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.

I suppose it's a new year now, isn't it. Hello, 2006.

Today, Oren came over and Carl and I went to lunch with him at Chipotle. After that we came back here to my place, and played video games for several hours. They played Kingdom Hearts and some Ocarina of Time, while I worked on some Perl scripts and whatnot. (Believe it or not, that's really like my ideal work environment -- hacking away on my computer with some friends hanging out in the other room being amusing but not wholly distracting.) We also played Mario Kart 64 together for a while, and some Pokemon Puzzle League.

Zach came over and then we all sat around playing Tichu for god-only-knows-how-long. Zach and I were partners against Oren and Carl and for the most part we got annhilated, not that I mind because it was just for fun.

Eventually Zach had to leave, and we headed up to Lake Forest Park, ostensibly to go to Heidi and Cory's new years party, but we decided to stop for dinner first at Pagliacci's, and by the time we were done it was almost 10pm and Carl was falling asleep due to east coast time, so instead we came back here and put on the movie Mr. Baseball and watched that. (I love that movie! And since it is about Japanese baseball, I think Carl and Oren enjoyed it a little too.)

5 minutes before the end of the movie, we heard a bunch of loud bangs and booms from outside -- people were setting off fireworks all over because it was midnight! We went out on the balcony for a bit and watched the fireworks, then came back inside, ate some mochi, and watched the end of the movie.

So, come to think of it, this was an awful lot like last year's new years' eve -- hanging out with close friends from CMU, playing cards, watching a movie from 1992. Glad I got to spend a second New Year's in a row with Carl. This year, rather than Chris calling me, arashink called me, though I didn't find the cellphone in time. Pretty amusing.

Happy New Year, everyone.

I meant to wake up this morning and head down to Safeco Field for a nice self-indulgent day at the baseball game. By "self-indulgent", I mean, wearing my Pirates Kendall shirt, watching batting practice and harrassing players for autographs, rummaging through the cheap crap in the clearance racks and bins at the team store at my leisure, and getting the best single seat I could snag in the stadium, even if it'd cost $50 and be only a few rows behind home plate.

Thing is, when I awoke to my alarm at 9am, I decided, "WHAT THE FUCK WAS I THINKING?" and instead turned off the alarm and went back to sleep.

So, I woke up at 2pm or so, and goofed off here for several hours, instead. I listened to relevant baseball games for a few hours (damn yooooooooou, Roger Clemens), played a little PP until the rainstorm knocked out my cable modem, and just sort of relaxed for once.

In the evening, I drove over to keevon's new house for his videogames/housewarming party thing. When I got there, a few people (megami, cheesethrower, tadzilla, keevon, and bobsyouruncle) were starting a game of Traders of Genoa, so I went downstairs to see what was going on there, and at first it simply looked like thunderbird8, tanuwa, Jeff, metroid23, and cynic573 were all intently playing games on their individual Nintendo DSes, while some weird music was playing on the stereo, except it turned out they were actually all playing "Band Brothers" together, and *making* that weird music. It was very bizarre. They told me to go up and borrow someone's DS since it'd support up to 8 players, so I got Kevin's and came back down and also connected, and played for a while. It was a lot of fun, if a bit strange. After that, Matt spent a while showing me a game called "Oendan", which is this funky music game that's sort of like a combination of Technic Beat and... gah, I dunno, it's got this weird manga plot on one screen and a really difficult music touch-screen game going on the other.

The upshot is, I really had no idea that the Nintendo DS could do crazy shit like playing multiplayer networked games like that. I probably spent a good chunk of the rest of the evening playing Oendan after a while. I did try out Jeff's crazy $500 Grand Turismo real-car controller on his big-screen TV, which was cool, but I suck at the GT games, especially since my method of playing racing videogames always involves knowing what speed and angle to ricochet off walls and cars at. I played a little Soul Calibur on the XBox with Charlie, but I really suck at all Soul ____ games that aren't the original Soul Edge, unfortunately. I did spend some time on the NES playing Marble Madness, though, and that was good. After that, Thunderbird played Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for a while, while Jerrad and Keith and Tada and people played Fluxx, and then a whole ton of people played poker in the basement, and I'm not really a poker person, so eh.

