Lies and Balderdash

Ferngully Dances with Pocahontas....IN SPACE!

2010-01-15T17:47:00.001-08:00

So I went to see Avatar last night, in the stunning grandeur that is 3D movie viewing. After buying my ticket, showing up early enough to snag a balcony seat (read: Waaaaaay too early), and donning my dorky glasses, I sat and waited until the lights grew dim and the screen started throwing pretty pictures out of it.

First, a word about 3D. If there's anything out there that would still convince me to go see a movie in theaters over DVD, it's this. The extra dimension really does make a difference on a screen that big. However, as visually stunning as it is, there's one big huge glaring flaw that continually bugged me as I watched the film. Occasionally there were shots where a wooden spear or gun or dismembered alien limb or something else long and pointy would look like it was literally jutting out of the screen, ready to make us puny moviegoers cower in fear, when whichever character was holding/wielding/flailing it would move the tip off screen. Instantly, the object was suddenly behind the screen again rather than getting cozy with us inside the theater.The sudden transition was always jarring, and only served to break the immersion that the film had previously held with such captivating visuals.

That said, alien sideboob looks way better in 3D.

Another thing: Whoever decided that the subtitles for the Na'Vi language should be entirely in Papyrus should go commit font snob seppuku for their grievous, terrible crime. Like, now. A movie spends $300 million in special effects, and every time they talk it looks like they hired a fourth grader to make the text look fancy.

It's one step up from Comic Sans, people.

Minor griping aside, this movie is still so damn pretty that you should really see it in theaters if you're going to see it at all. I still plan to see if I can make it to an IMAX showing in 3D, because some of those shots would straight up make you crap your pants on a screen that big. If you like expensive eye-candy, this movie has enough to make your eye-teeth rot. You know, if your eyes had teeth. Because the movie is candy, see? For your eyes?

Yeah, it was a terrible analogy. Sue me.

Moving on to the plot...

Despite being as predictable as the outcome of a boxing match between Evander Holyfield and an autistic puppy with only 3 legs, the plot isn't that bad. The characters fill pretty standard archetypes; the environmentally conscious scientist that everyone ignores, the testosterone fueled General Bullets-for-Brains, the soulless corporate schill ready to level the forest for a quick buck, etc. Still, the characters (and the actors who play them) do a reasonable job of making you care about them, despite the movie straight lifting several concepts that have been done to death (even some of Cameron's own).

One thing stood out for me, though. The dichotomy between the main character's small, paraplegic human body and his nine-foot tall "hey-look-I-can-use-my-legs-and-catch-dragons" body was particularly well done in my opinion. As the movie progresses, Jake (the aforementioned main character) spends more and more time in his Avatar body and begins to neglect things in the "real" world, going so far as forgetting to eat. There's a poignant scene where Jake pulls his immobile legs (which at this point look like they were on loan from Christian Bale in The Machinist) out of the device he uses to connect with his Avatar, and the dejected look on his face conveys everything as he wheels himself along.

I'd read going in that that particular part of the movie resonated strongly with gamers (MMO players in particular), and the parallels there are obvious. Wanting to ditching your mundane self for a proxy version who is prettier, stronger, faster, and more fantastic is a form of escapism that I think everyone can relate to. Cameron wields the metaphor like a blunt stick with the whole "legs/no legs" thing, but in this instance, at least, the movie has a shred of originality.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Blog.

2009-11-27T13:57:00.000-08:00

Jesus Christ, it's been a month?

Anyway, I strolled into work today to discover that I wasn't scheduled because it's going to be slow as balls on Black Friday (which makes me suddenly and very acutely grateful that I don't work in a heavy retail setting). Given this gift of a surprise day off, and on such a sunny and beautiful day at that, it only makes sense that I should spend in sitting in my room and typing on a computer.

Ah, freedom.

I typically refrain from posting on the grounds that I have little or nothing terribly interesting to post about (an assumption which is probably not true, but I'm also sort of busy...ish), but it turns out on this particular week I have not one but two interesting things to post about: I visited a room full of corpses, and also I ate one!*

Bodies: The Exhibition

I missed this the first time it came to town, and upon finding out that Wendy did too, we became resolute in our determination to see it this time around. Because they were open on Thanksgiving, and Thanksgiving was the only day I thought I had off this week, we did it in the morning yesterday.

