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.

D&D lasted way too long tonight. We basically played one battle from 8pm until 12:30am. That was just... bad. I lost interest about 2 hours in... well, really, I just got tired.

It was good to see people though, we had a whole buncha people hangin' out at the House of Slack for a while there. We listened to the Mariners game, which sounded fun.

I went to the gym after work and before D&D. I swam for half an hour. It felt really good, what with being sunburnt, but it felt really bad, what with being somewhat sore still. Walked to the HoS from the gym, which is also good exercise.

I left work right after getting a script to work. That was pretty satisfying. It's nicer to leave on an accomplished note than a "dammit, I'll figure it out in the morning" note.

Work was pretty good, too. I feel like I am getting more into the "how to sp34k p3rl" mindset every day. It's cool when I figure out the "right" way to write stuff the first time.

This morning, chai from Torrefazione Italia or however you spell it. Still generic, just like yesterday's chai from Tully's. I'm going to try chai from every coffee shop between 4th & Union and 4th & Madison, since I walk that every morning from the bus to work.

I'm sorry about London. I wish I knew if rkane was okay, since I know he's there for some Magic tourney that was starting today, but other than that I don't think I know anyone currently in London. It's very sad. Bad people suck.