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Fluffy Bunnies
Jan 10, 2009

CapnAndy posted:

I think if you've gotten to a point in your life where your instinct is, for any reason, to defend the bosses and disparage labor, you need to take a step back and rethink some pretty key things.

Always this. Pro-worker forever.

Also, I think it strongly depends on what your desired outcome is from work. Some people legitimately enjoy service-type jobs.

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Aphrodite
Jun 27, 2006

Folks, you cannot use the acronym CP on the internet. Jeffrey is already on a list.

Bottom Liner
Feb 15, 2006


a specific vein of lasagna

Cais posted:

My wife worked in food and beverage and generally speaking at least working at Disney they tried to follow fair labor practices and proper food safety unlike some of the places she worked at pre-Disney haha. And if you’re actually willing to stay in F&B you can move up quickly if you’re willing to stick around.

From what my wife has said, their own food safety inspection policies are a lot stricter than the state ones and they're pretty tight about it. I've never been worried about food at the parks because of that.

Craptacular!
Jul 9, 2001

Fuck the DH

SweetMercifulCrap! posted:

So if they're actually averaging around 18-20 an hour, then they're making on par with what an average Disney CM makes, and I can assure you, a large percentage of CMs are dealing with much, much more than what they are at a cookie store for the same pay rate.

It makes the whole document of demands sound even more like a terminally online person with little to no prior work experience that is blindsided that working there wasn't all fun and games. You hear a lot of similar complaints from a good portion of college program participants. "They're working us like slaves!", etc. Well, they're giving you a lot of hours, but they're not skirting labor laws or anything, it's just that jobs at Disney are typically demanding and they're coming from either no work experience or something super chill.

I've talked before about my desire to work at Disney and efforts to put it in motion, but I'm gonna tell you the CPs are kinda treated like crap IMO. I get PT/FT feeling envious of them because Disney screws with their hours (and that's why my best attempt to become a CM failed, because you have to start part time with no guarantee you'll make enough money to live in a stranger's spare bedroom) but they do that because they're already in deep with the company for the lovely housing, and will 100% always be utilizing the right to work laws avoidance of the union so they aren't represented in anything that goes south.

This is one of the reasons why the CP apparatus failed in California before shutdowns. Without a right to work law the college temps were implicitly expected to leave work and strike despite living in company arranged housing. Local behind-the-park leadership did not want it, but parks worldwide leaders in Orlando forced it on them with "we save so much money with this that we insist you do it too."

CapnAndy posted:

I think if you've gotten to a point in your life where your instinct is, for any reason, to defend the bosses and disparage labor, you need to take a step back and rethink some pretty key things.

The mentality that comes from sticking up for The Man is a safe way to get your foot in the door. If your boss thinks you're trying to make them look good to their own boss they'll be less in your face.

I'm not yet at the point of preferring positions without unions, but I'll only do as much for them as they'll do for me. Last time I followed any Disney people closely, people in one department (and that's as far as I'll divulge) was dissatisfied with their union because they did such a shitshow job at negotiations, pressuring the gently caress out of their membership to vote for giving Disney everything they want because "it's the best deal possible." We're talking levels of dissatisfaction with leadership that led to someone vandalizing the union building overnight.

When I was discussing orientation with many CMs they say the company just throws a bunch of papers to sign that includes the unions the contract allows the membership application to be bundled in with everything else (though in WDW they did negotiate time to put on an introductory presentation). I've talked to CMs who weren't even aware of any alternatives to just paying occasionally outrageous initiation fees.

So I'm basically of the mind that a lot of them are run either by huge multi-industry trades that mostly use the workforce for money on one side, and smaller single-workplace ones that often draw people who basically see management as their partner in squeezing blood from a stone.

Craptacular! fucked around with this message at 11:20 on May 17, 2024

Cais
Jul 10, 2006
unicycler

Craptacular! posted:


When I was discussing orientation with many CMs they say the company just throws a bunch of papers to sign that includes the unions the contract allows the membership application to be bundled in with everything else (though in WDW they did negotiate time to put on an introductory presentation). I've talked to CMs who weren't even aware of any alternatives to just paying occasionally outrageous initiation fees.


