tinaalsgirl

If you have a red membership cup it is valid indefinitely. You can use either the old version or the new version. Your membership entitles you to a new cup once per calendar year but if you ask at member services they will probably just give you one (provided you have platinum or higher membership). Yup, we have platinum memberships. Thanks for the additional info!

Thanks for the recap, Garet. And I'm glad you're able to get back to work!

Awesome. Thanks for the info!

Flattening the curve - EXACTLY. If you wanna see what happens when you DON'T flatten the curve, just read up on what Italy's going through. On the World News with David Muir tonight, they showed video of a guy who has been quarantined alongside his DEAD (from COVID-19) SISTER'S BODY and he can't find a funeral home who would bury her. (https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/03/funeral-services-refused-collect-body-coronavirus-victim-200310144913034.html) I currently have an 84-year-old grandmother who is on in-home hospice with less than a year to live from stage 4 cancer that has spread to her organs. Living with her are my aunt who has Lyme disease, Celiac's, and god knows what else. Also living in that household is my dad, who is 61, has hypertension. All three of those family members have a high risk of severity and death if they were to catch this. Thankfully, my dad's work is with computers so he's been working at home for years now; he makes good money; and he has a Costco membership. And thankfully, he's taking this seriously and has been stocking up for self-isolation. I don't know when I'll get to see my grandma again. I don't know if I'll get to see her before she passes. If she doesn't come down with this, then there's still time. If she gets it... that's it. Game over for her. AND, my 86-yr-old grandpa and 84-yr-old grandma (maternal) are not in a good situation either. My grandma had a MASSIVE stroke a year ago, and while it mostly affected her speech, the cause of the stroke was high blood pressure and she's struggling to keep it down because she's getting upset constantly because people can't understand quite what she's trying to tell them. And my grandpa, he broke his hip last year and had to get a replacement (that incident was the catalyst for my grandma's bp to rocket and cause the stroke). THEN, a month or two later, my grandma, who at that time hadn't yet re-learned how to use the phone, walked out of the house, down the block, across the 4-lane busy road, and was almost to my aunt's house when my grandpa managed to find her.... She'd been unable to wake him up, and since she didn't know how to call my aunt, she decided to walk there. This led to my grandpa being hospitalized because his fatigue turned out to be heart failure. He ended up with seven stents and he still doesn't have more than ~30% use of his front valve or something like that. TL;DR - I have grandparents I love very much and I would very much like to see them continue to live. Cancelling/closing large events and slowing the spread aka "flattening the curve" will make it less likely for my grandparents to get this disease that absolutely would kill them if they got it. Please consider your words more carefully next time, southpuddle.

So, how does it work to get the 2020 cups? My friends and I got memberships in July of last year and there was a deal going, so we get the memberships until October of this year. So we have the red 2019 cups... Do we have to bring those with us and exchange them for the new ones? Or can we just use our current ones?

It'd be kinda cool if someday in the far future (because I know it ain't likely in the near future), we got a strata coaster themed to the Arch. Someday... *sighs wistfully*

Dave & Busters sent a similar (but shorter) e-mail as well today.

Walmart "haul": a light-up rainbow necklace; a rainbow pendant necklace; World's Smallest Working Arcade Game (Pacman version) I don't celebrate St. Patrick's Day anymore (for several reasons), but it does give one the opportunity to stock up on stuff for Pride! Those necklaces are $4/each. The arcade game was down to $6.50, so I couldn't resist since it started at, like, $25-ish when it first debuted on the market a couple years ago.

They soft opened the "Magic Happens" parade today. I've already watched 5 different people's recordings of it on YouTube. It's great! Biggest issue is a lot of the floats are too tall in relation to the majority of people sitting to watch the parade. A lot of elements are hard to see unless you're watching from above (I'm waiting to see if anyone got video from the Main Street train station - that'll be a good angle). But the music is great and the costumes are wonderful (kinda bummed that Tiana didn't get a new version of her dress, when Cinderella, Aurora, and even the Blue Fairy got new versions of their outfits). I LOVE the way they did Aurora's dress - I wasn't sure if they were gonna use LED or fiber optics or projection to show her dress changing color... But they managed to do it just with a really well-done color-shift fabric! Can't wait for the higher quality videos that will come out within the next few weeks once the YouTubers have been able to do multi-angle recordings and the source file for the music leaks.... It's pretty much par for the course with Disney parades, which is great, because I haven't been to a Disney park in 8 years, so it's nice to have high quality videos/audio to watch/listen to online of the new parades! (Paint the Night is still my all-time fave so far)

I got the ride name survey, too. And I also thought Quest for the Hidden Cavern was the best of the options given. Most of them were just WAY too generic. But the description of the ride sounds fun!

I've gained back 20 of the 40 lbs I had lost. But it's kinda hard not to when you're traveling the country and have the opportunity to try all sorts of new foods. I mean, I got to try new places in Chicago and Tennessee and South Carolina and Georgia and, most excitingly, NEW ORLEANS (first time!). Can't go to NOLA and not try their food (within reason; I have to avoid the spicy stuff sadly). And then a couple weeks ago, I was in Birmingham, AL, and got to try Alabama white bbq sauce and WOW. Although, technically that one wasn't cheating because I just grabbed a bunch of pulled pork and smothered it in the white sauce... No carbs really in that. But, uh, kinda offset that by grabbing a whole bunch of their housemade potato chips, LOL. And at the end of the weekend, we went to Texas de Brazil, and that was SO good. And that, too, was a fairly low-carb option because it's all about the meats and cheeses (and omg the fish stew was DIVINE, though a bit spicy for me... but it tastes so good that I'll eat it again if I make it there in the future, and just make sure I have a glass of milk on hand. It's THAT good). I think most of my gaining back weight is because I'm stressed out in my current home situation and therefore have been eating all sorts of junk food again, like candy and non-diet soda and chips and dip.... Stress-eating is SO bad, and I *know* it's bad, but sometimes you just gotta give your mental health a treat even if it doesn't treat your physical health. Also, I learned that carbs help with dopamine production and apparently people with ADHD lose a lot of their sugar/carb cravings after they start taking Adderall. So, I'm hoping that once my prescription FINALLY gets approved and I can actually start taking it (it's been over a month now... waiting for a "prior authorization" or something like that), maybe it'll help me get back on track on the low-carb eating/drinking.

