#cause hes mostly worn 3 colors consistently together most days so far

[skitskatdacat63]

All white fit, hello??

[violetsystems]

#personal

I keep referencing this Chris Morris interview lately, mostly to myself. I try to talk to people in real life but the things other people take seriously aren't as important as any words I try to speak outloud. This is a trend that Morris and crew began to target in the late nineties when Brass Eye was released. When asked if Brass Eye could happen at the time during the Trump administration, he replied staunchly it could not. Back in the late nineties people took themselves far too seriously in the news. So it was easier to lampoon. These days it feels like a regression. Everyone has a statement to unload on you. A complex series of opinions, arguments, and rules about this or that. Some of them have some weight. Others are carried away by counter arguments and burnt at the stake. The only reason a statement, argument, or ideological battle penetrates the news is to simply kick it around for two weeks in a cycle. It never reaches any sort of consensus. It never diffuses into at the very least a case of agreeing to disagree. The Met Gala recently is a fine example of this. Statement fashion is simply meant to nudge the conversation into focus. At it's very minimum the shock is meant to jolt someone out of this seriousness. To rattle them away from their protective shell to change the dialogue. Think tax the rich or peg the patriarchy. Neither of them if you flesh out the argument have much teeth to them. I'm sure you could find yourself at a party defending either argument. "How many stocks do you have in the bank Mister!" Or why victims of childhood sexual harassment and violence might feel a little differently about proving how you might be able to face the patriarchy in a less violent and humiliating way. This is that none of us are defending a 35,000 dollar ticket to the Met Gala in the first place. There were plenty of other statements. After all the ideological dust settled I almost never realized that Iris Van Herpen designed Grimes suit of armor. If I were too clouded by the ideology I would have missed that legitimate moment of genius. I'm a technologist by profession. I have years of 3D fabrication support. I've often found myself drawn into the intersect of technology and fashion. The embroidery machines that print out all the stupid little poetry that gets stolen from other artists? Those are pretty complex to operate. Without them none of this would be possible. And yet good statement fashion does get people talking. But fashion is more than statements. Especially from the rich and wealthy. And if we don't talk about all of it, we start to realize who controls the flow of the dialogue when it goes petty. We're supposed to move on from these arguments like exhibits in a museum. Not get stuck on one or two moments and use them as a soapbox to drown out the entire room. Statement fashion gets people's attention. I wore undercover for years only to find for years people thought I was an undercover cop. I wear a mouse on a shirt and suddenly my porch is overflowed with them. I hold a raccoon in my arms in Korea one trip and the next year my porch is flooded with them as well. You like animals so much! Prove it!

Prove it was also a song by the underground band Television. I was introduced to them by the king of statement fashion itself, Jun Takahashi. I've worn undercover for years at this point. The story of undercover during the Scab years is an interesting insight into what Jun was trying to express at the core. His assistants were getting food in London on a break. An old woman came up to them and offered them a banana. She thought they were homeless. They were excited because the fashion they were wearing felt real and unpretentious. It blended in and confused people in such a way that it was not high brow or high fashion. It was accessible. It was street level. And it was largely coopted by the ultra rich and worn far too seriously for its own good. For people like myself who wore it out of love to provoking real conversation, it did the opposite. It cast me into a shadow realm where people thought what I was saying enabled them to push the limit. To use people like myself as cover in terms of hijacking authenticity. You used to wear undercover as a badge of honor in Japanese street wear. It was designed for rebels after all. You could wear a t-shirt that simply said RAT out in the street and assume if it applied to someone they'd read into it. But nobody including myself really thought you'd be able to change shit with a t-shirt. In America, people wear rebellious shit to express this idea of freedom. With Jun's stuff, it was all centered around this idea of individualism and anarchy. You can be who you are and there are so many variants of human that there is no comparison. America always wants you to prove it. Prove the right to be alone. Prove the right not to mix with the general population to avoid dilution. To avoid being neutralized or have a narrative hijacked. Nowadays you can't even afford to have a statement without someone explaining it for you behind your back. When the streets become the runway, retaliation happens outside the niceties of press and junkets. It happens with real unbridled emotions. The statements you throw into people's faces don't get moderated by it kids, secret tribunals of the ultra rich or your heroes. They get dealt with in a violent and sometimes mob like fashion by people who take themselves so seriously that their arguments against you are louder than a bomb or a nuclear powered submarine. And everything starts to contradict itself so much that none of us have the energy to argue. We just start mocking it. And the entire situation gets worse.

