Promiseland

[Fetian]

I'm painting my nails and Cael has Concerns

[Fetian]

Here comes a Sor, doo doo doo doo

[Fetian]

Sor is here! They have been here for a day, yesterday was semi uneventful of recovering from transit. Lots of video games, some youtube, we ate sandwiches and made pasta (me with fried mushrooms on top and Sor with raw mushrooms on the side). We were both very tired pretty early so went to bed at like, 9:30, though I woke up at 1-ish to pill and feed the cat(s) and then struggled to get back to sleep for a while. Sor was up at 7:30 to get ready to go pick up a rented car, because we had plans today that wouldn't be transit-able.

So they got the car and came back to get me and then we went shopping to get food to last us the rest of the week. And then we went to a bougie-er store to get some fancy cheeses to eat with crackers and semi-fancy salami.

After that we played some more video games for about an hour and then we headed out to Scandia, where we mini-golfed (I played abysmally -- I don't usually do the 'at 6 strokes just stop trying and call it 6' but I did several times today). We also lost our balls at the 3rd hole to an attraction with a clogged pipe, so we went to get new balls and let the employees know, and on the way we saw some people playing that hole so I let them know balls were getting stuck in the house obstacle, they thanked us, we moved on, and a minute later we saw them trying to get their balls out of the obstacle. We warned them! From then on we continued watching the house and seeing several families get stymied by the ball-eating house.

After that we rode some rides for a while -- Scandia does not have great rides, I dare say it has kind of shitty rides, but it does have rides. We did also ride the Screamer once -- a tall, flippy sort of ride that is much more modern and "adult" than the other rides. And we did some arcade until we ran out of money on the cards we got with our unlimited golf/rides passes.

After that we went to Denny's and hopefully will not have contracted covid (fingers crossed, touch wood) but it was pretty empty in there. Denny's portions have gotten much smaller since I was there a decade ago.

And then we went to a Valentine's Day haunted house attraction that, uh, was not actually very valentine's day themed in retrospect. It was fun, though -- it's supposed to kind of be four haunted houses but in practice you have to walk through one to get to the other and then that to get to the other, etc, so it's really just one very long haunted house experience. It was very fun, but I could absolutely have stood to have it broken up more with a chance to reset my adrenaline between "houses". All in all it was about a half an hour to go through the whole thing, which is a long time to be walking, in the dark, with people jumping out at you.

We got a funnel cake and then we took the car back to the guy, and walked to the train station to get home. There was An Incident happening at the train station when we got there-

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Train to home, and then we have been laying in bed doing whatever for a while. I think Sor has fallen asleep, and I expect the only change that will happen there tonight is getting up enough to get ready for bed and then go back to sleep actually in the bed instead of on top of it. We do not have plans for tomorrow, though there are a handful of things I want to do before the week ends. We also might just hang out all day and recover from being on our feet for hours.

Mostly a good day!

[Fetian]

Sor is gone! Has been for a couple days, and then I took a couple days to rest and catch up on linguistics classwork.

So Sunday was Scandia and the haunted house. Monday was hanging out and video games, Tuesday we went to the Daiso -- the little one that's very transitable -- where we just wandered around for a while, picked out a few things, and then grabbed some snacks to eat at home. After sitting for a little bit we then headed out again to go into the city -- there's a Japantown mural around where Japantown used to be (before it got demolished for racist building-a-highway reasons) and I'd been meaning to get over to it to see it; and there's supposed to be a cherry-blossom viewing area up by the river, so we tried to walk to that but then couldn't find it. Later I did some digging and found that we had in fact been standing on top of it, there just, don't appear to be any trees there and it doesn't look like a public park at all? I know it's not the season for cherry blossoms yet but I figured it would be a nice place to sit at least. I'm going to go back some time, knowing that that is where it's supposed to be, and look closer at it.

Despite not finding (or, not knowing we had found) what we were looking for, it was an extremely nice walk along the river, including under the bridge the amtrak and freight trains travel across. We did see a few trains on it but not while we were directly under said bridge, which is a small pity. An experience for another time!

Wednesday we went to the Dinos Alive exhibit in West Sac. When I'd bought the tickets I swear I'd bought them for 1 PM but the website must have refreshed itself in the process or something because when I looked at the tickets tuesday night, they were for 10 AM. After some sleuthing I did find on the website FAQ that you can upgrade your tickets to the 'flex pass' option at the counter that will let you in at any time, so we ended up getting there I think it was around 2 or 2:30. It is not in a pedestrian-friendly area and it was a bit of an adventure walking to and from it.

Anyway when I mentioned the ticket times mess-up the person at the counter said it was fine and just let us in with our original tickets -- also she was wearing a mask, which was awesome. The exhibit was fun, definitely geared more toward kids but the place was very clean and all the animatronics were in pristine condition, which is shocking for an exhibit that's been live for about five months. Like, we could reach out and touch the dinosaurs (and were encouraged to do so, gently, for whatever photo-ops we wanted).

It was a bunch of dinosaurs (and other prehistoric beasties) lined up along a path with little signs with info about them, and I believe every single dinosaur (&c) moved. They had a couple extremely large ones, notably spinosaurus and t-rex. About halfway through, the path went into a "virtual aquarium", which was advertised like so:

Screenshot 2025-02-24 at 13-59-07 Dinos Alive Exhibit Sacramento An Immersive Experience.png

 
And in reality was more like:

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a small room made of curtains with a screensaver being projected onto the walls

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complete with one of the walls just straight up being someone's desktop.

