Oh, I had the opposite experience. Once I managed the courage to get on every single ride at Six Flags, I barely felt the last one I was on. It was fun, but the thrill of free-falling from 300 feet wasn’t budging me by then.
Right, the new ones are so overbuilt it takes a lot of the thrill out of them. Nobody else in my family will go on them, and they always try to talk me out of them, saying I’ll have a heart attack. They don’t understand that I don’t get scared on them, at least not any more.
In the old days, you had those wooden coasters, and while you were standing in line, you’d see it come around the curve, and it would creak and sway, and looked like it was going to come apart any second. THOSE were scary.
While skimping on the details (PII), let’s say that I spent most of the 80-90s within a day’s drive from one of the world’s two parks known to compete back and forth every couple of years (pretty just against each other, at the top) to find out who could build a bigger, faster, crazier coaster. One of these parks is in Japan, and the other’s in the US, and I spent entire days at the nearest one every. single. summer.
There’s just something so magical about the instinctual, mortal fear (completely justified, normal AF) and the learned behavior of blind trust that some intangible “system” is in place, surely. There can’t not be, right? I dunno, after the last 10 years in this timeline, that latter bit’s atomized; a fine, red white, ^and blue^ mist, as they say. I feel ya.
Oh, I had the opposite experience. Once I managed the courage to get on every single ride at Six Flags, I barely felt the last one I was on. It was fun, but the thrill of free-falling from 300 feet wasn’t budging me by then.
Right, the new ones are so overbuilt it takes a lot of the thrill out of them. Nobody else in my family will go on them, and they always try to talk me out of them, saying I’ll have a heart attack. They don’t understand that I don’t get scared on them, at least not any more.
In the old days, you had those wooden coasters, and while you were standing in line, you’d see it come around the curve, and it would creak and sway, and looked like it was going to come apart any second. THOSE were scary.
While skimping on the details (PII), let’s say that I spent most of the 80-90s within a day’s drive from one of the world’s two parks known to compete back and forth every couple of years (pretty just against each other, at the top) to find out who could build a bigger, faster, crazier coaster. One of these parks is in Japan, and the other’s in the US, and I spent entire days at the nearest one every. single. summer.
There’s just something so magical about the instinctual, mortal fear (completely justified, normal AF) and the learned behavior of blind trust that some intangible “system” is in place, surely. There can’t not be, right? I dunno, after the last 10 years in this timeline, that latter bit’s atomized; a fine, red white, ^and blue^ mist, as they say. I feel ya.
Still. “There was a time…”, right? 😅🤞🏼