The Lonesome Praire
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My name is Ian Sage, this website hosts everything that I want to share with the world. Sometimes I write my thoughts down, and then sometimes I'll put these thoughts on my Webjournal. If that's nothing you care about, then perhaps you'd wish to download some of the music I've been collecting, or maybe check out my drawings.
My Webjournal
[Urban Exploration] The planetarium
March the 13th, 2025:
So we went there again, to the ecological park. For context, the city hall built this huge park in the 90s with tax money and later abandoned it three decades later. This time we lied our way in. Only racers and scoutboys are being allowed. We told the gatekeeper we were scouts and he reluctantly let us in. Seeing the expression he made, I gathered he knew we were lying and just couldn't bother.
We made the same trajectory as before, only this time we stopped at the planetarium and spent more time at the water park. All around the planetarium were strange machines, control panels and wires sticking out from the walls. It looked like the inside of some abandoned alien spaceship. To our excitement, we came across three trash bags full of DVDs sitting there like they were waiting specially for us, although almost all of it consisted of 2000s cheese.
I didn't want to flood my backpack, so I only took four: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003), because I thought it was the original; Some Hellraiser sequel, again, because I thought it was the original; "Helter Skelter" and "Kevin & Perry Go Large". I'll always regret being conservative with my backpack, I should've taken at least three more. Next to the DVDs was this huge keyboard from the 90s, which sadly, now that I am using a laptop, I have no use for. Inside an inconspicuous little cabinet I found two hard drives and some labeled CDs, the contents of which I'll be inspecting later this week.
Concerning the water park, most of the pictures I took are self-explanatory. The lighthouse is what I thought to be the coolest thing there. We climbed all of that rusty metal while I was naturally pissing myself, since I am afraid of heights, and the view we got was incredible. We even found a surf board inside of it.
All of the pools were empty except for dirty rain water, for those of you who thought we got to swim a little.
The staircase of the lighthouse.
The windows of the lighthouse cabin.
Some kind of rusty control panel.
This was a difficult walk.
'Round, 'round, get around. I get around, yeah.
The Lonesome Praire V3.0
March the 12th, 2025:
I've rewritten the site again. Not only that, since it's very inconvenient having to write my journal directly onto the html code, I've made a C program that copies all of my journal entries from separate text files into one html file with proper formatting and also updates the navbar on every page.
First, the program reads a file called "page-index", which contains a list of all the html files and goes through all of them, filling the space between <!-- navbar begin --> and <!-- navbar end --> with the contents of "bar.html".
The program then reads the file "entry-index", a list of all the entries in the "entries" directory, and copies 'template.html' to 'index.html' up until <!-- journal begin -->, then proceeds to copy each entry to 'index.html' using the macros:
"#ss" for <div class="small_space">
"#bs" for <div class="big_space">
"#br" for <br>
"#img='src' for <img src=src>
"#cimg='src' for <img src=src> preceeding a comment
Then copies the remaining of "template.html" into "index.html".
(Template.html is a copy of the main page without the journal posts)
Entries are named MMDDYYA, where M = month, D = day, Y = year and A is any letter, just in case I ever want to make two posts in the same day.
Each entry must have less than 80 characters on each line for the program to work. I use Vim's gq to format the text.
There are better ways to do this, C is not the optimal language for text manipulation. I would've used a scripting language had I known any. I've got an exam coming up on that topic, so it's good training.
I doubt it's going to be useful for anyone, but the code is here:
program.c
The explorers' guild go to an abandoned water park.
March the 5th, 2025:
Most of the photos I took got corrupted, as such this entry is way less interesting than it should have been.
A few decades ago, the city government started to build this giant complex that would include a planetarium, a zoo, an observatory, a race car track and even a water park. The whole area stands in the middle of large patches of undisturbed nature; they call it an ecological park. Ask anyone who has lived here for long enough and they'll have fond memories of it. I used to go there with my family on weekends, on school trips and birthday parties. Eventually the city no longer had the money to support such a huge infrastructure and it started suffering the neglect of newer administrations; this lead to an outbreak of spotted fever caused by an increasing population of wild capybaras. Last time I visited the place was during 2022; It was almost completely empty, most attractions were broken and the water park had been out of order for two years. A few months later it got closed to visitors, and hasn't been mantained ever since.
