#as far as OLD old animatronics go these guys are very pleasant to look at. some other bots from this time period look terrible

[jaspertjunk]

I have Beatles fans show up on my dash a lot (thanks to having a Beatles fan mutual. If you're reading this, hi) and as a huge animatronics fan I regularly think "I wonder if they know about the Beagles". So I thought I'd do my part and share my fan love with fans of a different thing entirely. If you're a Beatles fan and you're seeing this you now know about the Beagles. Also if you're not a Beatles fan and you're seeing this.

[arcticdementor]

There is an old adage in business; talent goes where the money is.

There will shortly be a new adage; talent avoids where the Woke is.

Google and Amazon became the powerhouses they are today because a generation ago (ouch) they were willing to spend big to get talent. And they got it. It says something about the level of people they were getting that one of the questions on Google’s employment application was, how many books have you written?  This was before internet publishing was a thing.

Unlike the Dickensian workhouse conditions for the Microserfs up north at Redmond, the googlers were treated like princes.  One of the big winners when the company finally went public was the company chef, not food service’s director you understand, but chef as in actual chef.  

…

The Woke will always find a reason to hire other Wokelings.  Diversity is usually a good excuse but there is always a way to justify hiring someone who is utterly unqualified for her job.  And those that are actually good at their jobs have to take up the slack for the useless dead weight. It used to be a “blonde with a great rack.” Now it’s a “three-hundred-pound, hippo with a purple mental-illness haircut.”  

The thing is the blonde was always cheerful, nice to everyone, and pleasant to look at.  She at least made the work environment more enjoyable.  On the other hand, the whale with the purple hair is constantly shrieking and demanding submission to the SJW narrative from everyone that she comes in contact with. During working hours instead of doing her job, she is organizing witch hunts to get people fired. She and her comrades make life miserable at that company.

Here’s my big point:  Every top tier worker in that field will know about this and avoid that company like the plague in the future.  

…

Disney Parks now has that same problem with the Imagineers.

There was a reason Disneyland was such a cut above county carnivals and that reason was…Europe?!?!

It’s true.  European amusement parks go back a long time, some of them are older than the United States.  Walt was impressed by the pristine look and feel of European amusement parks.  The reason they were cleaner and more highbrow was because they were parks first and foremost.  Europeans for centuries would travel to a certain locale to “partake of the waters,” or they would go somewhere with beautifully manicured gardens or magnificent concertos.  

The hawkers, vendors, and amusements would follow.   However, the men running the parks would demand high standards from these camp followers.  Since these people became permanent residents, it was easy for them to settle in and take snobbish pride in their professions and workplace.  

The result was a higher quality experience for European parkgoers.

American amusements were unfortunately dominated by carnival culture.  Dusty, grungy, chipped paint, gaudy lights, and fleece the rubes, then get out of town.   American carnivals consisted of ripoff games, creaking rides, and strippers who had young bodies with aging faces.   Kids always wanted to go but parents could see what was beneath the gaudy surface.  It was tolerable as a once-a-year thing, but so far as respectable middle-class families were concerned it was just as well that the carnies left town after two or three weeks.

After a trip to Barcelona’s Tibidabo, Walt Disney decided he was going to change all that.

Disney repeatedly said, “Disneyland could only have been built by a movie company.” And he was right. Nobody else would have approached problems in quite the same way as a film company.  Walt’s people understood perspective in a way that most architects and engineers simply could not. His parkgoers were viewed as an audience, they weren’t just there to go on rides they were there for a holistic experience. The park employees were called cast members for a reason.

Each of Disneyland’s three amusement parks had stories to tell.  And they were very American stories. Main Street USA was a step backward in time to an innocent America that knew nothing of the horrors of the Great War or World War Two, the desperation of the Depression, and fear of atomic weapons. Frontierland told parkgoers tales of myth heroes of the American people. The tall stories of frontier heroes like Daniel Boone, Jim Bowie, and Davy Crockett.  While Frontierland looked back with pride on the achievements of the past, Tomorrowland looked forward to an optimistic American future.  

As for Fantasyland, those stories were about as Americanized as you can get. All of my readers are probably well aware of little details that got filed off, like stepsisters cutting off their own toes or why Hansel and Gretel were really in the Woods all by themselves and what Prince Charming actually did with Sleeping Beauty. But fantasyland didn’t have any of those little details. It was a place of beauty, heroism, and of course magic.

At Disney Parks the backstory has always come first.  And all of the park rides have them

…

When Walt Disney was at the Tibidabo he saw the Automata Museum, he tried repeatedly to buy it over the years.  They were the kind of thing he would become obsessed with. The man who built a ¼ scale ridable railroad in his backyard had to have some of this own.