When it comes to a person like myself, I live in a surreal shadow world where the worst Black Mirror plot lines get tested. I've been writing and making statements for years. I've carefully parsed the arguments online. I've defended myself against an invisible hoard to let people know I am not like other people. And yet in America, until they can throw you in a group you are still nobody. You have to be attached to an ecosystem. A financial sink hole that can sell back your ideas to you instead of compensating you for the trouble. I can't take America seriously anymore even when it comes to it's idea of freedom. It lies to maintain a status quo. It constantly lies. It holds it's head high while sniffing the coke back into it's nose and proudly proclaims how it cares. And when people like myself stare it back in the face with our rotting street wear clothes from early 2010, it's a laugh. It believes until it has fully roasted the juices out of you then you are ready to be carved up. And we buy into it consistently. We waste our time feeding into arguments that have no intent on reaching a consensus. It's always you are either for us or against us. Go back and rally with your people. If you can't find your people it must mean you are mentally ill. America can never take the blame. If you catch it off guard it will figure out a way to trash you or cause a diversion. And so making statements to fuel an argument you can't win becomes a lesson in tedium. We should, by all means, continue to make fun of it. But the more we take these arguments seriously, we miss the real problems. We neglect the real art. We see that there's a good 35,000 dollar barrier to being heard. If we're lucky maybe we stitched together the rags these people wear. To me there have been statements in the populist context that have far more penetration into poking a hole in the patriarchy. I'm supposed to preface this by saying I own stock in some company. But I'm not trying to sell a portfolio. And it'd be kind of laughable to say that I'm only serious about feminism by putting my money where my mouth is to break this glass ceiling. The glass ceiling is there for a lot of us if minimum wage can't get us into the Met Gala. These statements are supposed to give you an idea to confront things in your own way. Not some secret way to groom you into humiliation and destroy your sense of self and sexuality. I write statements every week here most of the time. And they get chuckled at by friends and whoever these days spies on me to see how I deal with dead mice on my porch. Aren't I doing enough by saying something for free? I don't get paid to write any of these words. I don't get paid to talk about any of these people. What was that quote about art being counter revolutionary if it isn't accessible by the regular people? What I could do with a four hundred dollar statement t-shirt I can do with a color. Maybe I could make a statement shirt myself and have it ripped off by an incompetent designer one day. I could point at the screen and say "I copyrighted that statement." And look where it is now. Not in my wallet. Not anywhere near the 35,000 dollar ticket price to point back at the camera. Do you see me? No you don't. People in that realm only see themselves. And we take them and their arguments so seriously for what? A laugh hopefully. Because nothing is going to change if we're locked on the outside looking in at a bonfire of vanities. Witches get roasted either way. <3 Tim

[monikam-3d-visblog-blog]

Pioneers in 3D Computer Graphics

https://www.lifewire.com/pioneers-in-3d-computer-graphics-1958

1) Ed Catmull

Texture Mapping, Anti-aliasing, Subdivision Surfaces, Z-Buffering

Because of celebrated status as one of the co-founders of Pixar Animation Studios, Ed Catmull is probably the most well-known computer scientist on this list.  Anyone who's spent any amount of time following or reading about the Computer Graphics industry has almost certainly come across his name once or twice, and even folks uninterested in the technical side of CG may have seen him accept an Academy Award for technical achievement in 2009.

Aside from Pixar, Catmull's greatest contributions to the field include the invention of texture mapping (try to imagine an industry without texture mapping), the development of anti-aliasing algorithms, the refinement of subdivision surface modeling, and pioneering work on the concept of Z-buffering (depth management).

Ed Catmull was truly one of the first computer scientists to really begin laying the groundwork for a modern computer graphics industry, and his contributions to the field are truly staggering.  He is currently acting president of both Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios.