My wife, the daughter of lawyers, kind of pissed off the union reps at her Traditions because she told her table she wasn’t signing poo poo until she had a chance to read over the paperwork to join fully and not in the short time they gave them at the table. They were much more accustomed to folks just signing whatever was put in front of them.

CelticPredator
Oct 11, 2013
🍀👽🆚🪖🏋

Aphrodite posted:

Folks, you cannot use the acronym CP on the internet. Jeffrey is already on a list.

Idk why everyone is talking about me itt

Bottom Liner
Feb 15, 2006


a specific vein of lasagna
Are the initiation fees a DL thing because of Calirfornia laws? I don’t think any of them in FL have big joining fees and instead only take a % from your pay. I know some Hollywood unions can have 5 figure joining fees.

And the WDW unions generally do a great job for all workers, members or not. They’ve gotten starting pay for some jobs (pastry, bus driving, and others) from 12.50 in 2014 to $26 by 2026 with some hefty back pay bonuses along the way. That is massive.

Craptacular!
Jul 9, 2001

Fuck the DH

Bottom Liner posted:

Are the initiation fees a DL thing because of Calirfornia laws? I don’t think any of them in FL have big joining fees and instead only take a % from your pay. I know some Hollywood unions can have 5 figure joining fees.
The DoL lists what fees are in their database, but it can be a range. People I know who were most open to me stopped talking after I stopped pursuing the job, but it ranges from "price of a cheeseburger taken per month for the first year" to one individual who owes several thousand dollars for a job you could get out of high school.

In California, you can't completely opt out, right to opt-out only exists for state employees (and the state passed a law forbidding state agencies from telling employees about it.) You can be an objector under the 'Beck laws' where the union has to calculate how much their dues are spent on representation matters only and pay that. Depending on the union that might not save you much or could save you a whole lot, since their political lobbying campaigns and contributions are exempt from such fees. The union is still supposed to represent you under such cases as you are still paying them to do that, though people feel the unions don't work as hard for objectors for reasons anecdotal and conspiracy based. It probably won't surprise you that many objectors are GOP voters who don't want part of their paychecks supporting the opposition. Simply trying to be an objector is a process that requires jumping through hoops and will probably dampen your relationship with the shop steward.

In my case it's two fold: I expected I wouldn't be able to work at Disney for longer than a short period and would need all the money from whatever hours I get to pay my rent, and if you sign the union card at hiring you'll be paying into it right away but they won't represent you for 90 days on a probationary period. People who sign the card at hiring pay into the union for three months while it offers nothing in return. I have met people who lost their jobs based on word of mouth while they have no representation.

I didn't mind joining the union in full if I liked the job and got established, but I can't really spare that while struggling to get enough hours to afford the rate of living in somebody's garage. (Although I also personally believe that elections should be federally funded and hate lobbying, so who knows.)

Cais posted:

My wife, the daughter of lawyers, kind of pissed off the union reps at her Traditions because she told her table she wasn’t signing poo poo until she had a chance to read over the paperwork to join fully and not in the short time they gave them at the table. They were much more accustomed to folks just signing whatever was put in front of them.

My understanding is that in FL the reps show up because the GOP there has made it so ingrained in people that they do not have to be part of a union at all and can get a small increase in take-home pay that way, so they negotiated time to do a presentation for themselves in orientation and pitch themselves as something you should agree to. Since you can not be totally exempt in CA the card is just one of many papers handled while finalizing, in some contracts it's agreed that employer will provide new hires with the union paperwork, so people who aren't like your wife just blindly sign it assuming it's something from the company because HR provided it. Others allow for a 15 minute unpaid meeting with a rep to handle it.

Either way, if you don't address it the company is required to terminate you in 31 days.

Craptacular! fucked around with this message at 00:32 on May 18, 2024

Zero One
Dec 30, 2004

HAIL TO THE VICTORS!
My friend was fired by Disney after 10 years because of an administrative decision he made.

The union got him a temp job while they fought Disney for him.

They won. He got his job back after just a few weeks.

Union good.

Hutzpah
Nov 6, 2009
Fun Shoe
My family's Florida/Disney trip was last week and I wanted to thank everyone in this thread that offered me advice over the past few months. The trip went better than expected due to all of the tips and tricks that I got from this thread.

