Eagle-Time Gift-Sharing Thread

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SpoilerI should not make these threads when I'm tired but I need to get this ball rolling!

Welcome Eagle Timers to the Eagle Time Gift Sharing Thread

We're a pretty diverse community filled with really rad people and anyway I found a watch:

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I really liked this watch so I had a thing done to it:

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That date is the date the forum was created according to the user join logs.

I did this sort of on impulse, and I wasn't sure what to do with it. I mean it would be great to just wear it around town constantly. Or even just give it to someone.

Anyway I asked Pines and Schazer and it sounds like the best idea is to let everyone have it.

Which is great because this is a thing I was thinking of doing anyway.

So this is the first Gift of the Eagle Time Gift Sharing Thread!

Here's how the thread works:

Every month/two months/if there is interest a new Gift will be posted here. If you want to share in this gift, then sign up! You'll be placed on a ordered list that takes into account shipping costs (if the gift needs to be mailed), locations etc.

Then we start passing the gift around!

Now each gift may have some requirements associated with it, something that you need to do if you want to help build to the gift. After all, what good is passing a gift around if you don't get to improve it in some way?



Gift #1: A one-of-a-kind Eagle Time commemorative pocket watch!

Trading medium: Snail Mail!

Requirement: You need to take a picture of yourself with the watch at some local landmark. It doesn't have to be something fancy or well known. In fact, even just something about your local history or favorite hotspot will work! We'll get to see a growing photobook as this watch travels the world!

(if you're particularly camera shy- don't be! We love your beautiful face! if you're adamantly camera avoidant, maybe just hold the watch in front of your location of choice!)

Can I modify the item? Its up to group judgement on this. The watch will be shipped with a very small box, so if you want to send something personalized to the person next on the list then you could slip in it the box! The watch itself is pretty small and not easily modified: (but other gift exchange items will be highly modifiable!)

Anyway that's all I can think of to put here now! Ask questions if you'd like. Sign up if you'd like to too!

Signups!
- BTP
- Noodly
- Coldblooded
- Ed (?)
- g0m
- AgentBlue
...

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SpoilerDon't let worries about shipping costs keep you from joining in. If it's really an issue just know that I'd be happy to help any gift make its way to the next person!

I'd certainly love the chance to show the watch around Columbus. (And possibly NYC if it gets here in the next couple weeks(?) or so.)

I'm assuming we're not gonna try to rush this or anything? If you guys would rather me just snap a few pictures and send it straight off again instead of holding onto it for a small number of weeks, that's doable too.

Weeeeeelll, if air mail will work I'd love to let the watch see allll the non-sights Brisbane has, including Generic Ferris Wheel, Generic Glass Building, and Not Generic By Definition Arts District!

Oh, this sounds lovely

I'll ask my dad how doable is shipping things here.

giz please

This is still very much happening, I'm just waiting for a certain noodle based friend of mine to send me the pictures we took of this gift so we may begin to craft its story.

That being said I think this is a swell group of people to start up a list!

Coldblooded: you mentioned visiting New York, has that already passed?

Edit: and there's no real rush, I figure don't hold onto it for more than a month and you'll be fine. If its just gonna sit on your desk then I guess then send it to the next person but if you've got some rad pictures you have in mind then by all means keep it for those.

No, we're still not sure what day we're leaving yet, I'll let you guys know as soon as I find out.

Mkay well I think I'll get this thing going on the forums b-day on the 9th.

Now for some logistics:
I rearranged the ship to list based off my estimates of shipping costs and such. It looks like the cheapest way to have this guy travel is to stuff it in an envelope and send it like that (put it in a box and the cost skyrockets to 75 USD per trip.) Even with that it's looking like a good 12-15 USD to send it on each trip. Like I said I'm willing to pitch in some if that number scares you.

Ed, I couldn't find a good shipping calculator from Mexico. I know how much it should cost to get it to you but not how much for you to send it off. Maybe you could find some more pricing info on your end? Like how much it costs to send a .5 kg letter to Ireland or the US.

