16 posts tagged “gaming”
Be it resolved that one of my profs is kinda violent. She's starting to creep the class out with all of her ultra-violent example sentences. You can show instrumental-case movement with other phrases than "with a knife," y'know.
But it's been a good week, good golly! Somewhere between the academic shitstorming and the madness that is Indigo, I'm managing to have quite a bit of fun. The almighty Jess threw herself an awesometastic birthday party (Rebecca! Dervla! Sundry hipsters!), and even though my work schedule caused me to be ridiculously late, I still got to hang out with some awesome folks. However, I also had my first experience with Toronto's Blue Night buses, and now have no reason to question why they are called the "Vomit Comets." Sharing the same stale air as a guy who's passed out in a puddle of his own design makes the ride back to East York that much longer.
And last night was Settlers night! Vicky, bless her heart, plied me with beer and chili and dragged me over to the Village for an epic board game showdown with her engineer friends. Of course, she wrecked all that good-host karma by winning the game immediately before I was about to get the requisite thirteen points, but hey. I can't win `em all.
Random aside: this is really cute in an oh-you-silly-metalheads kind of way. And I really, really, really want to see this. Who's in?
Four days left before my ballyhooed return to the ivory tower. I've martyred my bank account, dialled back my availability at the bookstore, gotten a feel for campus, and laughed off one quasi-threatening email from a professor asking if I was sure I wanted to take her "very difficult" class. Despite all that, I approach the coming year with zanshin and sharpened pencils. I'm excited to be moving forward again. It's going to be a good year.
Highlights of the past few weeks:
- I've been getting a lot of shifts in the music section lately. This is more fun than I can comprehend. Picking the store's music is a blast, as is talking music with the customers, and pretty much everyone seems to be happy to have me there. Here's hoping I can continue this trend.
- I had a pretty awesome visit to Guelph. What was going to be a standard paperwork run led to busking, surprise hangouts with all kinds of characters, and crashing on the last couch I ever thought I'd crash on. My spiritual hometown gets weirder and better every time I come back.
- On that note, I am now completely in love with hollowbody electric guitars. Sustain and heavy-gauge strings are my friends.
- Does anybody else remember Moist? I swear, I hadn't thought about that band for at least a decade, but "Breathe" came up on somebody's iTunes at a party, and I still remembered every word. Frickin' awesome song.
- One of my coworkers called me "quite good-looking" after a shift this week. Uh-oh?
- God help me, I've gotten hooked on jazz music now. After having heard some of John McLaughlin's Indian jazz-fusion work when I did a project on Carnatic music back at Guelph, I decided to look up the Mahavishnu Orchestra, and from there, wound up lost in Miles Davis and John Coltrane. How the hell did I miss this stuff? I knew they were brilliant, but it's about time I experienced it.
- Rebecca came up to visit me this week! Hooray! We mostly just walked around a lot, cooked delicious quiche, watched some movies, and played Soul Calibur in my basement, but hey. It was glorious to see her again, especially since the next time will probably be the Three/Alpha Galates concert at the end of the month.
- Speaking of ridiculously complicated academic twists on lowbrow media, I've started reading Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum. Eco is quite the interesting character. He's a semiotician by trade, so even though the plot (so far, anyway) is pretty standard thriller fare, the text and dialogue are so full of obscure references (particularly Italian historical footnotes and the occult), I find myself turning to Wikipedia once every few pages to get the full gist of a joke. That said, some of the banter between his main characters (a trio of occult-book publishers) is downright hilarious, and this is a much more interesting look at all the Grail/Templar/Rosicrucian stuff than anything Dan Brown has ever done.
Sometimes you report in just to say that nothing is new. I, however had a pretty fucking fantastic Guelph visit last week and have been a terrible blogger. There was couchsurfing! Nostalgic hangouts with my much-missed friends! A crushing two-pitcher victory at Jimmy Jazz trivia night! Mario Kart! Hilarity at Vinyl! A surreal visit to my old bookstore (man, does it ever feel small now!)! Hiding behind a bus shelter! I have to say, though, it's completely disorienting returning to what had been my hometown for four years and being a couchsurfing bum.