Unfortunately, a close friend passed away last week so my wife and I had to leave vacation early to attend funeral services. We were able to go to Epcot with the kids, but they had to go to Magic Kingdom without us. Thankfully, their aunts/uncles/cousins/grandparents made sure that they had a great time.

Epcot was a lot of fun, though it was a lot busier than I expected (possibly because Simple Plan was playing that night?). We ended up using Genie+ since we had only 1 day in the park and wanted to get the most out of it. We got there before opening and decided to go to Frozen off the bat, but were surprised that the line was over an hour long even that early in the day. Fortunately, all of the kids had patience that early in the day. Unfortunately, my son reported that he "hated it" and my daughter said "I don't want to go on it again." Great start to the day. We had Remy at noon so we decided to do the 3 caballeros and soaring before then. Thankfully, everyone loved those 2 rides. At this time we probably should have just meandered over to Remy, but I had the brilliant idea to go on Living with the Land, since we were already there and the line was short. While this was a nice slow-paced ride, it meant that we had to race over to Remy before our lightning lane expired and before we were supposed to meet for lunch, at which point the kids were starting to get hot and hungry. We made it partway through the Lightning Lane before my son absolutely lost it. He was crying hysterically about the part of the ride where Chef Skinner's hand reaches out at you in 3D, which he knew about because my sister-in-law had shown him a video of the ride the night before. We decided to bail on the ride, but the guy at the entrance was kind enough to give my wife and I Lightning Lane passes for the ride that could be used any time before closing. We walked over to lunch, met with the rest of the family, and ate pizza and recharged. After lunch we went up to the aquarium area and went to the Nemo ride, which was alright, and then did Turtle Talk with Crush, which was really really enjoyable. After that we spent a little bit of time in the aquarium before heading over to Figment, which everyone loved.

Next we had our paid lightning lane spot for Cosmic Rewind, which we went on with my sister-in-law and our son while my mother-in-law went shopping with our daughter. I'll be honest, I had no idea what this ride would entail but had just been told that it's one of the best rides at Disney. I was a little salty about trying to do the VQ at 7:00 AM and not getting a slot, and having to pay $45 for the ride, but I figured I would give it a shot. While in line my wife asked me if it was a rollercoaster - she doesn't like roller coasters - and I said "I don't think so. I think we just ride in the dark and see Guardians stuff on the screen." Needless to say we were all surprised when we got launched backwards and flung around in the dark. It was wild, it was overwhelming, but it was really really fun. My wife loved it and even our son, who was a little iffy about most of the rides we had been on and covered his ears on everything, absolutely loved it. It was his favorite ride in the park.

Surprisingly, after Cosmic Rewind, my daughter decided she was ready to meet a princess, so I took her over to meet Anna and Elsa while the rest of the family went on Soaring again. She was really excited in line, but almost froze up completely when we got to see Anna and Elsa. Thankfully, both of them were so kind and welcoming that she quickly went over by herself and enjoying talking with them and giving warm hugs. It was absolutely a highlight of the day. She did make me promise not to take a picture while she was up there, so I'll need to buy a picture instead.

The day was starting to wind to a close so we met up for dinner and then made it over to Test Track. I didn't think it was a terribly great ride, but the rest of my family - especially my 2 kids - loved it. They had a great time 'building' their cars and were screaming with joy as we sped around the track. We closed the day up by going to Remy - which was great and my kids would have totally loved if they gave it a chance- while my sister-in-law walked around with the kids. Then we got ice cream and slowly walked around the lake while watching the fireworks show. When we were making our way back to the car we asked the kids what their favorite ride was. They both said Frozen. I'll never be able to figure them out.

Lessons learned:
Bringing a double stroller was a god send. It made it possible to quickly get from ride to ride.
I wish I ate more of the food from the various stands that we walked past.
Genie+ was worth it for us, since we were there for only a day. It sucks to pay more, but we got Remy/Test Track/Soaring/Nemo/Figment out of it and I don't think we would have been able to do all of those without it.
Virtual Queue sucks. Paying extra for a ride sucks. But Cosmic Rewind is awesome.

Bottom Liner
Feb 15, 2006


a specific vein of lasagna
drat sorry for your loss. Glad you were able to still have a great trip for the kids. Looks like all your prep paid off well.

