Hi, former Disney employee here. I actually worked at the parks, and unlike you, know something about ride safety and attraction maintenance. 90% of the time, shutdowns happen because a guest does something stupid. Standard procedure is a full evac and reset.
Be quiet.
Loot at what is happening with Tiana's Bayou Adventure
@Disney
I do not trust any Disney engineered rides, esp anything with drops or high speeds.
Disney has embraced DEI (Didn't Earn It) over MEI (Merit, Excellent, Intelligence) and is headed for Boeing level problems.
The
Damn, I really made you mad, huh?
I worked Attractions (ops), not Entertainment (people who dress as characters). That means I worked rides. I also worked with maintenance every day. Everyone at Disney is a Cast Member. You'd know that if you knew anything about the parks.
This is the viral post slamming me that people are using as a "Gotcha" about my Disney tweet.
He's "journalist" at
@IGN
and his experience at Disney? He was a CAST MEMBER for a year.
He was Goofy or Mickey running around in a fur suit, pretending to be a ride expert.
This is
Nintendo realized, long before anyone else, that chasing the graphical unicorn was a fool's errand that only leads to bloated budgets and longer development times. So they stopped doing it because, guess what, the general audience doesn't care. And that's where the money is.
People are (somehow) mad I said you play as fascists in my review.
This is satire! The first thing you see is propaganda from the Minitry of Truth! You play as the forces of SUPER EARTH, for God's sake! It's not subtle! Please be normal!
Also I loved it and gave it a 9.
Every attraction on Disney property is checked every night by the maintenance team, and then checked again in the morning and fully cycled (often several times) by the ops team before park open. If a ride doesn't pass any of those checks, it doesn't open. Period.
These rides are extremely safe. Disney has some of the most stringent safety regulations in the world and the people who work there are certainly more competent than some Twitter grifter who doesn't know what a linear synchronous motor is and can't explain a ride cascade.
It is hard to fathom, unless you have worked at a theme park, how many times these rides operate in a day, much less a calender year. Guests do lot of stupid stuff that forces shutdowns and evacs. Stuff breaks. A sensor being tripped accidentally can lead to a ride shutdown.
Last thing, since what kicked this off is about The Attraction Formerly Known as Splash Mountain:
Splash is a maintenance nightmare. Old, water ride, lots of animation, absolutely huge. It has always had issues. Sensors and water? Bad mix. That doesn't mean it's unsafe, though.
The real expert, though, would be my father, a nuclear engineer who, after a successful Naval career where he served on a black ops submarine, commanded an Ohio-class submarine, and saved a major naval base, was hired by Disney to spearhead their internal auditing team.
I've done this professionally for a decade and written 200 reviews. This doesn't happen.
No serious publisher or PR firm would consider it, and any journalist caught taking bribes would never work in this business again. Y'all just don't understand the concept of opinions.
You're not just a clown,
@Grummz
. You're the whole-ass circus. You're completely out of your depth, and anyone who's ever worked ops or in Engineering Services or knows anything about ride design and maintenance knows it.
The next time you come at me, say my name, you coward.
After writing the auditing guidelines that everyone at Disney uses, he joined the Engineering Services team, where he was the right-hand man to Magic Kingdom's Engineering Services Director. Think a park VP, but they run maintenance instead of ops.
He did that job for 15 years.
This industry collectively conned itself into thinking because it makes a ton of money, triple-AAA games are mainstream. They're not. The only reason it worked is because 1. you can charge a lot of money for a video game and 2. the people into this hobby are REALLY into it.
Twitter no longer works for me, so I will be muting this. I enjoyed talking about the parks with y'all, answering questions, and meeting so many former Disney CMs.
That job saved me life, and I miss it. Hopefully, y'all had a little fun reading the thread. Cheers! ✌️
You can sustain lot of things that way. But once budgets start ballooning into the $100-200+ million dollar range? You can't make mistakes. You can't not appeal to everyone. The enthusiasts aren't enough. And when everything costs that much and takes that long, it stops working.
During that time, he oversaw maintenance of more than a third of Magic Kingdom, including the park's most popular and difficult to maintain attractions: Splash (now TBA, the ride you're malding about), Space, Big Thunder, the riverboat, Stitch, Pirates, Jungle Cruise, TTA, etc.
I've also had the privilege of interviewing him professionally, mostly about Splash Mountain, which is now TBA, which is the ride you're malding about.
So yes, I know more than you. I have first-hand attractions operating experience, and access to an expert whenever I want it.
Anyway, I'm muting this again because Twitter is broken again. Didn't expect this weirdo to post my LinkedIn page, but I can't say I'm super surprised, either. Proud of the work I did at Disney, and the folks I worked with. Miss GMR. Hope y'all enjoyed the stories.
People in engineering just called him The Captain. When he retired, he was honored by having his name placed in the parks. Specifically, at Jungle Cruise.
As someone who worked ops at both MK and Studios, I've picked my dad's brain a lot over the years about this stuff.
He led each of those attractions through several major rehabs and to some of the best reliability numbers in all of the parks, despite the difficulty of maintaining those attractions. He also helped Imagineering design several things, like Pirates Adventure in Adventureland.
@alyssa_merc
My man would stick his hand in the flume on a downramp and then complain about how unsafe the ride is when the weight of the boat slices his fingers off.
@FloorPasta422
They also retain talent at an incredible rate, which doesn't hurt. When you have guys working on Zelda for 30 years, they tend to know what they're doing.
@Fan_Advocacy
I wrote a review, bro. Chill.
I also own every console released since the N64 and thousands of physical games. The idea that I'm an outsider to this hobby is genuinely hilarious.
