Every Day an Adventure

Today was a really good day, I think, but somehow I don't feel energized by it, which is an exceptionally bad sign.

I guess I woke up at 9:45am or so. I-Gene, who had crashed on the couch here last night, woke me up to say he was going down to ACME Bowl for the IIDX tourney. I was too zonked and decided there wasn't really a point in my entering anyway, so I'd roll over for another hour or two of sleep, expecting I'd make it down there around lunchtime.

Well, I woke up at 12:45pm. I think I finally made it to the arcade around 2:30pm. Both the In The Groove tourney and the Beatmania IIDX tourney were both in full gear at that point, surprisingly.

I saw kyleward and Chris Foy! I hadn't seen either of them in forever. Kyle looks great, he's lost a lot of weight since last time I saw him, and it sounds really exciting how him and Chris Danford actually get to work on ITG full-time now. We were reminiscing about the crazy old days when we'd always randomly meet up at Sunset Bowl at bizarre hours to play DDR. And Foy is still crazy, of course. I had fun brainstorming with them and Jerrad about tourney timing for their Las Vegas thing next week, which sounds like it'll go pretty well anyway, though. (good luck to all of you guys who are going! despite that I can't play the arrow-stomping games anymore, I am excited for you all.)

I also saw a lot of people in the IIDX tourney -- metroid23 was running it, and farren_bronaugh, cynic573, crackoon, bobsyouruncle, keevon, thunderbird8, tadzilla, zqfmbg, and some other people I didn't know or am forgetting, had all entered it. I got to see James win, and I-Gene come in second. There was some little kid named Gorrum or something who was pretty frickin' good, too. The funniest round was without a doubt the one where Met had this list of four incredibly easy songs and got people to eliminate them down to two songs -- THEN told them they had to play them on Light-14 (aka doubles mode). That was hilarious. Met deserves lots of style points for that, though I still think it would have been funnier to actually force people into playing Ballad For You.

There was a side room set up with some IIDX and Pop'n and all. I don't remember who the one guy was with the Pop'n setup (Gosha, maybe?) but it was really discombobulating to have the controller down on a table and have the screen be 8 feet up in the air. Almost like touch typing. I played a few songs on his controller though, and his right green key was sticking. If I'd had a screwdriver there I would have been happy to take it apart and fix it like I fixed mine :)

The side room was both cool and frustrating all at once. Sometimes I really hate how I end up acting more aloof and spacey around Bemani people because they can really, really frustrate me. The oldskool folks, the ones I know well from back when I first moved here and we'd all hang out at IZ or have Bemani parties all the time, they're cool, but the new crowd, which is pretty much all teenagers, I just don't really click with at all, especially since it always feels like they're mostly from the school of point 3 of a post that seishinbyou made a few weeks ago. There were a few nice people that I'd never met before, though, I guess; I shouldn't entirely generalize.

At any rate it got a lot more fun later on when it was Keevon and Amber and I sitting around singing along loudly and poorly to stuff like Dr. Bombay songs ("S! S! O!") and Prince on a Star and Macho Gang, and the m-flo songs on IIDX. There was also some guy who came in that was a friend of the ITG tourney organizer, and he was really nice and funny. ("I can't believe you guys are talking about Super Famicom cartridges!") It's a little bizarre to go to a big Bemani tourney in the Seattle area and not know who a lot of people there are -- but even more bizarre to not even know who the people *running* the thing are, since I used to be behind the desk helping out at so many of the DDR tourneys around here for a while. I still think my most memorable Seattle DDR tourneys were things like working all weekend for Nykkel at DM5, or being Steve's number cruncher at the first team tourney. Sigh.

But now, I just feel old. I dunno. God, I can't believe it's coming up on almost SIX YEARS since I first started playing DDR, and almost a year since I had to outright quit due to the knee and foot problems.

I ran into Bill Masterman (the guy who runs the arcade) though, and he still remembered who I was :) And I asked him whether he'd thought about getting Pop'n'Music, and he promised me that he's keeping his eye out for a good deal on a machine -- and that he specifically would want to get Pop'n' 10 or later, something new and cool. That made my day. I hope he was serious! And I hope Met-Matt will run a Pop'n tournament if he does get a machine!

I left the arcade around when the IIDX tourney ended, because I wasn't sure what dinner plans looked like for everyone, and also, I had said I'd show up at the gaming party at the House of Slack today. So I did. I arrived about 15 minutes before dinner was ready at the House of Slack, anyway. Megan and Josh had roasted a huge turkey, and also made stuffing, and mashed potatoes with horseradish, and some other stuff, and I was starving, so it was great.

