Altered by Jennifer Rush

TL;DR a drawn-out chase of genetically engineered teens by the evil corporation that experimented on them

(finished 6/29/15)

I do have to give Altered credit in that I was able to finish it in spite of my reading slump. I sat down to read it in my free time, and it was easy enough to get into. However, I wasn't impressed by it. And I think I might be in the minority on this one. Keep that in mind. 

Altered just didn't feel all that interesting or unique to me. The narration wasn't anything spectacular (and was even cliche, thank you "I let out the breath I didn't realize I'd been holding" on pg 311). I wasn't particularly attached to any of the characters. They were easy enough to tell apart, though Trev and Cas were pretty similar to me. I think the characters bordered a little bit on cliche, too, considering Nick was all bad-boy archetype and Sam was the stereotypical hero. 

The concept of the story was good, I think, but I think I would've been more interested in seeing them in the lab than just on the run. It didn't feel like there was any character development and the plotline of "avoid the Branch" was pretty basic. It's been done before and there wasn't anything that really made it stand out. The plotline of trying to find and decipher the clues left behind from before the story started wasn't intriguing enough to me, either. I think some people could find it interesting, trying to figure it out alongside the characters, but I didn't care for it. The whole mystery aspect didn't appeal to me at all. 

I only sticky-noted the last quarter of the book or so, so I didn't have too many issues up until the ending really started. There was nothing that made me support the romance that popped up (thankfully it was kind of minimal, but my comment on the last sentence of the book is "gag"). The final conflict felt poorly set up to me, both in narration and how the characters tried to execute it. Their game plan kind of made me question how they managed to evade the Branch that long. 

A lot of people have reviewed Altered pretty high on goodreads, and I can only find a couple where the readers weren't impressed. I think I probably just wasn't part of the intended audience of the book. I'm definitely more for character-driven books than plot-driven. I think part of my issue with the book was just that I didn't feel invested enough in the characters. I wasn't given enough to really care about them. (Point in case: when some of the boys were injured and left behind, I was just kind of like "whatever". It honestly didn't bother me that they were going to be re-captured. Maybe I'm just a heartless person. I don't know.) 

My friends seemed to enjoy the book more than me, and one of them recommended the second book, so I'll probably give that a try if the chance arises. I'm not gonna go out of my way to track it down, though. 

TL;DR Altered wasn't my thing. It felt too cliche and I didn't care for the characters or the stake of the plot. 

Twitter Links -- June / July

I decided to start another blog post series! I follow a lot of different blogs, mainly about writing, and recently I've started sharing links via twitter to blog posts that I've found pretty awesome. I love Oh, The Books!' weekly recap blog post series, and while I don't want to copy their idea (nor can I pull it off every week), I want to share the love like they do and share some blog posts that speak to me.

Some of these are inevitably going to overlap with some of their weekly recap ones, so I'm sorry about that!;;

Why We Need Millenial Writers: this is important to me because I'm a millenial writer and sometimes I feel like I need encouragement. I'm a (figurative) small child trying to follow in the footsteps of the authors I love. And that's kind of hard.

Dear Writers: None of Us Know What the Fck We're Doing (as a head's up, this post has a lot of cursing. It's used really well imo, though.) This is also reassuring to me as a figurative small child author because I'm used to BSing my way through things. Knowing that adults do it too is nice.

Labels are for Soup Cans (and also for me)
I’ve got a girl in the war
Liraz’s Asexual Armor: Second-Guessing AceAro Representation in YA
Straight is Not My Default: Understanding Katniss Everdeen as an Ace Aro
Reading Without Role Models: Asexual Awareness Week Day #3
Let’s Save Some Lives, Shall We? Asexuality in Mainstream YA
This is a lot of links. Sorry. I kind of went crazy in the Gay YA "asexual" tag when I realized that was a thing that existed. Asexuality in YA is a very important concept to me (as seen here) and I was really happy to see that I am not the only one who has talked about the lack of representation. Please read these!! Especially "Reading Without Role Models", since I identified a lot with that one.

