Is the US a dystopia?

People go into debt to go to Disney World. The kind of mindset needed to be like the people described in this article is unfathomable to me, it’s like they’re aliens.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/20/business/disney-vacation-debt.html?unlocked_article_code=1.EU4.b9w_.4-G4-EguG83L&smid=url-share

The costs are insane.

I never wanted to go - when I was young and my mother asked me, and post divorce when my ex and my son were going (they went like 3-4 times). A lot of that is due to a dislike of crowds and particularly amusement park crowds; I’ve been to Maryland area parks and just never really had that much fun. Too overwhelming.

I also don’t like amusement parks— I don’t mine rollercoasters but am not a fanatic, and one of the things that I hate most in the world is being compelled to have fun, and amusement parks feel like one booming voice ordering me to have fun or else.

Well said. It’s like “are you not entertained, and if not, what’s wrong with you?”

And even in the 80s local amusement parks were overpriced.

mandatory amusement parks really does sound dystopian certainly

The lack of shade, and the ban on outside drinks to force you to buy cold drinks, is the most dystopian part of the experience.

I’ll admit I went to Disneyland once when I was a lad and enjoyed it.

I was too young when I went to Disneyland to have any memory of it. I went to Disney World once and have vague memories of going to EPCOT. I also went to Busch Gardens in Virginia once, which had an excellent roller coaster that put you through a pair of interlocking loops.

I also went to Action Park in NJ and survived.

My family went to Disney World in March, we didn't exactly go into debt to go, but it did slow down the repayment of other debts related to some home repairs we had to do last year. It was definitely a bad economic decision, but at the same time this is basically my kids dream vacation and they are getting older, I mean what are you gonna do, I would regret not going way more than I'm ever going to regret the cost.

The lack of shade, and the ban on outside drinks to force you to buy cold drinks, is the most dystopian part of the experience.

This is definitely the case with most amusement parks, fortunately Disney World is pretty good for this. Plenty of places to cool off when you need it and you can bring outside snacks and drinks. We just brought our water bottles and some snacks and saved several hundred dollars doing that.

as a kid, Disney was a magical experience. one that no doubt waned as I got older and had been there a gazillion times.

I don't recall what the pricing was like then, but it's absurd now. annual passholders pay way more for Disney than any other theme park. I've only been three times since 1998, all of them I was comped in because I can't justify paying a single day admission.

I prefer Sea World/Busch Gardens tbh. much more affordable for annual pass, less people, and animals/sea wildlife.

Universal Islands of Adventure, I loved so much when it opened, and had an annual pass for years, and then just hit a wall, like everytime I go there I'm cranky from people crashing into me because they're not looking, the crowding, the heat....and I love coasters but as I got older they give me headaches now

But Ms. Leach, 38, who works in sales, relies on quarterly bonuses to cover vacation costs. She and her husband earn about $250,000 annually, combined, though that figure can fluctuate each year. Her family doesn’t always have the money to pay for vacations upfront. Instead, she books first, then pays off her balances as the bonuses come in.

...maybe not the best example to start with considering they clearly CAN afford these trips outright and it's just a timing issue re: bonuses.

there are definitely much poorer folks who basically mortgage their futures to go to Disney

I went once when I was a kid on a family vacation, flew down to Florida and stayed at some resort there and went to magic Kingdom and Epcot. Honestly my favorite part was probably the monorail system. Went to Disney in California a few years ago with the kid, just an overnight stay, it was fun. But even going there on a weekday in spring, letting him skip school to do it, it was 45 minutes to an hour in line for everything. He liked it, doesn't want to do it again. I know a few adults who have passes and they go all the time.

The lady with the 18 month old saying her son will never be a kid again, but she can make more money…
Kids won’t remember anything that happened at that age! I guess if you
rewatch videos and look at pictures regularly with the kid they’ll have constructed memories of it. I hadn’t thought about it, but people must visit Disney parks for the parental experience of seeing their kids in awe. Still, 18 months…

My parents took me to Disney World when my mom was 5 or 6 months pregnant with my sister. My dad won the trip in some raffle. I very vaguely remember grabbing Pluto’s tail and a breakfast where Snow White visited. That’s it.
I also visited in high school when our city’s high school orchestras pooled together to construct a large enough group willing to pay for the trip. We took a bus and it took 26 hours to get there.

I guess if you’re with kids old enough to remember it, it’d be a family experience but the closest I’ve gotten in the last several decades was humoring my friend’s proposal we go to the food/drink festival at Epcot.

WDW is absurdly expensive these days, nevertheless I'm going with friends in late September. Florida residents get pretty good deals on the hotels. I plan to eat, drink, and lounge around the pool. I haven't been to one of their theme parks in years.

fuck the commoditization of wonder imo

It doesn't bother me much. Albums, Library of America reissue of novels -- commoditizations of wonder.