I can't really stress enough how awesome this exhibit is and how much everyone needs to see it all the time. There's just something about the use of real human bodies for the displays that you just can't get with models or charts or diagrams. There were several disembodied parts in glass cases all around the exhibit, which were certainly interesting (and informative, with the aid of a small audio tour guide you can purchase), the real draw of the exhibit, for me at least, was the full body displays like our friend to the right there.

Standing in close proximity to actual, preserved human corpses was absolutely breathtaking. I was left completely dumbfounded at times by the realization that, holy shit, these were people once. Observing the individual pieces strewn about is easy enough to intellectualize and get your head around, even if they were actual bits of actual people, but something about seeing a complete set, being presented with a human being preserved in its entirety, was utterly fascinating, and hit me somewhere fundamental. I mean, I'm an organ donor and all, but when I die, I can only hope that my body is used for something even halfway as awesome.

Not to say that these displays are the only thing worth seeing there. Might I interest you in a disembodied circulatory system?

I choose this particular display not just because it's so visually stunning, but how they went about it was, simply put, totally awesome. What they did is inject a casing into the body, waited until it filled the vascular system and hardened, and then submerged the body in high strength acid that melted away everything else. So what you're seeing aren't actual veins, but rather the path that the blood takes throughout your body (which is, essentially, everywhere).

And I can assure you that the pictures I posted here (or others you can find online) don't do it proper justice. Go see it. You'll be glad you did.

Thanksgiving

After Bodies, I hopped a bus straight from downtown back up into Lynnwood to visit my parents for Thanksgiving dinner. This year was different, because it marked not only the first time I'd been back to my parents house in the past couple of months, but also this was my very first Thanksgiving there since I moved out, as a guest this time rather than a member of the household.

To be honest, I was a bit nervous that many of the things which frustrated me or caused contention while I was living with my parents would come to bear again (as they had the last time I visited, the weekend after I moved out), but I was pleasantly surprised. I showed up, dinner was ready, I ate while making (admittedly sort of small) talk with my parents and grandparents, and then played Wii sports against my little brother, who defeated me rather soundly in several rounds of digital sword fighting. We had pie, and then I managed to make off with a tupperware full of leftovers and completely avoid doing dishes.

Simply put, I had a good time. It was refreshing.

*The corpse in question was a turkey corpse. Turkey.

The return of the semi-bi-monthly blog!

2009-10-16T23:30:00.001-07:00

Sort of, I guess.

Shut up. I blog precisely when I mean to.

Basically, I just really wanted to make sure this got onto the internet:
Now that you've had a chance to at least try and process that devoid of context, let me provide some the best way I know how: by assaulting you with a flood of verbiage.

The above was the end result of Game Day at Jedi's house, a gathering I managed to get into which involved being at Jedi's house, and also playing games. Looking back I only actually played a few games, but these games are definitely worth mentioning.

1. Galaxy Trucker
If you've never contemplated what it might be like to be a spacefaring redneck trucking cargo throughout the known cosmos, then I posit that you have not truly lived, good sir. The way this game works involves having everyone build their ships out of tiles under a time limit at the very beginning. The process works very much like scrabble, in that the tiles start face down, and you can only pick them up one at a time to look at them and decide whether or not to add them to your ship. Discarded tiles go back into the pile, but face up so everyone can see them. The tiles represent everything from cargo holds to batteries to crew quarters to shields to laser beams, all of which are necessary to some degree or another if you want to make the most money while simultaneously avoiding becoming a hunk of floating debris. Events are dictated by a deck of cards which gets larger and more sinister as the game progresses through its three rounds. Players move around a board, but your position only matters relative to the other players, as it determines who gets the first shot at flipping the next card to find fortune, or perhaps the first to deal with Smugglers, Slavers, Space Pirates and the odd meteor storm or three. At the end of each round you cash in your cargo and pay for any broken ship parts, and once the space dust settles the richest man wins.

