politics cw

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

cryptotheism:

A Review of The Way Of The Shadow Wolves: The Deep State And The Hijacking Of America by Steven Segal

Alleged rapist and human trafficker, cop groupie, washed-up action movie star, and personal friend to Vladimir Putin, the paradox of Steven Segal is how he manages to stick around despite being –by damn near every account– a universally unpleasant vacuum of charisma. I could go on, but I feel that no introduction of Steven would be complete without the tale of the headlock. Legends tell of Steven’s conflict with legendary martial artist and hollywood stunt coordinator “Judo” Gene Lebell. Allegedly, the two fell into an argument on the set of the film Out For Justice. The crux being Steven’s claim that he was “immune” to being choked unconscious. Allegedly, LeBell called his bluff, and put the actor in a headlock. A headlock that resulted in Steven losing consciousness, and control of his bowels. Steven denies the story. He also wrote a book.

Keep reading

{{below the cut:}}

The book is garbage, but garbage in a way that can be easily overstated. I wanted to take a page from other reviewers of this book, and call the text what it is; a fever dream of exhausting mediocrity, swaddled in delusions of grandeur. I wanted to whale on it. I wanted to denounce it like some ridiculous fire-and-brimstone preacher of internet literary criticism. But this does not capture the core, the essence of Way of the Shadow Wolves. There is a paradox at the heart of this text, a contradiction that even now I struggle to describe. Because despite everything, despite the balls-to-the-walls premise, the disastrous prose, and the buckwild plot, this book is deeply and powerfully boring. To call it a fever dream is to imply that it might be exciting.

Some books are bad in a way that must be experienced firsthand. This is not one of those books. In a way, I feel that you’ve already read this book. You know Steven Segal. You met him in elementary school, when he told you he has “every black belt.” You met him in college when you tricked him into smoking a bag of oregano. You met him at your most recent family gathering, where you were trapped in an awkward one-sided conversation about “those people.” The bad-ness of Steven’s work is deeply familiar.

We have our boots. We have our waders. We have our shovels. But, before we wade into the shit, there is one more thing we need to get out of the way: The Shadow Wolves are real. In 1972 the United States government agreed to the Tohono O’odham Nation’s demand that border enforcement agents patrolling their land have at least one quarter native ancestry. The result being the specialized unit of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers known as The Shadow Wolves. In the 2020 Sonic the Hedgehog film, Dr. Eggman states that they are who trained him in the art of tracking.

WAY OF THE SHADOW WOLVES

Let us cook Way of the Shadow Wolves from scratch. Think of every dogshit C-list action movie you’ve ever seen. Ideally, you want the trash cuts of post-9/11 hysteria marbled with ex-cia heroes and vaguely arab villains. Drop it all into a stockpot. Next, roughly dice some comic books and kung-fu movies, the more racist the better. Now add some datura, it doesn’t matter if it’s edible or not, because you saw a native American in a movie make something like that once and you’re totally 1/64th Cherokee. Add a whole can of Qanon and a whole can of racism. Boil until you have pacing thicker than mud.

Way of the Shadow Wolves is a police procedural meets a spy thriller, a fast-paced action drama about elite agents on the fringes of the law who have the huge sweaty meaty balls to do what needs to be done for our country. It is Steven’s attempt at the action schlock he embodies as an actor. Our hero is John Gode: Shadow Wolf. Reservation-born native American tracker, ICE agent, and Kung-Fu master. I believe he might have been described at one point. If he was, I do not care. Steven does not care. It does not matter. John Gode is Steven, and he’s the most badass dude to ever not be gay. He is: Special Agent Shaman Cop. He’s gonna beat up the deep state. That’s all you need to really need to know. In fact, it is shocking just how little you need to know about this book.

We begin in a movie theater, where our protagonist is alone, watching the end credits of a movie about the atrocious treatment of native Americans on behalf of the united states government. When the film finally ends, John says to himself “It’s about time.” He gets up to leave. The chapter immediately ends. My compliments to the chef. A delightfully bland apéritif of a character introduction. Steven uses the essential point of first contact with our protagonist to tell us vital information like “He doesn’t like it when movies are long.” or maybe “He didn’t like this movie about the trail of tears.” It is unclear. To quote English-Albanian philosopher Dua Lipa, “Go girl, give us nothing.”

