When I turned 19 in April 2010, Facebook was still a relatively new, fresh, young place where we were cringe-uploading entire “albums” of nights captured on digital cameras; the iPhone had only just become ubiquitous by way of the iPhone 4; Jim and Pam were newlyweds; we were still at the dawn of Barack Obama’s eight year presidency; the Wizarding World of Harry Potter was still behind walls; and the MagicBand was merely a very expensive concept that wouldn’t be on a guests’ wrist for three more years.
Put another way, 2010 might as well have been a century ago. And there I was, in college, when I was offered what felt like the opportunity of a lifetime. I can’t recall specifically why or how Nick Sim invited me to contribute to his new brand new website, Theme Park Tourist, but I can tell you that I was sure it was a scam. Why would someone PayPal me actual, American currency for writing about theme parks? But the check cleared, as it were, and I was off and running.
I remember distinctly that one of the first things that felt really real to me is that Theme Park Tourist paid for my Cedar Fair Platinum Pass ($150!) so that I could review the then-new WindSeeker swing ride that opened at both Kings Island and Cedar Point in 2011. This, you’ll remember, was the dawn of Buzzfeed and “listicles” were all the rage. I wrote a lot of them in the early 2010s.
In 2013, I asked Nick if he would be alright with me trying something a little more long-form. The result was my Lost Legends: Geauga Lake feature – a very, very in-depth account of a park just 45 minutes from me growing up that was bought by Six Flags, who then turned around and also bought a SeaWorld located on the opposite shore of a 53-acre lake and then built a literal bridge between them, creating “the world’s largest amusement park…” until it crashed and burned after just three years. Something clicked, and at last count, that story had over 5 million page views – easily, I would suspect, the most-read thing I’ve ever written.
Naturally, that opened a door to other possibilities. Later that year, I wrote what’s probably my second most-read story – the in-depth history of the Lost Legend: Alien Encounter. Look, I know I was just building on the storytelling of Jim Hill, the analytical style of Foxx Nolte, and gleaning urban legends and grainy YouTube videos on the first version of that story, but I really felt on the cutting edge. It just felt like very few “mainstream” theme park sites were yet doing discrete, long-form stories about the development of, experience within, and closure of rides that were no longer around. I wanted to basically answer the question, “Who cares?” that I myself had sometimes had when it came to veneration of “old” rides that were long gone. I still think I did a good job!
You better believe that I carved out a little niche corner of the Disney Parks internet, and within a few years, my in-depth histories of Journey into Imagination and the PeopleMover and Horizons and all those other 9,000 word entries you’ll find under the “Lost Legends” header in the navigation bar above were at the top of search results. I knew I was just a kid faking it until he made it, but I really do feel like those retelling are – in some ways – “definitive” in terms of being digestible and well-told – even if I wasn’t sourcing exceptionally well back in those early days. (All of those features have since been re-sourced, re-written, and refreshed.)
When the “Behind the Attraction” series came to Disney+ in 2021, a friend messaged me and said, “Isn’t it weird that this show probably exists because of your writing [and the “Modern Marvel” series that explored the making of beloved attractions]?” That’s obviously high praise and absolute hogwash, but it did feel back then like I was doing something kind of unique and exciting that required a lot of genuine research, and that people were hungry for the next in-depth entry!
We soon entered the era of the YouTube documentary, and I admit that I was sort of miffed to see my own YouTube home page filling with creators who – it felt to me – were literally just turning my stories into mini-films, in the same order I’d published my stories. Sometimes I’d crossed my arms and click on one and skip to the middle and immediately hear a sentence I wrote but spoken out of someone else’s mouth. And I’d inevitably check the “about” and see my article listed four paragraphs down – or more often, see no citation at all.
The exception was Defunctland. When someone I worked with said they’d done a double take when they saw my name in the credits of a Defunctland video, I was floored. It turned out that Kevin Perjurer had cited me prominently in a number of videos. (He’s the reason I have an IMDB page! Ahh!) And out of the blue, Kevin invited me on the Defunctland podcast with the very ego-inflating episode title “Straight from the Source”. I was floored and have been chasing the high of being on a podcast ever since.
