An after-action report from the Everclear/Democratic party rally/concert thing.

I knew they were coming, and was going to go. Got to try and take my history midterm through them soundchecking... "Yup. Yup. Yup." went on for a while. Which of course made me want to get the hell out of class and on over to the MU where they were playing. Unfortunately I got out of there so fast that I got to stand around for an hour. Luckily about half my friends were there, so I got to BS for a while and generally hang out waiting while dodging various people with flyers and things telling me how to vote. It was primarily a Democrat thing, but a bunch of Bush people were there, along with a few Nader supporters.

After eons of waiting, a guy that I've never heard of before from some campus organization that I've never heard of before got up and did the introductions. In his REALLY crappy speech he mentioned that Ron Wyden (Oregon senator, the original speaker) wasn't going to be here today, so we got the Oregon SecState, Bill Bradbury instead. Then we got the campus president/VP to give their little speeches (they did way better), and then Bill got up. Wearing an OSU football jersey. And his speech wasn't all that bad, as speeches go. He's just not a great speech giver.

But that's ok, cause Everclear was next, and we all knew what we were there for anyway, right? Let me preface this with the admission that I am not really an Everclear fan, I just went for the music and to see what the speeches were going to be. But they rocked. It kicked off with something to the effect of: "Get those Goddamn Bush/Cheney signs down! Don't you know they suck? Do you know what they're going to DO to you?" etc etc. The Bush people didn't like it much, and continued to wave their little things around, whereupon the response was "Look guys, I'm older than you. I have a lot more staying power. I'm not playing a note until those things go down." things calmed down at that point, and they began playing.

And they rocked. I don't know any of the songs, but it was good. There was a lot of people crowd surfing, lots of jumping up and down, people singing along (which was really cool), and the highlight of the show: Two girls not far from me got up on somebody's shoulders and started flashing the band. He played it pretty well, although I forget what he said. Something about breasts and choices and something. It was funny, whatever it was.

Songs ended, and the little pep talk began. And lemme tell ya, politicians should take lessons from rock stars, because they can give a speech better than any politician. Obligatory stuff about choices, how the Democrats are cool, etc. He gave a pretty good pro-abortion talk. Things broke up after that, and now here I am.

It should be noticed that A, this is my first concert, and B, this is my first political rally. Both aspects were pretty good, although I can't help but wonder if Wyden would have been a better speaker than Bradbury. No complaints about Everclear though. I'm actually inspired to listen to their albums now, as a matter of fact. Plus the whole thing was free, and I got a good excuse to skip out of math. How good does it get?

[edit]And this is post 4444. How cool is that?[/edit]

Entry purged by State Security.

And it's a beautiful day here in Oregon, rain everywhere, my clothes are soaked, and I'm so very very tired. Which of course is the result of my ignoring Marius' First Rule: Stay up until exhausted, then sleep like you're dead until you wake up again. Because trying to go to sleep when you aren't exhausted is dangerous. Because then I start thinking. And the bad thing about thought is, you can't stop it very easy once you start. So from my somewhat bizarre late night ponders, I bring you the next installment of Marius' Rant of the Day. Today's topic? Friends.

They're good things of course, but. You see, I'm sitting here with this book behind me. In specific, the Monstrous Manual for 3rd edition D&D. Because I'm the Dungeon Master, and I create all the adventures that everyone runs through. Which although time consuming, is fine. I enjoy doing it. I like thinking up storylines, I like creating things, and I like running them.

The problem is, what it took to get this book. I've had the first two books since the middle of last month. Which is the entire basis of the problem. I realized that to do ANYTHING, I was going to need the third book. My group, however, absolutely refused to believe that. "Just use the old version." Uh-uh. Rules have changed, kiddies. Did the problem end there, you ask? Nope. ICQ messages from 3 people EVERY SINGLE DAY asking "Do you have the new MM yet?" Well jeeze guys, it doesn't come out till the middle of October. "Oh, ok." About 2 weeks ago, it started again. "Well, do you have it yet? I'm really bored, and I wanna play." Well no, it ain't out yet. When it DID come out, I went to get it, and found my card didn't have money. So I ended up getting it yesterday. And none of my friends knows this yet, although that may change while I write because I'm talking to one.

