Originally published at: Behold "Icon of the Seas," the world's largest ocean liner | Boing Boing
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OMG…why?
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Go aboard with norovirus, that way you can’t catch it off someone else
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This colossus is Icon of the Seas, Royal Caribbean’s new ocean liner
That’s no ocean liner. It’s a fucking cruise ship.
After all the stories about shipboard outbreaks of norovirus and covid, Royal Caribbean’s “of the Seas” naming theme always sounds to me like “of disease”. Icon of Disease joins Symphony of Disease, Wonder of Disease, and the others. Up next: Vector of Disease.
edit: also Cases of Disease, Hotspot of Disease, Outbreak of Disease. . .
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Hard pass.
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Is it just me, or does that ship look really topheavy?
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Really just looks like Las Vegas on a barge to me. 
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Looks that way to me too, but it seems to be just the logical continuation of the design trend that has been guiding cruise ship design over the last however-many years. They’re now basically just slab-sided floating mega-hotels with a theme park sprinkled on top. While I might think they look fugly as hell, apparently the accountants like the look. I just hope that the naval architects found a way to reconcile the demands of the Marketing department with the challenges of, you know, building something that will float and stay upright.
My gut feeling is that this design probably works perfectly well until it doesn’t. I don’t know if there’s a set of circumstances that could cause a catastrophic failure, but the day that it bites the big one with five thousand passengers aboard, things are gonna get pretty interesting (in the Hoban Washburne sense of the word).
The Wikipedia entry for Icon of the Seas has a more revealing picture. It actually looks more boat-shaped than some of its peers, although it still looks hella bizarre.
Should make a good setting for a Neal Stephenson novel or a post-apocalyptic zombie survival horror videogame, though.
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On Futurama there was a episode featuring a huge hospice/retirement space station; uh… this one, Near Death Star. Somehow can’t shake that analogy to these insanely huge cruise ships.
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Good lord. That writing is a fucking train wreck (or ship wreck, if you will). They have all the money to build a ship like that, but can’t be bothered to hire a copywriter, apparently. That blurb was almost physically painful to read.
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People who frequent cruises are a culture unto themselves. I almost wonder if they (in concert with the Cruise Marketing world) have developed a dialect full of shorthand, jargon and staccato phrasing that sounds like chaos to the rest of us. Like a sea-faring Guy Fieri speak. Perhaps libertarian techbros would have more luck with their colonies at sea if they learned the native tongue…
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Came here to say this. A liner, by definition, services a regular connection across an ocean; a line. A cruise ship… cruises around.
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Maybe they used an old version of ChatGPT to write it, using a corpus of old brochures of the type @HMSGoose discusses.
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“Hella Disease” and “Hell, on the Seas” sums it up for me.
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A supposedly fun thing I’ll never do.
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That’s a lot of prime rib, soft serve ice cream and mai tai’s.
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Welcome aboard The Magic Christian
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I went to the web site for this thing. It’s half broken, LOL.
I have to admit, though you’d have to pay me (and give me the cruise for free) to get on the boat, I still am a little fascinated about the logistics of such a monstrosity.
Hell - just whatever it takes to get 5000 (or more) people on and off.
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If that’s an icon color me an iconoclast.
It’s like vegas with positive buoyancy.
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