The Chem Lab

Oh Noes Tractor

noreply@blogger.com (ddbrown30) — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 19:53:00 +0000

It's still the government

noreply@blogger.com (ddbrown30) — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 02:24:00 +0000

A few weeks ago I received an email from out of the blue from some guy I had never met. He had stumbled across my blog while searching for Rhys Hovey. For anyone who hasn't read my previous post about him, he's an old teacher of mine from Ai with all sorts of crazy conspiracies about the government. He actually believes, I shit you not, that the government has satellites in space that can pull ASCII characters from your brain.

Anyway, this guy tells me that he used to work with Rhys at EA in California and had similar experiences with him. He and others there wanted to help, but since Rhys seemed unwilling to accept it, they just kind of watched the freak show like the rest of us. He asked if I had any other stories to share. I had a couple, but I wanted to check over the old post just to see what I had originally wrote. In doing so, I found another chunk of madness scrawled in the comments from Rhys himself.

The comment consists of several pages of the most random, crazy shit you will probably ever read. You'll read something, think to yourself, "Man, that's the craziest shit I've ever read," and then read something immediately after that blows it out of the water. I think, "There was not cum on the teddy bear, there was never a teddy bear," has got to be my favourite line.

...My god, the freak show continues. I just went to grab the link to use in this post and discovered an even newer comment from Sept 28. Apparently Rhys has uncovered proof that he is a mind control victim. Look folks, I just work here, I couldn't make up shit as crazy as what he's writing.

What I find most fascinating about this series of events is that my blog has been dormant for almost a year and yet Rhys is still compelled to add new comments to that post. Because of this, I've turned off comments on this post, just to avoid starting some fucking crazy flame war. I've said it before, but Rhys is definitely the most genuinely insane person I've ever met.

A Return

noreply@blogger.com (ddbrown30) — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 07:53:00 +0000

Wow, it's been a long time. I've been flirting with the idea of posting for quite some time, but having Vicki, an old friend from Kelowna, actually ask for some posts is really what pushed me into it. I have a few game reviews I want to post and a new anecdote or two, but for now, I'll just post a bit of catch-up.

I'm still working at Blue Castle Games and I'm still really enjoying myself. I'm currently working on the competitive multiplayer portion of the game called Terror is Reality. It's really exciting to be getting my hands on some gameplay and I get to work with some really challenging stuff. I find it rewarding and I'm excited to finish the game and see what the world thinks.

I'm planning on moving to France with my girlfriend Ave around the beginning of 2011. I want to get out of the country and experience a different culture for a few years and France seemed like a pretty cool place. On top of that, I don't want to sacrifice my career in any way and France has some pretty good game companies. I'm learning French right now which is going pretty well. I'm looking forward to when I can sit down and watch a movie in French and actually understand what's going on.

Beyond that, there have been a few events of note, but most of them probably deserve their own post. Instead, I will leave you with the trailer for Terror is Reality.

Video Games | Dead Rising 2 | TGS 09: This Is Reality XVII Trailer HD

XBox 360 | Playstation 3 | Nintendo Wii

Game Review - Spore

noreply@blogger.com (ddbrown30) — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 06:41:00 +0000

Will Wright’s latest brain child, Spore allows the player to take control of a life form all the way from a cell through to conquering the galaxy. An ambitious boast that, sadly, does not live up to the hype. While Spore does technically do all that it claims, it fails to make the journey a compelling or fun experience.

The cell stage is, by far, the least enjoyable of all of the stages. You swim around eating random bits of food until you get bigger, then you eat some more. Stage complete.

The creature stage is where the game actually has some aspect of fun involved. This is where you really get to customize and evolve your creature into some cool and unique. The stage consists mostly of looking around for new parts to evolve with and either befriending or killing other species. This quickly becomes tedious and boring as little to no skill is involved. Succeeding or failing is based almost strictly on stats and death has almost no consequence.

After sufficient evolution, your creature gains sentience and moves onto the tribal stage. The tribal stage amounts to a very simplified real time strategy game with some basic resource gathering and unit control. The stage again consists of either befriending or wiping out rival races. As with the creature stage, leave your skill at the door, your micro is no good here. Build up a pile of resources, send a wave followed by another, win.

