Cow-Town Getaway

One of my friends described the place she’ll be going to for college as “Cow Town”, implying a rural area.  I like that.  I’m going to Cow Town myself, in five or six or seven hours.  Oh God.  I need to sleep!  The trip out to somewhere in Pennsylvania takes around three hours, and the place we stay is a little hideaway we call Zook & Lyter’s.  It’s far enough off the main road to be secluded, and it’s gorgeous.  The most peaceful place I’ve ever been.  Right next to the Juniata River, beyond that some tree-covered mountains the name of which escape me.  A train runs through them, somewhere.  This place even neighbors an Amish settlement-place.  When it gets dark there, it gets DARK.  You can see all the stars.  It would be a great romantic place.

I can’t really describe the feeling it gives me.  There’s no Internet, though there is electricity and plumbing (well, septic tanks).  I like how it gets me away from TV and shit like that.  Just for a week.  Zook & Lyter’s is one of my favorite places.  It’s not like the beach or a boardwalk, or someplace you’d go to for entertainment (thus it’s generally a bad place to bring friends), but I still love it.  I’ve gone there every year since I was born, every year that I can remember.  It’s one of really just a few things that I dearly love and will miss one day.

I leave in even fewer hours than when I started this post.  I get back in around seven days.  Maybe I’ll fish when I get there.

The Hosts Are US!

How was your weekend?  Oh, I’m sorry, you can’t answer me intelligently, you’re a spam bot.  Riiiight.  Anyway, this past Saturday, we at the card shop had a large task to accomplish.  We hosted a regional tournament for Yu-Gi-Oh! at the Philadelphia convention center.

Now, regionals are nothing new to us.  I and my Dad have vended at a million of them.  But this time, one of the companies that was in charge of running these sorts of tournaments (Upper Deck Entertainment) was out of the picture after a lawsuit for producing counterfeit cards without their partner’s (Konami’s) permission (more about that).  UDE is the one that sanctioned the tournaments before, and hired people to run them.  Now, with Konami in charge of all of that, we had the opportunity to host our own tournament, which we did.  They approved us, and a tournament we had.

I haven’t slept in over 24 hours, so if I say things more than once, or a thought doesn’t seem like it came out right, that’s why.

Usually we have to pay whoever’s running the tournament in order to be there.  This time, since we were running the show, we not only got to vend as per the usual, but we also got to keep all the sweet cash that the hosts usually make from the tournament registration fees.  Sweeet.  Yeah, this regional definitely stood out from others.  Usually, the sales will trail off throughout the day.  Most of our business will be nearer to the tournament’s beginning.  But this time it kept pumping.  We were doing business throughout the whole day, which is awesome.  I was filling our bucket with the twenties that customers kept giving me to buy Special Edition packs or boxes or whatever of cards.  It was pretty great.

Konami’s never done this shit before.  They’ve never sanctioned balonie.  As a result, they suck at it.  They didn’t send us tournament policy info until around two days before the tournament was scheduled.  That’s stuff that we’re supposed to have weeks ahead of time.  What was worse was the tournament software they made us use.  It fucking sucked hard.  From what I gleaned of one conversation, I think they tested it on like 16 players?  Well, we had around 250 players at our event.  Round 6 or so didn’t happen.  The software was simply a piece of shit incapable of running the tournament after a certain point.  What ended up happening instead was the top 64 players all getting invites to Nationals, which is fucking unheard of.  What’s more, we did a top 64, which is when the tournament switches from Swiss-style to single-elimination playoffs.  That’s also unheard of.  I mean, we did a great day businesswise, but it was so prolonged.  We had to rush to get out before the janitors killed us or something.  At any rate, I made more money than I’ve ever made doing one of these things, and I think the card shop did too.  It worked out well in the end.

Okay, so the reason I’ve been awake for 25-26 hours now is that, well, I’ve been going to bed at a certain time, say 3 or 4 AM, and just lying in bed, thinking instead of falling asleep.  Just the other day, before I decided to do this, I went to bed at like 1 or so and woke up at 4 PM the next day!  How does that happen?  So, to try and fix this, I’ve just been staying awake, to give myself far better control of when I go to bed and fall asleep tonight.  It’s been rough, but I’m pretty stable right now.  No dozing or delerium at the moment, no drunken loss of control due to fatigue.  Mostly a general tiredness behind everything I do.  I’m also drinking a Bawls right now, so that might contribute to that.  Now, I wonder what time I should actually go to sleep tonight…

Last Week: Grad Party, Transformers, Denny Wednesdays, Alright!

