"At just a little under a dollar a word, becoming fluent in Na'vi is a very expensive investment."

Re: the implausibility of humankind ever actually visiting another inhabited plane... Avatar!

Commenting on the previous post, @tealin wonders if our hopes of encountering higher intelligences might be as much about a kind of "looking-glass colonialism" as they are about angelic conversations, and of course she's right. But the success of "Avatar" suggests a third and opposite fantasy - the desire to re-encounter the "Noble Savage". Were that ever to happen, the video below is probably as accurate a prediction of that encounter as we'll get. Some of my happiest recent viewing has come from discovering and then bingeing upon the work of youtubers who share my fascination with theme parks, and if that sounds niche let me inform you that Lindsay Ellis's piece on Hobbiton was just nominated for a Hugo, so keep up, old-timers! I'll share more of Ellis's stuff in another post - but what we're here to enjoy today is the work of Jenny Nicholson, specifically her hilarious fifty-nine-minute-long account of a visit to the newly opened Avatar theme park in Disney's Animal Kingdom.

Why not search for images of "Avatar theme park", and see if you can immediately distinguish

the concept illustrations from photographs of the finished park?

Now, I appreciate this might not sound like everyone's cup of tea - an hour-long monologue about a theme park based on a nine-year-old movie - but the sustained simplicity of the presentation is part of Nicholson's genius. My favourite detail is the Jordan Peele-y ambience of dread she notices pervading the park as a result of its invented backstory: the world's indigenous Na'vi have welcomed this second human invasion, we're told, there's statues and framed photographs everywhere celebrating human and Na'vi cooperation... but no Na'vi. Nicholson also just describes the rides, and I like just descriptions of rides, but these too add to the portrait of an idea that has over-reached itself just enough to be ceaselessly entertaining. Enjoy...