Also, sorry guys for not getting my pictures up yet! I promise to have some up on the 9th so you can know where this thing has already been!

My dad used to ship a lot of things in his past job, he must know where to ask. If it's not feasible it's no biggie if i drop out, right?

I will cry a million tears but yeah don't sweat it. There's no real rush to send this thing around, as long as everyone who wants to join in and is able to gets to!

At the start of this, I was wondering where exactly I could take the watch. I mean, sure there are some nice parks and statues and such here and some places I personally really enjoy, but I was hoping to get things rolling with something more iconic that people might recognize.

Where could I even take it that's in Houston?

Oh I don't know...how about...

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NASA

Here we have the lovely Noodly posing, watch in hand, in front of one of the entrance signs.

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Spoiler and here's me doing the same.

Now the space center here is divided up into two main parts. There is the "funtimes space museum" part designed to appease tourists while the real work is kept separate at the actual complex. There are security guards and other people who will get mad at you, so running around taking unauthorized pictures on government property wasn't really an option.

That being said, we did manage to hit the highlights.

Those being:

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MISSION CONTROL

and:

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A CRAZY HUGE SATURN V ROCKET (you know, the kind that takes people to the moon)

(sorry that not all of these pictures have the watch in them, it can be tricky to properly pose, especially when you're stuck in the middle of a tour group that doesn't want you to sit still)

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Spoileroops! getting interrupted in a post again! I'll post the next part of the trip later. In the meantime, the watch is being rushed to Coldblooded in hopes that it will reach him before he packs his bags for NYC. (CB if you get it let us know!)

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oops! getting interrupted in a post again! I'll post the next part of the trip later. In the meantime, the watch is being rushed to Coldblooded in hopes that it will reach him before he packs his bags for NYC. (CB if you get it let us know!)

It got here on time, and with a whole day to spare too. Three cheers for the Postal Service!

(Gonna try to borrow or buy a decent camera soon since carrying my laptop around to take pictures with is a less than optimal solution.)

Oh man i went to that museum when i was a kid! I distinctly remember those entrance signs.

Also, i think i won't be able to be part of this :<

And..... suddenly my dad found out that he has to go to a seminar next week and the trip gets pushed back to late July/early August.

Sorry for holding this up everyone, especially BTP since he ended having to pay express mail for no real reason.

Edit: Okay apologies if these pictures are coming out huge, generally I'll just tell photobucket to resize them and all problems are solved, but at the moment the resize doesn't seem to want to take. Of course that could just be my browser cache but I cleared that so I dunno. The cause is probably "using photobucket". but iiiim not sure which folders I stuffed the originals into so I'm a just gonna leave them here for when it's not 5 in the morning.

MORE STORIES OF WHERE THIS WATCH BE:

So anyway Noodles and I took this sucker on the NASA tram tour which conveniently stops at Mission Control. (see above picture)

Now "Mission Control" means a lot of things, and it didn't really mean everything that I wanted it to mean. For example, I thought it might mean "The Historic Mission Control Room that Coordinated the Apollo Missions."

well no it didn't.

I also thought it might mean "The current mission control where people are working and celebrating things like Dragon docking with the ISS or Curiosity rover landing on Mars."

No not that either.

What it does mean was: In the same huge ass building as those other two things and one floor directly below the second thing I mentioned, and viewing the previous mission control that was used in between the Apollo missions and present day and had the same screens that are typically shown on the floor above us and live feeds from the ISS so still pretty cool right?"

Anyway here are the pictures:

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Yeah. Gonna sync this sucker to NASA-time.



Not pictured here is the little Portal 2 Wheatly LED light that she carried around and also took pictures with because taking photos with stuff at nasa is what all the cool kids were doing.

(the cool kids is me).

