Happy Holidays

Christmas!!!




The only time of the year that an adult can act like a child. It is one of my favorite holidays of the year, then again who doesn't love it? I can only see maybe one individual not liking the holiday and that may be parents. A year where they have to buy presents for their kids and pretend that it wasn't them that did the labor to get everything their child wanted. Yeah, I can see why someone like that wouldn't love the magical holiday.




Too bad for them.




Christmas, as I have mentioned on my Facebook, was very kind to me. I had received a Macbook Air, an iMac and two FSU hoodies that I have always wanted. Not many presents in the eyes of a kid, but more than enough for me. I was surprise with the macbook, and then the iMac came and I was like "whoa,". I was even ecstatic to get the hoodies, because it was one thing I always wanted to get while attending FSU and I never got around to it.




Ah! I'm so happy!




Last year was also a good year for me as well. I got the Nintendo 3DS and three games which to me was a great gift cause I have many games for and I still heavily use it till this day. Getting chemo is a lot easier when you can be distracted by a good game. Chemo can take up the whole day sometimes when I go. The first day is always really long. It's the pharmacy that takes the longest whenever I go to the hospital. It's like they don't know what to do whenever they ask for my blood, platelets, or chemo. It takes hours! I'm sure they are very busy getting things ready for any emergency blood to the ER, so I don't really want to complain about them trying to save a life, but it really is annoying when they take so long.




I didn't get the PS4. This doesn't bother me because I actually don't want it. Now don't get me wrong, I do want to get it, but not anytime soon. Right now there is no game out that I really want to play for the PS4, seeing as they are still making PS3 games. I'm content playing my Kingdom Hearts ReMIX games for the time being. The only game that I want for the PS4 won't be coming out until June, so I have plenty of time to get the PS4. but if I can get it for only $275 then hell yeah I'll buy it right now instead of waiting. I can always play Little Big Planet 3 for now until a decent game that I will enjoy comes out.




Yes, I know that Destiny is really good and a lot of people really enjoy it, but to be honest I'm not that great at first-person shooter games. I like Halo, and I can play it, but that's the only exception and that's probably because my ex played it all the time, so I had to learn. Also FPS are easier to play on the Xbox. The controller is better designed for those games.




Another happy note is that I got to go to Universal and Islands of Adventure this past weekend for two days! That was extremely fun. Saw old friends and made new ones. I have to say that this was the first time I was in such a big group and enjoyed everyone that was there. We had such a great group of people and the weekend went by amazingly because of it. I finally got to see Diagon Alley! It was amazing!




If there is one thing that you have to know about me is my obsession with Harry Potter. There is only two things that I am obsess with: Kingdom Hearts and Harry Potter. I'm a little bit more obsess with Harry Potter, just because the universe for it is so big and a lot more international than Kingdom Hearts, but the passion is equal for both of them. I was so happy when they made the first park in Islands of Adventure. I went to the soft opening and it was awesome. Not too awesome every time they shut down the ride, but the stores more than made up for it.




Having the knowledge of the layout of the parks from past trips, I was really surprised the first time by what they did to bring Hogsmeade and Hogwarts to Islands of Adventure. Hogwarts for instance seems life-like in the sense of how big it looks. You think it's just as big as a castle, but in reality, the parts that are farther away are smaller to make the castle bigger than it really is. A nifty trick that really works to sell the image of a big castle. The portraits do move in subtle ways when they are not actively moving. They tend to twitch or blink all the time and then they act out whatever scene whenever they want. They made sure to make the videos look like an actual portrait. There are so many little things that they paid special attention to in order to bring the world of Harry Potter to us 'muggles' and they succeeded.




The same thing can be said for the creation of Diagon Alley in Universal. This past weekend being my first time going, I was extremely excited to finally go. I was a bit sad to notice that they had to get rid of the Jaws ride and world to make Diagon Alley, but I was so pleased with the new addition, I wasn't upset for too long.




You first walk into Muggle London. King's Cross is the first thing I see, before I notice the town homes that are next to it. The town homes are the street where Grimmauld place is located. Eek! I can't believe they decided to put this in the park! They always mention the Gringotts ride, but no one told me that they would have Number 12 Grimmauld Place! Every ten minutes they have Kreacher popping out in the window above the door. In front of Number 12, is the Knight Bus, there's not much there, beside the shrunken heads in the front that move at times.




The entrance to Diagon Alley is of course the back of the Leaky Cauldron, but this is where they made a mistake with the design. It says the Leaky Cauldron, but you are immediately walking behind a wall and then through the brick wall that Hagrid goes through in the first movie. To the left of the entrance is the Leaky Cauldron again, but it is the actual dining area of Diagon Alley similar to the Three Broomsticks in Islands of Adventure. Besides that design flaw the rest is very well done. They brought a lot of shops to Diagon Alley, which makes sense considering it's mainly a shopping district. Weasley Wizard Wheezes is there and I noticed that the version they had at IOA had a name change to Zonko's, but I remember that it was originally played off as a branch of WWW at Homemade. I don't feel that Zonkos would be extremely orange just like Weasley's Wizard Wheezes.




Gringotts is in the middle in the back and I very much feel that I am in Diagon Alley when I see it. It came as a shock when the Dragon actually breathed out fire towards the air. I had thought that it was just a commercial gimmick to get people to come to the park, but the dragon actually does breathe fire! Around every 10 minutes, it'll start to lowly growl and mumble before it lets out a tremendous roar. It's so cool. I didn't get to go on the Gringotts ride, it broke down right as we were going to get on and when we checked later to try to get on again, it was completely shut off.




So close yet so far.




I enjoyed Knockturn Alley, something I was happy that they included. It's small with only Borgin & Burke as a shop, but it has three interactive features that were really fun. This was something new. The parks now have an interactive feature with the wands that you can buy in the shops. I remember at first you could buy only a couple of wands, like Harry's, Ron's, Hermione's, Dumbledore, etc. Now you can buy Luna Lovegood, Cho Chang, Dean, Seamus, and more! I think this time you can buy all of the characters' wands. Also this time you have two options when getting your wand, either you can buy a plain wand, or you can pay ten dollars more for an interactive wand, that gives you a map where you can locate the interactive spells in the many places in both Diagon Alley and Hogsmeade.




I bought the Severus Snape interactive wand.




His wand is very simple and only has a small design on the handle. They look like kanji symbols, but none look familiar so I don't think they are. I love Severus Snape as a character and Alan Rickman played him superbly. So many emotions come attached to Snape that I could probably write a decent size blog on all of the feels.




The interactive spells are a lot of fun, once you can get them to work. They are a little bit tricky to activate, but the moment you get it, it becomes a lot of fun. I only did the spells in Knockturn Alley since it is mainly used for people to perform the interactive spells. I felt pretty nerdy performing them, but since I wasn't the only one pretending to be a wizard, I was fine for looking like a derp. The robes are still far too expensive and I don't know whether I will ever buy them. I now have an annual pass to the parks so maybe one day I might spend that chunk of money.....but I don't know.




The weekend being followed by an amazing Christmas, has really got me in a good mood. I'm going to be flying into 2015 on a high note. The fact that my dream from the Dream foundation will be happening right after the new year is another cherry on the top of this chocolate sundae.




Year of the sheep, here I come!