Dec. 11 – Just a minor update today, as the first update for Disney World is still at least a few days away (most likely to be the Magic Kingdom, and continuing in chronological order), but I wanted to go back and add photo journals for the other three Orlando theme parks I already covered before moving on too far to other parks. That said, there’s still 1093 photos included between the three galleries posted below (if you’re so inclined to peruse through every page), so perhaps calling it a “minor update” is a bit of a misdirection on my part. There’s also over a thousand more of the Disney World theme parks already posted to Flickr if you’re really photo hungry, although these will likely be included in photo journals of their own in the near future.


Nov. 10 – I am now off to Orlando, Florida. Below is the web version of the one-sheet presentation I’ll bring to the IAAPA convention. Sequencing is a topic I’ve discussed a lot in coaster reviews on these pages, but this is the first time I’ve formally explained what it is and how to use it to be shared with the public. By the way, I’m not worried about others “stealing” this idea from me and putting me out of a future job; by all means, I hope as many people as possible use the basics I’ve outlined here. The complex stuff is still secret to my own head, as well as all of the unexplored possibilities in designing the next great ride that I believe sequencing theory allows for. Anyway, hopefully I’ll be back with good news and another update in the next few weeks.


Nov. 6What cultural responsibilities does an African themed park hold towards both its subject matter and its audience? Should it choose to represent the continent as an alien land of exotic unfamiliarity to appeal to the visitors’ simultaneous curiosity and repulsion when faced with The Other? Or should it assume a sermonizing theme of global community and shared responsibility of nature and humanity on all continents?”

Reviews and photos from Busch Gardens Tampa are now online, capping off part one of what will likely become a two part series covering the major Floridian theme parks. I’m back off to Walt Disney World for a couple of days (first time I’ve done the entire resort including the Magic Kingdom, even though I’ve been to every single other Disney theme park around the world), which will also include a couple days spent at IAAPA… and what happens there may help determine the future of this website and my professional career at large.

I can’t speculate much about the latter, but I do have several general options for what to do next on the former (this website). One, I can continue doing capsule reviews for the Walt Disney World parks once I get back, maybe along with more photo journals if people like the one I included for Busch Gardens. (I can also maybe go back and create some photo journals for Universal and SeaWorld as well.) Two, there’s a host of regional North American parks I went to this summer, including some that I’ve already covered on this site but those reviews are a bit outdated. I can try to make capsule reviews and photo journals for those as well… but it might take a while. The third option is to finally start writing about that huge Asian trip I did in 2011 and still haven’t posted a single thing about it except for photo links. Honestly that has been the biggest psychological burden regarding my attitudes towards upkeep of this site, and now that it’s nearly two years since I first departed for it I’m really uncertain how I want to approach writing it, if at this point it’s even worth bothering with it at all. I guess the fourth option is to just officially put Roller Coaster Philosophy into a state of hibernation so I can focus more on the future instead of feeling continually dragged down by the past (today’s update is from a trip I took back in March), but I’d feel really lousy about doing that to you, if you’re reading this. Anyway, if you want we can discuss this topic more in the Dialogues, otherwise enjoy the material linked on the banners below.


Oct. 9 – “Nobody cries over bad art, but many people will shed a tear in the presence of great kitsch.” Kitsch is one of the central themes that ties today’s review set from SeaWorld Orlando together, and it’s an important topic to theme park discussions that I haven’t touched on enough for this website. Be sure to have a look at the review of SeaWorld’s Aquatica water park as well, and I’m curious if you’ll have any perspective to share on this question: “I can’t help but feel a bit of unease that we’ve crossed some sort of ethical boundary now that we’re using sentient creatures as thematic window dressings to enhance a water slide.”

Also, if you missed it in the Dialogues, I also had a chance to visit Canada’s Wonderland a couple weeks ago (along with taking in a few good movies at the Toronto International Film Festival), and I have a new set of pictures to share from the experience. Next up on the docket is Busch Gardens Tampa, and then I’m off to Orlando again for IAAPA and Disney World this November. Anyone who will be at either the parks or convention from the 11th to the 19th feel free to email me and we can be sure to say “hi” to each other.


Sep. 10 – “Let’s be honest: as a themed park, Universal Studios Florida kinda sucks.” Thus opens today’s set of capsule reviews from Universal Studios Florida. Lettered grades for the attractions covered in this edition were distributed as follows: D-, D+, D+, C-, C-, C+, B-, B-, B, and B+. Can you guess which got which?