Healthy Friendships in Books

sailorenergy.net This is actually a Sailor Moon fansite that I found back in elementary school and managed to re-find! At some point, probably when we switched computers, I lost the bookmark I had for the page and I didn't remember enough of it to track it down again. I was really lucky that I managed to this time! There's also sailor-games.com, which I played puzzles on a lot, but whatever plugin it used to run them is no longer supported by Chrome and I can't use them anymore :c Anyway, I'm really glad I managed to find them!!

Calvin and Hobbes embodied the voice of the lonely child

Why You Should Celebrate Your Blogging Milestones

DiversifYA: Nita Tyndall this is a blog post about identifying as asexual and kind of ties into all the other asexuality links above ;; sorry there's so much. (Not actually. I will talk about asexuality until I die.)

I'm not sure if I'll keep this as a usual monthly blog post, since it was kind of a pain to search back through my twitter feed, but I hope some of these links were useful or interesting!

Fave New Music -- June / July

The two months got combined because of my vacation posts. I ran out of time to post June's.

I just started using my Spotify account in June, and it's been really awesome for finding new music! Unfortunately, I created the account via Facebook, so I can't share my account without giving out my full name :( I'm still really disappointed by this fact, and I would've set up a new account if I'd figured it out before I added like twenty million songs to playlists. (That's kind of an exaggeration. Kind of. I've added a lot.) This isn't a complete list of all the new songs I've found on Spotify, mainly because I'm too lazy for that right now, so I'll either tack them onto the next Fave New Music or just edit them into this post later. 

There was also a lot of music in my June Vacation: Overview post, and I'm not gonna include those in this one. Check out the other post if you're curious about what I listened to on our vacation! 

Terror in Resonance

TL;DR "not so bad as they could have been" terrorists

(finished 6/14/15)

The tl;dr link goes to Funimation, where my friends and I watched it, but I'm not sure if it's behind a paywall so here's the Hulu page for it. It's apparently not on Crunchyroll. 

On to the review! This is the first anime that my friends and I finished during our now pretty frequent Anime Nights. I figured Terror In Resonance wouldn't really be my thing considering the genres I like, but it was good! It was a little different than I expected. In a good way. 

There's not too much that I feel like I can talk about without spoiling things, because to me it seemed layered along the same lines as Mekakucity Actors. You learn more as it progresses. The science behind it seems pretty legit, since my friend who is well-read with the science sides of Reddit was able to guess what Nine and Twelve were doing and explain it to us about a minute before the show did, and he was spot on. It was pretty cool. 

The content warnings I can think of off the top of my head: terrorist attacks, bombings, explosions, blood, emotional abuse (and maybe physical). There might be a few more, but these are the ones that really stuck out to me, so if any of those bother you Terror In Resonance probably isn't your thing. I'd also avoid it if you don't like suspense and life-or-death situations. 

The premise of the show was pretty interesting to me, especially Nine and Twelve's methods, and I was surprised to see character growth with them. The friend who had already watched Terror In Resonance and re-watched it with us had problems with Five as a character, but I'm not sure if I agree with his argument that she was a useless character. I haven't really tried to imagine what the plot would be like without her. 

Terror In Resonance is only 11 episodes, so it's really easy to get through. It only took us two Anime Nights to finish it. I'd recommend it if you like mysteries (since it also focuses on the detectives trying to foil Nine and Twelve's plots) and if the content warnings won't bother you. 

The Winner's Crime by Marie Rutkoski

TL;DR Kestrel and Arin kind of screwed themselves over in The Winner's Curse and are now trying not to go down in flames

(finished 6/20/15)

I reviewed The Winner's Curse back in December. I rated the first book really high, and though I rated the second book only three stars, it's not a detrimental downgrade. I actually really enjoyed reading The Winner's Crime, but I wasn't all that happy with it, if that makes sense. My three-star rating is mainly just my "... what" response towards the ending.

I don't remember if I mentioned this in The Winner's Curse review, but I really like the mood of the narration. It's really poetic but it doesn't push purple prose (imo) and I really liked how it set up the capital and the Queen's city. I sometimes have trouble with fantasy set in different worlds but this series hasn't been too bad for me. The map on the inside of the cover really helped. Somehow I got the impression that the Valorian capital was to the east of Herran, not the west, so it took me a little bit to fix that in my mind. 

