the housewarming party
Oct. 21st, 2002 01:15 amThe day, in a nutshell: Woke up, cleaned, had a party, saw lots of people (hi people!) and didn't eat any real food until 11pm.
Ok, let's see. Drew and Matt showed up first, with Megan and Josh and Justin and Colleen shortly after. Eli put together an IKEA chair for me as party entertainment for a while. I think we got most of our critical mass by 3pm or so. Who showed up? Let's see... Some of my CMU Microsoft friends that I hadn't seen yet, like Kevin Babbitt and Brian Grunkemeyer, showed up! And Jonathan Hardwick, although he couldn't stay very long.![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
aquatwo showed up with his totally adorable daughter! She's a real cutie. (Not that he isn't adorable too, but that's another story). And ezzie00 and alegria_a showed up and brought meerkat299 who I hadn't seen yet in Seattle! shimmeringjemmy was there at some point, but I didn't really get to talk to her. Same for katybeth, and Seth, and their friend I forgot the name of (Ruth?). Some of my DDR friends, like Nykkel and Joe, showed up, so that was cool, too. Oh, and soiwas showed up! Yay, we had a lot of fun juggling together. :) seanmcguire was there for a little while at one point, too.
Basically, for me, it was an hour of people sitting in a circle, chatting, which was nice, and then at some point I said "ok, too many people in the living room, let's do some other stuff". So Josh got some people into a game of Carcassonne, and since Nykkel had brought Cosmic Encounter, I said "Let's play Cosmic!" So we got Kevin to play since he'd played with us in the lounge years ago, and Matt because he hadn't played with us in the lounge, and Paul because... well, Paul was standing there. :) whee! So I got to play Cosmic! It was very weird, since Nyk runs it following the actual rules for timing, rather than the chaos we played with in the lounge. So it'd be like "ok, offense invites allies, defense invites allies, then we go around the table IN ORDER and decide whether and who to ally with". Quite, quite different. Also, we only played with the basic set - no extra alien powers, no moons, no kickers, reinforcements, etc. Eh, it was still a LOT of fun. I love Cosmic. We only played one alien power, so I was Reincarnator. Nykkel was Zombie, Kevin was Amoeba, Paul was Mirror, and Matt was Cavalry. I spent most of the game as Insect, actually. Kevin won, quite oozingly.
After that there was videogame silliness for me. Super Puzzle Fighter silliness, where I did my tricks where I play on the DDR pad and still beat people. But damn, there were like, 4-minute matches at points, which are about as exhausting as Maniac songs in DDR. At least, they made my legs hurt a lot. We did DDR pad Dan-on-Dan battles. :) Then there was some Beatmania-ing, which involved hooking up both my IIDX controller and Nykkel's, and playing on 6th Style which he brought. Except that I totally totally suck, and Joe is okay but not that much better, and so we sort of watched Nykkel beat a lot of hard cool songs, and then watched some of the Tatsujin Videos, which are scary as heck. Then we hooked up Joe's Gamecube after that and played some Super Smash Bros. Melee, mostly with experts like Joy and Ezzie. I think my decision on this game is that I'm willing to play it, but I fully acknowledge that I suck, my play style is COMPLETELY random, and I'm just in it for the amusement, not to win in the slightest.
A bit later I ended up in a game of Tigris and Euphrates with Drew, Matt, and Joe. It was ok, but it took FOREVER and I got sort of blasted out of what I was doing at the beginning by Drew which REALLY pissed me off and made me pretty ineffective for most of the game. Yuck. Twas still good to play, I suppose. In breaks I hung out juggling withsoiwas which was really, really fun, and watched aquatwo play Arc the Lad, which was really, really weird. Eventually it degenerated into talking about old videogames, which I stuck my foot in my mouth many many times during. Infact, the only real downside of the day was how many idiotic things I said... I'm still kind of kicking myself for being such a dork. Eventually people left and we kicked people out and all that sort of good stuff. Then my dad called, and Eli did a lot of cleaning because he is so wonderful and then we ate tortellini for dinner.
