Saturday: Epcot Center

Epcot.  Not the cool concept glossing over some kind of corporate/fascist paradise.  The educational side of Disney World.  Maybe "educational" is the better way to say it.  

It's still rather fun, if you go in accepting that you're going to pay a lot of money to visit.

Not the best sign when waiting for the bus.  This fog implies high humidity, which becomes a problem later.

 It also didn't help that there was a marathon around the park, which closed roads and screwed up traffic.  This made the shuttle bus late, meaning a longer wait.  It did eventually work out, though:

See?

The science stuff in the "world of tomorrow" is pretty cool, even if some of them have corporate sponsors that don't even try to hide their agenda.

This is from Color-topia.  Or Color-o-rama.  Color-pa-looza?  Something about color, sponsored by Glidden paint.  Color is pretty cool.  I'm pro-color.

 Later, when I talk about buying things, this is where I bought things.  I'd rather just put that all at the end.

The "The Seas" thing is run by Nemo from Little Nemo.  He has removed pretty much all the science from that section, except for the aquarium section full for animals.  Since aquariums without animals are just pools.  Anyway, huge manatee.

 And then it was basically lunch time.

Ok, so this is an odd restaurant design.  The best description is "ride with food."  There's a rotating restaurant that overlooks the "The Land" ride below.  The meal is prix fixe, with all options coming out "family style."  Since the restaurant rotates, they're timed so that you end the meal after a single revolution.

There's a decent amount of food, too.  This is for two, although I had the added benefit of a vegetarian second, allowing me to have my choice of the yummy animals.

It's full of characters, too.  Farmer Micky stopped by like 99 times.  I think we were the only ones in the place at the end, so that explains it.

Giant shortcake dessert.

Then we moved to the world tour area.  The main things to notice are that the various country pavilions are largely restaurant based, and that since this is the only place that serves alcohol, the majority of the adult only groups are kind of drunk.

Squirrel!

I'm sorry, Pooh-bear.  We need to have a discussion about this.  This kind of thing just really isn't cool anymore, so I think you should reconsider what you're doing.

Pooh was in here too, with Tigger.

Morocco.

Koi pond in Japan.

Pikachu.

I should explain the phone-based game that they have where you get a phone and do Phineas and Ferb scavenger hunt-like things with park interactions, but I'm tired, and it's more complicated that I care to cover.  Read this I guess.  We did France, Japan, and China.

Italy.

China.

And this is where things kind of fell apart.  You can tell from the pond that it's raining.  It started raining.  A lot.  A lot of rain.  Boom, rain everywhere.  This makes walking around outside less fun, so we kind of stopped the game, and tried to find inside places to be instead.

Three Caballeros ride in Mexico.  I thought that move was the propaganda one, but it was an earlier one.

 It kept raining.

And so that was Epcot.

Upon getting back to the hotel, it was pretzel time.

Pretzel power.

The things I got.

In science world there is a "health game/thing".  We did not play the extended search game, and everyone gets a rubber wrist band thing.

Wow!  Five tsum-tsum pins!  What a deal!

HOLY FUCK, TWENTY-FUCKING-SEVEN-DAMN-DOLLARS?  FUCK YOU, DISNEY!

And those aren't even that great of a selection of tsums.  There are a lot of blind-bag things.

My park ticket is Donald flavored.

I wanted a magnet for my fridge, and this one is Epcot themed and spins.

Frozen is still everywhere.  I got a pin for it.

And I had the thought that since Star Wars is everywhere too, I'd try to get a Rey pin, since she is the best character in the new movie.  That should be easy, right?

Of course not.  She's a female character, so she has less presence in products than the robot, generic storm troopers, and Captain Only-In-The-Movie-For-Five-Minutes.

She's an option in a blind-box thing, but fuck blind bags.

Eventually I found one in a pin-specific shop.  She's limited edition, I guess.

Japan had animal shaped paper clips.  So.  You know.

 Remember how it rained a lot?  It rained.  A lot.  We were in China when that happened, so:

I had to get the best umbrella ever.  I plan on using this as my office emergency umbrella from now on.

Because the internet is my pocket

Friday: end of the conference

My images refused to mail, so I had to edit the post from my phone.

I have enough images to make an alligator gif, but I'm going to wait until I get home to do all the gifs.

And then conference stuff happened.

The coffee place makes paninis, so I had one for lunch.  It's not a real panini, as the bread is pre cooked, the meat and cheese added, and then the whole thing microwaved or something to make it hot.  Not awful, but not quite what it's marketed as.

And then more conference stuff happened.

Afterwards I was hungry, but not interested in going out to eat.  So I ordered food in.  Yes, this is a burger again.  I was lazy.

• Pasta squirrel.
• Squirrel friends.
• Water squirrel.
• Puns.
• Wait, what?
• I was able to watch some new episodes of Steven Universe today as well.  Then I spent a lot of time searching tumblr for pictures of the Amethyst-copter.  Unfortunately, most of tumblr was too busy being all, "OMG Yellow Diamond" to talk about something so incredibly cool.

