friday last minute ramblings

Bleah. I overslept this morning and missed so many buses that I made Eli drive me to work rather than deal with the bus system.
It was a relatively slow day anyway, not much going on. We got free copies of the new Mason/HTML book because hey, we're Amazon, and O'Reilly likes us. It's a good book, but I would like to share my favorite quote from it so far:

"[The <%doc> block] is intended for use by component authors for documentation purposes. Its contents are completely ignored."

So I spent the afternoon reading and hacking Mason and Perl. I solved a Mason problem that Shawn had apparently been trying to figure out for a while and wrote a new component. Go me!

Eli is meeting me in a few minutes, and we're going to get dinner somewhere (although I'm not hungry), and then we're going to go see Dreams Come True in concert down at the Moore Theater. Wow. I'm wearing one of my brilliant green shirts (they're another j-music group) because I don't have any DCT shirts and I don't want to be "that guy" anyway. I'm really not sure what to expect from this concert.

Bleah, and tomorrow I might go play GURPS with some people down in Covington. Or I might just stay at home and clean. It's unclear. I am being a big waffler because I am too stressed over cleaning. I also don't know if I want to drive 50 mins each way for an RPG session, even though I haven't found any other RPG groups near me yet. And I don't even know if the group will be a good one... the guys I know in it are nice, but the GM is a newbie, and that's a little worrisome. At least they're near IKEA and the Philly's Best, so I can work that into the trip, if I go.

I really, really, really need sleep.

Going to go meet Eli now.

OH MY GOD WHAT A GREAT CONCERT

Ok, so Eli met me at Union Station; we went to Szechuan Garden or whatever it's called for dinner; got strawberry chicken, and dumplings. Took the busway and walked a few blocks to the Moore Theater. We were there like at 7pm. We went in and stood around for half an hour or so, then went in and waited around in our seats for half an hour or so. There were like ninety billion Japanese people there, and a handful of gaijin. It was almost like being back in Japan. :) I kinda wanted to talk to people but settled for innocently listening in instead. The only person to come up to me and comment on my buriguri shirt was another gaijin girl with blonde pigtails who was like "Wow, I love the Brilliant Green," and I said "Yeah, me too," and then she ran off. The funny thing about Seattle is that all the Japanese people seem to know each other. Our seats were ALL the way in the back of the left part of the first floor (row ZZ). It was ok, the theater's not that big so it was still not that far back really.

The opening act was some random local singer with a guitar. He wasn't bad, but goddamn it was a poor choice for a DCT opener. Most of the Japanese people didn't stop talking at all during his songs, and to be honest, I didn't really either... I think it was a really bad idea to have him open. I feel bad for him because nobody really cared about his singing, and bad for all of us since we had an hour wasted. Oh well.

Eventually at 9pm DCT took the stage. So, until today I had no idea that Taka wasn't touring with them anymore... oops. Miwa and Masa were there, and they had these two brothers as the guitar and keyboards, and another guy as drummer. Masa was so cute! He was wearing a cowboy hat, red pants, white shirt... almost very Naoki-ish. :) And Miwa was of course the epitome of cute, in a sparkly shirt and red pants and stuff. They came on and played Snow Dance as their first song and I was just, like, blown away. It was like, "Oh my god, I am at a Dreams Come True concert. Up there on stage is Yoshida Miwa, the best female vocalist to ever come out of Japan. Oh my god, I'm at a Japanese concert. Oh my god."

Oh my god. Well, so they played almost exclusively stuff off the new album, so I'm really glad I bought it. Let's see, I think they played from it, Flowers, 24-7, Pride nante shiranai, Snow Dance, suki dake ja dame nanda, itsu no ma ni, and crystal vine. Lots of stuff. One of the "old" songs they played was "Asa ga mata kuru", which is like one of my favorite songs ever of theirs, and I swear to god I got up and was dancing and waving arms and singing along with everyone else. It was a wonderful experience, really amazing. I always wanted to be at a Japanese concert and do that. I sang along for Flowers and Love Love Love and a bunch of other songs, too. It was so fabulous. Oh, yeah. I actually started crying when they played Love Love Love. It's such an amazingly beautiful song, and hearing Miwa actually sing it just made chills go down my back. They sang a few of the english songs from Sing or Die, which was really weird since I hadn't actually heard the english versions before :)

It was so intense. It was such a great show. It was funny because Miwa spoke about 2/3 Japanese and maybe 1/3 english in talking to the audience, and she kept calling us her "Seattle Babies". The funny thing is that I realized I wasn't even hearing a difference between the Japanese and the english... I just understood what they were saying. It was awesome. Masa doesn't speak much English and he kept asking how everyone in the nikai and sankai were doing and saying things like "Thank you I love you guys!" and stuff. Oh, it was so awesome. Lots of people brought flowers and balloons for Miwa, and people kept yelling "MIWA-SAN!" really loud, and she kept singing little things to the audience. She signed autographs for a bit for people in the front at the end. Lucky people!

Wow, wow, wow. That's all I can say. Wow. It's been so long since I've gone to a concert where I cared so much about the band, and I have never ever been to a Japanese band concert before, so this was just amazing. All of the waiting and stuff was well worth it. Dreams Come True are just awesome. As I've been saying for ages :)

After the concert we missed the 10:25 bus so we walked a block or two down to 3rd and Pike and waited for the next one. We got on the bus and sat down and it was almost like being in Pittsburgh, because I ran into people I knew! Kinda. Dylan, who plays PPP and DDR at Illusionz, was on the bus with three of his friends. So I talked to them for a while about the show and about DCT and stuff. It was really funny to run into them and talk to them and stuff. It sounds kinda scary though - Dylan says that most of his DDR team are going to enter Freestyle at Narrows Beta next weekend, so damn, I better either duck out or come up with a real routine. But, the real kicker was - the four of them came down for the concert without tickets and ENDED UP IN CENTER ROW K ON THE FIRST FLOOR. Man. I bought my tickets a month and a half ago and was all the freaking way in the back! Luckies, again. Heh.

Wow. What a great night. Now I should go unpack some more books, and umm, think about whether to GURPS, I guess. :)