Sep. 7 – Continuing the saga from sunny Florida I today present Wet ‘n Wild, now only the second water park featured on this site, but with a third one coming soon. Universal Studios Florida reviews will be coming very soon, in fact I wanted to publish it tonight but I didn’t have time to finish up every capsule review and get both articles formatted. In the meantime, here’s a selected quote from today’s update: “We don’t buy admission to Wet ‘n Wild for experiential storytelling of shared pop-cultural fantasies, we’re just there to play in the water, work on our tan lines, and sneak glimpses of the hot specimens in their swimwear.”


Aug. 11 – Today I am pleased to present the debut of the new format for this website from this day forward, covering the entirety of Islands of Adventure in Orlando, Florida. I bent the rule about “one paragraph or less” for a couple of rides, but there are a couple of rides here that simply deserve more than one paragraph to summarize my impressions. Future updates in the capsule format won’t be nearly as long; I also took the time to review each of the individual islands since each has their own very distinct character, and there’s an editorial at the beginning that challenges a few notions about the role of storytelling in theme parks. There should be less ambiguity in my opinions now that each review comes with a lettered grade, and fair warning to the IOA fanboys, it might not seem very flattering. First set of capsule reviews and there’s already two F-bombs and nothing was able to crack into the A range… although there is one B+, can you guess which got the honor? Don’t take it too personally, I start at an F and it has to earn it’s way upward, so a C ranking is generally well-earned. Vent in the comments or The Dialogues if you must.

A lot has happened since my last update. Remember in my Knoebels review from last autumn how I lamented that I lacked any unique, personal experiences with the park to consider it a favorite of mine? Well, how about getting a walking tour of the Flying Turns with Mike Boodley (who’s currently working on the fifth set of prototype vehicles), followed by a personal welcome from Dick Knoebel, and then riding an after-dark, rain-greased Phoenix in the front row with Jeff Pike and Chris Gray of GCII sharing the row behind you? That all happened, and a lot more at the FREDxGCII event I was lucky to attend this July. I have a full collection of photos from the tour (which also took me to a number of parks in the area, with a good amount of time spent on El Toro and Skyrush) on Flickr; you can also see some photos of me milling around the GCI plant in Sunbury on their Facebook page. I also did a quick stop at a local fair, which the friend who invited me was kind to write a fairly entertaining review of the experience (so that I don’t have to for this site).


Jul. 6 – The new photo journal format works so nice, today I used it thrice. It won’t ever substitute for the written form, but it’s very effective in covering parks and events where the emphasis is more on the visual rather than the conceptual. For example, Coney Island is a beautiful park, but once I start grading and analyzing the subjective experience of a decades old Flying Bobs you know this site is getting pretty close to jumping the shark. The photos with basic labels tell everything I’d need to say about a park like that. It’s even more true of the Columbus Zoo; one small roller coaster and a million animal exhibits. And the Flickr Gallery plugin makes it so easy to publish a simple photo journal update in a timely manner, I even decided to reach back into the archives and add another report from the Indianapolis Zoo several years ago, which I hate to say but I think the animal photos from back then were better than the ones I took this year. Hmm…

By the way, I’ve suddenly been given reason to visit Pennsylvania next week (July 11th to the 18th), and if anyone is interested in meeting up at any of the parks on the itinerary (Kennywood, Lakemont, Knoebels, Dorney Park, Hersheypark, and maybe Six Flags Great Adventure) please let me know in The Dialogues or by private message. It’d be great to get to meet some of you and do some real roller coaster philosophizing together!


Jun. 29 – Got a bit more housekeeping done today, updating all of the dreadfully old and crusty reviews from Six Flags Great America so it integrates better with the newer stuff. If you’ve read them recently don’t bother reading the new ones as there’s honestly nothing new, just better edited with a few minor opinions revised and some more recent photos included. The best improvement honestly is that the story banners are much prettier than they were previously. Check them out here. If you’ve never read the Great America reviews before, well, now’s probably the best time to do it while they’re still fresh. (Or, maybe reheated and seasoned after being stuffed in the back of the fridge and forgotten about for the past couple of years. You pick the best metaphor.)

A reminder from the update below, check this discussion in the Dialogues if you’re interested in joining me on a coaster adventure in Virginia sometime this August.


Jun. 28 – I decided to take a day’s break from editing the Islands of Adventure piece (each ride review might be only 200 words long but that still adds up at a park like IOA where there’s a lot to be said and words must be chosen carefully) and do a quick publication/test of another new photo journal format from a self-guided walking tour I did of Chicago two weekends ago. I should also have a slight update to the old Six Flags Great America content so it fits with the newer stuff sometime tomorrow, as well as maybe a really brief write-up and similarly formatted photo journal of Cincinnati’s Coney Island and the Columbus Zoo before Saturday.

