Halcy-Con may have topped that.

Obviously they are two differently shaped beasts. Very differently shaped. I played a very different role on the Starcruiser than I did at Halcy-Con. On the Starcruiser, I was a passenger. An active one! One who threw herself full-heartedly into the world and the events! Part of what made the Starcruiser so amazing was that the passengers did play such a crucial role in telling the story, and I loved it.

Halcy-Con, though, was something I got to help make, from the ground up. It was something I got to build in a very different way. The Starcruiser left me with a feeling of awe and wonder and appreciation; Halcy-Con has left me with a profound satisfaction and pride.

But maybe I should back up.

Halcy-Con? What’s a Halcy-Con?

I’m not sure it’s possible to have known me over the past year-ish and not know how much I adored my sole voyage on the Galactic Starcruiser, known in-universe as the Halcyon.

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When Disney decided to close that experience, the community that had built around it was heartbroken—but also determined. Fan events were already springing up before the closure, and there have been more since. Martin and Kristine Smith, two of the three co-hosts of Starcruiser podcast Heroes of the Halcyon, spearheaded a couple of those meet-ups and eventually decided — hey! Let’s put on a con!

This was not meant in any way to be a re-creation of the Starcruiser, but rather a celebration of it. Martin and Kristine also wanted it to be forward looking, not only retrospective, embracing the future of immersive experiences and what can be built from this amazing community. I loved all of that, and I knew immediately that I wanted to be a part of it.

I had, truly, no idea what I was getting myself into last December, when I emailed Martin and Kristine, whom I knew from being a guest on Heroes of the Halcyon, and said, “Hey, if y’all need some help, I have some skills.” I genuinely assumed they already had somebody to run Programming and that I was volunteering to be that someone’s assistant. Surprise! They handed me the reins—or perhaps I should say popped me in the cockpit—and trusted me with a pretty huge component of the entire event!

Running Programming

At one point during the con, I teased Martin and Kristine, “Hey, remember when we thought we were going to have to do incentive campaigns to drum up interest?” We really hit the ground running in January, and the community immediately validated this wild thing we were doing. Tickets and rooms both sold out in record time. From there, knowing that, “Okay, this is really happening!”, the event team all had our own things to focus on—but we were also always there to support each other. The Sunday night meetings, first monthly, then twice a month, then weekly, became something I genuinely looked forward to, even when I was tired and loopy. From January on, we really did not have any “down periods” — we were just moving from one phase of planning and implementation to the next.

So. My job, for anyone who wants a little behind-the-scenes look at how this sort of thing can work:

There are a few different ways to solicit and arrange programming for a conference or convention. There’s the “guest application” model, where people who want to be a part of programming tell the con that, and based on the information they provide, the con pops them into programming that the con devised. Sometimes the sessions might be suggested by guests, but generally not directly — they get trimmed, massaged, and synthesized by the programming coordinators. Then there’s the direct submission method, where attendees send in proposals (or, in a more academic context, abstracts). And there’s the solicitation method, where the conrunners approach pepole they want to hear from and ask them to speak or join a panel.

We decided to blend those approaches. Which was… complex, I’m not gonna lie. It was a multi-step process, and thus more involved than other cons I’ve worked on. Oh—and we also decided to do a community vote to see what programming people were going to be most interested in (because, with this being such a unique event, we were flying without full astrogation charts, as it were), which added its own phase to the process.

We took suggestions and submissions. Some of them came ready-to-go, pre-set panels and presentations and games and workshops. Some needed a little zhuzhing, and I worked with folks on that—because we knew we would have a lot of folks who had never presented at a con before, some who had never even been at a con before, and we wanted to support them in building the best sessions possible. And some sessions needed people! We had folks who had pitched panels that they wanted to lead, but they didn’t have other panelists.

So, I got to filling in the gaps.

There were a few concepts that we knew the community would be interested in, but that no one had pitched—so I wrote up some descriptions for those. For those and the unfilled panels, we opened guest applications and made some direct approaches, because Martin and Kristine know, I’m convinced, everyone who ever voyaged on the Starcruiser, and thus knew who would be a perfect fit for certain topics.

I had to cull. It broke my heart, but that’s part of doing programming for a convention. There’s not always time and space for everything—and sometimes it’s not just about having the space, but having the right shape of space. Certain games and crafts needed tables. Lightsaber training cannot be done in a small space or one with low overhead.

And then came my favorite part: actually arranging the schedule. It’s a lot pure logistics—making sure I don’t double-book anybody alone is a hefty part of it. A fair number of presenters were doing more than one session, and if one of theirs was a panel where someone else was also doing multiple sessions, then you quickly get into cascade failure territory when you try to move anything. I needed to think about which things were likely to both be large draws and be able to fill a large space, and which things would benefit from a more intimate setting and the ability to get close. I had to think about which rooms had AV (well aware that, as is always the case in these circumstances, half of the hookups were not going to work on the first try, no matter how well they were working the night before).

All of that is satisfying work, but where it gets fun is when I can arrange a “track”, even unofficially. When we’ve got multiple items of programming on a similar theme, and I can give someone interested in that theme a path to follow throughout the weekend. (The big ones for this con were immersive experiences, Sajas, and nostalgia.)

On the Floor

Of course, things did not go exactly according to plan. They never do! I knew that going in, and I started from a place of “prepare to pivot.” Admittedly I was not anticipating quite what a large pivot was going to be necessary at 7:30am on the first day of programming (before I had even had my cold brew, y’all), when external circumstances forced the withdrawals of a number of presenters.

But—we pivoted anyway. Through the generosity of so many individuals, the great grace of the community, and the willingness of all to go with the flow, we managed to shift in a way that was, while not invisible to the attendees, not something that derailed the experience.

I was extremely gratified to hear from so many people at the con that “It seems like things are going really smoothly!” because ideally, an event should always be like a swan: graceful and placid on top, churning chaos underneath. Honestly, I think a little chaos is necessary. Chaos is where creativity comes from. Chaos has its own energy that, when harnessed in the right way for the right causes, can do great things. And, frankly, it’s a place I tend to thrive. (This is why, though I am definitely not a Darksider, I also could never be a Jedi and would need to seek a different path in the Force. Come to think of it, I had this exact conversation with Saja Tycer on-board the Halcyon…)

I was in near-constant motion for three days. Clipboard tucked in my left arm (see above), I dashed from corridor to corridor, putting out fires where necessary, checking to make sure folks had what they needed, and—my favorite part—touching base with as many of my presenters as possible to make sure they felt confident and supported. While slip-streaming through the crowds, I only had full-on collisions with two people (sorry!), which I think was actually pretty good considering my speed and frequency. When I did stop moving for a minute, I often just folded down onto the floor, exactly where I was. (Floors can be very comforting sometimes.) I was running on caffeine and adrenaline and nerves, riding the edge of what Terry Pratchett called the “catastrophic curve.”

And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

In My Feels

A few people asked me during the event, “Have you actually had time to enjoy anything?” And that’s… a weird question to answer! Because, in the traditional sense, well, I didn’t do many of the things I usually do when I’m just a guest at a con. The only panels I saw all of were the two plenary sessions and the sessions I was in. I didn’t indulge in a saber session. Even at the dance party, I was (attempting) to keep things more or less in line with the run of show doc.

But did I enjoy myself? Yes. Of course yes. A thousand times yes.

The fun of it for me was being part of the team that set things up, spun them into motion, and then stepped back to see what the community did with it. I really love making things, particularly things that other people get to take joy in. I love events, and making sure that everyone else is having a good time is what gives me a good time. And when it all comes off well, when the pieces fit together, when we reach the end and everyone is feeling joy and satisfaction—it’s just the best feeling in the world.

As, um, pretty much everyone at Halcy-Con witnessed (because it kept happening while I was on stage), I was in and out of tears for about half of the Saturday night gala—but always for the best and happiest of reasons. I’m a heart-on-the-sleeve sort of girl, always have been. My emotions live close to the surface. I cry at parades, at fireworks, at sappy commercials, at happy-ever-afters in Disney movies, at rally moments in adventure stories.

At Halcy-Con, my emotions were entirely overwhelmed by the joy and love in that room. I have truly never been in the middle of so many people who were all so ready to give of themselves: their energy, their expertise, their experiments. I will be forever grateful for that experience.

I also needed this in a way not a ton of people knew about. For personal reasons, I needed this opportunity to reclaim myself, my skills, memories of an amazing experience, a sense of pride, the untrammeled delight of imagination.

I went in knowing I needed that reclamation. I didn’t realize—until I was in tears sometime Saturday—how much I also needed the… well, the vibes. Except that term hardly seems to do justice to the magical energy that was in that room Saturday night. The unique atmospheric cocktail of excitement and nostalgia and connection, the “together as one” sentiment that drove us, the hope and faith that whatever may come in the future, this spark stays ignited. The thing that had 600 people circled up and swaying along to a heartfelt Starcruiser tribute song, then doing the Ryloth Slide with full gusto, then singing along to the Star Wars main theme. Whatever that energy was, I needed it, more than I knew, to get my heart opened up and full-blooming again.

Maybe it was the Force, flowing through all of us.

Something that struck me was how many of those people expressed their shock in the same words: How can people support the monster on the other side? How do they not see what he is? How can they see what he is and still stand with him?

I told them something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately: Fear is a powerful motivator. He validates their fears, then he tells them that they’re actually strong and powerful (especially if they punch down at others).

Fear is a powerful motivator.

But so is joy.

The rhetoric of fear versus the rhetoric of joy is something I’ve been thinking a lot about these past couple of months, as Kamala Harris built a campaign on joy. The GOP wants to use this to paint her as silly or unserious, I find it to be a brave and powerful rhetorical strategy. In a cynical age, when earnestness is so often derided and a woman’s laugh is a target for mockery, she has blazed forth as a joyful warrior — and has been rewarded with electrifying energy.

I was so deeply moved by what she said during her interview with the National Association of Black Journalists.

I find joy in the American people. I find joy in optimism, in what I see to be our future and our ability to invest in it. I find joy in the ambition of the people. I find joy in the dreams of the people. I find joy in building community. I find joy in building coalitions. I find joy in believing that the true measure of the strength of a leader is not based on who you beat down but who you lift up.

Our nation, for all its flaws, is an aspirational one: there are ideals we are supposed to be reaching for, of liberty and justice for all, of the pursuit of happiness.

Shouldn’t we be joyful about that?

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On Teaching Rhetoric

When I was teaching English composition at a community college, one of our units was on rhetoric.

This was my favorite unit, and I probably spent a little more time on it and went a little deeper than was truly necessary. Many students commented on enjoying that section, though, because it introduced a new way of thinking about the media they engage with.

I always say that an awareness of rhetoric makes you a better listener, a better reader, a better writer, and a better thinker.

We are inundated with so many messages on a daily basis, far more than our ancestors ever had to deal with, and the bulk of those messages are crafted in some way to manipulate us. They’re using rhetoric; if you have that knowledge, too, it’s easier to see how and why someone is trying to manipulate you.

I didn’t actually get to do my favorite part of rhetoric in those classes — the devices and their arrangement — because the course’s requirements focused more broadly on the rhetorical strategies of ethos (the appeal to character and credentials), logos (the appeal to logic and facts), and pathos (the appeal to emotions and values). In class, we’d do things like look at advertisements and dissect which appeals marketing teams were leaning on for different products and to yield a desired result (usually, to buy a product). I’d share some examples from famous speeches, too (and in the classes where the students had already figured out they could utterly derail me by asking a question about Shakespeare or ancient Rome, I’d give a little mini-lecture on the differences in rhetorical strategy demonstrated by Brutus and Antony in Julius Caesar. This happened at least three times.)

One thing I stressed to my students, because I think it’s critically important, is that when a speaker is using pathos, fear is the easiest button to push.

It’s so easy. Making someone afraid takes almost no rhetorical skill whatsoever. Just threaten something they value. Simple.

Joy is much, much harder. But it’s also more powerful.

Fear enervates; joy energizes. This is a feature, not a bug, for the people who want to push the fear button. They need their audiences to be exhausted. When you’re exhausted, it’s much harder to think critically and make informed choices. Your body goes into survival mode, which is not the best place for nuance.

A Shakespearean case study:

This plays out fabulously in Richard III.

Towards the end of the play, the night before the Battle of Bosworth Field, the opponents King Richard and Henry, Earl of Richmond (the future Henry VII) both get straight-up haunted by the shades of all those who Richard wronged (and either outright killed or drove to their deaths). They hiss in Richard’s ears, each one telling him “despair, and die.” It’s a drumbeat throughout the scene, over and over again as they remind him of his faults and his crimes, as they wish him bloody doom, as they sit heavy on his soul: despair and die.

To Richmond, they give encouraement: “sleep in peace, and wake in joy”; “Dream of success and happy victory”; “Live, and beget a happy race of kings”; “cheer thy heart, and be thou not dismay'd.” So many words not only of hope, but explicitly of joy!

Richmond wakes up and, when asked how he slept, answers them accordingly: “My soul is very jocund / In the remembrance of so fair a dream.”

He then goes on to give a rousing speech to his troops. It’s not Shakespeare’s best—this is years yet before he’ll write St. Crispin’s Day or Friends, Romans, Countrymen—but it’s good! Throughout it, he paints a picture of a prosperous future for the men who fight for him:

If you do sweat to put a tyrant down,
You sleep in peace, the tyrant being slain;
If you do fight against your country's foes,
Your country's fat shall pay your pains the hire;
If you do fight in safeguard of your wives,
Your wives shall welcome home the conquerors;
If you do free your children from the sword,
Your children's children quit it in your age.
Then, in the name of God and all these rights,
Advance your standards, draw your willing swords.
For me, the ransom of my bold attempt
Shall be this cold corpse on the earth's cold face;
But if I thrive, the gain of my attempt
The least of you shall share his part thereof.
Sound drums and trumpets boldly and cheerfully;
God and Saint George, Richmond and victory!

The rhetorical devices in there are lovely, too, with repetitions that create a very solid feeling in the listener, a confidence that all will be well. But see there again, the words of joy, particularly in the final couplet, joining the ideas of cheerfully and victory.

Richard, on the other hand, wakes in fear and acts accordingly, passing that fear on to his followers. He’s full of portents of doom as soon as he rises: “the sun will not be seen to-day.” And when it comes time to speak to his men, his speech is full of words of fear. Even as he tries to hype them up, he also straight-up admits that he perhaps cannot justify his cause with anything more than “might makes right” — and if that means damnation, well, only cowards would worry about something like that. Then we get this couplet:

March on, join bravely, let us to't pell-mell
If not to heaven, then hand in hand to hell.

That is an exit couplet. I can’t prove this beyond any doubt, but that right there is a damn exit couplet (and I am indebted to Ralph Alan Cohen and Sarah Enloe for pointing this out to me). A rhyming couplet at the end of a long speech is supposed to end a scene. And though it’s not in the stage directions, Richard should try to exit there, only to realize that no one is behind him, because his next line is: “What shall I say more than I have inferr'd?”

He then goes on to paint a picture exactly opposite of Richmond’s: not the joy of victory, but the terror of defeat.

Remember whom you are to cope withal;
A sort of vagabonds, rascals, and runaways,
A scum of Bretons, and base lackey peasants,
Whom their o'er-cloyed country vomits forth
To desperate ventures and assured destruction.
You sleeping safe, they bring to you unrest;
You having lands, and blest with beauteous wives,
They would restrain the one, distain the other. […]

If we be conquer'd, let men conquer us,
And not these bastard Bretons; whom our fathers
Have in their own land beaten, bobb'd, and thump'd,
And in record, left them the heirs of shame.
Shall these enjoy our lands? lie with our wives?
Ravish our daughters?

This works well enough that the army does follow him to battle, but look at all that language of fear. He’s not promising prosperity; he’s speaking of “assured destruction.” It’s effective—up to a point. We certainly see in the modern day how being told what you’ll lose can be a motivation, and the way Richard speaks of Richmond’s army has parallels in modern political discourse as well.

Two men on the eve and morning of battle. Richard chooses fear; Richmond chooses joy.

So what happens?

The bigger picture:

In a lot of ways, this tension between the rhetoric of fear and the rhetoric of joy mirrors a greater challenge—a systemic challenge. Democracy is hard. Representative governments are really, really hard. A republic has to be constantly monitored, adjusted, and tweaked to ensure that it keeps working, even as bad actors find and exploit every weakness in its structure that they can turn to their own selfish purposes. To function, it requires citizens to be informed, alert, and engaged.

Autocracy is so much simpler. It requires less upkeep. Autocracy requires citizens to be uninformed, ignorant, and complacent. It makes things easy for them by taking away all their choices. You can be lazy in an autocracy, so long as you’re also compliant. For people who don’t like fighting the hard fight, that can sound very appealing. Someone tells you what to think and believe; you don’t have to exercise critical thinking skills, examine your own principles, or do the hard work of questioning and challenging your worldview.

There’s a reason I wrote this passage for The Bloodstained Shade:

Liberty asks a lot of you. Liberty takes work. Liberty is harder. But it’s ultimately more powerful—and more rewarding.

Kamala Harris isn’t afraid of this challenge. She embraces it. She knows how powerful it is.

Donald Trump embraces the rhetoric of fear because he is, I suspect, a deeply fearful man. All his accusations are projections, and projections are rooted in fear. Fear of failure. Fear of looking foolish. Fear of losing. Fear of inadequacy. I’d pity him, if his fears hadn’t contributed to so much destruction and chaos over the past decade, if his fears didn’t make him seek to strip away the rights, freedoms, and joy of others.

Because he is not a man who knows joy. I doubt he has ever had a moment of pure joy in his life. He’s not a happy person. He’s certainly not a content one. And, crucially, he has no empathy, which means he can’t push any other pathos buttons. He wouldn’t know how. He can’t relate to people with any humanity. He can’t call upon the pathos of community, of love, of compassion, or of joy.

Kamala Harris can and does. She can push so many pathos buttons in conjunction with joy, because she has empathy, she can relate to people, she knows what it is to feel love and compassion and vulnerability. But it’s joy that she has made the centerpiece. It’s an act of almost astonishing trust in the American people, to call upon the rhetoric of joy in this moment—a show of faith, a belief that we are still up to the rigor of defending liberty.

Let’s get out there and prove her right.

After all, Richard III lost the Battle of Bosworth Field.

Some further reading on Kamala Harris and joy:

• “Why Kamala Harris’ New Politics of Joy Is the Best Way to Fight Fascism,” Anat Shenker-Osorio for Rolling Stone (8/17/24)

• “Kamala Harris Is Using a Strategy Rooted in Civil Rights Activism,” Sheryll Cashin for Politico (9/29/24)

• “Kamala Harris is tapping into the Black Joy movement,” John Blake for CNN (8/25/24)

• “Kamala Harris is showing that joy can be a strategy,” Errin Haines for The 19th (9/25/24)

Why? Because they’ve come out with an absolutely insupportable position on “Generative AI.”

(And I’m using that term throughout this post because it’s the commonly accepted descriptor, but we all know it’s not really artificial intelligence, right? I also want to distinguish it from actually-useful and ethically-produced technology like what gets used in the medical field to help humans examine and analyze impossibly huge datasets in the service of doing things like curing cancer. We’re talking here about the plagiarism machines like ChatGPT, everything it underpins, and all of its conceptual mirrors.)

Screencaps in case they scrub the site:

(And before anyone asks, "Well after last year how could you be surprised?", I had and honestly still have only the blurriest of ideas of what happened last year as I was in the middle of a personal crisis at the time it unfolded. No, I am not asking for anyone to fill me in now; one catastrophe at a time is quite enough to be getting on with.)

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It breaks my heart to do this. I have been doing NaNoWriMo since 2001, when I was a junior in high school. There has never been a year since where I did not attempt either the classic November or a Camp Nano, and in many years, I did both. From Unseen Fire was a NaNo success story. It began life as my 2011 NaNo project, and I was previously proud to say so. I was absolutely delighted when I was asked to join their Authors Board. I have championed NaNo for actual decades at this point. I have written for their blogs and social media. I’ve taught workshops to high school students and library-goers. On this very blog, I’ve shared my joy of NaNo, posting prompts and pep talks. It’s been a long time since I needed NaNo to push me to write words, but I still loved being part of the excitement and community every November.

NaNoWriMo has meant so much to me over the years. But this position they’ve taken is infuriating and insulting.

Let’s break it down, shall we?

• Generative AI as it currently exists is entirely unethical. Full stop. This should be the end of any and all conversations when it comes to Generative AI, frankly. These LLMs only exist because they stole data, and by data, I mean the work of authors. They trained their machines on our books without our consent or any compensation. (And yes, “our”, my books were found in at least one of the datasets). They scraped them from pirate sites (so compounding evil upon evil there), and then, when called out on it, have said, “Well, but if we couldn’t commit this crime, our business couldn’t exist.” Sounds like your business shouldn’t exist, then! And now NaNoWriMo is taking the side of the techbros who have harmed the very authors it claims to support.

• Condemning AI is not ableist or classist. This is such an insulting implication that I hardly know what to say. Generative AI is not a tool to help those with physical or mental disabilities write. I know this because I have listened to my friends with physical and mental diabilities say so (and I have already this morning seen several of them furious that NaNoWriMo would use them in this way). I also know this because Generative AI cannot write. It can arrange words into a sentence, but it cannot write, because it cannot think, reason, or imagine.