I was kind of frustrated with the characters. I mean, in their situation, there's not many other options without essentially killing themselves in the process, but I really wish they'd have been a little more honest with each other. It's not even just Arin and Kestrel. All the characters lie and hide things, which I guess is to be expected, but more than once I wondered how the plot would've been affected if Kestrel had told Arin the truth about the engagement from the beginning and not the eventual way that she did. 

Honestly, the plot didn't feel as exciting to me as it did in The Winner's Crime. It wasn't a struggle at all to finish the book, but I think that was mainly because of its mood and aesthetic. I wasn't all too impressed with what all went down by the end of the book, and where it left off, I'm not very sure that I want to read the final book. I probably will. It's just not very high on my priority list. 

TL;DR I liked the aesthetic more than the plot or the decisions of the characters. It probably depends on what you thought of The Winner's Curse. 

June Vacation: Food

So you may or may not have been wondering why I have an entire post dedicated to what I ate on the trip. (I don't know. You may not even have questioned it.) I'm one of those girls who takes a lot of food pictures if I'm not at home -- not so I can instagram them (though I do sometimes), but because I forget a lot of things and there are a lot of cool foods in the world that I don't want to forget about.

If you're not in the mood to look at food pictures, or just aren't that interested in the first place, feel free to skip this post. I'm not gonna judge.

I might also go back and update this post after my mom corrects me about everything I got wrong ... like I said, my memory's not that great, so I actually forgot a lot of the names of what I ordered or where exactly we ate.

This trip, I decided to do something completely new and choose to eat only from places we don't have here on the east coast. I mean, I can eat McDonald's here any time. I may as well take advantage of new opportunities, you know?

June Vacation: SoCal

Second to last in the series! This is probably going to be the longest post since it covers about three days. The first two posts were Las Vegas and Disneyland. The next one will be about all the cool food I ate.

After we left our hotel in Anaheim, I asked to drive by the Angels stadium since it was close by. It wasn't something that had ever crossed my mind, and it's part of the reason why I'm so glad we were able to take the trip! At this point, I don't think it'll ever come up in the story, but I wanted a sense of how big it is and how long it actually took to reach from Burbank. 

So this is what the whole trip was planned around! We didn't actually go on the property at all, but we walked around it and timed the distance between the school and where I decided my OC would live. I'm so happy that I got to see Burbank in person!! I actually got some really good ideas while we were there and I definitely wouldn't have come up with them just from looking at Google Maps. 

Point in case: I didn't realize there was a donut place up the block from my OC's house! We actually stopped at a Yum-Yum Donuts on our way out of San Diego because I wanted to say that I tried them. It was good! I didn't notice any difference between it and Dunkin Donuts, though. 

After we did the stuff with BHS, we went to lunch! It was really good but my stomach was too small ;; We went on a Friday, so there were people with cool cars parked there for a car show, and we got to walk around and look at them. 

 After we ate, we went back towards the high school and visited the Burbank Town Center. It's a lot different than ours at home! Theirs is essentially a mall, where ours is a mixed shopping / residential area that takes up a couple blocks. There weren't many people there when we went. 

This store was close to the anchor store we walked in from (I think Macy's??) and I was just like (✧ ⌂ ✧) it's even better than a merch hall at a convention!!  I bought a couple notebooks for pretty cheap and a One Piece notebook as a souvenir for a friend (which as of yet still has not gotten to him ;; ) I really wish we had stores like these at home! 

This thing was in the big open area at the bottom floor of the mall. It was really cool! I have no idea how much it would cost but I watched the one kid jump on it. I think it would be pretty cool to play on, since the kid was going really high up.

There was one clothing store that was my aesthetic and I was (✧ ⌂ ✧) all over again. Most of the dresses were out of my price range, though (｡•́︿•̀｡) This was the only thing I could really find. It was on sale for $27 and I was so happy when I tried it on that I decided it was worth it. I wore it to the family picture we took after we got back from the trip! I also got hair bows from the store too, but I don't know if I have a picture of just those. Those marks on my feet are from walking around all day omg I'm so embarrassed

