the last thing that happened in February, other than me posting the blog, was dad and I watched jacob's ladder.
This 1998 horror movie, made during an era where surreal horror movies were the norm, and when the special effects were, well, good, jacob's ladder is one of those movies, and one of the best examples of that genre, the plot concerns a vietnam vet, who starts to have weird hallucinations, or are they?
Also it has macaulay culkin in a cameo.
the movie is quite creepy, and does a good job at having a surreal atmosphere, with a plot that delves into the strange bordering of dream and real, with strange plot twists that are normally generic, but are actually good in this movie. it influenced the video game silent hill, with its creepy monsters, and its personal plot, and plot twists that aren’t stupid.
Great film, also it has a scene where a chick has ____ with a demon.
anyways...
Late in the month, my parents and I had an 8 day long vacation in florida, where we went to disneyworld and The JFK Space center, and we had lots of fun with the family.
LONG POST DOWN AHEAD
The first day of this vacation had us arrive in florida after a long plane trip, we went on a disney themed bus to the caribbean resort hotel, a hotel modeled after the caribbean, which also had a market place with restaurants.
After checking in, we then took a bus to epcot where we beholded the grand dome, and a statue of goofy daisy and donald, donald looking angry as usual. And enjoyed all of the gardens.
We met with the family for a little bit, discussed plans, and we decided to go with the family on the first ride we went on, MISSION: Space, is a cool ride that motionly simulates the feeling of being an astronaut going to space, whereing you are rookies on a simulation mission, and in a cop out, not meeting John Carter. Or Martian Manhunter, because all of the famous mars people are on earth now.
For the rest of the day afterwards, me, and my mom and dad, stayed mostly with each other, without the rest of the family. We saw captain EO, which is about a sinister anti-hero on par with Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver, behold his power as he uses his mind control and dancing powers to make people into his dancing slaves! Also, was this a collaboration between George Lucas and Francis Ford Copala, or a collaboration between Jim Henson and H.R. Giger?
Then we went to the ride spaceship earth, which is delightfully stuck in the 80’s, because it ends with bill gates, who is somehow the biggest technology advancement in history. At least it has black cavemen.
Also at the end of the ride, you answer questions about what your ideal future will be, it then shows a 50’s fallout-like animation of your future, it takes a picture of your face and puts it on the one character. Only problem was that dad’s picture looked like he had horrifying growth, another mouth on his head, and i had holes in my head, truly a fallout future!.
After that freaky thing, we started visiting the countries of EPCOT.
we saw aztec gods but no human sacrifices at mexico, we saw vikings at norway, which was Frozen out, because it had stuff from the movie Frozen, and that was mainly it, oh, and good food. at china there was the circle vision (Circle Vision is when the movie is displayed on 9 screens that are in a circle, making it seem like you're really there) movie “Reflections Of China”, i have no idea if the narrator was an non-chinese person talking in a chinese accent, or a actually chinese. probably the first one because it sounded fake, still, it was cool, also there was a museum of chinese stuff, mainly the Terracotta Army Of The First Qin Emperor, which was interesting.
There was no hitler in germany, but dad learned how to say bathroom in german, but then forgot. And Italy had nice architecture, but otherwise nothing interesting.
And we didn’t do anything in the american adventure, because there was no robot lincoln. Unfortunately, by that time we did not have enough time left to finish off the countries, so we saved the rest for tomorrow, but we were there for the epic fireworks show. the fireworks show was very awesome, because it had explosions.
thats it.
also the music was good.
On the second day i woke up mom and dad when i sprang from bed screaming “ow, ow, ow, ow”, or something like that, because of a leg cramp.
we went back to epcot, and on the way to the countries we went on THE WORST RIDE EVER-er i mean journey into imagination, which was for the younger kids, which translates from nicespeek to english as: “IT STINKS”. Here are the reasons why it sucks:
The music was obnoxious,
the guest was annoying,
my dad thought the human guest was rick moranas (who we thought was dead, died from a rare disease, looking on the internet shows hes not dead, and is alive and well, turns out we were confusing him for harold ramis, who is now dead, RIP.) who stared in Honey, I Shrunk The Kids, and other movies and terrible sequels. (Now that i think about it, i think it was really him)
At the end, theres a flash of bright light and a bunch of loud music playing at the same time, which made me cover my eyes in fear, making mom have to hold me.