I have been dancing around the quality of the writing. It seems impossible to approach without the footing of a new paragraph, an opponent that requires full-focus, an all-out assault. It is nigh-incomprehensible. I hate comparing bad writing to drugs. It feels too easy. But there is a specific air to Way of the Shadow Wolves. There is a distinct cadence, simultaneously manic and lethargic, that comes from attempting to write while day drunk on over-prescribed amphetamines. And make no mistake, if Steven was not entranced by the muse of Too Many Uppers And Downers At The Same Time, if he wrote this thing stone sober, that is worse. Small quotes will not do the writing style justice, you must see for yourself how sentences flow into each other:

“The desperado’s mind went back in time to a small town in Mexico twelve years before, where he first met his two cohorts when they were thrown together by a tragic set of circumstances. Their parents had been gunned down by a cartel who was at war with a competing cartel for control of the area, which was a pathway to the American border near Nogales, Arizona. All three had been shepherded to a local mission where they were being cared for by the Franciscans, who were becoming overwhelmed by the growing number of children left homeless due to the rampant killings by the warring cartels …”

Labyrinthine. A paragraph structure that would feel more at home with Calvino, or Garcia Marquez at his most experimental, though stripped of its deft control and musicality.
Segal will regularly change temporal perspective in the middle of sentences. A single run-on sentence will begin in the past, have a middle clause in the present, and then return to the past by the end. There is a downright massive cast of characters for a 200 page book. Damn near every chapter introduces three or four more names, and we are lucky if Steven describes them before discarding them entirely. This book is a slog. I find myself losing patience with Steven.

—

Some time has passed since I began writing this review. Originally, my approach was surgical disassembly. I was going to go over the plot, summarize its anatomy, pick apart its flaws with surgical precision. But the more I cut, the more I felt as if I was the butt of a joke. I was performing an autopsy on a clown, pulling sheets of colorful rope from its gut, and the cadaver was laughing at me.

There is a moment, about halfway through. A woman approaches John at a bar. An assassin, who later attacks John in the parking lot with karate. A furious series of crescent kicks, effortlessly blocked by John Gode, who punches her in the ribs and knocks her to the ground. Realizing that her martial arts are defeated, she draws her gun, but John Gode is too fast. He fires his own weapon before she can get the shot off, killing her instantly. “Her round went upward toward the sky as she fell backward with eyes wide open, seeing nothing.”

This scene stuck with me. It illustrates one of the critical flaws at the heart of Way of the Shadow Wolves. Nothing hurts John. Nothing even gets close. He does not struggle. He does not sweat. He does not bleed. Steven clearly intends this scene to be badass, a moment where his self-insert hero defeats a dangerous enemy without trying. This book is an action movie, but John’s untouchability makes every action scene read as a moment of profound and boring cruelty. This was not a contest of master martial artists. This was an adult kicking a child in the throat.

I find myself losing patience with Steven. I am running out of humorous ways to describe this vapid tripe. This is, in my mind, the greatest condemnation of bad writing. There is no hell lower than being boring to mock. I see myself as a sort of sommelier of the awkward and disastrous. I will be the first to tell you “Wait! Don’t throw that out! There are things to be learned!” But Steven repeatedly proves himself to be a sort of Alchemist of Shit, capable of transmuting theoretically interesting bullshit into just fucking nothing. If this book deserves credit for anything, it is its miraculous ability to squander its own premise.

Why write this? Any of this? Steven clearly does not read. Or, if he does, he seems to subsist entirely on a diet of comic books about monkeys that do kung-fu. Why write this? At some level it all comes down to “because Steven wanted to” right?

Right?

But I cannot shake the feeling. To call this book masturbatory is to imply that Steven might have enjoyed it. There is a desperation to the power fantasy here. To be feared by men, desired by women, revered by all, yaddah yaddah yaddah, all the same trite excretions of blunt masculinity. But there is something else. Steven wants the same thing that every conspiracy theorist wants; a simple world. A world he can understand. Steven is exhausted, overwhelmed with a world he feels he can neither effect nor understand. I am exhausted.

I fear my earlier allusions to expressionist novels may have been more spot on than I imagined. Way of the Shadow Wolves has a plot in the sense that Sunny-D contains fruit juice. Its presence is a formality, a ceremonial hat worn for tax purposes. The plot is there, but it is unimportant. This is not a text that can be debated with. Because within the world of the text, politics is not complex. It is not actually a web of interconnected groups, each with their own interests, rivalries, alliances, and historical contexts. Behind all of it is two things: Good guys, and bad guys. The good guys are all working together, and the bad guys are all working together.