Also, be sure to have a look at this discussion in the Dialogues. I’d like to organize a first “unofficial” RCP meet-up possibly at Six Flags America, Kings Dominion, and Busch Gardens Williamsburg sometime in August, and anyone that can make it is welcome to come and analyze coasters in between riding them!


Jun. 6 – With today’s update I officially wrap the last of the 2011 reviews, and can now dedicate my attention to reports from the present year. Well, not counting the five months I spent in Asia in 2011 which I still haven’t written a word about. Hmm, I suppose I should probably start working on that story sometime soon as well.

Okay, so here’s my brief sketch of the future of Roller Coaster Philosophy. As I’ve been mentioning for some time now, the next update will likely switch to the capsule review format which will keep things much shorter and hopefully by extension higher quality. (By the way, photos will now be featured primarily in a gallery format; please have a look at this thread and help me decide which specific format works the best.) There will still be the occasional long form analyses, stories, and opinion pieces, but it will mostly be limited to topics of particular interest to me that actually require the additional length to get the entire idea out there. I’ve decided that the Asian parks from 2011 will be published on this website in the capsule format as well sometime after finishing Florida 2012, for the sake of timeliness and not completely loosing my sanity…

…however! There may or may not be a detailed narrative account of this Eastern odyssey, mixed with a revised and condensed version of the European 2010 trip and tangentially related existential pontifications, that will be coming to a bookstore probably not near you in the somewhat distant future. This takes slightly higher priority than this website, so forgive me if there’s not quite as much new content to read (although hopefully updates won’t be any more infrequent now that it will be easier for me to write and publish a series of opinions shortly after visiting the parks) and rest assured that regardless of appearances on this homepage, I’m hard at work on my computer and am not just sitting around all day watching season 4 of Breaking Bad.


May 30 – My return to Knoebels, possibly the greatest amusement park in the world (with emphasis on my still uncertain possibility) is not without its share of observations. Plus there’s a semi-complete Black Diamond review, as well as some brief re-reviews of Phoenix and Twister that hint at the denser capsule format I’ll be introducing on this website very soon. There’s one more report from last fall coming up, Conneaut Lake Park.


May 26 – So I took so long to publish this update that it is now quite seasonally incorrect, I’ll grant you that. There is a review of Sky Rocket at the beginning of it which at the very least should be worth your time. Two more reports from last fall on classic Pennsylvania amusement parks, and then it will be on to Florida, where lots of good stuff (and some not so good stuff) awaits.


May 22 – This is a review I’ve been wanting to write for a while, but I never knew how. I still don’t know if I really know how, but a weekend trip to Pennsylvania last fall took us right by the Cleveland area, and with a bit of spare time I was able to snag a few photos, so now I pretty much have to write about it. My fear (well, no… really, my hope) is that this will be slightly more controversial than most of my recent writing, but I’ve probably needed to get some controversy back into my writing to reignite my interest in this webproject. Not all-too subtle winks at Nietzsche aside, this is one of my more personal reviews I’ve written, so I hope you’ll read it and maybe leave a few comments in the reply box or on the Dialogues afterward.


May 19 – Holy cow, can it be? A report about a trip that actually happened sometime within the past week? That hasn’t happened on this site since, like, forever! Granted, it’s also been forever since I’ve updated. The good news is, I held off on finishing the stuff from fall 2011 so I could publish two Six Flags Great America reviews back to back, and I got a lot of pages already written before I left for Chicago last weekend so another update should be happening in the next day or two. I’ll be returning to Six Flags Great America sometime in June (season passes, ya’know) so I’ll probably revise/update the other reports I’ve written on that park as well.


Apr. 23 – On September 5th last autumn I had a chance to take one of the last rides on the Iron Wolf before it would leave Six Flags Great America forever. I’ve considered the Iron Wolf a tremendously under appreciated roller coaster, a sentiment I seem to share with extremely few others. Here’s the story from that final day.


Apr. 22 – Today’s report takes you to a small park in rural Wisconsin. It may look normal on the outside, but lurking just beneath the surface are secrets too dark and strange to imagine. Will you discover the one who’s pulling the strings behind the scenes, or will the rabbits get to you first? You’ll have to read on to find out. Then discuss it on The Dialogues. (P.S. the next update should be online very soon.)


