ugh…i hate stumbling across news late. and it took comments on a youtube track to even discover that nujabes, aka jun seba, was killed in a car accident at the end of february. sad face. nujabes was a japanese hip hop producer…probably best known in the west for his soundtrack for samurai champloo. i really dug his super-chill jazz-infused hip hop tracks. here’s to you, nujabes.
i’m including his most excellent nujabes remix of the clammbon track “folklore“…
oh shit! 8-bit apocalypse! via gizmodo
…and so are my allergies. motherfuck i hate allergies. i guess there are worse things to have than allergies…like missing body parts, or body odor. but the congestion is still fairly irritating.
EARLY MARCH
it’s been quite a busy month. my social life came roaring back to life, which was expected given a myriad of things…like good weather, and a sunnier socio-economic climate. or something. gabor made his way to nyc from amsterdam (via hungary) and is so far lovin’ it in that mcdonald’s jingle kinda way. he was one of the animators at my last job when i worked in their amsterdam office. the office has since shut down (a casualty of the shitty economy) so he migrated to their nyc office. so far he’s taken a shining to the city…woot. the first week he arrived, he came out to join the crew (pho, troche, dano, ivor, etc…) for some excellent pork chops, followed by some whiskey taverning. max was craving burgers the following friday, so we met up at corner bistro after work and gabor joined us in the noshing. fridays have been proven to be approximately 80% better when you combine burgers with mcsorley’s.
MID MARCH
the following wednesday found me at boka for korean fried chicken with di and emily. i had been planning to meet another friend that week for the aforementioned chicken of korean origin, but she had to reschedule…and my cravings remained. so hey…this worked out. we migrated to the second floor bar in the astor hotel to meet up with ngozi and boyer, who was in town from slovakia (?) i think…yea, slovakia. she’s usually found romping around europe these days, so the trips to the stateside are a rare treat.
we headed to the black door for after-work drinking the subsequent friday. it was somebody’s last day…or something, which usually means drinking. max joined in later in the evening, and the remaining five of us migrated to hill country for bbq lovin’ since we were starving at that point. m3ntal note tho…never drink with these people ever again. i understand that office gossip makes for fascinating times, but there was some shit i never cared to know or wanted to know. dear god i can’t unhear these things…
i tried to drown away the memories of the prior nite with beer and sliders at…some new place on st. marks i don’t know the name of…with sean and anna, followed by heavy drinking at hallo berlin with max and crew. apparently max had found the nite before amusing, while i found it to be detrimental to my brain functions. i still have nightmares.
LATE MARCH
thursday was an after-work meetup with lena, a former coworker and the person mentioned above in the same sentence as korean fried chicken. instead of the impossibly addictive bonchon variant, we headed to baden baden for the crispy type. <3 baden baden. the next day was bday drinks with dano at do hwa near my old office. i found it immensely entertaining seeing old coworkers walk in, give that “hey” nod in my direction, then proceed to avoid me the rest of the night. i must’ve made a pretty good impression during my time there…teehee. well to be fair, christa did chat me up during the food-eating portion of the nite. i thought that was nice and civil and friendly-like. thumbs up.
oh, and the first scrimmage of our soccer league was the following sunday. yes, i joined a soccer league. no, i am not in shape. but yes, it is ultra-casual. or it was suppose to be anyway. we got the impression the first team we played was anything but casual. when you’re calling out “flag” and “cross” and snipering the goals from 10 yards, you’re anything but casual. on the bright side however we outnumbered them greatly, and were subbing pretty much every 2 minutes. they still won by 2, but we did score 10 of our 11 goals the second half. worth mentioning in this paragraph too is that we decided on our team name during the post-game happy hour (icanhazgoalz?) lulz…and that our charity of choice will be doctors without borders.
APRIL
whew this is tiring. thank god i keep my plans on my iphone calendar. this past wednesday was foodage and drinks with max and patsy at half king to hash out their wedding plans and my upcoming vacation (yes, they are related). i’m off to scotland in may! word! doo didilee didilee….*dances a céilidh*
they were married last year, but had yet to hold a proper ceremony back in scotland for their family (they’re both from glasgow)…so that’s coming up in may. i plan on wearing a full-on kilt and outfit, complete with the jacket, socks, pouch (sporran)…the whole nine yards. as a bonus too, i’ll be taking a one-day layover in amsterdam…woot.
HOUSING WORKS
i did some last minute photog’ing for rebecca and housing works on thursday. i can’t say i was properly prepared for it (i got the call at 4pm)…so i had to cab it home just to grab my camera, and as a result didn’t notice til it was too late that my battery sign was blinking (that’s not a good thing), AND as a result of me fearing the battery would die any second, didn’t check that the ISO was set to some ridiculously high number (huh…so that’s why i could set it to f22 in the low light). all in all though, i did get off 50 or so shots, and they don’t look bad (just don’t zoom in). the event itself was pretty fun…it was tied with men’s health magazine and was a promotional sale too. alot of painfully beautiful people roaming about, along with television personalities that i had no clue about. whups.