• Generative AI does not help people find their voices. It robs them of that opportunity. You cannot find your voice by having a machine do the work for you. You cannot outsource your own voice. This was the core of the anti-plagiarism speech I used to give students: Why silence yourself by letting someone else’s voice stand for your own?

• Generative AI will not make anyone a better writer. You learn to be a better writer by doing the work. That will never happen if you’re plagiarizing, no matter what shiny tool you’re using to go about that plagiarism. Like any skill, if you want to be good, you have to practice.

• Getting feedback does not require paying someone. I mean, this is just a wild thing coming from an organization whose whole basis seemed to be connecting writers with each other. Critique groups are a thing! Both in-person and online! There are absolutely free ways to have human help you improve your writing. Heck, I’ve always said I learned so much of what I know from coming up through the fanfic trenches, precisely because that’s a place you can get feedback! There are also bajillions of free resources out there. So many authors put advice, tips & tricks, behind-the-scenes stuff on their websites and blogs, totally for free. If you can access ChatGPT, you can access all of that. The argument NaNoWriMo puts forth on this is so thoroughly disingenuous (but of a piece with the fact that NaNo has apparently been pushing lots of pay-to-play writing scams lately? Which is something else I’d missed the scandal over) — and it feels, as so many things with Generative AI do, as though it’s the solution in search of a problem.

• Creative writing has value even if it’s unpublished. That statement from NaNoWriMo makes it seem like this work is only worth doing if you’re going to get a publishing contract out of it someday. It isn’t. That’s a fine goal to have—as I obviously did!—but it’s not the only reason to write. It doesn’t have to be everyone’s goal, or even a published author’s goal for ever project. I would still write even if I weren’t ever going to publish again, because writing is about human creativity and expression. I always thought NaNo was about the joy of creation, not its ultimate monetization.

• Generative AI does not address issues of inequity within publishing. There are a lot of barriers to getting published, if that is your goal, and moreso if you are a member of a marginalized community. This is not an answer to any of them. It’s pretty insulting to imply that the only way members of marginalized communities can get their foot in the door is through the use of a plagiarism machine.

• Generative AI is antithetical to creativity. This is what underpins all the rest, really. And I’ve written about this before, so I’m not going to reiterate that all here, but it’s just unutterably depressing to have an organization that I thought was all about the joy of unfettered creativity decide that, no, it’s actually all about the churn of pointless, heartless, regurgitated dribble.

And on top of all of that, Generative AI is an ecological disaster, and it’s turning out to be a financial one, too. I’ve read a lot of people who are smarter about both tech and economics than I am saying that this bubble is likely to burst within the next year, so NaNoWriMo is torching whatever remained of its reputation for… what, exactly?

I don’t know what’s happened to this organization. It sounds like a lot of the worst parts of nonprofits, really, but that horrific statement also makes me wonder if they’ve got a big TechBro investor pushing them in a certain direction.

I am angry. I am hurt. And I am so, so disappointed.

ETA (~8pm, 2 Sept): I received a response from NaNo’s Interim Executive Director. It was, broadly, polite, but also defensive. It leaned heavily into the excuse many folks predicted would be their smokescreen: “oh we just meant other types of AI, people are misquoting and taking things out of context!”

Except.

That message was followed up with this:

So what, then, is the “certain way of writing” they don’t want to risk delegitimizing, in the middle of a conversation about Generative AI?

As for the separate post mentioned, it strikes me as curious that it was posted at, as best I can tell, roughly the same time as their AI position, which says to me that they knew there would be consequences and had a CYA already prepped and ready to go.

They do this without *directly* mentioning Generative AI, of course. But the thing about being a reader and a writer? Is you get pretty good at finding the relationship between plot points.

The second post is every bit as disingenuous as the other post, effectively equating the shame (rightfully) cast at AI “authors” with the stigma faced by romance, indie, and fanfic authors. Y’know. People who work at their craft.

I have no intention of entering a back-and-forth with the Interim ED. There are far better things I can do with my time — like, for example, working on writing a book! So long as they do remove my name from the website, I consider the matter closed. But I am grievously disappointed. I don’t know what’s happened to this organization in recent years, but it’s of a piece with the enshittification of so many platforms and gathering spaces. And that’s sad.

Earlier this month, I had the great joy of attending Twenty-Sided Tavern, an officially licensed Dungeons & Dragons interactive stage show. It’s a rollicking good time, and you don’t have to be an experienced tabletop gamer to enjoy it — although I do think it helps! — because the experience is designed to teach you the basic rules of the game and framework of narrative creation as you go. Since I do play ttprgs, this was thoroughly up my alley, and I’m glad that the Instagram algorithm intuited that I would want to know about it.

The experience does a great job of capturing the madcap spirit of ttrpgs, then expanding it to take up the space of a full stage and to encompass the liveliness of the audience. Engagement begins as soon as you’re in the theater: there are some fun Dungeons & Dragons set pieces and photo ops in the lobby.

(I did find myself wishing that the concessions on offer were more themed. There are a couple of specialty cocktails, but otherwise, nothing that really felt in-world or “taverny” — nor, for that matter, the sort of things that could be a bit tongue-in-cheek evocative of the typical fare when ttrpg players gather around a table.)

Once you’re seated, the performers start setting expectations. They welcome you, give you some flavor of their on-stage persona, tell you to scan the QR code in your program to open the website you’ll be using to vote, and start soliciting your input for Mad Libs. Your program also has, tucked inside it, a sticker giving you your role for the evening: either warrior (red), mage (blue), or trickster (green). That becomes important for later mechanics.

When the show gets properly going, the dungeonmaster DAGL welcomes you into the world and gives a very, very broad explanation of what, exactly, Dungeons & Dragons is. Together with the Tavernkeeper — responsible for much of the number-tracking and other logistics during the show — he explains the basics, including the importance of nat 1s and nat 20s, as well as the concept of a character sheet with modifiers. We then get to vote to narrow down the species and class of our avatar, as determined by our sticker and role. Rather than trying to educate the audience on all the options, the DM offers three choices for each. This mechanic is a great way of building camaraderie between performer and audience, immediately giving you a bond because you’ve had a say in shaping their identity for the evening. The night I was there, we ended up with a bird-person paladin who wouldn’t fly, a sex-crazed old lady mage, and a “wizard” with a secret past as an assassin.

The campaign is well-chosen, since the focus on chaos disrupting the magical weave of the world means they can introduce all manner of silliness and whole-heartedly embrace absurdity. They meet some standard D&D NPCs along the way: the barkeep, the gang of urchins, the sorcerer and their apprentice. Other choices of where to go and who to meet get made by a combination of votes and dice rolls. It’s all familiar fare, but given unique flare by the performers.

The set is a mix of digital and practical components, scattered with beaten-looking benches and stools, as well as a bar for the DM and Tavernkeeper, and shelves stocked with a variety of props for the performers to grab at will. The screen behind all of this projects backgrounds, which I found to be a nice augmentation but never a distraction, as well as the dice rolls (via cameras cleverly hidden inside lights above each performer’s dice tray), character sheets, and hit points, when such things are relevant, along with the results of the audience polls and skill challenges.

Oh yes, there are skill challenges for the audience. The roll of the dice determines a lot, but the audience has a palpable effect as well. Sometimes there’s a riddle to solve, and if not enough of the audience gets it, your performer fails in what they were attempting. Another challenge, used a few times, involved every member of a particular group having to button-mash on their screen in order to “fill up” a bar projected on the big screen — and either having to make it past a certain benchmark or, for added difficulty as the show went on, hit it between two benchmarks. We only managed that one out of three times! Those group challenges, especially by the end of the night, had the whole audience whooping and hollering.

And my gods, the cries of agony when someone rolled a crit or we failed a death save.

Because, yes, a character can die! (Although they do build in ways for that performer and their third of the audience to stay involved.) And death is not the only consequence of a bad roll — and nor is story success the only reward for a great one! Nat 1s and nat 20s also trigger the player and the Tavernkeeper to take a shot.

The audience is never left out of the action for any length of time. The DM and Tavernkeeper explain what’s happening in direct address all along the way. The Performers do most of their action down on the apron of the stage, and as I mentioned before, their rolls are usually cast up on the big screen, while occasionally, at moments of high drama, often when there’s advantage or disadvantage in play or for a death save, they come down and roll a massive d20 instead. Combat is kept short, to a single round in most cases, so that the story keeps clipping along. The audience gets solicited for shout-out contributions throughout the show, particularly whenever there’s an NPC who needs a name.

One downside of that particular mechanic is that you do end up somewhat captive to the lowest common denominator in the audience, who give “Boaty McBoatface” type names or whose sense of humor never progressed beyond repeating the most-well-known of Monty Python jokes. A little of that is tolerable; a lot of it starts to feel wearying, or at least it did to me, though admittedly I sort of burned out on Monty Python references by the tenth grade due to total oversaturation, and several years of working for a Renaissance faire lowere. YMMV, obviously. That said, the performers are very good at turning the low hanging fruit flung at them into something charming and clever, as well as building on the contributions throughout the evening so that the audience ends up with some “inside jokes” peculiar to it that will (likely) never be exactly repeated in another audience. (Ours was the curious recurring presence of Wario and Waluigi in the midst of Waterdeep).

A few lucky audience members also get brought on-stage for short periods. In one case, the skill challenge was a giant game of Jenga, played by audience representatives for the three groups. Another time, audience help was solicited so that the DM didn’t have to talk to himself as two different NPCs for an extended period of time.

The story itself matters far less than the joy brought to creating it. Everyone on-stage seems to be enjoying themselves to the hilt in every moment, their energy never flagging during the 2.5 hour performance. And that energy is infectious — I could feel it swelling in the audience as the night went on. Sure, some people entered the theatre already all-in (and yes, I was one of them), but not everyone. By the end, though, the reticence had sloughed off the stoics; the room had an electric buzz, everyone enthralled, holding our collective breath to see how the dice would fall, then exploding in either victory or defeat.

That shared experience is something I prize so highly. It’s why I love interactive and immersive entertainment, and it’s why I still evangelize for the American Shakespeare Center’s “do it with the lights on” ethos. I love feeling like I am, if only for a short time, totally in sync with a crowd of total strangers. It’s a special thing, and Twenty-Sided Tavern skillfully draws that camaraderie along.

I would definitely go again — not least to see how much changes night-to-night, not only in the story itself, but in its mood and tenor. It does tend towards broad caricature and slapstick humor, but there were some glimmers of deeper emotion. I’d be interested to see if, with an audience that tilted further in that direction, the show ends up showing a bit more heart as a counterpoint to the riotous comedy. Just a couple of well-timed, well-chosen deeper moments — moments of stillness, vulnerability, and true emotion — could create something sublime, if the opportunity was there for them. It’s not something you could force; it would have to rise naturally from the flavor of a particular audience and the co-created story — the same way that you can’t really force that in a game, but if it develops naturally, you end up with your heart in your throat and tears in your eyes. I’d be interested to know if something like that ever manifests in this show.

This show could easily develop a cult following, and I could also see it being franchised and running in cities all over the country (much like Drunk Shakespeare, which has a similar riding-the-edge-of-the-catastrophic-curve glee). I would be very interested to see Twenty-Sided Tavern mounted in some differently-shaped spaces, that bring the performers and audience together even more, like a thrust stage or something with cabaret seating to more nearly mirror the tavernesque vibes. (The traditional theatre seating in its current space does get elevated by fun lighting choices.)

Overall, I had a blast, and I heartily recommend the experience to anyone who has the opportunity to see it!

This was a trip of indulgence for me, and I will admit that right up front! I booked this back in November when I was desperately in need of a pick-me-up, and I decided right then and there that I was not going to skimp on things I truly wanted. That didn’t mean splashing out insensibly, but it did mean allowing myself a few luxuries I wouldn’t always choose.

So… would I choose them again?

Hotel

I decided to stay in Disney’s Caribbean Beach Resort, primarily because of its position as the hub of the Skyliner. The Skyliner is my favorite method of Disney transportation. And I admit to having been very skeptical about the idea when they were first building it, but now I just wish they’d extend it all the way to Animal Kingdom! But right now, it connects EPCOT, Hollywood Studios, and a few resorts: Riviera, Pop Century, Art of Animation, and Caribbean. Caribbean is the hub, which means if you’re coming from any of the other resorts, you may have to transfer here to get where you’re actually going. And there’s a Joffrey’s stand right by the entrance, so I could grab my caffeine before hopping on (at least, when I wasn’t there so early that the coffee kiosk hadn’t opened yet!).

I also got a good deal! I highly recommend keeping an eye out for these when you’re booking a Disney trip and even afterwards. I initially only had four nights, in a room with a king bed — but when JetBlue screwed up my flights by rewriting their entire spring schedule (don’t get me started) and I was trying to decide whether to stay an extra night or else lose an entire day, I noticed that Disney had released a new deal: If I switched to a different room type, I could get a fifth night for free! Actually, for about $40 less overall than I’d been paying for the king bed room for four nights. Staying an extra night meant I actually saved money! Obviously it might not always work out that way, but Disney’s starting to offer these deals or room-and-ticket packages more frequently than immediately after the reopening, so they’re worth keeping an eye out for.

The room was beautiful and comfortable! I got one of the newly renovated Little Mermaid rooms, and while I actually have a slight aversion to that particular IP, these are done very tastefully, so it’s not in-your-face the way Art of Animation would be. Mostly it just felt like a lovely, light ocean theme.

I got fantastic sleep every night — and that is not always the case for me, especially my first night in a hotel. My anxiety decides to get keyed up when it isn’t in a familiar sleep space, but between just being that worn out at the end of each day and the room being so comfy, I slept like a princess unbothered by peas.

I did have one small problem with my room — not a big deal, but definitely something that needed taking care of — and the front desk not only remedied it extremely swiftly, they also gave me a special little Skyliner pin for my trouble, which was such a lovely surprise! Be nice to cast members, y’all; frustrations and problems can crop up on every vacation, but being patient and understanding gets you so much farther than being a jerk about an issue.

Now, Caribbean has some infamous downsides, mostly related to its size. This resort sprawls. It’s large enough that some of its rooms are actually closer to the Riviera resort than to its own center. This didn’t bother me too much. I’m a good walker, and I clocked the distance from my room to the lobby at about 600 steps, so that’s not too bad. It did feel longer late at night, though, when I wanted to run down there to fill up my mug with Coke Zero for the morning — but even then, it was a pretty short journey. Anyone with mobility issues or small children might find it more difficult, though, or if you just plain don’t like walking as much as I do.

The other thing about the Caribbean’s size is that it can make the buses challenging — and those are the only ways to get to Magic Kingdom and Animal Kingdom. Because Caribbean is so spread out, it actually has multiple bus stops, and at busy times, that can mean that you’re waiting a really long time to get on or off, or that a bus might already be full by the time it gets to your stop. I actually didn’t encounter too much trouble with this, though! I used the My Disney Experience app to keep an eye on the anticipated arrival times, and my room was just across a little courtyard from the Trinidad bus stop, so it was easy to catch the ones going out. Coming back, it did take a while late at night because the bus had to stop everywhere to let folks off — but coming back midday never felt like it slowed us down much.

Worth it?

Honestly, I’m still a little undecided about this. I definitely don’t think I spent enough time at the resort to have gotten the most out of all it has to offer! I only briefly sat by a pool, I didn’t do any of the resort activities, I didn’t even hang out at the pool bar (mostly because I kept getting back so late that it had closed!). It’s just so hard, when I’ve only got a few days, not to spend them all in the parks — but I think if the trip had been even a day longer, I’d have needed to give myself a resort day as a break. Even my ability to run on caffeine and adrenaline has its limits!

The rooms themselves also aren’t wildly different from the ones at Pop Century. Maybe slightly larger, and of course the one I happened to be in is fairly newly renovated, which helps, but they’re the same style and general layout. (I actually think they’re almost identical to another Moderate resort, Port Orleans Riverside — the little bungalow-style buildings might be actual duplicates of each other, just painted different colors with different trimmings!)

But… the location can’t be beat, for my transportation preferences. The room was perfect for me, and everything about this resort is just so beautiful. It just feels relaxing to stroll around, and you get lovely views across the water.

So, ultimately, yes, I’d definitely stay here again, but I’d probably make sure I could get some sort of deal rather than paying full rack rate — and I’d probably plan a trip long enough to warrant a true resort day to lounge about and enjoy the amenities.

Park-Hopping, Genie+, and Individual Lightning Lanes

I grouped these up because they’re all add-ons to your standard admission. Park-hopping lets you visit more than one park in a day; otherwise, if you start in Magic Kingdom, you can only go to Magic Kingdom that day. You can leave and come back, but you can’t bounce over to another park.

Genie+ is Disney’s current and somewhat controversial skip-the-line service. It replaced FastPass+, which replaced the old “run to get it” paper Fastpasses from back in the day! I minded it less before they went to dynamic pricing, because I think dynamic pricing is the devil. Disney says you can use Genie+ to get on “two or three” extra rides in a day — and they are way underestimating, at least if you know what you’re doing and have a good strategy. Which I did! Thanks to many, many hours spent watching All Ears videos.

I did the extra cost Individual Lightning Lanes for Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind and Tron: Lightcycle Run. (Of the other ILL rides, I rope-dropped Flight of Passage and Rise of the Resistance, and I don’t give a damn about Seven Dwarfs Mine Train, which is both overrated and inferior to Big Thunder).

Worth it?

To me, absolutely. I love a midday park hop, not least because it helps prompt me to take the midday break that I very much know I need. It also let me take advantage of different parks’ operating hours — for instance, on the day that I started in Animal Kingdom and ended in Magic, it was because AK had the earliest opening, 7:30am for resort guests doing Early Entry (which means you get in half an hour before the park opens to non-resort guests), and MK was open until 11pm. Without Park Hopper, I’d have lost out on some hours of park time, because Animal Kingdom also closes the earliest (6 or 7pm most days this time of year).

Now, I might’ve then used that time to actually hang out at the hotel — but that wasn’t my priority. It also means that if the park I start in is feeling too crowded, I can bounce over to one that looks less densely inhabited. I love the flexibility that Park Hopping gives me, so I’ll pretty much always choose that add-on, and I made use of it every day except May the Fourth, since I was pretty well tethered to Galaxy’s Edge all of that day! But Sunday I went from Magic to AK to EPCOT, Monday from AK to Magic, and Tuesday from EPCOT to AK to Studios. (Yes, I really love Animal Kingdom).

Genie+? Also, to me, absolutely worth it. I probably didn’t need it every day I was there, but it helped me fit in everything I wanted without any stress. I knew I could get on all my priority rides and pretty well everything else, too, and didn’t have to sweat it. Honestly, just taking that weight off of my mind was worth the 20-odd dollars a day.

As for the ILLs: Yes, worth it, at least this time; I really enjoyed both rides (somewhat to my surprise), but I did not want the stress of the virtual queue. Plus, you end up waiting an hour even in the virtual queue. Pass. Would I get the ILLs again? Maybe not every trip — but these aren’t rides I feel like I need to do every trip. They’re worth it once in a while, though. (Just, please, EPCOT gods, next time, can I please do Guardians with something other than “Disco Inferno” as the song?)

Quick Service Dining Plan

Disney just reintroduced dining plans in January, and they’re both more limited and more expensive than they were pre-pandemic. Since I rarely have a burning desire to do a table service restaurant, I decided to give the less costly Quick Service plan a try this trip. With that, you get two Quick Service meals and one Snack credit per night that you’re staying, which meant I had 10 meals and 5 snacks.

I think it’s easier to make this plan financially sensible than the full dining plan, especially since the meal credits include an alcoholic beverage. You need the meals to roll out to about $20 each for the plan to save you money, but if you’re getting cocktails, you can easily hit what would be $30+. Since it racks up by the night, I was able to stretch it out some — I used my first meal right when I got in Friday night, and my last two on Wednesday for breakfast and lunch, with the others scattered in-between.

Worth it?

Financially, yes. Technically, at least. I’m pretty sure I beat Disney by consuming food and drink of more value than what I spent on the meal plan. On the other hand, I also ate more food than I really wanted to eat, and there were a few times I passed on a snack I would’ve rather had in order to maximize the dining plan value. I don’t think I’d do this again unless they reinstate the ability to trade in one Quick Service credit for three snacks, the way you used to be able to. I did enjoy not having to think about it, though.

(I also discovered that if you get a glass of wine to-go from a resort restaurant, they give it to you in a sealed container. I didn’t really want that glass of wine at 3pm when I was about to head back out, but I super appreciated having it in my beverage cooler when I got back in at midnight!)

Memory Maker

So, anyone can get a picture taken by Disney PhotoPass photographers for free — but if you want to keep unwatermarked versions of those photos, that costs money. You can buy them individually, but that’s pretty cost-inefficient if you want multiple pictures.

Memory Maker gets you access to all your PhotoPass photos from a trip (technically, for a 30-day period) for one bundled price. And there are a lot of PhotoPass opportunities in the parks. Many are at character meet-and-greets, but some of my favorites were actually just scenic ones. They almost never had any line! And I got some fantastic shots. Plus, you can get the Magic Shots that add in some fun digital element. They’re silly, but fun!