I find myself losing patience with Steven. I fear my earlier allusions to expressionist novels may have been more spot on than I imagined. Way of the Shadow Wolves has a plot.

John Gode finds a human tooth in the desert. It belongs to a body, a body of a woman described in lurid detail. Nearby, he meets a young native American man, a man who calls himself Sweet Tooth. The body is missing teeth, missing hands, missing feet. A trademark cartel killing. A young native American man. “I’m gonna be like, your assistant right?” A buddy cop dynamic. Meeting the task force. Tailing an ICE van full of cartel soldiers. A hostage situation. A shootout in the desert. Far away, faceless men in suits with masonic ranks plan a mass killing. Some sounded like they had Arabic accents. Freemasonry. Interrogation with a snake. The corpse was a woman. The woman was a reporter. She had the evidence on a flash drive, evidence that proved the existence of the deep state. What if its all connected? A sex scene, or almost a sex scene. A sex scene interrupted. A shootout in the desert. Kung Fu assassins at a bar. A cartel defector. A shootout in the desert. What if its all connected. They’re working with the Jihadists. The USA is already “half latino.” The government is paying the cartels to ship Jihadists north across the border. They’re well-trained and well armed. You can’t trust anyone. A terrorist defector who hears the voice of the prophet. The ghost of John’s grandfather. The sun sets over the Sonora. A shootout in the desert. They kidnapped John’s mother. Bring them the flash drive. They’re planning to bomb the casino. A shootout in the desert. The police chief was a traitor. The Catholics are in on it. Its all connected. A shootout in the desert. Assault by night. Rescuing the hostage. A knife dipped in pigs blood. A pit of vipers in the sonora.

Steven ends a chapter with the line. “They had functioned like a well-oiled machine that had just saved two innocent lives. All lives matter. Do they not?”

I am tired. I find myself at a neighborhood block party, trapped in a conversation I’ve had a thousand times. This time the man on the other end is a sweaty divorcee in range glasses who looks like a sunburned thumb. Last week, it was a woman with a necklace of crystals and blonde hair bleached blonder. “Haha yeah” I say, looking down at my phone. “Burgers look good this year huh?”

Thank you to my Patreon supporters who made this review possible.

Tags:

#reactionblogging #racism cw #politics cw #rape tw? #murder cw? #unsanitary cw? #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #(my favourite line is ”Way of the Shadow Wolves has a plot in the sense that Sunny-D contains fruit juice.”)

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

overlyactivepingpongball:

ac732a663eaf2107d69a2521defae82857d9454f
e9484d7fefa77420d092716e85f9dd785f3ce311
e5da7e5453dc4701f35b46964a5de3474b4b46e0
a3038c7a66ce7174563cd959925f9268a92f4cad
1f686ab56d46fbd0adaf8234469baeb0510dbb1c
1e7c6042f820503b755e8621b85552ee23582ac6

Welcome to the funniest set of memes I’ve ever seen thank you

Tags:

#gender #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #((this amusement not to be taken as expressing an opinion regarding the statement itself)) #(((more specifically‚ not to be taken as expressing an opinion regarding the particular paradigm of gender implied by these memes))) #(((I am aware of the existence of gender paradigms that think *both* transphobes *and* these memes are full of shit))) #(((but that’s way above my pay grade))) #(((regardless‚ that ”Pangea” one *is* hilarious))) #((((and to a lesser extent ”check out this cornfield”)))) #discourse cw #politics cw #cissexism cw

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

likeadevils:

so does the uk falling apart meant that johnlock is about to go canon or is that just for american politics

Tags:

#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #politics cw #BBC Sherlock #Britain #home of the brave

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

vaspider:

My great-grandmother was pregnant for over a decade of her life.

She was pregnant at least fifteen times, had over a dozen children. Raised all of them in a big rambling farmhouse in central Pennsylvania.

And I thought about her this afternoon, lying in bed with my spouse after my lazy weekend nap, snuggling him and burying my nose in his hair, taking deep breaths of the scent of his skin. This man who is the center of my universe, my best friend, one of two reasons why I literally decided I had to live and kept fighting through the pain after surgery when I really wanted to just let go and die: I held him closer and I thought of her.