TheBigBudgetSequel
Nov 25, 2008

It's not who I am underneath, but what I do that defines me.

Cais posted:

My wife, the daughter of lawyers, kind of pissed off the union reps at her Traditions because she told her table she wasn’t signing poo poo until she had a chance to read over the paperwork to join fully and not in the short time they gave them at the table. They were much more accustomed to folks just signing whatever was put in front of them.

Sounds like the parks union for sure. Some of their reps are super pushy, both to non-members and members alike.

My new role has an entirely different union, but mostly the same contract, which is weird.

Bottom Liner
Feb 15, 2006


a specific vein of lasagna
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0CpOYZZZW4


Jenny did a retrospective on the Starcruiser's failure and nails it with her criticism on the marketing especially. Instead of tiktok influencers that did silly dances for kids with no money, they should have been targeting the Comic-con crowd that has a lot of disposable income and is familiar with LARPing.



And maybe just not made it in the first place because it was a doomed concept from the rip lol

Arquinsiel
Jun 1, 2006

"There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first."

God Bless Margaret Thatcher
God Bless England
RIP My Iron Lady
Did she go back or is she still running off her experience where she ignored the entire game and got mad about it?

ETA: yeah, three minutes in and she's repeating stuff about Galaxy's Edge that was immediately relaxed five years ago.

Arquinsiel fucked around with this message at 03:12 on May 19, 2024

BlueBayou
Jan 16, 2008
Before she mends must sicken worse

Arquinsiel posted:

Did she go back or is she still running off her experience where she ignored the entire game and got mad about it?

ETA: yeah, three minutes in and she's repeating stuff about Galaxy's Edge that was immediately relaxed five years ago.

I wouldn't characterize it as "she ignored the entire game." I would call it "the game crashed/failed and didn't work for her."

If the players is supposed to get a text from an NPC and never does, that's not really on the player. And it's fair to maybe say that she didn't "do" the game correctly. But then thats on Disney for not doing a good job of explaining it and helping guests. Especially for something that expensive.

CapnAndy
Feb 27, 2004

Some teeth long for ripping, gleaming wet from black dog gums. So you keep your eyes closed at the end. You don't want to see such a mouth up close. before the bite, before its oblivion in the goring of your soft parts, the speckled lips will curl back in a whinny of excitement. You just know it.

Hutzpah posted:

My family's Florida/Disney trip was last week and I wanted to thank everyone in this thread that offered me advice over the past few months. The trip went better than expected due to all of the tips and tricks that I got from this thread.

Unfortunately, a close friend passed away last week so my wife and I had to leave vacation early to attend funeral services. We were able to go to Epcot with the kids, but they had to go to Magic Kingdom without us. Thankfully, their aunts/uncles/cousins/grandparents made sure that they had a great time.
I'm very sorry for your loss, and glad you had a good time at Epcot, at least. Do you have stories about how the kids did at Magic Kingdom?

quote:

Next we had our paid lightning lane spot for Cosmic Rewind, which we went on with my sister-in-law and our son while my mother-in-law went shopping with our daughter. I'll be honest, I had no idea what this ride would entail but had just been told that it's one of the best rides at Disney. I was a little salty about trying to do the VQ at 7:00 AM and not getting a slot, and having to pay $45 for the ride, but I figured I would give it a shot. While in line my wife asked me if it was a rollercoaster - she doesn't like roller coasters - and I said "I don't think so. I think we just ride in the dark and see Guardians stuff on the screen." Needless to say we were all surprised when we got launched backwards and flung around in the dark. It was wild, it was overwhelming, but it was really really fun. My wife loved it and even our son, who was a little iffy about most of the rides we had been on and covered his ears on everything, absolutely loved it. It was his favorite ride in the park.

CapnAndy posted:

I even looked it up and he's tall enough to do Cosmic Rewind. Which technically is a roller coaster, but one without any major drops or inversions, so, y'know... maybe? You go really, really fast both forwards and backwards and do a lot of turns.
:colbert:

But honestly, glad you had a smash with it. Must've been one hell of a shock, but it seriously is the most fun ride in all of Disney World. Also, your son took a 0 to 60 launch like a champ, which means he's qualified for basically any roller coaster. And the story about your daughter and Elsa and Anna was very sweet.