Btw, my pro tip for getting a castle shot (whether you’re doing a PhotoPass shot or not): Go on one side or the other of the castle, rather than trying to get the iconic shot down Main Street. Unless you’re there when the park is deserted, that iconic shot will have all sorts of randos wandering through the background. But the side view shots have no one in the background! This is true for EPCOT’s geodesic sphere and the Tree of Life in Animal Kingdom, too; you can generally find some better, less-crowded spot to get an amazing picture without strangers cluttering the view.

There are also special PhotoPass locations in each park for Disney Visa cardholders, which I am, but those actually did have long lines each time I found them, so I didn’t avail myself of them on this trip.

Worth it?

Absolutely. I got so many amazing photos that I would never have gotten on my own! I feel like 95% of the pictures of me from the past decade are selfies taken from the exact same angle. It’s nice to have some variety for a change, and to be able to show off my Batuubounding and Disneybounding in something other than mirror shots. And that’s why I decided on this splurge: I wanted pictures of myself that aren’t selfies, and this way, I got them taken by pros!

I do want to say, though: Disney? Stop replacing PhotoPass photographers with auto-cameras. They do not do anywhere near as good a job. They don’t even do as good a job as handing my cell phone to the character attendant. And they’re not fun in the way that the photographers are. I really love that moment of interaction, especially when I found photographers with no lines who wanted to play around a little bit. (Without fail, every time a photographer noticed I had a fan, they wanted me to do something fun with it). Pay humans for quality work!

Overall

So, overall, yes, this trip was a little more expensive than I’d generally allow myself -- but that was by design and intent, and with the possible exception of the dining plan, it was all totally worth the indulgence. I had a fabulous time with, truly, just about zero stress. That alone is such a rarety for me that it’s worth quite a lot.

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As a result of the founders’ statement, a fair number of both creators and supporters are leaving Substack. Even more, I think, are trying to decide whether to do so. A.R. Moxon and Catherynne Valente have said, more eloquently and thoroughly, the things I’m thinking and wrangling with, but I did want my readers to hear from me directly on this.

I don’t have a large following here. I wouldn’t be sacrificing a lot in direct income by leaving, but also, Substack would not miss me or my paltry contribution to their coffers.

I could, in fact, close down the paid memberships entirely, just make everything freely accessible, and suggest that people who want to support my work do so through Ko-Fi or Venmo or Paypal or whatever. (And if you are one of my paid subscribers, I’d genuinely love to hear your thoughts on whether you’re staying here, what platform you generally support writers and artists on, and such). Then I remove monetary support for Substack… but, I’m still driving traffic, which from some perspectives still makes me part of the problem.

I’ve had a Patreon for several years, as many of you know (and also support), but it’s been in decline for a while, because people who aren’t already familiar with the platform aren’t likely to join it, while people who only used it for my content tend to just not even notice when their card gets declined and they get bumped out of subscription. When you’re a creator trying to get support, you want to make it as easy on folks as possible—and Patreon is not currently that easy. And, frankly, about once or twice a year, Patreon also does some dumbassed thing that makes me consider leaving them. (That I haven’t is because they tend to reverse course when their creators raise a fuss, but their financial practices have been steadily getting worse over the years).

Moving platforms could very well cost me money, in actual expense, not just lost income, especially to get the features I have here—features that I want my followers to have as an option, like the sub-divided subscriptions I just introduced! (Sigh.) And leaving here would risk losing some followers, whom I value regardless of whether they’re paid or free subscribers. I’d also lose a lot of discoverability, since this platform is an active one. But on the other hand, if I stay, I might also lose people who are choosing to leave this platform entirely.

It’s a mess! And, like other writers have opined, I’m pretty sick of being chased off of platforms by bad actors. The Decline and Fall of the Twitter Empire has materially hurt me and my career. It drastically reduced the number of people I’m able to reach and build community with. In that case, I finally left for good (after, y’know, Elon tried to kick me off for making fun of him) because the experience on the platform itself became intolerable. That isn’t (yet, at least) the case here.

Moving somewhere else is also no guarantee that a new platform won’t also face the same problems someday, forcing yet another move. I’m a child of the LiveJournal age; I remember how it started, and I remember what happened when it got sold. Very few sites seem to have long-term viability without corporate backing, and the increased corporatization of the internet is most of the reason I think the internet peaked in 2007. Every site is potentially in danger. Just because Buttondown or other platforms are promising good behavior now doesn’t mean anything if leadership or ownership changes (citation: Twitter). As Moxon and Valente both pointed out in their essays, abandoning every site that fails a virtue test means giving all our playgrounds over to the Nazis, and I’m not sure I’m okay with continuing to do that.

So, my current answer to “Are you staying on Substack?” is “I don’t know.” If I do move, it won’t be immediately, because I do not have the bandwidth right now to sort out the details of doing so. If you are leaving, I respect that. At this exact moment, I’m probably leaning the most toward shutting down the paid subscriptions but keeping my activity here. But I’m not 100% there, and my feelings may change as I contemplate further.

In the meantime, I hope that readers will be willing to extend grace to all the creators who are, once again, having to perform these calculations of finance, ethics, and comfort on behalf of ourselves and our careers.

Wrapping up 2023 (and good riddance to it) and looking forward to 2024 (please, please let it be an improvement on that which precedes it).

Also, despite the microphone you can see sitting in front of me, my computer was apparently using its interna…

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Dear Chris, Hamish & Jairaj:

We’re asking a very simple question that has somehow been made complicated: Why are you platforming and monetizing Nazis? 

According to a piece written by Substack publisher Jonathan M. Katz and published by The Atlantic on November 28, this platform has a Nazi problem: 

“Some Substack newsletters by Nazis and white nationalists have thousands or tens of thousands of subscribers, making the platform a new and valuable tool for creating mailing lists for the far right. And many accept paid subscriptions through Substack, seemingly flouting terms of service that ban attempts to ‘publish content or fund initiatives that incite violence based on protected classes’...Substack, which takes a 10 percent cut of subscription revenue, makes money when readers pay for Nazi newsletters.”

As Patrick Casey, a leader of a now-defunct neo-Nazi group who is banned on nearly every other social platform except Substack, wrote on here in 2021: “I’m able to live comfortably doing something I find enjoyable and fulfilling. The cause isn’t going anywhere.” Several Nazis and white supremacists including Richard Spencer not only have paid subscriptions turned on but have received Substack “Bestseller” badges, indicating that they are making at a minimum thousands of dollars a year.

From our perspective as Substack publishers, it is unfathomable that someone with a swastika avatar, who writes about “The Jewish question,” or who promotes Great Replacement Theory, could be given the tools to succeed on your platform. And yet you’ve been unable to adequately explain your position. 

In the past you have defended your decision to platform bigotry by saying you “make decisions based on principles not PR” and “will stick to our hands-off approach to content moderation.” But there’s a difference between a hands-off approach and putting your thumb on the scale. We know you moderate some content, including spam sites and newsletters written by sex workers. Why do you choose to promote and allow the monetization of sites that traffic in white nationalism? 

Your unwillingness to play by your own rules on this issue has already led to the announced departures of several prominent Substackers, including Rusty Foster and Helena Fitzgerald. They follow previous exoduses of writers, including Substack Pro recipient Grace Lavery and Jude Ellison S. Doyle, who left with similar concerns. 

As journalist Casey Newton told his more than 166,000 Substack subscribers after Katz’s piece came out: “The correct number of newsletters using Nazi symbols that you host and profit from on your platform is zero.” 

We, your publishers, want to hear from you on the official Substack newsletter. Is platforming Nazis part of your vision of success? Let us know—from there we can each decide if this is still where we want to be.

Signed, 

Substackers Against Nazis

I feel quite confident in the base assertion that it does, and has, because I’ve seen it in action on people who aren’t as deeply invested in the IP as I am. I’ve watched videos of influencers who are only surface-level conversant with Star Wars be moved to tears by Yoda’s holocron. I’ve seen parents who thought they were only there for their kids get wrapped up in the experience. I’ve seen people who arrived in civilian clothes buy garments on the ship or in Batuu so they could feel more a part of things.

And I’ve seen people who were already Star Wars fans go absolutely feral. In a good way! But the response that this experience has from people who fully give themselves over to it is astonishing.

So. It works. The Starcruiser is a phenomenal example of what immersive experiences can be. Now: Let’s unpack how and why.

(Disclaimer: This is long, but I don’t want to cut it into multiple posts or forego having pictures, so if your email cuts it off, please do open it in a browser or the Substack app!)

(Second disclaimer: It may be useful, if you are unfamiliar with the Starcruiser experience, to first read my recaps, beginning here. And if you want raw emotion rather than analysis, please see my immediate post-voyage post Together As One).

Who am I, to analyze this?

A bit about me and my day job, for readers who don’t already know me: I work for Plato Learning, a company that creates mythology-themed summer camps for rising 2nd-9th graders. It’s (heavily) inspired by the Percy Jackson novels, and though I hadn’t actually read those before they hired me, I’ve always been a big mythology buff, so it was an easy on-ramp. My first job with the company was as the Quest Director in Richmond, a role responsible for pulling off each week’s big story event — but it’s also a performance role in and of itself, since I was with the kids all week and had to facilitate the movement between “regular camp stuff” and “story stuff”. I moved from that position into the Story Department, first as a Quest writer, then assisting with research and training, and now as a full-time story editor and worldbuilder.

All of which is to say: I do this kind of work, though on a smaller scale and with a much smaller budget.

So, any time I go to an immersive experience — everything from the haunted houses at Howl-O-Scream to the Bridgerton Experience to something as utterly epic as the Starcruiser — part of my mind is trying to see how the cogs fit together. Part of my mind is trying to figure out how it’s happening and why it works (if it does), trying to see the psychology and biology and sociology underpinning the end product — and hoping I can figure out how to adapt those things for the peculiar constraints I work with.

Because I just love thinking about it! Immersive experiences are such a fascinating mix of the physical, the verbal, the imaginative, the ephemeral, all blended together. Different levels of experience can control for different kinds of variables, but for me, the interpersonal touch is always what will make the biggest difference, moreso than the set dressings or technology (though those are, admittedly, a huge help in priming your audience, as I’ll discuss below).

That focus on the human connection likely derives, at least in part, from my Shakespeare training. Working at the Blackfriars Playhouse, I saw for years how much it’s possible to convince an audience to believe in magic and transformation, even when you have a bare wooden stage. If an actor says “Well, this is the forest of Arden” with enough conviction, you’ll believe it. You’ll think you hear birds and smell leaves.

Part of what creates that magic in the Blackfriars is the shared space between actor and audience. The universal lighting removes the barriers that a proscenium stage constructs, and I very much believe that assists in transporting the audience into the world of the play — and it creates opportunity for magnificent connection between performer and observer.

Immersive experiences, of course, erase that boundary between actor and audience entirely, because the audience member is no longer an observer, but a participant, a critical part in the story-making.

It all makes me think of Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy-stories” and what he calls Secondary Belief. Great stories do not, truly, suspend disbelief; they create inside the audience a secondary world, that they can believe in just as strongly as they believe in the real world. (I disagree with Tolkien in his assertion that drama is the enemy of fantasy, as illustrated above.) And I think of Neil Gaiman, writing in the Sandman issue “A Midsummer Night's Dream” that “things need not have happened to be true.”

Powerful words and live theatre have the ability to create that secondary belief, to create true things that never happened. But immersive experiences can have even more power in that regard. It’s not a matter of technology and money and glamour, either; ask any tabletop gamer who’s had an exquisitely moving experience, their hearts in their throats, with nothing more than pencil, paper, and dice in front of them.

The key to it is the interaction, the involvement — not merely a reader or an observer of story, but a participant. When you have fully involved yourself in an immersive story, those things happened. It is emotionally real to you.

Okay. Enough of me and story-making philosophy. Why do I think the Starcruiser is so very good at what it does?

Psychological Programming

Everything about the Starcruiser experience is designed, immaculately, to manipulate you. I don’t use that word in a negative way; it’s genius, what’s happening. Your emotions are being engineered with exquisite precision from the moment you embark.

The whole entry procedure is a brilliant design. How you enter a world is a huge part of any immersive experience — the reception desk and Manderley Bar at Sleep No More, the Instagram-bait wisteria walk at the Bridgerton experience, even the paths that take you into a haunted house — it’s all meant to transition you, mentally and emotionally as well as physically, into another realm. On the Starcruiser, after checking in, you move through very tight, close, deep-gray concrete hallways into the “shuttle” elevator, which is still small, but has more lights and color and different textures. No longer concrete; now you’re getting the gloss and sheen introduced, as well as the first bit of what you’ll come to recognize as the Halcyon color palette.

And then, you move from those enclosed spaces into the absolute glory of the Atrium, so bright and enormous. Coming in in small groups, apart from being logistically easier for crew to manage, also means your first experience of the Atrium is open rather than crowded. And it’s breathtaking. It is meant to awe you, and you’re primed for it because you were in those tighter, gray, deliberately-less-dazzling spaces first. It’s almost sensory deprivation, stripping away the mundane world before inundating you with the imaginative one.

This gets paralleled in the trip to Batuu. Great care is taken to make that move seamless, so you never need leave the imaginative realm you’ve entered and been living in for almost a full day at that point. (This is why I find it ridiculous that anyone would leave Batuu and go, like, ride Runaway Railway during their Batuu day; don’t break the illusion for yourself!) The transport bay in the Halcyon has fun travel posters (which I would love copies of to hang on my walls) for the ship’s ports of call, and it’s another fairly tight space. You’re moving back out of the expansiveness of the Halcyon into a shuttle. This one isn’t an elevator -- it’s, well, it’s a tram. But it is flush against the transport bay, as with a jetway at an airport, so you never see the mundane world — it’s not like waiting for a bus outside a regular Disney resort.

The shuttle has a very different vibe than the transport elevators, and you’re in it for longer — 5-7 minutes. It bumps along amiably, and it puts you out in Docking Bay 9 — another seamless transition. Here, too, you walk through tighter corridors first, though they have more character than the concrete entryways to the Halcyon — the stony walls aren’t uniform, there are planets, the color palette is warmer. You’re being psychologically prepared for what Black Spire Outpost is going to look and feel like, and how it’s different from where you’ve just been. Those tight walls likewise open up into a much larger space — one of the largest open areas in BSO, I believe, following probably the Resistance Base (though that’s broken up by trees and comms towers and such) and Docking Bay 5, where the Falcon is. The massive scale of the TIE Echelon assists with this transition as well.

And this use of the space to prime your responses happens all over the ship. Each room has its own vibes, though all united with the overall look of the Halcyon. Lighting changes at different times of day are subtle, but serve to guide energy. The open air of the climate simulator is a place of truth; the cargo bay’s close quarters create a space for the clandestine.

The psychological programming happens not just in space but in time, too. The way the schedule moves the participants is a finely-tuned instrument in so many ways. Your opportunities for free time are balanced with scheduled events; large scenes are balanced with smaller, more intimate scenes. You begin with more room in your schedule, and then by the end of Day Two (as you saw in my recaps), you’re moving at a hectic pace.

What really impressed me, though, was the scaffolding of the interactive experiences over the course of the two days. Bridge training was a particularly good example of this. In the first stage, in your training, you’re learning with training wheels on. It’s all a simulation. You’re not actually going to damage anything if you’re bad at it. But then, in the second stage (and the second half of the training session), it becomes real! The stakes go from low to medium — you’re still not engaging an enemy, really, but there’s a challenge and a sense of danger. But then, whatever your Bridge event is on Day 2, the stakes are then very much heightened! We’re not dealing with asteroids anymore; now there are TIE fighters, and there aren’t enough of us to deal with it, but we have to, and then we do, and it feels glorious. We’ve been prepared for this moment by what we did before, and that makes the payoff so, so sweet.

The overall movement of plot, too, helps with this management of time. Your datapad messages on Day 1 set up and fold into your Batuu missions -- which then unfold during Day 2 on the ship, often where you’ll start to see actual objects that you only saw virtually while on Batuu. It all fits together in a way that assists with creating that sense of secondary reality. Actions have tangible outcomes.

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Then there’s the aural atmosphere: Okay, yes, from a worldbuilding perspective, it might seem odd and not fully in-universe that symphonic background music starts playing at key moments, but it also damn well works. Hearing the strains of the Force theme fading in while Yoda is talking to you? It plucks every heartstring there is to pluck. Hearing the triumphant music during the final fireworks? Yup, that just underlines the sense of success and victory.

Gaya’s music fits into a different kind of aural atmosphere: her songs have hidden meanings, related to the Hayananeya and the coaxium missions — but they also serve a role in the plot. You don’t just hear them at dinner; they come back.

And then there are the subtle background noises. Each room has its own sound (and scent, actually). The hum of engines is with you almost everywhere. The Engineering room has steam hisses and other mechanical noises. The climate simulator is almost silent but for the fans overhead. The ship’s announcements have their own intonation. All of it wraps you up and makes the sensory experience more complete. And, as I mentioned, that’s not just flavor — it also gets used for story. That moment when the noises you’ve become so used to that they’ve almost disappeared… actually disappear. It makes it shocking. It was truly such an immensely effective moment of escalating stakes. My heart plummeted into my stomach. That is the effect of deft use of psychological programming.

Agency and the Bespoke Experience

The manipulation of time also plays into a different aspect of what takes this particular immersive experience so far beyond others of its type, and that’s the ability that the Starcruiser has to give every participant a bespoke experience.

This is, truly, a pretty astonishing thing to do, considering how finely-tuned the whole thing is! There’s such a trick in creating room for spontaneity and surprises within the boxes of What Has To Happen, and to creating the illusion of control in participants. The interplay between the datapad communications and what happens “on the ground”, as it were, drives a lot of that. The branching paths are genius, and if you really commit to them, so many wonderful things unfold. (Again, this is the sort of behind-the-scenes document I would just die to see. I want the map of the experience. I want to know how those branches are engineered.)

A lot of it happens, I think, through the time management — and crowd management. Structurally, I think they do a great job balancing large group scenes with the more intimate 12-15 person scenes and with the opportunities (not guaranteed, but so much more meaningful because they aren’t) for one-on-one conversations, like I had with Saja Tycer.

What individualizes the experience are those smaller scenes. Those are the things that both further and reward commitment to the branching paths. That’s especially true for the personal invites to the meetings that don’t even show up on your schedule — Captain Keevan’s meeting on Day 1, the “Gaya fan club” on Day 2. They derive from your tasks — from the places where the story asks you to take agency, to make a choice that will have an effect on what else you do. It may open a path up, or it may shut it down. And they feel special, making you feel that you’re “in on something” — which, of course, you are! It’s another deft bit of staging that enhances your investment and engagement with the unfolding plot.

Then, as I mentioned, the experience gets further individualized within those group tasks. What role you play in the heist (or sabotage, or counter-sabotage, depending on your path) is something only a few people are going to be with you on, and parts of it may be just you! You have to act, or things might go wrong — and I’ve heard of a few moments when a participant did something truly unexpected, like wandering away with the Hayananeya stone, and the performers had to somehow get it back on track! (I think anyone who’s worked in an interactive environment has had at least one heart-stopping moment where an audience member’s unanticipated choice Had To Be Dealt With in one way or another. It’s another skill you learn and a possibility you have to get comfortable with!).

The point is that every choice you make is supported by the overall system to further your personal story. That agency is what takes an immersive experience into the realm where things become emotionally and psychologically real. At my job, we often say that we want every kid to go home talking about something amazing they did, not something amazing they watched happen. Even the biggest scenes on the Starcruiser have some element of that, as you’re cheering or doing call-and-response, but the more intimate scenes, or individualized moments inside larger scenes, are what make the true impact. Those are the things you go home talking about.

I also got the sense that some tasks and sub-paths were specifically designed for varying ages or engagement levels. I might be wrong about this, but it felt like there were definitely some broad-strokes tasks that were designed to appeal to kids and to be both easy and a delight for them to carry out. Hiding Chewie all over the ship, for instance. That’s a very simple directive. Anyone can understand it — whether kids or the adults less-familiar/comfortable-with role-play. There’s not a steep on-ramp to taking part in that activity.

Similarly, Noah mentioned feeling like the Engineering meeting he ended up in was also geared to appeal to kids, because it was so physical, interacting with all the components of the Engineering room. And let me tell you, kids. love. pushing. buttons. The tactile nature of those tasks is going to be an immediate draw. It heightens that sense of “I am actively doing something,” but without presenting too great a challenge. (This is why children’s museums are, on the whole, more hands-on than museums intended for adults -- though that’s changing, as more and more museum educators realize how powerful interactive experiences are).

Other tasks felt like they had a slightly higher on-ramp. The Hayananeya heist, for example, was complex. It had a lot of moving parts happening all at once, and it was, in large part, a social task! (You’d be rolling Intellect and Presence, in FFG ttrpg terms, rather than Agility or Brawn. Cunning and Willpower could be used with either, I expect.) Coming up with distraction techniques, talking our way into or out of trouble, running interference — those are all things that ask a bit more of the participant than shuffling Chewie around or pushing buttons in Engineering. It’s obviously not that a younger participant, or someone with less role-playing experience, can’t take part or enjoy it, but it did just sort of feel like there was a slightly different target audience for different sub-paths — and that struck me as very clever and well-considered. Again, it furthers the individualization and thus the participant’s emotional investment.

