July 1st, 2025
Yet another long day. Very fun day, but very long day.
Woke up around 9:30, got out of bed, got breakfast, immediately went to the mall to find a swimsuit, went up to my room to put it on, and accompanied a 30+ person group to the bath house. I haven’t been swimming in years; it was good to get back in the water, but exhausting, and I was glad when we ended up in a warm pool where we could just relax. I should look for somewhere close by I can go swimming in my area, frankly.
I was also glad when we could leave; I could already feel the social fatigue getting to me, and besides, someone in the group had a speedrun to do live on stream. So naturally, we all ended up sitting in the crowd. There were so many donations during the run, and the streamer didn’t give enough time to read them all until far later, but everything went well, the vibes were immaculate, and there were a lot of laughs to be had.
I hung around for a while, waiting for my friends Shemp and Dylan’s run to start and generally feeling exhausted. Still, I powered through just fine, and the run was absolutely hilarious. The loser (“Shemp”) had to be slammed through a table, and the entire room was packed and the viewer count shot up for the run and subsequent table-slamming.
Finally feeling like I hit a second wind, another huge group met up to go out to a little… parkour park, I suppose? A place filled with astroturf and huge green cubes and hexagons, a few trampolines, and a skate park. Everybody was having a good time and were just hanging; at one point the cops showed up a little confused, but left us alone once they realized we weren’t drinking in public or anything. One of the nicer things I’ve seen is that we’ve sort of absorbed a Nintendo runner into the PlayStation Nation while we’ve been here. Super nice guy and he’s fit right in well, everybody’s been very welcoming. We all stayed out until 2:30am and I kept taking pictures and videos with my shitty little flip phone camera, which was almost never in focus. Finally made it into bed at about 3am.
Speaking of my flip phone, it’s been… kinda okay, honestly. Unfortunately I couldn’t get mobile data working on it with the Danish SIM card, but it’s been working well when I’ve had wifi, and I can still make calls from Sweden without much of an issue. Initially I thought I couldn’t get voice call working on Discord, but it appears to have righted itself after some hiccups. I can even do video calls on there. I was thinking about using the phone as a game console to speedrun games on as a gimmick, and Dylan suggested DOOM; I think I can hook that up properly when I get back. Maybe that’ll be my submission game for ESA next year, because I do plan to come back.