Saturday: The Strip, Kiltie Game, DDR, and Mike's Birthday.
Saturday morning, despite getting no sleep, we awoke around 8:30am and went down to the Strip District for breakfast and stuff. For the non-Pittsburghers around, the Strip is like this area down sort of near downtown near a lot of the docks and stuff, where they have lots of ethnic markets and such. It's kinda hard to explain. Saturday mornings there are sort of exciting since a lot of people come down to buy food and wander through the stores. We went to La Prima, a coffeeshop, to meet up with people. Eventually we found the place... then we found Stewart... then Karen and Pete and Kai showed up... then Pete Berger and his wife Annette showed up. Annette is scary because she's like 8.5 months pregnant and looks... well, not pregnant much at all. Anyway, we had some coffee, and I had run over and gotten some cookies from Enrico's, and after the cookies and hot chocolate and jet lag, my stomach was in really bad shape. So I ended up ducking out and coming to CMU.
Got to CMU *JUST* in time to hear the band start while I tried to park in the damned garage. Got a few pregame pictures as they finished up the alma mater and fight song. I actually had tears in my eyes as I sung along... I was so very homesick to be there and all. I wondered where the heck Nick was, as I knew he'd be at the game... and then the band came off the field and started filing into the stands, and after seeing and saying hi to and hugging a whole bunch of other people, THERE WAS NICK, IN A KILTIE UNIFORM!! Apparently![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
cdinwood convinced him to come to 9am rehearsal, fitted him for a niform and got him to play in the scatter show. Lucky. :P Anyway, I went into the stands and saw Bob Rost handing out music. HE WAS HANDING OUT MUSIC FOR BURNING HEAT! Oh my god. I was so incredibly, amazingly happy... I brought a tape recorder, and so I did get them playing it in the stands, but it wasn't very good. It sounded great. More like the NES version than the DDR version of course, but that's the spirit of the NES music stuff.
Anyway, so the game got underway. I kept turning my tape recorder off and on... so I'd catch people doing cheers and stuff in the stands and all sorts of other fun things. Haha, so Dan Fernandez, as part of the general Anti-Trombone movement, started up the Anti-Cheermastering coalition... it was hilarious, he has all of these parody cheers and others. So for example, the band has a "Director's Gone" cheer... so the anti-cheer is the "Director's Here" cheer. They also have the "Cheermaster's gone" cheer... and various cheers of various people, like the Rob Harris Cheer ("Give us a show but do it slow, Rob, Guys always like to get a *stomp stomp* SPORRAN!"), the Sally Bozzuto Cheer, the Bob Rost Cheer, the Hoss Cheer ("Chug-a-chug-a-chocolate milk, Burn Baby Burn, W-N!"), etc. It was funny as hell. Despite how much I feel bad for Mr. Gerlach, I am REALLY glad to see these new stands antics... between the nintendo music and the anti-cheers, I was laughing for large chunks of the time. Oh, and so like, Sally's mom was there! So like, the band usually does this whole "Who wants to say hi to ______?" "THE BAND WANTS TO SAY HI TO ________. HI!!!" where ____ is someone's parents, or the university president, or the Scottie Dog mascot, etc. Except this time, every time Mike Beattie yelled out "Who wants to say hi to _____?" a whole bunch of us got up and yelled "THE BAND WANTS TO SAY HI TO SALLY'S MOM! HIIII!!!" and waved at Sally's mom. Heh. The thing is, the "real" band antics weren't really providing enough entertainment... so... whee. It's so much more fun than it ever was... I really, really really really miss band.
Halftime was good. I sat in the stands withmrpeck and csg87. The first formation was a butterfly, for In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida, the second formation was a train for Mustang Sally ("What on earth does a train have to do with Mustang Sally?" Apparently they were supposed to play some other song, but axed it at the last minute and kept the formation), the third was the word "MUU" for the song "Moo Juice"... when the announcer "hit the spellchecker", they rearranged to spell "MOO". Then a buggy formation for "Vehicle". Wow! I hadn't heard Moo Juice or Vehicle since my first semester in band, like 4 years ago. So cool. Then they announced seniors, and the band "couldn't get off the field"... "we need someone to push the buggy!" so they had the cheerleaders run up and push the band off the field. heh.