Now, the performers are, of course, not going to truly let you fail, in either kind of task. The Captain isn’t going to intervene in the mayhem in the Atrium before she’s supposed to. Lenka’s not going to walk onto the Bridge before she’s supposed to. Nothing you do in the Engineering room will actually cause the ship to explode. But you feel like that could happen, and that’s the important thing for crafting the bespoke experience!

The Performers

So, so, so much of this experience depends on the skill of the performers. I’ve said it before, but interactive performing and performing on a stage are very different skillsets. A person can be good at both! But being good at one is definitely no guarantee of being good at the other. I, for example, think I’m a pretty good interactive performer, but I’m aggressively mediocre on the stage — and I have definitely seen people who were excellent on stage utterly choke when trying to conduct an improvised conversation in-character.

The Starcruiser performers are world-class. They are keeping so many things spinning all at the same time, never missing a beat. They have to hold character for an incredibly long time in a very hectic atmosphere — but beyond that, they have to use their skills to create intimacy, very quickly, with very many people, in the middle of that hectic atmosphere.

One large contributing factor is eye contact. I’m gonna get real nerdy here for a few paragraphs: Eye contact does powerful work in creating a bond, and the truly wonderful thing is, it doesn’t just draw in the performer and the participant that they’re directly focusing on. When we see other people having intense eye contact, we are also drawn in. Our brains recognize that something interesting is happening there, and maybe we want to know about it.

This is one of the reasons the Blackfriars Playhouse works so well, and there’s a lot of neurology behind it. A friend of mine, Lia Razak, actually did her Master’s thesis on this topic, and I had the joy of being one of her readers. It taught me so much about the science behind something I felt instinctively to be true. As it turns out, eyes are critical to many of the social cues humans have evolved.

Timing is also a key part of this — knowing how long to make eye contact. The sweet spot, according to Lia’s research, is between four and seven seconds. Less time, and your medial prefrontal cortex doesn’t get engaged in the right ways; more time, and it starts to feel awkward. That medial prefrontal cortex is the part of the brain responsible for deciphering context, decision-making, and emotional regulation, among other things — all components of social interactions, and all things that the Starcruiser is, in so many delightful ways, deliberately manipulating. It is, essentially, the core of social cognition in the brain, essential to successful immersive experiences — and eye contact is an extremely effective way to activate it.

For the participants, most of that is reactionary; we’re not aware that our mPFC is being activated, but we behave based on what it’s sorting out. The performers, though, have to make more conscious decisions about who to activate, when, and in what ways. I’m going to quote Lia here, again speaking about Blackfriars actors: “Using their social brains, the actors must recognize and decode opportunities for eye contact, understand and predict the possible outcomes, and behave according both to their predictions and to the actual outcome (which may, of course, be different from the prediction).”

Of course, neither the Blackfriars nor Starcruiser performers are (probably) thinking of this in terms of activation the medial prefrontal cortex. But they’re thinking about what will work on each audience member or participant, how to get to them, how to elicit a response. And they have to do it quickly and many, many times, and in a way that feels genuine and makes each participant feel unique and valued. It’s a lot!

The performers also have to balance people of different levels of engagement. They want to reach out to the reticent without frightening or overwhelming them, but they also don’t want to let someone running around with Main Character Syndrome pull focus and detract from someone else’s experience. Not all participants have the ability to self-regulate. Knowing when to step in is a huge part of this experience, but so is knowing when to step back — but not everyone has that skill, so sometimes the performers have to have it for them. It’s an extremely delicate line to walk, and it’s a lot of responsibility, managing so many experiences all at once.

Social Bonding

One of the coolest things, I think, about an immersive experience that is also interactive in this way (and not all are) is how it promotes social interaction and community.

While many of the tasks on the Starcruiser are things you can complete on your own — usually the things your datapad prompts you to do, on the ship or on Batuu — many, many others can only be completed as part of a community. Bridge training and the Bridge events require many hands. Some things only work if two people in different places do something at the same time. The complexity of the Hayananeya heist required so many people, doing different things but part of the same plan.

In all of my smaller meetings — with the Captain on Day 1, with Raithe and Gaya as we became part of their crew, opening the Holocron — the characters said the same words: “Look around.” They told us to look at each other, to notice who was in the room, sharing this space with us. On one level, that’s part of the story: these are people you can trust with the secrets of this plan. But on another level, it was forcing us to connect with each other. It was giving us something to talk about if we met up in the Atrium or on Batuu or in the Sublight Lounge. It was connecting us, sometimes in deeply moving ways.

All those components of psychological programming that bring us into the world and manipulate our emotions along the way also prime us for social bonding. Shared risk, shared danger, shared victory — even when those things are simulated, they are emotionally real for the participants, and they are states which promote and facilitate connection between otherwise unconnected individuals. So too, problem-solving as a group, or having to step outside your comfort zone in the company of others. (I saw this all the time with leadership programming at the ASC; we threw total strangers together and made them stage scenes. Awkward at first, but over the course of just a few days, I saw them open up to and bond with each other.)

Beautifully, those connections aren’t just limited to the people you actually experience the immersive experience with. The Starcruiser community goes far beyond that. Much of the joy of immersive theatre is in discussing that experience during and afterwards — and when you discuss it with people who have also had the experience, it goes deeper. You know what questions to ask; you can find out about the paths not taken. If you go into the Starcruiser groups on Facebook, you’ll see so much of this, people sharing the choices they made, the scenes they got to experience, and delightedly finding out how much else there was going on.

I can look at the Starcruiser community and know how much power it has to create bonds. People have made friends, started podcasts, organized outside meet-ups. And the swag! So many passengers, especially those who have been more than once, bring their own trinkets, artwork, and 3d-printed tokens to exchange or just plain give out to others. (This reflects another power that immersive experiences have: to spur a flourishing of creativity in the participants).

So… Why did it fail?

This question, I think, is plaguing all of us who love the Starcruiser. Despite doing all those things so very right, despite being an exemplar of what immersive experiences can do and why they are so important, why is the Starcruiser being closed down?

Well, the short answer is capitalism, of course, and I shall try to keep my grumbling about corporate decisions to a minimum — but I will say that this feels very much of a piece with movie and tv studios yanking from platforms anything that isn’t an immediate overwhelming success, or just not ever distributing something in the first place because it’s cheaper not to, even having made the damn thing. The slash and burn mentality of so many modern corporations is harmful to art, as is the utterly unrealistic demand for constant, never-ending exponential growth. I do believe we’re reaching a crisis point for all of that, so here is where I’ll throw a little plug to support the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes.

Anyway.

I expect there are all sorts of operational finances at play that I will not even begin to speculate on. But Disney Parks had to know that going in, yes? They still opened it. So why didn’t it perform in a way that justified its cost? Why didn’t more people realize just how special and transformative this experience could be for them?

From what I can see, the marketing absolutely failed the product, in so many ways.

The marketing failed to showcase this as an experience, not just “Star Wars hotel.” That should’ve been prominent long before any of the designs came out and people started complaining about there being no windows, no pool, and so forth. To market effectively, you have to tell people what a thing is. If you don’t, they’ll be disappointed, even angry, if what you give them doesn’t match what they expected. (Ask any author whose book cover accidentally made people think something was a different genre or tone than it is).

The marketing also made some of the coolest things look really gimmicky and silly. As I said of both the Bridge training and the lightsaber training in my recaps, I did not think those were going to be highlights of the experience for me. I was halfway wondering if I could skip them (before I joined FB groups that made it clear I absolutely should not). They were made to look just like games, not like an essential part of the storyline that each passenger gets to live out.

The biggest marketing flaw, though, in my opinion? Was in the failure to sell the characters as a major draw.

Oh, they dropped some one-paragraph descriptions of them, fairly soon before opening. They promised Rey and Chewbacca, I believe. But they didn’t do nearly enough to communicate to potential guests that they would come to love these characters every bit as much as they love the characters from the movies — and that they’d have a much deeper and more meaningful experience with them. This isn’t just a quick meet-and-greet in the parks; this is becoming a part of canon yourself because you are interacting with other canon characters, whose individual journeys are compelling and multifaceted, and who will look into your eyes and see you, too.

Big, big miss there.

I can think of some other financial problems: I don’t think Disney gave the Starcruiser enough time to succeed (another problem running concurrent with many tv shows today, canceled before they can find their audience). Opening this experience in March 2022 was… a choice. Yes, the parks had been open again for a while, and yes, many people wanted to consider the pandemic “over”, but in the spring of March 2022, large gatherings like sci-fi and fantasy conventions were only just starting back up. Not everyone was ready for being in crowd again yet.

Then, I think many people who wanted to go to the Starcruiser just plain didn’t have enough time to save up for it. I’m a lunatic who started saving as soon as I heard the project was announced — not when the price was announced, when the project was — but I am, demonstrably, not normal. If someone only started saving when the thing actually opened, 18 months might not have been long enough. I know so many people who were intending to go in 2024 or 2025. I was — Noah and I originally planned for February 2024 and were just waiting for bookings to open.

And that’s another flaw -- only allowing bookings six months in advance. I am not someone who cruises (being terrified of open water), but as I understand it, you can book cruises much, much farther in advance than that. 

So, I suspect those were all contributing factors.

But mostly, I choose to blame the marketing.

How could they fix that?

A lot of my work is marketing-adjacent, and I’m not going to pretend I know more than I do when it comes to the broad spectrum of possibilities. It feels like Disney missed a lot of opportunities to spotlight the fanatics that did come out of the Starcruiser absolutely loving it — the people who started podcasts and such. They relied on traditional influencers, many of whom were, well, lukewarm at best on the experience and obsessed with its price.

The number one thing I would fix, though? Is what I said about not selling potential guests on the characters.

The same way that a movie needs a trailer, this experience needed a preview that did more than just show the space. It needed something that promised the story.

There are a lot of Halcyon tie-ins in broader Star Wars media, but not in things that are easily shareable or easily consumable for a wide audience. Not everyone who’s a Star Wars fan reads all the books and comics (though The Princess and the Scoundrel and the Halcyon Legacy comics are both excellent).

They needed videos.

Animated, I think, so as not to promise the look of any one performer (especially since, at the time they’d have needed to start producing these, they may not have hired them yet). And so much is already happening in Star Wars animation, between the Lego shorts, the Tales of the Jedi, Visions… It seems like that would be a natural fit. Put them on Disney+, but also put them on YouTube so they’re easily shareable.

A series of vignettes, showcasing each character just prior to this voyage. Nothing that would give away spoilers -- but things that would provide hints. We’d see Captain Keevan, returning to her first ship, but aware that the galaxy is a different place now. We’d see Lenka Mok and SK-620 doing something, obviously for the Resistance (since that becomes apparent almost immediately, at Muster, anyway), but we wouldn’t know what they were doing. We’d see Raithe and Gaya learning that something they need is on that ship -- but we wouldn’t find out what or how they planned to get it. We’d see Lieutenant Croy, desperate to prove his worth to his superiors -- mirrored with Sammie, desperate to prove that he can make a difference in the galaxy. We’d see the Sajas and their nomadic lifestyle, deciding that the Halcyon is a place where they could both share and receive knowledge.

That, I think, is the most powerful change that could’ve been made in how the Starcruiser experience was promoted to the public. Show the stories. Show the characters that passengers come to love. Hint at the plots that you’ll get swept up in.

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Wrapping it up

I confess, I don’t really know how to end this post. In a professional aspect, I’m going to be trying to take so many of the lessons presented to me by the Starcruiser and adapt them for the work that I do (insomuch as I can, considering I work with vastly different affordances and constraints). But that feels a cold ending to leave you, Dear Reader.

I suppose I’ll finish by going back to what I said at the beginning: I love immersive experiences because they call on so many different pieces of you. Mind, body, heart, soul — when done well, the experience plucks on each of these to create a beautiful symphony of experience. And the Starcruiser does it very, very well.

And I believe that is valuable and important. These experiences reach something inside of us that the vagaries of the modern world often make inaccessible or distract us from. They let us play, they let us feel, they let us learn about ourselves. They give us a safe space to explore powerful emotions; they call upon themes and narratives that are critically important to our sociopolitical landscape; they open us up to further imagination.

Things need not have happened to be true. And what happens in an immersive environment has the capacity to be gloriously, transformatively, brilliantly true.

We need that.

• Day One, Part 1: Arrival and Exploration

• Day One, Part 2: Well That Escalated Quickly

• Day Two, Part 1: Batuu

• Day Two, Part 2: The Heist

6:00pm: Noah and I went to grab a quick drink in the Sublight Lounge, and he filled me in on what he’d been doing — something to do with the datatapes we’d collected on Batuu.

As we were getting our drinks, we heard a commotion in the Atrium. We emerged to see Croy and his troopers unfurling First Order banners over the railings, celebrating their takeover of the ship. In the scene that followed the Captain and Lenka, tensions were definitely ratcheting up very high. You could also, then, see TIE fighters circling the Halcyon through the Atrium’s viewports. (An awful lot of them, it seemed, for this one vessel! But I guess we did sort of mangle their Star Destroyer earlier…)

Afterward, I happened to be standing right by Sandro, who was very distressed. He’s a lover, not a fighter. He was with Ouannii, and I suggested that if anyone could make music to help bridge divides and set things right, it was them. I apparently unwittingly handed him a cue he needed, because he then invited everyone around us to help him work on lyrics for a song. I stepped away, though, because I only had a few minutes before… 

6:30pm: I had been invited to a special meeting down in the Lightsaber Training Pod. The blueshirt outside was asking everyone if they were here for the “advanced lightsaber training” and checking them against a list of the invitees. It’s very intimate — I think there were only about 12 of us in there. (They run this scene several times, I think, so more people than that experience it overall).

Inside, we find not only Saja Tycer, but SK-620 and Rey! I was so glad to see that SK was safe. Rey was so wonderful with this one little girl in particular, giving her the MacGuffin to hold on to during this scene. Saja Tycer introduced us as “the students I’ve been telling you about” and then told us that we’d found a truly incredible Jedi relic down on Batuu: a holocron.

None of us could open it alone. But all of us together, using the Force, got it to open.

And this was another part that was for 11-year-old Cass. The girl who used to stand on her head and try to move objects with her mind. And yes, there’s a metric ton of atmospheric manipulation happening in that room. The lights, the background music, the sound… it’s all perfectly designed to elicit a huge emotional reaction. And it works!

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When we managed to get the holocron open, it revealed a message from Master Yoda. It’s… a pretty incredible holographic effect, and the speech…

Yoda told us we had to keep the holocron safe, because it had powerful information, generations’ worth of knowledge and wisdom, and if it fell into the wrong hands, all would be lost. “Those of you who follow the path of the Light, hope to the galaxy will you bring. Your name I know not. Your spirit? Hmmm, yes, that I feel. Strong is your connection with the Force. Know you, I feel I do. But, should never we meet: May the Force be with you, always.”

And that made me cry. It’s making me cry just thinking about it now. This plotline wasn’t, really, perfectly on-point for Lady Annazena… but, like I said… that was for 11-year-old Cass. And 11-year-old Cass lost her damn mind hearing Yoda say that she was strong in the Force.

And then Rey made me cry. And then Saja Tycer made me cry. Just… tears everywhere. (Look, I am a highly emotional creature, and I will never be sorry for that. I love that the Starcruiser leaned into this earnest, heart-first storytelling as well as the drama and hijinks. So much media today seems afraid of earnestness.)

But then Rey gave us a plan. She knew that Kylo Ren would be coming for that holocron, and she told SK-620 that we could use that to distract him. Saja Tycer then swore us all to secrecy. Rey told us that we could gather others that we trusted and tell them “There is hope.”

(If you want to see this scene, you can search “Yoda holocron Starcruiser” on YouTube; I was not recording. I was far, far too much in the moment to have touched my phone. That was actually the case for most of the rest of the evening.)

6:45pm: After leaving the pod (weeping), I got a message from Saja Tycer reiterating that we cannot gossip about the holocron. I didn’t even tell Noah. Anyone could be eavesdropping! (I did tell him that SK was safe, though, because I knew he was worried about them).

I did not have much time to wallow in that emotion, though, because…

7pm: Secret bridge meeting with Raithe! This was another intimate group. Not even everyone from the heist was in on this. Just 15 of us, getting the coaxium onboard.

This was absolutely wild and so much fun. It builds on the Bridge training from earlier — more on that in the analysis — but it brought my energy right back up! Raithe told us that, well, he really wanted the coaxium for Gaya and Ryloth, but if we don’t get out of this blockade, Ryloth gets nothing. So, we could use a little coaxium to bust out of there, and Raithe promised that we, his crew, would be able to slip away scot-free! Perfect.

So then we had to help Hondo Ohnaka dock and drop off the coaxium! This felt like such wonderful payoff of the Batuu Smuggler’s Run mission. That meant getting Hondo’s ship past all those TIE fighters. We had people at Systems, Weapons, and Shields. I’m not sure if anyone was on Loaders? I don’t think so. We also had to convince Watch to hand over controls to us! He didn’t seem to trust Raithe, so Raithe put the Bridge in the hands of a teenager, Clark.

Noah and I worked Shields, our favorite station. Between the two of us, we were covering about half the table at one point! But a blueshirt came over to assist. Raithe went to everyone, encouraging them. He put his arm around me, told me I was doing a great job, expressed astonishment that I hadn’t done this before. It was so heartening!

Then, just when things were looking really dire, Poe Dameron showed up with reinforcements! They helped get the TIEs off of Hondo’s back so that the coaxium could be transferred to the Halcyon.

Once we did it, Gaya came on the bridge and thanked us all for our help. She gave another great speech about the liberation of Ryloth and how much we were doing to help her people.

And then… Lenka came in and wanted to know what the heck we were all doing on the Bridge. When she asked, “Who authorized this?” several of us yelled back, “Clark!” Which… was in fact accurate! For certain parameters of that term. Raithe flirted with her pretty adorably as they sorted things out.

7:15pm: Then followed a solid 55 minutes of hiding the coaxium around the ship! This was hilarious and so wild.

The First Order intercepted the cargo, but Raithe stole some back using Gaya’s acoustic concert as a distraction. We knew we needed that coaxium to break our way out of the blockade!

Then we had to shuffle it across the Atrium, using a dance line to cover up our actions. Like. We seriously conga-lined highly volatile coaxium across the Atrium. Raithe hid it in one of Gaya’s “makeup bags”, which he then handed to a little girl (who went so wide-eyed!), but Croy realized Gaya wasn’t leaving with as many bags as she brought in! So we had to keep hiding it!

Let the dance party continue! We managed to get it into another corner of the Atrium, but then we weren’t sure how to get it where it needed to be.

Then, without even realizing we’d gotten datapad messages from Raithe asking us to keep Croy distracted, Noah and I did exactly that, simply because we wanted to mess with him. So Noah started commenting on his jodhpurs, and that started a whole conversation about his style and the First Order’s depressingly monochromatic uniforms. I told him he ought to try something in blue, a nice bright and high saturation shade, cerulean or azure, because it would brighten up his face and bring out his eyes. Croy found that pretty amusing, announcing to everyone: “Lady Anna has been noticing my eyes!” Croy tried to convince Noah to join the Order so that he too could have very fine jodhpurs.

Somewhere in here, I think, was also when Noah asked a stormtrooper if he could boop the stormtrooper’s nose. He’d been wanting to do so all voyage. I honestly can’t remember exactly when that happened, though, but it was part of another distraction technique.

Then I had to let the Captain know that we did in fact still have the coaxium we needed, so I swept her up, telling her that “We need some help with Gaya’s makeup bag. It’s, ah, a bit volatile. You know how delicate cosmetics can be!” And I brought her over to the corner where we still had the coaxium in the bag.

The Captain decided to help cover for us, if only to keep Raithe from causing even more trouble. She sent us to find Raithe, and we looked everywhere, on different decks, before realizing that… he was on the bridge again. (I have no idea why. I think there was a 7:45ish bridge session too? But no idea what they were doing or why Raithe was there. Maybe getting Gaya herself off the ship and past the blockade?). So the Captain told me and Noah to go intercept him when he came out, which we did. I looped my arm through Raithe’s and escorted him neatly across the Atrium to the Captain, where they worked out a deal for Raithe to keep helping until we could get not just a shuttle but the entire Halcyon out of the blockade.

It really amuses me that, because I’d interacted more with Raithe and the Captain than I did anyone else, they both trusted me and both kept using me as a go-between to keep an eye on and/or fetch the other. Everyone heavily involved with these plotlines ended up with an individualized role, and that was mine!

So then we needed to get the coaxium down to the engineering room. With coaxium being so unstable, we had to do it swiftly but gently, and unfortunately, Deck 4 was crawling with First Order. So we piled into the elevator with Raithe and some others, then went to go find Sammie and pass the coaxium off to him. Raithe absented himself to go do some slicing, and… we finally went to dinner.

8:10pm: Okay, we were very late to dinner. But in our defense! We scoped it out prior to 8pm, when we were looking for Raithe, and there was a huge line to check in, so… why join that line when we still had work to do?

Dinner was lovely. There’s no dinner show on Night 2, but the theme is essentially a foodie tour around the galaxy. With each course, a chef explains what you’re eating, and the lights and music changed to reflect each of the planets that the dishes came from. (I desperately want that music for background ambience.) There was still some plot, though! Croy showed up, took the Captain’s seat at her table, was extraordinarily rude and specieist to her when she came in.