RIP Robert Conrad, age 84, star of one of my all-time favorite shows, "The Wild Wild West"

I've got two in my top 25... but that's only because I have been to limited parks and Disney uses Vekoma for just about all their coasters. (Expedition Everest & Rock'n'Roller Coaster are the two in my top 25.... cannot wait to be able to add Tron and Seven Dwarfs Mine Train and GotG and more.... man, I miss WDW)

Disneyland - 1988 Walt Disney World - MK & MGM Studios - 1997; Epcot & AK - 2011 None of the others yet...

A group of fans actually put together a Life Day meetup at Galaxy's Edge, which included re-writing Christmas carols into Life Day-themed songs. One of the YouTubers I follow got the whole day on video. It was an unofficial event, but Disney was chill with it and I would be very surprised if it doesn't happen again. Chewbacca was very, very pleased by all the attention he got that day, too, lol.

Based on pictures and trip reports from the various Asian Disney parks, it seems as though the animal characters are far more popular than any of the human ones, so I can see where a Zootopia-themed area would fit well over there.

Man, I am right there with you. I'm so done with snow. That 20"+ storm we had last winter was more than enough to get me through several winters.

"Christmas at Dollywood" was... okay. I've never really been into the Hallmark Christmas movies, and it was just as sappy and predictable as all the rest. The best part of the movie, imho, was near the end when Dolly sat with Danica's character and gave her advice; I LOVED Dolly's reverse-sequins outfit. Also, I was just... disappointed by the lack of park in the movie. Like, if you're gonna set a movie in a theme park with that park's name in the title.... don't just show us the front and one other location. I wanna SEE the rides and the eagle sanctuary and everything else. USE the location!!!

They say it comes in threes, and it did on the same day this time: In addition to Caroll Spinney, we also lost René Auberjonois and Juice Wrld (only 21, death from seizure). I also realized that a death we haven't acknowledged yet on this thread would be Cameron Boyce, who passed at age 20 from an epileptic seizure. And a Broadway actress, Laurel Griggs, died at only 13 from a massive asthma attack.

If switching from Coke to Pepsi means getting Dr. Pepper, I'd be all over that. But yeah, Coke Zero is absolutely the best diet soda out there right now; and the orange vanilla is HEAVENLY.

It's so exciting to finally have a decent amount of coasters that I can rank now that I've been to SFGAm and SFOG. My list is now at almost 40!

My decade-old PC won't run many games, so I mostly just watch play-throughs on YouTube. I'm currently working my way through ChristopherOdd's "They Are Billions" playlist (post-campaign release).

Welp, quite the chaos at this park tonight. It was trending on Twitter so I went to see what was going on. Apparently there was a robbery and a fight amongst a bunch of teens that escalated into people yelling out that there was a shooter... which caused mass panic as everyone in the park tried to flee. There are videos of people clambering over turned-over metal fences (the kind they use to make lines at the ticket offices), using jackets to cover the barbed wire of the fencing around the park so people could climb over to get out, people rushing through the parking lot.... LOTS of chaos. The police have said they responded to an active shooter call-in, but there were no shots fired. Regardless, the chaos happened and there are a lot of very terrified people, including *little kids*. Just the perception that there is an active shooting is enough to cause very real psychological damage; I hope whoever was involved in this gets arrested and harshly punished. It's like crying "fire" in a crowded theater. Like, geez. Apparently there's at least one person who broke their leg 'cause of all of this; I hope they'll recover okay.

OMG, y'all. I found all the documents regarding various TM/patent complaints that this guy's company, Adrenalin Attractions LLC, is involved with.... They filed against Kings Island for "Mystic Timbers" on the 11th of this month. I also see nothing regarding SDC. Now, according to this guy on his Facebook page (which hadn't been updated until I made a now-deleted [i did it] comment on their prayers video), it's SDC suing them because they sent SDC a letter trying to protect their trademark.... Maybe you guys can better parse some of the info available, as I know literally nothing about legalese. http://ttabvue.uspto.gov/ttabvue/v?pnam=ADRENALIN%20ATTRACTIONS,%20LLC%20%20

So, the guy behind this is now suing Silver Dollar City over the name of their new ride ("Mystic River Falls")... I foresee this not lasting long: he never objected to their trademark during the patent process; "Mystic Motel" is no longer open and the name isn't currently in use; and "Mystic River" is a name that has been used in Marvel Cave for over a century. I'm guessing this lawsuit is connected to the fact that he's trying to build his own theme park called "Mystic City USA"... The last post on the Mystic Motel Facebook page is a video of him and his son asking for prayers that they can somehow find the money to build said park. https://www.power965.com/2019/10/23/man-files-lawsuit-against-silver-dollar-city-for-use-of-mystic-name-of-new-water-ride/