Matt McIrvin's Freaky Alternate Reality

We spent the past week in Denmark, split between a couple of days in Aarhus (the biggest city in Jutland, the European mainland part) and a few in Copenhagen. Honestly, one of the main reasons I even suggested going to Denmark was to experience Copenhagen's world-famous urban amusement park, Tivoli Gardens, and its amazing bucket-list coaster Rutschebanen, a side-friction coaster built in 1914.

We'd had a stretch goal of also visiting Aarhus's amusement park Tivoli Friheden on the afternoon of our arrival there, but between bad weather and exhaustion that did not happen. We did spend the following sunny day at Aarhus's amazing historical reconstruction park Den Gamle By. That reminded me a bit of Colonial Williamsburg, but with a broader sweep, with restored buildings ranging from the 16th century to the 21st (there's a surprisingly big section of early-1970s streets, businesses and apartments, including a hippie commune and an electronics shop full of glorious analog hi-fi equipment, and a little section recreating for posterity a street from the 2010s with a dying Blockbuster Video). There are also several historical museums within the park. Highly, highly recommended.

The weather in a Danish autumn is at least as mercurial as in New England and you just have to work around it. We went to indoor attractions (mostly art museums) on the rainy days and hit Copenhagen's Tivoli on a relatively good one, which started out sunny with a little drizzle later. It was the beginning of Tivoli's Halloween event, so they were open late, but the weather got worse as the afternoon went on and we were getting tired, so we didn't stay super late. We're not big on Halloween haunts (I think they converted the funhouse to one; I'd like to hit it during the summer season) but the pumpkiny decor everywhere was beautiful.

I went directly to Rutschebanen and found it not yet operating, though there were workers milling about on the ride so that was a promising sign. Given that we didn't hit Tivoli Friheden, there was an opportunity for Rutschebanen to be my 40th cred, but, eh, that kind of numerological pickiness doesn't rule me. Instead, we decided to hit some rides that both of us could enjoy: the 70-year-old cast-iron Ferris wheel, the gorgeous, colorful bumper cars (which have a long, chaotic cycle), and my actual 40th cred, the powered Mack family coaster Mælkevejen (here is Amuseaholics' POV):



This is a fairly new ride that packs more force than you'd expect. It's a long ride, since they give you THREE laps around the course, and the layout is long enough that at an American park they probably would have probably gotten away with one lap. There is whimsical space-rocket theming about a transit service circling the Milky Way. It's a bunch of turns and helixes, all elevated enough that you get nice views of the park and the surrounding neighborhood, but we both got off a little dizzy.

Rutschebanen was still down so we went on the ride underneath it, an adorable dark boat ride called Minen (here's Attractions Magazine's ride-through):



This has a Ghost Hunt-style target-shooting element that I think was added after the fact, but it's not scored and isn't really the main focus of the ride. It's all about the cute funny-animal animatronics. We got multiple rides on this one.

I was steeling myself for Rutschebanen to never get running (this kind of disappointment is part of being a coaster fan), but, nah, they got this eleventy-one-year-old classic going before too long and I indeed got three rides on it that day. Here's CoasterForce's POV:



Rutschebanen (that just means Roller Coaster) is currently the second-oldest operating coaster in the world (since Lakemont's Leap-The-Dips has not been running lately and has an uncertain future). It is a side-friction coaster, that is, one that runs in a kind of trough with road wheels and side wheels that keep it centered on the track, but no upstop wheels keeping it from flying away. This is how log flumes still work during the drop, but full-fledged roller coasters with this mechanic are quite rare today. It has manually operated brakes worked by an operator who rides on the train, on a sort of jump seat at the head of the second car, with basically no restraint as far as I can tell. The operators participate in the lap bar inspection and then just jump on there and go.

The wildness of the ride you get depends on the brakeman's hand. I've heard stories of night rides where they let loose and allow tremendous ejector air. I did get some little airtime pops on my rides, but I wonder if these ejector tales are somewhat embellished, simply because it's hard for me to imagine how that would work. Since not ALL of the train is experiencing negative g-force at the same time, I can see how there could be such a thing without upstop wheels, but I don't get how the brakeman doesn't fly off--they don't have the loose lap bars that the riders have. Maybe they just hang on tight. It's a special job requiring a lot of training. They do wear hearing protection against the noise of the ride all day long.