After wiping out the other tribes and becoming the dominant species of the planet, you’ll move onto the second to last stage, civilization. In this mode, you continue with your basic resource gathering and begin building up your city. Throughout the stage, your goal will be to conquer the other cities either through social or military victory (sound familiar?). Yawn.

Having done all you can on your own planet, you look to the stars. Space, the final frontier (yeah, that was lame.) Easily the most complicated stage, the space stage seems to be where the game really begins. Unfortunately, it’s so poorly thought out and so incredibly bloated with features, it’s just not any fun. You can set up colonies in other solar systems to expand your empire. The colonies will mine spice for you which you can then collect and trade for a profit. This process is so painful it hurts (I’m on a roll.) You have to manually fly to each planet in each solar system in order to collect its spice. From there, you have to fly from planet to planet looking for the best deal. Did I mention there are multiple kinds of spice? How about that the prices change so that even after you find a good place to sell, you’ll just have to look again later? I could go on and on about this, but I think you get the point.

Finally, from a technical standpoint, the game is buggy as shit. Model loading issues, audio corruption, and even crashes. It doesn’t even look all that good.
To sum up, as with most games, it’s worth a play, but wait for the bargain bin on this one.

Game Review - Dead Space

noreply@blogger.com (ddbrown30) — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 04:06:00 +0000

There's a quote from a poster on Kotaku that I really like: "Hating EA is so last year." It's really true. EA saw their market share steadily decreasing after repeatedly fucking their customers in the ass and releasing shitty products and franchise updates. Realizing they needed to reconnect with their fans, EA set to work on creating some compelling titles including *GASP* new IPs. Dead Space comes as a result of this.

Dead Space is a survival dismemberment horror game where you dismember enemies to kill them by dismemberment. Got it? The game really only has one cool feature and it tends to get old before too long; shoot off the limbs of enemies and they die. Rinse and repeat. When you first start, this is awesome. I loved the game for the first few hours until I realized that it wasn't going to get any better.

As for the "horror" part of survival horror, the devs just missed the point. Survival horror, and horror in general, really, is about suspense and the possibility of danger. It's about surprising the player when he's not expected it and doing nothing when he is. In Dead Space, it's always expected. You always know when the monsters are coming and they can never really sneak up on you. The other problem with their take on horror is their lack of a safe zone. There's no area in the game where you can relax and let down your guard. Without that, you become overloaded by the input and desensitized to its effects. In short, it becomes the norm and you no longer care.

To be fair, Dead Space is an incredibly polished game and does what it does well. Unfortunately, it missed the mark on a lot of the important aspects of its genre. Overall, I'd recommend this as a rental, for sure, but pass on the 60 dollar price tag.

Uhnnnnnn

noreply@blogger.com (ddbrown30) — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 02:33:00 +0000

For the most part, zombie walk was nothing short of awesome. Even the fun hater Chris was unable to withstand the full force of its awesomosity. I thought there were a couple thousand people there, but reports suggest is was much less than that, possibly under one thousand. Everyone came out to have a good time and the atmosphere was great.

There were so many incredible costumes, from the clever to the detailed, and it was nice to feel like we were on the upper end. I went as High School Jock Zombie and managed to totally score by finding a letterman jacket at Value Village. Even without using anything fancy like liquid latex, I managed to pull off some pretty convincing makeup.

One of my favorite moments of the walk was just after we arrived at the art gallery. A tour bus stopped at a nearby light and almost instantly, about 30 or 40 zombies rushed the bus and started clawing at the windows. When the bus pulled away, it was covered with bloody hand prints.

The obvious highlight for me was our group's performance. On Friday night, we got together and learned a simplified version of the Thriller dance. After a few hours of practice, we managed to get a pretty solid grasp of the dance and called it a night. The next day, we did three performances, the largest being in front of around 100-200 people, and they all went off really well. There's a video of our dance on Facebook, but I'm not going to bother linking it as you need an account. When I get my hands on the actual vid, I'll make sure to post it.

