would be that Disneyland is a single theme park done perfectly, while Disney World is an entire city built around the concept.

    I’m sure that if I’d been spending the whole time worrying about how much everything cost, or how I was going to keep the kids well-rested and entertained, or any of the other genuine adult concerns that people have that make them critical of Disney, it would’ve been different. But as it was, I was free to just go around and be impressed.

    Burbank is going to seem a lot more mundane, I’m sure. Tonight is a comedy show with Patton Oswalt, Sarah Silverman, and others, which I’m expecting to be anti-Disney. After that I’m going to do as much sleeping in my own bed and playing with my own videogames as I can until I have to get on another plane.

  • Expedition Everest

    Attraction SignAs it turns out, the rumors of the total lack of internet access were greatly exaggerated. When I was ironing a shirt this morning, I found an ethernet cable hiding in the back of the closet, and I grabbed it like a kid opening a Christmas present.

    It doesn’t make that much of a difference, since I’m still not in the hotel room enough to keep up with my usual level of internet slack time. But it does at least let me talk about Expedition Everest to an audience other than those who are jaded about Disney rides.

    But first, the trip in general. So far it’s going so well that it’s unsettling. The travel itself was painless — they’d originally stuck me in the dead center of a 7-seat plane for a 4-hour flight, but just as I was about to sit down, someone asked me to trade seats so I got an aisle. And the flight got in ahead of schedule.

    The weather here has been perfect. Again, to the point of feeling unnatural — it’s just not right to be in Florida and not be soaking wet from a combination of sweat and sudden thunderstorms. But it’s been clear, sunny, and cool all week. The food’s been good, the people have been friendly, the parks have been fun, and the hotel is about perfect.

    So it’s just been a slacker’s vacation on Corporate Entertainment’s dime, right? Actually, no. Because we’ve got a smaller group here and because we’re far enough along in the project to know exactly what we’re looking for, we’ve gotten a lot accomplished, and the meetings have been going well. (Because I can’t say more than that on the internets, and because I don’t want to jinx it, that’s all I’m saying about that).

    And because it’s been productive, there’s been more time to just relax. We went to Animal Kingdom yesterday and rode Expedition Everest two times (keeping in theme with the trip, the line was less than 15 minutes long), and went back today to ride it again (the line was a little less than an hour this time, which was actually good because it gave us a chance to see all the details in line).

    It’s an astoundingly good ride, totally solid and a hell of a lot of fun. The Asia section of the park has remarkably detailed theming, and the ride fits in with that. The queue has tons of details throughout and combines a tourist center, a shrine to the Yeti as protector of the mountain, and a Yeti museum. That theming extends to the ride itself, as the lift hill goes through a temple that’s as detailed as anything you saw in the queue. And the rest of the ride crams everything good about Disney coasters into just over a minute — effects, animation, some innovation, an some genuine surprises (even though I knew the basic layout going in).

    Apparently the word going around was that it was a “gentle” coaster, but it’s not. It leaves you with the same overall feel as Big Thunder Mountain, but it’s a good bit more intense, especially the section in the dark. And the Yeti (hope I’m not ruining the ride for anyone, but yeah, you do see the Yeti) is just awesome. As much as I enjoyed the ride, it was even cooler seeing groups of kids getting off clapping and cheering and running right back to the entrance to ride it again. It looks like they’ve got a hit.

    Me, I got off, bought a T-shirt for it (I’d said I wasn’t going to buy any more Disney T-shirts, but this one was too cool to pass up), and casually walked back to ride it again. If the park hadn’t been closing, I would’ve tried to ride it one more time. There’s still two days left to get my chance…

  • Merge Right

    When Robert Iger showed up at that Apple announcement last year to bring “Lost” and “Desperate Housewives” to the iPod, people were saying it showed that Steve Jobs and Disney were close pals now that Michael Eisner was gone. Maybe there was something to that, because Disney finally bought Pixar.

    I guess things were going in that direction for a while, so it was inevitable. I couldn’t be less of an insider as far as the film/animation studio business goes, but at least from a surface assessment (Disney animation needs more innovation, Pixar animation needs more market profile) it makes sense. I also like seeing press releases that mention billions of dollars of stock transitions and “imagination” and “dreams” and “the child in everyone” all on the same page.

    I didn’t notice any mention of whether they’re going to keep the Pixar brand name. If nothing else, it’ll reduce some of their ad text, so for parades and rides and such they can finally stop saying, “A Walt Disney Animation Production of a Pixar Studios Film Monsters, Inc.“

  • Yeti!

    Chuck SMASH!!A Disney podcast called Inside the Magic has posted two ride-through videos of the Expedition Everest ride at Animal Kingdom in Florida. It is what we Imagineers like to call so totally wicked awesome.

    The video is from a roller coaster, so it’s dark and bumpy and blurry and such, but then that’s why The Zapruder Effect is in play. You can see the cool Yeti shadow effect, and the twisted tracks sequence, as well as pretty much the entire ride in the video. But what’s going on in all the pitch black sequences? And what’s it feel like on the ride itself?

    I’ll find out the next time my job takes me to Orlando. I’m feeling lucky!

    If you use iTunes, you can get at the video podcasts part one and part two.

    (And the goofy picture of me is just to test out ecto, a blog-writing app that I’m thinking of using.)