2) Jim Blinn

Blinn-Phong Shader Model, Bump Mapping

Blinn started his career at NASA, where he worked on visualizations for the Voyager mission, however his contribution to computer graphics came in 1978 when he revolutionized the way light interacts with 3Dsurfaces in a software environment.  Not only did he write the Blinn-Phong shader model, which presented a computationally inexpensive (i.e. fast) way of computing surface reflections on a 3D model, he is also credited with the invention of bump mapping.

3) Loren Carpenter & Robert Cook

Reyes Rendering

Our first pair, on the list, Carpenter and Cook are inseparable because they published their groundbreaking work as co-authors (Ed Catmull also contributed to the research).  The pair was instrumental in the development of the photorealistic Reyes rendering architecture, which forms the basis of Pixar's monumentally successful PhotoRealistic RenderMan software package (PRMan for short).  

Reyes, which stands for Renders Everything You Ever Saw, is still widely used in studio settings, most notably at Pixar, but also as a cluster of Reyes spinoffs typically referred to as Renderman-compliant renderers.  For smaller studios and individual artists, Reyes has mostly been supplanted by scanline/raytracing packages like Mental Ray and VRay.

4) Ken Perlin

Perlin Noise, Hypertexture, Real-Time Character Animation, Stylus Based Input Devices

Perlin is another one of those industry heavyweights who's achievements are far reaching and invaluable.  Perlin Noise is a popular and shockingly versatile procedural texture (as in, quick, easy, no texture-map required) that comes standard in virtually every 3D software package.  Hypertexture—the ability to view changes to a model's textures in real time—is one of the great time saving techniques in an artist's toolset.  I think real-time character animation probably speaks for itself.  Stylus Based Input Devices—try separating a digital sculptor from their trusty Wacom tablet.

These are all things that a digital artist uses every single day that he or she makes art.  Perhaps none of Perlin's advances were as groundbreaking as say, the invention of texture-mapping, but they're every bit as valuable.

5) Pat Hanrahan & Henrik Wann Jensen

Subsurface Scattering, Photon Mapping

Ever seen Pixar's Tin Toy,or any other early attempt at photo-realistic rendering of a human character?  Something looks off, right?  That's because human skin isn't entirely opaque—it actually transmits, scatters, or absorbs a large portion of the light that strikes it, giving our skin a subtle red or pink hue where blood vessels are closer to the surface.  Early surface shaders were incapable of rendering this effect properly, causing human characters to appear dead or zombie-like.  

Subsurface Scattering (SSS) is a shading technique that renders skin in layers, with each layer transmitting a different ambient hue based on depth-maps—this is Jensen & Hanrahan's greatest contribution to the field, and it's instrumental in the way human characters are rendered today.

The photon mapping algorithm was written by Jensen alone, and similarly deals with light passing through translucent materials.  Specifically, photon mapping is a two-pass global illumination technique used most commonly to simulate light passing through glass, water, or vapour.

The two were Awarded Academy awards in technical achievement for their work on subsurface scattering.

6) Arthur Appel & Turner Whitted

Raycasting & Raytracing Algorithms

Although technically two separate breakthroughs, we're counting raycasting (Appel 1968) and later raytracing (Whitted 1979) as a single entry because Turner Whitted was essentially building on and adapting the work that Appel had done many years before.

Together, the one two punch form the basis of most modern rendering techniques, and have supplanted scanline renderers because of their greater ability to accurately reproduce natural lighting phenomena like color bleed, shadow falloff, refraction, reflection, and depth of field.  Although raytracing renderers are highly accurate, their greatest disadvantage has always been (and still remains) their speed and efficiency.  However with today's ultra-powerful CPUs and dedicated graphics hardware, this has become less of an issue.

7) Paul Debevec

Image Based Rendering & Modeling, HDRI

Because of his breakthroughs, Paul Debevec is solely responsible for tens of thousands of ill-advised "futuristic car sitting in an empty white room but still reflecting a full environment" images.  But he's also responsible for simplifying the workflow of hundreds of environmental, automotive, and architectural visualization specialists.

Image based rendering makes it possible to use an HDRI image (a 360 degree panoramic image of an environment) to generate light-maps for a 3D scene.  Generating light maps from a real world vista means that artists no longer need to spend hours placing lights and reflector boxes in a 3D scene in order to get a respectable render.