I’m getting off track. The point is that Theme Park Tourist let me try weird things, and dip my toe into “niche” subjects. (Imagine today a Facebook-centered site that encouraged its writers to generate 8,000 word in-depth articles. Impossible.) At its height, its Facebook page had over 500,000 followers – and I was reaching them. It was unreal.
Even then, in the “good” days of the Internet, Nick and I sometimes disagreed. I sometimes hated that I’d write something really thoughtful and – to his thinking, by necessity – he’d retitle it with some clickbait-y title that buried the lede and / or required the word “abandoned” or a synonym of it. But hey, he was right. The views came. The conversation came. Some of my articles had over 300 comments not on Facebook, but on Theme Park Tourist – they were actually reading, and commenting via the site’s native comment system!
Nick Sim let me try things, take big swings, and develop a sincere library of in-depth ride histories that I felt we as fans needed – a collection of sometimes-sappy-and-subjective, embellished, romanticized reflections of rides – written in the same voice, and woven together through hyperlinking so that folks could get “lost” in the stories like we all do on Wikipedia. And shit, I think it worked.
Even so, I could feel the tides changing on Facebook. I told Nick that I didn’t like that Theme Park Tourist put all its eggs in the Facebook basket (which, I think I can say in good fun, I was right about, Nick! It got bad, and lowbrow, and awful. But I do think Nick would see the humor in me then immediately making the same mistake by making Park Lore’s only social media presence on Twitter! A cosmic punchline, I think.)
After writing excellent books on Alton Towers and Universal Orlando (which you should purchase – I sure did!), Nick Sim passed away in 2016. He was survived by his wife Natalie and a young son. Through them, Theme Park Tourist endured.
Fast forward to 2020 when free time came in surplus and we all needed projects to keep us moving. After much waffling, I decided to be brave and reach out to Natalie to ask how she felt about me essentially taking back my writing. In a rambling email, I tried to explain how grateful I was for her and Nick allowing me to build up such a catalog, and how proud I was of having kept those articles up-to-date and refreshed and how I intended for that to continue, and how much I didn’t want to sour my relationship with her or Theme Park Tourist, and how I intended to continue writing for them if they’d have me, but also wanted to “go it alone” and create my own archive. I even suggested that any future writing they funded could have some “exclusivity window” on Theme Park Tourist before I published it to my own site.
To my surprise, Natalie’s response was basically, “Sounds great! No exclusivity window needed. Can’t wait to follow your work there, and hope you’ll keep writing for us here, too!”
Park Lore was born.
I would never have imagined that I could work through the logistics of securing a domain, and a web host, and then crafting a website… much less the meticulous, full-time work of porting my stories from there to here, giving each a full head-to-toe refresh, re-source, and new high quality images and asides along the way.
Because I had felt occasionally deflated by the need to generate clicks on Theme Park Tourist, I also made the very easy-but-hard decision to make my own site ad-free. I honestly just didn’t want any pressure to count pageviews for a project that I sort of envisioned would be about in-depth storytelling that the “Facebook audience” of the 2020s was clearly migrating away from in favor of (let’s be honest) junk that you comment on but never click, and sensational headlines, and video that I could never produce.
In retrospect, a model where my site is ad-free and supported by Members clearly worked well. I am endlessly grateful for the small – but immensely kind – group of people who “put their money where their mouth is” and support this kind of work, keeping it ad-free and available to all just because they (apparently) think it matters and is fun to get lost in. But at the time, I really didn’t know if anyone would read or support something like Park Lore – so I opted for the version that would make me feel better, which was “quality over quantity.”
So, Park Lore was my “pandemic project” that kept me sane and focused. I reached out to a few trusted people (including Kevin Perjurer!) to let them know that I was taking a big gamble and was hoping that on the day I became official, they’d do me the favor of letting their audiences know.