At the end of dinner, our server handed me part of a letter, saying I must have dropped it. It was part of a message from Lenka about Sammie and SK! We only had part of it, but I kept it secret because the people asking about it weren’t people I recognized from the Captain’s secret meetings, and I was pretty sure at least one couple was working with the Order. Better safe than sorry.

We left dinner a few minutes early, because we knew that the final scene would start at 9:30, but….

9:20pm: Shipwide alert! I was very glad we were already on our way out of dinner (and had paid for our drinks as soon as we got them!). We bounded up to the atrium very swiftly.

9:30pm: This is the finale! So much happened. Honestly, to get the full plot, go watch a video on YT, because I will never get it all straight.

We went to our muster station and were told we had to sit down. But no one around us was sitting, so after a minute we stood back up — and were immediately ushered down again, at which point we realized, oh, that means something big is going to happen right here. And it did.

As the conflict unfolded, we had troopers firing over our heads, then Chewbacca came in with his bowcaster, then our friends (the Captain, Lenka, Raithe, Kyr) were using the muster podiums to rally the Resistance side of the battle. It got so chaotic! Croy was rallying his people yelling “For the Order!” and Lenka and Kyr had us shouting “Ignite the spark, light the fire!” and “Together as one!”

The battle between Kylo Ren and Rey is really something to watch. Seeing a lightsaber battle with practical effects is so cool. It all happens in the upper gallery, which helps to hide some of how they do it, but if you’re just letting yourself enjoy the spectacle, it’s near-seamless. At one point, Kylo started to bring down the massive chandelier in the Atrium, right on top of us all, but Rey stopped him. Kylo gave instructions for Croy and the stormtroopers to, well, literally murder everyone present — even the First Order sympathizers in the group!

Eventually, SK used the Yoda hologram distraction. Rey pretended to flee the ship with the holocron, drawing Kylo Ren after her — but she actually sent a decoy vessel! She came back to warn us that he would realize that soon, though, so we had to get out of there. SK-620 decided to go with Rey to join the Resistance — which was very sad for Lenka, their best friend! We got to see a very touching farewell between them.

Then, Lenka produced the necessary device to make our coaxium break us through the blockade — and it worked! Whew! The Captain took her ship back from Croy and put him and the troopers in custody, with help from Sammie. Then, after some speeches from Lenka and the Captain, we gathered for fireworks on the bridge.

After the closing fireworks, we managed to say goodbye and get selfies with Raithe, Kyr, and Tycer, though everyone else had disappeared. I was sorry to miss the Captain, particularly! But we got to have very nice moments with the folks we did get to say goodbye to. Raithe promised to follow up on our strategic alliance with Ryloth and the Tapani Sector!

9:55pm: We received a very bittersweet message from Lenka about letting SK go with Rey! I also got one one from Saja Tycer, thanking me for my part in everything.

We grabbed a last celebratory drink and went to see Sandro and Ouannii perform in the Crown of Corellia dining room. There were desserts and treats there, too, so we could’ve stayed longer, or we could’ve gone back to the Lounge, but Noah and I decided to head back to our cabin so we could just… savor and reflect. I’m a big fan of ending a night on a high note.

Day 3:

We woke up with the final hyperspace jump back to Chandrila, but didn’t get out of bed for quite a while. We were both just… utterly unwilling for it to end.

The Lady H still had a few surprises in store for us, though. We had farewell messages from some of those we’d helped, a last interaction with D3 on the room panel, and a message from D3 in the Atrium that made me cry. You could still see the effects of the previous night’s fight — including the chandelier, still dangling in the Atrium!

We had breakfast, wandered a bit. Said goodbye to the ship and took some last pictures.

And then we had to go.

I really cannot express how loath I was to leave that place.

Getting to live out a dream was just… indescribably amazing. I felt so fulfilled, so warmed, so much like I belonged. The whole thing is designed to heighten your emotions, and, wow, did it. There will be more on this in the analysis post, but… Immersive experiences are powerful. They have all sorts of psychological and physiological effects — so the drop you feel afterwards is very real. And they can be transformative. They can spark something in the participant that might otherwise have lain dormant. They can reinvigorate creativity. They can strengthen interpersonal bonds. They’re just… amazing, and that’s why I love them so much.

I’m so heartbroken that I’ll never be able to visit the Halcyon again. I actually thought about using the suitemate finder FB group and trying to find someone with a spare bunk, going again this month, but… The other thing is, I don’t think I would want to do it again so soon. In six months or a year, I think I could have a different enough experience. Right now, I don’t know. The original is so fresh in my mind, and those memories are so golden and shining… I wouldn’t want anything to supplant them.

I just wish I were going to have that chance, in six months or a year, or two years, or five.

But as I said before… I will hold out hope. Disney will do something with that building. I just hope they have the courage to re-tool and re-market the immersive experience in a way that’s sustainable, rather than gutting it for something easy but empty.

Anyway — That’s it for the recap! Next, I’ll be turning on my analytical brain and discussing why the Halcyon experience is just that good. It’s not luck; it’s craft, and I admire it so much.

• Day One, Part 1: Arrival and Exploration

• Day One, Part 2: Well That Escalated Quickly

• Day Two, Part 1: Batuu

So, after getting back from Batuu, we took a bit of time to clean up and get changed and ready for the afternoon and evening. I’m very, very glad we gave ourselves this brief respite in the middle of the day rather than staying on Batuu longer. Batuu will, after all, still be there after September 30.

Then it was time for…

1:45pm: Lightsaber training! This is something else that the marketing really made look like a gimmick, rather than selling what a deeply moving experience it has the potential to be, if you’re in a receptive frame of mind. Saja Tycer led our session, and apart from obviously having some real stage combat and/or martial arts training, he also just made it feel, well… magic.

It’s also quite a workout! I’m a walker by nature, and all the bending and squatting involved some muscles I do not typically exercise. My thighs were feeling it for a few days afterwards! One person, in front, has the lightsaber and is, at first, trying to hit a beam of light; the people behind them have shields and are there to catch the blast if it gets past the lightsaber. Then for the final round, you don’t see the beam of light, but rather a little glimmer — which is, as the Saja will tell you, the Force giving you a hint about where to aim. I was actually better at it than I expected to be.

At the end, there’s a very cool moment where you hear the voice of Master Yoda. It’s brief, but… yeah, hearing Yoda say that you’ve taken your first steps down the path and “May the Force be with you”? It got to me! The whole experience really is much deeper and more, well, spiritual than the advertising made it look — and a lot of that is down to the skill and heartfelt emotion of the Saja leading you.

And afterwards, I went to thank Saja Tycer and ended up getting pulled aside for a chat. We talked about, oh, all sorts of things. Personal philosophy. The legacy of the Force. The nature of the balance of chaos and order in the galaxy. How to deal with life when it feels out of control and overwhelming. It was really lovely. Truly, one of the things the Halcyon does so well is leaving room for these moments of personal connection. Then we walked together back over to Noah, commenting on his nature as an agent of chaos — and isn’t a little drop of chaos necessary in the world? Well, it certainly is in mine. ;)

We then had a brief bit of time to get a snack and some water before it was time to free SK-620!

3:15pm: So we met up with Lenka, along with a lot of other people, to come up with a plan to distract Lieutenant Croy. We had the unbolting codes and everything else we needed, but of course as soon as Croy realized SK-620 was gone, he was going to try to start looking for them — so we had to delay him as long as possible, to give SK the chance to safely hide away.

The main part of the distraction was a bunch of kids with small toy droids creating a ruckus in the middle of the Atrium. Saja Kyr did manage to dash over and free SK quickly, but Croy noticed very soon afterward. (This is a place where I’m genuinely not sure how fast the beat is supposed to go, if Croy is always supposed to figure it out that fast, or if the distraction just did not give him enough excuse for plausible deniability). But the group did manage to delay him getting out, asking him if every one of the toy droids was the droid he was looking for.

The best part of this was when Croy got tired of our nonsense and snatched up one of the small droids that a boy had been playing with, and he stormed off saying something to the effect of, “Until I get SK-620 back, this droid is mine!” (I believe it was one of the ship’s loaners, but it was still fun to act like he’d stolen from a child).

We were still in the Atrium when Croy came back a little while later. I got myself in some trouble by suggesting to him that, well, if the First Order had the codes to unlock SK, maybe he should look to his stormtroopers. It sure seemed like it must have been an inside job?

Croy was very offended, but I thought I was just being logical. Then when the Captain showed up, Croy told her what I’d said. “Lady Anna suspects my stormtroopers of disloyalty.” Then everyone present started talking him around in circles pointing out that he said he had a droid, clearly, right there, and he had very clearly stated “This droid is mine” when he left, so… what was the problem? He had a droid! And then some other passengers had to relate to Croy the story of his stormtroopers getting locked in the brig, which they hilariously decided to do through spoken word poetry. I quite enjoyed watching that unfold and applauding every ridiculous bit of it. (And I maintain it sure sounds like the stormtroopers locked themselves in the brig).

Croy eventually stormed off again, and a blueshirt very kindly invited us to join Know Your Copilot, a Newlyweds-Game-esque event in the Atrium. I actually would have loved to have played! But it ran right up to our, ah, prior engagement, so we had to decline.

3:55pm: We headed down to the cargo hold to meet Raithe. As with the Captain’s meeting the night before, people kept trying to come in (to complete a cargo mission for Sammie, I think, which was on the other side of the hall — another place where I’m not sure if that’s supposed to be an impediment or if it’s a bit of cross-scheduling that got tangled. I can see it either way, but it did make the scene a little hard to get through). Raithe had to chase some of them out and then post someone to keep others from coming in.

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Then Raithe went through the whole plan, using sabacc cards on the floor to map it all out. Our testing of the systems had, as it turned out, created a small window of time when Watch was going to run a diagnostic. We had from 4:15 to 4:35pm to get the job done. (I think I’m remembering that rationale correctly).

Raithe was great throughout all of this — so quick with the jokes on top of managing a fairly sizeable group of people. (I’d guess there were about 25 of us crammed in there?) Everyone got assigned a role, mostly in groups of three-ish, with a few larger groups. And most of those were things well-suited to the characters, which is also a very impressive bit of interaction.

Noah and I, along with Lady Ganmé from Naboo, he had clocked as being “good at dealing with authority figures,” so we were tasked to intercept the Captain if she came into the Atrium while the heist was going down, then find some way to get her into the Sublight Lounge and hand her off to Gaya, who would keep her occupied a while longer. Other people were causing a larger distraction with Sandro, involving an impromptu Gaya celebration dance party, and others had to help with slicing into the hyperspace compass’s systems and actually getting the stone out. There were other tasks, too, but I can’t remember them all! It’s really quite a complex bit of social engineering.

Ultimately, though, the plan is to swap in the stone we got made on Batuu for the real thing, and no one would be the wiser! And really, it’s not like the display antique would suffer for it. So we would do this, for Ryloth!

And then, as we were wrapping up, the Captain walked in! And we had to try very hard to pretend we were just a meeting of the Gaya Fan Club… in the cargo hold… nothing suspicious at all! But the Captain, well, she’s no fool — and she likes her plausibile deniability, too. She just told Raithe to “stay out of trouble” — and, hey, as long as we didn’t get caught, he would be! Raithe reminded us all that we were about to commit a felony together, and Noah pointed out that it’s only a felony if they catch and convict you.

4:15pm: Heist time!!! Things kicked off with the dance party in one corner. We had to wait a few tense minutes for our part in it to manifest. Then, along with Lady Ganmé, we intercepted the Captain as she came down from her quarters. I started pitching an idea for a special cultural tour, one that would start at Naboo and work its way over to the Tapani sector.

And look, it was a very good distraction. I could’ve kept going for ages on that topic, but we handed her off to Gaya and then took up our secondary posts, which were to relay a warning signal if the Captain re-emerged.

Which she did, of course, at the most dramatic possible moment! She confronted Raithe and made him turn out his pockets and his pouch, which were… not holding the Hayananeya stone! Or, for that matter, any other incriminating items. Because he had passed it off to someone else for safekeeping…

4:35pm: Back down to the cargo hold for the debrief and to celebrate our felonious act! Raithe wonderfully gave each different set of us our due accolades, even if he did rib me for the Captain distraction being “almost long enough.” Look, I had handed her over to Gaya as instructed! (And, of course, she’s not meant to stay distracted actually long enough, because that other scene has to play out.)

Gaya joined us, and the Hayananeya stone was restored to her. Gaya then gave a really wonderful speech about what that stone means to her people — and this is a place where it’s incredibly important that Gaya is always played by a woman of color. The story of Ryloth is one of colonization, occupation, and enslavement, so when she speaks about standing up to oppressive powers, about not losing faith in yourself and your people even in the darkest times… it has a special resonance.

Raithe is adorably earnest throughout all of this, showcasing more wonderful talent from that performer — being able to switch from the rapid-fire, devil-may-care attitude to that total heart is a real skill. We were all declared to be members of Gaya’s crew, Gaya’s Singing Stones. (And we got a datapad achievement icon to prove it!)

4:55pm: Raithe followed up with a datapad message, telling us not to miss Gaya’s acoustic set in the Atrium later that evening. As if we would!

5:00pm-ish: Noah had a secret meeting in Engineering with Lenka. I did not have this one (and would later figure out it was because I already had the Saja meeting scheduled for a little later, and those things appear to be experientially if not temporally mutually exclusive, as part of how they engineer everyone getting something cool and small-group like that). I tagged along just to see if they’d slip me in, since I had also been helping Lenka. The blueshirt started to be very apologetic about saying no, but I waved her off. “I understand completely. We all have our own roles to play. Ignite the spark.”

As it turned out, they could have slipped me in, because as Noah told me later, someone else didn’t show up and they were one station short, which made their task a bit hectic — but instead, I had an incredible moment of serendipity.

I wandered over to the climate simulator to just take a few minutes of a breather. At least, that’s what I thought I’d be doing. I was sitting there alone, arranging rocks, when the door opened and a bunch of people started streaming in, ushered by Saja Kyr.

I realized this was probably another small-group meeting, and thus I should not be there, so I stood and made for the door to absent myself — but Kyr stopped me. “No. I can trust you. Stay with us.” Which felt really nice to hear! So, I did.

And that’s how I ended up accompanying her and the rest of the group to the transport bay to welcome Rey on board. I am guessing that’s what was happening with whoever had Bridge training or a Bridge event at that time — and was possibly also connected to what Noah was doing in Engineering? At any rate, it was… really pretty cool to just stumble into that.

Rey is a character who is definitely more there for the kids than the adults, and the kids in our group adored her. They were so eager to tell her All The Things that had happened! When she looked me dead in the eye, though, I did take the opportunity to tell her that Croy seemed really needy and desperate for approval.

5:15pm? ish?: And then, the First Order took full and complete control of the ship.

This was probably my favorite moment of atmospheric work in the entire experience, and I’ll talk more about it in my analysis post. I don’t know if it would’ve been as noticeable if I’d been elsewhere, but back in the transport bay, the ship’s engines are really very loud, this constant humming in the background. You stop noticing them, just white noise… until they’re not there anymore.

When that power cut out, everyone in that corridor looked at each other with expressions of total horror, and poor Saja Kyr seemed about to panic. We realized we couldn’t just keep hanging out in this transport bay. Rey had with her a piece of a … honestly, I forget what it was called, she had a MacGuffin. She needed to put it together with another MacGuffin from the ship (I think Sammie’s plot revolved around this? But I never interacted with that line at all!).

So we had to get her over to, I think, Engineering. We moved with her out of the transport bay, only to run into some stormtroopers! Eek! But, lol, no worries. Rey just used the Force on them and made them forget seeing her. As she kept moving, I faded back to let the kids accompany her to Engineering. I needed to go find Noah and catch up on what was happening elsewhere!

And we’ll wrap things up in the next post!

• Day Two on the Halcyon, Part 3: Coaxium

I bet you can’t. I certainly couldn’t have imagined just how absolutely packed with adventure our day was going to be.

Need to catch up?

• Day One, Part 1: Arrival and Exploration

• Day One, Part 2: Well That Escalated Quickly

6:30am: Noah and I woke up bright and early and got ourselves ready for a morning on Batuu! I already had a message from Saja Tycer, telling me to go tune into a certain comms tower to get some information.

We slept with the viewport in our cabin on, even though that meant keeping the white lights around it on, too. But we both decided we could deal with that. We wanted to keep seeing space! And it meant that, when the ship jumped to Batuu early in the morning, we saw that, too!

I wore a much simpler outfit for Batuu, being well aware of what sort of climate its three suns produce. (And that, truly, is another delightful bit of lore. What a great way to handwave the general Florida-ness of it all). Even Lady Annazena will sacrifice a bit of glitz for practicality -- but I like to think my Batuu outfit still had a certain style. (Hot tip for anyone going to Batuu — well, anyone whose body structure fits this kind of pant: cannot recommend these highly enough.)

7:15am: Breakfast! Loved the CSL waffle and the green-dusted pastry treat. I also really loved the metal insulated cups they had there. If they’d been selling those with CSL branding, I definitely would have bought one. (Yes, I know they are a very basic cup. But I wanted a Halcyon basic cup!)

7:40am: We were going to just go hang out in the transport bay to wait for the first shuttle, but they actually sent us out early! I’m guessing because they had 15 people ready to go and figured, well, might as well clear them out of the queue before more show up.

The shuttle is another genius piece of work. Okay, it’s literally just the back of a truck, but you’d never know it from the inside experience. The way they move you from the Halcyon to the Starcruiser is literally seamless. More on that in the analysis post, actually — here I’ll just say how cool the shuttle is. You get some tunes blasting through from DJ-R3X.

7:50am: Noah and I appeared to be literally the first people other than CMs to set foot in Batuu that morning. The park was not open yet even for early admission. It was empty. Amazing. We got a few good pics with no one in them, then got started on some missions since Rise of the Resistance wasn’t even open yet.

From Raithe, our first task was to procure a look-alike for the Hayananeya from Zabaka, the toymaker on Black Spire Outpost. This was a little challenging since Toydarian Toymaker wasn’t open yet, either! But we managed to trip the correct sensor anyway, and toymaker Zabaka got in contact with us about the stone. We had to slice her the Hayananeya schematics so that Oga wouldn’t interfere and take a cut!

Zabaka made fun of our slicing abilities (or at least mine, anyway, I don’t know if Noah’s were as bad! I definitely bobbled my datapad and barely got it done in the time limit), but agreed to help us. She dropped a little more knowledge about the stone, then told us to find a pit droid head she could use as a mold. That meant running around near the Droid Depot to find the right crate to scan. Once we got that to her, she promised to set to work.

Then, Raithe gave us instructions on the coaxium -- which meant riding Smuggler’s Run, so we saved that one for a bit.

8:00am: Lenka checked in and asked for our help with two things. Which first? Rescuing SK, of course! So she sent us to the Droid Depot to find an unbolting program in one of the crates outside, and told us to meet her in the atrium that afternoon to help create a distraction.

The Captain also checked in, telling me she needed me to send word to General Organa about the data that SK was protecting. She told me to find the Resistance base and make contact.

Y’all, I have to tell you, this was one of those moments where eleven-year-old Cass was just losing her damn mind. Leia Organa specifically needed me to send her critical information! I don’t care if 200 other people got the same message, it was still just a wildly cool thing.

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8:15am: Got the unbolting program, told Lenka, then got sent to Oga’s to make contact with a slicer to figure out why Croy wants the Halcyon’s schematics.

8:20am: But, since our Oga’s reservation wasn’t until later, we decided to go to the Resistance base first, particularly since we know they, ah, aren’t always actively recruiting. (This is the in-world terminology for the ride being down — which is quite clever! In fact, they were not actively recruiting for over an hour later in the day, so my instinct was right. If that happens, you have a dialogue option for it, and I think that gives you a different mission to complete?). The Captain had us tune in to a comms tower to send some data, then told us to go talk to the Resistance members on the ground -- and this is what gets us on Rise.

Noah had never ridden Rise before! So that was very special. Seriously, that ride is… simply incredible. It’s a twenty minute experience. And the level of detailing in it is breathtaking. I think my favorite moment is when you come out beneath the AT-ATs. The utter scale of them is astonishing. Or the moment when Kylo Ren’s lightsaber starts stabbing down at you! Seriously, it’s such a thrill. At least that won’t be going away anytime soon.

Afterward, we told the Captain what happened with the Star Destroyer — uh, oops, perhaps not as subtle as we’d hoped to be! — and she noted that Croy wouldn’t be pleased and would likely escalate his efforts on the ship.

9:20am: I found the first comms tower I needed for Saja Tycer, then got instructed to go find Savi’s Workshop and scan some crates there.

9:35am: We checked in for our reservation at Oga’s — and told the folks out front that “Oga has some information for us”. The check-in lady passed us a special coaster with a scan code, which got us in contact with Gwellis Bagnoro. He identified himself as a forger and slicer — just what we needed! And he was willing to help us if we helped him. He asked us to shut down the Ronto Roaster podracing engine oven.

9:45am: Into Oga’s for a drink! I had a Bespin Fizz, Noah got the Jet Juice. Both were delicious. I really liked that the Jet Juice didn’t taste harsh to me, like most whiskey drinks do. We didn’t spend our whole 45 minutes in there, though, because we had too much stuff to do!

10:20am: Rode Smuggler’s Run! Got a message from Hondo afterwards, promising to bring the coaxium up to the Halcyon later in the day. Raithe checked in and told us to meet him on the bridge later so we could clear the way and get the coaxium onboard. (Thus assigning us our bridge subfinale).