Now that you've read that incredibly long story, I'll get to the point. I don't LIKE being somebody's boredom sink. I don't particularly want to hear about you being bored off your ass every single day. If you mention it, that's fine, but don't harp on me about it, and most of all don't expect ME to solve your problem. It's YOUR problem. I AM fully realizant that yes, some of this stems from the fact that they ARE my friends, and yes, I do live 20 miles away and that it's incredibly hard to see me without spending half an hour driving. OTOH, I'm somewhat bitter about the whole thing. I have spent incredible amounts of time slaving myself to the creation of both the adventures that they play and the worlds that they adventure in. 99% of all the games we have held in 8 years of playing have been held at my house. I have spent somewhere in excess of $500 on the books (although many of them were presents), although recently one of my friends/players has bought two of the books for me. And I appreciate that. And they now contribute to the pizza fund, and supply their own pop (recently). However, there is one glaring problem that crops up. They all want sessions, but they REFUSE to take the initiative to set them up. They all expect me to do that. And you know what? I'm tired of it. setting one of these things up is harder than hell. I have to reconcile the schedules of 4 people, not to mention dealing with my parents, who are understandably unexcited about the prospect of a group of teenage males taking over the house for a night. I have repeatedly asked that somebody else set things up, but who ends up doing it? Me. And I am REALLY sick of it. And when they complain to me that "Hey, I'm really bored, let's have a session" repeatedly, my first reaction is "Hrm, I think I'll go play some AoK or something." Take some fricking responsibility, and SOLVE YOUR OWN DAMN PROBLEM. I don't want to.

Yeah. I think I might have gone a bit overboard there, eh? It's something that I've been increasingly angry about over the past months. Now on a lighter note:

It's worth noting that these guys ARE my friends. In some cases, I have known them since Kindergarten. I guess my class was like that, really. More recently, I seem to have become the focus of a bunch of people who range from 2 to as much as 4-5 years behind me. And it's pretty strange. It's like my own personal fan club or cult or something. I seem to be this combination friend/role model for these guys, and it's a really strange feeling for someone who maintained like 3 friends all the way through HS, and was totally the opposite of anything concievably popular. I still have a hard time dealing with that sometimes. Goes to show you that my life has really CHANGED in the last 5 years or so. I'm not as much of a loner as I used to be. I actually go out and do things every once in a while. Talk to people, even. People seem to have found me, and they ain't letting go... Scary.

It was time for another one, I figured.

Let me start by saying that I hate being tired. I'm really, well, tired of it. Possibly because of the fact that over the summer I got into the habit of sleeping during the day and staying up all night. Which my parents absolutely hated, thus forcing me to try and change it around. All summer. Bleh. Here, of course, it's because of my IDIOT HEATER that starts going crashrattlebangsmashclangpingpingping at odd times during the night, thus forcing me to wake up for half an hour at a time each time. Raarg. Compounding the problem is the fact that I live on the 5th floor of Callahan Hall. The elevator sucks, so I get to walk up and down 5 flights of stairs 6 or 7 times each day. My feet hurt. Every single day. This makes me unhappy. Then I get to go to class. Which, fortunately, is my BORING loser econ prof. Instead of intelligently falling asleep like all the people around me, I sit and read AoK strats all 2 hours of class, popping my head up every five minutes just to realize that I already know what he's talking about. THEN I have my ever fun math recetation, which is populated by idiots that refuse to go to class/do the homework, and ask stupid questions like "What's the answer to the problem that the professor did on the board twice last time?" and "Can you do this insanely easy problem that takes a chimpanzee about 5 seconds to do in his head?" this takes up well over half an hour. Again, unlike the smart people who fell asleep, I stayed up all period. The quiz at the end of class was so easy that the proverbial chimpanzee could do the work in his head in TWO seconds instead of 5.

Proceed to shopping. I've been after this book for like 3 months. I KNOW that I have money on my card, cause I JUST put a ton on. Walk in the store, and the guy is like "Uh, they don't like your card." Well crap. I resist my urge to run over to my bank and decapitate a bunch of people, go get some stuff at the store, and go back to my friend's apartment, then go home. Tip of the day: Do NOT walk down the street with a thing of bread and a ziplock bag like it is perfectly normal. People will look at you REALLY strangely. Like this really cute girl I passed. Doh.

And as a final note, the entire population of Callahan Hall waits eagerly until I go to take a shower, then they run in and flush the toilets repeatedly just so that the cold water will never kick in and I will get 3rd degree burns from the water. It's a conspiricy, I tell you. The government is AFTER me.

The good news? Well, you'll just have to go over to Gaming Arena and see, won't you know? The thread should be completely obvious to you, because it's on top. Because nobody posts there. So yknow what folks? POST IN GAMING ARENA. And even better yet, POST IN EDUCATION. Or my pet rabbit will have to take steps. *looks down at the inch tall quartz rabbit sitting on his desk with an innocent look on it's face* Trust me, he's really ferocious when he wants to be. *rabbit sits there, unmoving* Really, really he is.

[edit]I forgot some stuff. The fool on the really loud lawnmower outside needs to shot. Marechal, do you suppose you could deal with that? And whatever's going on with AOKH's forums needs to STOP.[/edit]

[more edit]*holds up a loaf of sourdough french bread* Dinner, Tontos. Tontos, Dinner. *eats the bread*

Don't naps just ROCK?[/more edit]

RoTD X, I suppose. Am I up to 10 already? Eek.

You know it's Monday when...