The only downside of the walk was crossing the Burrard St bridge. It was 20 minutes of boredom and baking in the sun. Apparently, it was done to appease the cops so hopefully we'll be able to wander around downtown next year.

Overall, rad day. I can't wait until next year. Hmm, what to wear...?

E3 Impressions - Microsoft

noreply@blogger.com (ddbrown30) — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 05:11:00 +0000

I'd have to say that Microsoft was the clear winner of this E3.

I didn't catch Microsoft's presentation live, so rather than just rehashing stuff that I'm sure you could find elsewhere, I'll just discuss a few of the things that caught my eye.

Let's just get this out of the way: FFXIII is coming to the 360. Meh.

One of the big changes coming is the update to XBL and the 360 Dashboard. The dashboard has been completely redesigned to follow more closely with the look of Nintendo or Apple products. The result is a slick interface that appeals to a different audience than the previous Dashboard. I'll reserve judgment until I see the final version in action; I imagine I'll like it just fine.

As for XBL, Microsoft is adding two new major features: avatars and Live Party. The avatars idea is pretty neat and, again, targeted at a different market segment. Live Party looks very sharp, however. It's basically a way for a group of friends to connect smoothly, game together quickly, and share media easily. One of my favorite features of Live Party is the ability for everyone in the party to stream the same movie at the same time. You can basically watch a movie with someone while they're somewhere else without the hassle of trying to sync up manually.

Other than that, Microsoft didn't say much that I cared about. They talked about some incredible games coming up like Fable 2, RE5, and Fallout 3. I'm really looking forward to those.

Hopefully, I'll actually have a 360 by then.

Also there's this

noreply@blogger.com (ddbrown30) — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 03:31:00 +0000

Best. Trailer. Ever.

Make sure you watch it in HD if you can.

E3 Impressions - Sony

noreply@blogger.com (ddbrown30) — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 02:43:00 +0000

Ahh Sony. E3 does not treat you well. Nothing can compare to your epic failure 2 years ago, but you just can't seem to win.

In all honesty, Sony's presentation at E3 was really well put together and was an enjoyable watch. The problem was content. Their only new announcement was their movie download service which, much to their credit, launched immediately after the conclusion of the presentation. It also allows for you to download these movies to your PSP. Very cool. Everything else was essentially reminding you that all of the games that have been announced are, yes, still coming.

The show started off with a history of the PS1, PS2, and PSP. In every case, he was focused on pointing out that all of these platforms had extremely slow starts but after about 2 years, they really started picking up and have gone on to be successful platforms. Wait a minute, the PS3 has had a really slow start and it's been out for, hold on, two years! I see what you did there.

Not surprisingly, LittleBigPlanet made a prominent appearance, this time being used as Sony's "PowerPoint" tool. They made a completely interactive and well timed presentation that really showed off the engine and was fun to watch. That was definitely the highlight of the presentation for me.

One of my favorite demos was a showing of Resistance 2. That game looks incredibly immersive and polished. It's the type of game that could actually get me to purchase a PS3. Let's hope that the PS3 drops to closer to $300 by the time it comes out.

Beyond that, we saw footage of a bunch of announced games. Some comic book artist did a single one-handed push-up and winded himself. We saw a couple teaser trailers for God of War 2 and some game I'd never heard of called inFamous. They talked a lot about new features for the PS3 in general and discussed the future of trophies. In short, they announced what the 360 announced two years ago.

Overall, a good presentation without a lot of substance. There wasn't really anything that I took away from that show where I was blown away. It'll be interesting to see what they have to say next year.

E3 Impressions - Nintendo

noreply@blogger.com (ddbrown30) — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 04:19:00 +0000

Despite promises of core game announcements at E3, the Nintendo press conference focused squarely on a bunch of shit that I don't care about. The big announcement was Animal Crossing for the Wii. SNORE. I've already played it on two systems and they were identical. At least we know the Wii version will have waggle.

I watched the press conference live, but I only caught the last third or so. In that time, they were showing off Wii music. I think I can honestly say that it's the worst "game" that Nintendo has come up with yet.