His work on image based modeling allows for the generation of a 3D model from a collection of still images—these techniques were initially used on The Matrix, and have been implemented in dozens of films since then.

8) Krishnamurthy & Levoy

Normal Mapping

Where to begin with these two.  Their oeuvre may only consist of a single breakthrough, but boy was it a big one.  Normal mapping, is built on the idea that it's possible to fit a highly detailed mesh (with millions of polygons) to a low resolution polygonal cage based on the model's surface normals.

That might not sound like much if you're coming from a visual effects background where it's not unheard of to dedicate up to 80 CPU hours of render time to a single frame of film.  Just get a warehouse full of computers and brute force it, you might say.

But how about in the games industry where entire environments need to be rendered 60 times every second? The ability to "bake" highly detailed game environments with millions of polygons into a low-poly real-time mesh is pretty much the sole reason that today's games look so darn good.  Gears of War without normal mapping? Not a chance.

9) Ofer Alon & Jack Rimokh

Founded Pixologic, created ZBrush

Just about ten years ago these guys rocked the industry when they founded Pixologic and introduced the revolutionary modeling application, ZBrush. They single-handedly ushered in the era of the digital sculptor, and with it came hundreds of fantastically detailed, impeccably textured, organic 3D models like the world had never seen.

Used in conjunction with normal mapping, ZBrush (and similar software like Mudbox built on the same concepts) has changed the way modelers work. Instead of laboring over edge-flow and topology, it's now possible to sculpt a 3D model like it's a piece of digital clay with little need to place polygons vertex by vertex.

On behalf of modelers everywhere, thank you Pixologic. Thank you.

10) William Reeves

Motion Blur algorithm

Reeves is one of those guys who has worn just about every hat you can imagine in the computer graphics industry.  He worked as technical director on John Lasseter's seminal Luxo Jr. short film (the birth of the Pixar lamp) and has played major roles in eleven feature films.  His contributions have usually been in technical positions, but he's occasionally lent his talents as a modeler, and even once as an animator.

His greatest technical achievement, and the real reason he's on this list, is for developing the first algorithm to successfully emulate motion blur in computer animation.

[thekimmiandjackieshow]

Spring Break: Sunburns, A Broken Monorail, and A Magical Surprise

Most people probably wouldn’t combine EPCOT and Magic Kingdom in one day, but we decided to for a few reasons. The first being that we definitely wanted to reserve a full day for Universal. The second was that Jackie wasn’t able to be gone the entire spring break because she works as a research assistant for her lab and needed to get back to work. The third is that we had already combined DAK and Hollywood Studios together. And the fourth is that neither of us really care for Magic Kingdom’s attractions so we figured we’d spend most of our time at Flower & Garden and then head over to Magic Kingdom for whatever was left of the evening. It made for an interesting day filled with memories.

I was really excited to take Jackie to Flower and Garden. The topiaries I had seen were phenomenal and I couldn’t wait to go around the world and try everything. 

My goal was to take pictures with all the topiaries and load up a Flower and Garden gift card to try all the food with. For both major festivals at EPCOT, they offer mini gift cards that are worn around your wrist so that you don’t have to continuously pull out your wallet during your journey around the world. I think it’s brilliant, especially if you aren’t staying at a resort with a credit card attached to your MagicBand. Part of me also thinks it’s for when people get super super drunk and can no longer find their wallet, but I doubt Disney would admit that.

We got our gift cards and headed around the world, starting at the Pineapple Promenade for a Violet Lemonade. This was my first time trying Violet Lemonade and it changed my life. Honestly this is something I’d normally stay away from. I’m not one to eat foods that are wild colors and don’t give a clear indication of what they taste like. I mean what the heck does violet taste like? That’s a color, not a flavor. But at the time, I figured, what the heck? Why not? If I had known it would’ve been that good, we would’ve gotten our own. I mean I seriously went back to EPCOT several times just for this. The smooth, frozen, purple drink was hands down one of the best things being served at Walt Disney World.