Thursday: Poster presentation day.

Also, birthday of the bestest dog of all time, Kimchi the dog.

The poster went well, with a lot of people coming to visit and ask questions.  I also met a grad student who had an adjacent poster that is doing what I did for my thesis as the next step of the project.  It turns out that my thesis code would be very helpful for that, so I should take some time to rewrite that code to make sure it compiles and works correctly.

Also my computer at home crashed, again, so I don't have links today.  Well, except for this link to a network connected power outlet, which I'm probably buying when I get home so I have a way to power cycle the crashed computer remotely.  I'll need to get a decent router to handle that, but that's been on the shopping list for a bit.

Here's what else happened today, in pictures.

While getting dressed this morning, this sock fell out of my shirt.  I seem to have stolen it last week.  Oops.

I don't remember the caption I was going to put here when I took this picture.  After taking this picture, I dumped a bunch of sugar crumbs on my keyboard.  Double oops.

 Then the rest of the day.

Another note from housekeeping.  Today they replaced my water and my soap, so today was a good h-k day.

 Even though I still have lots of pizza left, I went with "expensive hotel food" for dinner.

Bourbon beehive.

 What's in that?

Read the menu.

The sage adds a strong initial scent, which is soon diluted by the bourbon.  Nicely sweet without being cloying.

She-crab soup with cheddar biscuit.  Pretty much exactly what I want with a seafood based soup.

Ribeye with smashed red potatoes and marrow butter.  This makes the steak from a few days ago seem like garbage.  Super flavorful and tender, with potatoes that tasted like they had cheese in them.  I don't think they did, I think that was just the butter/cream/marrow butter making them super rich.

I was kind of hoping for a chocolatey dessert after all this.

But I was eating at the bar since there weren't any tables open, so dessert was Oban, neat.

Ok, technically, dessert was this ice cream bar I bought on the way back to my room and ate an hour after dinner.

Wednesday: This plan came together perfectly.

"What plan?"

The plan to have lunch today.

Sure, a pretzel usually doesn't count as a full meal.  However, pretzels are usually not 99 pounds and the size of a barge.  It was a good pretzel.

Also the second plan worked great.  "Which was?"  So, the conference webpage lists that one of the local restaurants that has a deal is the Pizzaria Uno (which isn't called that as they don't want to be pigeonholed as solely a pizza place, but come on).  Pizzaria Uno makes Chicago style pizza.  This is something I haven't had in like six years, so I decided on Sunday that this was going to be something I did.

I forgot to mention the conference to get a deal, but it doesn't matter too much.  Getting this pizza still cost less than every other food option at the hotel, and given that it was clearly too big to eat in one sitting, the price per meal value was far better than the hotel options.

I also tried to get something to drink from that pop machine from yesterday.  It turns out that a pop machine with rules ("credit card only" and "cash only") does not actually accept either option for payment, and therefore does not dispense pop.  It was also out of each of the six choices, so that probably didn't help.

In any case, forty five minutes later:

"Wait it comes with the bag?" "Yes.  Yes it does."  So now I have an insulated grocery bag that is designed for transporting pizza.  This would be fine if I wasn't 4757 miles away from home. 

They also gave me a bag of plates, napkins, and cheese and pepper.  No knives or forks, though, which was a bit inconvenient.

Oh yeah, the pizza.  The "Chicago classic" which has sausage and chunky sauce.  And is super thick and full of cheese.

The only issue with it is that I don't have a microwave in my hotel room, so I'm going to have to eat the rest of it cold.  This is a minor inconvenience.

• Lalique.
• Squirrel gachapon toys.
• Dogs.
• This is dumb.  "We did it to prevent spoilers."  Yeah.  Sure.
• "It was just for spoilers, so we're going to fix it soon!"  Yeah.  Sure.  This isn't just damage control.

Tuesday: Late dinners are hard to deal with.

 Which is why this post arrived exactly one minute before midnight.  Because of the complications of late dinners.

These are the greatest conference session chairs ever.  The padding doesn't suck, and the back flexes in a way that makes them comfortable.  There's resistance to the flexing, but it's not a hard back.

And then I went out to dinner with some people from grad school.  They're not staying at the conference hotel due to the expense, and that rolls into eating out away from the hotel, since everything here is super expensive.  So a Lonestar steakhouse.

This was not the greatest steak ever.  It wasn't awful, but there was a lot more inedible fat than I really wanted.

Also: angry orchard cider is everywhere here.  I have never seen a cider promoted so much.

The high cost of everything goes into keeping the cupola lit.  I wonder if that's where the big spiral staircase leads.

On the way back to my room I thought about getting something to drink.

This is the first pop machine I've seen that is credit card only.

But, wait, what?  Let's zoom and enhance this.

So the front says it's credit card only, but the reader says it's cash only?  How does this thing work?

• This is dumb.  Twitter is twitter because it has to be done quickly.
• Pokemon Snap.
• Fuck Elsevier.
• Rey is great.