The ride does provide powerful lateral forces on the turns, particularly in the dark section toward the end, which made me think of Space Mountain though this ride is 60 years older than Space Mountain.

This is a coaster that was partly blown up by Nazi saboteurs during World War II to break the morale of the Danish people--and was, according to the ACE plaque at least, prioritized for reconstruction in the midst of wartime to preserve said morale. That's how important this thing is. And, yes, I can see it.

The park's highest-thrill coaster, Dæmonen, didn't get running until the late afternoon, when I took a ride on it. It's a remarkably miniaturized B&M floorless looper with three inversions, shot here by Attraction Source:



You get fantastic views of downtown Copenhagen from this coaster, which is probably why it opens not with a big drop but with a turn and helix off the lift hill (kind of like Hersheypark's Great Bear). There's a modest drop into the vertical loop, then an Immelmann and a roll, and that's basically it. It's got some good positive g-force and whip to it; I'd rate it below SFNE's Batman: The Dark Knight for thrills, but that's not really the point here; the remarkable thing is just that they managed to fit it into Tivoli Gardens. It's a decent ride in a wonderful setting.

This was the one ride where I had to wait in a substantial line, probably in part because it opened so late, but it also has some capacity and operations issues that I think are caused by the site constraints. Riders exiting Dæmonen have to leave the station on the same side they came in (possibly after retrieving their stashed goods from the bins on the far side), which creates some crowd-flow issues. The ops have to tell entering riders to stay put for a few seconds after the air gates open, to give the previous riders a better opportunity to clear the area. I don't quite understand why the air gates can't just open later, but that's what I saw happening. I guess it's designed so that the exit gate can't open earlier.

That domed building you can see from the top of the lift is Ny Carlsberg Glyptoteket, an art museum housing the collection of brewery heir Carl Jacobsen, a 19th-century gentleman with a highly focused obsession with classical statuary (particularly Roman) and anything resembling classical statuary. There's a spot in there, among the crumbled statues of gods, emperors and hippopotami, where you can distinctly hear screams coming through the wall of people riding Daemonen. I think it adds something to the tableau.

When I was a kid living in the DC suburbs, the closest thing we had to a home amusement park was Kings Dominion near Richmond. We went there several times, but we always preferred a couple that were a bit further away: Hersheypark in Pennsylvania, and (once it opened) the brand-new "Busch Gardens: The Old Country" in Williamsburg, VA, which promised to simulate a European vacation close to home. It never quite did that, but it at least had some pretty theming and landscaping. And, over time, it started accumulating impressive rides.

When I went to college in Williamsburg, Busch Gardens Williamsburg very much was my home park, and that was when I started riding their roller coasters. But the last time I was there was in the early 1990s, so the last coaster I'd ridden was the ill-fated Drachen Fire (an exciting but mis-designed ride that beat me up enough that, in hindsight, it put me off riding coasters regularly for decades).

Getting interested in them again in the 2010s, I was aware that BGW had added many impressive new rides. But though I still have family in Virginia, I'd never found the time to go back there. My sister and her family love the place (still much more than they do Kings Dominion) and go often, and she'd had a long-standing offer to take me back to Busch Gardens sometime.

We went down there to hang with family over the past several days, and on Friday, with a smaller party consisting of my sister and my daughter, I finally caught up with Busch Gardens Williamsburg. It was an oppressively hot weekday, so crowds were very light. But it did mean we had to hydrate and pace ourselves. Nevertheless, I managed to ride a lot:



Yeah, I went straight to Pantheon, their massive multi-launch top-hat coaster. None of this working up to things. My rides on coasters with inversions were going to be solo, since the people I was with don't like those, but that's fine. It was nearly a walk-on. I had an interesting conversation with the guy riding next to me, the kind of coaster freak who indulges his hobby while traveling on business (seems to be a common thing).

