Yesterday, to celebrate the joint birthday of Severin and myself, we went to DisneyQuest with our wives, and also with Brian and Darren. (Apologies for the unwieldy sentence structure, but a comma-separated list could easily have been mistaken for an appositive.)

We arrived in time to be there when the doors opened, a disappointingly late 11:30. Immediately, we made a beeline for the Pirates of the Caribbean game, in which you stand upon a tiny re-creation of the fo'c's'le ringed with small cannon. One person stands at the ship's wheel (reversed, so that it steers like a car, and with a throttle to control the wind) and maneuvers the ship so that the gunners can yank on the pull-cords behind the cannon for all they're worth, and try to sink the ships for treasure. Karen, who gets motion sickness just watching a first-person shooter game, didn't feel even a little bit of nausea. Hooray!

Her luck didn't hold with Ride the Comix or Alien Encounter, unfortunately, but she did enjoy Cyberspace Mountain, in which you build your own rollercoaster, then step into a gimballed simulator which displays the coaster from the car's POV while pitching and rolling to match. (Copy from a poster outside: Cyberspace Mountain — Design it, then ride it in a real simulator! That's great, because I'd hate to waste my time in a fake simulator.)

There was much playing of nostalgic games (thanks to MAME, I didn't find the classic video games as appealing as many of the others did, but I enjoyed the air hockey greatly). After dinner, we were met by Carlos and Carolina, and among other things, managed to get all of us into the eight networked auto-racing machines at the same time. By the last lap, when I found myself in seventh place, I turned around and went backwards on the track. I deliberately ran into the first car I encountered, and (oddly enough) my place jumped up to sixth.

After staring at teenagers playing Dance Dance Revolution all day, we got in line for it. Cord and Brian went first, and managed to make it look completely unlike the country line-dancing that all the previous participants had made it resemble. I was next in line, but none of the others were brave enough to try it. So what the hell, I did it next to a kid probably less than half my age, who of course danced all over my grave. For some reason, I kept missing the little sensor squares, hitting the unyielding metal instead, and by the time we got to the third level, my brain was short-circuiting. Afterwards, though, I realized that there was absolutely no reason to scorn the school systems that were using Dance Dance Revolution in Phys Ed; that was one hell of a workout. No wonder all the kids who were good at it were skinny.

As the others went back to the classic arcade games, I designed and rode a roller coaster that contained nothing but moves that turned it upside down. Muah hah hah hah. Some more Pirates and Alien Encounter, and we finished off the night with a weird game called Panic Park, which has two "joysticks" on swinging arms that intersect each other's paths. Not only do you have to maneuver your character to pick up coins while avoiding obstacles, but you try to physically push your opponent so that he runs into the obstacles and misses the coins.

This morning, I hurt. My fingers are stiff, I've got a scraped knuckle from the air hockey paddle, a joystick blister from years of disuse, and my arms hurt from yanking that damn cannon pull-cord. But it was worth it for twelve and a half hours of fun.

Miscellaneous sighting: a CitiGroup T-shirt emblazoned with the slogan: One Look. One Voice. One Reason. Disturbing historical allusion, anyone?

Well, there's 660 words that could have been written for NaNoWriMo. Oh well. (Or 666, if you count these.)