4 hours is an awfully big investment... Especially for those of us with multiple young kids and who no longer own their own free time. Care to give the gist?
Defunctland is genuinely amazing and always a fun watch, and I never regret the time spent on their videos, they're kind of like a special occasion... though they're getting incredibly long... :)
There are a few older shorter videos in the half hour range, I highly recommend checking them out if you find some quiet time! (It's awfully hard for me too in recent times, I haven't gotten around to watch the Living Characters one myself, so I can't give the gist... I'm just glad I got the holidays off to finally catch up!)
and for anyone with 4 hours to kill... here's as an incredible documentary covering the misaligned incentives and poor guest experience at the now-shuttered Disney Star Wars hotel.
She covers everything - the line getting in to the hotel, the size + cost of the rooms in comparison with the same size/cost on a Disney cruise ship, and theories on why the experience was so poor.
Just from your description, I know this is Jenny Nicholson. I agree it is an incredibly insightful breakdown and analysis of why it failed, all while being funny and engaging.
One of the key reasons is that it would be really, really easy to accidentally injure parkgoers with any design big enough to interact with and engineered well enough to be reliable in a full day of appearances.
For example, the working WALL-E robot that's made a handful of PR appearances weighs seven hundred pounds. They absolutely can't risk that ever running across some kid's foot.
This is one of those situations where that's legitimately difficult. Kevin Perjurer is quite a good documentarian, and there's very little trimmable fat on the four-hour product if you want to keep in all the points he made.
gkoberger's peer comment is a pretty good summary. Another interesting point is that these technologies can benefit the brand bottom-line even when they don't make it into the park, because part of Disney's brand is "tomorrow today." Even when things are one-offs, they become one-offs that people stitch into the legend of the parks (in both the retelling and in their own memories), which gives them a larger-than-life feel; your visit might not include one of the "living characters," and statistically it probably won't.
... but it might. And if it does, you'll never forget it.
Personal anecdote / example: I stopped in at the "droid factory" in the Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge area of Disney World a few years back. They had several bits of merch for sale including one life-size R2-D2, inert. I took a close look at the R2 because it was an impressive bit of work. Turned around to look at a rack of t-shirts. And was, therefore, startled as hell to hear a bwoop behind me, turn around, and see that it had followed me out of its charging receptacle and was staring at me. It was not at all inert; it was a very impressive operational remote-control replica.
The cast member behind the counter was doing his best to hold down his grin and not give me a "GOTCHA" look. He has to, because you never know what kids might be watching and he doesn't want to break the magic. And... Yeah, he got me good. "That time I was at Disney World and R2-D2 followed me around the t-shirt shop" is gonna stick with me.
I saw a video of someone who bought one of these (iirc from Home Depot limited sale)... and it definitely looks impressive, though a few minor flaws. I've seen a handful of R2D2s at conventions over the years, and they're always pretty cool... while a BB8 might be technically more impressive, I just don't care for the character nearly as much.
The basic gist is that while the tech is cool, it just ends up being impractical for regular use in the parks. (But like the other poster mentioned, with Defunctland it's less about the tldr and more about the journey and fascinating segues he takes)
Totally get it's difficult to make time with kids, but depending on your kids ages... the video shows a LOT of Disney characters talking and doing things and the videos are colorful, so it could work as something you can listen to and they won't mind having play in the background!
What do you guys think of this? https://www.textaurant.app. It's an AI "agentic" SMS ordering system that's hopefully better than Taco Bell's attempt... I got sick of navigating every restaurants nuanced online order placing and figured I'd try to standardize it myself with an SMS based assistant (yes I'm aware of the XKCD). The idea is every restaurant would have their own number, or down the road I could have a single number for all restaurants but I'm somewhat token/context limited right now. It uses GPT 4o and I've been working on it for the past 4 months. Closed source for now but who knows I might open it up but I'm deciding if it's worth trying to patent.
Cool, SMS is an underrated UI. Its universal, works accross all phones, requires no app installs or fancy website work, I like it! I think it would need to integrate with the delivery ecosystem eg. doordash/uber eats to get traction, have you talked to any local restaurants about it yet?
Late reply but I have a local restaurant that's willing to beta test it. I'm trying to get all the edge cases ironed out before I go live. There's a whole lot of branding logic I'm trying to account for so nervous it won't be reliable and they'll flake on me.
This is a great article, and I largely agree but I feel like we're giving ourselves an excuse to be lazy. Because I've absolutely seen this principle swing in the opposite direction, where someone writes slop code, without ever having had a real conversation with the end user(s) and consequently the software goes out the door without having considered top 5 most common edge cases that would have been so obvious if a little more effort had been put in.
Have to admit the lazy thing threw me, but I can see how the “doing less” I’m arguing for could be taken that way. The “less” is not about avoiding handling edge cases that are possible now, but about avoiding putting in layers of code to handle cases possible only in some future versions of the code (with some limited exceptions that I mention at the bottom of the post)
In fact, it’s crossing my mind that people might not want to be accused of being lazy, and that is a motivation to over-engineer solutions.