Apart from its lackluster "Roman" theming and maybe being a bit too short, everything about Pantheon is great: the weirdly banked airtime hills, the forward and backward swing launch with an airtime bump in the middle of it, the way it launches you directly into an inversion out of the station just to show you it means business, the stall that is basically a whole hill taken upside down. What you can't see in the video is that the lap restraint seems designed to give you a lot of room to float around, so my butt was flying off the seat basically the whole time. Good times.



InvadR, the wooden coaster in this Coasterforce video, was the coaster for the whole group, since my kid has decided she likes wooden coasters on this scale and my sister has always liked them. This is the first coaster by manufacturer GCI that I've ridden, though Compounce's Wildcat has GCI trains and Boulder Dash has GCI retrack. It's a modern but smallish ride, 75 feet tall with a tangled twister layout. InvadR is a decent ride, though it has more rattle than some other woodies we've ridden lately. This is in the "New France" section that the park has always had as a sort of Frontierland, fudging the Europe theme a bit. The theming seems vaguely based on ideas of Viking colonization in the New World but seems to imagine the Vikings attacking French Canada? I'm not sure the dates work out. Oh well, it's got some bite, I had back row so I was probably feeling that bite the hardest, and it was fun to be able to ride with everyone.



My sister and I rode the newest one in the park, Big Bad Wolf: The Wolf's Revenge (pictured in this Attraction Source video). It's a nice tribute to the original, defunct Big Bad Wolf, which was a formative ride for me, but it's considerably tamer than the original, with no large drop and inverted but not free-swinging cars. It's built not in the original BBW's space (which is taken up by Verbolten), but in the area formerly occupied by Drachen Fire. The village theming, though, is more elaborate than the original version. Since your legs are dangling free, they can really go to town with foot-chopper illusions, which were rather disconcerting to me, since I'm used to head-choppers but not this.

An unusual thing about it is that unlike many coasters of this type, there isn't any kind of retracting floor to help load and unload in the station, so getting on and off can be quite a hop, which slows things down and will require many smaller riders to be boosted by an adult. The seats are also some of the least accommodating for larger riders. But I can imagine that for many kids, this ride will be a gateway to riding big coasters like the original Wolf was, as long as they can take the idea of dangling below the track. On the day we visited, it was the only coaster for which there was really a signficant wait for me (and that was not very long).

At this point, things were getting downright nostalgic. We took in some lunch and air conditioning in the old Festhaus near BBW: The Wolf's Revenge, and to stay cool we all took a couple of spins on Roman Rapids, which was the first theme-park raft ride I ever rode, depicted here by Canobie Coaster:



It's nothing special as these rides go, though the theming is a little unusual. But my next ride, after some nonsensical struggles with the park's locker system, was a very special trip down memory lane:



The ride, the myth, the Monster. This CoasterForce video shows the refurbished Loch Ness Monster with the audio and theming enhancements they put in last season, including audio on the lift hill, video in the long helix tunnel and a statue of the Monster after the final loop. It's running great and I'm happy to say that it holds up. This was the first looping coaster I ever rode, about 35 years ago; it's outlived some of its successors, and it's great to see the park giving it love.

After a transit ride on the park's wonderful triangular skyride network, I tried a coaster that surprised me--I didn't expect to like it as much as I did, possibly because it's of a type that gets some snobbery from coaster enthusiasts:



Griffon, in the "France" area, is a colossal B&M dive coaster with a very simple layout, shown here by Coasterforce: its main event is a 200-foot, entirely vertical drop, which it first dangles riders over for several seconds like sinners in the hand of an angry God. That leads into a huge swooping Immelmann turn, which leads to... another vertical drop and another Immelmann, as if we didn't get it the first time. Then there's one little airtime hill, culminating in a splashdown effect which is mostly there to wow people watching from off-ride (you don't get wet), and into the brakes.