2. Dominion
I'm not really sure that I can add too much to the praise that this game has already gotten, but for the three of you who have been spending your nights under a rock at the bottom of the ocean, I suppose I can try and give you an impression. This was my first time playing Dominion, and it really is as good as everyone says it is. I'm a sucker for strategy-heavy cards games and get downright excited by the prospect of resource management, so the idea of a game during which you strategically assemble a deck of cards to maximize your resources while trying to keep everyone else from doing the same gives me a straight-up nerdgasm. Add to that a wide range of different cards to choose from to generate constantly varying gameplay, as well as a recent expansion of entirely new cards, and it was all I could do to keep from popping wood. Ridiculously easy to learn, but with a rewarding depth of strategy. Bottom line, this is a game that should be in the collection of even the most casual of tabletop gamers, and is an absolute necessity for the hardcore.

3. Curses!
Towards the end of the night, our eyes were getting droopy and our minds a little dull, and the prospect of playing another long game where we had to think a lot was beginning to sound unappealing. Enter Curses!, the appropriately punctuated game best played by the easily excitable. The premise is simple: every turn, you draw a card from the challenge deck. This card will tell you to do something, whether it be explaining how to shave your invisible cat, pretending to be a cop and pulling over the player to your left, or playing a game show host and announcing that night's guests. After completing the challenge, you give the top card of the Curse deck to the player of your choice. Curses dictate how you act, weird shit from howling like a wolf whenever anyone claps to saying everything through your invisible CB radio. If someone breaks a curse by forgetting to behave in the way it describes, another player can ring the bell in the middle and call them on in. Break three curses and you're out (although you get to hand any of your remaining curses to whatever player you wish).

Last man standing wins.

Now, I don't mean to brag or anything, but I sort of fucking rocked at this game. I think it has something to do with how my bizarre sense of humor combines with my complete and utter lack of shame (and how the two of them mixed so wonderfully with the addition of alcohol). By the time I won, the list of curses I had acquired were thus:

- When the player to the left talks, constantly interrupt them.
- Talk like you have an invisible golf ball in your mouth
- 1 inch long arms (you must keep your wrists in contact with your chest at all times)
- Talk like Elmer Fudd
- Act like a Rock Star and strum your invisible guitar whenever you speak.
- Pinch your nose whenever you talk.
- Talk through clenched teeth.
- Whenever anyone touches you, hunch over your invisible pot of gold and cry "They're always after me lucky charms!"
- Talk like a pirate
- Every time bell is rung, cry like a baby.

The only curse I broke is when I once forgot to cluck like a chicken before I spoke.

Towards the end of the game it basically boiled down to me hunching over the table whenever anybody did anything, repeatedly grunting nasally through clenched teeth followed by an Elmer Fudd laugh, all while pantomiming something that looked very much like a Tyrannosaurus Rex desperately trying to masturbate.

So you can see why this is my kind of game.

Shortly after the game was finished it somehow came to the attention of Pixie (whom I had previously met playing Galaxy Truckers) that I used to be Mormon until recently, and therefore had yet to get laid (as it turns out over twenty years of willing abstinence combined with a sheltered upbringing really puts a damper on your sex life). Determined to help me in the best way she knew how, she dutifully collected crack team of women from among the Enforcers there and compiled a beginner's guide to sex using a series of offbeat analogies combined with inside jokes about zombie movies, comic books, and Strongbad. After a solid half hour of alternately laughing helplessly and turning inventive new shades of red, the studious note-taking that River had been doing produced the image at the beginning of this post, which I'm prepared to call one of the greatest thing that has ever been committed to paper.

So that was my Game Day. Hope they'll have me back next time, too.

Holy fuck this is the best thing anyone's ever done with a pancake.

2009-09-27T15:09:00.000-07:00

Wendy and I made pancakes the other day, and she devised a plan so wonderful that I felt it had to be documented for future generations.

1. You start with a pancake the size of a dinner plate.

2. Nutella. 'Nuff said.

3. More Nutella. Also, peanut butter to taste.

4. Rargh....graarrgh...BANANA MONSTER!

5. ??????????

6. HOLY SHIT IT'S A PANCAKE TACO!

As you may well imagine, biting into this warm nugget of culinary genius is like a flavor punch in the face from a semi truck full of deliciousness propelled entirely by a wave of tasty. Also the truck might be a ninja.

And this is just the Mark I, kids. Don't think we're stopping there.