I chatted with Thunderbird about Puzzle Pirates a bit (he was being lame and playing the single player version on his laptop), and ended up leaving around midnight because I was still pretty tired, and I'm going to get up for real and go to the Mariners game on Sunday. It was good to see people from the old Bemani/videogames crowd.

But, now I'm somewhat torn. I was thinking of making a big videogame order sometime soon since I need to catch up on a few titles (speaking of which -- anyone know an importer who has Pop'n'Music 10? NCSX/Himeya/TNJ say they're out of stock), and now I'm wondering if maybe I want to get a Nintendo DS as well. I've never ever owned a handheld game system (despite having 11 consoles or so), but I always figured one of them would eventually break me, and this one is looking pretty close, especially since I could still pick up some of the GBA games that almost broke me when the GBA-SP came out.

On the other hand, even if I got a DS, I don't think I want Nintendogs. I have enough things to worry about *without* adding on a cute virtual pet that might run away from me and come back with fleas.

I am so sore.

Okay, so after getting 3 hours of sleep last night I woke up at 7am today to go do the 5k co-ed walk in the Race For The Cure. Heidi and Cory picked me up, and we went downtown, and registered and stuff, and caught up with Megan and Katie and Jessica as they were finishing the 5k womens-only run. Then we started our walk. It was pretty cool. We walked from the stadiums up to the Western Avenue exit of I-99, all along the highway, first on the bottom side, then the top side. It was pretty neat and you got a great view of the water. I took tons of pictures.

The only thing is, since I did leg workouts yesterday with Megan and Heidi, my legs were JELLY when I was done. Still, it was pretty neat. The cool thing is that it turns out my brother also did the Race this morning, except that he actually ran the 5k. So I called him and we talked for a while and it turns out he's coming out here the day I have tickets to the Mariners-Mets game! Whee!

We went to breakfast at Minnie's cafe afterwards and got way too much food, but it was fun to chill out with people.

I came home, changed clothes, and then headed out to Marymoor park for megami and metroid23's party picnic thing. There were a whole bunch of people there I hadn't seen in a while; Kiefer and Fire, Laura, Fuj, Minwiz, DJ, Tanya and Charlie, Steve, Keith.. I called Edgars and he showed up after a bit too. We had a barbecue, and everyone else was playing bocci or however you spell it, the weird lawn bowling game. After a while we had a game of Ultimate frisbee, which was pretty fun, and oddly enough I found myself to be in better shape than several of the other people playing, even if I suck at throwing frisbees :)

There were these Amtgard or whatever people in the field next to us playing with big padded swords. Eventually they kicked us off of our picnic tables since they actually had the site reserved. We went and hung out in a field throwing around frisbees and stuff for a while. Keevon showed up, and Chris Foy, too. Around 7pm I realized that I'd been up for 12 hours on 3 hours of sleep and decided to drive home.

I nearly fell asleep on the way home, plus I am REALLY FUCKING SORE from doing the 5k and then playing Ultimate. So, sadly, I decided to just stay at home for the evening because I was worried about either falling asleep at the wheel of the car, or about not being able to actually walk. I've been in the Jorvik blockade on PP, and oh man, is it painful. Fuj should get here soon, he's gonna crash here and we're gonna go to the Mariners game tomorrow and watch Trailer Park Boys. Fun stuff.

I have cool pictures from today but I don't feel like playing with them yet.

Anyway, I do want to apologize to theadana, datavore, and loree for skipping out on parties. I have the worst timing with everything... I always wish I was invited to parties, then when I am, I go kill myself and can't go :(