The next day we did something equally exciting: Little Tokyo! It was awesome to be there when everything was open. I don't really have any pictures, but I hit pretty much all of the stores that sold stationery. I was really happy to be in a Kinokuniya again! The one in NYC was more impressive, but I was honestly just so happy I got to go in. We also ate at the bakery we did the first time, which was awesome! I really looked forward to that. We walked a few blocks away to a different shopping center and found a Daiso and I was very ᕙ(* •̀ᄇ•́ *)ᕗ Honestly if we had Daiso back at home I'd probably be broke ... All the stuff I bought is super quality! I finally got cheap washi tape ♥ The craft stores here at home sell some but they're, like, $4 a roll x__x Everything in Daiso is $1.50 unless they say otherwise on the packaging, so I got more notebooks and more pens. I'm seriously in love with all the stationery I bought (ღ˘⌣˘ღ) Two of the pens came in matching sets, so I gave them to two of my closest friends! One is going away for college and the other is still in high school (and is moving about an hour away by metro) so I was glad that I got to give them those souvenirs. 

After Daiso, we walked over to The Last Bookstore! We passed by it last time, but like everything else, it wasn't open yet then. They actually have a security checkpoint right inside the door! My dad had to wait outside with all my Little Tokyo stuff ;; I was lucky enough that my backpack was small enough they just waved me through.

This was right past the doorway. There was a poster taped to one of the support columns that promoted a Fierce Reads tour, and then when I looked at it I realized I'd walked right into it 10 minutes after it started!! I was internally screaming for a couple minutes. I follow Fierce Reads on Twitter but I never really pay attention to the tours because very few come to DC, let alone being places that I can reach easily. I'd actually heard of all the authors before too! I haven't read any of their books yet, though, and all the chairs were full, so I just stood in the area for a couple minutes and then wandered off. (I picked up a bingo sheet and two pens so I could give one to a friend ;; shh don't tell anyone.)

There wasn't a very good vantage point from the second floor, but the floor plan of the building is pretty cool. They had a couple art displays on the second floor and they had all the cool displays of books that you hear about on the internet like shelves arranged by color or the huge arch walkway.

The lighting was kind of dim and there were just enough people around that it was hard to get a shot of the cool book arrangements. These are the only two I have ;; 

After The Last Bookstore, we rode the bus down to Venice Beach. It was a pretty long bus drive but it was kind of nice to be able to sit and chill. It did get kind of boring after a while though. 

The beach was really wide! I've actually seen the Pacific Ocean more times than the Atlantic Ocean in the past two years or so. (I honestly don't even know if I've been to the beach at all in the past two years other than in Hawaii.) We didn't walk in the sand but I would've liked to walk along the water a little bit. But then I'd probably hate myself the rest of the day for getting sand in my sneakers, so it was probably for the best. 

I'm pretty sure I saw a commercial the other day for a Kidz Bop CD that made it look like the music video was filmed in front of the V thing on the left. Venice Beach reminded me a lot of the boardwalk at Ocean City, which I find a little sketch ;; Venice Beach is really pretty and all but I'm not really sure I would go back when a bunch of people were there like there was when we went.

After that we rode the bus a few more stops up to the Santa Monica Pier. My friend told us that we should go on the ferris wheel, but Mom said that it was pretty expensive and there were even more people than at Venice Beach, so we stayed pretty close to the entrance.

We ate dinner at a place on the pier and got drinks from a different place. Then we hopped back on the bus and rode up into Hollywood. I'd learned during one of my graduation ceremony practices that there was a Pokemon pop-up store that was opening the weekend we were there, so I was really excited about it! 

Unfortunately, the line to get in was probably about two blocks long and wasn't moving very fast, since the store is pretty tiny. So I just made do with looking in the window instead. I'm not really sure there was anything I would want to buy in there, anyway. 

There was a food truck handing out free boxes of matcha pocky to people visiting the pop-up store, so I brought them for my friends. I got to eat one of them because not all of my friends like green tea-flavored stuff. Unfortunately the cream had melted by the time I got them home and all the pocky stuck together ;; I ended up just having to break little pieces off the huge chunk in order to eat it. 

We walked from the Pokemon boutique up to the Hollywood Walk of Fame. It was a really long walk and it got dark on us >< It was kind of creepy since the area we had to walk through had very few people. The area with all the stars also reminded me of Ocean City's boardwalk, and it was kind of the same as Fremont Street in Las Vegas in that it was really crowded and a bunch of people were drinking at the restaurants or smoking. I don't have any pictures of it because the light quality was terrible and it was almost impossible to stop long enough to get a good picture. (Not that I really wanted to stop, anyway.)