It seemed like it might be kind of a one-trick pony. But experiencing it in person, you get the full force of its theatrics. Everything about it is outsized. The track and the station and the trains look like they were made for beings several times the size of normal humans. The view from the leisurely turnaround before the first drop is spectacular, skyscraper-worthy. And it makes sure you get a really good long dangle over the abyss, held in only by shoulder restraints. More than any other coaster at BGW, the aim is awe. It really gives you the feeling of being manhandled by inhuman forces. I do think Pantheon is the best ride at the park, but Griffon is a surprisingly close second for me.

Griffon actually had a single-rider line of sorts, which I used, and it got me on the ride almost immediately, on a seat in the front row. I think my brother-in-law had warned me that this usually doesn't work, but I suspect that's on heavier days when the line extends beyond where the single-rider lane branches off.

We had some ice cream in the France area and spent some time listening to a band that did a pretty good cover of Fountains of Wayne's "Stacy's Mom." Then it was some more transiting on the skyride, culminating in a long, hot march to our last ride of the afternoon:



Yeah, I knew we were gonna do Apollo's Chariot (depicted by Coaster Studios there) sooner or later, because my sister likes it, and it's great to be able to ride with somebody. (We'd tried to ride it earlier in the day, but it was broken down then.) My kid declined, but this B&M hypercoaster is the kind of truly massive ride that people who aren't hardcore coaster freaks will actually ride, because it doesn't beat them up and the thrills are just manageable enough. It's a lovely long ride, and it was actually more forceful than I expected--it may have been because I was tired and overheated, or maybe Apollo's Chariot itself was just really warmed up late in a hot day, but I was graying out a little on the turnaround helix. I love that surprise violent dip at the end where they take the on-ride photo.

What didn't I ride? Well, DarKoaster has been broken all season, and I wasn't that interested in Verbolten (dis-recommended by my sister), Tempesto (essentially identical to Phobia Phear Coaster at Lake Compounce--a good ride, but it's not a priority here), or Grover's Alpine Express in the Sesame Street-themed kiddie land (my companions did ride that a couple of times when I was off riding something else).

And I just had to triage out Alpengeist, the giant inverted looper, which would have been one assault too many for my old body in that boiling, busy day. That's a ride I've been interested in for a long time, nevertheless. In a sense it was the ride that started to turn the Busch Gardens I knew as a kid into the park it is today. My brother-in-law doesn't like it, but I'll surely do it if I ever go back.

And just a few weeks after our last visit to Lake Compounce, we went back today. Sam had actually bought a season pass, which for Compounce is a really good deal that pays for itself almost immediately, particularly if you use the three buddy passes that come with it. So we only had to buy one new ticket for this visit.

We went today because my daughter's summer job is giving her some weekdays off instead of weekends, and unlike some regional parks, Compounce's waterpark was now open (it wasn't on our last visit). Hours were short, though, and it was an "Education Day" attended by many school field trips. So crowds were, not heavy, but a little heavier than before and very tilted toward large crowds of teenagers.

The only coaster we got on was Wildcat again, which has become a new favorite of my daughter. This time we sat near the front, which made for a less forceful ride but more impressive visuals. (Boulder Dash actually wasn't running today, or I'd had tried for a front-row ride there, which I've heard is essential.)

But we did do a bit of splashing around in the lake itself at the small beach there, and rode the park's large family raft slide, Mammoth Falls. But the real highlight of the day was that Compounce's excellent but frequently inoperative raft ride, Thunder Rapids, was actually operating! And, yeah, we got multiple rides on that thing. Here's Canobie Coaster's off-ride footage, which gives you some idea of the nice landscaping:



This is in an area oddly isolated from the rest of the park, far out along the west edge of the lake. The miniature steam train does now have a station there, but the vintage trolley that used to also run out there is gone. Anyway, it's easily the best of these rapids rides in New England, far livelier than Blizzard River at Six Flags, or Dr. Geyser's Remarkable Raft Ride at Story Land. When it's actually running, it's imperative to ride it.