Bottom Liner posted:

Jenny did a retrospective on the Starcruiser's failure and nails it with her criticism on the marketing especially. Instead of tiktok influencers that did silly dances for kids with no money, they should have been targeting the Comic-con crowd that has a lot of disposable income and is familiar with LARPing.



And maybe just not made it in the first place because it was a doomed concept from the rip lol
It really was doomed. I'm a big RPing nerdlinger who loves Star Wars, I'm right dead center in Galactic Starcruiser's strike zone, and when the pricing came out I moved immediately from "oh man gotta figure out how to swing this" to "lol no maybe in 15 years or something to celebrate something really special?" Absolute failure of market research and planning, because when the projections come back on how much you're going to have to charge on the thing to turn a profit, if those prices are the numbers you saw, the project needed to be killed right then and there in the planning phase before a single announcement was made or ground was broken, because those prices were not feasible.

But it's also possible that it was feasible and died by greed, because the whole thing always seemed like a shining example of Chapek's management philosophy of "everyone's got a different amount of money, so we need to provide a vast suite of micro-and-macro-payments at every step to ensure everyone is soaked for every last dime they can possibly spend". Like how they didn't even offer pricing for a single person. You wanted a room? Pay the maximum amount or gently caress off and get outta line so that someone with more money can do it instead; that was never a good look.

Arquinsiel
Jun 1, 2006

"There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first."

God Bless Margaret Thatcher
God Bless England
RIP My Iron Lady
Apparently it was plenty feasible and even running at 50% capacity was going to be profitable, but not profitable enough for Chapek. Once the closure was announced it completely sold out until it closed, with some people going four or five times. That points to another problem though. Some people were posting about these major emotional breakthrough experiences with various actors. That makes it sound like the repeat visitors were spending stupid amounts of cash to trauma dump on $18 an hour actors instead of going to therapy, and is super uncool.

BlueBayou posted:

I wouldn't characterize it as "she ignored the entire game." I would call it "the game crashed/failed and didn't work for her."

If the players is supposed to get a text from an NPC and never does, that's not really on the player. And it's fair to maybe say that she didn't "do" the game correctly. But then thats on Disney for not doing a good job of explaining it and helping guests. Especially for something that expensive.
Nah, in her Patreon video she admitted to just ignoring her phone for the first day so there was no input for it to assign her missions with. In the new video she describes what the game she would design would be and it's just the game that existed. Disney put a fuckton of effort into making sure you knew how central the app is to gameplay in the booking confirmation emails and encouraged you to login before even arriving to check your schedule and start getting messages so it's entirely on her. Of course the logical counterpoint there is that Disney had no fallback option for guests like her where the system failed except... they did. You just had to go ask and on-site IT would modify your JSON to get you on the track you wanted to be on.

DC Murderverse
Nov 10, 2016

"Tell that to Zod's snapped neck!"

Arquinsiel posted:

Nah, in her Patreon video she admitted to just ignoring her phone for the first day so there was no input for it to assign her missions with. In the new video she describes what the game she would design would be and it's just the game that existed. Disney put a fuckton of effort into making sure you knew how central the app is to gameplay in the booking confirmation emails and encouraged you to login before even arriving to check your schedule and start getting messages so it's entirely on her. Of course the logical counterpoint there is that Disney had no fallback option for guests like her where the system failed except... they did. You just had to go ask and on-site IT would modify your JSON to get you on the track you wanted to be on.

Did you get to the part of the video where she talks specifically about people making arguments like this and how disingenuous it is? It was a poorly implemented system that failed regularly and spending potentially hours of time to potentially fix it is a bad solution for a multi-thousand dollar experience like this

Arquinsiel
Jun 1, 2006

"There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first."

God Bless Margaret Thatcher
God Bless England
RIP My Iron Lady
Of course she's going to claim it's disingenuous to point out where her actions caused her to miss out on stuff and that she ignored the instructions telling her how to engage with things but didn't because she was recording everything for her job. The story pathing breaking happened to me and took about five minutes to fix, not "potentially hours", and her not asking for help is a recurring theme. If she mentioned to the server that she wanted a vegetarian option when she was seated she'd have gotten one. It was real good too. I guess it's also disingenuous to point out that her complaints about paid extras also apply to the parks in general, or that she's simply repeating out of date information about the parks from 2019 without bothering to verify if it was still accurate when she went in 2022. Some stuff that she complained about is valid, her view of the dinner show for example, but she even found the pathway to get herself access to the engine room early on and never checked if her knowledge of aurebesh is as good as she thought it is. I got the impression from the Patreon video that she went in hoping for contrarian content back when that dropped, and she's just doubled down in this one.