On Pubs, and the Crawling Thereof

2009-09-23T21:52:00.000-07:00

11 Days. Not a terrible haitus, I suppose. Where was I? Oh yes, Pre-PAX dinner, then on to the pub crawl.

After a brief stop at the hotel to fetch my fluffy pink bathrobe (can't have a night of drinking and not bring your bathrobe), I met a several people at the Green Tortoise and we all hopped a ride on the SLUT (people will tell you it's the South Lake Union Streetcar and not a trolley, but we all know better) to get down to the Naval Reserve Building (I really love parenthetical statements, just so you know).

This year was my first year at the Pre-PAX dinner, and indeed my first year at any of the community events, and as such I was trying to fit as many of them in as humanly possible this time around. So I must say that after two full days of MMT shenanigans (and a non-PAX George Clinton concert thrown in for good measure), I was already starting to feel a tad weary. So as you can imagine, I was excited that the next stop on my whirlwind PAX adventure involved two of my very favorite activities: eating, and not moving.

The not moving portion of the evening came first, as after we funneled in and got our forum member badge holders, our sweet Pre-PAX Dinner Buttons, and a free bottle of Bawls, we spent a good amount of time sitting around, trading buttons, and geeking out in general.

Oh, and this happened:

Video artfully captured and mixed by our good friend arnonaut, hereafter known as the man. Keep in mind that there was no alcohol involved in this occurrence, only Bawls.

Bawls, and love.

It was at this point in the proceedings I decided that it was best to try and commemorate the accomplishment of gathering so many wonderful people in to one area by hopping up on the balcony and snapping a photo with the PAX pirate overlooking the dinner. As you can see by the blurry picture to the left, the photo was eventually taken, but not without...complications.

You see, there is a maleficent force for evil and also not-good in this world, and her name can be garnered from the terrified whispers of children: eye-shuh.

Whereas most normal people would have had their hearts warmed by such a gesture, on account of them having hearts and all, the rock solid and cold black void that eye-shuh substitutes for a heart was not amused. True to her Omegabat name, she snuck up behind me in pure silence (maybe she swung down from a gargoyle?), stole the pirate, and held it precariously over the edge.

Now, I don't have any pictures of this instance due to the fact that both of my hands were busy defending the very life of my swashbuckling plastic friend, but I'll see if I can't paint you a picture:

Two full-grown adults, he in a pink bathrobe and yellow tie, her in a goddamn cape, both draped in 1.5 inch wide circular buttons, struggling epically and wholeheartedly to decide the fate of a Playmobil plastic toy pirate while below a crowd of onlookers watches intently, several of them dressed as teenage wizards.

Goddammit, I love my friends.

And if anyone has any pictures (or video!) of this battle, I need that shit like a fat kid needs cake. By which I guess I mean it's not strictly necessary, but dammit I want some.

After eating delicious, delicious food from Skillet, people started separating into their various houses in preparation for the pub crawl that would finish everything off.

While I'm on the subject of Hogwarts houses and pink bathrobes (vaguely pictured to the right there), I'd like to mention another nugget of greatness that came from arno that night. Given that there were several of us who weren't officially in houses (although I was lending my dual support to both Hufflepuff and Slytherin in spirit), and that at least a couple of us were in bathrobes, it was decided that there needed to be a Big Lebowski/Animal House-esque washout house where all of the lazy drunkards and party animals go. Thus was born the Manatee house, affectionately also known as the "Dugong Dudes". Watch for us next year. We'll be the lazy ones.

I ended up starting the pub crawl off following Slytherin around, which may not have been the best choice due to the fact that our first stop on the crawl was at The Garage in Capitol Hill. Many of us suspect that this was a ploy instituted by AtlusParker, organizer of the pub crawl and, interestingly enough, Gryffindor head boy. This is because, while some of the house took cabs there, a majority of us decided to walk. And walk we did. An hour later (just in time to start heading to the next bar), we all showed up a panting, sweaty crowd to meet our more spendy comrades just in time to grab a quick drink (I think I had a whiskey sour?) and try to catch up with them at our next stop: The Chapel.

The Chapel gets its name from the fact that it looks like it is (and very well may be) a chapel ironically remodeled for the purpose of drunkenness and debauchery. We managed to meet up with at least part of the house there, grabbed some drinks, hang out, and head on over to Linda's, where we would be meeting up with Hufflepuff for our first challenge.

