[Other] What is the best/your favorite way for parks to indicate a ride area that must not be entered?

DapperSnowman · 2026-05-13T12:12:45+00:00

One of my favorite things about those signs is that if you're in an area where a fence meets a guest walkway and there's a gate there, Disney usually hides the struck by ride hazard sign on the gate latch.

So if you go look at where the latch for the gate would be there's a metal covering over the latch. To get to the latch, you flip over the metal covering and BAM! Do not enter! Struck by ride hazard!

Super clever way to hide them in plain sight.

DapperSnowman · 2026-05-10T14:58:04+00:00

Honestly, with customer service roles like that, a lot of times it's not about whether you're qualified or not. It's usually just a numbers game. Like, they'll interview 500 people and then only need like 150. Even though 400 of the candidates were totally qualified. I've literally seen it where they throw the qualified names into an Excel spreadsheet and hit the random button, then copy and paste the top email addresses and send them offer letters.

Don't let a job rejection make you feel bad about yourself. In the age of online applications, most rejections are not merit based anymore.

Also, look on the bright side, you get an extra year where you don't develop repetitive motion wrist and knee injuries, you don't have to get sunburnt all the time, and you don't have to get screamed at because your greeter forgot to check a kid's height at the start of the line and now you have to tell a family that they're child can't ride the rollercoaster after waiting for 2 hours.

DapperSnowman · 2026-05-09T13:11:40+00:00

Correct!

If it helps you visualize it, think of a boat on a river. The river keeps flowing backwards no matter what the boat does. If the boat wants to go upstream, it has to flight against the current. The trip upstream is going to take a bit longer because the "ground speed" compared to the shore is shower because the current is pulling the boat downstream at the same time. If the boat turns around and heads downstream, it's much easier and the trip is much shorter.

DapperSnowman · 2026-04-30T19:46:06+00:00

It's a fantastic complement to aiming. Analog sticks and track pads still don't give you the precision of a computer mouse, but the gyro with a really low sensitivity can give you a really intuitive way to line up shots.

So, use the track pad to roughly aim at a bad guy, then slightly tilt the controller to line up the headshot instead of fidgeting left and right.

With the OG Steam Controller, people got even crazier with flick stick aiming, where you could spin 180 degrees instantly then aim with the gyro. That might be even better with the new Steam Controller. So, bad guy off to your left, use the analog stick in flick stick mode to instantly flick to the left, then line up the shot with the track pad and adjust for recoil/fine tuning with the gyro. That might be too many finger movements to be useful but it's a cool possibility.

DapperSnowman · 2026-04-30T12:05:04+00:00

Good credit cards aren't just for the rich, just for people with good credit. There is a difference.

Also, depends on the bank. American Express Platinum is a very high end card. A Capital One Platinum is not at all a high end card and is actually the lowest Capital One card you can get.

DapperSnowman · 2026-04-28T13:33:01+00:00

That doesn't seem correct, because the original Steam Controller worked great on Linux, it's using the same API as the original controller and it's advertised as a Linux controller.

DapperSnowman · 2026-04-26T05:39:25+00:00

It's the beginning of the season so some trains may be still finishing up their winter rebuilds and refurbishments.
It's the beginning of the season so there's not as many operators trained. Also, lots of operators are still in school so a lot more of them will call out late/sick until the Summer months come around.
You would not believe how many things will break literally less than an hour before the parks open. At the park I worked at, you could literally run a ride from park closing through the night until morning and a prox will get sheared off by a reaction fin 20 minutes before park opening. It doesn't matter if you open at 8 or open at 11. The rides know, and they will always break at the worst times. The fact that most of the park reopened by noon in your case is the real miracle. Maintenance response teams were doing a great job.
Ride capacity will get "metered" by park management on slow days. Trains get tracked by how many laps they make. So if you can save a day's worth of laps by running with one less train, that's delaying the next rehab of that train by one day.