The next day we drove down to San Diego to tour this huge monstrosity of a ship. We got a late start in the morning so we didn't get to the museum until early afternoon, and we were there right up until they closed.

I don't really have any pictures of the inside of the ship, mainly because the headset for the audio tour didn't have long enough cables to fit in my pocket when I wanted to take a picture ;; I had to juggle the unruly remote thing and my HTC, so I just never really bothered. The inside was pretty cool though! Mom initially got my audio tour in Japanese so I didn't understand too much, since most of my Japanese listening skills are from anime and I knew no military terms, but we passed an empty volunteer desk that had the codes needed to change the audio to different languages and I figured out how to switch it. I listened to a couple of the things in German even though I haven't studied that since summer after sophomore year. I figured out that the kids' tour numbers would play in English on the thing, so a lot of times I just ended up doing that.

We stayed at a hotel a little south of San Diego, so we were actually really close to the border! Not that we could've really done anything anyway with a rental car and no passports. The next morning we drove back to Las Vegas, which was the only part of the trip that was like "ugh whyyyy". I've gotten a lot better at packing lightly for trips, but that also means that I get bored of what I have to do pretty quickly when there's no wifi. I listened to the Welcome to Night Vale podcasts some when we were driving through the Mojave Desert area. It matches the whole desert aesthetic, but because I started listening to the Night Vale podcasts on our Alaska trip, I associate Cecil's voice more with cold and fog than I do dry / hot / sunny. 

SoCal was really fun! I would love to go back and spend some more time doing things and visiting other areas we didn't get to hit, but I'm really happy with what we were able to see. I got to knock out both writing research in Burbank and a return trip to Little Tokyo at the same time, neither of which I really expected to ever happen. SoCal has a very different feel than here at home and I've come to notice and appreciate how different the scenery is in all of our trips. 

Thank you so much if you've read this far! ♥ I know that this post is really text- and image-heavy ;; The final post in this mini-series will be about food, and then I go back to book blogging and other assorted posts. 

June Vacation: Disneyland

Second post in the series! The first one was Las Vegas, and the next one will be SoCal, followed by a post just on food. Also check out the overview post if you missed it!

I was really happy that we got to do Disneyland on the trip! We've been to Disney World twice before, but I've been curious about Disneyland through all the Wiki Adventure games I end up playing.

The hotel we stayed at was right across the street from California Adventure, which was pretty hella. We ate dinner outside the night we got there to see the fireworks, but they ended up not doing them :( We had to buy our tickets at the park but there was no line. It was so strange.

It was really cool to be able to go during the Diamond Celebration!! There was a lot of cool merch, but it was kind of expensive :( The walk between our hotel and the entrance to the two parks was really pretty!

Disneyland had a slightly different feel than Disney World had. I think it's to be expected, since Disneyland is in the middle of Anaheim and Disney World is pretty isolated from the other stuff around it. There were a few helicopters that flew overhead and a couple airplanes coming for landing at LAX, and I don't remember really seeing anything at all overhead in Disney World.

This is really bad photo composition ;; The other picture I took seems dark for some reason

I was kind of surprised to learn that the two parks have almost the same layout! For some reason I was expecting that they'd be significantly different than each other, but at least the entrance / castle areas are almost exactly the same. It was actually really nice. 

The castle was all sorts of decked out with celebration regalia. It was really pretty! I think it was Mom that pointed out that Cinderella's castle can be seen from almost anywhere in Disney World and that not having that kind of landmark was a little strange.

But she was really happy that we were able to go inside the castle! They have an attraction thing where you walk through Sleeping Beauty's story. It was dim inside so a lot of my pictures don't look that great ... They had some really cool illusions though where they projected clips of the movie over 3D stills they had made, or used the projections to make really cool effects like fire. 