Last week was full of things.  Here they are! *throws*

The day after my last post, a Saturday, was the day of the grad party of my best friend Paul.  I had been to a few grad parties a couple weeks beforehand, each taking place at the respective graduatee’s house.  The first was the best of them.  The next was just alright, and the one after that (same day even) was short for me, since I had to work.  But this last one, Paul’s, took the cake.  First of all, his wasn’t at his house, it was at a local ballroom.  Waiters and everything, even a bartender who looked like he just hated being there.  Awesome!  It was awesome, actually.  The other attendants were people of varying closeness to me, from pretty-good-friend to someone-I-might-have-never-seen-before.  At any rate, this party eventually deteriorated into leaving and getting another friend, opening helium balloons, and three of us ending up back at my house to play Rock Band 2.  It was fun.  The best of the parties, imo.

Wednesday I and eventually around eleven others went to see Transformers 2.  I didn’t really expect so many people to be going.  I just got a call one day from Paul asking if I wanted to see Transformers 2 on opening night, which I agreed to, since we hardly get out to see movies anyway, and I wasn’t about to decline a trip on opening night.  Tuesday at around 9 PM I got another call from Paul, telling me to be at his house.  It turned out that another friend of mine, Mike, was picking us up.  A third friend, Clinton, was waiting for us in the car as well.  That’s four.  Then we went to Mike’s house, where we met up with the rest of who would fill up nearly an entire row in the theatre.  No names.  Too many (plus I don’t exactly remember them all).  At any rate, we were met with even more friends after we got our seats.

Then we waited.  For an hour.  Actually, after I switched from one end of the row to the other, waiting around became good fun.  What was also fun was a delay in the previews, followed by a problem with the audio/video sync during the previews, and some of the beginning of the movie.  But they fixed it, so it was good.  The movie itself was pretty fucking awesome, aside from the unnecessarily high rate of penis jokes and humor like that.  But that stuff couldn’t ruin the awesome that the movie had.  Optimus kicked ASS!  And face!  And I was reminded of why I like premieres so much: the fans!  The clapping when something exciting happens!  One thing I hate most is when a movie has been out for two weeks and I’m just seeing it for the first time, and the other people there don’t give any shits.  I almost always feel like applauding a movie after I see it.

The night I had after Transformers was pretty great as well.  I need to end this post, so I won’t go into very much detail, but basically I sat around with some people I’ve only sort of met before and we hung out until it was daytime again, when those of us who were left went to Denny’s.  Denny Wednesdays!  Sounds good to me.

Oh yeah, I also got a new Xbox 360, it’s a graduation present, it might be broken and need returning, that’s it.  Really.

Hello Again

Ahhh, it feels…well, I don’t really know how it feels to be back yet.  I didn’t really leave, per se, so much as just stop posting things.  Apologies for that Terry thing I started.  Just messing around.  I honestly thought I had something there, but it kind of petered out as I wrote more.  Oh well.

So, I graduated high school.  Pretty sweet.  I thought it would hit me more, the whole being done with school, the not having to worry about anything for a while, but it hasn’t really.  What I have noticed is that without school, I’ve pretty much lost direction.  I got out of bed at 3:00 in the afternoon today.  I don’t think there’s been a single day this week when I’ve actually gotten up before noon, at least not to go back to sleep again.  However, my work schedule is changing soon, requiring me to be at work AT noon most days, so that should fix me up.

When was my last post?  March?  That’s a good three months.  Whenever I get back to posting after a while, I always want to clean up things.  Like right now, it feels like I have too many categories.  Most of them don’t get used at all.  It seems like there are too many to choose from.  It’s just kind of annoying.  Do I even need categories?  I wonder how many I could just delete…

Oh shit, and how do I label this post?  D :

Terry

On Sunday a man came to Terry’s house.  His visit wasn’t unprovoked, or unexpected.  More so, there was nothing Terry could do about it.  Anything Terry did would just give the man’s coming more urgency.  Terry had been sitting in the sofa, arms stretched over the arms, back straight upright against the back.  He had watched as the owner of the house, a tall middle-aged brunette named Louise, pressed the phone against her frizzed hair, staring straight at Terry with her weary, worried eyes.  “It’s gotten worse.  I…I don’t feel safe any…yes…yes, that’s fine…as soon as possible, please…oh, thank you. Thank you.”