DC Murderverse
Nov 10, 2016

"Tell that to Zod's snapped neck!"

Arquinsiel posted:

I guess it's also disingenuous to point out that her complaints about paid extras also apply to the parks in general,

This is, in fact, literally the entire endpoint of her video.

SweetMercifulCrap!
Jan 28, 2012
Lipstick Apathy
I'm only about halfway through it - 4 hours is a LOT. But just about every point she has made has been valid minus perhaps the stuff about her ignoring her phone. Disney would be wise to hire her.

Bottom Liner
Feb 15, 2006


a specific vein of lasagna
Jenny makes funny videos and sometimes that includes recounting events in a hyperbolic way to make a point. It doesn't invalidate her points, but it's important to remember she's not presenting herself as a professional culture critic or anything. She's a youtuber that has a good perspective and insight on some hilariously niche nerd culture topics and found an entertaining way to convey that.

SweetMercifulCrap! posted:

Disney would be wise to hire her.

Also this

Hazo
Dec 30, 2004

SCIENCE



Hutzpah posted:

We got there before opening and decided to go to Frozen off the bat, but were surprised that the line was over an hour long even that early in the day. Fortunately, all of the kids had patience that early in the day.

I don’t remember if anyone mentioned it in their pre-trip advice for you, but one thing some people don’t realize is that even though the World Showcase portion of Epcot doesn’t open until 11AM, the Frozen and Ratatouille rides located within it (and maybe even Three Caballeros?) follow the rest of the park’s operating hours. So parents with same idea as you will immediately head straight for the Norway pavilion and the wait times will be over an hour at opening. So you made the right move.

CapnAndy posted:

I'm a big RPing nerdlinger who loves Star Wars, I'm right dead center in Galactic Starcruiser's strike zone, and when the pricing came out I moved immediately from "oh man gotta figure out how to swing this" to "lol no maybe in 15 years or something to celebrate something really special?"

Aside from the crossed-out part, I’m extremely :same:. I don’t do formal roleplaying or DnD or anything, but I love Star Wars and I had so much fun doing the Datapad missions and shooting the poo poo in-character with the CMs in Galaxy’s Edge. The hotel seemed right up my alley…. until they revealed you were going to have to spend 4 grand to maybe take part in one of several possible story lines, and that’s only if you don’t want to sleep in or relax or go to the parks or do anything else you’d do at a normal resort.

With my FOMO already staggeringly high when I’m on vacation, I’m not paying that much money for a 2-day glorified dinner theater experience no matter how many lightsaber training minigames they throw at me.

Bottom Liner
Feb 15, 2006


a specific vein of lasagna
https://twitter.com/uniondrip/status/1792036265468248445


good

PurpleButterfly
Nov 5, 2012
Huzzah! Character Performers are actors, and I'm so glad they're being recognized as such.

"It's great to have solidarity,
An actors' guild for me!"

:haw:

(I'd figure out more lyrics if I had the time and patience right now)

Aphrodite
Jun 27, 2006

Was Florida already unionized then? There was just that discussion about dues and stuff in this thread.

Craptacular!
Jul 9, 2001

Fuck the DH
Florida has already been for a long time.

Edna Mode
Sep 24, 2005

Bullshit, that's last year's Fall collection!

I forget if it was discussed in this thread, but I enjoyed the podcast Keys to the Kingdom. It's two former cast members talking and interviewing current and former performers. One episode does go into the tension between the character performers and the union actors and comedians. It seems wild that you could be performing a recognizable character day in day out and not be considered a "professional."

Cais
Jul 10, 2006
unicycler

Aphrodite posted:

Was Florida already unionized then? There was just that discussion about dues and stuff in this thread.

Yeah I believe teamsters represent the performers and character attendants (which is why some folks feel like the union has weird priorities sometimes).