Apr. 16 – The end of my college career is much too quickly approaching, and yet I still have time to pontificate about roller coasters and other subjects related to the political economy. Although, actually, the super-senioritis might help a lot with my dedication to pontification of coasters rather than assigned work. Oh well, your win, right? I’ll be back next week with one more park from Wisconsin, but in the meantime: The Dialogues.


Apr. 8 – Okay, so I cheated a little bit with this review. Not like you can do anything about it. Except for to join The Dialogues. That you can do. (Seriously, I’m impressed at how many people have found interesting angles to contribute to the discussion on whether current enthusiasts expect too much from new attractions.)


Apr. 2First things first: Noah’s Ark review is online, marking the first ever water park review on Roller Coaster Philosophy. Click the banner below. Second things second: The Dialogues. Check it out and join in the fun (or more precisely, the incredible analytical hair-splitting discussions). You know you want to. Third things third: I recently reset all of my 30,000-some photos on Flickr to have a Creative Commons Attribution license. That means you can download, edit, manipulate, and re-distribute any photo you want without needing to ask the permission of the copyright holder (me) beforehand, even if it could be considered for a commercial purpose. That’s always been my attitude towards people’s use of my photography, but now it’s official.


Apr. 1 – No joke, my review of Mt. Olympus Theme Park is now posted online. Also, please remember to check out The Dialogues and join in the conversation. Think of that one really random or esoteric thing you’ve always thought about in regards to roller coasters and theme parks, but never wanted to discuss because it seemed too out-there and you were afraid the moderators might yell at you. Then create an account on the Dialogues and talk about it there. No moderation, just discussion. Seriously, do it, now.


Mar. 24 – Starting on a new review series from last autumn, the first chapter detailing the Wisconsin Dells (including one roller coaster) is now posted online. Mt. Olympus review to follow in the near future. While I’m at it, I’m going to continue plugging The Dialogues for the next several updates. Already there have been some really good conversations started, we just need to get more people to join in so the dialogues are more dynamic than just a back-and-forth game of ping-pong! (Remember, there’s no censorship whatsoever!)


Mar. 17 – In addition to a short write-up on Santa Monica’s Pacific Park, the Dialogues are now online and ready for people to join; click the link below or in the upper right of the menu bar to check it out!

The Dialogues – Roller Coaster Philosophy’s New Forum

There’s still a handful of kinks that need ironing out. For example, your username can’t include spaces, only underscores (when/if this gets fixed I’ll let you re-edit your username), and I’m pulling my hair out over how to get external hyperlinks to work in comments; anyone with Vanilla Forums experience have any suggestions? Anyway, I’ll have a few topics started if you want to peruse them, and hopefully you’ll have a few of your own you’d like to discuss. Reiterating my point below, I expect conversations to reflect the sort of focused, in-depth, sometimes theoretical content of this site, but since there’s essentially no moderation, what goes on in there is ultimately up to you. If anyone has any problems or concerns with creating an account, let me know by email.


Feb. 21 – Today Tomorrowland is finally done, finishing (for now) the series on Disneyland. And while we’re on the subject of Tomorrow, it seems an incredibly apropos time to discuss the future of Roller Coaster Philosophy, especially in light of my long (and, honestly, unnecessary) disappearance for over a month. Basically, the short of it is that for the past three years or so I’ve been on an endless monologue about roller coasters, theme parks, philosophy, and the like. Granted, I’ve not been working alone in a cave. I’ve been truly impressed and appreciative by how many people have taken the time to write thoughtful and involved responses to my reports. Even if I haven’t responded personally to every comment, please know I always receive a feeling of deep satisfaction when I see someone has engaged with my work, even (in fact, especially) when it’s critical.

Yet as the Disneyland reports continued to drag on with seemingly no end in sight, my voice began to turn hoarse and I became uncertain how much longer I could realistically sustain this monologue. As much as I love writing these detailed reports, the hard truth is it takes a lot of time and effort to publish these tomes, and I do sometimes have to question if it’s always worth it in the end, especially when I see other websites are able to publish a review in photo report format an easy day after the visit. But if you’re a long time reader whose become increasingly frustrated/worried at my inability to keep to my own promised review update schedule (like, every update from the past six months has sarcastically gripped about how late I am, and today’s update is from a park visit that happened over one year ago), fear not. I’m not writing this today to let you know I’m ready to throw in the towel. Quite the contrary; I’m still burning with ideas and stories I want to share, particularly from my extensive travels last year to the Far East. Yet I don’t think this story can continue in strictly monologue format. As great as your feedback has been, the way the comments sections is set up on this site is really awful at initiating two-way exchange. It’s time for Roller Coaster Philosophy to take the next evolutionary step.

