Dec. 9 – True to form, I can’t keep a schedule or an agenda that resembles anything like my prior promises. Hopefully most of you will regard that as a good quality with this update, which I expect to be on a somewhat more popular topic. Whether great or just good, Steel Vengeance is a ride that demands to be written about.
Feb. 18 – This is a theme park you probably haven’t heard of. In fact, doing a quick survey of the web, this may be the very first photo report ever taken at this unique indoor theme park that opened in 2015 (in English language at least). It’s got a weird custom Maurer spinning coaster, a big interactive dark ride, and some other odds and ends. Next update I’ll jump much further back in time to finally cover my massive Asia trip in 2011.
Jan. 13 – There’s a pretty good chance you’ve never even heard of Harbin before. However, this post is very special. Not only was it my first chance to visit my wife’s hometown, but it was also my first chance to see a themed entertainment project I personally worked on in the real world. Plus lots of other interesting sights and observations from this city in China’s far northern frontier.
Aug. 19 – I ended up covering even more from my relatively recent (still slightly less than a year ago!) trip to China. First, culture from Beijing and the Forbidden City, then coasters from Happy Valley Beijing. My hope that the photo journal format would be easier to publish so far hasn’t quite panned out, as it turns out I take a ton of photos when I’m traveling (who knew?) and it’s still a lot of effort to sort and post them all here. Combined, this is one very long update. Enjoy!
Jun. 26 – Today’s two-part update finishes the Shanghai Disneyland series, with Adventure Isle (it’s very good!) and a conclusion with the nighttime spectacular (it’s very much!). Not 100% sure when or even what the next update will bring, but I’m looking forward to regular updates being kind of a regular thing again, so hopefully we’ll know before long. In the meantime, follow me on Twitter for more useless opinions.
Jun. 17 – Today’s update is a great example of how this combined photos and text format can let me revert back and forth from simple photo sharing to a much longer, in-depth essay if there’s a particular topic that warrants it. Yes, there’s definitely one attraction that’s going to need a lot more analysis than everything else in Shanghai Disneyland, and you probably guessed it… Pintel & Ragetti’s Grub to Grab. Enjoy!
May 31 – Fantasyland at Shanghai Disneyland now marks three updates in the same month, just like old times. Thanks to the new format, it’s also now the longest update on this entire site, measured in page length, not word count. Even still, this is a pretty substantial update to read through, so make sure you have a few minutes before clicking the link below. Shanghai Disneyland is a big park with lots to talk about; I’d expect future posts in this new format to be a bit more fleet. Treasure Cove with Battle for the Sunken Treasure is coming next, though perhaps slightly longer than the interval between the last two updates.
May 22 – New update! Shanghai Disneyland! Tomorrowland! More to come! Soon!
May 14 – Slowly getting back in the groove. This update I wanted to try something new. I’m about to dive into covering my giant Asian expedition from 2011, but part of the issue that held me back from doing it for so long was that I didn’t know the best format to do it with. Today I’m experimenting with (yet another) new format which I’m going to try to use for Asia, which combines my traditional essay format with the photo journal format, so that if there a topic I want to write a more in-depth narrative for, I can, but then switch to full-sized photos with minimal or no captions for other sections where I’d prefer the images to primarily tell the story instead. So far it seems to work well, and now that I’ve got a workflow for this new format ironed out, I’m looking forward to new updates coming more frequently than once every six months.
Even better, let’s have an update with something more recent before jumping back into the time machine. I was lucky to get to do two days of Shanghai Disneyland last fall, and after contemplating it, it seemed rather strange to me that I’d spend a significant amount of time writing updates for park visits that happened six years ago when I’m sure Shanghai Disneyland would be of much greater interest for people still reading this site in 2017. This first part is just an introduction and tour through the entry zones, but I’ve already started on the next section which should be posted extremely soon (extremely being relative, of course).
Nov. 19 – Sometimes the world needs to begin its slow destruction to remind you to finish those things you always intended to do, before it’s too late. One of those things was to write about Shivering Timbers, a ride I think in the abstract is great for many reasons, yet also one that I have a long personal connection with, which had always made it hard to properly write about. Now with some more distance, I hope I finally did it justice.
More to come later. Maybe much later. But this site still isn’t dead yet. In the meantime, please enjoy my first full essay since 2012 devoted to analyzing a single ride:
Apr. 25 (2016?!?) – Hi. You’re still here? Wow, it’s been awhile. Uhh… so let’s catch up on what the hell happened to this website.