My sister-in-law was so kind as to give me the download code for X-Plane 12 for Christmas. I'd previously found its graphical improvements not quite impressive enough to justify the purchase, but the new lighting and shading model really shines when the lights go down in the cit-tay, and the sun shines on the baaaaaayyyy:



It's also much better in garbage weather with rain and such, though that is harder to convey in a still image.

Graphically, they're playing a probably impossible game of catch-up with Asobo Studios' Microsoft Flight Simulator and its real-time streaming world derived from Bing Maps data. X-Plane still uses the old model of a static world stored on your computer, and relies on optional downloads from its user community (both freeware and commercial) to flesh out the parts of the world you really care about with add-ons. But that also means it's far less dependent on some outside server infrastructure.

But this computer can't run Microsoft Flight Simulator.

The San Francisco pictured above uses the data that ships by default with X-Plane. I was actually using a very detailed free add-on for San Francisco with X-Plane 11, which didn't have any special landmarks for that area in its factory download (so while the basic geography would be there, all the buildings and bridges and such would have been generic "autogen" assets). You can see that in X-Plane 12, a few landmarks like Salesforce Tower and the SF-Oakland Bay Bridge are represented pretty accurately, but there are still a lot of autogen buildings there.

The basic global geography download includes more or less accurate street layouts and coastlines for much of the world, but the shapes are relatively low-resolution polygons and one thing that does tend to take me out of the simulator immersion is when that's hard to ignore. You'll see a coastline with realistic-looking soil and vegetation, but following unnatural precise angles (in a place where human intervention shouldn't have created that in reality). The same is true of roads. The curved lozenge shape of the block across the street from me is there in the database, but sharpened into a parallelogram. I actually think they could do a lot to improve the basic visuals just by automatically putting some subtle curves on street bends and intersections, though they may be afraid of any deterministic process to do this going wrong in some situations.

I haven't tried using the scenery add-on I was using before in here yet, but I suspect it would work fine. Most of the scenery and aircraft add-ons for X-Plane 11 do work here, though some add-on aircraft that predate version 11 don't work or work badly. Some of the authors have made updated versions that use new features in X-Plane 12.

Users have created many libraries of free objects to use in these add-ons, and one of the frustrations of free user-created add-ons is that they often have a lot of external library dependencies which are hard to manage. I've noticed that the most popular add-ons tend to be the ones whose dependencies are simple or nonexistent. It seems like everything like this eventually evolves to needing a package manager.

One bug I remember vividly from Microsoft Flight Simulator 1.0 for MS-DOS, that I haven't been able to reproduce here, is that sometimes mysterious replicas of whole airports or components of them would appear at some distance from the original, probably because of integer math rollover. Either I haven't been able to reproduce the conditions in FS2 for Atari 8-bit, or they fixed it for that version (I don't recall seeing it on the Atari ST either).

I think the things most likely to do it in MSFS 1.0 were the little refueling depots (just a letter F in a square) that don't seem to exist in this version. I notice the manual tells you just edit your fuel level to keep flying when you run low. Most likely, the fuel thingies were positioned relative to the airport center with lower-precision math.

All versions of MSFS and Flight Simulator II have had a "slew mode" in which physics is suspended and you can just reposition and reorient the aircraft with six degrees of freedom using the keyboard. I recall spending a lot of time just moving around in slew mode, and just rising upward toward space--eventually, you'd encounter the outlines of a ghost airport hovering at a vast distance above the ground.

I don't think I posted about it back then, but one of the things I did when I was messing around with flight sims a few years ago was to download FlightGear, a sim that is actually free and open-source (more precisely it is GPL'd free software). It's been around since the 1990s, slowly being developed, and it does show its age, but you can't beat the price:





When I tried it a few years ago, it seemed a bit awkward and glitchy, and I had no luck using it to fly anywhere other than its default low-res rendition of Hawaii. It's matured a little more since then (and my computer is more capable), and there's an automatic-scenery-download feature you can use to get world scenery for anywhere on the planet, though it doesn't download fast enough to stream and teleporting to a new airport will likely trap you in a gray void for a while. The autogen scenery makes many areas look kind of post-apocalyptic, in the manner of X-Plane with the specs turned way down, and its imagery of urban areas is schematic at best, but the airports are there.