I’m excited to say that the next time this page is updated, it will be to announce the debut of a new feature to Roller Coaster Philosophy: The Dialogues. As you can probably guess, this will be a community forum section that will allow a much greater exchange of information than the current review format is capable of. Now, an obvious question might be why on earth would I want to start a forum when every other coaster fansite and their moms have online forums filled with inane banter about coasters and theme parks. That was my attitude for a long time as well; find an unsatisfied niche market and specialize in that and only that. However, I’ve really not felt the desire to actually join any mainstream enthusiast forums despite the fact that I’d like to discuss some of these ideas with other people. Rather than state explicitly the reasons why I’ve felt this way, instead I’ll state the reasons why I think it will be worth your while to join in this particular forum once I get it online.

  1. A smaller, more intimate, intelligent user-base. By no stretch of the imagination is RCP a high-traffic, low-denominator website. Pretty much everyone that reads this site and joins The Dialogues would hopefully be interested in many of the same theoretical topics that these reviews are largely about, and that’s not a huge quantity of people. The Dialogues would be the place to go when either the general mass traffic sites or fanboy specific forums are inappropriate for a detailed conversation on coaster history or aesthetic theory, or when there are too many unfamiliar names shouting “me too!” in a given topic to be able to sift through to find the few good replies.
  2. A clean, simple interface that puts the emphasis on the discussion. I’m thinking of using Vanilla to power the forums, although that might be subject to change. No signatures, minimal avatars, easy to read colors, no labyrinths of topics and subtopics and subsubtopics. However, it will also feature a flexible toolbox allowing for a choice of html or markdown language, post-tagging, whispering, and so on.
  3. It seems like most other forums suffer from a degree of over-moderation. It seems to almost always be the case that when someone finds them self in the role of an administrator, they feel compelled to administrate. The intentions are probably good and in most cases it’s probably necessary, yet I’ve always felt that the prospect of a watchful eye somewhat stifles conversations just when they start to get interesting. That’s why I’m going to experiment with making The Dialogues a 100% censorship free, community moderated forum. For all intents and purposes, I would basically be just another user (there will probably have to be some exceptions, but I’ll get into those later). Anyone will be free to use The Dialogues for any purpose they wish, and should any problem members develop it will be up to the community to use their powers of persuasion to correct these situations; or when that fails, to use the “Ignore” feature. (By the way, yes, that means you’ll also be allowed to use all your favorite four-letter words in discussions as well.)

The main “review” portion of the website will by and large remain unchanged. Is this the first step towards a totally interactive, user-content driven version of Roller Coaster Philosophy as well? I’m not certain. Possibly that answer will be up to you. I will give a brief outline of what I’m going to try to do in the near-future as far as reviews are concerned:

Most immediately, the Pacific Park review, the last section of California, will be the next review to go up, probably at the same time as The Dialogues. After that, the Autumn Tour 2011 reviews will be next on the docket, probably in more or less an unchanged format from the current one I’ve developed. That series is mostly small parks or season specific events so it hopefully should read pretty quickly compared to the major California themers I’ve been covering.

The 2011 Asia stuff will trickle in slowly over the next year, possibly two. I’m going to shift the perspective less from detailed park and ride analyses to more of a first-person narrative account of traveling through a foreign land. With any luck it will read more as a continuous creative non-fiction story and less like a series of dry, technical reports, although a few high profile rides and parks will undoubtedly be getting the usual overly detailed attention from me as well.

In about one week’s time I’ll be packing my bags for a ten day spring break trip to Orlando, Florida, armed with an unlimited ticket to Universal Studios, Islands of Adventure, Busch Gardens Tampa, SeaWorld Orlando, Aquatica, and Wet ‘n’ Wild. I’m going to experiment with a new writing style for these parks in the form of capsule reviews. Basically these are short, concise, individualized reviews that should hopefully read more as poetry than as long-form narrative. That will be the style used for most upcoming park visits in 2012 until I get the Asian stuff done; whether or not I go back and do the usual long detailed reports for these parks will remain to be seen at a future date. The good news is that these should be able to be completed very quickly after I visit the parks, so no more waiting months or even years on end for me to finally get to the bottom of an ever-deepening “to-write” list.

I’ve gabbed enough; there will be plenty more to be said once The Dialogues are online. In the meanwhile, please enjoy the last of seven parts of my Disneyland series: Tomorrowland.


Jan. 5 – Well… better late than never.

2013 Updates / 2011 Updates