Now, Linda's knew we were coming (and indeed was nice enough to put a wizard-themed drink, the "Cherry Potter", on the menu), but even so, as 100 nerdy drunk people dressed as wizards descended on the quiet little pub, you could see a mixture of annoyance and honest-to-god fear in the eyes of the bouncer checking IDs. I got a Cherry Potter (how could I not?), and a White Russian to wash it down with. There were a bunch of people who had squatted at Linda's to watch the houses roll through, so I found them and hung out for a while.

After a while, I realized that none of my Slytherin brethren were around anymore, and must have headed out to the next stop already. The Hufflepuff crowd was still there, though, and I was in a yellow necktie, so I figured I'd follow them the rest of the night. They were leaving soon, so I hurried to the bar to settle up.

This is where my night started to get interesting. While I was waiting for my tab, some guy came up to me and asked exactly what all of the costumed drinking was about. I told him we were all in town for PAX, and that we were a ton of nerds on a bar crawl. He asked if he could tag along with us, and I said sure. What's the worst that could happen? So we left with Hufflepuff.

It turns out that tagging along with 'us' meant tagging along with me, and just me. I figured he would mingle, at least a little, but the fucker followed me around like a sick puppy. At one point I mentioned (to other people) that I didn't know exactly where I would be sleeping because DIMD, who's floor I was crashing on, hadn't come on the crawl and might have been asleep by then. Once we got back to the Chapel (because Hufflepuff was doing the same list of bars, backwards), he mentioned to me that he lived about ten minutes away, and if I needed to he had a couch I could crash on.

Think about that for a second. I refused on the grounds that I met him ten fucking minutes ago.

I grabbed a water (both because I was poor and probably needed to stop drinking anyway), and true to his modus operandi he proceeded to follow me around and grab a seat next to me, where he proceeded to talk my ear off about something he managed to make terribly uninteresting. Sitting there, ignoring him, and staring into my drink, I was hit with some sudden realizations:

1) I was cruising bars in Capitol Hill.
2) Some guy from the area wanted me to crash on his couch.
3) I was wearing a pink bathrobe.

Jesus H. Tapdancing Christ, I was on a terrible date with a gay man.

Now, I can't really say for certain whether or not he really was gay, because I never thought to ask as I found some reason to excuse myself and get the fuck out of there, but even if he wasn't he was annoying enough to make me want to leave and find Slytherin again. So that's what I did. Here are two authentic drunk text messages from that night, one to eye-shuh, one from:

Me: Off to hunt down Slytherin.
Her: Oh dear god. Please don't die or get raped.

While I managed to avoid doing either of those two things, I also managed to completely avoid finding Slytherin again, despite many repeated calls to Erica (BrokenAngel) to the effect of "what? where are you guys? I'm like right here, but I can't see you? Oh, the other Pine?"."

I did manage to find Gryffindor, though. Twice. And this cool piece of street graffiti.

Eventually during my drunken wanderings I managed to get enough of my bearings to realize that I was reasonably close to the Convention Center, and therefore to the hotel room I was going to be crashing on the floor of. I decided through a combination of exhaustion and finally sobering up a little that it was probably time to call it a night. I gave DIMD a call, and luckily he was still awake, and even more luckily he was about to watch Greaser's Palace, quite possibly the single greatest worst movie ever made. I highly reccommend it to anyone who can find a copy.

So next comes posting about actual, honest to God PAX. Maybe if I post daily I can finally catch up to the damn present?

See you all next time.

A (Hopefully Brief) Hiatus.

2009-09-12T23:31:00.000-07:00

I know I promised you pub crawl and pre-PAX dinner, but I'm going to deviate from the regularly scheduled programming somewhat (hey, the blog is called Lies and Balderdash, right?).

I just wanted to give everyone fair warning that I'm about to drop of the face of the planet for a little while.