"Forced joy" irks me more.

re: the resident thing

the guy who was proposing we go to epcot had passes from when he and his ex/her child would visit with his former on-laws. after they broke up, he became a Disney guy having become accustomed to the catered tourist experience and went so far as to have a faux-Florida address to get the resident discount. there’s apparently an entire cottage industry catering to fake residents

no offense to Floridians, but imagine pretending to be a resident solely for Disney purposes. the closest we have here is people with expensive or multiple vehicles pretending to have residency in, say, South Dakota in order to have cheaper vehicle registration

I went when I was eight. I remember it! It was fun. My parents had never taken me anywhere like that and would never again.

weirdly the strongest memory i have of theme parks (we went to disneyland and knox berry farm every year for like 5 years when i was a kid) is watching dudes in line ahead of us stick two fingers down past the lycra waist line into the top of the buttcrack of the girls they were with and just like keep em there for 30 minutes.

someone would have to pay me at least $500 to spend a day at a theme park. seeing as that's not going to happen, i'm never going to one again and perfectly happy about it. i also steer clear of disney fans / disney gays bcz ewww. i don't necessarily hold it against them, we just aren't going to relate.

exactly— like we went when i was 4 to WDW, and i think my parents took me to one or two other amusement parks during my entire childhood? i went to a ton of museums and outdoor playgrounds and stuff tho, and beaches. and guess what? i never felt deprived!! in fact, i always felt great about spending the week at the beach or on a mountain somewhere for a few days and then a city for a few days.

i got mixed feelings about simulacra. certainly there are _endless_ possibilities for dystopian simulacra. the potemkin village, for instance, i'd call that a form of simulacrum. you look behind the curtain and you see a nightmare. that said, i'm personally very fond of simulacra and i think there are a lot of positive possibilities there.

so i'm gonna talk about trans shit again. there are those people, you know, who say i'm not a "real woman", someone like me can't be a "real woman". those people are minoritarian and increasingly marginal. they weren't when i was young. i kinda internalized that. these days, that's a not credible statement, you know, trans women are women, trans rights, that ought to be obvious to everyone here. and i agree with the people who say trans rights, i agree with what they're saying. i mean ok, i'm a real woman, i guess. but also so what? what if it so happens that i'm not a real woman, that i'm a simulacrum of a woman, a woman's hormones, face, voice, clothes, that there is something that makes someone a "real woman" and i don't have it?

i mean, drag queens, it's a performance, whoever or whatever they really are, they're performing as simulacra of women, and people get mad about that, and honestly i think it's silly.

i like simulacra. i like cosplay and kink and, just, the possibility to see ourselves as other than who we are, to see our world as other than what it is. i don't know anybody who does that better than disney.

weirdly the strongest memory i have of theme parks (we went to disneyland and knox berry farm every year for like 5 years when i was a kid) is watching dudes in line ahead of us stick two fingers down past the lycra waist line into the top of the buttcrack of the girls they were with and just like keep em there for 30 minutes.

I love this

my issue with disney is that the simulacra they peddle is super aggressive about ignoring huge areas of truth and experience. it's like if you want to offer someone the chance to eat delicious food all the time and the only thing on your menu is smarties. it's bad for people and it rots their teeth. i don't think that means fantasy or simulation is bad. it should just be open to drawing on a lot more truth in order to create it. i actually do believe that the point of all this reality soup we're in is to create a fantasy meal out of it.

like, for me, my fantasy is to be a Big Strong Capable Man. can i live that fantasy by pretending to be the Brawny Man all the time? no, that shit is unsustainable not to mention corny. i can make my fantasy my truth but i have to draw on the rich messy stuff i have in order to do it. how i process vulnerabilty and my inner child is paramount, if i ignore that i won't achieve it. disney ignores a lot of fundamental stuff and is pernicious because of it imho.

other myths or fantasy authors outside the disney acquisitions treasure box provide a lot more sustenance to me. but also i find that who has convincingly written the fantasy i want to live? no one that i've run across, granted it's not like i look too hard, i'm busy making it up for myself.

it should just be open to drawing on a lot more truth in order to create it.

otm

As someone who went to parks a couple times a year with family in my adolescence and with my nieces up until the pandemic began, I got to watch a lot of the reality cosplay at the parks. My experience is that even those wackadoodle parents who put $8000 on their AmEx don't believe Disney's fantasies. Even the slightly older kids know perfectly well they're not taking pictures with Goofy and Stitch or whoever: they're taking pictures with people in Goofy and Stitch costumes. This is especially so in the Instagram/TikTok age. The cool photo at Disney with your favorite character is the point; most people are aware the quotation marks, maybe more than our generation was.