Ed Latimer came by too. I was like "WHAT ON EARTH ARE YOU DOING HERE WEARING PANTS, BOY?" He apparently had a fallout with Mr. Gerlach... I don't know why and don't really want to. But he's not playing in band at all anymore. Hmm.. so, the last half of the game was good and bad. Bad because the football team lost... good because everyone did a lot of fun stuff and I got to talk to fun people, and take pictures (mygrane apparently just got some neato digital camera stuff too, lucky her!). I did record some more cheers and some more nintendo/etc music, although the one that came out the best was Bob's "Harold and the Other Guy" song... which is the "theme song" of the comic he writes for the Tartan. Can I possibly stress any more how fucking cool Bob Rost is? No, I don't think I can. Bob ROCKS MY WORLD. Oh yeah, so Bob not only got elected as an officer in the band (VP for Concert? I think?) but Dan Fernandez handed off the anti-cheermaster status to Bob. So woot! It was funny because Bob even led some spontaneous silly shit cheers -- like in the last ten minutes when our team gave up our huge lead and proceeded to lose, he was like "The Holy Shit Our Team Is Losing, Go, Tartans, Go cheer!" and got everyone to yell "HOLY SHIT, OUR TEAM IS LOSING! GO, TARTANS, GO!" At one point the band yelled for 35 Cheermaster pushups... so James and Mike and Tim (the trombone former and current cheermasters) went up there... and Dan and Bob ran up there too and did sit-ups. Man. It was awesome. I haven't laughed so hard in such a while. Oh, we did do Jam, and I went up with everyone and did it too... although it is nowhere near as much fun if you can't make a sporran go flying.
I did manage to record the fight song twice from in the middle of the band, and King Arthur, and Moo Juice, and some of the cheers. Hopefully they'll be mp3ed at some point, and you too can hear "GO, GO, MAIM EM MAIM EM, RIP OFF THEIR LEGS!" on your computer.
Oh, and the best is... after band, I got together a small group (Bob Rost on alto sax,mygrane and Aaron Tarnow on tenor sax, cdinwood on mellophone, and Jeremy Olisar (random Kiltie freshman) on clarinet... and recorded several of the NES themes. Got Burning Heat, Kraid's theme (Metroid), Vegetable Valley (Kirby's Adventure), Kid Icarus, Double Dragon, Contra Base, and Excitebike. It was fabulously wonderful, and I'm totally hoping to be able to get Eli to help me turn them into mp3s at some point. Wow. After that, I went into the band room, looked at the uniform charts, and it turns out Jeremy has my kilt from last year (577). Even funnier, nickjong apparently wore my jacket from last year (519). Ha! That's pretty good, even though Nick and I already knew we wear almost the exact same size of clothes. :)
Anyway, so after all that, I went to the UC... found Bayani at gaming club, and we went to the cluster for a little while, and thensorakirei called, so we met her and nerdboyhimself down at the UC turnaround, and also the jweill/jweisz/piatek/adubois car. Then we all went off to Century 3 mall. I got to play the NES band music in the car... I think it amused people. :)
Okay, so like, the machine is SO GHETTO it's not even funny. The marquee has a 7th mix one over a 3rd mix one, like the owner didn't even know how to take off the 3rd mix one or something. And the sound is SO QUIET... you can't hear it when you're more than a foot or two further away than the pads are. I could barely hear it when I was ON the pads... still. There was this guy there, I'd never seen before, apparently "dancing mewtwo" on the DDRFreak boards. He came up to me like "Hey, everyone says you're good. I wanna play against you next. I'm like really good at Perfect Attack and all." I was like "uhh... sure, whatever..." At the time,gootmu was on the machine, so after he was done, I went up with the other guy. HAHAHAHA. I beat his ass into the ground. The machine's not even remotely unlocked, so I couldn't play all of my favorites (Spin the Disc, Burning Heat, I Feel, etc)... so I picked Ever Snow, and AM-3P, and he picked something in the middle, forget what but it was an 8-foot maniac, and I aced all of them (minus a few misses purely from not being able to hear the machine). (For the rest of the day, this kid kept whining "Oh, I don't want to play against you any more, you're too good, I can't pass all of those Heavy songs...") I don't really entirely remember all of the songs I played, but I pulled off some cool stuff, especially beating the heck out of Rob Vallecorsa on PA on all the maniac songs we played together (I think I even beat him on Twilight Zone, despite the fact that I'm not sure I've ever actually PASSED it before)... it was funny, I even FC'ed Absolute in front of everyone, and Mike was like, "Wow, you get a LOT more perfects than you ever did before..." I think it must be the Seattle push.