10:35am: Went over to Ronto Roasters and shut down the podracing engine for Gwellis. Gwellis then acknowledged having taken a commission from the First Order to override the Halcyon’s security protocols. He sent us behind the Droid Depot to go find some datatapes. Gwellis agreed to reprogram them and send them up to Lenka.

Noah was having some trouble with his datapad, so while he figured that out, I ran around to finish my missions for Saja Tycer. I went to the crates at Savi’s and found Jedi training remotes and the Force-sensing portable viewscreens like Qui-Gon uses in TPM. Then Saja Tycer told me that he’d gotten a message from Savi about a shipment headed to Dok-Ondar. First I had to tune into another comms tower to get information about it, then I had to go find it. Once I did, I had to negotiate with Dok-Ondar’s assistant Tohago to get it -- but it worked! Saja Tycer invited me to join him later in the afternoon to open up the crate and find out what was in there.

In case it’s not obvious, we were running around all over the place by this point. Noah had also gotten very interested in scanning every crate he saw! The datapad game for Black Spire Outpost is highly addictive even without the Halcyon missions, as I discovered last year.

11am: Lenka checked in, so we told her we got the datatapes. We bounced around a bit more, tying up the last few things Noah needed to do, and then we headed to Docking Bay 7 for lunch. I wasn’t terribly hungry (I never am in the heat), but I was pleasantly surprised to find that the Pirjanad Hot Chicken Tip Yip actually has a bit of a kick to it! I mean, it’s a Disney kick, but still. It was tasty, as was the Takodana Quencher! (Noah did not agree with me about the Takodana Quencher, which is, admittedly, very tropical in its flavor; he did, however, enjoy his Gold Squadron Lager).

And after that, we were just about done! We knew we needed to get cleaned up before the 1:45pm Lightsaber Training, so we double-checked all our tasks and then headed back to the docking bay for the transport back to the Halcyon.

11:45am: As soon as we boarded the transport, Lenka got in touch to tell us how to upload the droid unbolting program. So we did that before heading to our room.

To be continued in…

• Day Two on the Halcyon, Part 2: The Heist

• Day Two on the Halcyon, Part 3: Coaxium

Ah yes — just a bit after Muster and the Captain’s Reception.

Need to catch up?

• Day One, Part 1: Arrival and Exploration

4:55pm: Lt Croy slid up into my DMs! I tried to play it as coy as possible (such as the pre-set dialogue options will allow). I actually gave a scoundrel answer to one of his questions, because I didn’t want to pledge loyalty to him or give away my affiliation with the Resistance.

5:30pm: Captain Keevan followed up with a message about making a deal with Gaya to capture and split some coaxium on its way to the First Order. At this point I realized I was going to have a fine line to dance, since I very much wanted to help the Captain and Raithe and Gaya.

5:40ish: Completed a task for Lenka, overwriting some systems on the ship to help hide information from Croy. We needed to cover up some tweaks to the personnel files, because as it turns out, mechanic/engineer Sammie wasn’t actually crew with the Chandrila Star Line! He was a new Resistance recruit that Lenka brought on-board.

Almost immediately after doing that, I got contacted again by Croy! He continued to test my allegience, and warning me off Sammie (with whom I had really not interacted at all, but I trusted Lenka about him). I played very dumb, choosing all of the “Oh, I’m sure there’s nothing suspicious going” on dialogue options.

Somewhere in here we also stopped into the Sublight Lounge for a drink and a couple rounds of sabacc.

I sort of wish we’d had the chance to play more! We had vague intentions of doing one round of the tournament on Day 2, but as you’ll see, we were far, far too busy for that. It’s definitely something I’d try to work in if I were able to go again.

6:00pm: We had a little time before bridge training, so we decided to hang out in the Atrium -- and happened to be there for Sector Set starting! So, sure, why not? It’s basically space bingo, and even if I am baffled as to why it uses totally different galactic divisions than the usual Core, Colonies, Inner Rim, Mid Rim, etc, it was fun! The blueshirt running it also gave some trivia about the planets as they were called.

And then Lieutenant Croy sat down right next to us and asked us how to play. I tried to play off “charming socialite, not suspicious at all, just a frivolous passenger!” Then he took over the drawing and was very hilariously grumpy about it. He kept pulling out planets and saying, “No, I don’t like that one. No, not that one. No, that’s too hard to say,” and tossing the chips aside.

6:30pm: Bridge Training! This was seriously so much fun — and it’s part of some amazing scaffolding that I’ll talk about in the analysis post later. Honestly, I wasn’t sure going in that I would like this, because it was one of the things that the marketing for the Starcruiser made look very gimmicky. But it was so fun and so well-run.

So how it starts is: the passengers, here for a demonstration of the ship’s operations, get divided into four groups: Blue Banthas, Gold Mynocks, Red Rathtars, or White Wampas. Those groups are each assigned to a station with consoles: Systems, Weapons, Shields, or Loaders. Weapons and Loaders both operate on the absolutely massive Bridge viewport; Shields has a big circular display in the center of the Bridge; Systems has complex panels with lots of dials and switches and toggles. You also get to meet AJ-1O, aka “Watch,” the ship’s navigation droid, unseen but often heard.

At each station, there are two rounds: one for practice, and one for points. The goal is to beat the blueshirts’ scores — which I would be astonished if any passengers ever did, because the blueshirts are very, very good! But I think the Blue Banthas performed pretty well! (I wish these scores somehow ended up in your datapad; being bad with remembering numbers, I had trouble tracking our performance).

Noah and I started at Weapons, which was simple but very satisfying: I was aiming, Noah was firing. I really can’t overstate how cool it is to play the game on that enormous viewport. It’s very easy to forget you’re not actually in space, firing lasers. From there we moved to Shields (I think; I may have steps 2 and 3 backwards in my brain), which is essentially playing Pong, but it’s also so satisfying. We both liked this station best — which apparently is an unusual choice? But we were very good at it. (This would be important later). Loaders was a bit like weapons, with one of us moving and the other grabbing cargo out of space. Then Systems was the hardest by far — but I think my second-favorite station. The display tosses up a sequence of positions that the console’s various dials, buttons, and toggles need to be in, and you have to match it as fast as possible to keep the ship in good repair. That station was manic. There are so many buttons. It was genuinely hard to keep track of them! But hard in a fun way.

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Then — plot happened.

Each Bridge training session is interrupted by some character, introducing some plot point. It’s different each time, and each one plays into the larger story. As I understand it from talking to other passengers, the first one brings Gaya on-board, the second one sneaks Chewbacca on, and then there was ours. We got taken over by Lieutenant Croy.

This was my face.

Croy forced us to help him as he made an unscheduled jump to (I think) Kuat to pick up some First Order supplies. Croy was in communication with one of his superior officers, and as part of the conversation, he talked about knowing that SK-620 had information that he wanted, and that he was going to get it one way or another. I was pretty livid by this point. How dare he threaten my new friend SK??

Unfortunately, we jumped straight into an asteroid field. (This seemed to be happening a lot with these unscheduled jumps; I have some questions about Watch’s astrogation). If I’d been on Loaders or even Weapons at this point, I could’ve just been spectacularly bad at my job to make Croy look bad in front of his superior, but I was on Systems, and… I couldn’t let the ship get damaged! So I had to do a good job, but it was under protest.

7:15pm: Walked out of bridge training and immediately tried to catch Lenka’s attention to warn her that Croy was threatening SK. I missed catching her, but Saja Tycer saw me trying and promised to pass the message along. I think this may have upped my credit with the Sajas at this point, because I started getting more messags from them soon thereafter.

Then, we randomly joined the tail end of Outer Rim Regalia, because… why not? That’s basically just a fashion show. I took a nice little twirl down the red carpet.

We also realized at this time that we had some more messages from Raithe! We’d heard by then about the Hayananeya Stone, from the card he’d given us earlier. The stone is sacred to Ryloth (the homeworld of the Twi’lek), but had been stolen from them centuries earlier. And it turned out… the Hayananeya was in the antique hyperspace compass in the Atrium.

I love this so much because it’s developing some wonderful lore, and it ties in with the greater struggle for Ryloth’s freedom, which is a plot point in books like Resistance Reborn and, I think, an underappreciated thematic element in the Star Wars universe. (More on that in Day Two’s recap.) Anyway, Raithe said he’d noticed us as passengers perhaps willing to break the rules for a good cause. So he sent us to go test the alarm systems.

7:30pm: We received messages from Croy thanking us for help on the bridge, even though we only did it under duress and to keep the ship from exploding. He asked for my loyalty. I left him on “read” until I could ask the Captain what to do.

7:45pm: Right before dinner, I went to meet the Captain in the cargo hold! Which I had trouble finding, because I hadn’t actually made it to that point in exploration. Fortunately I saw someone else who’d been in our earlier meeting, and she helped me get to the right place.

The Captain let us in on some of her plans. She had an amazing way of communicating utter sincerity and earnestness, holding eye contact with such potent meaning. We had to tell anyone who tried to come into the cargo hold that we were having a private tour, and another would be starting shortly! It happened so many times — which added a good balance of levity to the otherwise serious scene. And then a couple of stormtroopers walked right in! So several of us in the group started babbling all sorts of nonsense about how impressive the cargo hold’s organization was. I think I said something like, “You know, we travel through space all the time, and we take it rather for granted, but it really is quite a marvel when you think about it.”

The Captain also told those of us not currently under suspicion from Croy that, if we were brave enough to play double agent, we could try to get more information out of him — so I responded to his message at last. He asked me to get into the Engineering room for him, but I left that task on “read” as well. I suspect here I missed out on a branch of tasks — but there was truly just no way to do everything, and I’m happy with the choices I made. If I were to go again, though, I do think I’d lean more heavily into the double agent role. I could never, never swear myself to the First Order — but Lieutenant Croy is an incredibly fun character to play with, and our performer was thoroughly charming.

Meanwhile, Noah was helping Raithe, watching to see what happened in the Atrium when the silent alarm on the hyperspace compass was triggered. I think the stormtroopers went right from the cargo hold up there, to check out what happened, because Noah told me that when the silent alarm was triggered, the stormtroopers came to check it out, but it took them a few minutes.

8pm: And then… Dinner! Which was delightful! The food was great, our lovely server Gladys from Batuu was attentive and so friendly, and the floor show from Gaya was superb. Seriously, friends, her songs are total bops. “Coaxium” is my favorite, but they’re all delightful. Go look up the Galactic Starcruiser soundtrack on your music platform of choice. You’re welcome. There are also some great videos of the floor show on YouTube. The music ties in to her overall story, particularly with the Hayananeya stone.

The other characters move in and out of dinner as well — and I know they’re also bopping back and forth from other scenes and Bridge trainings, so this again speaks to the wonderful talent and stamina of these performers. The Captain welcomes everyone and sits at her table for a bit; Croy comes in to grandstand; Sandro gets Gaya’s attention and actually gets to play with her and Ouannii — it’s a wild hour. Dinner is not downtime!

Toward the end of dinner, we got a message from Lenka telling us to meet her for her toast later that night -- that she’d have a plan for keeping SK safe from Croy.

9:30pm: Unfortunately, before that point, Croy assaulted SK! He took over and threw his weight (and that of his stormtroopers) around to put a restraining bolt on them! The absolute cruelty! In the hubbub, Noah and I shouted about droids’ rights. (If I had the ability to go again, I would definitely be bringing swag from a droids’ rights nonprofit agency).

At this point, it also appeared that Sammie betrayed the Resistance, turning SK and Chewbacca over to the First Order! And the Captain had to let it happen — but she assured us in a datapad message that she had a plan, and that Sammie was taking an opportunity to get a closer look at the Order’s inner workings.

We had a quick minute to talk to Raithe after that. He checked in with us about the Hayananeya’s legacy, affirmed that we were all-in to help Gaya and Ryloth, and then said, with this absolutely wonderful chaotic energy, “We’re gonna steal it.” (At least, I am almost certain this is when he said that. It might have been earlier. I genuinely can’t keep it all perfectly straight in my head.) He invited us to meet him at 4pm the next day in the cargo hold to discuss the plan. This meeting, he warned us, would not show up on our datapads, and it really felt very cool to get that personal invite.

9:45pm: We got some more messages from Raithe, following up on the spoken conversation — and also bringing in the plot point about getting some coaxium, as the Captain mentioned earlier. Noah and I both answered in the affirmative; we were down to commit felonies for a good cause!

We also decided to step into the Sublight Lounge for a nightcap. We spent a little time chatting with some lovely fellow passengers.

10pm: I received a message from Saja Tycer, who asked what path I saw myself taking. I knew the Force answer would lead to more interaction along that line, but I had to be honest: Resistance. That still seemed to work, as the Saja’s response was about counting on our friends. Noah answered true to himself as well, and I think the scoundrel answer there might have shut down this branch for him, at least on the datapad.

10:30pm: I think this is about when we realized we were getting a little tired (we were running on about four hours of sleep) and wanted to conserve our energy for the morrow, so rather than closing down Sublight, we took ourselves up to bed.

And then we had an amazing conversation with D3-09. Honestly, this is something I’m not going to go into too much detail about, because it felt so personal and like it had been tailored just for us. I know it wasn’t, and that other people had the same interaction, or very nearly, but… well, we love droids! So it was very special for us, and for Noah especially. (There’s a whole backstory there with the Edge of the Empire game we were in and the droid interactions he had in that). If I have any regret about the trip, though, it’s that I didn’t catch that one on film — but I thought we were just going to say a quick goodnight! I didn’t realize it was going to be A Whole Thing!

10:45pm: We both had a few more messages from Lenka, setting up things for Batuu and giving us some options on what task to prioritize. We both asked if we could help free SK, of course.

11pm: And then, after changing into my PJs, I had to put clothes back on to complete one last mission for Lenka before bed! Noah, fortunately, had not yet changed. I just counted myself lucky no one saw me all schlumped down. Not the way Lady Annazena wants to be seen! We had to go to the console and enter a configuration to scramble the data that Croy was extracting from SK. Fortunately, there’s one on each deck, so we didn’t have to wander too far.

I also got a final message for the night from Saja Tycer! Giving me missions to accomplish on Batuu. (Noah did not get these).

11:05pm: Still not done! We got some messages from Raithe about plans for getting the Hayananeya, telling us to meet him in the Atrium at 4:15 -- but we already had the verbal invites to join him at 4pm in the cargo hold (which I now knew how to find). He also gave us instructions about what to do on Batuu.

And then, more from the Captain for me! (Cannot remember if Noah got these or not). Also about doing things on Batuu.

By the end of all of this, I had high familiarity and high trust from everyone except Sammie and Croy. Sammie was low familiarity but high trust, I suppose because the Captain and Lenka trusted me. Croy was, hilariously, high familiarity but low trust. Valid.

And that was Day One!

To be continued in…

• Day Two on the Halcyon, Part 1: Batuu

• Day Two on the Halcyon, Part 2: The Heist

• Day Two on the Halcyon, Part 3: Coaxium

At least, this post will start it, because I barely got halfway through before it started warning me that I was “near email length limit.” So this post will have the first bits of Day 1, another post will finish Day 1, and then… well, we’ll see how many it takes to get through Batuu and the second afternoon and evening! (I’m also writing this as a straightforward chronicle, not attempting to put it into a proper narrative form; if I did that, we’d really be here forever, I could write a whole book.)

Look, those of you who know me know that if you ask for “everything”, you’re gonna get every-damn-thing. So really, you brought this upon yourselves.

I’m also doing this before doing my analysis, partly because just talking through it, to myself and to you, will help me organize my thoughts, and partly so that the analysis will have context for those who haven’t had the chance to experience it.

Warning: here there be spoilers! I really couldn’t go in depth without giving away the game, so if you’ve got a voyage yet ahead of you and want to be surprised by all the magnificent things that will happen, bookmark this for after you get back.

This is, though, only my experience. (Well, and most of Noah’s). There were whole tracks and subtracks I didn’t even touch! I love so much how many different stories play out simultaneously; this is just my path.

As a general overview: I said already that this is just the most amazing experience. I think without exaggeration that it’s the single greatest event I’ve ever participated in. It really does make you part of a Star Wars story, and both the digital design and, most importantly, the performers do such a wonderful job of making each individual feel like you are critical to a mission’s success.

If this comes back in some form, I hope it isn’t watered down to be just “Star Wars hotel”. That might almost be sadder than if it didn’t come back at all. I’m going to hold out so much hope that it can be re-imagined in a financially sustainable way without losing the magic, because…

Well. Take a look at all that would be lost:

Day One, Part One

(If you haven’t already, you might want to introduce yourself to Lady Annazena before diving in here)

Early: Noah and I went to EPCOT After Hours the night before, which had the benefit of making me too tired for “too excited to sleep” to plague me. We technically had until noon to check out, but knowing that people start lining up for Starcruiser entry early, we were not inclined to dawdle. We took the Skyliner over to the Riviera for a really lovely breakfast at Primo Piatto. I love the Riviera. It’s so beautiful and peaceful. Then we went back to Pop Century to get kitted up in our first day costumes!

11:00am: We began departing Pop Century for the Starcruiser. We knew we could get luggage services to hail us a cab, which Disney would pay for (it’s their way of accounting for the fact that they don’t have any other transport to the Starcruiser the way they have buses, boats, monorail, Skyliner connecting all the other resorts). As it turned out, we should have called down to luggage services rather than heading down first, as there was quite a line! But we got a cab summoned for us, and headed for the Halcyon!

11:30am: Or slightly before? We rolled up to the Halcyon and got checked in. The blueshirts (the passenger services crew — or, in usual Disney terms, the CMs) out front were all so friendly and kind! We got our pictures by the entry wall, then were ushered into the building. So glad we were early enough to make it inside, because folk who arrived much later were stuck outside in the heat. Mind you, the blueshirts did a very good job keeping people shaded, and they were passing out waters both inside and out.

We ended up in the hallway close to a bunch of the other deeply invested, already-in-costume folks, some of whom I recognized from the . So we started making friends! Noah and I both had cards to hand out, introducing our characters and linking to our real-world selves, since we’d seen on FB that that was, apparently, a thing people did. I was all prepared to feel awkward about it, but we immediately started getting handed back swag and cards and all sorts of lovely things.

1pm-ish: Boarding officially began at 1pm (although I think they took the first group into the pre-entry safety briefing a little earlier than that). We were in the second group taken onto the transport shuttle. We didn’t get entry photo by the glowing logo at that time because we didn’t want to hold matters up, and the blueshirt seemed eager to get the safety briefing underway — which, considering how many people were in line behind us, I completely respected.

The shuttle was so cool. It’s the most elaborate elevator anyone has ever been in, designed to very much look like the interior of a shuttle. It has viewscreens at the top where you can see other ships taking off and leaving, and then as you ascend, it goes to blue streaks -- although I have some quarrel with the idea that you go through hyperspace to get up to orbit. I get that they wanted to give everyone that classic experience, but canonically, it makes no sense. You don’t go to lightspeed within atmosphere.

Another lovely blueshirt, Tara, took us up to our room, chatting a bit along the way about what brought us to the Halcyon, so we started dropping a little backstory. The only real downside to all of this was having to use our real names for check in, a problem that continued with dinner and events and such. If I had any small tweaks to suggest, it would be that they could map character names to overwrite those real names for people who come prepared! We did make it clear, though, that those were just our Earthen aliases — because we wanted it clear from go that we were there to play.

About this time, we also got our first messages from Cruise Director Lenka Mok. She introduces herself, welcomes you to the Halcyon, and then gives four dialogue options geared to start you down one of the narrative paths: Resistance, First Order, Scoundrel, or Jedi. This definitely doens’t lock you in, but it kicks things off, especially for people who don’t immediately go around the ship looking for trouble. Noah picked the scoundrel answer; I picked Resistance.

We didn’t spend a ton of time exploring the room, because, well, we knew what it looked like, and we knew there’d be more time later at night to investiage its details. It is stunning, though. It really does feel like you’re in a spaceship. That viewscreen is beautiful — and cameras don’t do it justice, since they pick up some glare.

We also took a moment to introduce ourselves to D3-09, the ship’s logistics droid, who has a communications panel in each room. We had a lovely chat with her! Truly, what a charming droid. She encouraged us to explore the ship and go to muster — which is just what we intended to do!

We went shopping first, though! I knew I wanted to snag a few items and didn’t want to risk them running out. I used the code phrase I’d learned to get the special Resistance pins (“I’m looking for something special, something that will really ignite the spark of conversation at social events, you know?”), as well as a normal pin, a patch, an SK-620, and a few other things. (I… I did some serious damage to the gift card loaded onto my spira. But it was all free money from my Disney Visa rewards! Which I had saved specifically for this purpose).

We also stopped by a console and, in playing around, tried to just casually access some restricted systems -- which got us our first comms message from Raithe! He was impressed at our willingness to bend the rules! He helped us get into the restricted systems, then asked for our help with something in Engineering. We decided we’d see what we could do to assist him! … After lunch.

Then we hit up Passenger Services to get our bridge training changed from 4:30 to 6:30. I truly didn’t want to engineer our experiences too much or try to force certain interactions, but I knew that 4:30pm was the same time as the Captain’s Reception, which is a good time to meet a lot of different characters, and we wanted that opportunity. So I told the blueshirt that, “We’re very sociable people” and didn’t want to miss it! They were able to switch us into the 6:30pm training with no problem.