Our next stop was more for me than Jackie. An outdoor kitchen had found itself right outside Canada, called Urban Farm Eats. They had a watermelon salad that sounded fantastic. I was right, it was everything I hoped it would be. It’s hard to find good lettuce in Florida. That sounds weird but a lot of the lettuce I had was just not fresh, and kind of limp. This was the first salad that had enjoyable lettuce on it, which was nice considering EPCOT was boasting about their fresh foods.

Not every stand interested us. We passed a lot of foods (and alcoholic drinks) that had lengthly lines of people with more sophisticated palettes (or had very little idea of what they were ordering). A few of the things we tried were okay but nothing to rant and rave about. On the other hand, some of the food won me over completely, and became all I wanted throughout the rest of my spring program.

Japan, for example, had some excellent food. We actually went ahead and got every single food item from Japan because it all sounded pretty great. Beef Teriyaki Udon, Frushi, and a chicken edamame bun. I was skeptical of the chicken edamame bun but I figured I’d give it a go anyway.

I was right to be skeptical. I didn’t like it at all. Jackie really enjoyed it but I wasn’t a fan in the slightest. The teriyaki udon was fantastic though and the frushi ended up in my top 3 Flower and Garden offerings. I don’t ever eat sushi but frushi is definitely not raw fish, so I’m all for it. I was surprised how much I liked it though considering I’m not usually a fan of raspberries and this had quite a few raspberry elements. 

China also impressed in some interesting ways. We tried the spring rolls and the candied strawberries.

I didn’t like the spring rolls in the slightest. They sounded good on paper but in actually trying it, it was one of my least favorites. The candied strawberries though were simple and yet very impressive. Basically the strawberries were coated in melted sugar and sprinkled with sesame seeds. It sounds odd but it actually was amazing. Although difficult to eat, the candied strawberries remained in my top 3 throughout the day. 

I’d definitely say that my favorites were the violet lemonade, the frushi, and the candied strawberries. Maybe that makes me basic. Who knows? What I do know is that it’s dang good, and everybody should try them.

Alongside the food offerings, we took pictures with every topiary, even when the characters weren’t our favorites. Overall, EPCOT is really beautiful in the spring. In addition to the topiaries, they add extra floral arrangements everywhere and it just adds a lot of color to areas that are sometimes lacking. My favorite floral additions are the floating flowers in the lake between World Showcase and Future World.

As big fans of Beauty and the Beast, we were really excited by these topiaries. Cogsworth was one of the most impressive to me, seeing as his arms were an odd shape and his tummy was completely see through to make room for his pendulum. They were kind of hidden in a planter back behind Belle and the Beast, which made me sad because they were really excellent. 

France was one of the pavilions with many topiaries as they were also home to Prince Charming and Cinderella. 

Snow White’s design was one of the more peculiar because you couldn’t quite get her and all her seven dwarfs in one shot. It was supposed to be Snow White skipping and the dwarfs following behind her, but it was kind of an awkward shot. I also just wasn’t impressed with Snow White after seeing how well Belle and Cinderella were done. I suppose if you started in Mexico and worked your way around, you’d see Snow White first and be impressed but I really thought they could’ve done her better. But again, I really shouldn’t judge since I’m not actually a florist.

One of our favorites was the Lion King topiary. I’m sure that comes as no surprise to anybody considering DAK was our home, but I just thought the overall design was pretty complex. I mean to have Rafiki holding Simba, and it all to be made of plants... I’m sure there’s some underlying sorcery there but for now I’ll just be in awe of the magic.

There were so many amazing topiaries around. While I had walked around and seen most of them (some of them I had previously walked past), it was really fun to see Jackie’s reaction to all of them. I felt like they got really creative with some of it and I started to think about how plain EPCOT was going to look when Flower and Garden was all wrapped up. 

To give you an idea of how many topiaries there were, this wasn’t even all of them. We had so much fun finding them all and checking them off our passport. One of the most impressive ones was over in the UK pavilion. Peter Pan was clearly causing trouble over there, and it was a fantastic display.

What was even more fantastic was the Photopass photographer over there. He was having a blast posing guests for pictures that went with the topiaries, which was fun considering most of the people we had run in to would just snap a few with a grim straight face and scan our MagicBands while looking elsewhere and muttering something about having a great day. It was refreshing to have someone so into it who was taking the time to make sure we got all the pictures we could’ve possibly wanted.