Weird aside: video games have done absolutely unfathomable damage to peoples' brains because the game worlds revolves around you, The Main Character of the Universe, and I think a lot more Absolutely Deranged Gamer Behaviors make way more sense in that context.
The best thing about Dragon’s Dogma 2 is seeing all the people so used to video games telling them they’re a good, special boy crying because their pawn got the clap and murdered an entire village.
Hilarious to watch people lie about how "critics hated Bayonetta/Nier Automata" like those games weren't critical darlings hailed as actual masterpieces to defend Stellar Blade.
These people didn't know who Kim Hyung Tae was until last week! They didn't play Magna Carta!
@CamHamm8
Tunnels were great. I got lost down there real bad during orientation, which is super funny if you know how the tunnels are laid out. Sometimes they smelled really bad, which wasn't great if you were on lunch. But, man, being able to move around off-stage was great.
@Fan_Advocacy
Have you read the review? Basically all I do is praise the game, man. There’s nothing obnoxious or obtuse about it
But yes, Helldivers 2 is 100% satire. Super Earth is run by fascists. This is text, man. The developers have confirmed this.
THIS is BY FAR, one the BEST idea's for modern reviewing of games I've seen in YEARS! Shout out to the ENTIRE crew of the
@LonghouseGaming
! THIS should put the ENTIRE journalistic community ON NOTICE!!
#BoomStickApproved
@itsVanAken
@TristanZelden
And the worst part is, by all accounts, Redfall's failure wasn't even their fault. That game clearly wasn't done and was rushed out the door.
"Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.' "
- Isaac Asimov
@technofolklore
I am genuinely stunned people are mad about a review that is 1. Two months old. 2. Overwhelmingly positive 3. Is just stating facts.
Helldivers 2 is satire, which is inherently political. There shouldn't be anything controversial about saying so.
Begging people to be normal.
@headfallsoff
As a former WDW employee: the reason they enforce this (and they do enforce this, for the most part) is to protect Cast Members (and guests) because people get confused. We had a lot of problems with people in really good costumes getting confused for on-stage cast.
@DoofyDEIAHires
@jakeformers
Never said I did. I worked ops. I opened and closed them, brought vehicles onto the track, cycled those vehicles, and ran safety checks on them in the morning and at night.
That means knowing how the ride works, what causes it to break down, and what to do when it does.
@InsatiableDong
@Rantman2018
My dude, I'm old. People were calling each other gay over everything when I was in high school.
A little sad to still be doing it now.
@Maverace_Studio
Cast Member is a catch-all term for anyone who's "on-stage" at Disney. Custodial, Attractions, Entertainment, Food and Beverage, the department doesn't matter. We were all Cast Members.
School did absolutely absurd amounts of damage to some of y'all's minds if you are making report cards for art.
This is, without exaggeration, an insane way to consume media. You don't get prizes for liking the "good" stuff! Some of the most interesting art is deeply flawed!
@MitchyD
I just cannot fathom missing the point of a piece of media so thoroughly.
Like, it's fine if it's for the bit, but there are people who type that and believe every word, and I just can't, man. It's right there, in front of your face.
@nickjcal
You know he's just sitting there shaking in rage behind his monitor, wracking his brain to think of some half-clever comeback. We love to see it.
@BrianMartinB
It's funny when people post one of my bylines as some kind of own. Yeah, bro, this company paid me a lot of money to play and write about games. Did you think you did something there?
@DoofyDEIAHires
@jakeformers
Incredible lie. Let me correct the record: most cast members are not trained on ANY attractions. They work Food and Beverage, Entertainment, Custodial, and so on. You can cross-train, but most people train on two rides at most.
People whining about game journo difficulty would lose their minds if they played games for review.
You have 72 hours to beat the game, capture footage, and write around 1500 words. The build is buggy and not complete. There's no guides/help. You can't talk about half of it.
@jukins5
The general audience could not care less, especially young kids. See: Minecraft, Roblox, Fortnite, Pokemon, and so on and so on and so on. Ditto for the mobile market.
People think denying codes is a dunk on journalists but we're gonna write our reviews/features/guides and get paid regardless.
It hurts YOU. They are trying to sell as many copies as possible before reviews/word of mouth can tell you to save your money.
This is to fool YOU.
I think fans misunderstand what not giving codes out really means. It’s not a dunk against games journalists. It’s marketing trying to prevent as much negative attention as possible
Media can’t accurately report anything about the final build without seeing it
ADHD has made me time blind, chronically late, unable to sleep at normal hours, hyperfocused or completely unable to focus at all, impulsive, and a lot of other things.
It has never made me a thief or a plagiarist.
Fuck James Somerton.
He's mad Kratos spared Thor after he spent an entire game trying to be a better person so he could raise his son right? This is what he's upset about? Bro...
What are we doing here, man? How did this happen?
"Also I noticed the women were ugly." Like clockwork, every time.
I talk about this in the
@SpawnOnMe
dropping on Monday, but after digging a little for the REAL reason we're seeing all this backlash against SBI and DEI work here it is in plain language from an interview with the Steam page creator.
For the record: Stellar Blade might be cool. Haven't played the demo! Combat looks like it has potential but for the love of God stop being weird about video games, please.
Playing Black Myth Wukong and as a certified Action Game Sicko ™️, I think
@adashtra
was right. So far, I am bored out of my skull and wondering when the fun starts.
All this drama over *this?* *This?* It’s piss easy, and the combat is dull. There’s not even aerial raves. 😭
What accountability? Executives aren't living in their cars because they lost their jobs. They're sharpening the next axe.
None of you have taken accountability for anything. You just make some sad social media post about how sorry you are and you expect us to feel bad for you?