Okay, so bragging aside (hehe), we got a whole lot of people out there... our cars of 8, and Marybeth and Marc, and the mewtwo kid, and Juan and Rob and some other guy from BVM, and Adam who dresses as Rage, andsighterfoxfh, and... dunno. There were some annoying spectators, like this one retarded kid in a wheelchair who kept yelling "HEEEEEY MACARENA" every time he went by, which was often. But overall, it was fun... there were a lot of people so we didn't all play that often. Mike is way out of practice. He's gone totally academic though, and it sounds like he's doing really well with stuff (same for Justin). So I think that's better for him than necessarily being the best DDR player in Pittsburgh. Plus, he's still just as super-nice and cool as ever.
Yeah, so basically, around 7:30pm or so, some of us gave up on DDR and went upstairs for food... since we have Chick-Fil-A in PA and we don't in WA. So I got to sit and eat and hang out with Mike, Justin, Jason, and Andrew. It rocked. We sat around mostly talking about video games, and OGS, and Japan a little, and Justin's monitor delivery woes, and such. I had a really awesome time hanging out with them... such a shame that I really didn't get to know any of them until a few months before I moved away. Great group. And Justin still has like, the nicest smile of anyone I've ever met at CMU, I think.
Anyway, since I had to get back to Oakland by 9, we went back to the DDR machine, I met up with people, and then we all headed home. I got to the CMU garage at 9, which means I got to Mike's house at 9:15. I decided against a shower (wasn't all that sweaty anyway, since I only played maybe 4 games AND it'd been like 2 hours since I played). Changed clothes slightly, and then we headed out to get Carl and go up to the Waterfront, since Mike had made reservations for birthday dinner at Mitchell's at 10pm.
It was nice..lorimelton and ralphmelton were there, and of course mrpeck since it was his birthday, and me and Eli, and Carl, and Brett Diamond and Katherine Crawford (who I know from Kiltie Band). We had a lot of fun eating and talking and taking pictures and stuff... I think everyone had a good time, and the food was good, and we had to fight Mike for his check to buy him dinner afterwards, but it all got taken care of. He'd asked for no birthday presents, but Eli and I decided to give him the best present of all anyway: houseguests. :)
So, afterwards, we all headed back home, and Eli and I stayed up trying to take pictures of Nicki and Sinbad (Mike's dog and cat) for a while, and then slept. Yay Saturday.
Got to CMU *JUST* in time to hear the band start while I tried to park in the damned garage. Got a few pregame pictures as they finished up the alma mater and fight song. I actually had tears in my eyes as I sung along... I was so very homesick to be there and all. I wondered where the heck Nick was, as I knew he'd be at the game... and then the band came off the field and started filing into the stands, and after seeing and saying hi to and hugging a whole bunch of other people, THERE WAS NICK, IN A KILTIE UNIFORM!! Apparently
cdinwood convinced him to come to 9am rehearsal, fitted him for a niform and got him to play in the scatter show. Lucky. :P Anyway, I went into the stands and saw Bob Rost handing out music. HE WAS HANDING OUT MUSIC FOR BURNING HEAT! Oh my god. I was so incredibly, amazingly happy... I brought a tape recorder, and so I did get them playing it in the stands, but it wasn't very good. It sounded great. More like the NES version than the DDR version of course, but that's the spirit of the NES music stuff.Anyway, so the game got underway. I kept turning my tape recorder off and on... so I'd catch people doing cheers and stuff in the stands and all sorts of other fun things. Haha, so Dan Fernandez, as part of the general Anti-Trombone movement, started up the Anti-Cheermastering coalition... it was hilarious, he has all of these parody cheers and others. So for example, the band has a "Director's Gone" cheer... so the anti-cheer is the "Director's Here" cheer. They also have the "Cheermaster's gone" cheer... and various cheers of various people, like the Rob Harris Cheer ("Give us a show but do it slow, Rob, Guys always like to get a *stomp stomp* SPORRAN!"), the Sally Bozzuto Cheer, the Bob Rost Cheer, the Hoss Cheer ("Chug-a-chug-a-chocolate milk, Burn Baby Burn, W-N!"), etc. It was funny as hell. Despite how much I feel bad for Mr. Gerlach, I am REALLY glad to see these new stands antics... between the nintendo music and the anti-cheers, I was laughing for large chunks of the time. Oh, and so like, Sally's mom was there! So like, the band usually does this whole "Who wants to say hi to ______?" "THE BAND WANTS TO SAY HI TO ________. HI!!!" where ____ is someone's parents, or the university president, or the Scottie Dog mascot, etc. Except this time, every time Mike Beattie yelled out "Who wants to say hi to _____?" a whole bunch of us got up and yelled "THE BAND WANTS TO SAY HI TO SALLY'S MOM! HIIII!!!" and waved at Sally's mom. Heh. The thing is, the "real" band antics weren't really providing enough entertainment... so... whee. It's so much more fun than it ever was... I really, really really really miss band.