This is something that crossed my mind more than once, and I'm not really sure if anybody will understand, but Disney's grasp of mise en scene is amazing. Every little detail is accounted for in order to create the atmosphere. I don't know where the thought initially crossed my mind, but it's especially noticeable for the Tarzan's treehouse attraction and the queue lines for Big Thunder Mountain Railroad and the Jungle Cruise. There are little accents to make everything look so realistic, whether it's the stuff on abandoned desks or how some things just look naturally old. 

Anyway! I nerded out a little bit there. Mise en scene is something we talked about in my Vid Prod class this year when we weren't in the studio and were analyzing Star Wars -- my teacher described it as "everything in the shot". Essentially, it's little things that would probably go unnoticed but make the scene more concrete. Like the little telegraph noises you can hear from the loading area of Big Thunder Mountain. Disney goes out of their way to make sure you're really immersed in your surroundings no matter what you're doing. 

One of my favorite rides is Big Thunder Mountain Railroad. We had a really short wait for it! I've learned that the Disneyland and Disney World tracks are mirror images of each other, which I didn't realize. The two versions had different feels to them. It was cool to see how they differed. 

Instead of the castle being the defining landmark of the park, the Matterhorn Bobsleds mountain is! 

We got to ride the carousel, and we only had to wait for the previous round of the ride to finish! The wait was so short!! The park actually wasn't that crowded in the morning even though it had already been open for a few hours by the time we got there. 

We rode on Mr. Toad's Wild Ride next. Because it was only me and my parents and a lot of rides are two-seaters, my parents usually switched off riding with me. Mom rode alone for this one and said the ride was a little scary. There were definitely parts that seemed a little creepy, since the entire ride is pretty dim, but I wasn't familiar with what the ride was based around ;; 

We rode the Matterhorn after that. I was really excited at first since I'd learned about it through Wiki Adventures, but Mom commented on the yells we were hearing as the ride went by and made me worry that it wasn't going to be my kind of ride. I'm glad I ultimately didn't back out though! (Mom also wouldn't let me step out of the line ...) There weren't any big dips like Mom made me fear. The ride goes up really steeply at first, but that's just to get you to the top of the ride. It winds around the mountain and there weren't any drops that scared me. It was actually pretty fun! 

After the Matterhorn, we regrouped and had a snack. I went into a couple of the gift shops nearby us and bought a sweater since it was cloudy and honestly almost chilly. The sweater is so soft inside! It's similar to a shirt I remember Mom having and should be really cute to coordinate with skirts and collared shirts come the fall. 

At some point we watched the afternoon parade, but all I have from it is video so I have no idea where it falls chronologically. 

We went on the Buzz Lightyear ride! Courtoon, one of the cosplayers I follow, has posted a couple times about her scores whenever she visits the park, so I was really excited. Dad ended up doing better than Mom and I somehow! There were also Buzz Lightyear hoodies in that gift shop, which I'd wanted when we went to Disney World, but Mom pointed out that it would be harder to coordinate and wear every day. (I might still buy one off the internet or if they sell them at Disney stores. One day.) 

And of course I manage to cover most of my face with the gun ... 

Mom wanted to go on the Finding Nemo ride, and the wait was kind of long, but it was cool! I took a bunch of video of it but I'm not sure if I can use it because of the format it recorded in on my HTC ;; I still have to do some research into it.

Okay, here's an example of mise en scene. Look at all the stuff stacked on the desk on the left. I wish I'd gotten a better picture to show you guys ;; There are a bunch of books stacked up somewhat precariously and a chemistry set that looks like it was in mid-use. The scene set up where Tarzan is found as a baby was amazing, but my only picture of it is really bad ;; It was so realistic in looking like someone's room that had been destroyed. (I haven't watched Tarzan in a long time. I don't remember what exactly happened.)

The queue line for Pirates of the Caribbean didn't give me a good angle of the sign ;; The ride was really cool! The loading area (and the restaurant) were in a room that was set up to look like night, and I actually couldn't find the ceiling at first! It really looked like we were standing outside at night. (Unfortunately, I did manage to find the wall / ceiling line and ruin the image, but it was still really good even after that.) One of the girls sitting behind us in the boat pointed out that there's a shooting star projected on the sky every five seconds, which was really cool! (Also another example of mise en scene. I would've missed it if it weren't for her.) There were bigger drops than the one in Disney World, which scared me ;; I think that one only had one drop, so the second drop took me completely by surprise. 

