Be-Mania IIDX : The Party

Tonight I hosted a big badass Beatmania IIDX party.

Lots of people (lessee, Okaeshi, Laura, Farren, Joe, Allan, Robby, Cory, Mwinzi, Nykkel, Metroid, Kiefer, Derick, Max, Shiguma, Sniggy... wonder if I'm forgetting anyone. Only about half the people actually emailed me or told me in advance that they'd be here... many just showed up randomly, but that's fine, everyone was pretty cool). Lots of Bemani. There was IIDX the entire time in the living room; for a while we had it going on in the dining room as well. When Met showed up with his insane $500 IIDX arcade controller, the living room sort of became the serious IIDX room, and after a while we switched to KeyboardMania in the dining room. Then after a while of that the dining room became PPP... and then later Super Smash Bros, which is entirely not Bemani but I don't think anyone cared at that point. We got pizza from Pagliacci or something or other in the U-district, and Max and Farren went to get it and came back with a ton of bubble tea, which was very interesting - I had never had it before! The pizza was really really good, too!

I didn't play much IIDX, but I think I did pretty well in most of the doubles sets I played with people, even if I did pretty badly on my own on Matt's bigass controller. It was funny the sheer number of people who played V, Sync, and the hard songs I don't know the names of in 6th Style, over and over and over again.

It was very interesting to meet some of the people I never had before (wow, we had like a third of Team Seattle here!) and to talk to some people, and to generally watch people play a lot of IIDX and have a generally good time, and to play and do some Para Para, and so on. Overall I'd say it went really well, and I'd be happy to host another one sometime; people were in general really good to the house and didn't destroy anything. The kitchen was a little messy, but it was mostly cups and wrappers and stuff. The worst is that I'll have to rewire most of my entertainment center tomorrow since I rewired it to take out the SNES and the VCR.

The best is that despite us having tons of stuff here, the only thing that got left was Shiguma's "Team X" card. Oh, I guess I forgot to mention how people made card lines for the two Bemani stations. That was HILARIOUS. "Oh my god, there's a card line in my OWN HOUSE!" Still, we had three JPS2's, 6 IIDX controllers not counting Matt's super-arcade IIDX controller, two KBM controllers, KBM 2nd mix, IIDX 3rd - 6th (and 2 copies of 4th and 5th), a gamecube and SSBM and controllers for that, and... basically, and add this to my usual stash of games and consoles and it was quite impressive.

baritone bugles and other stuff

Today I went down to Federal Way with alegria_a to attempt to join a drum and bugle corps. The funny thing is I got the impression it'd be more like the marching band stuff I am used to... but, it's pretty different. For those of you who know about drum corps, it'll seem normal, but to me the idea of working on 3 pieces for 6 months and then having like 6 performances over a month or two seems... weird. Shrug.

At any rate, when we showed up, I with my baritone and Joy with her mallets, we were basically put into different rooms (duh, one perc and one horns). Then I was told "Oh, you play baritone? Excellent, here's a baritone bugle." "A what?" "A baritone bugle... we don't play baritone horns like yours." "Oh... I see. Uhh... it has two valves. Where's the third?" "Huh, I guess we don't have any with three valves. Well, you just don't play low D's or A flats." "I... see."

Then I went and got some music for the stuff we're playing. It's ALL IN TREBLE CLEF!!! Aiiieee! So I'm playing a G instrument in treble clef when I am entirely used to a B-flat instrument in bass clef. Oh man.

We had a big group meeting where they told us a bunch about what was going on with the band, mostly things like "we practice a lot, and tour, and by the way, dues are going to work out to $200 per person... plus tour fees... see... we have to buy a lot of stuff, including instruments and practice space and..." Whee. I was sort of at that point thinking "ack, that's a lot of money to sit around playing a dumb treble clef bugle thingy".

But then we split back up into our separate rooms and started playing. We're doing all spanish march type stuff (Aztec Heat, Bolero, and El Toro Caliente for those of you who've probably played them before). So I know a lot of the patterns already from doing all of those spanish marches in Kiltie Band. So even though I don't know treble clef, I was able to sight-read almost all of Aztec Heat... and the 3rd Baritone part for Bolero is almost all middle C; the issue is being able to play lots of 16th-note triplets in a row. Ouch. The third piece is sort of a nightmare but hopefully I can learn some of it by next time. Anyway... in the long run I really enjoyed playing music, even if I am still a little apprehensive about it. The band is a mix of young people and old people, which is a little weird, but.. there's another guy in the baritone section who's also a euphonium/trombone player, and also a Perl hacker! and he's from Georgia Tech, and when I said "blah blah went to Carnegie Mellon" he said "oh, you marched with the Kilties?" and I was like "YEAH! WOW! SOMEONE KNOWS OF US!" which was awesome. So he was pretty cool even though he left early, and he gave me his business card and said to get in touch about carpooling down and stuff.

Shrug. Anyway, so we had rehearsal. I took home one of the freaky 2-valved baritone bugles, so I can learn how to play it a little better. I could use a new mouthpiece... should find a music store in Seattle. Whee. So Joy drove me home...

...and I pretty much wasted the evening playing video games. Cleared a whole bunch of songs in Frequency (YAY SCIENCE GENIUS GIRL! GO FREEZEPOP!). Actually, the problem with Frequency is that once I cleared Science Genius Girl, I just played it over and over again and sort of gave up on the other songs. Well, no. I did clear up to Stage 3. But. Science Genius Girl! Whee!

Also played more IIDX... passed Starmine Light-7, which is my first 5-star! Also passed "Love Will" after whining at Farren enough about it for him to give me advice so I could ignore it and go just brute-force through it in Training Mode. I'm never playing that damn song again. On the other hand... so now I have passed all of the songs up through 3-stars on Light 7 on 4th style, and several 4-stars, and one 5-star! I think it goes a lot better when I'm more awake than if I play at 1am, you know? :)

Scanned in my Otakon pictures at long last, too. An update to the DDR Cosplay page will come after I finish actually separating stuff out (I basically just scanned everything into big PSD files, burned 'em off Eli's computer and took them upstairs to work on. The scanner's on his computer now because mine hates it).

Whee.