I thought of how family myth tells us that after a decade of being pregnant pretty much constantly, she kicked my great-grandfather out of their house. How she made him go live in his workshop, and he came to the house for meals and to check in.

But he slept in his workshop.

Not because she didn’t love him, but because she did.

She loved him, and if they slept in the same bed together, these two people who had crossed an ocean together, had built a life together after getting out of Poland together, they’d have sex. And because cheap, reliable, universal birth control wasn’t available then, and she was terribly fecund, apparently, she’d become pregnant again, inevitably.

My great-grandmother was TIRED of being pregnant.

So she kicked her love out of the house, and he went. He lived in his workshop, on their farm, and they stopped sleeping together, in every sense of the word. My father tells me he remembers as a child his grandfather sitting outside his workshop, leaning back on his chair, and looking up at the house in which he couldn’t sleep anymore, just… sad.

They missed each other desperately from across the yard.

I listen to @adhocavenger sleep, to the sound of his breathing, a sound that’s as familiar to me as my own heartbeat, and I can’t imagine having to sleep away from him for long. To have to separate myself from my spouse or to have to completely eschew having the kind of sex they obviously enjoyed having. To not have him close enough at night that I can curl up to him and breathe in the scent of his skin.

And that, I think, is the sort of thing that I think maybe I take for granted. That I know I can be secure in the knowledge that I can have sex with my spouse when I want to, and not have a baby.

The personal is political. I do not want our country to continue to slide backward on reproductive freedom. I do not want us to lose our freedom, threatened and small as it may be.

There are a thousand small tragedies that we talk about from the Olde Days. The unwanted baby of the unmarried lass, of course.

But my heart breaks tonight for the story I was told as a child, of the lovingly married couple who had to sleep apart because she was just damn tired of being pregnant.

Because she’d been pregnant for a DECADE of her life.

Tags:

#storytime #pregnancy cw #death tw #politics cw #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what #that one post with the thing

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

actualaster:

kingdomheartsloversstuff:

looney-toons:

timemachineyeah:

Gen Z is awesome and generational fighting is bad, but I do sometimes talk to Gen Z folks and I’m like… oh… you cannot comprehend before the internet.

Like activists have been screaming variations on “educate yourself!” for as long as I’ve been alive and probably longer, but like… actually doing so? Used to be harder?

And anger at previous generations for not being good enough is nothing new. I remember being a kid and being horrified to learn how recent desegregation had been and that my parents and grandparents had been alive for it. Asking if they protested or anything and my mom being like “I was a child” and my grandma being like “well, no, I wasn’t into politics” but I was a child when I asked so that didn’t feel like much of an excuse from my mother at the time and my grandmother’s excuse certainly didn’t hold water and I remember vowing not to be like that.

So kids today looking at adults and our constant past failures and being like “How could you not have known better? Why didn’t you DO better?” are part of a long tradition of kids being horrified by their history, nothing new, and also completely justified and correct. That moral outrage is good.

But I was talking to a kid recently about the military and he was talking about how he’d never be so stupid to join that imperialist oppressive terrorist organization and I was like, “Wait, do you think everyone who has ever joined the military was stupid or evil?” and he was like, well maybe not in World War 2, but otherwise? Yeah.

And I was like, what about a lack of education? A lack of money? The exploitation of the lower classes? And he was like, well, yeah, but that’s not an excuse, because you can always educate yourself before making those choices.

And I was like, how? Are you supposed to educate yourself?

And he was like, well, duh, research? Look it up!

And I was like, and how do you do that?

And he was like, start with google! It’s not that hard!

And I was like, my friend. My kid. Google wasn’t around when my father joined the military.

Then go to the library! The library in the small rural military town my father grew up in? Yeah, uh, it wasn’t exactly going to be overflowing with anti-military resources.

Well then he should have searched harder!

How? How was he supposed to know to do that? Even if he, entirely independently figured out he should do that, how was he supposed to find that information?

He was a kid. He was poor. He was the first person in his family to aspire to college. And then by the time he knew what he signed up for it was literally a criminal offense for him to try to leave. Because that’s the contract you sign.

(Now, listen, my father is also not my favorite person and we agree on very little, so this example may be a bit tarnished by those facts, but the material reality of the exploitative nature of military recruitment remains the same.)

