I'll Stay in Normal Reality, Thanks

Lydia's Dad's crew is still in town so we've been entertaining them with all of the wonders of Seattle.

Their Kirkland Airbnb.

There's a Sandbox VR place in Totem Lake that I've walked by about 400 times and have been curious. Evan is into his Meta Quest 2 and this is kind of like that but with a group, and you get to hold an actual gun controller as well, so you get to do cool team shoot-em-up missions.

Things got off to a bad start immediately. There was a bunch of warnings when I signed up about getting their early, they'd cancel my reservation but still charge me if I was late and the world would end, etc. So of course when I got there on time, they weren't ready, and were busy setting up another team. We stood around and waited I would estimate a half hour before they let us in.

The fans turn on at important moments in the story. Virtual Reality!!

Another advancement over Meta Quest was they put sensors on your arms and legs so the simulator has a better sense of where your body actually is rather than just your head. We were plagued with technical problems. We were stuck in a training simulator forever trying to get our weapons to work. When we did finally get going on our mission we had more issues but we'd already been through so much that I think we just wanted to get it over with.

The only branded mission option was a Star Trek one so I chose that because I guessed it would be higher quality. It had a little story line and everything. There were a few places in the game where we were doing investigations with our tricorders which I thought was pretty cool. It wasn't all just shooting aliens, but there was plenty of that as well.

Overall it was a pretty expensive, pretty bad experience with poor graphics. I'm glad I did it but I think that it was fun for the wrong reasons and I don't think I will be back any time soon. Honestly for all the torture they put us through it should have been free. The place wasn't exactly bursting with customers either so I would expect this place to be out of business soon.

I think these janky videos they send you afterwards do a good job of capturing the insanity.

Mini Golf for the Motherland

My lifetime unlimited mini golf membership at Flatstick Pub may be the best investment I've ever made.

We took Evan and Sam to play at the new location in Redmond, WA. Lydia actually tied me at mini golf which was an unexpected advancement in her skills. 

Usually I spank her at mini golf and she cries, but this this time she did not adhere to our tradition.

They created this game called Duffleboard which is kind of like billiards mixed with golf. For those who feel that mini golf is just too large.

Lately I've been playing Atomic Heart, which is just such an interesting game. The premise is if the Soviet Union made a huge scientific breakthrough in the 1930s, and then by the 1950s they had AI robot soldiers and workers walking around. It has a really wild soundtrack as well.

In the save rooms there are often retro tvs playing episodes of Well, Just You Wait!, a Soviet cartoon with a Wile E. Coyote type wolf character. They used to play these cartoons at Propaganda, a now closed Soviet themed bar that I used to like in St. Louis.

The Velvet Underground

Lydia's Dad and crew were in town visiting so we did some fun touristy stuff.

We did a Seattle underground tour in the Pioneer Square neighborhood. 

The deal was that after the Great Seattle Fire of June 6, 1889 the city took the opportunity to regrade the streets. Prior to this I think the sewers weren't steep enough and so wouldn't drain correctly. So they raised the street "ground level" up one floor. Initially the streets were high but the sidewalks were still open trenches that you could take ladders down to get to the businesses that were still operating below. This inevitably led to deaths of people falling into the ditches and dying. Eventually the sidewalks were covered and then a creepy sort of ghost town existed where all the storefronts used to be. This became like rat heaven and so in 1907 the city condemned the Underground for fear of bubonic plague.

Even today there are a ton of these glass sidewalk gratings that were designed to let in light for what I assume is a subterranean race of humanoids that evolved to live down here with the rats.

All of the public sanitation talk on the tour led there to be a fancy Thomas Crapper & Co of London toilet in the visitor's center.

We then moved down to do some Pike Place Market perusing. We made our first appearance at the Crumpet Shop and snagged a crumpet.

The Seattle Art Museum was so expensive that it made sense to just go ahead and buy an annual membership. The high quality free museums is one thing that we sorely miss from St. Louis.

I need a kimono with friggin skeletons on it to wear when I go to sushi restaurants.

We apparently have collected about 40 children worth of pacifiers with the ardent hope that his baby highness will find one of them suitable for his slobbery mouth.