So we listened to a college intern give a speech about space and space programs and then took questions. Some guy apparently confused Bruce Willis' Armageddon with reality and asked about when we landed on that meteor. I figured the bar couldn't be set any lower so I asked where the hell NASA was when the Aliens took over on july 4th and Bill Pullman had to save us all. (Her look told me two things: 1) she genuinely thought I was serious, possibly due to past experience, and 2) she has never seen the movie Independence Day. both things made me pity her greatly)

THEN WE WENT TO ROCKET PARK WEEEEEE

Rocket park is an outdoor park with Rockets that I don't know much about but there there was the SATURN V ROCKET. (see above picture again) (Also a new one).

So I spent a great deal of time mashing buttons on my eyephone trying to figure out exactly which saturn V Rocket this one was. (Noodles spent most of her time making this.)

Okay so like Mission Control I was hoping that this thing was cooler than was logistically possible. I was hoping that maybe this gigantic crazy intact rocket had been into space and back again.

Well turns out the Saturn V rockets (okay if you didn't scan the wiki already these are the rockets that ran the moon missions), are disposable rockets. You just sort of leave the parts in space. Most are not meant to return. So this rocket was actually a bit of a mash up from a couple of Saturn V's that didn't go to space (the front bit was initially supposed to go star-bound, but they instead used the rest for a non-manned mission so they didn't need the extra stages to bring the people back).

I explored it a bit. Walked around, and then noticed that there was one part where if I leaned in just right and didn't bother anyone I could actually maybe sort of put the watch...inside the rocket.

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It is totally behind that glass I swear.

See here is a unflattering picture of me craning my arm to get it in without letting it fall and become unrecoverable.

We then took the tram ride back to the not-nasa part of nasa. We checked out the food court, which touted such classes as :"Moon Wok", "South of the Martian Border", and "Italian Bistro", and decided that it was probably better to spend our food budget elsewhere. (despite how tempting "SPACE DIPPN DOTS" looked)

awwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww
what a nice adventureeee

Warning: There are approx. 30 large images underneath these spoilers, so if you're reading this a phone or a stone age computer, just.... brace yourself, I guess?

So anyway with that out of the way, I guess it's time to just go ahead and kick off


Eaglequest 2012
(Name pending.)


Chapter 1: Gettysburg

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SpoilerAfter seven straight hours of driving through no man's land, we arrived at our first stop, Gettysburg Pennsylvania.



"Bloodiest battle ever fought in the Western Hemispere? Yawn, whatever." - Me, without even a hint of sarcasm.

But seriously, there's not a whole lot to see here besides some statues, some graves, and some empty fields that used to have people dying on them. The guides tell you a whole bunch of stuff about how many people died where, and what the different tactics were and all that, but after awhile it just kinda blurs together into a giant clusterfuck of statistics and death. My dad seemed to enjoy visiting it though, so good for him. Anyway, here's some pictures I took.



North Carolinian soldiers, marching in the traditional confederate formation???



The Virginia statue is one of my favorites, because you can see it from one of the hills about a mile back, but the metal parts are almost completely invisible against the tree line. So from a distance it looks just like a giant golden pair of pants floating over the battlefield.



And here's Pennsylvania, clearly overcompensating for something.



This picture still makes me mad. I almost had the perfect picture of these two kids carelessly playing on the edge of the VALLEY OF DEATH, but some jerks stepped right in front of me at the last second and ruined it. Oh well, maybe next lifetime.



The Eagle takes a moment of silence to pay its respects to those that lost their lives nearly 150 years ago. Despite not actually having the ability to speak.



After walking around aimlessly through the cemetery for awhile, we stopped at a gift shop that sold some Confederate flags, Confederate T-shirts, Confederate bumper stickers, and plenty of other unpleasant things. I bought that eagle statue at the bottom instead.



And then we saw a spooky ghost and hightailed it right the fuck out of there.

Chapter 2: Washington D.C.

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The rest of the trip to DC went smoothly enough, at least up until we actually made it into the city and had to wait around Bethesda for two hours and get new tires after running over some nails in the street.

And then we just drove straight to the hotel and waited till tomorrow to start the sightseeing.