1. Due to insomnia, you get to sleep at around 4:30am, and you have to be up at 9:20am to go to class.
2. The phone you borrowed because yours sucks gets a low battery warning and starts beeping once a minute, and because you've never had it happen before, you spend 15 minutes looking for the thing and plugging it in, ending the problem. This causes the loss of another hour of sleep.
3. Soon after, random loud people in cars start driving around, which you can hear even though the window is shut. Looking at the clock, it's 2 hours before you have to get up.
4. Finally, right before the alarm is due to go off, you fall asleep, only be to rudely awakened by a beepbeepbeep from the alarm. Class calls, but not on no sleep... Punch the alarm and go back to sleep.
5. Wake up, realize that it's 9 minutes before your next class and that you will never make it on time, but get up anyway.
6. Get your bill from the college, then realize that it's due tomorrow, and they charge interest.
7. Go to seal the envelope for your bank deposit, and realize you wrote all the adress stuff upside down.
8. Look outside and realize it's raining.

Looks like today is gonna be one of those really joyous sorts of days... In the words of Garfield:

Jon: *sigh* It's Monday. It's cold, it's dreary, and it's raining. What could be worse?
Garfield: There's a motorcycle gang in the driveway.

Well, my motorcycle gang has arrived.

Alternately known as How to Have Fun on the Weekends in Corvallis.

Or how not to, I suppose. It's dead around here. We have a total of 3 theater...whoops, make that 2. They just closed the cheap re-run theater, so we're left with two, one of which is pretty crappy. What's that leave to do on the weekends? Well, there's always homework, but cmon, besides my fanatic engineering major friend, who does homework on Friday night? Parties? Hordes of drunk people and horribly loud horrible music don't appeal to me (minus one or the other depending on some parties). We are now left with one last option: Watch movies at home. Which is actually a pretty good idea, considering the electronics systems that some of my friends have, but gets fairly old after you do it both Friday and Saturday nights every week for over a year. You run out of movies eventually. *sigh*

Compounding the problem, of course, is that even when called by the girls that are (in theory, at the very least) our friends, my friend refuses to actually invite them to do anything until I force him to call them, and then he first A, hits speed dial and calls the wrong guy, invites HIM over, and then calls the girls, just to figure out they're all busy/tired/not interested. Doh. Of course, on one hand, that's good, because they don't like movies with tons of acts of random violence and bloodshed like the guys do. Chick flicks get old after a while.

On the other hand, there's always BG2, but that doesn't get one out much...

Entry purged by State Security.

This is probably a bit too early and close to the other ones, but hey. It sort of seemed appropriate, given the events of the day.

Notably, I have discovered something. If you do 7 straight hours of homework, your mind burns out at some point. Isn't that an amazing thing? Went from math straight to history, then on to more of the same history, then on to MORE history, then I realized that as cool as it was, I was VERY tired of reading about what dead people did.

Then I decided to play BG2. I decided to play BG2 for about 5 hours, with a dinky break in the middle so I could fake dinner. I love this game, I really do. Vastly improved over the first one. In specific, I love how the quests give you real live xp now, instead of like 500. And they're all actually meaningful, instead of please rescue my little kid from wolves and retreive my cat from the waterfall. My NPC crowd seems to be having a lot of conversation, which is really sweet. Notably Minsc: "Aerie, would you be my witch?" And Aerie "I lost my wings, do you think I'm ugly?" and Jahiera "I lost Khalid, and I'm going to pester you to death about it." Yoshimo, aside from a few cool one-liners and a fairly involved quest, seems to be mostly quiet. I'm sure Keldorn will have something to say eventually, but I just got him, so... There IS a downside though. The minor stuff: The shields look totally...weak. Uglier than sin, maybe. And I'm still angry that I lost ALL my cool eq from BG1 except the helm of Balduran. Thus leaving me with no cool weaponry, and almost crippling my main guy. Oh well. On a major note, I HATE how I seem to die in every single fight. No matter what, I always seem to die. On little side quests, no less. It's getting old. Me and the difficulty level settings are going to have a talk, I think.

I also need to rant a bit about the state of the McNary Dining Center here. Sundays, the only thing open is the crappy cafeteria place that nobody frequents for fear of getting food poisoning. Thus, I have lived all day off of black licorice and goldfish crackers. I wouldn't try this one at home, kids, cause it sucks. I have a headache. Fortunately, I'm broke and my car is out of gas, too. Also on the plus side, I can't use the floor's kitchen because some loser barricaded it. So no tea for me. I'd also like to thank my stereo, which for some reason doesn't want to play the words to the Stones' 2000 Light Years From Home. It does the music just fine, but refuses the words on general principle. It also sounds wierd in my room, which sucks. And an update on the headache. I just checked my Advil, took one, and discovered I have 4 left. Gah...

So anyway, the moral of the story, or morals:

Don't try and live on goldfish crackers and black licorice.
Don't do 7 hours of homework straight (and don't procrastinate)
If heinous losers barricade doors, ram them down and then blame the losers.
Play BG2 on one of the easier settings, or hope you found better eq than I did.

Don't leave ICQ on all the time. Too many of your friends know your number, and proceed to spam you to death. (which has nothing to do with anything, but hey)

Now then. I'll try and give it a day or two before I post another one of these.