There was honestly a surprising amount of things to see during the Flower and Garden Festival. We wandered through the butterfly exhibit and saw tons of butterflies. They also had so many hands on learning activities for the kids to learn about flowers, bees, pollination, and the life cycle of butterflies. The other kind of fun thing was the variety of gardens. I’m not the type to garden (although I have recently started growing some herbs in my window) but some of them were really interesting. There was an entire garden of peppers that included all kinds of awesome information about pepper heat and how it comes about. I was interested in finding the Water Wise Garden (as a person who hailed from California, the state that was in a severe drought at the time and yet still had residents insisting on lushes green lawns) and Jackie wanted to find the prehistoric plants garden. We had gone all day without finding them until we wound up in Future World mid-afternoon. The prehistoric plants garden was tucked away, but when we found it we saw tiny dinosaur toys hiding amongst all the plants.

The Water Wise Garden wasn’t far away from that. It had all sorts of tips on how to garden in desert lands so that your lawn could still look great, without sucking out all the water. California isn’t in a drought at the moment thanks to an insane amount of rainfall this past winter, but I still think decorating lawns in smart ways can save gallons upon gallons of water a year. Drought or no drought, that’s a good thing.

Along our adventures around EPCOT, we both got sunburned pretty badly. I was a lobster by the end of the day, which doesn’t usually happen to me. I had failed to put on sunscreen consistently though, and wound up feeling incredibly sick and dehydrated as a result. I needed a real plate of food instead of sharing small snacks with Jackie throughout the day, an air conditioned building, and ice water. We had some time to spare so Jackie decided to make my day by taking me to Nine Dragons.

Nine Dragons was the restaurant I was looking forward to eating at during my family’s Christmas vacation. Unfortunately for me, my work schedule didn’t agree with that and scheduled me to work during that time. I was incredibly disappointed. Jackie wanted to fix all that, so she took me. The restaurant was mostly empty so we walked right in and got a table without a reservation without an issue.

It was perfect and the food was amazing.

Shortly after that we decided we were done with EPCOT and ready to head over to Magic Kingdom. We said our goodbyes and headed out.

The nice part about park hopping between these two parks is that you can just take the monorail from EPCOT to the TTC (ticket and transportation center) and then transfer to a monorail that takes you from the TTC to Magic Kingdom. We thought it’d be a smooth ride over and we’d be in Magic Kingdom in no time. 

We were so very, very wrong.

We walked up the ramps outside of EPCOT and waited at the gates for a monorail to arrive. The standing around waiting for the monorail already felt like quite a bit of time, but I figured I was just being impatient because I wanted to get to Magic Kingdom. By the time the monorail arrived, enough people were waiting for it that Jackie and I were standing. At some point in between EPCOT and Magic Kingdom, the monorail stopped. Sometimes that happens because of traffic delays up ahead. The monorail has to wait for the monorail ahead to clear. All good. Except it was then announced to us that they were having difficulties with the monorail. 

So here we are, stranded high up in the air just a few feet away from the Magic Kingdom parking entrance. I’ve been stuck on rides before. I’ve also been evacuated off rides before. This was probably the one that bothered me the most (and I was stuck on Pirate’s for an hour and a half listening to “Yo Ho Yo Ho a Pirate’s life for me! repeatedly at Disneyland years and years ago). Here we were, standing in an enclosed monorail with little to no air circulation, high above the roads, stuck. For at least a solid 45 minutes. By the time the monorail gets up and running again, I barely trust it to deliver me safely to my next destination. I was reminded yet again that Walt Disney World’s attractions are subpar and desperately need to be upgraded.