Halftime was good. I sat in the stands with
mrpeck and csg87. The first formation was a butterfly, for In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida, the second formation was a train for Mustang Sally ("What on earth does a train have to do with Mustang Sally?" Apparently they were supposed to play some other song, but axed it at the last minute and kept the formation), the third was the word "MUU" for the song "Moo Juice"... when the announcer "hit the spellchecker", they rearranged to spell "MOO". Then a buggy formation for "Vehicle". Wow! I hadn't heard Moo Juice or Vehicle since my first semester in band, like 4 years ago. So cool. Then they announced seniors, and the band "couldn't get off the field"... "we need someone to push the buggy!" so they had the cheerleaders run up and push the band off the field. heh.Ed Latimer came by too. I was like "WHAT ON EARTH ARE YOU DOING HERE WEARING PANTS, BOY?" He apparently had a fallout with Mr. Gerlach... I don't know why and don't really want to. But he's not playing in band at all anymore. Hmm.. so, the last half of the game was good and bad. Bad because the football team lost... good because everyone did a lot of fun stuff and I got to talk to fun people, and take pictures (
mygrane apparently just got some neato digital camera stuff too, lucky her!). I did record some more cheers and some more nintendo/etc music, although the one that came out the best was Bob's "Harold and the Other Guy" song... which is the "theme song" of the comic he writes for the Tartan. Can I possibly stress any more how fucking cool Bob Rost is? No, I don't think I can. Bob ROCKS MY WORLD. Oh yeah, so Bob not only got elected as an officer in the band (VP for Concert? I think?) but Dan Fernandez handed off the anti-cheermaster status to Bob. So woot! It was funny because Bob even led some spontaneous silly shit cheers -- like in the last ten minutes when our team gave up our huge lead and proceeded to lose, he was like "The Holy Shit Our Team Is Losing, Go, Tartans, Go cheer!" and got everyone to yell "HOLY SHIT, OUR TEAM IS LOSING! GO, TARTANS, GO!" At one point the band yelled for 35 Cheermaster pushups... so James and Mike and Tim (the trombone former and current cheermasters) went up there... and Dan and Bob ran up there too and did sit-ups. Man. It was awesome. I haven't laughed so hard in such a while. Oh, we did do Jam, and I went up with everyone and did it too... although it is nowhere near as much fun if you can't make a sporran go flying.I did manage to record the fight song twice from in the middle of the band, and King Arthur, and Moo Juice, and some of the cheers. Hopefully they'll be mp3ed at some point, and you too can hear "GO, GO, MAIM EM MAIM EM, RIP OFF THEIR LEGS!" on your computer.