On July 5, 2020, I officially tweeted about Park Lore, and god dammit if Kevin didn’t pull through. Thanks in no small part to his tweet, I think I had 2,000 followers within a week – more people than I could ever have imagined. Having basically a living archive of my stories is one thing. Another is figuring out what my “niche” was in the fandom – just searching for “Alien Encounter” and then cold-call replying to be like “HERE’S THE STORY”? I hoped not, but at that point, linking people to my old stories was kind of all I had?
I needed to figure it out – if Park Lore would be my “voice” to an audience, would that voice be pessimistic or optimistic? What would Park Lore commentate on, and what would it ignore? Would I be funny or sincere? It all took time. I would argue that I’ve found my niche – in-depth, inclusive theme park storytelling and art. Newer projects – like my 100+ hand-drawn ride layouts, my Blue Sky theme park build-outs, and my weird niche diagrams and graphs – are things I never shared back to Theme Park Tourist, since their audience relied more on “updates” and “listicles” – which is all fine! It’s why Park Lore needed to break off and do its own thing in its own way!
It was certainly sad to quietly begin to acknowledge that back on the “ad-supported” side of things, the game had changed. Instead of hundreds of thousands of page views, things I was writing for Theme Park Tourist were sometimes barely cracking a few hundred. I hated seeing people in the comments complain about the ads, or the occasionally-clickbait-y titles, because I knew that there was a widow behind that site trying to run her small business to support her family – and to pay me, too! (Eh hem. Not every theme park site pays its writers a fair stipend for their freelance work…)
This is the era of the toxically-positive theme park influencer; of “did you know the castle comes apart in hurricanes” TikToks; of live streaming your way through the Food & Wine Festival; of clickbait articles generated only to shovel into the roiling #content #algorithm engine that requires 5 – 8 posts a day – and several paid boosts – if you want to be seen at all. I was proud of Theme Park Tourist for “sticking it out” and continuing to generate really good content from really good writers. (No, I’m not mad that slop like Inside the Magic has ten times as many followers as I do – why do you ask?)
Now via adding another two thousand words to Park Lore (which is already knocking at the door of two million), we finally arrive at the point.
Theme Park Tourist is no more. Standing at the crossroads of “adapt or bow out,” Natalie made the very thoughtful (and perhaps inevitable for all of us whose online efforts live so long) decision to end the site. As of today, it’s entirely offline. So much of what I’ve written is gone forever – much of it timely & outdated or under-sourced, sure, but it’s gone.
They say that despite appearances, we’re living in what will be remembered from the future as an information dark age – as we die or move on from hobbies, our web hosting will expire; our social media accounts will lock down until they’re “MySpaced” away as well; our access to something lasts only as long as our subscription; the communities we think we have last only until Elon Musk buys the place where you hang out – unless you’re willing to take steps to stay in touch.
Nothing is printed, nothing is physical, nothing is owned, nothing is permanent. It’s a depressing conclusion, but take it from this writer who just said goodbye to the site that made Park Lore possible: it’s true.
After all, there could come a time when the members currently supporting Park Lore decide that $2 / month adds up (because it does!); a time when the site looks as outdated to audiences as an old AngelFire site looks to us today, requiring an expensive and time consuming redesign; a time when I simply can’t afford to renew the site’s hosting and domain and security add-ons. And if none of those come to pass, then there will be a day when I die. And when that day comes and the hosting doesn’t renew, this site won’t exist, and all two million words I’ve written (which I’d like to think will be closer to five or six million by then) will be left to the Wayback Machine.
It gets you thinking existentially. Which is why the only conclusion I can come to here is that I’m grateful to Nick Sim for taking a chance on a twenty-year-old kid who thought he’d hit the big time by being paid $20 for a review of a ride (because he had)!
I’m grateful beyond words that (some of) the best of my work was salvaged and brought here though Natalie’s kindness and lack of ego.
I’m grateful beyond words that I had the experience of starting with Theme Park Tourist.
And I’m grateful for finding my “niche” and my “voice” and my “people” through Park Lore. Long and self-indulgent as this “obituary” might be, I hope it reminds you to enjoy the places you frequent, support the writers and artists who produce the kind of content you care about, and take advantage of the communities you’re part of; they won’t last forever.