Bill and Katje are in town, which was the impetus for having people over. It was sort of funny since because when I arrived, the living room was full of people with babies and puppies, and the dining room was full of people playing a piratey boardgame that Bill described as being "a combination between Monopoly and Talisman", which doesn't speak well for it at all! After they finished that and after dinner and after hanging out chatting a bit with Sheryl and Ficus and all, a bunch of us ended up getting out the World of Warcraft board game -- I'm really not making that up -- and played it for hoooooooours.

Jarrett and Josh and I were the Horde characters, and Bill and Justin and Cory were Alliance. Horde went first, and I guess we got lucky with our quests and never got jumped by random monsters, and Josh had a polymorph spell which knocked them out easy anyway. So we jumped ahead pretty quickly and kept levelling faster and beating up bigger and bigger things. I played a troll priestess, and I made a point of being an obnoxious online person *in real life* for amusement sake. Like, Josh would say "How about we go take on that quest over there with the goblins," and I'd be like "OMG OK I want XP LOL", to which Josh replied, "Deanna has been KICKED from the group." Heh heh. Or when the Alliance guys were near us on the board and we were a higher level I was suggesting we should go PVP them -- "Let's go gank those noobs LOL!" I was thinking it'd be really cute to get a t-shirt made for a newborn baby that simply read "NOOB", but something tells me that most of my friends who currently have newborn babies would not be into dressing them in such a t-shirt.

The game's supposed to take 30 turns, but we quit playing at 2am, about 24 turns in. I think it's a fun game, but it suffers from vague downtime issues -- while your faction is actually doing stuff, it's a lot of fun, but while the other faction is doing stuff, you pretty much sit there and wait for them, which isn't particularly exciting. Oh well. I'd play it again, and I don't even play World of Warcraft. So arr.

Anyway, yeah, it was a long day full of hanging out with people and playing games, which should have been pretty good, and I guess it was. I dunno.

Today, due to not wanting to California Carpool, I ended up just hanging out at an arcade all day and Beatmania IIDXing it up, mostly. zqfmbg and I went to lunch at Blue C Sushi, yay, and after that we headed down to ACME Bowl, where we ran into cynic573 who informed us he'd just broken the 3 key on the left side of the IIDX machine -- but he'd also called Bill to get a tech out. So we played on the right side. As kieferskunk and farren_bronaugh also showed up, it was funny because the right side handicapped everyone except I-Gene. Soon a tech showed up and fixed the left side, yay, and we pretty much just had the four of us taking turns playing IIDX for like 4-5 hours. I actually pretty much have the exact same skill level now that I did when I played a lot, which is sort of odd, but whatever. I did get Extra Stage a bunch of times by passing 6-stars at 100%, but still didn't pass any 7's of course. Farren and I tried to play every single Good-Cool song on the machine for a couple of sets too, which was pretty funny. Later in the day, the 1 key on the left side started sticking instead and we had to start playing right side again, which sort of sucked again, too.

I played a little bit of Drummania, and I also beat Soul Calibur II arcade-mode as Taki twice. Some little kid was watching me play the whole time like "holy CRAP", which was funny, because quite frankly, I suck at Soul Calibur, at least compared to how I used to be awesometastic at Soul Edge.

I-Gene picked up lauraisback from the airport, and mightyflorist also showed up, but by then it was like 8:30pm and I was really burned out from being in the arcade all day, so I-Gene drove me home, grabbed his stuff from here, and drove back to the arcade to get Laura, and he's staying at her place tonight instead. Just as well since I have to wake up for work and all that, but it also means I need to go up to Vancouver if I want to mess around with his Pop'n'Music stuff. Hey fuj, if you see this, I need to bug you sometime.

Oops, I guess I went to sleep last night without updating. I thought I had, weird. Friday at work, I was a bad girl and ducked out of yet another all-hands meeting, to go down to the IT guys and beg someone to make my laptop work for remote VPN stuff. They were all like "Bah, we are very very busy, file a ticket and we'll get back to you in a couple of days," and I said "Can't I just plug it in and show you the error I got since I already installed all the stuff and I'm just getting a weird message or two?" So they gave me a cable modem to plug it into, I booted it up, showed them one message which turned out to be that I needed to uninstall Norton, and the second was some arcane Lotus Notes problem, but the IT guy typed a few random incantations into it and it magically worked. I think I wasted a total of maybe half an hour of his time, so I guess I do feel a little bad, but it wasn't like I had some huge hours-and-hours-long issue to work through.