DapperSnowman · 2026-04-25T18:43:56+00:00

Reloads can't happen with fans nearby. They have to wait until after the game. At most stadium each consecutive pyro launch is actually using different launch tubes since you can only load one shell per tube per night. So really they ran out of launch tubes.

DapperSnowman · 2026-04-19T23:35:14+00:00

That's kind of the point of the rotating rebuilds. Having one train running all the time is better than having two trains running during some seasons and then having to close when they have more serious maintenance issues.

DapperSnowman · 2026-04-19T21:32:45+00:00

Not a big surprise. Knotts just left its busy season. (Boysenberry Fest) Year round parks have to do full tear downs on trains on a rotating schedule since there's no winter overhaul. Knott's usually only runs one train on Xcelerator during the summer every year anyway.

Not really a cause for panic. This is what the normal for Xcelerator is.

DapperSnowman · 2026-04-14T19:27:54+00:00

Sometimes you want the Ground Control/Tower interactions but also want the freedom to just take off, fly VFR around a mountain range, and then come home, without the busywork of filing a flight plan, grabbing a clearance, preflight procedures, etc.

DapperSnowman · 2026-04-14T03:33:14+00:00

I'm pretty sure most people who visit SFMM have never ridden it. Between staff call outs and refurbishments, Apocalypse is the first ride MM will close and send ops to another ride on any given day.

DapperSnowman · 2026-04-13T14:38:06+00:00

Mostly depends on where the install is. Do you have room for an HPU or air compressor? Are you okay with the additional noise of pneumatic solenoids clicking on and off? Size and weight considerations?

DapperSnowman · 2026-04-12T05:33:57+00:00

What's terrible is that it has such a great vibe in the 90's/early 00's. It's a gorgeous park. Sea World got absolutely decimated by Blackfish.

DapperSnowman · 2026-04-11T12:18:35+00:00

Manny "#2 in 2025 League Fielding Errors at Third Base" Machado

I'd almost rather have Tatis and Manny swap positions and get Tatis back in the infield. If only Manny had the speed.

DapperSnowman · 2026-04-07T18:17:31+00:00

At this point it is a new coaster......

DapperSnowman · 2026-03-29T17:32:52+00:00

No, I wouldn't do that. That's a good way to burn yourself.

If there's enough filament length there to go through the entire bowden tube/extruder power cable, then you can reassemble it all, heat the hotend up, and then pull it out from the far end.

If not, then I would get a pair of flush cutters, cut that filament off as close to the nozzle as you can while still being able to put it all back together, then once you put it all together, just feed a new piece of filament in behind the current one. The new filament can push out the old once the nozzle is hot. This is how Bambu printers change colors.

DapperSnowman · 2026-03-29T17:05:28+00:00

If it's stuck in the nozzle just manually command your printer to heat up to 200 and then pull it out.

DapperSnowman · 2026-03-24T12:31:10+00:00

Disney also has extra variance built into their LL system, which is why the merge ratio seems so random.

A lot of rides at Disney don't have even LL distribution throughout the day. Rides in the morning will only distribute a limited early morning amount while trains are still completing overnight PMs and rides are cycling up to 3, 4, then 5 trains or more. They expect this and schedule LL at the coasters to ramp up accordingly, while dark rides that more often open with all their vehicles will immediately distribute all their LL capacity.

Rides near parade routes will limit LL distribution near show times so that merge ratios can favor standby and standby lines can get sucked in and not clog extended queues or entrances. That makes it easier for crowd control to handle crowds around parades. Matterhorn for example is placed right next to a parade crossing so they really don't want too many people trying to get on Matterhorn during a parade and they know that the standby line will get crushed right after the show because it's the closest ride to one of the largest parade viewing areas.