It also now recognizes game controllers without much trouble, though the default mappings for the DualShock needed work much as with X-Plane (a centering analog stick is really not appropriate for controlling a throttle). With the controller set up correctly, FlightGear is actually fun to use.

The keyboard mappings seem inspired by the original subLogic/Microsoft Flight Simulator from the 1980s. Of course I had to take off from Oakland International and fly over San Francisco, the default area from Atari ST FSII.

It is still a bit glitchy--at one point my Cessna refused to budge from the runway even with the propeller going at full throttle, and after several attempts to check all possible ways I could have accidentally left the wheel brakes on, I Googled it and found a discussion of a known bug that causes this to happen sometimes until you toggle "Enable damage" on and off. The discussion was from several years ago, so, yeah. Some things happen slowly.

The frame rate it manages with the above settings is also kind of stuttery by modern standards, even on my new computer. X-Plane does much better with that. It is apparently possible to use it with a multi-monitor display, but it takes a lot of messing with configuration files and it was more than I was willing to do.

A charming detail is that the Cessna's engine will die if you just go immediately to full throttle after starting it--you have to handle it with realistic care, going easy on the throttle at first and ideally manipulating the fuel-air mixture and such. This is a bit annoying if you're just starting out but I kind of admire their insistence on that. The initial download only gives you the Cessna 172; there's a big library of free plane models you can download and install, but I haven't tried them. There are also a lot of scenery add-ons to make the local area of your choice look nicer.

FlightGear looks like a thing from a bygone age, and it isn't going to replace paid sims for me, but if you want something that costs $0 and actually models an airplane with some care, I doubt you can do better.

Last night, having properly connected a game controller to my computer, I booted up the Atari800MacX emulator and for the first time in ages I played through a whole game of Star Raiders, the Atari 400/800's true killer app and the granddaddy of the modern "space sim" genre.

This video is highretrogamelord playing it on the highest difficulty level (not sure if there are any cheats involved).



Star Raiders was basically a hybrid of the old text-based "Star Trek" game, and a first-person arcade space shooter like Starship 1. It had a bit of strategy to it: the galaxy is a grid of "sectors", and you're trying to wipe out all the enemies while keeping them from destroying your starbases, which they do by surrounding a starbase sector with enemy-occupied sectors on all sides for too long (like an attack in Go, the game that inspired the name Atari). Within a sector, you're chasing down enemies in three dimensions in a mostly smooth first-person perspective view that was just mind-blowing in 1979. You have limited energy and can take systems damage that affects gameplay in various ways; the starbases provide energy and repairs. Travel between sectors is by hyperspace jump, which is expensive and tricky. Your "rank" at the end of the game is computed from a formula that combines several aspects of your performance (the manual actually gave the formula).

I was playing it on Pilot, the lowest difficulty level that isn't baby/God mode (you can take damage, and have to manually fly the hyperspace jumps). Wow, I've gotten really bad at Star Raiders. I never got that good at it, I think because when I was a kid, its immersion was actually anxiety-inducing--a remarkable thing to say about a primitive game for an 8-bit personal computer.

But last night, I think I got the lowest possible joke ranking, even though I completed the game without dying and I think prevented any starbases from being destroyed. (It was a near thing--the *last enemy left in the galaxy* got in a lucky hit that took my shields down, and rather than continue to duke it out as a one-hit-point wonder I ran away to a starbase for servicing before coming back to kill it, and that probably dropped my score.)

I'd forgotten how tricky the "stay on the beam for the hyperspace jump" mini-game is. Mastering that is probably key because if you're not good at it, it doubles the number of expensive hyperspace jumps you have to do.

Seen with modern eyes, the game can get repetitive. But it successfully tugs at your emotions and it's got some interesting emergent strategy that comes out of the interaction of simple features, which is always something I like in a game. (For instance, how do you get to a starbase for repairs if your main engine is broken? The hyperdrive never goes out, so you have to initiate a hyperwarp and interrupt it until you're close enough.)