And this is one of a few examples I’ve come across recently of members of Gen Z just not understanding how hard it was to learn new ideas before the internet. I’m not blaming anyone or even claiming it’s disproportionate or bad. But the same kids that ten years ago I was marveling at on vacation because they didn’t understand the TV in the hotel room couldn’t just play more Mickey Mouse Clubhouse on demand – because they’d never encountered linear prescheduled TV, are growing into kids who cannot comprehend the difficulty of forming a new worldview or making life choices when you cannot google it. When you have maybe one secondhand source or you have to guess based on lived experience and what you’ve heard. Information, media, they have always been instant.

Society should’ve been better, people should’ve known better, it shouldn’t have taken so long, and we should be better now. That’s all true.

But controlling information is vital to controlling people, and information used to be a lot more controlled. By physical law and necessity! No conspiracy required! There’s limited space on a newspaper page! There’s limited room in a library! If you tried to print Wikipedia it would take 2920 bound volumes. That’s just Wikipedia. You could not keep the internet’s equivalent of resources in any small town in any physical form. It wasn’t there. We did not have it. When we had a question? We could not just look it up.

Kids today are fortunate to have dozens of firsthand accounts of virtually everything important happening at all times. In their pockets.

(They are also cursed by this, as we all are, because it’s overwhelming and can be incredibly bleak.)

If anything, today the opposite problem occurs – too much information and not enough time or context to organize it in a way that makes sense. Learning to filter out the garbage without filtering so much you insulate yourself from diverse ideas, figuring out who’s reliable, that’s where the real problem is now.

But I do think it has created, through no fault of anyone, this incapacity among the young to truly understand a life when you cannot access the relevant information. At all. Where you just have to guess and hope and do your best. Where educating yourself was not an option.

Where the first time you heard the word lesbian, it was from another third grader, and she learned it from a church pastor, and it wasn’t in the school library’s dictionary so you just had to trust her on what it meant.

I am not joking, I did not know the actual definition of the word “fuck” until I was in high school. Not for lack of trying! I was a word nerd, and I loved research! It literally was not in our dictionaries, and I knew I’d get in trouble if I asked. All I knew was it was a “bad word”, but what it meant or why it was bad? No clue.

If history felt incomprehensibly cruel and stupid while I was a kid who knew full well the feeling of not being able to get the whole story, I cannot imagine how cartoonishly evil it must look from the perspective of someone who’s always been able to get a solid answer to any question in seconds for as long as they’ve been alive. To Gen Z, we must all look like monsters.

I’m glad they know the things we did not. I hope one day they are able to realize how it was possible for us not to know. How it would not have been possible for them to know either, if they had lived in those times. I do not need their forgiveness. But I hope they at least understand. Information is so powerful. Understanding that is so important to building the future. Underestimating that is dangerous.

We were peasants in a world before the printing press. We didn’t know. I’m so sorry. For so many of us we couldn’t have known. I cannot offer any other solace other than this – my sixty year old mother is reading books on anti-racism and posting about them to Facebook, where she’s sharing what’s she’s learning with her friends. Ignorance doesn’t have to last forever.

0b82c21b0a293e26810cf5d02a7acc008098fc56

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

This just applies to so many things in life. If you don’t know that you don’t know something, how can you ASK about it?

Also research is a skill, not an innate ability in all humans. Research is actually a variety of skills and they’re not always exactly the same when you’re talking about when and where you’re researching.

Knowing the best way to google something isn’t the same as knowing how to find something in a reference book isn’t the same as knowing how a card catalog works and how to navigate research when you have limited access to physical materials.

Sometimes even when people want to educate themselves, they’re lost and confused.

And then when they ask… They get beaten down for daring to ask instead of “educating themselves” because people forget that asking questions from sources you trust is part of trying to educate yourself.