Some performers are covered by Equity but they tend to be more specialized performers - voices of liberty, frozen sing along performers, Indiana jones show, fotlk singers but not necessarily the rest of the cast.

Good-Natured Filth
Jun 8, 2008

Do you think I've got the goods Bubblegum? Cuz I am INTO this stuff!

Edna Mode posted:

I forget if it was discussed in this thread, but I enjoyed the podcast Keys to the Kingdom. It's two former cast members talking and interviewing current and former performers. One episode does go into the tension between the character performers and the union actors and comedians. It seems wild that you could be performing a recognizable character day in day out and not be considered a "professional."

Agreed that it was a great podcast. I think I got the recommendation from this thread.

Doronin
Nov 22, 2002

Don't be scared
I watched all of Jenny's video in chunks through the weekend. She raises a ton of great points. I think she took plenty of time to acknowledge she probably messed up aspects of the game, but it's also fair to point out that for that price, all that stuff should have worked.

Either way, I was more intrigued by her take on Disney's business model evolution of "charge more, offer less." I've been pretty vocal on here and other forums about that. So it honestly felt a little validating to hear someone else really hammer them on it. But it's also depressing because, as she pointed out, it may be 3 to 5 years before the actual ramifications are felt. Which means it would be years after that before a course correction ever occurs.

As a public relations practitioner myself, Disney's seeming lack of response makes more and more sense. They have sycophants who they can literally piss on and tell them it's raining, and they'll happily accept it and report what Disney wants them to (the influencers). Then they literally own all their traditional legacy media, so they also dictate what's going to be said via those channels. So frankly, they don't have to actually respond to poo poo because they control their narrative so thoroughly. It's so deceptive at such a macro level, that it's downright impressive in all the wrong ways.

I'm also still in awe of the price comparison Jenny pulled on her "cruise" vs. Concierge on the Disney Wish. Holy poo poo.

CelticPredator
Oct 11, 2013
🍀👽🆚🪖🏋

The fact that so much of the Star Wars larping hotel revolved around using your phone is stupid.

I really thought you would just be able to wander around and get into adventures and also use your phone. Not just use your phone for 3 loving days

Roadie
Jun 30, 2013

Arquinsiel posted:

Nah, in her Patreon video she admitted to just ignoring her phone for the first day so there was no input for it to assign her missions with. In the new video she describes what the game she would design would be and it's just the game that existed. Disney put a fuckton of effort into making sure you knew how central the app is to gameplay in the booking confirmation emails and encouraged you to login before even arriving to check your schedule and start getting messages so it's entirely on her. Of course the logical counterpoint there is that Disney had no fallback option for guests like her where the system failed except... they did. You just had to go ask and on-site IT would modify your JSON to get you on the track you wanted to be on.

If a $6000 experience requires you to pay attention to your phone instead of to the environment and paid cast to actually get any of the cool stuff to happen, its design is fundamentally a failure. If that ultra-luxury experience (by price, certainly not by quality) requires you to figure out any problems yourself and ask the staff to fix them, that's an even bigger failure.

Edit: At that price point there should literally be a 24/7 secret fun squad shadowing groups via the creepy Disney magicband tracking to make sure they're encountering neat things every 20 minutes they're not in Designated Chill Areas.

Edit edit: Also, lol, literally the same video at 3h27m.

quote:

Despite the apparent frequency of the gameplay issues, whenever I saw people mention them in the fan groups, they would be quickly shouted down by other fans. They were often polite, but they would tell them that these issues were simply their own fault for somehow playing the game wrong.

"No one else has had these problems you're talking about, so clearly it's on you."
"You get what you put into it, so maybe you didn't try hard enough."
"You ruined your experience by trying too hard."
"You weren't a big enough nerd to appreciate it."
"You're a lying hater who's only pretending the Starcruiser is bad, probably because you're jealous you couldn't afford it."
"The app doesn't do anything, you need to talk to the actors."
"The actors don't do anything, you need to use the app."
"You played the game wrong, you were supposed to pick one specific storyline to follow."
"You played the game wrong, you were not supposed to pick one specific storyline to follow"
"You must not have had an exciting enough costume."
And my personal favorite, "You must have the wrong personality."