Back in TO, it's the same ol' cycle of work and downtime, though there have been occasional adventures in the names of sushi and friendship. Kudos to the sushi bar at the corner of Logan and the Danforth for somehow hitting the grail combo of cheap, delicious, and non-toxic.
Also: goddamnit, Rebecca has gone and gotten me back into Kingdom of Loathing. An adventurer is me.
So I saw Iron Man a few nights ago. It wasn't the cinematic orgasm so many of my friends have made it out to be, but it was a pretty damn solid movie, certainly the best of the current epidemic of superhero flicks. Picking a troubled hedonist like Robert Downey Jr to play a troubled hedonist like Tony Stark was an inspired choice, and Jeff Bridges made a damn good evil tycoon. Even Gwyneth Paltrow, who normally bugs me on a level I can't even explain (this was true even before she married Chris Everything-That-Is-Wrong-With-Modern-Rock Martin), was a cute sidekick and convincing redhead.
Most of my life lately has been work. I've been pulling forty hours a week at the flagship, and I'm still in love with the place. I even have a German-speaking buddy on staff, which has been refreshing practice. Oddly enough, I also find that the stockbrokers and socialites actually have a more manageable sense of entitlement than the bitchy suburbanites we had at Guelph and Waterloo. Oh, Toronto, will you never cease to boggle my mind?
On the urban exploration front, I finally lost my Kensington virginity a few days ago. What a neat little neighbourhood! I went hat shopping, enjoyed the best burrito of my life and laughed at the crass service at Big Fat Burrito, and wound up demoing a doubleneck guitar for some of my fellow customers at the pawn shop. On the way home, I also popped by Yonge Street for some bargain-hunting and found an awesome alternate solution to my home electronics problem: why spend $40 on a cable to connect my laptop to my TV for movies when I can buy a $45 used Playstation 2, play movies on it, and be able to play some games? That's a victory, I think.
Good Lord, I'm 22. I guess it mostly feels like 21, but still. Balls to aging. That is all.
Today was a pretty spectacularly random day. As I was enjoying a nice bike ride around town for some exercise (all of this home cooking and relaxation has me feeling like a lard-ass), I ran into my old friends Alex and Danielle on King Street. That led to me winding up at an apartment full of Comp Sci majors, flexing the old Waterloo in-joke muscles (totally beat everyone on the "phone's a-ringin'" thing) and playing the new Smash Brothers game. Even on the fancy new system, I'm still a hopeless player, though Ganondorf (one of the coolest game villains ever) and his comical 300 kick served me well. It was good to see those kids again, too. Alex is going to go very far with that computer brain of his.
I got in touch with Esther today, too, and we went out for coffee and a movie. The Princess was showing La Misma Luna, a really touching story about illegal immigration. It's a damn shame that there were only four people in the theatre. I can't imagine going through the shit that those people go through to try to support their families. You know it's got to be a good movie, too, when it stars a precocious, silly little kid, and I don't hate him after two hours.
So, the war with the University of Toronto rages on. I've been phoning and e-mailing the bejeesus out of them, and the good doctors of the Department of Linguistics have been saints. If this shit works out, I owe them the biggest platter of homemade brownies in the world.
It's hard to believe that I only have two hours of scheduled academic playtime left in my BA. The German exam on Thursday was ein Kuchenstück, except for a few brutal questions about German cultural footnotes that we only touched on briefly in class. I'm going to miss Waldemar, though. Cool guy, great prof. Powell's Last Stand on Monday should be an entirely different battle. Having not written anything large for him, I'm a little terrified of a 40% essay question.
Between all the bouts of studying, I seem to be spending a lot of time hanging out with folks to watch bad movies and play video games. American Dreamz was a surprisingly cute political satire, and my SNES combat chops seem to be as good as ever. So much for my Mario Kart prowess, though.
Ah, Easter, that holiest of days, when the Easter Bunny and his Peep minions bring Jesus back from the dead so they can both hop around the world, giving delicious chocolate and gummy candies to the saved and curse the damned with those awful creme eggs. Or something.
As seems to be the trend with family occasions lately, it was a low-key one this time. My ailing grandparents didn't show up, so it was just my parents, aunt, step-uncle, and I devouring the Easter feast. After that came a very silly game of Scattergories (things that jump, starting with M: "Mid-1920s Stockbrokers").