All in all, it was pretty successful, considering how worried I was about the mix of people, and I would love to invite people over for more gaming and maybe actual dinners and things. The house feels quite warmed, too :)
Ok, let's see. Drew and Matt showed up first, with Megan and Josh and Justin and Colleen shortly after. Eli put together an IKEA chair for me as party entertainment for a while. I think we got most of our critical mass by 3pm or so. Who showed up? Let's see... Some of my CMU Microsoft friends that I hadn't seen yet, like Kevin Babbitt and Brian Grunkemeyer, showed up! And Jonathan Hardwick, although he couldn't stay very long.
aquatwo showed up with his totally adorable daughter! She's a real cutie. (Not that he isn't adorable too, but that's another story). And ezzie00 and alegria_a showed up and brought meerkat299 who I hadn't seen yet in Seattle! shimmeringjemmy was there at some point, but I didn't really get to talk to her. Same for katybeth, and Seth, and their friend I forgot the name of (Ruth?). Some of my DDR friends, like Nykkel and Joe, showed up, so that was cool, too. Oh, and soiwas showed up! Yay, we had a lot of fun juggling together. :) seanmcguire was there for a little while at one point, too.Basically, for me, it was an hour of people sitting in a circle, chatting, which was nice, and then at some point I said "ok, too many people in the living room, let's do some other stuff". So Josh got some people into a game of Carcassonne, and since Nykkel had brought Cosmic Encounter, I said "Let's play Cosmic!" So we got Kevin to play since he'd played with us in the lounge years ago, and Matt because he hadn't played with us in the lounge, and Paul because... well, Paul was standing there. :) whee! So I got to play Cosmic! It was very weird, since Nyk runs it following the actual rules for timing, rather than the chaos we played with in the lounge. So it'd be like "ok, offense invites allies, defense invites allies, then we go around the table IN ORDER and decide whether and who to ally with". Quite, quite different. Also, we only played with the basic set - no extra alien powers, no moons, no kickers, reinforcements, etc. Eh, it was still a LOT of fun. I love Cosmic. We only played one alien power, so I was Reincarnator. Nykkel was Zombie, Kevin was Amoeba, Paul was Mirror, and Matt was Cavalry. I spent most of the game as Insect, actually. Kevin won, quite oozingly.
After that there was videogame silliness for me. Super Puzzle Fighter silliness, where I did my tricks where I play on the DDR pad and still beat people. But damn, there were like, 4-minute matches at points, which are about as exhausting as Maniac songs in DDR. At least, they made my legs hurt a lot. We did DDR pad Dan-on-Dan battles. :) Then there was some Beatmania-ing, which involved hooking up both my IIDX controller and Nykkel's, and playing on 6th Style which he brought. Except that I totally totally suck, and Joe is okay but not that much better, and so we sort of watched Nykkel beat a lot of hard cool songs, and then watched some of the Tatsujin Videos, which are scary as heck. Then we hooked up Joe's Gamecube after that and played some Super Smash Bros. Melee, mostly with experts like Joy and Ezzie. I think my decision on this game is that I'm willing to play it, but I fully acknowledge that I suck, my play style is COMPLETELY random, and I'm just in it for the amusement, not to win in the slightest.
A bit later I ended up in a game of Tigris and Euphrates with Drew, Matt, and Joe. It was ok, but it took FOREVER and I got sort of blasted out of what I was doing at the beginning by Drew which REALLY pissed me off and made me pretty ineffective for most of the game. Yuck. Twas still good to play, I suppose. In breaks I hung out juggling with
soiwas which was really, really fun, and watched aquatwo play Arc the Lad, which was really, really weird. Eventually it degenerated into talking about old videogames, which I stuck my foot in my mouth many many times during. Infact, the only real downside of the day was how many idiotic things I said... I'm still kind of kicking myself for being such a dork. Eventually people left and we kicked people out and all that sort of good stuff. Then my dad called, and Eli did a lot of cleaning because he is so wonderful and then we ate tortellini for dinner.All in all, it was pretty successful, considering how worried I was about the mix of people, and I would love to invite people over for more gaming and maybe actual dinners and things. The house feels quite warmed, too :)