After work we had D&D at Cory's house. We now ACTUALLY have one session remaining. As in, our final boss to fight is in the floor above the room we're at. We've worked our way up the outside tower thing, found the ethereal plane portal, went up the other side, had a few fights, and are now there. We were going to do the shopping thing, since Cory got turned to stone (for like the third time -- honestly, he had sprung a prismatic spray trap early on and got turned to stone but Justin decided that'd be lame so instead he just got hit with a lot of damage by a ray. Then later, we had prismatic spray cast on the party and AGAIN Cory got hit by the "turned to stone" ray and AGAIN failed his save) but Josh decided to Miracle him back since I didn't have Stone to Flesh memorized, and so in theory we'll just plow through, next session. Though next session might not be until mid-December at this rate thanks to travel.

Today I meant to do some shopping and then go visiting people, but I was exhausted and slept until 2pm. Oops. So instead, I got up, called oren, went and picked him up around 4ish, and we drove down to Tacoma.

First I stopped by Narrows because the In The Groove nationals qualifying tourney was going on and I just wanted to stop by and say hello to people. I didn't see many people I knew -- darknote and toastercookie and Jedi and Shakespeare by the 5th mix, and cynic573 behind the table, and bobsyouruncle and crackoon getting ready to actually compete, and keevon over by the Beatmania III machine. There were bunches of other people there, but I didn't know who they were. I played a game of Beatmania so I could play 20 November just in case, and I also played a game of Drummania for the hell of it. Oren played a game of Initial D, and in the meantime Jeff had called me, so I called him back and we headed even further south down to Lakewood.

We got to damienroc and wooko's place, and they were there, as was Pete, and Julianne. Wooko took Pete home for some reason or another, and Jeff and Julianne and Oren and I went to grab pre-HP dinner; we ended up at Applebee's. It wasn't too bad. islandergirlro and Brien caught up with us to give us movie tickets at Applebee's, and then we all ended up at the theater a bit later, and we saw Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. I'll talk about that in a second.

After the movie we came back and watched a 5-minute episode of some weird anime (Magical Play?) with "The 2-D vs. 3-D fight!", and then I suggested we watch the Simpsons softball episode, which was of course vastly entertaining, and then we all headed home. Whee.

Tomorrow I might go try to play IIDX at that new arcade thing, or maybe stop by Illusionz or such, but more likely I will just go shopping for my trip and maybe start packing. I will make sure to play 20 November on some Bemani game one way or the other, though.

I guess I'll LJ-cut in case people haven't seen the movie, but is it really possible to spoil it?

( Harry Potter And The Triwizard Tournament )

Today was pretty cool. Fuj and I went to the Mariners - Devil Rays game. Due to my intricate knowledge of Safeco we managed to score some pretty awesome tickets in Field seating. It was a good game, too. Hideo Nomo was going for his 200th career win (counting his Japan and America professional games) and Jamie Moyer was going for his 198th career win. Moyer and Borders as a battery are the oldest pair in recent baseball history. It was Little League day and they had a giveaway of an adorable poster of current Mariners with pictures of what they looked like in little league. (It was for kids 14 and under, but I managed to find a stray one.) The stadium was reasonably packed. Pat Borders beat out a bunt for a single. Aubrey Huff pretend to be Ichiro, failed, and dropped a ball which led to the tying run. Moyer struck out 6 guys in 6 innings.

The game see-sawed a lot, with it tied 5-5 coming into the 9th. Adrian Beltre got his 1000th career hit, with a single to right -- and a minute later Richie Sexson hit a double, driving him in for the game-winning RBI. Good stuff. Well, except where Ronnie The Bear got the win totally randomly.

( Don't come around here Nomo )

After the game, Fuj and I came back to Northgate and bummed around the mall a bit. We went to Toys'R'Us and looked through their baseball card sets and bought a few, then looked around the mall for other stuff. Came home, he went to Safeway to get junk food, sort of like how I always raid Zellers for junk food when I'm in Canadia. Then we opened baseball card packs like the dorks we are, like "woo! I got a Hideki Matsui rookie card!" and whatnot. The Topps Cracker Jack cards really annoy me.

Went to Applebee's for dinner with Tanya, Charlie, and Keevon, which was neat because I haven't seen them in ages (well, before yesterday at least). Then we watched all of season 4 of Trailer Park Boys, which Fuj brought down on DVD. Goddamn that show is hiiiiiiiilarious, especially the "Ricky-isms" feature on the first disc.