Now, I'm generally a huge supporter of Nintendo and what they're doing with the Wii. It's opening up games to an entirely new group of people; I never thought I'd see my mom not only playing a video game, but enjoying it enough that she now has her own console. I find that incredible. That having been said, Wii Music is a joke. It requires no skill to play, there is no winning or losing, and there is no score. The "gameplay" doesn't even require button matching. To play the horn, you quite literally put the remote up to your mouth and push buttons randomly.

The most painful part of this presentation was their demonstration of gameplay. They brought out 4 Nintendo execs, all in their mid to late thirties, and had them play the Mario song on stage. This amounted to four fully grown adults jumping around the stage like retarded toddlers hopped up on sugar. It was so cringe-filled that I actually had to turn it off. The best comparison I can come up with is think of how you feel during the super awkward scenes in The Office. Now apply that to a group of real people. Harrowing.

I heard there was more horrible parts to the conference, but I just couldn't be bothered to take time away from doing absolutely nothing to listen.

Review - No More Heroes

noreply@blogger.com (ddbrown30) — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 02:17:00 +0000

My god, I'm doing a game review. It's madness, madness I say!

No More Heroes comes from the same offbeat team that brought us Killer7. It has a very similar art style to Killer7 but as I've never played Killer7, I'll save the nitty gritty comparisons to you. No More Heroes is over-the-top gory, charmingly quirky, and very funny.

You play as Travis Touchdown, one of the top assassins in the world - number 11, in fact. He is a stereotypical otaku, collecting anime and wrestling masks, and has an impressive porn collection and obvious addiction. Travis is approached by the mysterious United Assassins Association and offered the chance to become number 1.

The story and characters require so much more than I could do justice to here, so I won't even try. Every character, including every boss, has a unique personality and they're all wonderfully... fucked up.

The combat in the game is another high point. Sword swings are accomplished by simply pressing A and whether the attack is high or low depends on how the Wii remote is being held. This adds a level of strategy into the game necessary to get past certain blocking enemies. The really fun part of combat, however, comes from the finishing moves. After weakening an enemy, an arrow will pop up on the screen. If the player swings the Wii remote in that direction in time, he'll do an extra powerful attack that also has the chance to hit other nearby enemies. This usually results in gigantic explosions of blood and death. Very rewarding.

No More Heroes has a large open world portion as well. In between boss missions, the player needs to collect large sums of money to pay for the next boss event. Where this part of the game really shines is in the side jobs. After every boss, a new side job is added and these range from collecting coconuts to mowing lawns. Each job has a unique control scheme associated with it and some of them are very clever.

Alright, let me stop jerking off the game for a bit and get to the bad stuff. At times, the combat gets extremely repetitive: A, A, A, swing, A, A, A, swing. The only really unique and challenging portions of the game are the boss fights themselves which are generally incredible. As well, however unique and clever they may be, doing the same side jobs or assassination missions a million times to get your money gets old fast. An objective based system whereby the player had some specific mission to accomplish before being granted access to the next boss would have been a much more intuitive and fun method of doing things.

And so ends another Chem Lab Meandering Review™. The bottom line: buy this game and you will not regret it. It's charming, fun, and, most importantly, a new experience. It's rare to find something so fresh that also does it so well.

Hicking

noreply@blogger.com (ddbrown30) — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 00:11:00 +0000

While perusing Plenty of Fish the other day, I found something that made me weep for the future of mankind. The profile of a young woman had an interest in "hicking." I immediately figured that it must be a spelling mistake, but that theory was called into question when I noticed that the interest was hyper linked.

Something to note: Interests on Plenty of Fish only get turned into a hyper link after a certain number of people have all put the same interest. Clicking on the link will then show you a list of people who have that interest on their profile.

My next thought was that perhaps this was some slang word that I was unfamiliar with. It wouldn't be the first time and slang is this constantly evolving entity. I went to the standard collection of retarded language, Urban Dictionary, to find my answer. Sadly, Urban Dictionary returned no results.

Now, what this means is that there are enough illiterate, lazy morons on Plenty of Fish that are incapable of correctly spelling "hiking" to have it show up as a valid interest. Awesome.