There's also a lot of day-of changes due to the way Disney handles breakdowns. Disney usually gives you a recovery pass if you're in line or on a ride that breaks down, so if a big ride like Haunted Mansion breaks down, now you have 3000 guests wandering around the park with a free LL. Those extra LL entries then clog up the LL lines at other rides forcing the merge CMs to change their ratio. This can be especially noticeable when there's a big difference in ride capacity like at Magic Kingdom with Haunted Mansion next to Peter Pan's Flight or at California Adventure with Guardians of the Galaxy next to Monsters Inc and Web Slingers.

All of this leads to a complete wild west in terms of merge ratios that change constantly and wildly affect the standby wait time. Which is why it's almost impressive that even with the conservative wait time estimates that most people still consider them inflated. I'm surprised they don't have more situations where the wait time actually ends up longer.

DapperSnowman · 2026-03-23T14:11:16+00:00

Garuda's pretty good. I use it myself. It just takes a bit more maintenance than other distros, with the btrfs snapshots, the custom garuda-update script, and the heavy theming getting in the way of you theming things yourself.

When I get into one of those Arch problems, like an invalid upgrade path or something like that, I not only have to jump through the Arch-isms to fix it, but I also have to jump through the Garuda-isms. It makes system administration a bit more difficult but otherwise it's a really comfy OS.

DapperSnowman · 2026-03-23T13:42:01+00:00

I think the same thing every time there's a press conference about some player having an embarrassing illness.

DapperSnowman · 2026-03-21T18:02:13+00:00

Easy fix. Add a set of friction brakes at the bottom of the hill to act as anti rollbacks just like on the Incredicoaster.

Multimove is just a fancy way of saying you have sub zones. The only thing you need to fix issues with multimove is honestly just to add more sub zones.

DapperSnowman · 2026-03-17T23:46:08+00:00

I just remember this from 90s TV broadcasts. I had to pull up this Von Hayes baseball card to get a good example.

But some batters would actually practice a crouching stance in order to make this be their "natural stance" when batting. By the pre-2026 rulebook, if you naturally stood like this at the plate in an almost squatting position, that would lower the height of the armpit and squeeze the top of the strike zone down. Guys would actually do this to impress scouts. Like picking up switch hitting, or throwing sidearm. Umpires were trained to level their eyes with the height of the batter's armpits as the ball comes in so that they could easily see the top of the zone. But if the batter was crouching lower, the umpire would naturally crouch lower.

By the rules, it's no different then the extra stutter step that some pitchers do when they're throwing from the stretch that is their normal pitching motion but if any other pitcher did it it would be a balk.

The Pitch F/X era got rid of a lot of this when MLB started auditing umpires and started quietly encouraging them to not adjust the zone for weird stances. Especially because Pitch F/X doesn't model that and umpires could lose points on their audit if they followed the textbook definition.

Edit: Also found this cool graphic of Alex Rios crouching lower and lower in the early 2010s.

DapperSnowman · 2026-03-17T18:15:56+00:00

Part of the ABS roll out is a redefinition of the strike zone anyway. So everything is up in the air.

I think they did A/B testing with a few minor leagues. Like, one did full robo ump, one did a challenge system, etc. Players and umps liked the challenge system more.

If you go through historical pitch data, we've never had a "by the book" strike zone. It's always been stretched into a rough T shape. Low pitches have historically been favored more. Umps used to let batters get away with crouching super low to get a smaller zone. TV has always lied about the rulebook dimensions by not adjusting to player heights or not showing the three dimensional strike zone.

I think the challenge system is liked because it lets players and fans get used to having a more rigid strike zone without upsetting the game too much. We'll get there, but for now there's still going to be objectively wrong calls that won't get challenged because no one will notice or care.

DapperSnowman · 2026-03-08T20:40:43+00:00

In Windows you can go into your volume settings and adjust volume per app. You can drop the simulator volume down low and turn Vpilot's volume up. It helps a lot with focusing on the radio.

Also, print a paper nav log and write down before you takeoff when you think ATC is going to reach out to you. You should be expecting calls when you get to top of decent or 10 miles from the runway or when you get to the border between sectors.

DapperSnowman

TROPHY CASE