I'm reading one crazy-ass book right now: Chris Adrian's The Children's Hospital. It's a (surprise, surprise) end-of-the-world story about a second Great Flood, with the Ark replaced by a somehow-floating pediatric hospital. The mixture makes more sense when you consider that Mr. Adrian's degrees are in children's medicine and divinity, but it's still quite the trippy read. Lock Salman Rushdie in his fatwa-proof bunker with only the first two seasons of House, M.D. and he might write something like this, except it wouldn't be quite this morbid and magical (though the angel in the elevator is starting to get on my nerves). His prose is gorgeous, too.
I'm just worried, on page 150 of 600 or so, as to how he's going to pull it all together. Don't fail me now.
So, uh, prepare for the nerdiest obituary entry ever. I'll try to give links to the nerdier references.
E. Gary Gygax, the creator of the Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying games, failed his saving throw versus death yesterday morning. As somebody who played once a week (sometimes more) throughout high school, I haven't been hit this hard by a celebrity death since...well, Kurt Vonnegut last spring (somebody keep an eye on the surviving members of the big 1980's thrash-metal bands, lest I lose all my counterculture nostalgia in less than a year).
I never met the man, having only seen him from afar and spoken with Ed Greenwood instead, but his crazy little game was a formative part of my teenage experience. Escapism, yes, and probably not the best use of my precious time, but those Sunday afternoons around Alex's kitchen table or in Chris' musty basement were some of my happiest times in high school. One-pound bags of polyhedral dice. Making up characters like Zippy the Dire Rat and the legendary Spherical Monk (morbidly obese, but a martial-arts master and capable of jumping fifty feet in the air from a standstill). Watching the DM almost burst into tears as his beautifully-constructed plot got thrown off the rails (probability-defying critical hits felling main villains before their time were fan favourites). Flumphs. Consuming massive amounts of no-name grapefruit soda and extra-butter microwave popcorn. Learning neat words like "expeditious," "doppelgänger," and "phylactery." Sneaking over to the Friendly Local Gaming Store after high school to pick up the latest rulebooks. Laughing at the idiocy of anti-D&D alarmists like Jack Chick and Mazes and Monsters.
I hadn't really thought about the game for about four years, but today I'd like nothing more than to bust out the dice, roll up a Paladin, and pwn some rust monsters and red dragons in a smelly Kitchener basement. Requiescat in pace, Mr. Gygax. May you have nothing but high rolls and +5 loot in the great beyond. Or, y'know, lichdom.
Naturally, Rich Burlew says it way better than I ever could (plot catch-up for those of you who don't read OOTS: Roy the Fighter is currently dead and watching down on his friends from the afterlife, and the little ball of light is a Lantern Archon, a sort of spirit guide). This is cute too, but not very accessible if you haven't played.
What else is up? Not a whole lot. Trivia Night last night was another dammit-we're-in-second bust, even with reinforcements from Meg's physics friends. Mike's kegger was fantastic. Waterloo is boring. Asha and I had a great conversation about obnoxious ethnic stereotypes in Super Nintendo games (remember Deejay, Dhalsim, Zangief and T-Hawk from Street Fighter II? Or anybody in Punchout? Geeez). Life goes on.
Speaking of monsters, though, there was some unexpected hilarity in the Bullring today. This year's big campus musical is a production of Zombie Prom, and the cast stormed through in full make-up, chanting "BRRAAAAAINS" and flailing at anybody foolish enough to get in their way (two girls even ran up and practically molested the "dreamy" guy doing open mic). Only at Guelph, kids.
Fine ways to spend an evening: drunken Mortal Kombat at Kate's place. I'm amazed by how goddamn fancy those games have gotten: 3D arenas, ostensibly-accurate mixed martial arts, elaborate combos...dammit, get off my poorly-rendered 16-bit lawn.
I feel like I haven't been reading nearly enough lately, especially given the very nifty novel Jen lent me. Pat Cadigan's Tea from an Empty Cup has the strange distinction of being the only major cyberpunk novel written by a woman. So far, so good, though it's one of those truly evil books that peppers the dialogue with phrases from a language I don't speak. If anyone knows of a good romanized-Japanese-to-English online dictionary, I'm very open to suggestions.
Also: eight weeks until I'm not an undergrad anymore? Holy. Shit.