One Life Goal Complete

noreply@blogger.com (ddbrown30) — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 01:31:00 +0000

Guess what I did this weekend?

Long Time No See

noreply@blogger.com (ddbrown30) — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 07:20:00 +0000

Wow, it's been a long time since I've posted anything. Armoursuit Warrior was completed successfully and, for all its flaws, I'm really proud of it. I got hired at Blue Castle Games as a front end software engineer. Very awesome. It's a great place to work. I also bought a new 47" LCD TV. Also very awesome.

And there's 3 months in a nutshell. Maybe if I'm bored over the next few days, I'll come up with something interesting to write.

Important Information

noreply@blogger.com (ddbrown30) — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 21:31:00 +0000

Here's a gem of knowledge from my 6 year old self from a school report.

A great way to become a vampire is to be born with red hair.

A Good Day

noreply@blogger.com (ddbrown30) — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 06:54:00 +0000

Overall, today was a pretty solid day.

My GPW project finished up today and we presented. The presentation was... average, but the game itself turned out extremely well. I'll be posting a type of postmortem along with the game itself over the next week or so, schedule depending.

On a much, much better note, I logged onto MSN this morning to a message from Greg telling me that he had a job opportunity for me and then he needed to talk to me right away. I messaged him and he told me that Su was looking for someone for a position and she needed to hear from me as soon as possible. I gave her a call, emailed her my resume, and a couple hours later she booked me for an interview on Monday.

I'm both shocked and super stoked to be having an interview there. Hothead is pretty much my dream company in terms of their environment and the types of games they want to create. The shocked part comes from their previous policy of only hiring industry veterans. I had almost completely written off Hothead as a possible source of employment after school due to this. It was left as a future goal after some experience and I never expected to receive an interview even before I'm finished with school.

Hopefully the interview goes well on Monday. I'll be sure to post as soon as I hear anything.

Crushing Blow

noreply@blogger.com (ddbrown30) — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 07:26:00 +0000

Something I've always had great pride in is my level of intelligence. I've always been a really bright person and this was reflected in my school marks as well as my IQ test results which would range from around 150-170, usually clocking in closer to around 160-165. The subject came up today and someone has said that 190 was a ridiculously high IQ and I chimed in saying I was 170 and I'm certainly not some Rainman genius. He didn't believe me, but whatever.

It had been a few years since I'd taken an IQ test so I decided to take one this evening just to see where I'm at. I came in at a measly 120. I was crushed to see that. Just to be certain, I took the test again with a similar result.

How the hell did this happen? It's really bothering me now. I think I might take it again tomorrow with a fresh mind and fresh meds. If it comes up shit again, I'm going to be flexing my brain again to get that shit back up there. I'm barely into the "high intelligence" range anymore.

One of these things is not like the other

noreply@blogger.com (ddbrown30) — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 04:03:00 +0000

One of these things just doesn't belong.

Measuring Success

noreply@blogger.com (ddbrown30) — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000

How do you measure your success in life? Is it how much money you make? Maybe it's if you're happy with what you're doing. Perhaps it's if you feel you're making a difference. For me, it's a little of one and two, but oddly, my view of success is a little bit different.

It's strange, but quite often I find myself looking at me through the eyes of my yet to exist children and wondering how they'll view me. More specifically, I find the ultimate success is to be the dad with the coolest job on the bring your dad to school day.

Weird, I know.

Maybe it's the kid in me that just doesn't want to let go. I want to make sure that kid thinks I'm as cool as my real kids.

It was the government

noreply@blogger.com (ddbrown30) — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 23:50:00 +0000

I think Rhys Hovey may be the most genuinely crazy person I have ever met. This is a guy convinced that the government is out to get us will all sorts of insane conspiracies. If you've ever heard of a conspiracy, no matter how far fetched, Rhys has probably already heard about it, researched it, and has a pile of 'facts' to go along with it.

One of his favorite stories to tell is about the audio spotlight. The audio spotlight is a piece of technology that allows the user to direct sound in a very focused manner, similar to a spotlight. It's easy enough to find info about this on the net and there are even a couple youtube videos of it in action.