Oh, and the best is... after band, I got together a small group (Bob Rost on alto sax,
mygrane and Aaron Tarnow on tenor sax, cdinwood on mellophone, and Jeremy Olisar (random Kiltie freshman) on clarinet... and recorded several of the NES themes. Got Burning Heat, Kraid's theme (Metroid), Vegetable Valley (Kirby's Adventure), Kid Icarus, Double Dragon, Contra Base, and Excitebike. It was fabulously wonderful, and I'm totally hoping to be able to get Eli to help me turn them into mp3s at some point. Wow. After that, I went into the band room, looked at the uniform charts, and it turns out Jeremy has my kilt from last year (577). Even funnier, nickjong apparently wore my jacket from last year (519). Ha! That's pretty good, even though Nick and I already knew we wear almost the exact same size of clothes. :)Anyway, so after all that, I went to the UC... found Bayani at gaming club, and we went to the cluster for a little while, and then
sorakirei called, so we met her and nerdboyhimself down at the UC turnaround, and also the jweill/jweisz/piatek/adubois car. Then we all went off to Century 3 mall. I got to play the NES band music in the car... I think it amused people. :)Okay, so like, the machine is SO GHETTO it's not even funny. The marquee has a 7th mix one over a 3rd mix one, like the owner didn't even know how to take off the 3rd mix one or something. And the sound is SO QUIET... you can't hear it when you're more than a foot or two further away than the pads are. I could barely hear it when I was ON the pads... still. There was this guy there, I'd never seen before, apparently "dancing mewtwo" on the DDRFreak boards. He came up to me like "Hey, everyone says you're good. I wanna play against you next. I'm like really good at Perfect Attack and all." I was like "uhh... sure, whatever..." At the time,
gootmu was on the machine, so after he was done, I went up with the other guy. HAHAHAHA. I beat his ass into the ground. The machine's not even remotely unlocked, so I couldn't play all of my favorites (Spin the Disc, Burning Heat, I Feel, etc)... so I picked Ever Snow, and AM-3P, and he picked something in the middle, forget what but it was an 8-foot maniac, and I aced all of them (minus a few misses purely from not being able to hear the machine). (For the rest of the day, this kid kept whining "Oh, I don't want to play against you any more, you're too good, I can't pass all of those Heavy songs...") I don't really entirely remember all of the songs I played, but I pulled off some cool stuff, especially beating the heck out of Rob Vallecorsa on PA on all the maniac songs we played together (I think I even beat him on Twilight Zone, despite the fact that I'm not sure I've ever actually PASSED it before)... it was funny, I even FC'ed Absolute in front of everyone, and Mike was like, "Wow, you get a LOT more perfects than you ever did before..." I think it must be the Seattle push.Okay, so bragging aside (hehe), we got a whole lot of people out there... our cars of 8, and Marybeth and Marc, and the mewtwo kid, and Juan and Rob and some other guy from BVM, and Adam who dresses as Rage, and
sighterfoxfh, and... dunno. There were some annoying spectators, like this one retarded kid in a wheelchair who kept yelling "HEEEEEY MACARENA" every time he went by, which was often. But overall, it was fun... there were a lot of people so we didn't all play that often. Mike is way out of practice. He's gone totally academic though, and it sounds like he's doing really well with stuff (same for Justin). So I think that's better for him than necessarily being the best DDR player in Pittsburgh. Plus, he's still just as super-nice and cool as ever.Yeah, so basically, around 7:30pm or so, some of us gave up on DDR and went upstairs for food... since we have Chick-Fil-A in PA and we don't in WA. So I got to sit and eat and hang out with Mike, Justin, Jason, and Andrew. It rocked. We sat around mostly talking about video games, and OGS, and Japan a little, and Justin's monitor delivery woes, and such. I had a really awesome time hanging out with them... such a shame that I really didn't get to know any of them until a few months before I moved away. Great group. And Justin still has like, the nicest smile of anyone I've ever met at CMU, I think.
Anyway, since I had to get back to Oakland by 9, we went back to the DDR machine, I met up with people, and then we all headed home. I got to the CMU garage at 9, which means I got to Mike's house at 9:15. I decided against a shower (wasn't all that sweaty anyway, since I only played maybe 4 games AND it'd been like 2 hours since I played). Changed clothes slightly, and then we headed out to get Carl and go up to the Waterfront, since Mike had made reservations for birthday dinner at Mitchell's at 10pm.
It was nice..
lorimelton and ralphmelton were there, and of course mrpeck since it was his birthday, and me and Eli, and Carl, and Brett Diamond and Katherine Crawford (who I know from Kiltie Band). We had a lot of fun eating and talking and taking pictures and stuff... I think everyone had a good time, and the food was good, and we had to fight Mike for his check to buy him dinner afterwards, but it all got taken care of. He'd asked for no birthday presents, but Eli and I decided to give him the best present of all anyway: houseguests. :)So, afterwards, we all headed back home, and Eli and I stayed up trying to take pictures of Nicki and Sinbad (Mike's dog and cat) for a while, and then slept. Yay Saturday.
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dancing mewtwo?
He then asked us what we played, and I told him what we had at home and that we were getting a PS2 and the new DDR soon, and how I'd played it at a friends house and they'd already unlocked all the songs. (This is not surprising - I think everyone living at the house plays DDR, and then friends all come over to play as well.) He wanted me to get a copy of that memory card for him, which was odd because I don't know him at all.
He then asked why we were there, and I mentioned that you were in town, and he of course asked how good you were ;) so I was honest and said you were passing catas now and had style as well. Sad to say, he didn't have any at all, but at least he didn't fail the songs he was doing. Just a weird guy.
Aside from the weird guy, it was nice to see you again. I'll do my best to not be sick next time.
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