A few years ago, in the depths of COVID shutdown when I was probably hankering for a view of the big world, I went on a tangent about flight simulators. At the time Microsoft had just put out a spectacular ground-up reworking of Microsoft Flight Simulator, but I didn't have a machine that could run it, so I sprung for X-Plane 11, the most advanced one available for the Macintosh.

My MacBook Pro was already old and feeble at the time and could just barely run it. It worked, but the frame rate was pretty choppy under the best of circumstances, and the UI was kind of glitchy, and I could forget about running it on more than the laptop's built-in display--it would just get unusably slow.

Well, I recently got a new MacBook Pro with an Apple Silicon M3, and Apple's handy Migration Assistant dutifully hauled all of my old garbage over here where, remarkably, nearly all of it just runs without any trouble even though Apple has switched to a completely different processor architecture (for the third time)! I think the biggest thing that I did have to upgrade was Sagemath, but that's no surprise--that thing is a bear.

Amazingly, X-Plane 11 running under Intel emulation on this ARM-based computer is way smoother than it was running natively on the old one (this may be more down to this computer's relatively powerful GPU than anything else). And I can use a big external monitor as a second screen with no trouble at all, which makes flight simming a lot more fun.

X-Plane has had a version 12 out for almost two years now, which is Apple Silicon-native on Macs; I don't think my old computer could run it at all, but my new one can. I did download the free demo (which is the full product but limited to 15 minutes of flying around Portland, Oregon) and give it a try. The online consensus about it seems to be that, while it looks significantly better than X-Plane 11, it's not enough better to really be impressive in a world where Microsoft Flight Simulator exists, and for most people who bought version 11 it's not enough of an upgrade to justify springing for the rather high price.






(The pilots among them also debate whether X-Plane 12's flight model is better or worse, but this is so far beyond my expertise that I couldn't usefully comment. It does seem touchier--it seems much easier to crash the plane if you just mess around. But that might be realism!)

I think that's basically correct. The other thing I noticed is that X-Plane 12 is demanding enough that on its default settings, it makes my new computer stutter a bit. I'd probably have to dial back some of the bells and whistles to make it buttery smooth.

For now, I think I'm satisfied with running version 11 on this machine. And for pure sightseeing jaunts using realistic streamed scenery, I'm still better off using the toy flight simulator in the ancient "Google Earth Pro" app, which makes no pretense of very realistically simulating an airplane.

Had a dream last night in which we had traveled to some distant city and were preparing to board an attraction that advertised itself as a kind of space tourism--but with carefully cagey wording that left open that maybe a trip into space wasn't actually what was happening.

I'd read an email from a friend who had ridden it, saying that the real fun of the trip was figuring out the gimmick they were using, and he wasn't going to spoil it for me.

Which just had me scrambling for spoilers to figure out what I was in for. In line to ride, furiously checking online reviews, I finally found one that gave a partial explanation: "Through clever optics, instead of going into space, riders are actually going up their own anus."

And then I woke up with more questions than answers.

I may have been thinking about immersive amusement rides too much.

I think about roller coasters more than I actually ride them, and I think there's nothing more emblematic of that than the fact that I seem to have several consistent credits that exist only in dreams.

I think I dreamed about these rides a while ago, and every so often in another dream I remember that I actually have ridden them. Only these coasters don't exist in reality.

Most of them were at an entire park themed to dinosaurs, which was filled with these janky, rusting steel coasters themed to different dinosaur species and decorated like dinosaurs. In the dream, I think I supposed this park to exist somewhere in central Virginia. I suspect the rides were inspired by videos of Gao at the Japanese park Mitsui Greenland, a janky old "jet coaster" themed to a dinosaur, which I have definitely never ridden:



(The only dinosaur-themed coaster I *have* ridden is Roar-O-Saurus at Story Land, which is completely unlike these rides.)

Another one was a wooden coaster built underground in the basement of a building, descending several stories into the earth. There are a few coaster/dark-ride hybrids that actually resemble this (aside from being rather tamer and not as deep), but I've never ridden any of them.