day two in austin :)

Okay, so we woke up this morning and finally showered and changed. On a whim I decided to wear a tanktop and khaki shorts. (I never wear tanktops.) Brad and I played some IIDX before realizing, HOLY SHIT IT'S LATE, so we were a little late meeting up with the gang at Hula Hut or whatever it's called. When you have a group of 14 or so it's really hard to get a table. We hung out on the pier for a while, drinking iced tea and watching ducks and fish and hanging out. I got a sunburn! Go me. Lunch was okay but VERY slow. By the time we got our food I'd eaten a billion chips and wasn't very hungry, but I ate my BBQ Chicken tacos anyway. Allwein got this impressive drink that was literally the size of his head. Our side of the table (me, Eli, Brad, Oren, Carl) decided to leave at like 2:30 (LONGEST LUNCH EVER) while the rest waited for their (!?!?) dessert. We came back to Brad's place, where Brad and I played some MORE IIDX, and then we went to Adam and Rehana's place to rejoin the rest of the gang.

Tmaher showed up a little bit after that, and people played a bunch of monkey ball and SSBM, but I was over on the table... Carl and I played some Lost Cities and then I played Puerto Rico with Adam, Roman, Kevin, and Brad. I had 47 VP's as second to Adam's 50 first, but everyone said my strategy (hospice - university - residence) must only work because I play against poor PR players. Now I'm kinda interested to go back and play with more people and analyze this. (I ended up actually going for the major shipping strategy this game anyway because I was low on cash). Then Adam and Carl and I played a game of Tigris which Adam absolutely stomped us at, but it was fun to play again after so long. Between those two games I called bk3c and hopefully I'll see him tomorrow or Sunday.

So by the time we were done with all this it was like 7:30 and we were supposed to be at sainogo's place for ANIME NIGHT EXTREME at 8. We stopped at a McDonald's and gas station on the way because the car was empty and so was my stomach. When we got to Alan's, James (ponta_kun) and proz were already there, and atomx arrived a little while later. So we fired up the DDR 5th mix and set up IIDX on the TV and hung out :) I should stop to explain that Alan's house is full of REALLY COOL STUFF. Like he has a ton of pinball machines and arcade machines in his living room and a ton of computers and whatnot. So cool :) And of course he has a DDR machine, too, in good condition :) Brad (atomx that is, I'll just say "Brad2") and I played a first set together, and I sucked at it, and pretty much sucked at DDR for the rest of the evening, but I blame 5th mix. I'm HORRIBLE at sight-reading on 1x now, unfortunately :( Still it was really fun to be playing DDR in someone's living room for free, and watching everyone else play too. James and Brad2 are really good at DDR! IIDX was cool too, mostly I watched James play but he gave me the controller a few times and I mostly sucked but I finally passed Still My Words 7K (!!!!) and I got 180k on LOT 7K cold, and whatnot. Yaaaaaaay IIDX. And trash-talking about the AA contest :O

I guess after an hour or two of Bemani we were bemani-ed out so we adjourned to the couch and we watched "This is Otakudom", which Brad2 had brought over. It was a mostly-Fushigi-Yuugi AMV type thing about going to Otakon 2001, which was pretty freaking funny, I highly recommend watching it if you can get your hands on a copy. They basically took FY scenes and turned it into a group of people going to OT2K1 with crazy cuts and dubbing. After that we watched a few episodes of DNA^2, which of course I watched many years ago with dvarin, but it was kinda amusing to see it again. I remember enough of it to get the context and anticipate the groan-ish scenes but not enough to ruin it. Plus, and here is the key thing - watching anime in a group is ALWAYS fun. I really think that's why I don't watch any anime anymore - if I had a group like these guys, I would totally always watch stuff!

I guess we all left around 1am, Brad and I fetched Eli from Zach's house, and now we are back. Hi! It was a really good evening. I guess the quote of mine from the evening that I want to remember is like, at one point I had my hair out of my ponytail so James took his hair out of his ponytail and he's like "HA, you think you're so cool" and I'm like "Bring it on, bitch, mine's longer!" Hahaha. Dunno why but that'll probly stick out in my head as the best moment of the evening. Well, maybe not. Proz: do you remember what you said right before I left? I really shoulda replied "me too."

Anyway, I gotta sleep. Night everyone.

Austin day 3...?

Well, we have some downtime while trying to get everyone together so I figured maybe I'd write another short trip journal update. We got up this morning and after some confusion ended up going to some dive place with Ben and Kat and Jason and Julie. It was Star-something. The food was really good and it was good to see all of those people again. While I don't know Kat very well, she seems like a really fun person and is really easy to talk to. And they're going to the Mariners-Rangers game tonight up in Arlington, luckies! And of course me and Ben go back like 12-13 years so it's always good to see him. Jason and Julie are doing exceptionally well but the reasons for this are their business so if you read their journals you'll know :) It was good to see them and they gave us a ride back up here, too. We met up with Roman, Oren, Tom, and Brad, and now we're all chilling here at Brad's. We played some IIDX (Roman tried it out), then Brad let me try to play Unison, which is DUMB, and then Brad and I played Bishi Bashi Special :) It's such a silly game but nowhere near as much fun as with the arcade machine. Oren's playing GT3 now and I think we're going to head out soon to meet up with people.

The big irony of course is that I kept saying "If I go to Austin for the 4th of July it's going to rain, you know..." and people laughed at me and sure enough it was raining earlier this morning. Hopefully it'll clear up so we can do fireworks somewhere tonight, though.