Then we finally headed down to the Crown of Corellia for lunch, where we took a moment to talk to Chef Diego, who was so wonderful about our dietary needs. He looked out for us so well, including remembering to ask Noah about gelatin and warn him about some things that we might not have realized had animal products in them.

Lunch was yummy! I had tip yip chicken, among other things. We also got our first celebratory drinks of the voyage. (Throughout, we stuck to wine; the Halcyon offers an impressive array of mixed drinks, but many of them have vodka, which counts me out right away, and they’re, well… much more expensive than wine, and Disney drinks are generally mixed pretty weak. Sticking to wine or beer is generally better bang for your credit!)

And yes, I stole those coasters. (It’s not really stealing; they’re cardboard and disposable).

3:00pm: After that, we took Raithe up on his challenge to see if we could get into Engineering. We could. It was… crowded. The poor blueshirt stationed in Engineering was having to ask everyone “Um, why are you here?” and not all the passengers were giving well-considered answers. We offered Noah’s excellent services as someone very familiar with ship operations, and we both managed to complete our tasks for Raithe. I was told to help keep Gaya’s communications private, setting up a secure channel in the Systems Patch Bay; Noah was told to make sure there was an escape pod ready for her if needed, using the Mechanical Systems.

While we were down there, we decided to check out the climate simulator — which is a little atrium giving you access to fresh air, as much as that term can be said to apply in central Florida. Outside the simulator, I scanned a crate, found a kyber crystal, which caught the Sajas’ notice! The Sajas are a new type of character created for the Halcyon — not Force-users, but students of the Force and its history. It’s sort of a handwave for how they can have lightsaber training as an activity, but the Sajas are all such lovely, heartfelt people, and I’m really glad I got the chance to interact with them. Saja Tycer’s message asked about my interest in the Force and hinted at maybe needing my help with recovering some artifacts on Batuu.

3:30pm-ish: We wandered onto the bridge to check it out ahead of Muster, and that’s where we met our first non-blueshirt character (in-person, as opposed to just in the app)! Sandro came in and introduced himself. What a sweetie. He’s an aspiring musician who’s a big fan of Gaya, so we talked a bit about why he was there and gave him some encouragement!

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4pm: Muster! This is the first “big event” on the ship, which seems wild considering how much we’d already done! We were in Cresh section, led by Saja Kyr, who is cute as a button. By her instruction, we were trying to also keep an eye on mechanic/engineer Sammie, who was “helping” with muster drill and seeming to have a hard time of it.

Then, the welcome was rudely interrupted by the First Order! Lieutenant Croy showed up, all disingenuous smiles, telling us that he had to investigate suspected Resistance activity on board, and that anyone helping the Resistance was guilty of treason. I muttered that I wasn’t sure how he made that out, considering I certainly didn’t remember swearing loyalty to his Order in the first place. Lenka didn’t do a great job hiding her feelings about the whole thing, but the Captain kept a cooler head.

The Captain went on to tell us about the amazing dinner show we would be enjoying — but she was interrupted by Raithe Kole, letting everyone know that Gaya wasn’t actually on board yet and that we needed to go pick her up. The Captain did not seem pleased about this detour — but considering how many happened over the next few hours, it was really just a drop in the bucket. At least Coruscant is close to Chandrila.

Then, the Captain’s reception, where we did get to be sociable and talk to many people. We chatted to Raithe and made ourselves known as people who love mutually advantageous friendships. We tried to drop just enough backstory to give him the hook to draw us in further. He palmed me a card to scan, which triggered some necessary information for later.

I really love this picture Noah snapped! I think I look quite the proper Tapani diplomat, making new connections.

We also got to meet SK-620, the Halcyon’s astromech droid! I asked them how they like their work, are they well taken care of, you know, making sure the ship’s droids are well-respected for their labor. We mentioned being very big on droids’ rights. I think they quite liked us! We were both encouraged to scan our M-bands on them — which would become important later.

Then we got to talk to the Captain! I let her and Lenka catch a glimpse of my starbird tattoo, while Noah talked about how we don’t care for the First Order getting in the way of people going about their lives in the galaxy. They cause impediments. So the Captain drew me aside and offered us a tour of the climate simulator. We picked up a few others along the way, but I got to walk with her and tell her a little about the Tapani blockade. She was very sympathetic.

When we got to the simulator -- only six of us, I think, a very small and intimate group -- she told us what she was doing with the Resistance, asked if she could count on us if need be, and promised to keep everyone on the ship safe. This all felt very cool, to get drawn into something private so early. She told us to meet her in the cargo hold at 7:45pm for further instructions.

Afterwards, we also got messages from Lenka about the scan from “overly trusting” SK. But no worries, of course — we could be trusted. It turns out SK had given us the location of the Resistance base on Batuu, which I solemnly vowed to keep safe.

And that, I believe, is where I will stop the first part of this, as Substack tells me I’m approaching the email length limit!

To be continued in…

• Day One on the Halcyon, Part 2: Escalation

• Day Two on the Halcyon, Part 1: Batuu

• Day Two on the Halcyon, Part 2: The Heist

• Day Three on the Halcyon, Part 3: Coaxium

It was… sublime. Beyond incredible. Beyond all my expectations. As high as the hype was, as much as I was hyped for it… it went higher.

It’s going to take me some time to process everything, but I’ve got a couple of in-depth posts planned. One (or, possibly, one set, so as to avoid a behemoth post) will be, well, very personal, focused on the experience itself. For all the friends who said, “Tell me everything!”, this will be for you! And for me, too, to help me lock absolutely everything, carved indelibly into my memory. I’ll walk through the story I got to live, step by step, moment by moment.

The other post (or set of posts) will be more analytical, using my immersive-experience-professional brain to think about how Disney Imagineering managed to craft such an astonishing thing -- and, possibly, how I think the marketing utterly let them down (and what might be done to remedy in the hopeful event of a revival, someday).

This one, though… this is just raw feeling. Unfiltered. Unprocessed. Just… what’s been churning in my head since leaving the Starcruiser yesterday. (And this post will be spoiler-free, for anyone with a journey yet ahead of them in this last month; the other two will be, of necessity, spoiler-full).

I truly could not have had a better time. There is not a single thing I would have done differently. The whole experience felt absolutely charmed. Every choice I made panned out into something spectacular. I got tapped for exciting components of much larger group efforts. I made connections with some absolutely amazing people, both among the performers and my fellow passengers. I was surprised and delighted by moments I never could have anticipated stumbling into.

As much as I would love to have the opportunity to go back, it would be very different. Nothing would be quite the same as getting to make those discoveries in each individual moment for the first time.

And there was just… there was so much. Especially on Day 2. Noah and I spent four hours in Batuu, and almost all of that time was completing missions. We were running around all over the Outpost. And then once back on the Halcyon, we had a little breather (and much-needed time to clean up, considering the effect that Batuu’s balmy climate has) followed by lightsaber training, but from 3:30 onward? It was just go-go-go. Of the four major paths available, I ended up on three of them. (Or, at least, pieces of each -- there are sort of sub-tracks to at least the Resistance path, with different characters and objectives). My schedule was bonkers. I think I had seven alarms set on the evening of Day 2 to make sure I moved when I needed to.

If you’re willing to go hard, it pays off. You absolutely cannot do everything -- many things are mutually exclusive just due to scheduling. But you can do a lot if you’ve got the energy, the focus, the time management skill, and the willingness to dash up and down a few flights of stairs many times.

Anyone who was inclined to mock the price tag has no idea just how much goes into creating something like this -- both creating it in the first place and then running it on a daily basis. I have some idea, but the work I do is on such a smaller scale, to say nothing of a smaller budget. But I know how many documents it takes to get the story set, to plan the props and scenic elements, to train the performers for something that’s really just a couple of hours of “on” time, without the complex branching trees the Starcruiser has. To do something for a 45-hour long experience, with so many variables… it would have to be utterly gargantuan.

I would fist-fight a gundark to get a look at some of those behind-the-scenes materials. The scripts, the beat sheets, the branching trees for dialogue and individual choices. All of it. It’s the sort of thing I do for work, but I… I want to see how it goes when you have Disney-level resources and Disney-level scale.

My heart is just breaking for everyone involved in this project. To see it shut down so soon… It’s awful. It’s a tragedy. Every inch of the Starcruiser was created with care and creativity and so much love for the world. The Imagineers thought of everything. There are so many clever details, so many subtleties, so much pure worldbuilding craft.

And the performers and crew… every single one of them appeared to be throwing their whole heart into the effort. I truly cannot praise them highly enough. The performers are… stars. Absolute masters of their craft. And doing this kind of acting? Is a wildly different skill set than just doing stage or screen acting. You have to be able to think so fast. You have to react to the unexpected, then steer things back on track. These performers were stellar. The way they managed both large crowds and intimate moments… well, I’ll have a lot of thoughts later about the crafting of the immersion on that level. And then the blueshirts! The passenger services crew were so wonderful as well, so kind and helpful and ready to engage.

I hope they know, all of them, on-stage and behind-the-scenes, how much the Starcruiser’s closing is absolutely no reflection on their work. Disney Corporate let them down.

I’m so grateful I got this incredible opportunity. Star Wars is… it’s the IP that means more to me than any other. It’s the IP that made me want to be a writer and a creator of worlds. I have wanted to be a part of it since I was eleven years old, staring up at a screen full of stars. Since I was a kid trying to stand on her head so she could use the Force.

The Starcruiser had so much for adult Cass, who tells stories and crafts immersive experiences and builds worlds. But it also had so much for that eleven year old Cass (who is, truly, never very far from my heart). I got to be a part of this universe that I have loved for so very, very long. It was truly magical. And as much sorrow as I have for what will be lost when it closes, my heart is brimming over with joy and love for what it was and is, for the memories I made there that I will truly cherish forever.

After all… you never forget your first ship.

And I’ve been miserable. I feel utterly drained of creativity. I can make words, some days, but they feel lifeless and flat. There’s too much weight on everything, too many other voices in my head. It leaves no room for natural flow.

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Why have I been putting myself through this? Flatly, fear. The fear of obsolescence. The fear that has followed All That DAW Stuff. The fear that taking too long with my next project will mean everyone in the world forgets about me, forever. The fear of disappointment and disappointing. The fear of publish-or-perish.

I wanted to make something good, good enough to get me back on track, and I wanted to do it faster than I’ve been able to do things in the past.

What I’ve done to myself, though? Is just made things worse and made them take longer.

And yes. I know. There’s no One Right Way to write a book. There’s only the ways that work for you. It’s a lesson all writers learn, I think, and perhaps some of us have to learn it multiple times. Perhaps all of us.

Sometimes, though, those fears make you want to see if there could be another way that works. Half hope, half desperation. But clearly, none of what I’ve been trying is getting me anywhere.

I need to shake myself loose.

So, it’s back to embracing Chaos Muppetry.

I need to give myself permission to wander in my creativity, rather than pre-examining every scene with a “How will this work?” “How does this serve the story?” “What purpose does this have?” mindset. That can come later, but trying to do it at the start is absolutely stifling me. So many of the craft books I’ve been reading want me to do that analysis before I write anything, so that I don’t waste time, waste words. But it’s not wasting words. It’s telling myself the story. As for the time… well, trying methods that don’t work hasn’t saved me any in the long run, now has it?

I need to set aside expectations — both those I’ve imposed on myself and those I perceive (or imagine) coming from others. I need to conquer my own perfectionism, and I need to stop worrying about what my agent or a potential editor will think. They can’t think anything until I’ve actually written something!

And I am really going back to basics at this point. I’m closing all my Scrivener projects (and yesterday, I had four open simultaneously), and I’m opening a Google Doc instead. I’m going to try to write something each day, but I am placing absolutely no limitations on what that means. It won’t be sequential. It won’t all be on the same project. I may not even have projects in mind some days, but will just lean into freewriting and see what comes. When I do write multiple snippets within the same story, they might be contradictory to each other.

I need to explore — and to remind myself why I like writing. Figuring out how it all works, what serves the story, that can all come later. I can’t do that before I know what the story is.

I’ve said before that, while people love to talk about “plotter vs pantser,” I think of myself as a story gardener. I nurture some seeds, and I see what grows. I don’t always know what sort of a plant I’m even dealing with until it sprouts. Some things that I think will blossom, don’t; some things I’m not expecting turn out to be the most beautiful blooms or verdant leaves.

I need to give myself room to see what grows.

Because y’know what? This is how I got to the Aven Cycle.

Back in 2011, I had barely written anything fiction in years, thanks to academia and my first Grown Up FT Job. I had to get back in the habit. So I started with just 100 words a day. I slowly grew that into longer writing stretches. I played, I experimented, I wrote whatever came into my pretty little head on a given day. Many, many, many of those scribblings never panned out.

But some of them, by mid-2012? Were a draft of what would become From Unseen Fire.

Almost every professional writer has heard some version of this, over the fence from a neighbor, at a reunion where you’ve identified yourself as A Writer Now, from a cousin or aunt or in-law. We hear it so much that it’s sort of an industry meme.

These people, I think, mean well. At least I choose to believe they’re in earnest and simply unaware of what a wildly disproportionate division of labor they’re proposing.

They are unused to creative work, and therefore unused to the idea that it is work. They’ve never actually done the work, so they don’t know.

Relatedly: Over on Worldbuilding for Masochists, we occasionally get emails from listeners who have been working on an idea and want to share it and get feedback, but are very concerned that someone might steal their great idea. They ask for advice: How do we protect our ideas?

This is often a very funny prospect to working authors, most of whom have far too many ideas already. Trying to finish one project often means beating all your other ideas away with a bat. We don’t need to go around stealing them. We are up to here with ideas.

Having ideas is never the hard part. The hard part is the work.

I currently have at least half a dozen ideas in some degree of being-toyed-with. So far, I haven’t been able to make any of them book-shaped, and while we can set aside the existential crisis of being an author struggling to make book-shaped words in a publish-or-perish industry for another day, the point is that those ideas, on their own? Are nothing. They’re candyfloss of the mind. I might enjoy turning them over in my head, but they’re not doing anything for anyone else unless I can make them work.

And making them work is the hard part. Writing is the hard part.

Those are just the ideas that have some glimmer of potential fruitful development. I couldn’t begin to tell you how many other ideas pop in and out of existence, like soap bubbles, in a given day.

There’s a great quote from Terry Pratchett (as there is for most things), in Wyrd Sisters, involving his Shakespeare-analog character Hwel.

Everyone wants to believe that their ideas are great. Special. Worth something.

And I don’t want to say that’s totally untrue.

But….

Yeah, I kind’a do.

‘Cause here’s the thing — and it’s why I feel mean saying it, which makes me not want to say it — those of us who have lots of ideas? We know how worthless they are on their own.

For one thing, the chances of actually having a totally unique idea are vanishingly small. You’ve probably had the same idea, with slight variations, as many other people.

But, just as critically, is the uncomfortable yet unavoidable truth: Ideas only have meaning with work behind them.

If you get hit with sleeting inspiration all the damn time, it no longer feels special. Sometimes it feels like swatting away gnats. Sometimes it’s sifting through straw, looking for the strands that you think you can spin into gold, maybe. Sometimes it’s trying to get a squirrel to stop gnawing on your leg. A really shiny idea can be as much a nuisance as a boon, because you know how much work will be required to turn that idea into something anyone else should care about.

What Pratchett calls “a receptive mind” isn’t just the sleeting inspiration hitting a mind willing to entertain the idea. It means hitting a mind willing to do the work.

This is something that feels obvious in other industries. If you have a great idea for a new kitchen appliance or a special piece of furniture or — idk, just for instance — a self-driving car, that’s neat, but it means nothing if you can’t make the thing and make it work.

And yet when it comes to writing — and to other arts, as we’re clearly seeing in the realms of music and visual art — a lot of the population experiences some vital disconnect there. They don’t understand why the idea on its own isn’t good enough to earn them income and acclaim.

Which brings us to AI.

And the part where I really feel mean but am also pretty certain I’m right:

I think if you’re someone who doesn’t have a constant inundation of ideas, then when you do have one, it feels more precious to you than it does to those of us for whom ideas are just the unavoidable detritus of our lives. It makes you think, “yeah, this would be worth 50% of the proceeds from a book; yeah, just having this idea is 50% of the value of a product.”

And to at least some of those minds, AI is great. AI promises them fulfillment of their idea without having to do any of the work or having to figure out why their writer friends engage in awkward conversational contortions rather than just saying, “Sure! What a great deal!” when offered the unsolicited proposal for a 50/50 split.

AI lets them ignore the fact that writing is work.

AI tells them that yes, the idea alone has value. The idea alone is enough.

I’ve been working on this post for a while, but part of what spurred me to finish and post it was seeing, two days ago, a new “gpt-author” piece of absolute nonsense promising a whole novel! ready to publish! from just one prompt!

No.

Never mind that, in order to generate something based off of that idea, the AI generator is stealing other people’s work.

That doesn’t matter to people who don’t think the work has value, who believe that all the value lies in that glimmering, shimmering idea.

And so many of these are people who aren’t just ignorant of the work, the way a well-meaning but oblivious friend or relative might be; AI is popular with people who are actively disdainful of the work. Why should they have to work to get better at something?

These people are also missing the point of art entirely, but that’s probably an entirely separate post. The work is also the fun part. The work is where discovery happens. The process has value for the creator, and not only because it gets you to the end result. Humans create because we love to.

That’s how you can tell these folks don’t actually want to be writers, just to be known as writers, when they say things like “Now I can skip the boring part” — meaning, the actual writing.

This tweet is satire, but… y’know, only just barely. These are almost verbatim things that I’ve seen AI proponents say.

AI proponents don’t want to hear that it takes time and effort to turn an idea into something worthwhile. They just want the immediate gratification, and they actively mock the professionals telling them, uh, that’s really not how art works. If you want to be good at art, you have to practice it. A lot. With an eye towards improvement. Nope, they’re not interested in that. They want whatever prestige/respect/money/glory they imagine that the pros get, without having to be pros.

Now, to be clear, I’m not saying that people shouldn’t dabble in the arts! Dabbling is fine! Dabbling is great! I actually think that, despite the negative connotations of the word, there’s nothing wrong with being a dilettante. Cultivating an interest in something does not obligate you to develop it as a professional-level skill or put professional-level hours of work in.

I am absolutely a baking dilettante. I enjoy it. I do it sometimes. I know a little bit about it. But I’m never going to put in the hours and labor and study and work to get really good at it. And that’s okay.

What you can’t do is be a dilettante and demand the (dubious) benefits that you’d get if you were a professional.

I’m an okay baker, but what I’m not going to do is act like I’ve got anything in common with a pro, or even with the really dedicated non-pros on Bake-Off. I’m certainly not going to show up to an event with a bunch of stuff I stole from one of those people and try to pass it off as my own — but that’s what AI art and writing creation does.

The drive for this increasing tendency of dilettantes aping professionalism comes, at least in part, from the incredibly toxic idea that if you’re doing something with your time that isn’t directly earning you money, it’s a waste of time and effort. Never mind that the arts are unlikely to make most people, even the pros, very much money anyway. Modern society demands that we monetize our hobbies, and I think that’s incredibly awful (as I ranted about, with regard to fanfiction, a few years ago).

Part of what’s so great about the arts is that — despite what the Tech Bros peddling AI want you to believe — there’s nothing stopping you from doing them on your own. No one’s going to tell you that you can’t. No one’s going to take the keyboard or paintbrush from your hands. People should have artistic hobbies! It’s healthy!

You can still get personal value from an activity you aren’t that good at. Bake the cake. Sing the song. Paint the picture. Play the sport. Write the fanfiction. You don’t have to be a pro for the time spent doing those things to be worthwhile!

But I think this fear of Wasting Time And Not Being Productive Enough is what sucks in some of the folk whose intentions may be benign but whose actions end up being harmful — your neighbor or relative or co-worker who offers you that great 50/50 deal.

AI’s sinister appeal lies in its promise to those who are unaccustomed to creative work. They promise users the credit, the money, the prestige — such as any of those things are — for having the idea but not doing the work. Then it’s not a waste of time, see! Then your idea has value, because it’s getting you something! Immediately!

But it’s all built on the theft of actual work.

(This all ties in, of course, with the movie studios and publishing houses who are eyeing AI to see how it can be useful to them — meaning, how it can increase shareholder profits by cutting out those pesky creators of the content they peddle. When you convince yourself that the labor does not have value, why bother paying the laborer?)

It’s going to collapse, eventually — precisely because ideas alone are not enough.

There are some suggestions that it’s already happening, as AI trains on itself in an ouroboros of dreck. Without human effort behind the generation, there’s nothing of value there. The people promoting the AI generators know this. They’ll straight-up tell you that if people could opt-out, their plagiarism machines wouldn’t work as well. (The jerk who runs Sudowrite openly admitted this, as well as admitting that it’s just too hard and expensive to compensate the people he’s stealing from).

The human effort is essential. Ideas alone are insufficient. Ideas alone have no inherent value. Ideas are cheap.

If you want to make an idea into something greater?

You have to do the work.

Unfortunately, while this news is terribly sad, it’s also not wholly unexpected. The Starcruiser has had trouble ever since it opened. The high price point, unusual conceit, and level of fannish commitment required for full enjoyment seem to have kept it operating at low capacity.

