Entries Tagged 'series' ↓

Well, I thought I would throw up some more party-related photos from a recent party (Saturday afteernoon), as a supplement to my earlier entry about such parties.

For somewhat arbitrary reasons the theme of this particular party was H.P. Lovecraft and the horror mythos he created. Just as with the Shark Week party, my artistic friends provided theme-related food:

I would like to take a second to inform you that none of us actually ate any of the Cthulhu melon. Perhaps  we were restricted by some unearthly, ancient force; perhaps we were simply too frightened,or perhaps we were actually just frieghtened by the sheer size watermelon that originally came from (look at the diagnol picture and consider the scale given by the cup of straws and cake nearby). I can not say that the King in Yellow got off so easily.. leading to this terrible joke o_o:

Anyway, the primary reason for this party’s theme was because one of the main events was playing Arkham Horror. To those of you who don’t understand the horror of Arkham Horror, or mistakenly think it is simply due to the Lovecraftian elements.. there is also some horrible, as with the melon, in the sheer size of the undertaking (again, my phone doesn’t do a great job of capturing scale.. but consider the size of people, and my hat .. and the sheer number of pieces)

*nerd talk, feel free to skip*
If anyone is interested about the actual specifics of this game itself (assuming you are already familiar with the rules, which are much too complicated to go into here): We were playing with an Ancient One ( I believe Glaaki whose attack was simply to raise the terror track, defeating and devouring all if it reached 10. Due to a complete lack of Elder Signs and failure to get places quick enough, 6 gates opened with only 1 being closed. Thus with 8 players, we faced an awakened elder god (with a full doom track, though I’m still not sure that it should have automatically filled with the awakening) with a need for 8 hits per counter. At -5 bonus and a physical resistance (half off bonuses for physical weapons), this meant that we had 10 turns to roll 8 x 12, which is to say 96 positive fight checks (in layman’s terms, out of approximately 280-320 d6 rolls, 96 had to be a 5 or a 6 … before you throw in random factors caused by other game elements). Against (or right at, by my probably incorrect math) the odds, we successfully defeated the GOO (with the help of a sacrifice by one player giving us 3 extra turns), and Arkham, Dunwhich, and Kingsport were returned to safety. .. in other words, we somehow managed to win! ^_^
*end nerd talk*

Log story short, after a couple hours of playing, we all won… except for the game’s owner, who got devoured by an ancient god… meh, it happens.

Anyway, it was fun and I was glad to get to hang out with all my friends again. I really am going to miss them..

~Donald

EDIT:

Here is a picture of my friends.. also, another edition of the great game entitled “how many people can we fit on the couch?”:

The following is part of a series of “miniposts” about the routine things of my summer that, since they are less routine to others, I hope are therefore interesting. More on my skewed logic and decision to do this can be found here:

I have awesome friends. Now I know that we all think we have awesome friends, but oh well, I just wanted to get that out of the way. Though this entry series is ostensibly about “routine” things, and parties are not actually routine for me, being the anti-social one that I am, I think the fact that there were two in the last week make it totally legit!

Anyway, first I wish to clarify what I mean by “party”. According to the M-W dictionary a party is (amongst other things) “a social gathering”, there is no problem with this definition for my events. Urban dictionary however describes a party as first “something I never get invited to”, since I went to these, NO! .. it second defines it as “When everyone gets together at someone’s house, get drunk, consume illegal substances like weed and coke, and trash the place completely.” This is equally, if not more wrong than the first definition!!

My friends and I party in a different way. In fact, I’d say the only constant is probably houses and couches. There are no drugs (except caffiene, on occasion) and only sometimes music or dancing. Also, some of the dancing may be in absence of music.  Anyway, some select activities from two parties of last week:

• A seated airsoft battle. Yes, I did just say that I was a pacifist, but I have to say I am against real violence. And truth be told though I may have had a bit to do with starting this, I soon sat it out. Anyway, long story short.. my friend left out his Airsoft guns and so he got shot with them. Thats karma for you.
• A first grade style story time. In addition to being awesome, my friends are a bit odd, and while this manifests in many ways (other “games” this day: how many people can we fit on the 3 person large couch? 9 how many feet can we fit on Donald’s face? .. apparently 8 .. though that was something I could have done without knowing), one way it manifested was that a friend brought this book to the party :When this book was thrown at me and I was told to read, I did so, with feeling, and a different voice for big foot, and showing the pictures to everyone. It was definitely odd, but also very fun. I highly recommend this book for a laugh. If you want to know what it is like, there’s an excerpt on Amazon and a page spread shows up on google image search.
• Watching Mythbusters, specifically the Shark Week episodes of Mythbusters. This is to say, we used Shark Week as an excuse to party, and its a perfectly good one. Okay, so we didn’t actually pay that much attention to Mythbusters, but we did sit on a couch (this couch is huge!! it can comforably fit 9 people (if you are curious 2 people were different than on the other couch)) facing vaugely in the direction of the television. Anyway, in the spirit of shark week, some of my friends, who are better artists than I, made shark week foods.
  

  Seal Melon

  

  ...with a shark wound

  

  Possibly from this shark-o-melon

  

  ..with its teeth!!

  

  Sadly it could not be satiated on these fish heads (which were full of salmon)

• Finally, we watched the 3 acts of Dr. Horrible which is most excellent. To those of you who missed it, it was a short (42 minutes) musical written during the WGA strike, directed by Joss Whedon (of Firefly, Buffy: the Vampire Slayer, etc. fam) staring Neil Patrick Harris (of Doogie Howser, Starship Trooper, and Harold & Kumar fame), Nathan Filion (also of Firefly fame), and Felecia Day (best known for roles on Buffy and her popuar online series The Guild). If you are still with me after that sea of parentheticals, I highly reccomend you check out Dr. Horrible. You can download all three acts from iTunes for $4 or you can watch it with commercials at: http://drhorrible.com/mushortio.html ). It is hilarous for the majority, and then has a bit of an artistic turn at the end. Anyway .. that is all I will say about it, but check it out!

Anyway, that is just a selection of the activities that went down at parties with my friends in the last week. Personally, I think our varied definition of party is far superior to the urban dictionay one. We never know what will happen, but because we are pretty awesome its pretty awesome.

</ “Minipost” >

~Donald

P.S. I hearby define “minipost” to mean “post of arbitrary length but more than likely containg a bulleted list of some sort”

The following is part of a series of “miniposts” about the routine things of my summer that, since they are less routine to others, I hope are therefore interesting. More on my skewed logic and decision to do this can be found here:

Every week, three times a week for the last six months (Mondays @ 7:15pm, Wednesdays @ 7pm, and Fridays @ 6:30pm), I have been engaging in a class known as “Realistic Self-Defense” taught at the local Taekwando dojang. Though I did take Taekwando here as a kid (3rd grade – 6th grade or so) and hold a 1st Degree Black Belt according to the ATA, this class has nothing to do with taekwando.

Whereas Songham Taekwando (the style taught by the ATA) is a martial art grounded in self-discipline and perseverance, practiced by a series of progressively more complicated set forms and structured with a series of belts, RSD is based on Krav Maga, a martial art invented by Imi Lichtenfeld in 1930s to kick Nazi ass. It is practiced by a lot of punching, kicking and structured by who can kick you the hardest.

Krav Maga is a martial art that assumes “no quarter” which is a military way of saying “dude is trying to kill you,” as such mercy, fairplay, and rules of engagment are not matters of high importance. Though I am taught to a civillian standard, removing killing strikes, lets just say one of our routine drills is aptly entitled “front kick to the groin.” yea. (Also, the fact that this class lacks any killing strikes has not dissuaded by mother and sister from reffering to it as my “killing people with pencils” class).

If you are starting to think, “hmm.. this doesn’t particularly sound like relalistic self-defense,” I would tend to agree. The philosophy here is clearly “the best defense is a good offense.” The class generally runs as follows:

• we arrive and line up for the opening (the instructor says “kida” as far as I can find online this is hebrew for “bow”; we bow and say something to the effect of “ush” .. which I have yet to find a translation to (unlike the korean words we used in taekwando, no one has seen fit to explain to me what these mean)).
• After the opening we run in a circle and do calesthetics of various sorts (pushups, situps, flutter kicks, toe-touches, jump squats, etc). On occasion we stretch.
• We proceed to do many partner exercises, usually begening with straight punches. This means, to put it simply, that for 30 seconds to 2 minutes, you wail on the partner your partner is holding (often directly against their body), then you switch and they wail on you. Thus you go quickly from hard activity to mostly resting .. except that you are being hit.. often hard enough that new-comers vomit their first class.
• There are often large group exercises where either two lines form and you do the same partner exercise 5-10 times down the line and then hold for 5-10 times or circles are formed and each person does something in the middle while everyone else holds. These mean respectively, that you completely exhaust yourself over a line of exercises and then have to recuperate, or that you completely exhaust yourself in ONE exercise and then have time to recuperate.
• On rare occasions there are exercises that involve one person holding a pad at the end of the room, one person lying on the floor, and everyone else lying on top of him/her. Person on the floor then has to get up (while people lie ontop of him/her), run across the room (sometimes with yet further people preventing this), and then proceed to do the drill (punches, kicks, knees, elbows) with the person holding on the pad for 30 seconds to  1 minute.
• On even rarer occasions, there are actual defense (blocking, gun disarming, etc.) drills

This sort of class tends to attract a certain type of person. This type of person is in or planning to go into the military, thinks “hope” is a word for quiters (I’ve had to defend Barack Obama to these people many times), and loves to watch UFC fights. This person is not .. me.

Interestingly, I am actually a pacifist. I do not seek fights, to my best not to praticipate fights, and in the event of a military draft would refuse to serve. It is an interesting clash of cultures which I enter weekly. *sigh*. Still, it is an excellent work out and has put me in much better shape than previously.

All told, though, the contrary natures of pacifism and practicing such a martial art are probably a bit more cognative dissonance than I like to handle, so, at MIT I will either switch to a less violent one ( I am interested in akido), or possibly jump all the way to dance (which is very different, but uses similar muscles).

Oh and don’t think about making fun of me for wanting to do dance, because while I am morally opposed to it, I totally am trained to beat you up!

~Donald Guy

P.S. I am aware that my “minipost” is longer than the one introducing it… what can I say? I am a bit voluable.

So, this summer a lot of my local friends have gotten into pen and paper RPGs .. a la Dungeons & Dragons (in fact, D&D specifically). While buttering my toast this morning (and by morning I mean 3:38pm), it occurred to me… roleplaying games are never complete — they leave out huge parts of life. Never has there been an RPG involving such mundane tasks as buttering toast, brushing your teeth, using the restroom, etc.

Why is this? Well, it’s presumably because these things exist for another take on things, for adventures and the like, not the daily grind.

There have been games that did showcase the daily grind though, incredibly popular ones, in fact. The  Sims, for example, is the best selling video game in history¹. Why is it that when so much of gaming/movies/television was founded on providing distraction, providing colorful imagery and exciting adventure, that somehow the mundane became so popular?

And this trend does not stop with the Sims, it includes such movements as reality television and, I would say, blogs.

All of these present others’ lives within a semblance of our own, there is familiarity and yet an aloofness and excitement. In The Sims, the exciting element was that you got to micromanage a whole family in every aspect, time compression let you simulate events that are ever unsure in our own lives. Reality TV introduces various distortions, be it forcing people of unlike minds into closer proximity, introducing absurd challenges, or even simply the elements that the extra scrutiny add to people’s already odd lives.

And then there are blogs.. blogs offer us windows into people’s lives, but only what they wish to report. They provide a filter and give us access to part of a person’s life, but not that which they either don’t want others to see or simply think others won’t care about. And it is this limited portrait which produces intrigue, which produces excitement…

Well, if the limitedness correlates with the excitement, clearly this is one of the most exciting blogs ever! ^_^  So, other than a critique on the nature of the medium and a joke at my own expense, what shall I do with this entry? Originally, I intended to explain my lack of prolific blogging is the result of lack of interesting (and also freely admissible) happenings in my life, but I have talked (written) myself out of this because its a lame excuse AND I realized that one man’s tedium may be another mans enthralling subject matter. The Sims proved that everyday life CAN be interesting.

Therefore I have decided to use this entry to introduce a series of miniposts on the routine things of my life that have been busying me of recent. I hope that they give you a window into my routine life, familiar enough for the appeal of a reality show, but aloof enough to be intriguing. These miniposts should follow in (relatively) quick succession after this one. I hope you enjoy them! ^_^

~Donald Guy

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¹ I am enough of a Wikipedian to provide citations to blog entries: Walker, Trey (2002-03-22). “The Sims overtakes Myst”. GameSpot. CNET Networks. Retrieved from http://www.gamespot.com/pc/strategy/simslivinlarge/news_2857556.html .