Needless to say, when I published that last update a little more than two years ago, I never thought it would take this long to do the next update. If it hadn’t been clear, I had already been having a harder and harder time motivating myself to keep the website going the way it once had been, and had spent the last two years trying to find new formats that would keep the flame alive… message boards, photo journals, capsule reviews (with lettered grading to really stoke the fires). Even the simplest updates would often take the better part of a day or two to complete (never mind the weeks that some of the more ambitious capsule reviews required), and I simply reached a point where enough was changing in my life that I couldn’t find the motivation to keep it going the way things had been. What started as weeks of procrastination turned into months, and on and on. The longer time went by, the harder it became to get into it again, and the more I knew that when I finally did make a reappearance, it would be under the heavy obligation to do some hard reckoning about the future of this website, which I was never prepared to do. And eventually, it seemed like Roller Coaster Philosophy had already died a quiet, natural death, and there would be little point in reviving it for parting words anyway.
Except for I really didn’t want all my hard work to end like that. And I’m assuming, if you’re still reading this, that you didn’t either. So, happily, I’m not here to officially announce that this is the end of Roller Coaster Philosophy (which I’m sure many had already assumed), although I’m not here to announce that this is a new beginning either. Looking at the creaky circa-2009 WordPress design I cobbled together when I barely understood html (and have now forgotten what little I did know back then), it’s clear the infrastructure of the site itself is in need of a major overhaul if it’s to keep thriving into 2016 and beyond. And frankly, I’m not sure if that’s possible, or even desirable. There’s something comforting about the way the content fits the pages like an old shoe.
But it is old, and what’s more, the review and analysis format that formed the basis of this site has gotten old too. I started it at the beginning of my college life when I was really excited by the idea of exploring these existing parks and attractions I was visiting with a level of depth and complexity that made the writing experience seem novel, even at times transgressive. But after a while, certain patterns emerged, and it began to feel less like an exploration and more like a catalog. Worse, the format was pressing me to give opinions on lots of things things I really didn’t have much of an opinion on, while the few topics I did find worth exploring in depth I was having a hard time fitting within any sort of established format. I’m no longer in school, looking and reflecting upon what already exists in the world. I’ve mostly made all the points I wanted to make by surveying the existing landscape, and I’m now much more interested in what isn’t out there. In what could be done that hasn’t been done. In what I could do in this not-very-well-defined world of “location-based entertainment” if I was ever given the chance. And now I’ve been working as a creative associate for one of the largest themed entertainment design firms for over two years now, I’ve finally had that chance!
So, with regards to Roller Coaster Philosophy, I’m not announcing the end, and I’m not announcing a new beginning either. Instead, I’m announcing the beginning of the end. As I said, this was essentially a college project (if not for course credits, at least for developing a certain state of mind), and now that I’ve moved on and landed in the career I needed to keep moving forward, the website has outgrown its original purpose. But, crucially, it’s still an unfinished project. There are things I promised I wanted to do with this site that I never got around to, and I’m going to be haunted by that until it’s finished.
What does that mean? Basically, I’ve decided to lock down Roller Coaster Philosophy to become the journal of my years when I actually studied philosophy in college and had the time and state of mind to wander the world riding and writing about roller coasters, from 2008 to 2012. Anything beyond that point in time becomes the domain of Twitter and Flickr, at least for now. It’ll give the project the closure that’s been missing all this time, and help write the full arc of that chapter of my life. And that actually means there’s quite a lot of content that’s still to come, which is why I’m not declaring this the end yet, not by a long shot.
To begin with, there’s the last of the photo journals from my 2012 travels, Hersheypark and Canada’s Wonderland, now published with links below. Then there’s the massive 2011 Asia trip which I’ve still not written a word about. That by itself will be massive, accounting for nearly 50 parks! It will probably rely mostly on the photo journal format, because that’s how I can be laziest without writing a full novel like I did for Europe 2010, and many of the details are fuzzy enough in my head by now that I really need the photos to help narrate just what the heck happened. There will probably also be a long-form essay (or three) to accompany those. And lastly, how about a throwback to a couple of honest-to-goodness, old school Ride Analyses before I ride off into the setting sun? Shivering Timbers, Magnum XL-200, and Maverick will all finally get their own in-depth boarderline-aspergers reviews, publication date unknown… but until they are, consider this site unfinished.
After that, I don’t know. Maybe the spark will be renewed and I’ll decide to start updating from 2013. I might have a few other topics I’d like to touch on. I might start a secondary site, more flexible and with a new focus, or maybe I’ll find a new place to express my thoughts somewhere offline in the real world. Most likely, the site will get locked down and preserved with an actual, proper goodbye and parting thoughts. My hosting is currently paid through to 2021, and I’ll make sure beyond then it finds a place to live out a long retirement so these pages will never disappear completely.
So I guess that’s it for now. Please enjoy this long overdue update! As always friends, thank you so much for reading. And we’ll see each other again soon, this time I promise!
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