Speaking just for myself: I never gave a damn about Disney characters as a kid (I was a total Bugs Bunny/Loony Tunes smartass). The way WDW created this, yes, simulacrum four hours away from me fascinated me, though. Here's a Polynesian resort that looks like photos of Polynesian resorts, not Polynesia itself. When I started traveling to Europe and around the States I compared what I saw to pictures I'd seen. My experience with travel is not dissimilar to how I experience(d) Disney: a lot of walking, a lot of mental notes, a lot of comparisons.

So, no, I don't regard Disney visits as any more or less harmful than visiting idk NYC too often -- a city that already looks as if it absorbed the Disney ethos 25 years ago. But then my secret theory about travel is....it's not edifying in and of itself. I know too many people who've been to Europe way oftener than I have who don't return like Lucy Honeychurch in A Room with a View. Maybe it's better these people stick to yearly trips to the Magic Kingdom instead of crowding me at the Tate Gallery.

i always like reading alfred's thoughts about disney parks, it's a nice window into them without having to actually go there.

the other thing it occurs to me to say about the world of disney is how sexless it is overall. if i'm going to enjoy fantasy it's gotta have a generous smut factor involved.

now that is certainly true, though my young cousin's staring at Snow White's generous cleavage suggests Disney knows what it's tapping into hormonally.

Let's pay whiney weingarten and Walter Benjamin to Substack about their WDW experiences.

NYC is a huge city, there’s a lot out there that hasn’t been gentrified, it’s just visitors don’t hang out in Canarsie or Jamaica.

Yeah, I should've written "Manhattan" or "Times Square." When I visit I'm usually in Ridgewood.

i'll go on the L.A. reddit and every day someone is showing up asking advice about their itinerary, which invariably involves wanting to see Beverly Hills, the Walk of Fame, Universal Studios, Disney, etc. Those kinds of vacations just seem like hell to me, idk.

when I travel I prefer to travel alone. mostly because...I am very spur of the moment and hate to plan my trips down to the minute. but worse...what I can't stand more than hyper-planning a trip is indecisiveness. if a conversation about what we want to do lasts more than 5 minutes, with endless options being suggested, but no actual decisions being made, that is my personal hell.

Example:

"We could go to this bar at 2, maybe?

"sounds great, I'll get c-"

"there's also this other pub in the East village"

"I mean if you prefer that, that's fine t-"

"hmm, but i don't know, maybe I want to stay in until the show we have tickets to later"

"I mean if you want to do that, I can go do some things by my-"

"no hold on - just give me a bit to think about it...there's also this wine tasting that I'm reading about"

*30 minutes later, we're still talking about it, wasting time in a hotel*

in 2018, I showed up to NY to see the Decibel Magazine tour at Irving Plaza, and pretty much left everything else open and just happened to notice John Mulaney was taping his Kid Gorgeous special at Radio City Music Hall, and just impulsively bought a ticket and went. I never have a hard time entertaining myself.

In big groups we always separate and agree to meet for dinner or drinks. It's the only way.

And I always arrive a day earlier to be alone lol

separating is the best way! I always get annoyed when people get offended at the idea that you want to do something on your own.

last visit to NYC though I wasn't really able to do that much solo as my mother and my brother's mother-in-law could not navigate Manhattan without my brother or I helping escort them.

meeting up like that is the best, trade adventure stories.

I remember once getting in a HUGE fight with a friend who was just toxic and abusive to everyone (including his girlfriend) in NY and him pissily going to bed early so I went out exploring Times Square until 4 am by myself, it was dope. then I stopped hanging out w/ that dude.

Let's pay whiney weingarten and Walter Benjamin to Substack about their WDW experiences.

― the talented mr pimply (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn)

there's this lady named jenny nicholson who makes these insane four-hour video essays about theme parks... i haven't been able to watch a whole one but people i know speak highly of them.

like, for me, my fantasy is to be a Big Strong Capable Man. can i live that fantasy by pretending to be the Brawny Man all the time? no, that shit is unsustainable not to mention corny. i can make my fantasy my truth but i have to draw on the rich messy stuff i have in order to do it. how i process vulnerabilty and my inner child is paramount, if i ignore that i won't achieve it. disney ignores a lot of fundamental stuff and is pernicious because of it imho.

the other thing it occurs to me to say about the world of disney is how sexless it is overall. if i'm going to enjoy fantasy it's gotta have a generous smut factor involved.

