This October Walt Disney World will celebrate its 50th anniversary. I know this because I saw an article about it after I woke up this morning. I almost feel obligated to go since I was there for their 25th anniversary. Back in the late Fall of 1997 I was in Orlando for training. My mom asked if she could tag along and so she went too. It was our first time traveling together by ourselves... but wouldn't be our last. Not by a longshot.

I had training for two days. While I was in class, mom would sit by the pool at the Buena Vista Palace and read a book. On the third day we moved to Disney's Wilderness Lodge for the remainder of the week. At the time there were only three parks... Magic Kingdom, EPCOT, and Disney MGM Studios (eventualy named "Disney Studios"). Animal Kingdom wouldn't open for another year yet. I had been to Disney World once before, but mom never had, so it was a lot of fun.

The iconic symbol of the entire 25th anniversary celebration was turning Cinderella Castle into a massive, heinous, pink birthday cake (NOTE: All these photos are old scans from a cheap APS camera, so they don't look great... sorry)...

This was supposed to be an APS "tall print" but got printed regular,
so it's chopped off... my mom is still there though!

You could see the ugly thing from afar...

Disney's Wilderness Lodge is my favorite of all the on-property resorts. It's pretty much an attraction unto itself. There was all kinds of things to see and do... including renting tiny little speedboats. Despite being in the Navy, mom was afraid of water since nearly drowning as a kid. Even so, she was a trooper and had a great time as we went buzzing around Bay Lake...

It's definitely the best vantage point to look back at the Wilderness Lodge...

Interesting to note that DisneyQuest... a kind of advanced arcade... was being built at the time I was there, though it wouldn't open until the following Summer. It would close in 2016 once Downtown Disney was transformed into Disney Springs..

The following week was spent driving over to Kennedy Space Center... then onward to Disney's Vero Beach Resort for a couple nights... then driving down the coast to Ft. Lauderdale and Miami... then finishing our trip in Key West...

Sooooo... yeah... that was 1997, 24-some-odd frickin' years ago when I was young, handsome, and had the world at my feet. Not like now where I'm old, grizzled, and have been buried by the weight of the world.

I do have a much better camera now, however, so there's that.

It's currently 15 minutes until midnight. I have precious little time to get a blog entry in for the day... and nothing to blog about.

Except...

Just now ehen I was looking through my iPhone photos to see if I could remember something blogable that happened today, I saw this photo taken earlier this evening at 10:11pm...

What is this?

Where was I at 10:11pm?

This has to be in my house, but I'll be darned if I know which part of my house it is.

I actually walked around room to room, holding up my iPhone to see if I could figure it out. My best guess is that this is my upstairs bathroom and that rectangular hole in the upper-right is my skylight. But what would I be doing with my camera app running in the bathroom?

AM I FILMING PORN IN MY BATHROOM WHILE SLEEPWALKING NOW?

Wait... I am a sleepwalker?

Wait... I fell asleep at 10:11pm and didn't know it?

I suppose if money starts rolling in from an OnlyFans account (which I also would have had to set up while sleepwalking) then I'll know for sure.

Otherwise?

I'll be darn disappointed if I'm sleep-sexting my homemade sleepwalking porn to people for free.

So there I was going through some of my old photos looking for a shot that I wanted to use in a Photoshop project. It was an image of Akihabara, Tokyo from the late 1990's that I wanted to combine with a shot of Seoul from the early 2000's that would be overlaid on a photo I took in Prague from 2010. I found all the photos, but combining them was no easy task. The Tokyo shot was scanned from film. The Seoul shot was from a low-resolution hobby-camera. And the shot of Prague was a high-res pro-camera.

The solution is to bring them all down to the lowest common denominator. The Seoul shot gets some grain added. The Prague shot gets a lot of grain added. That way they won't look out of place when combined with the Tokyo shot.

This got me thinking about how often society has to bring itself down to the lowest common denominator. It happens all the time, everywhere, always. Just think of what we could accomplish if we didn't have to do that?

This pandemic has brought this all into vivid relief for me.

Time warp time is here! Which means time is fleeting, but madness takes its toll... because an all new Bullet Sunday starts... now...

   
• Glue! Ha! This morning I noticed that even though my trip to Maui was over a month ago, my PRE-CLEAR wristband is still hanging on!

Alaska Airlines uses some good glue on these things!

   
• NEWSLINE: Intel CEO: My job is to win Apple back Good luck with that. The Apple M1 family of chips have jaw-dropping performance with ridiculously low battery drain (see chart in the comments). I can't fathom how Intel could ever get the kind of integration between hardware and software that Apple is able to achieve in-house. But, hey, if they can do it... PLEASE GET ON THAT! Performance and better life better than the M1 would be a nice thing to have!

   
• Instant Memories! Another couple photos for the box! Are there any other INSTAX photo whores out there?

I have hundreds of the things and I want to do something with them. I first started when I got an INSTAX camera in Japan decades ago for an art project. I never really used it for photography... I would use it to make crummy little prints of my digital photos! I would display the photo on a computer screen and take a picture of it. The quality was so bad that you couldn't really tell, and I loved that. It's cool how they are bad. Eventually I switched to the INSTAX printers when they came out. And every time I go on a trip or meet up with somebody or anything, I make INSTAX Polaroids of a photo or two and toss it in a box. I have them dating back to 2000... so it's 20 years of memories. Maybe a giant collage or something? That would be kinda nifty! A couple years ago I started writing on them, then went back and wrote on all of them with dates so other people could understand them. Now I love them more than ever. Gotta figure out a way to display them.

   
• Kermie, NO! OH MY GAWD...

I laughed way too hard at this. Way too hard.

   
• Artistry! And even harder at this...

SO INAPROPRIATE!

   
And that's all there is, Halloween fans.