Mere days after the call, the man arrived.  He and the woman had made arrangements for the man to stay in the house for a week, during which time Louise would stay at a cousin’s house.  The man had with him a crew as well.  Terry stood by the wall and watched them bring in equipment: laptops, bundles of cable, cameras of all sorts, various other devices too.  They set up computers in the kitchen, and by the time they were finished there were cables and wires running through each room of the house.  There was a camera for almost every corner.  Terry stood, and the men walked by him without a passing glance, moving through him as he passed along through the kitchen, into the hallway, into the living room.  He stood before a camera as they set it up on a tripod.  It looked very expensive, top-of-the-line.  Terry tried to touch it, but it was too difficult.  Instead he put his arm back down and continued to stand, going unnoticed still.

Terry had lived in the house for decades.  He and his wife had lived there.  He and his wife, until his wife had a tragic, fatal accident with a truck while out on a walk.  The truck was going much too fast, and her death warranted the town borough to put up a restriction on trucks driving through the backstreets at all.  Her body was cremated, and left as an urn on the mantelpiece that later served as the living room’s main decor, around which the coffee table and sofas and chairs were now placed.  The rooms of the house had been changed since Terry lived there with his wife, furniture rearranged and finally replaced when it got too old.  The urn was gone now, in its place a gaudy, plastic vase containing fake yellow flowers.  Terry stood staring at this vase, in the place where his wife’s urn once stood.  He never got to spread his wife’s ashes.  He had still been going through the feeling of his wife’s presence, and just couldn’t part with her at the time.  Terry tried to see the urn again, but the plastic vase was in the way.  It was all he saw there.  He strode silently over to the obstruction; with a surge of energy through himself and a chill in the air, he lifted it up and threw it with all his might at the opposing wall.  The men in the room jumped and yelled at the event, one man darting out of the room.

“Yo, man!”
“What was that?”
“Fuckin’ crazy, man.  Jesus!”

Terry, calm again, looked at the spot once more.  There his wife’s urn stood, just as he remembered it.  He gazed at it lovingly, again standing still in the room.  The chill vanished.

“Man, lady was right.  Crazy shit goin’ down in here.”

(to be continued)

Zombies Calling

I’ve set up almost this list or line-up of graphic novels I’m interested in purchasing and then reading.  I keep hearing about The War At Ellsmere by Faith Erin Hicks.  Rather, I keep reading things about it or seeing something on SLG Publishing’s website.  Somehow I automatically simultaneously became aware of Zombies Calling, Hicks’ first published work.  Zombies Calling appealed to me more than The War At Ellsmere when I read up on them both, and it seemed like a good starting point for some reason, so I went and ordered myself a copy.

I was surprised at how short it was.  I guess I just expected something that takes a while to read, but maybe I have to get that idea out of my head.  With my first looks inside at the pages, I wasn’t sure of the art style.  It’s unique.  After re-reading the beginning twice, her style really started to appeal to me.  I breezed through half the book without realizing it.  Tonight I finished the rest of the book in similar fashion, though I was more aware of where I was in relation to the total number of pages.

What I like most about Zombies Calling, I think, is the style in which the characters like Joss are done.  Their expressions, with those big eyes, and their lips.  Fine lines creating detail within bold outlines that are everywhere.  What I thought was strange at first I soon came to love.  As well, at first I thought the writing was going to get to me.  It was something about the way Joss (the protagonist) talked about zombie movies, I don’t know.  Well, it turns out the writing didn’t get to me, and in fact I really enjoyed some exchanges, such as Joss and Sonnet in bed.  The art really helped, though.  As for the actual zombies, I think the comedic style of the zombies works well, though they didn’t make me laugh so much, personally.  They were more than enough to portray “Zombie!” however, and they certainly don’t look like something you want clambering all over you.

I think that the book really is held together well, with just this really nice arc of story, intro to action to ending.  By the end, I felt like Joss was an excellent character with her own world.  I like the ending given to the book.  I felt the little epilogue was a nice way to treat Joss.

Next on my list: Whistles Volume One: The Starlight Calliope.

http://www.faitherinhicks.com/

Poem: Starboy (revised)

Child you hurt your parents
When you flew away
Up beyond the atmosphere
Into stars that day
They’re sorry that they yelled at you
They wished that you would stay
Once you swept the window shade
When you flew away

Child you hurt your shuttle
Soaring into sky
Shown flight by a human girl
But not quite how to fly
She skewed the way you looked at life
And took you up too high
Poisoned was the air you breathed
Soaring into sky

Child you hurt your body
Sniffing evil foam
Drinking poisonous alcohol
Damaging your chrome
You’re sorry that you blasted-off
And now you can’t go home
Man lost in the endless void
Starboy all alone

I wrote the original version of this five or six months ago.  With the recent announcement of a poetry contest in my school, however, I took a look at the poem again, and decided it wasn’t perfected.  So I fixed it.  Now it has an entirely new second stanza, and modified third stanza.  Now I’m ready to enter it in the contest, which I could win $100 in if I win.  Pretty sweet.

