Hail, hail, the gang's all here

Tonight I hung out with Carl, Kevin, Roman, and Andrew. We went to Kiku for dinner and ate a lot of random Japanese food. They had a special on toro, (fatty tuna), so we tried it. I thought it was ok but not horribly wonderful - I can quite live without it. They weren't kidding - while we were finishing our desserts we watched the head sushi chef cut up a gigantic pink fish that had to be tuna. Anyway... the food was yummy and it was good to listen to the waitstaff speaking Japanese. The place was so empty that it wasn't hard to hear them. At one point one waitress was like "kinyoubi desu! kinyoubi desu!" which means "It's Friday!" and I was like "anou... kyou wa, suiyoubi desu ne?" to Carl (Which actually meant "Isn't today Wednesday?"). The person was then like "Mokuyoubi desu..." which means "Today is Thursday". Then I realized that it is, infact, Tuesday, otherwise known as kayoubi. I've always had trouble remembering the days of the week except for kinyoubi, so I guess that wasn't so weird. I had plenty of chances to speak Japanese to the staff, but I didn't want to embarrass my friends (read: Carl).

Afterwards we came back here. I demonstrated Para Para Paradise, and everyone decided it was freaky. Then we played Ricochet Robot for a game, and Apples to Apples for waaaaaaaay too long. I made up some new cards on the blanks Carl gave me for Christmas last year. So now we have cards for "Harry Potter", "Sushi", "Dance Dance Revolution", "The Settlers of Catan", "The Post-IPO Implosion", "Corey Kosak", "Scott Robbins", "The CS Undergraduate Lounge", and such.

I guess it wasn't the games that made it fun, it was more hanging out with my old gang. See, these guys have been friends since fall of '96 or so (if you add in Oren and Brad and Li (and Tom)), and I barged in on their social group in the spring of '98 because of Japanese class. Well, Oren and Brad and Li and Kevin left town when they all graduated in spring 2000, and then Kevin came back, but now Andrew is leaving around Thanksgiving time, and Roman is graduating this semester and also most likely leaving. So, although these are people I still get to see semi-regularly and talk to online regularly, it's not an everyday thing like it used to be, which is weird. Soon it will be down to me, Carl, and Kevin, the unholy trinity of procrastination. Blah. Well, we should be catching up with Li in New York in a few weeks when we go up to take the nouryoku shiken, and I'm sure we'll find some way to hang out with Oren and Brad again (heck, maybe this summer the four of us will go back to Japan again! I can only hope...)

Well, so anyway, after everyone left I played PPP for a while. I tried like 20 different song routines. There are some I could do almost instantly and some that were really hard to catch on to. I think I have almost all of the hand motions down for Velfarre 2000, and now I am trying to get the feet right. The thing is, I discovered that if you just hold your arms to block the beams of the PPP controller, you will get "good"s, not "great"s on the arrows. And a lot of the routines sort of involve you keeping the beams blocked while you do hand windmills or waves or whatever. So, I dunno. By 20 November I should have at least 3-4 PPP routines memorized though. But I look really stupid doing them - I'm not really that stylish a club dancer, I'm really more of a ballroom dancer. I kind of see why people would rather be a technical player than a freestyler at DDR - freestyling involves looking cool because of dancing, and technical stuff just means you do so many complicated songs that nobody watches you, they watch the screen and are astounded by your combos.

I guess that's about all I have to say for the evening. I really feel like I'm kind of in my own little world both at work, home, and so on. Blah.

Oh, and Kevin showed me how to play Simcity 3000. Whee!

More interesting than a chain letter

I sort of like this whole counter-meme idea. It's certainly more interesting than that "hi" chain from a few weeks ago.

Interests on LJ are hard to scan through

I really wish there was a good way to alias certain things. For example, I don't want to list "carnegie mellon", "carnegie mellon university", "cmu" to make sure that anyone else listing CMU will find me. Same for things like "d&d", "dungeons&dragons", "dungeons and dragons", or "sci-fi" "scifi" "science fiction", and so on. Of course, it's a matter of whether the Interests section is more for you to convey what you are into so that other people can decide whether your page is worth looking at, or whether it is for you to find other people on LJ with similar interests. Y'know?

Also, I made two new LJ pictures for myself. One is screaming (which I'll use for this entry) and the other is "pensive" which I used for the last entry. (Incidentally these are both from pictures I took with shimmeringjemmy's digital camera back in the summer of '97 when she and blk and Ros and I worked for the Andrew Systems Group in UCC 179... whee) I need to make one out of something with me sticking my tongue out - I feel that I want to use the different pictures to convey moods, rather than just sort of randomly. (Although yesterday I was actually wearing my maroon MIT shirt and had my hair in two braids, so that picture was at least applicable)

1988 (from a thread elsewhere)

Yeah, I was thinking of posting something like "in 1988 I finished sixth grade and turned eleven, neither of which was all that exciting. However, given a moment to think about it, I can still name at least 20 out of the 30ish people in my sixth grade class. But I have a freakish memory, so that doesn't count.", but I decided not to.

Or maybe I did. Ha!

Now that I think about it, 1988 was also the first year I was a regular caller/poster to BBSes, often convincing people that I was in my early 20's because of my quick typing and precocious command of the english language. Sad, isn't it?