Weekend Adventures

I woke up on Thursday at 1 PM.  I expected it to be basically any other Thursday, but the weather said otherwise.  My weekend started on Thursday at 5 PM when a rather vicious storm knocked out the power to most of the city.  Unable to be contacted from the outside by friends due to horrible cell phone reception (Thanks TracFone+AT&T), I had nothing else to do but lie around and complain about how warm it was getting in the house.

The home phone still worked though, and since we have not one or two but three phones that don't need wall power to work, it was ringing periodically.  After a while, when I'd just decided that I needed to take off my pants to try and stay cool (shirt was already off by this point), a couple friends came and rescued me from total boredom.

We drove around trying to find an open restaurant, and eventually ended up at the Wayside Deli, specifically, Durty Nelly's Pub.  This seemed to be the only street corner in Charlottesville with power, and approximately everybody was there.  I got the worst roast beef sandwich ever (It was advertised with all sorts of toppings, I ordered it toasted, and what I got was a very lightly toasted if at all sandwich with nothing but roast beef in it).  Went over to the convenience store that's connected to it and bought a NOS to drink.  Then we went over to another friend's house to hang out in darkness on his back deck.

Once it got really dark (it was 1 AM at this point) we moved from the back deck to the front of the house.  Continued talking about random shit (I don't even remember what we talked about) and then his power came back on.  That kind of defused the lack of power party, so we left to go bug another friend.  Partway through this we decided to go see if any fast food drive throughs were open; we couldn't find one.

After a while more of hanging out on his front porch in darkness, we left around 4 AM.  I got dropped off at home where I discovered that despite my best efforts I couldn't get to sleep.  Only at this point did I remember that I have a fucking battery powered fan.  So I chucked the batteries in it and got a current going, but I still couldn't fall asleep.  It was light at this point (around 6 AM) so I went downstairs.  After a while of sitting around absolutely bored, my parents took my car and drove to Culpeper or something.  I would have gone with them, but I wasn't really interested in doing anything that they'd have dragged me along on (except for food).  I used the time to read the volumes of the Negima manga that I've had sitting around since Christmas.  I'm behind on getting the official American release, but I do my best.  Del Rey's doing a pretty good job with it.

Luckily, all was not lost.  The generator got started up when my parents got home, and the rattiest looking box fan ever that my dad has was brought up from the basement because it moves more air than my battery powered fan.  This thing is impossible to kill, my mom once drove the car over it (an old Nissan Stanza wagon that ate oil for lunch) and it still works.  I ended up camped in front of it.  Then at 5 PM the fucking power came back on.  Shortly thereafter the friends from Thursday called to say that the LAN party they had been planning was a go, so I took a shower, got dressed, and hauled my computer over there, grabbing some Taco Bell on the way.  Grilled Stuft Burrito (with beef) combo and a large Mountain Dew Baja Blast no ice.

LAN party was awesome.  After a while of dicking around listening to Galneryus and browsing the internet catching up on things, I actually started gaming.  We got the absolutely worst game of Diablo 2 going, where the party never stuck together and only myself and one other person knew where to go.  I was playing a druid specced into shapeshifting named "furfag".  Yeah.  After we got bored of that I dicked around some more.  Started up my copy of Windows 3.1 in DOSBox and messed around in Paint.  The newer versions of paint lack a really neat brush from the windows 3.1 version: the one that only erases a specific color.  I made some bullshit abstract art thing that had a ton of colors and said "Win 3.1 FTW".  Then I played Minesweeper for a while.

Then it was suggested that we get a game going in an open source FPS based on Quake 3 called Nexuiz.  After getting my config set (mouse sensitivity defaults to like 3 or something, had to turn that shit up to 15 so I could turn) I joined in.  Somehow I won the second match.  Playing with a trackball.

Partway through this it was realized that a fair number of MAGFest staffers were present (pretty much everyone was at the very least an attendee), so it got asked out loud "how many people here AREN'T MAGFest staffers?" to which only about three people raised their hands.

We continued playing Nexuiz until photons started coming in from outside.  I'd lost total track of time by this point, so I don't know when we started playing or when we stopped, but it's one hella fun FPS.  Once it got bright enough outside, people started either crashing or shutting down and leaving.  I was part of the "shut down and leave" crowd.  Ever tried to pack up your computer's cables (no macfags at LAN parties, after all) in a dark basement where you can't see color?  Yeah.  Fortunately I didn't miss anything and got everything back home.  At this point, sweat was rolling off of my face.  I hooked my computer back up here, turned it and my server back on, set up my usual session, then took a shower and went to fucking sleep at 7 AM.

What a weekend.  To point some sleep-related statistics out, I'd been awake for over 24 hours when I got to the LAN party.  When I finally went to sleep, I'd been awake for 42 hours.  I got up briefly to eat dinner (woke up at 5 PM, couldn't get back to sleep), then my neck was having trouble supporting the weight of my head around 1 AM so I went back to bed.

Hopefully next weekend is normal.  Also hopefully soon my dad will get the Passat fixed so I have my car back.  Stupid water pump.