― he/him hoo-hah (map)

oh, i absolutely agree. i went to disney world once, when i lived in florida, and i found it a fascinating experience. the ideas disney peddles are crap. walt wanted to be fucking bob moses or some shit, and disney since, i don't believe they've ever truly strayed from that legacy. let's all go to the world's fair. let's go to george romero's amusement park. let's visit the world of the future. i think we're all bozos on this bus.

yeah i got my own fantasies. rich and messy and with generous smut factors involved. shit, i wish there could be a theme park like disney world for my fantasies. there aren't. there are bdsm dungeons. there's a lot to love about bdsm dungeons - and they're corny, for the record, they're corny just like disney world is corny, i embrace that cringe - but damn that shit gets complicated.

that's what i like about mimesis, i like leaning into that complicatedness. kink isn't just fun and games for me. i get involved with this one particular fetish-adjacent community and pretty much everybody there is a trans woman who was sexually assaulted by an intimate partner. and here i'm like oh jeez, i thought this was just hot and sexy fetish art. well, shit.

the disney rabbithole - and there is one, all "hidden mickeys" - it is a false consciousness, a pseudo-gnosis. Operating Thetan. that's the people i feel for, the people who make their lives about disney. my girlfriend, most of her life, the only two things that ever made her happy were disneyland and meth. when she found a life that didn't involve the latter, well, the former went out the window as well.

in conclusion: we don't just need more bdsm dungeons. we need _better_ bdsm sex dungeons, sex dungeons that aren't just about furniture but offer people opportunities to genuinely heal from trauma, rather than recapitulate trauma. even the dungeons we have, though, even with all the problems, they're still better than the Disney experience, a "pleasure island" that refuses to engage with the psychological reality underlying its existence.

I grew up two miles from OG Six Flags but it was too close to care about - a place you went on field trips every so often and eventually worked at for a summer or two.

The theme park I'd go back in time to visit (and see if it's as shitty as I assume) is a Flintstones village where my grandparents stopped on the way back from Canada when we went to meet my grandmother's birth mom.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bedrock_City_(South_Dakota)

in conclusion: we don't just need more bdsm dungeons. we need _better_ bdsm sex dungeons

kate for president 2024

I don't even own a Disney

I went to wdw as a 10 y/o and it was fine but mainly remember intermittent joys and endless fascination of seeing how funny and odd the other visitors were to me. i especially recall how much i enjoyed seeing how my fancy grandmother and her dear friend tackled eating their ice cream cones, which was hilariously funny, and we ALL discussed the best and/or proper way one should eat an ice cream cone in the heat.

and so I cannot imagine going to such a place without the objective being to provide a 6-12 y/o absolute joy and otheriness. As an adult, we didn’t do too much amusement park stuff at all, we’re more outdoors-y. still, my visit to Legoland in San Diego with my then 8 and 10 y/os, and the accompanying photo captures, were/are a real source of delight. They are adult now. I have not asked them how they remember it.

i am very glad for those memories, but I am quite sure I would not advise others try for it. no guarantees, high expense. and without any kids along? for adult satisfaction? that is utterly mad. but I’m not everyone.

I don't even own a Disney

― Jedi, I've got your number (Ye Mad Puffin)

i think it's the other way around

kate for president 2024

― he/him hoo-hah (map)

can i be vice president instead? i've been feeling pretty subby for a while now

jfc this story is bleak:

A woman working for Wells Fargo in Arizona died at work and was found four days later, authorities have confirmed.

Denise Prudhomme, 60, last clocked in at the Wells Fargo in Tempe at 7 a.m. on Aug. 16, the Tempe Police Department confirmed to USA TODAY on Thursday. She was found at a third-floor desk in the office on Aug. 20, leading on-site security to call police.

Firefighters also responded and pronounced the woman dead at 4:55 p.m., police said.

Prudhomme's cause and manner of death were pending as of Thursday morning, according to the Office of Medical Examiner.

According to police, an initial investigation found no obvious signs of foul play. An investigation is ongoing and authorities are interviewing employees at the Wells Fargo location to get more information.

Wells Fargo workers reported smelling a foul odor but thought it was an issue with the plumbing, local television station KPNX reported citing an unnamed employee.

The outlet reported that Prudhomme's cubicle was on the third floor and wasn’t near the main aisle. Most Wells Fargo employees in the office work remotely but the building has 24/7 security, per KPNX.

I bolded the bleakest part

wow that is grim.. but also very sad

Yup, being the last one to leave the office, a mistake!

The real dystopia comes when Wells Fargo tries to determine her exact time of death to clock her out, gotta make sure that last paycheck doesn't overpay the heirs by a few hours.

but then we all learn our lesson when a24 releases a pitch-black comedy about it in 2027.

I get the UK magazine Fortean Times and they routinely have a roundup of deaths gone unnoticed, sometimes for months or even years.. with the utilities paid by auto-debit. Feel likes it happens a lot in Japan

xp - map, you forgot the part where it is later revealed that Wells Fargo funded the flick, but the heirs don't see a dime because of the release they shoved in the heirs' nose for signature in the immediate minutes after learning of their loved one's death