Tonight is the night where I have to finish packing up all of the little things that I've left out and been using on a regular basis, so I can finally have everything packed. Unfortunately this means both my 360 and my computer (which wouldn't be such a problem if my laptop weren't so broken, but whatever) are going away. Even more unfortunate is the fact that I have no idea when we'll have internet at my house after we move in, so short of some unsuspecting, unsecured wireless next door I'll be completely off the grid for an indefinite period of time. My cell phone will be the only means of electronic communication by which people can reach me, which is good I suppose, because that's what cell phones are for, but regardless being without a steady connection to the internet will be positively maddening. It's very possible I'll wind up on the floor twitching and muttering something about "the javagoogles".

Sitting here posting this I get a distinct sort of "last night on Earth" feel, both because this is likely to be my last communique with the online world in a while, and because in less than 12 hours I'm fucking moving out. My life is currently taking up maybe 20 square feet of space in my parent's garage, boxed up nicely to be transported to the next big step in it. It is at once both terrifying and exhilarating.

Like most things in my life, Randall Munroe manages to put it much more eloquently than I do, and with stick figures to boot:

I guess tomorrow I'm an adult, officially? I certainly don't feel any different.

MMT Day 2: Electric Boogaloo?

2009-09-10T22:35:00.000-07:00

I'm going to try and keep this post a little more readable than the wall of text that was my last. I suppose that where Twitter forces me into unreasonable brevity, this blog is a proper avenue for being unreasonably verbose. Perhaps I can strike a happy middle ground? We shall see.

Day 2 of the Magical Mystery Tour was sans bus, but all of the joyous spirit that permeated the first day remained safely intact. Our numbers grew as well, as people just arriving from out of town filtered in for a day of fun before PAX proper.

We met in front of the WSCTC and hitched a ride on the monorail to The Experience Music Project/ Sci Fi museum. This is yet another thing which, despite being a Seattle native, I had yet to actually experience for myself. You'd be surprised how little of a city's tourist attractions you see when you live there. I suppose it's some sort of mental construct which curtails the need to go see awesome shit because you live near it. Perhaps it's for the best, though, because if they'd let me I'm pretty goddamn sure I would pitch a tent right next to the original Death Star model and camp the fuck out.

Almost everything about the Sci Fi museum was, as you might well have expected, dorky nerd's wet dream come true. I say almost due to one glaring flaw: upon entering the museum proper (just past the GORT statue), we were informed that you weren't allowed to take pictures.

I'll let that sink in.

Let me put this in perspective for you: There is a case in this museum. In this case, there are no less than seven robots. That's seven more than most cases in most museums! I'm not sure they fully appreciate exactly what they've got there when they prop R2D2 up next to the Terminator. How am I not going to take pictures of this phenomena, when it takes every fiber of my self restraint not to break the glass and have my illicit way with the robot from Lost in Space?

And that's just the robots. There's a full size Stormtrooper in there, and guns and jetpacks, and a statue that's supposed to be Charleton Heston but totally looks like Chuck Norris (and either way looking primed and ready for some ass kicking). And I think I mentioned that there was the original model of the Death Star, the one they used in the movie? There was a button in front of it, that caused it to light up and play the Imperial March. I kept looking for the button to blow up a planet.

Needless to say this rule cramped my style, somewhat, when I was forced to take crappy stealth pictures with my cell phone instead of with my camera (a la the one to the right, there). Unfortunately a member of the SciFi Museum's anti-fun squad caught me before I could nab a picture of the Death Star, but believe me, that's no moon.

Regardless of the draconian picture policy, though, it was still thousands of square feet filled to the brim with everything that we hold dear. Certainly worth a visit, if only to see how many pictures you can take before they catch you. My record is 3. I know you can do better, people. Fight the power.

At some point we were supposed to look around EMP, but as it turns out there was a gift shop for the SciFi museum. Despite the fact that I promised myself I wasn't going to spend ridiculous amounts of money on tourist trap items in my own damn city, I still ended up buying a t-shirt that said "Don't Phase Me, Bro!". Something about the brazen collision of geek culture references and internet memes warms my heart and loosens my wallet. It's like they got peanut butter in some chocolate, and it was so fucking awesome that they made an awesome shirt and sold it to me. Or something.

Either way I still consider this a win, because I didn't also buy every other item in the whole damned store.

Just outside the entrance to the store there was a TV display showing off a copy of Star Trek Scene It?, a DVD party game soaked in the delicious irony that if you're really good at it, you likely don't get invited to many parties.