Ah yes, Washington D.C. "The City of Angels." "The Gateway City." "The Big Easy." "The Manatee State." "The Babylon of the West." "The Twin Cities" (along with Lincoln, Nebraska.)

But of course, DC is best known as "The Putrid Swamp Town" (where the rest of the country gets rid of all of their unwanted traffic, murderers, and politicians.) It's got some nice buildings and monuments though, so we'll let it slide.



And here's me standing in front of the Capitol Building, blinded by the light of patriotism, wearing a pink shirt, and looking almost unfathomably nerdy.

After going through security, we had to watch a 10 minute movie about how great freedom and the constitution are before getting into the rest of the building. The Swedish students in front of us kept snickering the whole time and it hurt my feelings. :(



In case you ever wondered what the inside of our nation's capitol dome looks like: It's a painting of George Washington rising up to become a god, surrounded on all sides by Victory, Liberty, and the female anthropomorphizations of the original 13 colonies.



And then there's this lady directly below Washington who represents WAR AND FREEDOM. I swear to god I'm not making of this up. At least now everyone can all sleep soundly tonight with the knowledge that America is exactly as dumb and tacky as you always imagined.

(Couldn't find any reliable sources on whether she's related to Captain America in any way though.)



I fucked up this picture something fierce, but I know for a fact there's at least four different eagles in this one shot, plus several others scattered around the room.

There are 100 different statues of various famous people, two from each state. This room contains one of the two statues from Ohio, which they recently voted to send home and replace with Thomas Edison, as opposed to Neil Armstrong, the Wright brothers, any of Ohio's other 7 presidents, Drew from TFD, and the guy that wrote the Bone series. Presumably in order to drive home just how dumb Ohio is.

Anyway, then we left and went to check out some of the Smithsonian Museums.



And here's the watch taking in the view of the Washington Monument, as well as a ridiculous number of American flags and one particularly imposing restroom.



Hey look, it's that building from Fallout 3.



Here's the view from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, with the reflecting pool under construction for some reason. In the background, you can see the Capitol Building and.... maybe some of the Smithsonian Museums? Kinda hard to tell.

Anyway, the Smithsonian Museums were definitely the most interesting part of the National Mall for me at least, and I wish we'd had more time to spend there instead of just running through all the interesting sounding ones in only a few hours. Make sure to set aside a good day or two just for the musuems if any of you guys ever go to DC, there's a lot to see.



And here's the memorial itself. Along with me being completely unaware of Lincoln's terrifying, ominous silhouette in the background.



Then we stopped at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. One of the 58,000 names on it is Roy Phipps, my grandmother's cousin. My dad says he still remembers him from when he was a kid. He also happened to die at just the right time to get himself placed on the top row of this particular block. RIP Roy.



Here's that Fallout 3 building again. But apparently here they call it the Jefferson Memorial instead? Weird.



The Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial is a relatively new monument, which only went up in late 2011. People walk through those two granite slabs on the left to get into the memorial area, and the statue is cut out of that original chunk of granite and looking out over the Potomac River.

The sudden cooling effect from walking towards the river and the permanent alleviation of all white guilt after visiting were also really cool features as well. A+ monument. Highly recommended.



It was already dark by the time we reached the White House, and I didn't get any good pictures, so I just attached a relevant stock photo instead.

But trust me, the watch did end up travelling within one block of the President of the United States! Probably. And on the day before his birthday too! Crazy stuff.



Anyway, the next day we visited Arlington National Cemetary, which we got to by crossing over this cool, horse-themed bridge.



It's kind of hard to get a sense of how big this place is from photos alone, so I'll just tell you. It's over 400,000 graves spread out across about 1 square mile. This was the most I could fit into a single shot, but it's still probably not even 1% of the total graves here.



I don't know who this woman is.



This here's the Amphitheater that they have funerals in whenever somebody important enough dies. Behind that is the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and the spot where the Changing of the Guard takes place a couple dozen times per day.