Taking the initials of his name; Walter Elias Disney founded WED Enterprises and began building his own automatons which he called, animatronics. The men who designed them were christened, Imagineers.

The Imagineers were the men who made the dreams happen, they were the illusionists who created the magic. Make you an audience think they were taking a trip to the moon?  No problem.  Take a cable car ride to the top of the Matterhorn? Easy. Convince people they were in a mansion surrounded by 999 ghosts “with room for one more”? Give me a real challenge.

Okay, that last one was a real challenge as it turned out.  Disneyland has nowhere near the room that Disney World would have in years to come.  The Imagineers needed to figure out how to get the Haunted Mansion’s passengers from the assembly station to the start of the ride when there were railroad tracks between these two points and keep the audience engaged in the story at the same time.  The solution was to build the world’s largest open elevator and make it part of the story.  Which is how the Stretching Room came to be.

The Imagineers have had their fails as well.  The Yeti on Expedition Everest was the largest animatronic Disney ever built.  And it was only briefly in operation because as it turned out the rest of the ride was under-engineered.  The robot-monster was so big it was damaging the roller coaster during its act.

Well, anyone can have a bad day.  My point is that, traditionally, the Imagineers successes are so big their failures really standout.

Note my use of the word “traditionally.”

The old guard of Imagineers as represented by the likes of Joe Rohde, found themselves out of a job this year.   Pushed out from below by the Young Turks of the Stories Matter group.

Far from viewing the audience as their public to be entertained, the Stories Matter Imagineers clearly and obviously view it as a class in need of education.  Although, the Stories Matter crowd is often desperate to show how clever they are.  Remember how the old school guys wanted to keep the crowd in the moment at the Haunted Mansion?  The new generations of Imagineers could care less about that. Witness the Stargate and Death-Taco that are now hideously disfiguring the beauty of the World Showcase Lake at Epcot.

Now they are moving on to the backstories.  The Jungle Cruise ride is being refurbished on the fly without closing it.  They don’t have any choice the movie will be out before they could close and reopen. They are also frantically retconning the backstory of the ride to make it much more Woke.

[petty-revenge-stories]

Tales of delicious revenge from a recovering retail worker.

story data: long story. 2301votes. %97 upvoted. very popular.

I discovered this blog @petty-revenge-stories a while ago and it has breathed new life into my withered soul. Today, it's time that I return the favor.

These tales of petty revenge all took place over the three long years that I had the misfortune of working retail at a big-box store best known for its red bullseye logo and bitchy middle-class clientele. Enjoy.

ONE: THE TAG SWITCHER I was working in the fitting room one night when this lady bustles in with 3000 different items of clothing that she wanted to try on. Unfortunately my store had just lifted the item limit for the fitting room, so I begrudgingly had to let her take everything back.

She proceeds to make a HUGE mess in the fitting room (leaving clothes inside-out all over the floor, tags ripped off of items, size stickers peeled off and slapped onto the wall… the whole nine yards).

After she leaves, I report the ripped off tags to Assets Protection (per fitting room policy) and, figuring that would be the extent of my revenge, I resigned to cleaning up the mess she left me.

Then I get a call from the manager. He wants me up at the registers to do back up. I had worked the registers before, but it was exceptionally rare for me to get pulled away from the fitting room to do backup. Still, I don’t protest and I head up to the register.

Guess who my first customer is? Yep, the mess-making bitch from the fitting room. The manager has directed her straight to me, and I can tell from the wide-eyed look of horror on her face that she realizes she has just been lead into a trap.

She slowly begins to plop her items onto the conveyerbelt and tries to make nervous small-talk. At first I assume she’s just feeling awkward about the mess that she left… but when I get a better look at her items, I immediately realize there’s something much fishier going on.

Her purchase consists entirely of women’s clothing, and I recognize most of the items as brand new stuff that has recently come in. Stuff that should cost full price. So when I see nearly every single item’s price tag covered with a bright red 70% off clearance sticker, I realize that something’s up. When I look down at the first item from her pile, my suspicions are confirmed: the item I’m holding in my hands is a woman’s Mossimo Black clothing item, but it has a bright blue Circo tag that belongs on infant boy clothes.

Busted! This bitch was switching tags on clothes to get a lower price! Not only that, but she was so brazen (or stupid) that she used tags from the wrong department!

I don’t make it immediately obvious that I’ve figured out her scheme. Instead, I think fast. From my experience in the fitting room, I know every item of clothing has a little white tag on the inside that has a nine-digit item code. So instead of scanning the items, I proceed to type in each and every item manually, using the ACTUAL numbers inside each garment.