To be fair, though, I was shoulder to shoulder with a bunch of other nerds relentlessly mocking the game while simultaneously failing at it for the space of at least an hour. For a taste of how awful I was, my first answer to a fade-in picture "name that character" question was Lando Calrissian, before I was politely informed that this was Star Trek. Either way 90 percent of the questions were damn near impossible, even to a group of accomplished nerds such as ourselves. I mean, how were we supposed to know that a ceti slug was missing from the photo when the only other thing in the photo is tongs?

So eventually we realize that there is, you know, a whole other tourist attraction we have yet to go to, but to be honest in the short amount of time I had to look at it I was underwhelmed. Perhaps I'm not enough of a music nerd or didn't have enough time to fully explore, but regardless I had barely taken a pitcure of the PAX Pirate (as he had come to be known) next to Michael Jackson's jacket and glove before we were off to meet the CCST back at the WSCTC and then depart for some R&R.

Speaking of R&R, it's getting a little late now, and the Pre-Pax Dinner and Pub Crawl deserve to have their stories fleshed out far better than I have the energy for right now, so I'll leave those for later. Until next time.

I went to PAX 2009 and all I got was this lousy swine flu.

2009-09-09T10:10:00.000-07:00

No, really.

Now, before people start sending me their condolences or (perhaps more likely) asking if they can have all of my stuff, keep in mind that it's really just the flu, swine or not. All of the deaths from swine flu came out of the third world, which is a full two worlds below the one I'm in. It's not like everyone is coming down with swine AIDS or swine Parkinson's.

But the title of this post is not a little disingenuous, because I certainly can't say that disease was the only thing that I took away from PAX this year without doing a serious injustice to both the convention itself, and its incredible community.

Not to get too mushy, but I started meeting people at pre-PAX events over the summer, and in the space of three months I made more friends (genuine ones, not the cheap knockoffs like you find at discount stores) than I had previously managed to garner myself in the year prior. I had thought I was full up on friends at this point, but that notion was shattered when PAX finally came around and I realized that the portion of people I had met were just the locals, and that the rest of the PAX party iceberg was located far below sea level, just waiting to sink my PAX Titanic into the deepest depths of the PAX shenanigans ocean.

I suppose I should start at the beginning. For me PAX started two days prior to PAX proper, when I convinced myself (with little effort) that I needed to tour my own city via the Magical Mystery Tour. For those of you who don't know, the MMT is a two-day guided tour put on this year as a joint effort between Erin Bestrom (our very own MetaverseNomad) and Isha Zubeidi (better known as The Goddamn Omegabat). I'm not sure what the official head count for this year was, but I know it was hovering right around 40 people or so. My day started next to a Golden Pig in Pike Place Market, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Our first stop was the Seattle Aquarium. I hadn't actually been to the aquarium in ages, so it was refreshing to finally go back and look at how little things had changed from the last time I had been there (except that I was viewing everything from higher up). That said, it was still completely aweseome. Cool looking fish and interesting factoids aside (did you know that Tiger sharks are 12 feet long on average, or that they have an Orca-themed set of trading cards?), once again it was the people that made this particular venue. Whether it was imitated whale calls (we have video!) or remarkably detailed plans to start an underwater octopus cage fighting ring, the laughs were in no short supply as we endeavored to put the word "wang" on as many things as humanly possible. Oh, and there were otters! Cute little fuckers.

After that, we went to the well known Underground Tour of Seattle, which despite being a Seattle native for the past 20 years, I had never actually bothered to try and attend before. So naturally I was excited as we all funneled in, paid for our wristbands, and sat down for a 20 minute talk about all of the stuff that people don't want you to know about Seattle.

I don't want to bore you with all of the details, but suffice it to say that Seattle was built on top of mud, every single person that had anything to do with founding Seattle is a dirty scumbag, poop jokes are still funny after the even after the 4th time, and making fun of Tacoma never gets old, ever.

Oh, and don't throw water onto a grease fire in a room filled with sawdust next to several buildings full liquor, dynamite, and ammunition. Just a heads up.

Our tour guide (Steve if you like him, Tom if you don't) was amazing and made the whole tour lighthearted and fun despite being informative.