Tags:

#(I don’t actually endorse a lot of the OP‚ I’m too hobbity‚ but:) #FTR I was 12 when I learned what ”fuck” meant #(so this would’ve been…December 2005‚ I think) #my mom got a copy of The Time Traveller’s Wife for Hanukkah that year and I read it while she wasn’t looking #that is also how I learned what oral sex was #I’d heard the *term* before (mentioned in news articles)‚ but I’d figured it was‚ like‚ phone sex #but no it is *so* much less sanitary than that #(meanwhile I hadn’t realised beforehand that ”fuck” would *have* a meaning) #(I’d assumed it was pure expletive‚ kind of like an interjection) #also‚ part of the trouble with tech changing so fast is that it can be hard to distinguish lack-of-autonomy-because-you-were-a-child with #lack-of-autonomy-because-your-society-was-incapable-of-giving-people-as-much-autonomy-as-it-can-now #do Kids These Days still have book series where #they’ve only read books 1 and 5 because they haven’t yet had an opportunity to get their hands on 2 – 4? #I can really see that going either way #God knows an adult in the early 00’s who wanted a copy of The Reptile Room could have driven to Barnes and Noble and bought one #if–and here we come back to one of OP’s points–it had *occurred* to them to do so #I was *used* to operating under very limited resources as a child #and if my standards and knowledge had been higher I *could* have done more with what I had #(I checked *new-to-me* series out of the library all the time) #(yet somehow it never occurred to me to check out the missing books of series I owned part of) #(even when the library totally would have had them) #(I still haven’t read half the Chronicles of Narnia) #tag rambles #politics cw #discourse cw? #our roads may be golden or broken or lost #my childhood

DC Police: Persons of interest sought in US Capitol riot

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

{{Title link: https://www.abc15.com/news/national/dc-police-persons-of-interest-named-in-us-capitol-riot}}

{{OP by the-real-numbers}}

rustingbridges:

judiciousimprecation:

rustingbridges:

voxette-vk:

Noice

shout out to the six people pictured who actually covered their face. just seems smart, y’kno

Politicizing masks as a 5D chess move to make sure all the MAGA rioters get caught on camera but antifa doesn’t

getting arrested to own the libs

Tags:

#politics cw #home of the brave #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #illness mention #covid19

I Went to Disney World

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

{{previous post in sequence}}

{{Title link: https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/07/disney-world-during-pandemic-extremely-weird/614617/ }}

{{OP by bambamramfan}}

jadagul:

brin-bellway:

jadagul:

brin-bellway:

jadagul:

This article is amazing and wonderful.

I can’t trust any take on Disney from someone so clearly ignorant of what he’s talking about that he can say this with a straight face:

“That is because in normal times you must choose perhaps four or five big rides, each lasting mere minutes, and spend hours waiting in line to be admitted to each.”

Dude, just showing up at a major Disney ride and expecting to be seated is like just showing up at a fancy restaurant and expecting to be seated: in both cases *you are supposed to make a reservation*. When I went in the autumn of 2015, ride reservations (“FastPasses”) were quite flexible (one-hour usage window) and very often available on a same-day basis: while we *had* reservations months in advance, we made last-minute adjustments to them pretty much every day (you can do this on your phone, thanks to the complimentary Wi-Fi [link]).

(Also a part of me is going “you’re complaining about how expensive everything is and yet you stayed at the fucking *Contemporary*??”, while another part goes “why did the Atlantic send some poor dude with a COVID-19-naive immune system to fucking *Florida*? they’re a bunch of Americans in the summer of 2020: did they *seriously* not have anybody who’d had it already that they could send instead?”)

Still, it’s interesting to hear some reporting from the field. Just…with some caveats.

That is all relatively recent, though. Fastpass was introduced in 1999; I definitely remember the process he describes from when I was growing up. And the author is of course describing how Disney “usually” is off of secondhand reports, since he’s never been before.

But yeah, the article is great as a description of how Disney is now. And the observations about it as being part of the American civic religion aren’t original but they are fairly good points.

I *suppose* you could call 21 years relatively recent compared to the total span of Disney World’s existence, but it’s simultaneously a long time.

I guess a generational thing does add another layer to the bit about his parents refusing to go there: *I* grew up hearing Dad complain about “standing in line for hours for every five minutes of ride” as the reason he refused to go to *Six Flags*, and perhaps even specifically as a reason why Disney was better than Six Flags.

(A bit of context: I was born in 1993 to a family that *was* upper-middle-class at the time and a mom that loves Disney World. I’ve been five times: 1998, 2000, 2001 (we were there on 9/11, it was a hell of a thing), 2004, and 2015. Our trips were generally around 1.5 – 2 weeks long: trying to cram everything into a long weekend is a recipe for exhaustion and FOMO.)

—

In additional to the description of how things were going on the ground, I thought the bits about the Disney World government having legitimacy in the eyes of its constituents, in a way the American government does not, were an interesting way of looking at it.

