pluk

When I was born, I was the: 4,336,070,727th person alive on Earth and the 78,859,098,382nd person to have lived since history began http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-15391515

From Theme Park Worldwide on facebook Ratatouille area is huge and coming along well, excited for this!

Cat insurance for more than £15.99 a month? Jesus! 'The injection' costs a one off £20 you know!

Seeing that money going from your account through closed season with crap all to use your card on is going to be painful, but it certainly feels good value during open season when you see what you can do for your £15.99 each month. I don't like loans or spread payments, I prefer to just pay stuff straight up, but that is just my preference and if this works for you then that's good. I think it would market much better if they increased the open season monthly cost to £21.99 and gave you the closed season for 'free', I know it doesn't make any difference but it would feel better.

I love a bit of chilled stuff in the sunshine. Getting me home from work today were... http://youtu.be/-xfKU31v3Hc (Always reminds me of 'Air' for some reason, think there is a similar baseline going on?) Beautiful stuff.

I think the riders come through incredibly infrequently due to the no automatic brake setup. I presume one can only go once the previous person is off the bottom so there is no chance of high speed coming togethers, so to someone watching it for a while they might think it isn't running. Still mental to get on the track though.

They should be open then anyway, it shouldn't be a paid for bonus. Not far of MoS nights without them bothering to arrange the nightclub bit!

Over £10,000 a day for the single tickets alone then. They have clearly become reliant on this income for the park to make a profit they are happy with, regardless of what it does to guest experience and satisfaction.

It might be nothing, but history tells us when it goes down it often stays down a good while so it is understandable people think like that. Glad I've already had a couple of rides this year anyway! I'm not entirely surprised, it was clearly having difficulty slowly raising and lowering recently even if it was Slamming like a dream once it was up there. I'm pretty sure they got fairly heavily compensated not too long after installation, as I understand it to their credit they came to a mutual agreement without it having to get to suning each other.

1000? How is it possibly that bad? And if it is that level of fastrack is disgusting. If they are chosing to run their new ride at 800 pph they deserve any flack they are getting for the queues. And overall they deserve to be a failure.

I'm very sure I remember there being some sort of spoken narrative in the queue line long long ago, in its first few years, but if it was actually that I'd have no idea. Would make sense if it was.

The problem with that sort of atmospheric maze is the fact that you are in a group, the group itself usually breaks the atmosphere. A big part of what is scary about something like Slender is your aloneness, the quiet and stillness. In a group of 12 you'd think 'ah, we can take him!' and half of them would be chatting amongst themselves instead of going along with it. I don't remember CCR ever being used before, but it surely should. As a ghost train, an adult black spot type thing maybe, more fun than scary. The throughput could be huge too, which is something fright nights needs.

A slightly unusual one, Alpine Coasters are something I really want to try one day and they do seem pretty safe. Vid of ride involved, not of accident. As usual an accident by someone doing something stupid, entering a ride area to stand on the track and take a photo. Genius. http://austrianindependent.com/news/General_News/2013-07-09/14276/Hiker_killed_by_summer_sledge_incident

A time I should be able to make. Hurrah! Although I am likely to lose spectacularly, facts aren't my thing. I have been preparing myself for the failure by coming 6th out of 7 teams in my local pub quiz last night, the shame.

Looks very good, especially the rolling launch. Shame we haven't seen one of these in the UK yet.

Planning has been submitted for a star flyer and big big wheel. http://www.echo-news.co.uk/news/10519080.Adventure_Island_plans_big_new_rides/?ref=mc Not the most exciting of developments for me tbh. I can't see a star flyer working often with the wind that batters the seafront constantly, and the thought of a 'Southend Eye' is a bit depressing. What are you going to look at? The front is at the bottom of a very high steep hill, this thing will barely raise you above the level of the high street anyway!

A close to an accident you are ever likely to see... http://www.liveleak.com/view?I=d71_1372089548 I guess she tried to climb out while it is out of shot?

Sure has! Very good it is too.

Does look really well done. Not that I've ever managed to get the whole way through any of the Potter films so it is mostly lost on me. How big is the site it is on, do you think there could be any opportunity to develop to into a complete studio type theme park? If they built a forbidden journey clone I'd go even if I don't get Potter!

Good it is up, but screw that. Join it now you might end up being one of the first people to ride it in the dark!

It is still very much ongoing, some of it has been written today in fact! A lot of work has been done (most of which is technical stuff to make it work that I don't understand) and all is looking very good. But it isn't too late to get any suggestions and ideas included if you have any you'd like to share.

It's not 6 months after it opens it should work reliably (note reliably, not 100% as nothing ever can be), it is when it opens. What I am saying is the handling of everything, from the first signs of problems to right now, has been just about as bad as it could have been. These problems might not have been foreseeable then, because all is so revolutionary. I struggle to believe that and if the right people were working on it they could have got whatever is wrong right. People are going now to ride The Smiler and quite regularly they can't. That's not good for customers, for reputation, for business or for anyone involved. It doesn't have to be like this and it should not be like this, if it was closed today during a preview period no one could have much of a problem with it, and if that is what it takes then that is what it should be.

Not never, thats just silly. Things will always fail, not everything is foreseeable, there are a lot of parts. I know this and all of what Stretchy said (mostly because he told me already!). But all the things you talk of a variations on tried and tested things, they aren't groundbreaking, and if the parts (or one in particular) coming together to make the ride work keep failing they haven't been designed or built well enough for their use have they? My point is that this is not when they should be discovering these failures, these things they have got wrong. When it has been open for months and people are turning up and paying their money to ride it but finding it closed with such frequency something is very wrong with what has led up to this point. 'Sorry, it's new' doesn't cut it for me at this stage. If this stuff is all so groundbreaking (for Gerst / Alton, it is clearly not in the outside world and other manufacturers) there should have been unadvertised soft openings once it was clear pre season testing was not an option because they don't know how to dig a hole.

You say complex. It is a coaster with no trick track and a few blocks, it is essentially simple stuff that has been done for decades and although this is something of an evolution of their vertical lift even that is nothing new really. Look at something like Potter or Spiderman, thirteen maybe, even launch coaster to an extent, they are complex and have things about them that may be inherently unreliable. This is wheels on a track with gravity, and versions of lifts that have been around for decades. It is clearly unreliable because it was rushed at the end and not tested properly to get the bugs out before opening, it should not still be regularly unreliable (I don't actually know that it is, I'm taking the 'again' as a sign it is) this far in.

With Dragon Falls I can see scope for building replacement theming that is not the same as the old but can still be good, maybe better even. I can't see the same thing being possible with RMT. It is essentially a small and pretty crappy ride made great by being partially enclosed by the rockwork, anything they do which does not enclose it in the same way can not be as good and rockwork is the natural choice for that effect. Just put it the hell back to how it was.