It's gonna snow!

Wish I had a good way to evaluate my ankle. Monday I could barely put weight on it; today I was able to run across the street to catch a bus without any pain, and it doesn't hurt at all now. Whee.

Last night I was going to go lift weights after work, but when I realized I couldn't really stand on my left leg at all -- after stopping at Best Buy, which is near the gym -- I came home and called Carl and made him come over so we could finish watching Lunch Queen. It had both a great and disappointing ending all at once. Something weird is that I've now watched six full doramas with Misaki Ito in them... and only in ONE does she actually end up paired with a guy who's actually her age or older (You're Under Arrest, where she gets paired with an older cop). It's probably because she's exactly the same age as me -- she's 19 days younger -- that I actually notice the age differences. Anyway, this is my way of skirting around actually saying anything about the plot since commenting on the episode at all would invoke spoilers. Also, Tsurumai station is in Nagoya... I wonder if they were supposed to actually show a station name in the background in that one scene.

Tonight I went to dinner with Zach at Chinook's to chat about house stuff. Now that he's back from India, the dogs are back too. And they smell good! And they're wearing bandanas! It's pretty amazing how nice the dogs smell and how soft their fur feels after they've been properly bathed and groomed. I mean, I actually let Watson get near me, and usually I kick him away like "Eww, smelly dumbbutt puppy, go away!"

It's really cold out -- and supposed to snow tonight. Wowie. I went to the supermarket around 11pm, and my car was iced over and I had to wait for it to heat up to get the ice off the windows. Well, I brought my work laptop home with me, so if Seattle freezes over tomorrow, as long as we have power and internet here, I should be fine. Though I was looking forward to dragging Chris and George with me to volleyball, and the gym tends to close early if the weather really sucks. Oh well, we'll see.

At Safeway while I was looking for stuff, and heading towards the register, I heard over the loudspeaker, where you'd usually hear things like "inventory needed on Aisle 6" or "price check at register 2" or whatever -- "Angie, can I go home now?" echoing through the store. Which seemed funny, until I got up to the register -- the only open register -- and the guy's like "hi, how are you doing?" or whatever and I realized he was the "Can I go home now?" voice, so I said "better than you, it sounds like," and he was saying how he'd been there for like 8 hours with no lunch break AND there was no other cashier scheduled to take over for him for another hour -- and this is the 24-hour Safeway in Ballard. I felt kind of bad. He said, "If it starts snowing, I'm just going to quit my job and go home." I wonder if he was kidding.

I'm watching/listening to the 57th Kouhaku (the 2007 New Year's Eve live music festival) in the background while doing other stuff. I blame kawaru. It's pretty good, nobody had told me it was hosted by Nakama Yukie and Nakai Masahiro, they're awesome. It's a nice mix of music, honestly, lots of great stuff, anything from pop to rap to rock to oldies to enka. If I ever buy an enka album I'll have to kill myself, but over the last few years I've had to admit I don't hate it all. (I almost like Hikawa Kiyoshi.) Also, it should probably scare me how many of the people I'm familiar with in the program, considering how few current American TV people I recognize these days. Then again, I don't have to study English, goddamnit.

A Eulogy for Illusionz

(I very specifically tried to write this entry without names because I'll feel bad for forgetting people, but most of you know who you are in the things I've mentioned.)

This morning Magic Mike sent out an email of "Illusionz is closed". Not "closing", but "closed". The announcement's also up on their website.

Illusionz is/was this huge arcade out in Issaquah, about a 30-40 minute drive from me. When I arrived in Seattle, it had *FIVE* DDR machines, a Guitar Freaks/Drummania/KeyboardMania setup, a Dance Maniax, a Samba de Amigo, a Para Para Paradise, and two Pop'n'Music machines. It was THE place in Seattle to go for Japanese music videogame goodness.

It's funny. The last time I was there was literally exactly one year ago today. I remember making the staff turn on PNM5 for me, and then having people come in to bowl and I couldn't hear the machine for the rest of the time there.