At one point, the audience goes by a giant fly in a change, oh wait, that was the best part.
(As a side note, do to his non-appearance in the ride, or just appearance, we talked about rick moranas, who we thought was harold ramis, and his role in the “Honey, I...” series, during this discussion, i mentioned the two terrible sequels to Honey I Sunk The Kids, Honey I Blew Up The Kid, and Honey We Shrunk Ourselves, which i called on accident, Honey I Shrunk Myself......you can guess what the movie’s plot would be, But if you can’t figure it out, it would be about a guy who has a small johnson and tries to convince women that its normally bigger, or the dad accidentally shrunk his.........in a lab accident.
this led to the idea that Honey I Blew Up The Kid’s plot was that he accidentally left dynamite by the baby. Lit dynamite. Its a prequel, about the kid who the others kids don’t mention.
Also, dad thought that the first movie would lead to a divorce, because putting your kids in dangerment thanks to your incompetent science experiments, i asked for a name for the movie where she divorces, and he came up with “Honey, I Lost The Kids”, and i came up with “Honey, Why?”.)
The ride blows, don’t go on it, its only for the little ones. Which is why it sucks.
fortunately, this was followed by something less stupid, our wrapping up of the world showcase! We saw over 20-50(!) year old bonsai trees, in japan. morocco was the most like you were actually in the country, with beautiful tile, and excellent archetecture, easily my favorite from epcot.
there was nothing interesting in france.
united kingdoms was also uninteresting, well, ok it kind of was with the interesting on the street guy they had, but otherwise, completely boring.
and finally canada, which had another circle vision movie, starring canadian comedian Martin Short, it was familiar to me because of dual-canadian-american-citizenship.
And finally, we went on Soarin’, which emulates how it feels to fly, and it was very awesome, except for the unnecessary tinkerbell cameo at the end. But still, i was almost afraid to go on it, because of how high it was, but i did it anyways and i didn’t die, i was, instead, amazed.
And that was it for EPCOT, it was pretty cool, despite all of the walking we had to undergo, and journey into imagination, and the tourists, and the corniness. But it was still awesome.
And we weren’t done yet! Since the day wasn’t over yet, we still time to do lots of stuff!
The first thing we did afterwards in the park was go to hollywood, to see star tours just to see star tours, and a bronze shrine-er, bust of bea arthur, also a bust of walt disney himself, the only time walt disney appeared in the park itself, other than the statue of him at magic kingdom. anyways, Star Tours 2: The Wrath Of Jar Jar, since the new Star Tours is randomly generated, i was hoping to not see jar jar, dad was hoping to see me scream NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO at seeing jar jar, and....there was no jar jar. But yet, there was darth vader, boba fet, yoda and general arbak, who where all the cool characters.
The kicker is that when we reserved our tickets, i told (well, more like joked, really) with the guy at the booth all that stuff about not wanting to see jar jar and stuff, when we walked into the building of the ride itself, we saw a guy who worked at the place, perhaps the same guy, hand a note to another employee, the other employee then ran into the backstage, dad joked that there was a secret spy ring in disney, but i like to think that the note said “No Jar Jar!”, thus the guy listened to what i said and made sure that jar jar didn’t appear, thru use of a secret spy ring.
Oh, and mom felt sick and i got a headache after the ride.