It was very cool though despite the jank and we had fun doing it! Have a picture of some of the dinos:

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Thursday we took another down day -- during the rest days (and between adventures on not-rest days) we played Diddy Kong Racing (working through adventure mode together, and then at the end just cheating to unlock all the tracks), a bunch of PlateUp and a bit of OverCooked, and all the big names in anomaly-finding -- I'm on Observation Duty (the first), Exit 8, Platform 8, and Shinkansen 0, and we watched youtube and Our Flag Means Death (season 2). We made it through episode 4 and will need to date to see the rest -- I'm super enjoying the season so far and am just dreading how it's going to end, knowing we won't be getting a third season.

Friday we did an escape room -- we picked Red Door Escape, which is a national chain, just because it's right off one of the light rail lines so it was super easy to get to. It was also very fun! We did have to use all of our hints, but we beat the room with about a minute and a half to spare (and despite one of the puzzles being extremely jank, requiring us to try to solve it three times after being prompted to because we'd thought it was already solved. In general there wasn't enough telegraphing which puzzle did what in the environment, in my opinion, it was way too easy to just not notice something had happened because you were too focused on finishing the puzzle that was causing it). After that we walked to a Japanese restaurant down the street from the escape room, picked up some food, and then headed home. On the way there was a man on the light rail acting extremely suspiciously, my personal guess is either extremely socially awkward or on amphetamines -- a lot of walking up and down the train, sitting in a chair at one stop and then walking to the other end to stand next to a chair for the next stop, then back to the seat. He also was keeping his skateboard at the other end of the train for some reason? And when someone was trying to find out whose it was (because an abandoned skateboard, you'd reasonably assume someone had forgotten it) he continued just, leaving it there. Very strange!

We had intended that to be a late lunch and then later that night go out and get some actual dinner but the restaurant gave us enough food that we were good just having that for the night. It was a solid 7/10 in quality, in my opinion, so pretty decent, and again just, enough food to keep us full until we went to bed. A good place to keep in mind, especially being so close to light rail -- I don't think I'd go there just to go there but if I were in the area I'd happily get food there again.

Alas Saturday was Sor's departure. We watched an OFMD and played video games all morning, and then they packed and we drove them to the airport. That night I watched a Severance with ash but otherwise just chilled out in front of the computer and caught up on some internet stuff I'd missed. Yesterday I watched another Severance with ash (so we're caught up on those, now) and did linguistics classwork all day. Luckily the classwork for that week was very easy -- watch a documentary, answer questions about the documentary, write a discussion board post about prosody and respond to someone else's.

That basically catches me up! Today I have showered and I need to clean the litterboxes and take the trash out. And do laundry, because at some point a cat peed on one of my shirts. I also want to take a covid test here in a minute, make sure I didn't catch something during all the adventures over the last week.

[Sorcyress]

It was good adventures!!!

[Fetian]

I don't think I've talked in detail about this yet, but I started using the visible app a few weeks ago, and even got the arm band to get more accurate readings (mostly because without the arm band, the app takes readings via the camera and it's so finnicky on my phone and requires I hold my hand at a weird and painful angle to get it to work). The idea is it reads your heart rate and HRV (heart rate variability), which it says are shown to correlate with certain disability flares, like chronic fatigue and MCAS. With the arm band it does live readings throughout the day and warns you if you've been in your "exertion zone" for too long, and assigns "pace points" that exertion and activity use up, to encourage you to pace yourself (hence the term). And in the morning you do a morning check-in that reads your vitals and gives you a score from 1-5 on what condition said vitals are in, the idea being that on a 1 day you'll want to be gentle with yourself because your body isn't at its best, and on a 5 day you should be good to go for whatever you had planned.

I'm laying all that out so that when I say "Today my morning check-in gave me a 1" that won't be complete nonsense.

Anyway, today my morning check-in was a 1, so I'm taking it pretty easy. Current plan is to watch the Next to Normal slime tutorial stage recording again, and poke at writing a little. I have the last of my laundry from last night in the drier, so in half an hour I'll go get that, but I probably won't put any of it away today.

[Fetian]

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I've started actively trying to bring my heart rate down into my "rest zone" before I do the morning check-in, so they're all starting from roughly the same baseline and aren't thrown off by like 'today I was woken up by a cat jumping on me'. Today it was very difficult to get there, took forever and I'm pretty sure jumped back up right away.

[Fetian]

Just realised this bootleg has accurate subtitles, I love fans

[Fetian]

This is an edit of the OBC version of Next to Normal, with Alice Ripley, J Robert Spencer, Aaron Tveit, Jennifer Damiano, Adam Chanler-Berat and Louis Hobson. I've used a total of 6 versions of the show, but you will mainly see 3 - the only OBC videos out there. I've cut them together so as to show as much of what is happening on stage as possible, as many close-ups as possible, and also as many of my favorite moments as possible (because I am nothing if not self-indulgent). Subtitles are included!

Oh my god I love fans!!

[Fetian]

My little man's next digivolution requires a 50-70% battle win percentage, so I'm sitting here beating up children all day