Yeah, I think there’s something of a generational thing going on there maybe?

I was born 1986 and we went to Disney World like eight or ten times when I was a kid/teenager. I think we might have gone there, one way or another, every year from 95 or 96 to 2000 or 2001 or something like that? And then I wound up there again in 2004.

(And then I also went to Disneyland in August 2004 because it was effectively a compulsory part of college orientation, long story. I used my deep knowledge of Disney World to go around with a couple friends and maximize the time we could spend in air conditioning. I think we rode Small World multiple times becuase it was shady, air conditioned, and had short lines.)

Fastpass was introduced toward the end of that, so I definitely remember it as “that new thing they just rolled out that makes the lines easier to deal with”. But by the time they’d introduced it I was absolutely fucking sick of going to Disney World.

But yeah, if you asked me what Disney World was like, my gut reaction was “Standing in these awful lines constantly, although I think they did a thing to make that better recently.” Also, I don’t know how the system works now, but when Fastpass was new you could only have one at a time. So you’d get a Fastpass for a long-line ride like Space Mountain or something, and then you’d go stand in long lines for other attractions while you waited for your time to come around. So it let you do more things but still the dominant experience was “standing in line”.

But yeah, the bits about Disney’s “governmental” legitimacy were really interesting. I kept using the phrase “American Singapore” to a Disneyphile friend today, who eventually responded: “I think there’s a limit to my appreciation of the dystopian artwork in which we find ourselves.”

(see also)

As of 2015, there were three tiers of ride and you started off with one reservation in each tier. There were circumstances (I’m not sure of the exact rules now) where you could snap up extra FastPasses that other people had abandoned (and/or perhaps that Disney had added upon seeing the ride wasn’t full enough), and I remember them being fairly easy to find. But OTOH this *was* September, a month so slow that Disney bribed us with a free meal plan to schedule our trip for that time period.

(Joke’s on them: we were planning to go for September anyway. That meal plan was great: more credits than we could possibly use (presumably it was aimed to accommodate people with much higher appetites), and with prices denoted simply in “meals” and “snacks” rather than dollars. Being 100% price-insensitive in your food-buying decisions is a wonderfully liberating experience.)

Tags:

#reply via reblog #Disney #politics cw #illness tw #covid19 #home of the brave #food #adventures in human capitalism #disordered eating?

I Went to Disney World

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

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{{Title link: https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/07/disney-world-during-pandemic-extremely-weird/614617/ }}

{{OP by bambamramfan}}

brin-bellway:

jadagul:

brin-bellway:

jadagul:

This article is amazing and wonderful.

I can’t trust any take on Disney from someone so clearly ignorant of what he’s talking about that he can say this with a straight face:

“That is because in normal times you must choose perhaps four or five big rides, each lasting mere minutes, and spend hours waiting in line to be admitted to each.”

Dude, just showing up at a major Disney ride and expecting to be seated is like just showing up at a fancy restaurant and expecting to be seated: in both cases *you are supposed to make a reservation*. When I went in the autumn of 2015, ride reservations (“FastPasses”) were quite flexible (one-hour usage window) and very often available on a same-day basis: while we *had* reservations months in advance, we made last-minute adjustments to them pretty much every day (you can do this on your phone, thanks to the complimentary Wi-Fi [link]).

(Also a part of me is going “you’re complaining about how expensive everything is and yet you stayed at the fucking *Contemporary*??”, while another part goes “why did the Atlantic send some poor dude with a COVID-19-naive immune system to fucking *Florida*? they’re a bunch of Americans in the summer of 2020: did they *seriously* not have anybody who’d had it already that they could send instead?”)

Still, it’s interesting to hear some reporting from the field. Just…with some caveats.

That is all relatively recent, though. Fastpass was introduced in 1999; I definitely remember the process he describes from when I was growing up. And the author is of course describing how Disney “usually” is off of secondhand reports, since he’s never been before.

But yeah, the article is great as a description of how Disney is now. And the observations about it as being part of the American civic religion aren’t original but they are fairly good points.

I *suppose* you could call 21 years relatively recent compared to the total span of Disney World’s existence, but it’s simultaneously a long time.