This land all used to belong to General Lee, back before he left to lead the Confederate army. After he died, the US Government took it and turned it into the cemetery it is today.

This is the view from Lee's front yard, literally right across the river from the enemy capital. If you look closely, you can see the Lincoln Memorial, Washington Monument, and the Capitol Building from here, as well as some sort of hi-tech metal air-machine. Also notice how D.C. has approx. zero buildings taller than 15 stories high.

The John F. Kennedy Memorial/Burial Site is also located right at the bottom of this hill, but all this dumb ground got in the way so you don't get to see it.



I was gonna take a photo of the Pentagon as we passed it too, but it turns out, it looks the same as just about every other building from any direction other than straight down. So I just took a picture of this cool-looking..... (quickly leafs through physical copy of Wikipedia)...... United States Air Force Memorial.... thing....

After that we spent a good hour or two trying to navigate our way out of the unending nightmare that is DC's infrastructure.



But eventually we escaped and headed north on I-95. On the way we spent a good several seconds taking in Baltimore's skyline before driving right along and never thinking about it again. Pictured above: My cyclopean nose getting ready to smash the Ravens' stadium into a fine mist.

Later I found out that from Avi that he was going to a bunny meetup of some kind in DC, which I ended up missing by less than a day. Which kinda sucks. Sorry Avi, I'll try to get in touch with you sooner next time if I'm ever in the area again. Hope you guys had a good time without me.

We stopped for the night at an Econolodge in Delaware, conveniently located right in between a Denny's and a liquor store.

We had finally managed to escape the Washington's labyrinth, but would we be able to survive the many trials of the New Jersey Turnpike?!?!? Find out in the next exciting episode of Eagle Time! (Spoiler: yes.)

Next time: New York City and Columbus

Word stuff:

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SpoilerWell this ended up taking about two months longer then I had originally planned, and while I could come up with a few work related/getting hammered excuses, for the most part it was just crippling laziness that made me take so long. Sorry everybody, especially BTP. My bad.

Anyway, Bob wanted me to post some of the pictures before sending it off to see if anyone else over here wanted to get a hold of it before it gets sent overseas. So yeah, People in North America: It is still not too late to sign up! Also, people everywhere else in the world, it is still not too EARLY to sign up! Feel free to sign up at your earliest or most convenient convenience.

I'll probably be sending it out at the end of the week to whoever it gets sent to though, so sooner would be better than later if you live in this half of the world.

Eaglequest chapters 3 and 4: Coming to your local internet box in the future at some point, eventually.

So uh, who's getting the watch next?

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Roight. Ed or g0m. Gotcher. :3

ahhhh, washington dc! that bethesda place you mentioned is just south of me- in fact i used to live there!

i enjoyed all your captions they were great!

woo dc.

wish I could have walked like 10 minutes and met up with you guys.

cause I live there.

necroposting this cuz it's spring cleaning time as Chateau Du Crapteau Du Schaz, and I am a terrible impulse-purchaser with a dickton of Weeb Shit that I'd get more pleasure out of gifting to other folks rather than hoarding for myself.

(Also because I am overdue a trip to the post office so it's all very convenient and coerces me to Get Shit Done)

Sometime next week probably (I'm bz this weekend!) I'll post pictures of shit I'll gift to folks, no strings attached. First in first served but I'll need your postal addresses.

Plz nag me to get this done because a tidy house makes me feel better but I'm also a chronic procrastinator <3

WOAH DANG

This is what necroposting is all about.

Free stuff from Schazer sounds awesome.

Dang, where is that watch now anyway?

Man I think I've ever received A Thing from anybody here somehow so uh, address incoming when I get home from work.

Remind me to art you something later too

Oh yeah i was going to send people energy drinks and probably nz chocolate. I have money right now so if you want in on this shit then ayyy

I was going to send people ~maple sugar candies~ but kiiinda forgot, hit me up if we're cool and you want some maybe? Schaz, Plaid, and Agen are already on the list.