The woman watches this all unfold with a nauseous look on her face, as item after item rings up at full price ($19 - $29, compared to the $2 or $4 price tags she had stuck on each item). As her total grows, so does the look of combined hatred and fear on her face.

Finally she stammers something about “coming back later” and runs off towards the exit. The Assets Protection guy watches her walk out, then comes over to me. He reveals that he had been watching this chick before she even went into the fitting room, but he didn’t have enough on camera to approach her. Since I was the only team member working that night who was familiar with the clothing / tags, the manager put me on the register to check her out.. literally!

TWO: THE PHONE SHOPPER It’s the week before Christmas and the store is frantic. I’m manning the phones (which are ringing off the hook), and one night I get a call from Bitch Princess, who wants to know if we have any [insert name of whatever animatronic hatching robot dog toy every kid had to have that year].

Now the store’s holiday policy said we could confirm availability over the phone, but we weren’t supposed to put high-demand items (like the barking bird robot thing) on hold for a customer. Regardless, I was still un-jaded enough to like hooking people up (I’m still waiting on that lifetime of good retail karma to kick in…)

I let BP know that this highly-coveted toy has been flying off the shelves for weeks and I’m doubtful that we have any in stock, but I can happily check for her if she’s willing to go on a brief hold. She impatiently agrees to the hold, and I set the phone down.

After being slightly delayed by a customer that ambushed me on the sales floor, I miraculously find ONE of these stupid toys on the shelf. I grab it and head back to my post, excited to tell BP I just saved Christmas, but when I get back I find the phone ringing again. Recognizing the number on the caller ID display, I quickly deduce that Bitch Princess has hung up and is now calling back.

I barely get a chance to recite my scripted greeting before BP cuts me off, yelling that I put her on hold for “30 minutes” (more like 7), that she’s a customer and it’s my job to assist her, some nonsense about her having priority over the customers in the store, blah blah blah. I want to point out that literally NONE of what she’s saying is true, but I keep my lips sealed.

Instead, in a ridiculously pleasant voice, I say: “ma’am, thank you SO MUCH for your patience. I checked the sales floor and couldn’t find [stupid toy], but the computer is telling me that we might have one in the backroom. If you bear with me for another minute here, I can—”

She grumbled that yes, I could check the backroom, but I “better hurry” because she doesn’t have time for this. Smiling gleefully, I put the phone back on hold and proceed to return [stupid toy] to the spot where I found it on the sales floor. I then spend a nice chunk of time helping out ACTUAL customers in the store.

Eventually I remember that BP is still waiting on hold and I return to the phone. “Ma’am, good news… we do have ONE in stock,” I say. BP immediately barks at me to put it on hold, and a devious Grinch-like smile spreads across my face. “I’m so sorry ma’am, but we’re actually unable to put high-demand items on hold at this time. All I can do is confirm that it’s currently available on the sales floor…”

BP unleashes the wrath of a thousand fiery infernos and demands to speak to a manager. I oblige, transferring her to the closing manager (who confirmed the store policy, before promptly being hung up on).

I was pretty pleased with the turn of events, but the cherry on top came a short time later when BP actually shows up at the store, only to discover that the toy had already been purchased by another guest.

THREE: THE SHOE SNATCHER It was nearly closing time, and I was tasked with “zoning” (or straightening up) the shoe department for the night. It was nearly impossible for me to get anything done, though, because this obnoxious woman kept making me drop everything to help her shop for shoes for her toddler.

The worst part was that the woman didn’t put anything back where she found it. Instead, she just leaves the shoe boxes strewn throughout the aisle (wtf). She finally leaves, and I drag myself over to the massive mess that she’s left behind.

As I’m returning all of the discarded shoe boxes to their rightful locations, I’m popping them open to make sure the correct shoes are inside. When I open one of the boxes, I discover a very sweet sight indeed: a dirty pair of toddler sneakers.

It’s a scam I’ve seen far too many times: someone swaps out a pair of new shoes with their old dirty shoes. Only this time, instead of getting away, I had caught the crook red-handed (or red-footed?)

I tucked the shoebox under my arm and quickly retraced the woman’s steps. Sure enough, I was able to find her in the grocery section. And sure enough, her toddler was sitting in the cart wearing a pair of brand new cartoon character sneakers.

I approached the mom with a giant shit-eating grin on my face and said: “I’m so glad I caught you! You almost left without these!” I held open the box with the dirty sneakers.

The woman had the nerve to pin the blame on her child, playing it off as if her kid had swapped the sneakers. Smh.

(source) (story by DeliciousRevenge)