It was generally agreed upon, I believe, that the most interesting piece of information that came out of the tour was news of Seattle's former "garment disctrict", which raked in upwards of 80% of Seattles income for several years due to a very loose definition of "hemming" which involved the "seamstress" letting someone put his "penis" into her "vagina". You know, if you catch my drift.

So the long and short of it is that my hometown was built on a foundation of mud, shit, lies, sex, and a stolen Alaskan totem pole. I knew there was a reason I loved Seattle so much.

After the Underground Tour, we met up with the bus (yes, we had a bus, and yes, it was awesome). It was on this bus that the trivia game started, wherein Nomad would ask Seattle-related trivia questions and then I would answer them and get buttons. Okay okay, so there were other people who answered questions too, but suffice it to say that by the time we stopped at Essential Bakery (which is apparently famous even though I'd never heard of it), I had nine buttons. This will be important later.

So we descended on Essential Bakery like a school of nerdy sharks hungry for blood (or sandwiches, we weren't picky), and after we had gotten what we'd come for we headed to Gasworks Park for lunch and a rousing round of MarioKart.

I'd like to take a moment here and immortalize a particular occurrence. We had 7 human players and rounded out the 8th with a CPU, upon which Isha announced that anyone that came in behind the CPU was getting their gamer card revoked, to which Nomad agreed. At the end of the round, through a flurry of shells, bananas, and lightning, the only two people who managed to come in behind the CPU were (gasp!) Isha and Nomad. Hm. Of course, they destroyed us in the rest of the races and got first and second overall, but the irony is too delicious not to spread around everywhere.

Also, on our way out I got a call from "Jules Walker with Q13 Fox News" to inform me that I had won a $100 giftcard to Taphouse, defying all logic and somehow making my day even better. Liger, if you're reading this, I still owe you drinks.

After Gasworks we discovered that you can't really get a 58-person bus anywhere near the Ballard Troll, so we moved on to the Ballard Locks. They were locks, and um, they were in Ballard. Also, there were salmon, too. And a salmon ladder. You know, for the salmon.

Moving on, we stopped at Archie McPhee's because everyone, at least once in their lives, should stop in a store that physically carries the Avenging Narwhal playset, or action figures for Poe, Jund, Freud, Einstein, Houdini, and a plethora of other wonderful historical figures who totally deserve action figures but get muscled out by the likes of GI Joe. I mean, when's the last time Snake Eyes revolutionized and entire branch of scientific theory? Or convinced a ton of people that they secretly want to have sex with their mothers? Yeah, that's what I thought. For some strange reason I don't seem to have any photos from Archie's, but that's probably just because I was having way too much fun looking at all of the awesome shit in that store. I mean, where else will you find a pink suede skull less than 10 feet away from a set of band-aids that look like bacon, which in turn is right next to a roll of packing tape covered in Jesus?

The next and final stop was at Trophy Cupcakes. Now, I must admit that my default stance on everything is skepticism. So when everyone I talked to told me that "OMG THESE ARE LIEK TEH BEST CUPCAKES EVER LOL!!111!1" (and they said it just like that, I swear), I remained unconvinced. They might be tasty, but I was reserving judgement until I had actually experienced them for myself.

The verdict?

OMG THESE ARE LIEK TEH BEST CUPCAKES EVER LOL!!111!1

I ended up grabbing one of the Chai Cardamoms, selected purely because it had the word "Chai" in it (who the hell even knows what a cardamom is?), and it was literally like someone had given my mouth a massage with a happy ending. I don't know what the fuck they do to those things, but it works. Also there was a platter (pictured) full of Star Wars themed cupcakes. It's like they knew we were coming, and wanted to welcome us in style.

After trophy we returned to the WSCTC to call it a day and say our goodbyes until the next morning. Oh, and to hand out sweet prizes for the trivia. Remember way back up the post when I said I had nine buttons? Well, that turned out to be about 3 more than anyone else had, so I slid rather effortlessly into first while everyone else did rock paper scissors for second and third. First place earned me a small plastic Playmobil Pirate, which is currently residing on top of my computer monitor.More on him later.

Seeing as how I'm just now through my first day of PAX shenanigans and this post is already getting too long, I'll take blogging about PAX much like I took PAX itself: one day at a time.