Despite that I haven't really played DDR much in the last three years, Bemani and Illusionz were a huge part of my first year and a half in Seattle. Illusionz was part of what made me decide to want to move to Seattle -- even my first time visiting the city, I got a friend to drive me out there, and I was so happy to play DDRMAX (this was in early 2002 when the only DDR machine in Pittsburgh was a 4th mix an hour out of the city). My third day ever even living in Seattle, I went out to Illusionz to play DDR -- and first encountered those "crazy good Team Seattle people with their weird card lines". Having gone from being one of the better players in Pittsburgh to the absolute worst player in Seattle was pretty striking, let me tell you :)

I entered the DDR Magic 4 tournament three weeks later... the day after going hiking on Mt. Rainier. So, I sucked. A lot. But I met a few people that day, and then three weeks after that I went to Free Bemani Night, and sometime after that I started actually talking to people on the DDR Global BBS, started going to IZ regularly on Wednesday nights to hang out with people. I remember the week that DDR Extreme came out, I literally spent about 30 hours at Illusionz, between new year's events there and just going to hang out. Eventually I stopped being scared of everyone, probably around when I started hosting those IIDX parties at my house, and when I started really branching into getting competent at all the other Bemani games. And then we had those "glory days" at IZ, when every Saturday night we'd have a gigantic crowd of us around, we'd play 5-person Session on GF/DM/KBM, we'd have huge crowds of us doing Para Para around the machine, we'd go out to eat dinner afterwards, and I'd always end up giving people rides back to UW on my way home. Magic Mike himself used to read our BBS and post about improvements at the arcade, and he knew most of the Bemani regulars by name. The weekend of Illusionz DDR Magic 5, I had like six people staying over at my house, we had a huge party, I spent like 20 hours of the weekend helping out at the tournament, it was a blast.

Not sure what happened exactly. Eventually the machines stopped being well-maintained, and there was a lot of group drama going on, and so the huge group stopped hanging out. People went to Narrows instead a lot more since the machines were better, and I personally started playing DDR more at Sunset Bowl and Kenmore and closer places than IZ, for exercise -- it wasn't worth driving 30-45 minutes to hang out at Illusionz by myself. When they first had the In The Groove location test there it sort of revived the group thing a bit -- I remember it was a lot of fun playtesting it at first (some of you will remember my absolute glee at the mines exploding the first time I played "Hip Hop Blam", as I called it), but around then I also started having my knee problems, and so then the issue became that it wasn't worth driving 30-45 minutes to go watch other people play ITG on a regular basis. When I got a Desktop Arcade Pop'n'Music controller near the end of 2004, that pretty much signalled the end of me ever having any reason to go back to IZ again.

I do sort of miss that feeling of having a place where I could go to and play videogames and always have people to hang out with. Having a central hangout for a big group of people that isn't a personal residence is really important to me -- all through my time at CMU we always had various places that served that purpose, whether it was the office of a student organization, or the CS lounge, or dorm lounges, and so on. So IZ had become that for me for my first year or two in Seattle... the place where, if I had no plans in particular, I figured I could go out there and I'd run into someone I knew and be able to have fun. The fact that I was part of one of the best DDR/Bemani groups in the country back when it wasn't completely mainstream was just a side effect.

Funny, IZ is actually somewhat partially responsible, even indirectly, for my current baseball writing hobby and infamy, because without IZ I wouldn't have met the people who introduced me to Puzzle Pirates, which is where I met the friend who went with me to my first USSM meetup over two years ago, where I had a conversation that led me to decide to start writing Marinerds. And one of those IZ friends even went with me to my first baseball game in Japan, which is where I became a Nippon Ham Fighters fan. Go figure.

Magic Mike asked for people to send in pictures of Illusionz, of which I have a bazillion, though I took most of them off the net 2-3 years ago because I was sick of people photoshopping mean things out of the people in them. I hate the internet sometimes. I'll have to see if I can find some of the shots with no people in them -- I know that at one point when they rearranged the machines in 2003, I went around and just took pictures of the layout. I'll post some here if/when I get around to doing that.

RIP Illusionz. 大事な所を絶対忘れないよ.