I guess a generational thing does add another layer to the bit about his parents refusing to go there: *I* grew up hearing Dad complain about “standing in line for hours for every five minutes of ride” as the reason he refused to go to *Six Flags*, and perhaps even specifically as a reason why Disney was better than Six Flags.

(A bit of context: I was born in 1993 to a family that *was* upper-middle-class at the time and a mom that loves Disney World. I’ve been five times: 1998, 2000, 2001 (we were there on 9/11, it was a hell of a thing), 2004, and 2015. Our trips were generally around 1.5 – 2 weeks long: trying to cram everything into a long weekend is a recipe for exhaustion and FOMO.)

—

In additional to the description of how things were going on the ground, I thought the bits about the Disney World government having legitimacy in the eyes of its constituents, in a way the American government does not, were an interesting way of looking at it.

P.S. Oh, also we homeschooled, which meant we could arrange to go during the school year (usually in autumn, sometimes winter). So come to think of it, that’s another reason why my experience of Disney would paint it as less crowded (and with less miserable weather!) than many people claim.

(Florida in the autumn is basically the same as New Jersey in the summer: my body was already adapted to that temperature and humidity range in general, and in most cases had the advantage of having *recently used* said adaptations (since New Jersey summer had only just ended). (Though in 2015, when I’d spent the last eight years in Canada, I was pleasantly surprised by how intact my heat tolerance was. My body walked out of the airport into the 95F-and-very-humid dusk, went “Oh hey, it’s summer! I remember summer! I haven’t had summer in *years*!”, flicked a few settings, and happily continued on its way.))

Tags:

#reply via reblog #my childhood #Disney #politics cw #illness tw #home of the brave #covid19 #homeschool #weather

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I Went to Disney World

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

{{previous post in sequence}}

{{Title link: https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/07/disney-world-during-pandemic-extremely-weird/614617/ }}

{{OP by bambamramfan}}

jadagul:

brin-bellway:

jadagul:

This article is amazing and wonderful.

I can’t trust any take on Disney from someone so clearly ignorant of what he’s talking about that he can say this with a straight face:

“That is because in normal times you must choose perhaps four or five big rides, each lasting mere minutes, and spend hours waiting in line to be admitted to each.”

Dude, just showing up at a major Disney ride and expecting to be seated is like just showing up at a fancy restaurant and expecting to be seated: in both cases *you are supposed to make a reservation*. When I went in the autumn of 2015, ride reservations (“FastPasses”) were quite flexible (one-hour usage window) and very often available on a same-day basis: while we *had* reservations months in advance, we made last-minute adjustments to them pretty much every day (you can do this on your phone, thanks to the complimentary Wi-Fi [link]).

(Also a part of me is going “you’re complaining about how expensive everything is and yet you stayed at the fucking *Contemporary*??”, while another part goes “why did the Atlantic send some poor dude with a COVID-19-naive immune system to fucking *Florida*? they’re a bunch of Americans in the summer of 2020: did they *seriously* not have anybody who’d had it already that they could send instead?”)

Still, it’s interesting to hear some reporting from the field. Just…with some caveats.

That is all relatively recent, though. Fastpass was introduced in 1999; I definitely remember the process he describes from when I was growing up. And the author is of course describing how Disney “usually” is off of secondhand reports, since he’s never been before.

But yeah, the article is great as a description of how Disney is now. And the observations about it as being part of the American civic religion aren’t original but they are fairly good points.

I *suppose* you could call 21 years relatively recent compared to the total span of Disney World’s existence, but it’s simultaneously a long time.

I guess a generational thing does add another layer to the bit about his parents refusing to go there: *I* grew up hearing Dad complain about “standing in line for hours for every five minutes of ride” as the reason he refused to go to *Six Flags*, and perhaps even specifically as a reason why Disney was better than Six Flags.

(A bit of context: I was born in 1993 to a family that *was* upper-middle-class at the time and a mom that loves Disney World. I’ve been five times: 1998, 2000, 2001 (we were there on 9/11, it was a hell of a thing), 2004, and 2015. Our trips were generally around 1.5 – 2 weeks long: trying to cram everything into a long weekend is a recipe for exhaustion and FOMO.)

—

In additional to the description of how things were going on the ground, I thought the bits about the Disney World government having legitimacy in the eyes of its constituents, in a way the American government does not, were an interesting way of looking at it.

Tags:

#reply via reblog #Disney #politics cw #illness tw #covid19 #home of the brave

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