TOO MUCH CHICKEN
i wonder how many times ‘korean fried chicken’ is mentioned in this one entry. probably not enough…so here’s another mention. friday nite we decided to head oot and aboot…because that’s what people do on friday nites. we (as in mai, jon, max, patsy, and later on ivor) hunkered down at mad about chicken (formerly bonchon k-town) for plates and plates of chicken, alongside liter after liter of beer. by the end of the night, we had finished off four plates and 9 liters worth of beer. my liver would hate me for the rest of the weekend. and i was actually content to stay in the rest of the weekend to rest if plans didn’t suddenly appear on saturday…
WHITE STAR BERFDAY
…which was what jess did for last minute bday drinks at white star. the drinks were good however, albeit on the fancy and expensive side. this was alleviated however by the fact that we didn’t pay. yea…we skipped out. or more precisely their tab-keeping system failed them when they insisted our tab was paid for. i didn’t know this, but i did notice everybody making their way outside very fast. and i didn’t want to be the last one of the crew to not know what the shit is going on and get stuck with the bill when (and if) they wised up. anyhoo, i spent my surprise refund on a really good kebab on houston. that was yum.
long post done…yay! what, no picture? bleh…whatever…
better late than never eh. the making of a man’s man’s commercial…via media blips…
whoa is right…new tron legacy trailer, via aicn.
it’s probably moot to point out the decline (in my eyes) of modern blogs, given the difference in the number of posts between when i started this blog (2004…2003??), and now (seven years later). no, this isn’t an entry saying “fuck it…i’m shutting it down“, but i do find it interesting that the conversations been brought up more often lately with some of my friends who do still have their own journals. tho many of them have evolved into either photo journals or topic specific sites…the personal online journal doesn’t seem to be as prevalent amongst my friends as they once were. between facebook, twitter, etc…the actual online journal itself seems to be an inefficient relic, given the (intentional) immediacy of facebook and twitter and all the other on-the-second sites out there, not to mention the network aspects of a journal. networking is the intention of those sites, whereas a journal (to begin with anyway) is an island in a vast sea that has to be discovered. but then again, who knows the permanence of those other sites…whereas i get to determine the permanence of this one. so that in and of itself will always give it an advantage, even if i’m too lazy to post regularly. anyway…
i went out and did stuff…yea. seven years down and the day-to-days get reeeal boring when written out. a better writer could make my daily rhetoric fascinating. but i’ve found in my years writing this journal that i in fact suck pretty bad as a writer. i thought i was a super writer in high school…but then again, i probably thought my emo poetry also had depth and convoluted meanings too. lulz.
amongst the fun had in the past weeks tho included a big crew dinner at excellent pork chop house, binge drinking at john and amy’s, scratcher’s for sean’s big 3-0, morning coffee with steph, and candela candela for di’s berfday…and subsequent e.vil roaming with the left over crew. as an aside too…since it’s always fun to point out how small this city is. alyson had brought her friend lily to di’s berfday dinner, and it was pointed out how she was from cornell too (this is not uncommon, given the size of cornell). what was funny however tho was after the usual name exchange, lily goes “i remember you…“, and i’m thinking…”from….?“. “freshman year. you were on my floor.” yea…what the shit. full disclosure however…alyson’s husband also happened to be my freshman year roommate…and the connection there between him and lily is probably easily made. still fascinating, this network we live in however. we then proceeded to try and recollect other names and faces from our freshman dorm…with limited success after all these years, i’ve only ever kept in touch with greg. everybody else eventually fell away, and by my second year, 99% of my friends were cornell architects. damn that dungeon.
fun things on the horizon…one of the animator’s i became friends with during my time in amsterdam (he’s actually hungarian) has made the jump across the ocean, and is now a giddy new yorker. so i get to play tour guide again. woot. it’s always good to start fresh new yorkers off on the right foot. we don’t want them going down the path of shitty and retarded. like hanging out in meat packing…or thinking murray hill is a viable area to have fun in.
perusing today’s penny arcade and then reading the subsequent story (i’m not a console gamer, so it’s all news to me) reminded again that there is a vast sea of dickery out there in the gaming world. for the most part it’s easy to avoid, or in my particular case of warcraft gaming, the instances of dickery are usually so infantile that it’s easy to channel out.
i found it coincidental then that i had to deal with my own dickery as recently as yesterday. as any wow gamer knows, the daily pug (pick-up group for the uninitiated) is a ritual many go thru to get their shiny emblems. i usually get mine out of the way early in the evening before a raid or just logging off and heading out the door. i’ve been lucky, in that the groups i’m usually tossed into have been amiable. yesterday pretty much shit all over that semi-flawless track record. the run itself started off pretty bad. upon zoning in (cos), the healer states he needs to break for 5 minutes to go shit. i go “wtf”, while the tank decides to just leave. awesome. a new tank arrives shortly, but starts bitching about the length of the “role-play” until he notices that we’re already well into the dialogue. red flags go up however as he liberally tosses out “fag” and “shit” in his typical communiqué. fine, whatever. we get thru the first half, and then the healer decides to bail too all of a sudden. maybe he was clairvoyant.