I am the guild chief of the Explorers' Guild, an urban exploration club. We break into abandoned buildings for fun. If it sounds criminal, it's because it is (sometimes), but on the other hand, it's also a legitimate hobby practiced by quite a lot of people. When it comes to having fun while living in a small town, you gotta be creative. This holds twice as true for those of us who are not so easily entertained.
One afternoon, me, along with two of my droogs, decided to invade the park.
We got off the cab a couple of hundred meters from the entrance, where there was a guard post with two guards inside who were either deaf-blinds or really didn't care about intruders, since we walked right in front of them before climbing the fence as noisily as we could. Then we walked through a long forest road, past the observatory and past the carousels until we reached the planetarium. The glass doors had been conveniently smashed into pieces, so getting inside wasn't a problem. We skipped the planetarium itself since we didn't have enough time. It was already deep into the afternoon when we arrived.
An empty chapel.
The building adjacent to the planetarium was mostly empty except for one room in the second floor which contained dozens of taxidermied animals and jars with preserved animals inside. Aside from that, we found a bunch of VHS tapes, a phone which I took for myself and some books on photography.
After that we followed another long forest road. Eventually the road flanked a river that was full of capybaras. There were lots of birds too; vultures were everywhere. Vultures can smell death, they show up when death is close by. That's not a good sign.
Next we reached the kart tracks, then, finally, the water park. The sun was already low in the sky, so we skipped the kart tracks. I didn't know it at the time, but the tracks ware still being used. It was a good thing we didn't go near it. The unwritten explorers' code says we must not go inside buildings that are still in use.
It was nearly nighttime when we reached the water park. I said we needed to swallow our excitement like adults and go home, or else we could be trudging the long way back to the entrance in the dark. Nobody listened, so I said we could walk through the place for a bit and then turn back the way we came. My friends climbed this huge waterslide while I chickened out. Apparently, the slide was deemed unsafe even before the park closed.
Unsurprisingly, we had to walk back to the entrance in the dark.
A souvenir pickled snake.
My new laptop
February the 2th, 2025:
Ever since I was a kid, I've been using the same 2009 Acer laptop. It was my first computer and the only laptop I've ever owned. It never gave me any trouble, but I was never much of a laptop man either, I've always preferred desktops. Now I realized how convenient it would be to use a laptop as a daily driver as opposed to using a desktop whenever I'm at home and a laptop for any mobile computing needs. I saw a Lenovo Thinkpad T400 on the internet the other day and promptly bought it without a second thought. In retrospect, I should've waited and seen if I could get an IBM model. They're way easier to install custom firmware on and I much prefer the 4 by 3 screen. I don't get the whole excitement around widescreen monitors, they're way too large. Now all my wallpapers don't fit. I installed Arch linux and baptized her as "PROMETHEUS9000".
A good thing about the T400 is that it is built with a tactile keyboard instead of a chiclet one.
I also got an antique desk set from my grandmother. It's very nice, but the table's too low and I've been having back pains because of it. Now I can't help but think about how if I were using a desktop I could just position the monitor a little higher.
So what of this desolate scrapyard, anyway?
January the 27th, 2025:
The praire has been my digital home for two years, and it hasn't grow much since I first moved in. In fact, it's shrinking. I keep deleting stuff because I don't like how it is written. There is so much I want to share with the world, but I can't express myself. I get stuck. That's what this whole ordeal has been about from the beginning. I don't get many chances to speak my mind freely in real life. I wanted someplace I could leave a record, throw my ideas out there, maybe they'd reach someone someday. And if I were to die suddenly, this would be proof of my existence. But even this short paragraph is a giant struggle. Sometimes I wonder if I'm retarded.
Basically, what I'm trying to say is: I'll be updating the site regularly from now on.

Copyright Ian Sage