justinderosaphotography:

Starfall

(via lsleofskye)

pureimagineering:

a-land-of-shadow-and-substance:

New post up on the Blogspot!  This one is an in-depth exploration of the use of color to tell the story of the Tower of Terror attractions, and how each different Tower employs its color palette in a unique way!

Keenly observed!

goodstuffhappenedtoday:

UNTIL RECENTLY, THE people living on the island of Kokota thought their forests were lost forever.

The tiny Tanzanian islet measures only one square kilometer and is home to just 500 people.

For centuries, Kokota’s residents subsisted by harvesting the island’s natural resources, including its trees. By the early 21st century, though, the deforestation had become unsustainable and the islanders faced a crisis. Fisheries were depleted, which threatened the Kokotan’s food supplies, and rivers ran dry, which left people with little water to drink or cook with.

Kokota’s residents also faced threats largely out of their control. A changing climate has meant the island is now experiencing rising sea levels, more erratic rainfall, and coral bleaching in the surrounding waters.

But in recent years, the island has managed to step back from the brink of ruin. Reforestation efforts began on Pemba in 2008, and since then, more than two million trees have been planted there and on Kokota. Kokota also has its first school as well as a system for collecting rainwater. Though small, the island is an example of how a community can successfully adapt to the growing challenges created by climate change, its residents say.

more at the link.

lsleofskye:

View of Mt Oberlin | Timothy Entropy

Location: Glacier National Park (Lewis Range), Montana, United States


(via lsleofskye)

maureen2musings:

The Alaska life

patrickthunphoto

(via lsleofskye)

etoile-filantes:

“There are stars within me. Some nights they shine, other nights, they collide.”

— etoile-filantes

(via that-girl-who-sails)

gusgrissom:

In loving memory of the NASA astronauts we lost in 2018:

Capt. John Watts Young (September 24, 1930 – January 5, 2018) – Gemini 3, Gemini 10, Apollo 10, Apollo 16, STS-1, STS-9

Capt. Alan LaVern Bean (March 15, 1932 – May 26, 2018) – Apollo 12, Skylab 3

Col. Donald Herod Peterson (October 22, 1933 – May 27, 2018) – STS-6

Col. Richard Alan “Rick” Searfoss (June 5, 1956 – September 29, 2018) – STS-58, STS-76, STS-90

(via astrophysics-daily)

bogeybo:

theme-park-concepts:

Those of you that have followed this blog for a while know that one of my favorite solutions to the queue length problem is the idea of using multiple long preshows that become part of the experience. So that way a 45 minute wait might actually only feel like a 15 minute wait + 30 minutes of show + ride.

Recently I sat down to do the math behind this idea, and while I hope this isn’t revelatory to anybody working in the industry, it does prove insightful to me.

It turns out the above kind of solution only is effective IF those staggered preshows are essentially skippable. Or more realistically able to be dynamically shortened and lengthened. Here’s why.

Imagine we’ve got a ride system capable of taking 100 guests a minute (ha! I wish we had these). With just a normal queue this means that if 101 guests show up at once - guest 101 must wait 1 minute to ride.

Now…imagine we’ve devised an elaborate procession of preshows. To make math easy, Each is 1 minute long and there’s 5 of them. They all have the same capacity as the ride system.

Now again, 101 guests show up at the same time. 100 enter preshow 1. And guest 101 is now left in the outside queue for the same 1 minute wait he would have had anyway. Only now after that 1 minute wait he gets 5 preshows. All we’ve essentially done is move the entrance of the ride and lengthen the experience. We haven’t taken the line actually into the show and the line outside the show will end up being whatever it would have been without the preshows. And we can’t increase the THRC of the preshows because then that’ll just cause a backlog inside someplace.

What we REALLY want is for guests 1-100 to go straight on to the ride. And then guest 101 will get put in preshow 5 for 1 minute, until space is available.

If 600 guests showed up at the same time. Then 1-100 go right on the ride, 101-200 see only preshow 5, 201-300 see 4 and 5, 301-400 see 3-5, 401-500 see 2-5, and 501-600 see 1-5 (as would the guests that came after them until the crowds started slowing down). By doing this, at no point is there ever a wait outside the doors to the attraction, all of the waiting is absorbed by the show.

This poses some interesting questions though - as normally we don’t think of preshows as skippable. After all they’re part of the show. And the whole goal here is using the queue to our advantage to make a more interesting, longer, and more immersive show. So how do we get around this?

I think there’s a few things that can be done. First just because ideally mathematically the shows would be entirely skippable doesn’t mean we have to do that. It might be that 1 segment is entirely skippable, but the others still take some sort of time - just in slow periods less.

And then there’s many ways to manipulate the length and content of these segments. Some ways to manipulate the length of the segments are as follows:

-a standard length show but playing with the duration of the loading and unloading frequency

-multiple versions of a show

-walk through at your own pace segments (ala Forbidden Journey)

-holding areas in between shows that act as their own segment (easily bypassed but easily put to use)

-lounge segments (play with activities until your number is called)

Those are just a few ideas. Battling long queues is going to be an ever increasingly part of designing attractions and as many ways around this as possible are needed. Hope this helps you as much as it helped me.

Another fun solution that comes more from the museum world than parks is the introduction of live interpretation that supplements the main attraction. Instead of fully scripted preshows of preset length, having live actor interpreters allows for flexibility in the presentation and more dynamic crowd control.

(via cattink)

lsleofskye:

Amazing Bolu-Golcuk trip | arkns

Location: Gölcük, Bolu, Turkey