Finally failing all other ways to blame the customer, people will just say "Aww, it sounds like you were just unlucky. That's too bad, because it was great for everyone else." And they say this as if it's acceptable for so many people to be unlucky in a way that breaks a $6,000 experience. So I'm just preparing you, if you see any diehard fans making any of these excuses in the comments, they're not good enough.

CelticPredator posted:

The fact that so much of the Star Wars larping hotel revolved around using your phone is stupid.

I really thought you would just be able to wander around and get into adventures and also use your phone. Not just use your phone for 3 loving days

:yeah:

Roadie fucked around with this message at 09:32 on May 20, 2024

Bottom Liner
Feb 15, 2006


a specific vein of lasagna
Regular people definitely know to ask IT to modify their JSON when a theme park hotel app gets their larp off track

Arquinsiel
Jun 1, 2006

"There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first."

God Bless Margaret Thatcher
God Bless England
RIP My Iron Lady

Roadie posted:

Edit edit: Also, lol, literally the same video at 3h27m.
I was going to get back to the four hour long video at some point and then see if Jenny's later points changed my initial impression, but if the level of discourse is this:

Roadie posted:

Edit: At that price point there should literally be a 24/7 secret fun squad shadowing groups via the creepy Disney magicband tracking to make sure they're encountering neat things every 20 minutes they're not in Designated Chill Areas.
Why bother? We're already in the demanding a unicorn phase, may as well acknowledge that and move on.

Bottom Liner posted:

Regular people definitely know to ask IT to modify their JSON when a theme park hotel app gets their larp off track
I asked if I could watch what they were doing because I'm an IT nerd, expecting them to pull a usual Disney "no backstage" rule on me. They didn't, so now I know what format the game save is in. It's just an example of how willing they were to do whatever to make a guest happy :shrug:

CelticPredator
Oct 11, 2013
🍀👽🆚🪖🏋

Regardless it didn’t seem like there was enough to do there.

If I was a kid and I went all I’d want to do is grab a laser pistol, run down the halls like Han Solo fighting stormtroopers

The activities they had seemed so boring. Where’s the adventure? “Danger”?

Bottom Liner
Feb 15, 2006


a specific vein of lasagna

Arquinsiel posted:

L

I asked if I could watch what they were doing because I'm an IT nerd, expecting them to pull a usual Disney "no backstage" rule on me. They didn't, so now I know what format the game save is in. It's just an example of how willing they were to do whatever to make a guest happy :shrug:

You mean like how they refunded her memory maker after she got zero photos from the trip or how they replaced her droid after their shipping lost it?


Oh right they only did that after she used one of her massive social media accounts to publicly complain and ignored her through the regular channels. A normal guest would have been out that ~400 bucks.


And having an experience manager for the hyper luxury priced one of a kind immersive experience is not “demanding a unicorn” it’s called concierge :lol:

CelticPredator posted:



The activities they had seemed so boring. Where’s the adventure? “Danger”?


My biggest criticism of the Starcruiser is that no one ever wanted to experience Star Wars via luxury anything. Like Jenny points out, the rich in that universe are always bad anyways, and when you layer on that weirdly stale Disney production to it (like they awful awful song) it becomes even less Star Wars and more generic future sci-fi. The whole thing always looked more Star Trek than Star Wars, and not in any of the good ways that separate those two.

Bottom Liner fucked around with this message at 14:12 on May 20, 2024

Aphrodite
Jun 27, 2006

Yeah she sucks.

Edit: they suck too, to be clear.

Aphrodite fucked around with this message at 14:14 on May 20, 2024

Bottom Liner
Feb 15, 2006


a specific vein of lasagna

Aphrodite posted:

Yeah she sucks.

Edit: they suck too, to be clear.

Turn on your monitor

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Arquinsiel
Jun 1, 2006

"There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first."

God Bless Margaret Thatcher
God Bless England
RIP My Iron Lady

Bottom Liner posted:

You mean like how they refunded her memory maker after she got zero photos from the trip or how they replaced her droid after their shipping lost it?


Oh right they only did that after she used one of her massive social media accounts to publicly complain and ignored her through the regular channels. A normal guest would have been out that ~400 bucks.
Yeah, you're right. It's weird that they refunded memory maker after she didn't bother to get the in-park photographers to take photos of her and conflated it with a different paid upgrade. A normal guest would have been SoL there.

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