vovat | Thrilling, Isn't It?

Our second trip to California was primarily for OzCon, but we did a few other things as well. Beth and I flew in last Thursday, and I rented a car through Turo, which we'd heard about from Stephanie. It was my first time using it, and it's weird, because you're just renting some other person's car. For some reason, that makes me more nervous than getting one from a rental place, even though it's cheaper. I'm not even sure how insurance works; they tried to sell me some kind of extra protection, but since I couldn't figure out exactly what it entailed, I declined it. It worked out all right, although the car wasn't great on hills, of which there are a lot more in the Los Angeles area than where we live. We got in pretty early to have the chance to do some stuff before the convention, but we really didn't. I did stop to do a bit of laundry at a place called Laundry 2000, but we couldn't find anything else that had convenient parking, and we were both tired. A few hours later, we ate at a diner called Norm's, an area chain that I'd never heard of. While driving back to Pomona, we crossed a street called Lark Ellen Avenue, which was weird as there was a character with that name in The Mysterious Chronicles of Oz. I looked it up, and it's the nickname of an opera singer, Ellen Beach Yaw, who lived in the area. On Sunday after the convention, we drove to downtown LA and went out to eat with Stephanie. Her original plan was to eat at a fancy place on a rooftop, but since it was so hot out, we ended up just getting drinks there and eating at the IHOP nearby. Stephanie said she hadn't been to one of those in a long time, but she liked it. As someone who likes to eat what's familiar, I'm a fan of chain restaurants, although I get why people want to try local things when on vacation. I was glad to see that Denny's is apparently still thriving in the area, even though we didn't go to any of them. Around here, a lot of them have closed, and the open ones no longer serve food all day.

On Monday, we went to Six Flags Magic Mountain, as we'd been planning to do on our last trip until I forgot my glasses and couldn't drive there. It's built on an actual mountain, although it's not as vertical in its layout as Universal Studios. I understand it's also the Thrill Capital of the World. It's been very hot recently, and I'm sure that wasn't good for us when we were outside all day. I don't usually get sick from roller coasters, but I did a few times on that day. And, as it's a Six Flags park, they definitely emphasized the coasters. The only non-coaster things we rode were the carousel and the train.

Their carousel doesn't have its own music, which is kind of disappointing. Since it's a Warner Bros. park, they should at least have a particular song playing when it isn't running.

The first thing we rode, the New Revolution, appears in the movie Rollercoaster, and both that and Twisted Colossus are in National Lampoon's Vacation.

It was just the Colossus back then, though; the Twisted part is due to a 2015 remodel that added steel to the wooden frame. There are some steampunk-type things in and outside the waiting area.

We also rode X2 (formerly just X; did Elon Musk name it?), Viper, Tatsu, Full Throttle, Scream, and Wonder Woman Flight of Courage.

Viper was the same as the one they used to have at Great Adventure, which was really rough, and was removed some years ago.

The name of Tatsu made me think of Shredder's henchman in the first two Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies, but it's really just Japanese for a dragon. It's like Superman Ultimate Flight at Great Adventure in that the seats turn you into a position with your back parallel to the track, but I found it more intense. The ride's slogan is "fly at the speed of fear," similar to "travel at the speed of fright" for the now-defunct Big Bad Wolf at Busch Gardens in Virginia.

Wonder Woman is a single-rail coaster.

A lot of them were running only one train at a time, which was frustrating despite fairly short lines. There were a few others that were either closed or we just didn't have the time and/or energy to ride. It's kind of confusing that Six Flags parks will use similar names for different rides. At Great Adventure, there's a Wonder Woman pendulum ride, while one of the coasters at Magic Mountain that was closed was Superman: Escape from Krypton. Yeah, there's more to the names to distinguish them, but still. The tickets we bought included parking, unlimited refills on drinks throughout the day, and food every hour and a half. We didn't really take advantage of that last one, due to time constraints and several food places being closed, but I did get pizza at two different locations.

We're back home now, and it's still strangely lonely with the cats gone. I went back to work yesterday, and I've been feeling kind of awkward there recently for a few reasons I don't want to go into just now, and that probably don't really matter in the long run. I did learn that we'll be able to work from home two days a week starting later this month, although it's different days every week. The problem is that the work laptop has such a tiny screen, so it's hard to switch from one thing to another. Maybe I could hook it up to my computer monitor. I'm also wondering if I should just stop using Twitter. As far as I can tell, changing its name to something really dumb hasn't changed the interface or anything, but there just doesn't seem to be a lot of interaction there anymore, except from the all too numerous spambots. Mark Zuckerberg is probably even worse than Musk in some ways, but he's more behind the scenes, so I don't have to think about how much of a jerk he is every time I open Facebook. Twitter was just so convenient when I had one-off thoughts, though. Musk is like Donald Trump, not just in that they're both bigots, but that they presumably have enough money that they could just live a life of leisure, but instead insist on playing businessman. I guess they crave the power and attention. And I'm still not sure how constantly making things less convenient for users is supposed to make money. It's probably related to how stock prices apparently have very little to do with whether companies are producing anything, but just about the whims of investors; and how every other ad online is about a vague concept instead of a tangible thing.