Then, late in the night, we went to the magic kingdom, there was a parade that Khris (My dad’s brother’s) Kid liked, but i didn’t care for it, the real reason i went there was to see the automations play “Robot Lincoln”, ok, it wasn’t called that, it was really called “great presidents of history” or something like that, it was something i wanted to see for ironic value, yet mom and dad enjoyed it unironically for some inexplicable reason, I thought it was kind of silly, but hey, everyone's a critic.
after that, it was the night, and most of the family was leaving disney, but we wanted to do one more ride, space mountain, i wanted to do it because i had never been on it before, but the line was very long. we talked about if we would go on it or not, we were unsure as to rather we would do it or bail on it, still unsure, we went into the line where there weren’t much people in it so we could leave the ride if the waiting time was too much, luckily, the time for how long it would take went down from something like 0:50 to 0:40, so maybe it won’t be too bad we thought, james and domenic came to the line, because they also wanted to do one more ride before the end, but we were still undecided, and then the line got too big and there was no choice. a really long line happened, and during it, i talked about how home school was going and high school movies with domenic, complained about how long the line was, and while talking to james i mentioned something he had promised a while ago.
years ago me and dad’s old beloved dreamcast broke, after limited its death, we tried looking for a new replacement dreamcast, and years later, we found out from james that he had a dreamcast in a closet, (this was in 2009), we asked him politely for it, he said ok, and we waited for the dreamcast to come.
It didn’t arrive, so i asked him about it and, instead of it getting lost through the mail or something, he just forgot about it, so in debt for forgetting it for years i told him he had to sent it on (or near) my birthday, he was ok with this agreement. i hope he doesn’t forget about it this time because the dreamcast was awesome and the death of a dreamcast = 10 Holocausts.
So James, you better get that dreamcast on time, or YOU’LL BE SORRY.
Why?
...Because you’ll feel bad for forgetting again, and i don’t want you to feel bad, do i?
Anyways, we finally we got on to the ride, i was very scared of the ride because it has fast roller coaster ride, so, in a pussy move i closed my eyes for the durion of the ride, sometimes i opened my eyes and saw the cool looking stars of the ride, but mostly my eyes were shut, very embarrassing to see on the photo, also james was pretending to be asleep on his photo. i don’t know if thats more embarrassing or less.
on the third day we said goodbye to disneyworld, and left in a rented car, drove by Khris, who is a lawyer, not that that's relevant at all, i just wanted to point it out, anyways, he drove us to the cruise ship Enchantment On The Sea. this ship is one ship out of a large number of luxury cruises, it had rooms, a movie theater, and a cafe and restaurant.
it was fun to be in, even though it was just a vacation cruise that just kindered to the taste of the people and only docked on port towns and doesn’t try to examine other countries cultures. but this was a vacation, so yeah. the diner and restaurant they had where nice, and those where the places where the family met up the most. we interacted with each other while we were on the ship, mainly because our rooms were close to each other.
on the fourth day we arrived at the bahamas, at a port town specifically, it was very interesting to see, the people were friendly, there were lots of tourists, and also the beach we went to sucked because it was right by a bar, meaning that people would go out in the middle of the night after getting drunk and break their bottles there, i’m saying there were a lot of broken glass in the sands of the beach. so we went back to the ship.
later in the day, we heard music outside our room, we looked out from our private patio, and we saw a boat with a bunch of partying people on it, they looked all drunk, and none of them looked like they weren’t in college, the boat had a banner on it that said “Booze Cruise”, that was the name of the boat, and there weren’t any seats on the drunk boat deck, which meant that all they did all day was party.
dad said jokingly to the boat “Jump!” one of the partiers lifted up on of his legs over the bar in response. A little bit after that, a cop in a cop boat (we also saw 2 cops go into the bar earlier in the day, i wonder if it was one of the same cops.) came by the booze crew and it looked like the booze crew were about to get busted, but then the cop just talked to somebody on the boat, and the booze crew didn’t get busted, it was obvious that the cop just warned the cruse about driving too close to the dock or something, or he was just chatting it up with a hot chick he saw on the boat.
the boat came back later in the night and the night afterwards, because of this we had to wear earplugs during those nights.
