December 20th (25 hour day)

It was such a dull night the most note worthy thing was when the phone rang at 4 am and a co-worker goes, "Joe's Morgue, you stab 'em we bag 'em".

Around 11 am Mike picked me up and then we went to get Rashaad for a venture to South County (SoCo) and spent the afternoon at Crestwood, playing ITG (In the Groove) and laughing as Mike's little sister ("MARC") kicked ass in Tekken 5 when she had never played a fighting game before. My skills need a lot of improvement, which wouldn't be to hard to do and afford if it weren't for my legs giving out sooner than anyone else there. Maybe I need to change my technique or its just improved stamina that I need, I dunno.

It was interesting to see numerous others, mostly strangers, including one pretty nice looking gal that was there when we showed up, who were really good at it and could play really rapid paced songs. I don't know how to describe it further, its just really impressive that certain people have the ability (and inclination I guess) to be experts at it.

I was probably the worst person there all day because others were going maybe ten minutes of fast paced songs without losing the cooperation of their legs. And because Glenn is better than Mike. Heh.

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The ITG Cast of Characters

NOVA = Mike

SKDG = Glenn

MARC = Marcie

PHNX = Rashaad

363* = Me

(* to be changed to CAIN

or something next time)

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After Mike had to go to Megan's house to drop off some presents we went back to his house and at first got to watch Glenn and Rashaad play each other in Rise of Nations, that in of itself was funny. Rashaad was upstairs in Mike's room, and Glenn was down on the ground floor.

Eventually when Mike and I checked up on Glenn after observing Rashaad's build up we saw that he could not possibly be defeated with the empire he had going. He had fourty percent of the map, unbeknownst to Rashaad, and he had a large modern army and air force (army of around 200 units divided into 1st Infantry, 2nd Artillery, and 3rd Infantry), and so we went back upstairs to watch Rashaad, and in comes a swarm of Glenn's B-52 bombers to bombard his city, destroying his Hanging Garden (he had no anti-air defenses whatsoever). His reaction was hilarious as Glenn also sent comments.

Deception is one of the most potent weapons. Glenn researched the Missile Shield, which Rashaad took as to meaning he was dead. So he starts making nuclear missile silos, and blows away the nearby computer player, afraid of a swarm of return nukes from Glenn. When me and Mike scrambled downstairs we found that Glenn had no missiles or silos, it was all a mind game, and it worked. Rashaad could have obliterated part of Glenn's territory since he had the nuclear weapons first, but because of the deception Glenn developed his own missiles eventually, and first layed siege to ther computer player near Rashaad's holdings (He had employed a strategy of taking down all the computer players one by one first), and then two of Rashaad's cities were blown away by nukes.

The crippling lack of information on the full picture cost Rashaad in his game with Mike, too. Mike amassed his army eventually on Rashaad's southern border after slowly sweeping away a computer player in the corner region (the map had a number of large lakes), and Rashaad never knew, he was focused on conquering a computer player on his opposite border.

Mike didn't even need to develop nuclear missile to finish him off. But he sure got two computer player's cities in a mass of six simltaneous missile strikes.

And when I got home I just crashed since I had been up about thirty minutes more than 25 hours. No complaints there, I enjoyed the day, SoCo and hanging out at Mike's was awesome, and I have such a lack of other topics right now and an interest in things like strategy and shit that I was compelled to write. But, as Glenn says:

Glenn: you actually blog
Glenn: i love you
Me: lol
Glenn: like a daily occourence of events
Glenn: or at least a bi-daily

Even though its not that consistent, and not always what I'd consider "high quality" even when it is.

And I could go on to a seperate angle of the afternoon to a more angsty kind of evaluative / self critical, but, nah. Same goes for a semi-wierd dream. Maybe another time if at all. I may let it fade away so it is 100% technically "Good Times":

A lot of people always say that it’s good times. But when isn’t it good times? There are times when it’s not good times, but we don’t like to talk about them. Since we don’t talk about when it’s not good times, we don’t remember that they happened. And if there’s no record of it, it’s like it never happened. So it’s always good times.

- Attributed to Amir, class valedictorian