Monday: So I totally didn't just fall asleep for three hours.

Ok, maybe I did a little bit.  I didn't sleep much last night, and then spent today moving boxes and putting things together for the conference booth. Woo.

Yes, there are actually for realsies alligators.  Also turtles, as you can see.  I'm going to try and catch the feeding tomorrow evening.

 And then I moved a bunch of boxes.

So I had a bigger than planned lunch.  I also met up with someone who I have randomly run into at conferences/pre-conferences like two or three times before.  It's a weird thing.

Then putting shit together, and discovering when everyone arrived and things were finished that we didn't have the second power strip we should have.  Oops.  It should be sorted tomorrow, though.

Also there's a snake display in the shack I can see from my hotel room balcony.  That sounds like a weird sentence, but to be fair, it totally is a weird sentence.

We also didn't know that there was a reception happening in the same room as our booth, and neither of the others were interesting in being there this evening.  It wasn't too bad, but I had reception food instead of a proper dinner.

And then candy instead of a proper dinner.  I probably should eat something healthier tomorrow.

Because why not take a picture of Ornament Borb?  It gives me a reason to link to the barb/birb/borb post again.

I haven't had as much time to read everything completely, so I don't have super complicated links right now.  I'll need to read through the backlog of links later.

• No, dog.  No.  That's not how that works.
• No, racoon.  No.  That's not how that works.
• No, domestic terrorists.  No.  That's not how that works.
• But hopefully, they'll all go to jail for forever.
• This reads as "Reagan wasn't so bad" until you get to the last few paragraphs, and you can only conclude "Reagan was pretty much a monster who could have made the world more secure, but didn't, because see above re: monster."
• I liked today's episode, but I don't think I'll be able to catch the rest.  It looks like the listings are being updated at the last minute to make the shows visible to the DVR, so if this continues I should be able to record them.
• I was watching this episode of Odd Squad and thought, "isn't that like most of the Kids in the Hall"?  Yes.  Yes it was.
• I like Rey, too.
• Marnie.

Sunday: More travel.

This leg is for work though, so I needed to stick to the plan as close as possible.  My flight was in the afternoon, but I thought a decent breakfast would be a good idea, as I wasn't totally sure when I'd be able to eat again.

This was a pretty decent breakfast, at the place near the one mall.

And then after an hour of packing checking, more games, and then another hour of BART travel, I was at the airport.  I did not know that "you-check-your-bag" was the new way to do things.  You fill out the destination stuff (or the database does), and then fold the check sticker around the handle.  You still have to show id and turn it in to an airport worker, but this method works way better.

As does pre-check, which I had for this flight.

I got a cookie at the place I usually get a pastrami sandwich, mostly because I was still full from breakfast.

My flight was rather crappy, as I was stuck in the shit seats, and it was super crowded.  Eventually we landed, and I spent another hour waiting on the local travel to organize.  Then I got to the hotel, and checked in.  The counter person checked my room twice, making sure me being there wasn't a mistake.  I wasn't sure why until I got there:

Ok....where's the bed?

Not around that corner.

I seem to have some sort of suite room.  No clue why.  The bed is in a different room.  It's odd.

And I got a very expensive burger since nothing else was open so late.

Saturday: My last full day here.

I'm super sleepy, so I'm just going to gloss over things.

Korean BBQ:

Japanese cheesecake Kit-Kats:

High broiler for about 20-30 seconds.o

 Settlers of Catan:

• PBS.
• Kittens.

Friday: New Year's Day.

Today was mostly a lazy day without doing too much.

Did you know that they make Olaf waffle irons?  Neither did I, because I assumed people were sane.

And then far later, there was pizza for dinner. 

As BMO would say, "It's red hot like pizza supper!"

• Squirrel vs. snow.
• Topical politics.
• Dogs vs. jerks.
• Wieners.

Thursday: New Year's Eve.

Today was a whirlwind of shopping for groceries and converting those groceries into food.

Also, today was the day that they repainted the balcony.  I don't they're called lanais here.

 I also failed to take pictures of most of the food.  The only thing that I did remember to snap was the cheese plate:

Goat cheese, blue cheese, some third cheese that I don't remember.

And then more cooking continued, with the only major problem being a burn.  I guess the fact that we've gone something like seven years doing these NYE things with this being the first casualty is pretty good.

Here are the recipes that I didn't take pictures of.

• Corn pudding.  This ended up too eggy for me.
• Potatoes.
• Butternut squash soup.  After spending a lot of time yesterday working on this, I completely forgot about it and never had any.

Also there was pork in a delicious mushroom sauce and some green beans.

• Christmas baking.
• Dog, no.  Stop that, dog.
• Star Wars fan theories.  I can read and link to these now.
• BB-8.
• New level.
• And just a final reminder that tomorrow is the Day of Third Impact, so I hope everyone is ready for the conclusion of the Human Instrumentality Project.

And this link has been sitting lonely in my saved RSS feeds since last year.

• The artwork of La Vie Parisienne should really be collected and anthologized.