Earlier in the day, zack my cousin ordered a game from the cruise, apparently the cruise had an arcade that you could play games at and even order games and a ps3 from, zack got Assassins creed 3, which at first made it seem like it would be cool, but then he opened the case and instead of assassin's creed it was need for speed or something like that. The classic disk isn’t the game for the case switch aroo.
I watched him play the game, and the game is mostly just crashing into stuff and being a bad driver, i played the game for a little bit, and mostly tried to kill myself by standing still on the road and allowing cars to hit me, this proved to not work as the cars kept hitting the breaks, so i drove off a cliff. At one point Zack was playing the game and robert came in and asked him how does someone win the game, and zack said without thinking “You win by winning”, robert looked in disbelief and said flatly “You win by winning”. this became a inside joke for me.
On the fifth day me, my parents and dom and zack went to the atlantis water park, also Khris two daughters did some thing where they swam with dolphins, which costed like, 200$ to do, and 100$ to watch, which is dumb, but we weren’t there for it, instead we mostly rode on the lazy river, which was a ride where you go down water while on a tube, the ride mostly moves on itself, so you could spent the entire day on this one ride! But thats only if you're a lazy american (Says the American Canadian).
But don’t get me wrong, its a fun ride, and probably was one of the highlights of the day. But just don’t make that the only thing you do.
The other ride i went on (with dad) is a slide that has you go threw a dark tunnel, and then into a tube where you can see real sharks! And yes the tube and the sharks were separated by glass dummy, if it wasn’t, this would be jaws 5: FYI, We Want Back To The Future 2 To Be A Reality. Of course its possible that it would be jaws 6-18, but i just want to let it be known that jaws was the first selberg/Lucas production to be ruined by sequels.
The plot would be a water park getting attacked by another shark, because the jaws series is just a movie series about random sharks attacking random people now, no relatonship with the past movies.
anyways, after dad put his hand on the glass, another person knocked us out of the tube and into the pool, which is supposed to happen, making this the funniest ride ever.
there were also beaches where me and mom mostly hanged out.
And we got a tan, and by tan, i mean we got sunburned. meanwhile, dad and zack spent most of their time on the rides.
btw, the people of the bahamas are very nice! There was this stupid thing from the water park where you have to put on a band to let it known that you're at this water park or something, after leaving on the bus (Also the two bus drivers we met, the first on the way, and the second were also nice and the second one was funny, he did a tour of the surrounding areas and pointed out all the fruit he saw for some weird reason), a guy came up to us and asked if he could remove the bands for us, i accepted, and he took them off. the others rejected this offer, and later at the hotel room, mom and dad where having trouble with taking off the bands. so i helped them take it off with what i learned from that stranger, thanks stranger!
on the sixth day, nothing of note happened because all the ship did was move, but there was one thing of note. The ship had another stupid contest, this one was called the sexest man in the world, and in order to be juged the sexest man in the world, the man in question had to not wear his shirt and do a “sexy pose”. For some reason alien to my mind, Robert and Dominic thought this was good idea, and entered the contest, and guess what, domenic won, and robert got third place, so that means that my cousin is the reincarnation of fabio, i guess, but i’m pretty sure he thinks fabio would melt at just at the sight of him.
My cousins and uncles are awesome.
The other notable thing was when dad left to play bingo with his dad, and mom was napping, i heard what i thought was a knock on the door, since Jordan (Khris’ kid) had visited us before, but it seems like she knocked on the wrong door, or i misheard something, because she wasn’t at the door, but her and Khris were in the hall.
anyways, i accidentally let go of the door, and then it closed behind me....
and i had left my card inside the room (the ship used cards instead of keys for the hotel rooms).
I told khris what happened, and i decided to get dad so he could give me his card, so i could get back in. khris give me a shirt, (because i didn’t have one on, and didn’t want to run around shirtless) and we went to dad at the bingo contest, dad was weirded out to see us, and after finishing the bingo game with his mom and dad (They lost, along all those other people there at the event.), he give me his card, and i ran back REALLY fast to our room, hoping that mom didn’t wake up and see that i was gone, and freak out over it. I got there and mom was still sleeping, i sat down where i was before, i was so thankful that mom didn’t wake up while i was gone.