When we finally got off at the TTC, we were told the monorail to Magic Kingdom was closed and that we’d need to board the ferry. By this point, the sun was starting to go down and Jackie and I have wasted a solid two hours attempting to park hop from EPCOT to Magic Kingdom. Understandably, we were a little annoyed but probably still more patient than most guests would be. I mean we weren’t late to any reservations or Fastpass options. We didn’t even have plans for the rest of the night. We just didn’t expect to have to spend that amount of time enclosed in an outdated monorail that wreaked of stinky tourists. So Jackie decided to kick around the soccer ball she got from World Showcase a few hours before to relieve some stress. This girl played soccer all her life mind you and is pretty dang good at it. She was just dribbling it between her feet as we walked to the ferry when a disgruntled Cast Member tells her that she has to carry it because kicking it is not permitted. This rule was news to us and we chalked it up to him having a really bad day, but we laughed at how utterly ridiculous it was. Here we were trying to relieve some of our aggravation and even that was not allowed. But we listened, picked up the soccer ball and headed towards the ferry.

I’m not going to say we were in need of some magic but... we could’ve used some magic at that moment. We walked into Magic Kingdom at dusk as the lights were starting to set. There weren’t too many rides we had to do but we knew that we’d be missing Wishes to do any of them. That didn’t really phase us but it still wasn’t ideal. As we walked down Main Street I told Jackie I wanted a picture of us kissing in front of the castle. I love kissing photos in places like that, I just think it’s fun and romantic, but I don’t tend to show them off because I don’t think that’s necessary. It’s more just for us and our memories. Knowing this, we decided to stop at one of the many Photopass photographers down Main Street.

We’re not huge on public displays of affection either, so getting this picture is always moderately awkward for us. But we wanted the shot so we stood where the photographer placed us and kissed, waiting for her to let us know she got the shot. There was this long awkward pause that Jackie and I both felt, so we stop kissing and look up, only to find a bunch of our favorite people photobombing us! We had no idea they were walking down Main Street when we were, so it was a really fun surprise. When the two of us started cracking up and hugging the group, the photographer started grabbing pictures. I still wish she had managed to get a picture or two of them photobombing us while we were kissing, but she said she didn’t because she didn’t know if we knew them and didn’t want us to be upset by it. The pictures she did get were wonderful though and some of my favorite pictures ever.

Once again, the DAK PAK was spontaneously reunited. It was moments like those where you wanted time to stand still so nobody had to go back to the real world and we could all run into each other at the parks all the time. 

We said our goodbyes, Jackie and I got our picture, and we headed to ride a few rides. After hitting a few of the mountains, we went to Casey’s for food. Walt Disney World has a terrible habit of closing most restaurants down before the park officially closes, leaving guests with only a few options in usually highly populated areas. Jackie and I were going to have to fight electrical parade crowds to get to Casey’s and we weren’t thrilled. But we made it and were met with a magical moment. The Cast member helping us was from Woodland, CA. I happened to recognize the small Northern California town thanks to my sister and brother-in-law living there. I don’t always make small talk with the Cast Members but this time I decided to mention that I actually knew where Woodland was and had family out that way. She was so excited that somebody recognized her city (almost everybody who sees California assumes everybody either lives in San Fran or LA) that she made a magical moment for us. She grabs a bag of cotton candy from behind the counter and told us it was from the mouse as a thank you for brightening her day.

It definitely made our day too! We raced around Magic Kingdom trying to get things done before finally heading back to Main Street around closing time. I was texting Ricky to try to meet up with everybody one last time. The next day Jackie was leaving to North Carolina and I wanted to make sure we both got to say goodbye to everybody else who was just here on break.

Our final meet up on Main Street was sad and awkward, pretty typical for our little group. Nobody knew how to say goodbye but we all knew it was coming. We all knew that by the end of the week, half the people on vacation would be back home and at the end of just a few short months, the rest of us would be leaving too. Time on the Disney College Program had an odd way of standing still and flying by at the same time. On the one hand it felt like none of us would ever leave and we’d all be making magic in the parks for years and years to come. On the other hand it felt like we’d all be a distant memory at our location in just a few short days.

The goodbye was painful and we all made loose promises to have a reunion again soon. When and where was TBD, but we all knew we had to see each other again at some point.

Despite the sunburns and absolute exhaustion, the vacation was ending on an absolutely perfect note. I couldn’t have asked for a better spring break vacation, even if it was short. I loved being able to take some time off of work to be with some of my favorite people and truly enjoy the Disney parks. I only wish we never had to leave.