Fatigued

Tired to the point of impairment.  A fatigued character can neither run nor charge and takes a -2 penalty to Strength and Dexterity.  Doing anything that would normally cause fatigue causes the fatigued character to become exhausted.  After 8 hours of complete rest, fatigued characters are no longer fatigued.

- Dungeons & Dragons v.3.5 Player’s Handbook

I’ve been extremley tired lately.  School for me starts at 7:40 AM.  I’ve been staying up very late at night for maybe the past few weeks, until 4 AM at my worst.  It’s not an inablility to sleep, so much as that combined with a lack of willingness to.  At any rate, regardless of cause, it’s been happening, and I’ve been really starting to feel the effects.

As well, my brother has noted more than once that I consume a lot of “crap” throughout the day: cookies, these creme-filled chocolate things, around four sodas.  I’ve been noticing myself getting more and more tired throughout the day, like just sitting here, tired.  After also noticing that any kind of soda I drink seems to have the effect of making me sleepy, I have decided that this is a problem that must be fixed.  I’m giving myself a limit of two sodas in a day, preferably one, eating less crap for snacks, and trying to get myself to bed at 1:00 AM at most.  That gives me about six or seven good hours of sleep, which is excellent in comparison to the three or four hour schedule I was on.

It’s such a great feeling to wake up at five in the morning, realize I have two more full hours before I need to get up, and then just roll over and go back to sleep.  So great.

As well, I have started this: http://hundredpushups.com/index.html.  I missed my self-set schedule already, which included yesterday.  I’ll do yesterday’s today, then tomorrow’s tomorrow as planned.  So far I like it.  I think it will work, and I think it’s definitely good for me.

To health!

Who Watches the Watchmen?

It was Thursday night, Friday morning.  The TV was on, but silent.  I sat leaning on my table, radiator hot by my side, lamp illuminating the glossy pages of the book.  It was 3:00 AM, and I was more than 3/4 of the way done with Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s Watchmen, excluding the chapter-break excerpts detailing the histories of the book’s characters.  I had a goal, and the goal was to finish the book before seeing the movie, a mere ten or eleven hours away.  I…uh…okay, this isn’t working.

Indeed I read, and I read quite a lot.  I eventually made it to the beginning of chapter 11, when the fatigue became too great, and I decided to get two hours of sleep before going to school that day.  During school, I nearly fell asleep during two different periods.  During the first of those two, the teacher had to wake me up.  Horrible.  But I did get most of the book read, and now I remember a surprising amount of details.  I kind of feel like I stretched my stamina for reading graphic novels.  I mean I read before.  But now I can really read.

I feel like Watchmen didn’t translate well into a movie.  I mean, a lot goes on in the novel.  I got the impression from the movie that the scenes were rushed in order to keep it from being too long.  Some scenes were cut, and some worked around altogether, understandably so for the time-frame needs.  But to me that doesn’t make the movie feeling rushed an understandable outcome, it still makes it worse as a movie.  Then again, maybe I can attribute the feeling to having just stopped reading the novel itself before I saw it.

I did like the movie.  What I really enjoyed was seeing the characters involved in so much action.  In the novel, there are some punches and things like that, and there is enough, but in the movie you really see the characters kick some ass.  Although to me they did seem a bit strong.  I thought they were just people who beefed-up and became superheroes, like a realistic take on it, but kicking someone ten feet through the air, while entertaining and full of awesome, is a little too inhuman.  The fight scene in the beginning of Watchmen involving Edward Blake and his assailant–the one nonexistant in the novel–was excellent!  Brutal, even.  It really was a good way to start off that movie.

Not actually having read the ending in the book, I felt a sense of awe seeing the ending of the movie.  That part  In all, there is no way I would call the Watchmen movie bad, but there is also no way I would call it better than the novel, or even seeing it the same experience as reading the novel.  The novel presents everything better.

I am not finished with Watchmen yet.  Having read most of the book and seen the movie, I must now read the rest of the book, including the background bits between chapters, and the full-paged parts of the sub-comic.

Poem: A Thought

I see each day and you look fine
And I have questions on my mind
I want to ask but I don’t know
The way that things are gonna go
It feels as though this could be it
But it’s like all the same old shit
I missed my chance, the timing’s wrong
You’ve been together for so long
The thought that I am offset by:
I wonder if you have moved on