Mom also had the great idea of going on Splash Mountain, especially since it was closed last time we were at Disney World. I was really apprehensive to it. My parents initially got in line thinking it was going to be close to an hour, max, but I got out of line and walked up to the front where the sign said it was closer to 90 minutes. And then I refused to stand in line that long for it. We got fastpasses and ended up waiting like 10 minutes max. I ended up getting pretty splashed on the ride even before we made it to the top ;; I was not happy about that. And on top of that, Dad and I were really close to the front, so we got really soaked at the final drop. I wasn't happy at all ;; The drop was honestly really terrifying and felt like a complete free-fall to me, and I'm not sure if that's because I'm so tiny or if that's how it's supposed to feel. Mom also didn't buy the picture, which I thought was her initial reasoning for going on it -- my grandparents bought the picture from when we went on it at Disney World the first time. I was pretty ticked that I had to put up with getting soaked and the free-fall for not getting any evidence ;; I sulked for a couple minutes afterwards. I was probably kinda bratty, ngl, and I feel bad for it. 

I wanted to go on the Haunted Mansion ride as well because of Wiki Adventures. I rode the Disney World version with my uncle, which was really cool because the ride didn't seem spooky at all with him. We talked about the ride and the effects. Wiki tells me that this version is shorter than the Disney World one, which seems true. (It also says that the floor does go down in the room with the stretching paintings. Take that, Mom.) I really like the one scene with all the dancing ghosts because I learned how they do it.

At some point after it got dark I got what I've wanted since our trip to Disney World: a Peter Pan hat! I even got my name embroidered on the side~ I'm really glad that I was able to get one, even though it was a little bit of a hassle to get it back home ;; (I wore it in the airport so it wouldn't get squished in our luggage. Mom said people were giving me confused looks.) 

I took this once we got back to the hotel room. Mom took one of me as soon as I got it but I'm not sure how it turned out since her camera's kind of old and a little useless without a tripod even during the day.

The castle looked like it was sparkling! 

After that we waited and watched the night displays that the park did. We watched the first light show that was along the river. Our angle was a little bad and there were trees in the way but it was really cool. The effects were awesome. Then we watched the fireworks from nearby that, and I have no idea if they projected anything on the castle like they do at Disney World, but I was able to see the Tinker Bell figure for a few seconds. One of the cast members told us that if we didn't move out of the area immediately after the fireworks we'd get stuck in a people gridlock, so we took off and managed to get the same seats we had watching the parade earlier in the day. 

The electric parade was really cool! I was so surprised to hear Owl City as the parade reached where we were sitting. That was definitely an unexpected highlight. It was a remix of the song from Wreck It Ralph with slightly different lyrics, but it still put me in a really good mood. One of the first floats in the parade was Peter Pan and Tinker Bell, and as it went by my mom said, "Look, it's your boyfriend." I thought that was kind of funny. (Plot twist though I am Peter Pan. My boyfriend is still Jack Frost. P: )

That's all the pictures I have! I probably forgot to mention a few things since I put the pictures in first chronologically and then wrote about them. (I actually forgot about the afternoon parade until I wrote about the electric one ;;) Everything felt more relaxed, which I really appreciated. It had only been about two and a half years since we went to Disney World, so it wasn't like we had to go on any rides. (Dad mentioned going on Space Mountain again, but I didn't really like it, so I said I didn't want to go on it. I feel kind of bad ;; I dictated most of the rides we went on  ...) We also had a lot fewer people this time than last, so we didn't have to worry about the group being split up or wanting to go in different directions. The park wasn't too crowded, especially compared to last time since that was a holiday weekend in January that tended to be kind of packed. I don't remember which holiday it is.

Again, I'm really glad that we got to visit Disneyland. I'd honestly kind of figured it would have to be a trip of my own once I'm an adult since it's on the opposite coast of us, and Disney World is much closer to us (though still far away). I had a ton of fun--excluding Splash Mountain--and I'm grateful that my parents let me ride what I wanted. 

I actually have a bunch of video clips that I was hoping to splice into a vlog, or at least a teaser video of sorts, but the video format isn't something that my writing laptop recognizes ;; I forget which file type it is. I'll update this post if I ever figure it out!