Also the whole family got a picture taken of all of them.
Also this day was fida’s birthday, and mom and dad’s anniversary i think.
on the seventh day the boat docked in orlando, and we drove to.......
..........THE KENNEDY SPACE CENTER
It is a wonderful place, a place dedicated to science, progress, rockets, and JFK.
OK, not that last one, but it had Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, and other stuff about SPAAAAAACE!
The highlight was seeing the Atlantis Space Shuttle, this amazing piece of technology, is now retired after many years and 33 successful missions, it is now held up back at its home, it was amazing to see, the ACTUAL thing in person, also the place had a repeal of a space satellite, which you crawl through, also you have to take off your shoes, because astronauts don’t wear shoes.
and also there was lots of stuff about the space shuttle, which was very interesting to learn about, and made it a fun learning experience, we learned about eating in space, the canadian arm, a model of the hubble space telescope, how space settles work, a model (Or was it real?) of the nasa van, and lots of amazing stuff about space shuttles, like the weird mission insignias nasa uses, and i do mean weird, because one of them was a pirate flag. Actually, it was better, it was a pirate SHIP, in SPACE.
Sadly i can’t find a picture online.
(Mom told me about how buzz aldrin was glad he wasn’t the first person to be on the moon, because he wouldn’t had say anything as cool as what neil armstrong said. also before every mission on the atlantis every team would always eat the same breakfast, eggs with bacon and toast, and play the same game of cards. Everyone.)
In the same building as the Space Shuttle, was a ride that simulated going up in to space on a space shuttle, for the record, it was more realistic than MISSION: Space, because Mission Space has you part of a team that resembles a team in star trek more than a actually astronaut team, it was actually more like star tours, in that the technology for the ride was almost the same, and that it has the same bumpiness, as star tours, and the same movie screen thing, as star tours. i was scared to go on it the ride the first time, because it was emulating going to space and going to space has lots of rumbling and you go really fast and your face feels really weird going up through the atmosphere. But then the ride was just star tours but without the annoying robot guest and darth vader, the ride also has a cool part at the end where the wing opens, and you see earth from out of the top of the shuttle. Or, since its in zero-gravity, is it technically from below?
There was also a building dedicated to motivating children to be future scientist and austronauts, and was very necresser costrding that the government cut funding for nasa because they want america to become a thrid-world country, ruled by a monocracy rather than democracy.
what was i talking about? Oh yeah, there a presentation about future astronauts by a nasa
scientist. and some other interesting stuff about the future, nothing as notable as the space shuttle, however.
also there was the imax theater, where we saw a 3d movie about living in space narrated by tom cruise, it was interesting to see real footage of people living in space. but tom cruise is still stupid.
And then we saw a thing where a robot talks about robots in space and stuff, it was interesting to learn about that stuff, also it was set on a colony on one of the moons of mars, both of which are the setting of the Classic PC Game Doom. (Not counting hell.)
The robot reminded me of fallout, again. Because fallout new vegas has a lot of scenes where you talk to robots.
and then, we saw another movie about the hubble space telescope, which was narrated by leonard dicaprio, and it was better, because the hubble space telescope is really cool and a beautiful invention, and the people who fixed it when its lens got broken are HEROS.
OOps, now i sound like a member of the cult of personality.
theres was also a restaurant and a shop. which had lots of cool stuff that we brought back home.
we bought some freeze dried ice cream, and freeze dried ice cream sandwiches, and a book called “5 ideas the shook the universe”, from the kennedy space center, to bring back home, at the very end, the center was starting to close down for the day, but me and mom were so amazed that we had to look at all of the amazing rockets that were there, and read the things about them (like the booster rockets the spetzna, landing pads, and stuff about shepard, and recall of the thing astronauts would walk onto the space shuttle on.), afterall we might never go back to the place ever again, dad waited for us patiently outside while we did this.
