The article's predicate is that rollercoasters have no purpose, but then seems to explain what their purpose is. There are far more things in the world that are "purposeless" than rollercoasters, if amusement is insufficient.
As someone who appreciates rollercoasters and psychoactive substances, I've made comparisons between them. A good ride will make you feel weightless one moment, four times heavier the next. You'll feel adrenalin, awe, fear, and catharsis, all neatly packaged in under five minutes, usually a good deal shorter than that, and with fewer contraindications.
Rollercoasters and psychedelics can be a great pairing, too, but your mileage may vary, of course.
According to the premise of the article then go-carts, ATVs, jet skis, or any other machine for recreational activity is also useless. I agree that the useless premise is wrong.
The article is not saying rollercoasters are useless: it starts by noting they are apparently useless, and goes on to explain in great detail why they are in fact wonderful and useful.
I am deeply interested now which effects of rollercoasters and which effects of psychedelics you would or would not be able to distinguish. Please keep a notebook with detailed observations and post them somewhere. This is scientifically valuable.
Guy writes 10 bazillion sub-lit-crit words on rollercoasters, fails to mention Euler spirals and clothoids, where the beauty is, where maths guides and protects meat. A depressing lack of curiosity by the author.
As someone with kids. We now know that “senses” aren’t just things that we have that inform us about the world, there are also “sensory needs.”
From proprioception to vestibular and plenty other $5 words. This seems like a new development or at least a new acknowledgement and awareness is still growing.
So I would say that these devices produce sensory experiences.
One could also argue that a coaster is a transducer of sorts. It converts chemical energy into sound (screams of passengers) and is also a substance-free emetic [1].
When i was young my siblings and I were riding a low/mid intensity coaster. My brother and I are smiling and screaming, and we look at momentarily at some point backwards a couple of cars and we see our sister, looking completely unamused, staring indifferently out into the horizon. No smile, no frown. She seems like normal person now. But what does that say about a person!? Maybe it was an 8-10 year old power move.
"Star Tours" at Disneyland doubled down on this uselessness factor. When it opened in 1987 I was fascinated, as a teen, and there were several demonstrations of the technology they were using, and principles they exploited, to make a roller-coaster ride out of a "room" that never traveled anywhere! It was a large-scale flight simulator, in fact; you cram people into the fuselage, shut the doors, and then toss them around with hydraulic actuators while showing them a film, and the combined sensations really convince people that they're in motion, flying through space, and being buffeted by battles and explosions.
The waiting in line part was even made fun by all the branded Star Wars animatronics. There was never a dull moment, even if it was two hours before you actually boarded the "ride".
But it was all completely fake, pseudo-futuristic, and based on a fictional universe of characters who don't exist, yet with all those layers of simulation, people paid good money and invested an entire day at the park to be hoodwinked and thereby entertained, and indeed, inspired to bond with friends, family, and significant others.
>> inspired to bond with friends, family, and significant others.
That is what I remember from decades past, but parks seem different now. With all the complex ticketing and line-bypassing schemes, it now seems more about social signaling than enjoying the ride. Those Disney lines were fun but now it seems that standing in a line is only a signal that you aren't subscribed to whatever scheme allows one to bypass the line on a given day. Airlines are the same. Once upon a time everyone just got onto the plane. Now we all line up and compare each other according to which order we are allowed to board. Disney worked to make the line entertaining. Now they want to upsell and I worry that, like airlines, they now want to make the line experience worse in order to better sell the bypass option.
(Starting in the late 90s, Disney actively tried to reduce lines so that people would spend more time shopping/spending, which is why the parks suddenly felt far more crowded.)
It's not like this is a new thing at Disneyland or anywhere. When they opened, they sold your tickets in tiers, and that's when we coined the expression "E-ticket Ride" because they'd deem the most desirable, most exciting attractions as top-tier premium packages, and families on a budget would settle for less.
It was the abolition of these distinctions and the flattening of the price of admission that took a step forward. Since Disneyland's reputation had been established, they were more willing to let the patrons and fans decide which rides were the best and coolest, and inform future iterations of Imagineering.
By the way, to speak to the article itself, I've been reviewing "classic" Disney films and found significant occultism, a lot of "magick" and such ("Sorceror's Apprentice", "Pinocchio"); everyone knows the fairies and supernatural elements; some say that Disney has changed and Disney has lost moral character and is no longer suitable for children, but I suggest that Walt Disney's morality hasn't altered course since its foundation, when "Alice in Wonderland" was a drug-fueled sex romp written by an ephebophile; when Steamboat Willie was an arrogant bigot who violently pounded other animals into submission...
we ride on our ships, further than most
raiding and pillaging from North to South Coast
We steal only metal, like guns, tanks and toasters
and melt them all down, to make RollarCoasters
--Buckethead
>Horror stories, like pop music and alcohol, are designed first and foremost to make sex possible. Horror stories let young men place their arms across the shoulders of young women.
So much here to unpack about the author's world view in just two sentences. I think I'll stop reading here.
What a ridiculous piece. A rollercoaster is just like literality 100000 other things that are done just for the adrenaline/novelty maxing like video games, sports, scrolling tiktok or jumping into a pool of water over and over.
Play behaviour that carried over from kid to adult life to encourage developing oneself and exploring the environment, all traits that tech today exploit in benign and less benign ways.
Not sure about this. Isn't a ski lift in the same category? A machine strictly designed to give humans a thrill, not to do any other useful work otherwise. Where do you stop? A water park? A movie theater? Any form of motorized racing?
this is just basic thermodynamics, converting liquid capital energy into emotional energy which has monetary value to justify the loss of heat produced by the conversion cascade from liquid capital to revenue
Yeah, it shows that the writer is a true rollercoaster afficionado. Basically, the technology of rollercoasters is pretty simple: converting potential energy into kinetic energy and back several times before friction has a chance to eat it up (while taking care to not exceed certain acceleration limits that would hurt the passengers or, in case of wooden coasters with "classic" rails, send the cars flying off the track). All the rest is just in our heads...
As someone who appreciates rollercoasters and psychoactive substances, I've made comparisons between them. A good ride will make you feel weightless one moment, four times heavier the next. You'll feel adrenalin, awe, fear, and catharsis, all neatly packaged in under five minutes, usually a good deal shorter than that, and with fewer contraindications.
Rollercoasters and psychedelics can be a great pairing, too, but your mileage may vary, of course.