a replacement arrives and we continue on. the tank wants to do an achievement, and dishes out vague and retarded directions to the rogue to do so and so. the rogue does as he’s told, and we don’t get the achievement. more “fags” are tossed about in party chat. i tell him to shut the fuck up. he immediately retorts with “no you” (oh shit), and proceeds to go on a diatribe about how i’m fat (hardly) and a nerd (possibly) and have never seen a vagina (i have…they’re nice). i’m unaccustomed to being bombared with 3rd grade insults, so i just tell him to stop breathing and point out that he’s a fucking idiot for calling others nerds while within an online game. he continues on about people not having seen vaginas and butchering the use of “your” vs “you’re”. its intolerable. i’m mashing the ‘vote to kick’ option but we’re in combat. by the time i can however, we’re at the last boss, and i think “fuck it”. we jump on the last boss, i notice the little dick’s not tanking…so i proceed to tank and kill the boss with little to worry about. i type out a last message suggesting he’s a failure at many things, including this game and life, and leave immediately. in hindsight (of course), i…and we as a party, could’ve probably 1. gotten him killed on the last boss, 2. had him kicked properly, or 3. track down his personal info and hire professional hitmen to torment him and anyone he’s associated with. the first and second didn’t happen for various reasons, and the third option can be costly and possibly illegal. so i just put in a ticket to a gm to have him suspended. hopefully we’ll hear good news today!
USELESS HEADER
it’s been a fairly quiet couple of weeks, january and february. my first attempt to see my new niece josie was thwarted by a massive snow poop. then my niece may’s bday celebrations were snowed out too by passing snowstorms (whups), which in turn pushed our backlogged plans into my dad’s 60th birthday vicinity. eventually we just met up this past weekend to consolidate my seeing my new niece for the first time, may’s birthday (well…really just giving her her gift), and a lunch for my dad. silly weather…stop fucking up my plans.
I WENT OUT
prior to that tho was the usual smattering of dinners and drinkage, amongst them ippudo with sara (wow…finally. fuck you ippudo), le singe vert with margie, and harefield road drinkage for fonz and erin’s post-wedding celebrations (even tho they married over a month ago).
THIRD PLACE
as a random aside too, while we were hanging out at my parents house this past weekend, i went digging thru my room for some things i’d left behind when i moved to my new apartment. and by chance i came across a bronze track medal i won my freshman year (the only medal i won during my short but illustrious career). so of course i snatched it up to bring home. my brother-in-law dave mentioned how they don’t really give out medals anymore. instead they give trophies to the school. i’m thinking to myself, wow…that sucks. so much for individual achievements. not to mention the medals pretty boss. anyhoo, it’s going on display somehow in my apartment. maybe i’ll frame it. woot.
because i’m feeling like a ‘wow’ mood…and i don’t feel like making a proper journal post just yet. as an fyi too, in case it’s not common knowledge, it’s a take on discovery.com’s “the world is just awesome”.
crap, the journal has yet again fallen to the wayside. i’m going to blame….*spins the wheel-o-blame“…my job this time. for inundating me with short deadlines and then making me tired once i get home. ya. for real.
i had on the agenda a massive post ala anna’s year-end photo recollection, but that’s turning out to be taking muuuuuch longer than anticipated. so fuck it. i’ll post it when i post it. in the meantime tho, a recollection of the year thus far. it’s already halfway thru january…time just continues to fly right by.
JOSIE ELLA
first and foremost…welcome josie ella to the world! my new niece. ella was my suggestion too. she rocks. niece’s rock, because i get to be a proud uncle without having to deal with the actual parenting. it’s a win-win situation. a concern we’re having at the moment however is, given her older sister’s astonishingly advanced developmental state (i know parents/uncles/whatever always say this…but seriously, this is not hyperbole), we’ve postulated that she may in fact turn out to be functionally retarded. or something. too many awesome genes were invested in may. we don’t know what was left for josie. i know…feel the love emanating from her uncle. just kidding, we <3 josie.
REWIND
two weekends ago was hot pot at my place with jen di, sarah, and crew. i’m very much liking a semi-regular hot pot to be honest. it’s a social activity that involves everything i love…eating, drinking liquor, and watching movies. we followed this up with thursday noodling at the excellent pork chop house with di and em. they’d never been, so i felt like it was my obligation to wise them to the goodness that is taiwanese cuisine. we headed next door after dinner to apotheke, which was hilarious considering two drinks cost more than the entirety of our dinner a few feet away. they however did send us free rounds of their mulled wine, called gluwein. very soothing. after apotheke, we migrated to the whiskey tavern to meet up with more people and continue our drinking (with the addition of tater tots). i felt like shit the next morning…it was super.
and hmm…yea, i didn’t do shit this past weekend. doh!