So, last night as I was nursing my sadness about probably never getting to go, I started thinking… 

If I were going to design a Star Wars hotel for Disney World, one that might stand a better chance of succeeding… what would I do?

I freely acknowledge that I know nothing about hotel operations, so everything I’m going to say here is pure thought experiment and speculation. Disney’s also never been explicit (at least that I’ve seen) about why the Starcruiser was so much more expensive to operate than its other properties, so I’m just guessing at what problems need solving.

I am fairly familiar with Disney Parks and their hotels in general, though. Not at the level of the influencers who go all the time, certainly, but I visit regularly, I watch those influencers, and I read a lot of the behind-the-scenes stuff that makes it online. This does not make me an expert. I’m being really clear about that because I don’t want anyone thinking I’m claiming to be.

But what I am an expert in? Is immersive entertainment. That’s actually my day job now. I’ve learned a lot about balancing the environment with the theatre of the imagination — and practicality with idealism in storytelling. I can also look at what patterns WDW hotels have used before — what things seem to work for them, as determined by the people who really are experts.

So, blending experience and observation, here’s my thought experiment on if I were designing a Star Wars hotel for Disney World:

Basic Principles

From where I’m standing, these would seem to be the major things that need to work for an immersive Star Wars hotel to be both sustainable and worth the effort: 

• The price point.

• Getting people in.

• The balance of immersion and entertainment offerings with the practicalities of people on vacation.

• Telling a coherent story.

So these are the things I’m going to think about when imagining an attractive vacation destination.

A new premise -- and a new structure to go with it

I suspect that one of the Starcruiser’s big failure points is its initial premise: that you are on a cruise, just in the stars rather than on water.

It’s a neat idea! And many people have said it works once you’re there -- but getting people there is clearly part of the problem. Many folks who might have been interested in a Star Wars hotel heard “but you’re basically locked in for 60 hours, into a cinder block with no windows” and balked. (That’s exaggerating the reality of the experience, since I don’t think anyone could actually stop you from leaving the hotel, and there’s an outing to Batuu -- but still, I think that’s what many people heard when examining the premise). It seems restrictive, which isn’t what most people want when they’re booking a Disney World vacation.

So that basic concept would need to change if we want to appeal to a wider set of potential customers.

Fortunately, we have some models to work from.

Many WDW hotels aren’t single buildings. Many of them have a central hub and then little pods of bungalows or smaller motel-style buildings -- and sometimes, those areas will vary in their theming.

A Star Wars “hotel” should implement that kind of design, with a central hub that’s your spaceport, and different pods representing different planets.

Those different pods could allow Disney to offer different experiences and, critically, different price points. Some more basic lodgings could be geared to the high end of Value / low end of Moderate resort pricing, while the fancier locations or those with more immersive elements could be higher.

Different pods would also encourage repeat visits, something else that seems to have been a problem with the Starcruiser. But you shouldn’t have to be staying in a pod to visit it -- once you’re checked in at the spaceport, you can go anywhere within the complex.

Design

Here’s where my nerdery gets to shine. If someone said to me, “Hey, I need a plan for just such a hotel right now,” here’s what I could spin out really fast:

Spaceport

Give it a cool name and an identity of its own, but this is the central hub -- the check-in lobby, main restaurants, and some large central features where you could incorporate some of the elements from the Starcruiser.

The spaceport is also where you fix part of the challenge of telling a coherent story: the timeline.

The timeline has been an issue for Disney Parks for a while. Even back before Galaxy’s Edge, Hollywood Studios had to balance the prequel and original trilogy eras. But often they just… let it slide. Darth Vader shows up during Jedi training? Sure. Why not? Mash-up the planets used in Star Tours? Sure, awesome. And gods know the Hyperspace Hoopla never gave a single damn about continuity.

Because the thing is, people visiting -- especially kids -- want to see the characters they love. They want Darth Vader and Chewbacca and Rey and BB-8 and Amidala and Grogu.

Believe me, I sympathize with wanting to tell one story, at one point in time. I love Batuu and its story. I read the tie-in novels. I adore it.

But for something this ambitious to be sustainable, it has to be more flexible. It has to meet the expectations of the people who come wanting to see their faves -- in the same way that all the Princesses can share a hall, despite coming from wildly different times and worlds. The magic of Disney can allow for some handwaving.

And this is, honestly, an easy worldbuilding fix. Slap some signs up in the spaceport warning that “this sector of space is currently experiencing temporal instability; we apologize for any inconvenience or displacement”.

• Conceit and Theming: The visual design here can borrow a lot from what I’ve seen of the Starcruiser, I think, but I’d love to go further with making it feel like a bustling place. Lots of travel ads for different planets as well as products that would exist within the world. Propaganda posters for the Empire / Rebellion / First Order / Resistance. I’d also want lots of audio design here, so it feels like you’re hearing ships lift off and arrive as you go through.

• Features: 

  • Restaurants! Maybe a food court that features stations for different planets and their local delicacies.

  • Virtual games like the Batuu Bounty Hunters, centralized here but maybe sending you on “missions” to different planets, encouraging folks to run around to different areas of the hotel complex. This is how you build in more immersion for the folks who want it.

  • Different “portals” to get you to the different pods. You could do something fancy here with how people physically move - a tram or contained moving walkways - but if we’re keeping it simpler and more economical, I think there could be neat design behind just plain sidewalks, designed to look like hyperspace lanes.

  • Hotel staff stay in-character, as they do in Batuu.

  • Gift shop: Maybe it breaks the immersion a little, but -- it would be fun to have a gift shop that sold more of the cosplay-esque clothing options that you get in Batuu and sell more of the Star Wars books! Especially since you could easily feature the books that connect to the pod locations.

  • A movie theatre! Just continually showing Star Wars movies and television.

  • Lightsaber training.

  • Lots of character meet-and-greets. Literally whoever you want on rotation. Temporal instability!

• Go the extra parsec: This is where I suggest things that could really go above and beyond with the immersion -- maybe not things you’d plan for on day one, but things you could leave yourself space for, once the hotel’s doing well.
  For the spaceport: Give this building some spaces that are, essentially, black box theatres -- places where you could easily change out the decor and scenery, allowing them to take on different vibes over time. Then, you can swap in new shows and entertainment, character meet-and-greets, digital experiences, Jedi training, whatever. But it stays flexible and fresh, encouraging repeat visits even to the “boring lobby” part of the hotel complex.

Endor / Kashyyyk

• Conceit and Theming: One or two pods themed around forest adventures. This is your most kid-friendly area. Small building clusters, like in Port Orleans Riverside, but designed to look like they’re treehouses! If Endor, this is clearly an Ewok village.

• Features:

  • An absolutely epic playground (Who else remembers the Honey, I Shrunk the Kids: Movie Set Adventure from then-MGM Studios? Like that. Heck, if you’ve still got some of those pieces mothballed, slap some fresh paint on ‘em and stick ‘em back in!). Lots of cargo nets, slides, kid-safe rock-climbing features. Maybe a stormtrooper helmet xylophone in there somewhere.

  • A good kid-oriented pool with a water slide.

  • Character meet-and-greets with Chewie, Ewoks, obvy, but maybe also the OT crew in their Endor gear.

• Go the extra parsec: Design an immersive element not unlike the Quests I do at camp. Set start times, a one-hour adventure that takes you all around the pod, including to some “secret” locations. Guided by one performer who leads them around and gets them access. A mix of puzzles, physical games, and character encounters.

Niamos

• Conceit and Theming: I know, I know, it’s not a major location. But it could serve a particular need for this hotel complex! The Niamos pod could be a little more sparse and budget-friendly than some of the other sections -- a way to give those of us who love Star Wars but do not love shelling out thousands upon thousands of dollars a feasible option. Simple motel-style section, not a lot of frills, but comfortable and relaxing, and a good jumping-off point for getting into the parks.

• Features: 

  • Wave pool with a little beach.

  • Maybe an arcade -- could be fun to do a Star Wars-ified version of the sorts of carnival games you’d see at Boardwalk.

• Go the extra parsec: Build in some optional immersive elements like needing to sneak around the shoretroopers to complete a mission.

Naboo

• Conceit and Theming: Tranquil and beautiful, but family-friendly. Here’s where you go luxe and set up your DVC villas. Super luxe. We have so many great examples of Naboo interiors to work with!

• Features: 

  • Really beautiful pool area with lots of natural features (and a pool bar).

  • Maybe a higher-end restaurant?

  • Maybe some higher-end shops with jewelry, fancier clothing.

  • Padmé Amidala meet-and-greet (and handmaidens! Let’s meet the handmaidens!)

• Go the extra parsec: Some artsy activities to embrace Naboo’s reputation as a cultural center. Painting, music, crafts -- easy to do with kids in groups, but something with unique Star Wars flavor.
  I’d also really love to figure out a way to bring in a Gungan water/underwater feature, but I can’t think of a practical way to do that. Maybe a basement aquarium of some kind? Or work it into the pool somehow?

Corellia

• Conceit and Theming: I know, I know, it’s not a major location and the only bit we see of it on-screen is a slum. But here’s the thing: Solo did not do a great job with Corellia. In the old EU, Corellia is… well, more balanced than most worlds we see. It’s not a bleak wasteland mono-biosphere; it’s not a haven of the wealthy; it’s not a wilderness. It’s… a planet. Not unlike Earth! It has richer and poorer areas, luxury resorts and backwater towns, industry and agriculture. So this could be an opportunity to build out a new location! I’d go for a hotel in Coronet City’s entertainment district — a fun, fast-paced vibe, something a little more urban-feeling to set it apart from most of the other pods.
  This pod could be dialed up or down when it comes to immersion. It could be a little more “normal” to welcome guests who aren’t super-fans… or, you could go hardcore and give it a big story, where Something Is Happening relevant to the galactic war that needs your help, intrepid visitor! Maybe with a tie-in novel. That I write.

• Features: 

  • Droid depot -- or something like it but instead of building a droid, you’re building a model starship (Corellia’s known for its engineering!)

  • Sabacc tables.

  • Han and Chewie meet-and-greets.

• Go the extra parsec: Take the concept of Oga’s Cantina and straight-up build a dance club with DJ R-3X spinning the galaxy’s hottest tunes!

Rebel/Resistance Base (Yavin IV / D’Qar / Ajan Kloss)

• Conceit and Theming: Me, I’d go with Yavin IV, because the temple look you’d get there is so iconic. This pod would be a more self-contained experience, more similar in concept to the Starcruiser. This is where you get a more stripped-down hotel experience (bedding more like the Starcruiser, bunks, etc) but the most story. Maybe there’s an Imperial/First Order spy that you have to find. Maybe you need to help Han and Chewie with some smuggling. This could have lots of digital missions, tied in to the datapad you use in Batuu.

• Features: Lots of interactive virtual games. Lots of character interactions -- OCs and familiar characters. Frankly, all the best parts of Batuu, just more of them.

• Go the extra parsec: X-Wing flight simulators. Bring back some of that tech used in the old DisneyQuest, update it for the 21st century, make it a whole thing.

Coruscant

• Conceit and Design: Here’s where we go for the glamour, and for an experience perhaps more closely aligned to the original Starcruiser. I’m envisioning this with a feel sort of like Riviera, very sleek and glam. It’d be neat if there was some visual trick that made it look like the building was actually just the top peak of a much larger structure.

• Features: 

  • Mix of rooms and studios at a lower price point with multi-bedroom villas.

  • Rooftop bar (obviously). Maybe a rooftop pool?

  • Here’s where you put a “museum” feature like they’ve had in Hollywood Studios at various points in time and like we see in Andor.

• Go the extra parsec: Build in a Jedi temple and do lightsaber training here.

Wrapping It Up

So those are my ideas! I could certainly come up with more planet-themed pods -- and probably will, just for my own mental amusement.

And truly, I think -- with my admitted total lack of hotel expertise -- this could work. It would be a lot to design and build, but a concept like this would have broader appeal, bringing in more visitors and thus generating more income.

It’s less fully immersive, true -- but I think you could still offer the opportunity for immersion for those who want it. The real windows might look out onto Florida, but you could still include fake windows looking out onto CGI-generated locations, especially in the hallways and such. You could build in as many character experiences as you wanted and could afford. Maybe there could be certain weeks where there’s even more of a set story — times that are more of the lock-in experience the Starcruiser offered, but that aren’t the default setting for the resort.

So, hey, Disney Parks, if you’d like to bring me in to help make this vision a reality? I’m an immersive entertainment professional, and my email inbox is always open. There’s more where this came from!

With in-person conventions back (if often in modified form), I’ve had the opportunity in recent months to think about what makes a panel fun and interesting both to be on as a panelist and as an audience member.

If you’re attending cons as a writer, you’re selling yourself and your work. It can be a great opportunity to reach new readers and develop relationships that can be fruitful in the long term. The exact procedures and best practices can vary by con, as some are more formal than others, but on the whole, here’s my advice for giving good panel — which, for me, means being both engaging and considerate:

Practice (and tailor) your introduction

Introducing yourself at the start of the panel isn’t the time to go into your full CV or publication history. It’s not even the time to recite your full 100 word bio that’s printed in the program.

A good formula? “Hi, I’m [name], I’m the author of [most recent publication or series] and [something else relevant to your writing career]. I’m also [whatever your day job is, or if you don’t have one, mention a hobby].”

Then, if there’s anything particularly relevant to the panel I’m on, I’ll mention that. I tend not to go into my background as a Shakespeare scholar, for instance, because that’s usually not directly relevant — but at RavenCon last April, it was! I was on a panel called “Elements of the Fantastic in Shakespeare,” so it was good to establish my credibility to speak on that particular topic.

Keep the intro to your book or series brief — an apposition, just a short phrase. “I’m the author of the Aven Cycle, historical fantasy set in an alternate ancient Rome” or even just “I’m the author of epic fantasy series the Aven Cycle.”

Something else relevant to your career could be mentioning another book or series, particularly if you have a sizeable backlist. It could be mentioning that you’re a cosplayer, that you write for a fanzine, that you’re also a vendor, whatever. For me, it’s generally mentioning Worldbuilding for Masochists (since being on a two-time Hugo Finalist podcast is pretty cool and helps establish my credibility on related topics!).

Practice your intro so that you know what you’re going to say before the panel even starts. You don’t want to sound like you don’t know what books you’ve written!

Try to give actionable advice

If you’re on a writing panel, your audience is interested in the craft of writing. Many of them may be writers themselves, whether they intend to seek publication or not. So don’t just talk about what you’ve done; tell them how you do it. Break it down into chunks that could apply to anyone doing this kind of work, not things that are so idiosyncratic to you and your own work that they’d be hard for anyone else to mirror.

For instance, I was on a panel about creating magical systems. We had a question about what to consider when developing them. So I broke it down into three simple things: the source, the cost to the mage, and how it fits into the society around it.

All of those three things are places I can go a lot deeper, of course. Thinking about the source can mean deciding if your magic is divinely inspired, rises from nature, whether there’s a finite or infinite amount of it, whether it’s innate or can be learned. The cost might be literal or more figurative. The societal considerations might cause you to ask how common magic is, how it relates to religion, if a career can be built off of it, etc. And we did go deeper into some of those ideas. But when the moderator or an audience member asks “How?”, I try to keep the initial answer simple and brief.

That’s important because it keeps things nice and clear for the audience members, but also because you need to…

Be mindful of time

Every panel seems to have at least one guest who talks for three times as long as anyone else. Maybe they’re arrogant. Maybe they’re oblivious. In either case, it’s not kind either to the audience or the other panelists.

So, be aware of how long you’re speaking! I know some panelists who prop a clock up in front of them, giving them an easy way to track how long they’ve been talking at a quick glance.

Don’t feel like you have to get everything in. You may have a lot to say! You might be able to fill the whole hour on your own! But that’s not the point of a panel. No panel ever covers everything possible about its topic. Think of it more like offering a sampler platter, with the hopes that it will inspire the audience to go find the buffet.

Be careful, too, not to belabor a point. You don’t need to reiterate the same idea four times in slightly different words; make the point, then stop talking.

If you’re nervous about going on too long, practice ahead of time. If you know who your moderator is going to be, email them and ask if they have questions prepped — or, just take a guess at what some questions on your topic are likely to be. (The panel description might help you out there.) Then, set a timer and practice answering. This can be helpful just to get you comfortable knowing what talking for thirty seconds, one minute, or two minutes feels like! (It’s not nearly as long as you think). And, really, that’s the range you should be aiming for.

In a fifty-minute panel, most moderators have six to ten questions prepped, though I’ve been on panels where either the conversation was good enough or someone bloviated enough that we only got through three or four. Rarely do you actually get to ten. So, let’s say six — Well, at least 5 minutes at the beginning and a few at the end are gonna be introductions and wrapping-up. If you want to get through six questions, that’s seven minutes per question, and at least one of those is probably going to be the moderator asking and explaining it. So, six minutes to divide between panelists. If there’s only two or three of you, you can go on a bit more. If there are five of you, less so!

A short, pithy answer is also going to be more memorable to the audience than a long meander.

Don’t give a full synopsis of your book

One way to make sure you’re not going on too long? When you’re talking about your own work, keep it brief.

You want to give the audience the flavor of your book, enough that it might pique their curiosity and make them follow-up by taking your card, following you on social media, or — glory of glories! — actually purchasing your book.

A detailed synopsis isn’t going to do that. They haven’t come to have a book report read to them, so don’t give them the story plot point by plot point. Don’t even give them the jacket copy. The jacket copy is too long. Give them major concepts and themes.

So, for example, when I’m talking about the Aven Cycle, I don’t get into the specific moves and countermoves that the characters are making; I talk about how the books explore power and agency in a complex world and about how I love the intersection of magic and socio-politics. Let the audience hear the big picture things that make you excited about your own work!

I also recommend not mentioning your characters’ names. For the most part, the audience is not going to retain that information. Just say “my protagonist,” “my antagonist,” “this great side character,” “the love interest,” etc.

Spread the love

Don’t just talk about your own books. Yes, you’re on this panel because of your expertise, but it comes off as tedious and self-centered if you can’t seem to relate the topic to anything but your own work. Recommend other books that exemplify what it is you’re talking about. Pass along craft advice that you’ve received from other authors. Tell the audience where they can go to expand their horizons.

And, of course, I advise being mindful about who you’re recommending. I’ve sat next to a lot of older white dudes who don’t seem to have read anything new since 1990, so that’s all they can rec. It’s highly predictable, and it’s not really helpful for anyone in the audience hoping to be published. They need to be investigating the genre as it exists now. I intentionally recommend authors from marginalized communities as often as possible, and I try to keep those recs very current. I’ll only dig back in time if I need to talk about something that was formative for me or for the genre; otherwise, I go for things that were published within the last few years.

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Listen to your fellow panelists

It’s super easy, when you’re on a panel, to fall into the trap of just waiting for your turn to speak, practicing your own answer to the question in your head. This is particularly true if you’re nervous. But do both your fellow panelists and yourself the solid of actually listening to them!

For one thing, they’re here for a reason. They’re going to say smart things, and you never know who might be your next great read, critique partner, podcast guest, or just good friend! And you won’t find out if you’re not taking in their words.

For another — and this is, admittedly, a paneling preference of mine — conversations are more interesting when there’s some interplay between the panelists. Now, not all moderators really allow for this. Some are very strict about one person answers, then the next, then the next. But the best panels I’ve been on have had some flexibility, and once everyone’s at least had a chance to talk, allow for some chitchat between panelists. I was on one at ConCarolinas where the conversation was so great that forty-five minutes passed and it felt like twenty.

It’s also wonderful to be able to refer to what someone else has said — and not repeat it! It’s always okay to say, “Yeah, I think [Other Author] summed that up perfectly” and then allow the panel to move on.

The panelists’ table is not authors’ alley

At many cons, authors and other creators will bring samples of their work to put on the table in front of them while they panel. It’s a mini-marketing opportunity, and it’s great if the audience can associate your face and words with your work right off the bat.

Whether this is commonly acceptable or considered crass depends a lot on the con, though. I find that the more academic or professional the assembly, the less likely people are to do this. It’s a lot more common at fan cons, where it’s generally accepted that everybody’s trying to sell something.

What you don’t want to do in any case is usurp the entire table with a display of all your books and other knick-knacks. This isn’t the vendor room, and chances are good that anytime someone bumps the table, something’s going to fall over.

I typically have one book and a stack of my postcards with me. I’ve invested in a couple of solid stands so that I’m not trying awkwardly to prop a book open to get it to stand up. (I use these). And I usually wait to see what other folk are putting out before I do one, both, or neither.

Let them know where to find you

Most moderators will give all the panelists a chance to close out with a mini-pitch for themselves and their work. If you’re going to be on other panels during the con, it’s great to mention that; if you have a table in authors’ alley or the vendor room, point the audience there; if you’ll be hanging in the bar and are open to random folk coming to talk with you; if you’ll be at karaoke or a dance and want people to hang out with; if you’re leading a tabletop game — all of those things are great to mention! If the audience is digging you, you want to be able to build on that connection.

And, let them know where to find you post-con. I used to try to rattle off my website and socials, but now I just tell folk to come up and grab a card, since that has the QR code for my LinkTree on it. Then they don’t have to try to scribble anything down or memorize a handle.

So that’s my advice for being a pleasant panelist! Do you have any favorite tips and tricks for preparing for being on a panel?