We took our time leaving this place. And then we left.
After that amazing place, we all stayed at a stupid hotel based on nickelodeon, atleast i found it terrible, i’m sure jordan and julia, khris and jamey’s two kids, most likely enjoyed it, but i didn’t, and because i’m nice, i didn’t talk about my hate of it, but still i thought it was lame compared to disney and the space center.
This was also the last day robert and dominic and zack were with us during the trip before they went back home, we hanged out in one of the hotel rooms we had rented (All of the rooms we were in and rented were close together, this was intentional, and done both for the ship and the nick hotel, because we wanted the family to stay close.), and i brought up to “The third and first sexiest men in the world” and others a funny and dumb story, i found on the internet:
The story, if you refuse to click that link, is that a long time ago on fan forum for some stupid online star wars game, some guy was having trouble running the game, and so he went to best buy (UH OH), to get a “ultimate gaming rig” so he could run the game, when he got to play, what do you know, the game was still laggy, and he blamed “star wars”, instead of the people who made the game, like the movies themselves are responsible.
His knowledge of the difference preteen product and makers aren’t the only thing he sucks at, he also seems to think that a dell gaming mouse affects your computer's performance, it does not.
And Chris pointed out that 1500$ is not enough for a “ultimate gaming rig”. Indeed, it is too cheap for what the geek squad (The supposed computer experts who work for and “fix computers”) said was a ultimate gaming computer, while giving him a graphics card that is massively underpowered and poor in general specs (As the other users of the forum point out), could it be that it was the geek squad that said a dell gaming mouse affects your performance, and everything else? Of course, this is why best buy has a reputation as WORST BUY.
This guy got scammed.
This story i showed the family turned into a bref in-joke, where someone would say something like “I’m going to bestbuy to get a gaming computer (Or sometimes: “To Get a dell gaming mouse”), wanna come with me?” and someone might say “Don’t forget a dell gaming mouse!”’ Or “And if the game doesn’t work, blame the People who made the game!”, and i once said something like: “The geek Squad are in league with neo-nazis”, Ok, that one was too far.
The massage is:
Don’t trust best buy or the geek squad.
on the eighth and final day, we woke up and drove to a old restaurant that papa went to when he was a kid, did he express disappointment at it not being like it was when he was a kid? or did he enjoy it, it living up to the hype?
nether, he just ate. we just ate.
and then we drove to the airport where we said our goodbyes, and headed to the plane. unfortunately, at one point dad accidentally left her bag at the desk, so dad went back thru the tram, the line, and then ran around the airport to the desk, got back the bag, ran all the way back to the line, had to go threw the line again and security again, and then threw the short tram ride, and then went up the us while i was sitting on a bench and mom was getting starbucks.
we got on the airplane and the airplane ride took, like, seven hours or something like that, to pass the time, mom and i watched “It Might Get Loud”, a documentary starring Jack White, The Edge and Jimmy Page.
After that cool movie, me and dad vandalized a magazine for alaska airlines which they had on the back of the seats with a pen, we put in lots of funny stuff in there, like drawings of monsters attacking cities, crossing out words to make it say something different from what it said, and barely readable words. we got the bring it home (Hey, i might even make post showing the magazine!)
finally, the plane landed, we got our luggage fairly quick, we wet back to the car, and we drove home, in the night highway of Seattle.
and when we got home, i felt so unfamiliar with my surroundings, i had been far away from it too long.
so i went to bed, exhausted, but i didn’t because i had to shower first, so i did that, and then i went to bed.
And thats it.
See you next time.
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(I should also say that i forgot to mention my grandpa’s brother and his brother’s wife, who where also there on the cruise ship, Sorry i didn't get to interact with you that much!, and also sorry i don’t remember your names.
Also, sorry i didn’t mention you either, Rose, Robert’s Wife. But your still family, and thats what matters. )