Rhys loves to talk about 'them' using it to start fights and get you to look at ads as well as for psychological warfare and even to turn people gay. Why 'they' want to turn people gay, I'm not sure, he's a little fuzzy on that point. I think he alluded to something about gay men buying more clothes or something, but I digress.

Now, not only does he believe in this stuff, but he claims (and I feel genuinely believes) that 'they' were actually using this on him while he lived in California. He says that the spotlight had been used on him to trick him into looking at guys in their underwear on billboards. He also claims that, evidently, they would use this audio spotlight to blast gay porn into his bedroom all the time.

Yeah, gay porn. What a nut job.

Yuck

noreply@blogger.com (ddbrown30) — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 15:05:00 +0000

I put on 8 pounds over Christmas. Horrible.

At least this goes to show that I really do need to weigh myself every couple of days in order to keep track of my weight.

Well, back on the diet for a few days.

Holstering

noreply@blogger.com (ddbrown30) — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 08:00:00 +0000

I was recently watching porn, as I am wont to do, and I was viewing a tasteful presentation of a bunch of dudes gangbanging a chick. During one scene, two guys were DPing the chick with one guy lying under the girl and the other guy on top. The guy on top was having a grand ol' time. The guy on the bottom, however, was not.

They kept fucking for a bit before the guy on the bottom pipes up with, "Dude, your balls."

"Oh, sorry bro." came the reply, and the guy on top reached down, grabbed his balls, pulled them up over his cock, and returned to pounding his splayed princess.

Chris and I got to thinking, what would you call that? We spent a good chunk of our drunken time in Kelowna thinking about it, along with some help from Dan. Finally, we had our answer.

I submit to you a brand new addition to the dictionary: Holstering. The act of pulling up your balls during DP to avoid slapping against the other dude.

Spread the word.

Antics (In Stereo)

noreply@blogger.com (ddbrown30) — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 22:30:00 +0000

I spent some time getting ready for the trip to Kelowna by picking up some new blank CDs and burning an assload of music to listen to on the way there. When Chris and I hit the road, it didn't take long for us to get bored with the radio and move toward throwing in some good music.

Over the past few trips to Kelowna, my stereo had been slowly getting worse and worse. It finally decided to completely give up the ghost. We couldn't get any CD to play without skipping, burned or otherwise. After sitting in silence for about an hour, I checked the clock and noticed that it had only been 20 minutes.

"Fuck this, were going to get a stereo right now."

We pulled off in Chilliwack stopped in at a Canadian Tire. We found a nice deck pretty quick. It was solid amperage, had an aux in, played mp3 discs, and was a decent price. I picked it up (along with some stools) and headed out to the truck to install it.

Chris and I had just started ripping apart my dash when my Dad called.

"Hey, have you guys left yet?"
"Yeah, we're in Chilliwack installing a new stereo in my truck."
"Ha ha, oh yeah. So, have you actually left yet?"
"No really, we're in a Canadian Tire parking lot installing a new stereo. My old one broke."
"Right. Good luck with that."

Awesome.

We finished getting the old stereo out and hooked the new one in. The deck got power... sort of. Lights came on and I attempted to get a CD in. It didn't want to take it at first and the final grabbed onto it and slowly pulled it in. And with much pomp and circumstance, nothing happened. Sadly the wiring harness from the old deck didn't match up with the new deck.

Sadly, we were out of time and a rewiring job would have taken far too long, especially with the tools I had. We hit the road with no music.

The next day I installed it in my Dad's garage with no problems. The new stereo is in and sounds great. I'm looking forward to being able to use mp3 discs on my trip to Kelowna next week. Should be rad.

Tool with Tools

noreply@blogger.com (ddbrown30) — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 11:46:00 +0000

It's been a long time since I've posted anything and I'm getting tired of looking at that downer of a post.

Chris and I just went down to Kelowna last weekend to see the Tool show. It was fucking rad. Unfortunately, its radocity was diminished some by how lame Kelowna can be.

First, they had these retarded constraints to get into the show that included no cell phones. Because of this, they were doing hardcore searches on everyone at the door. The doors opened at 6:30 and the first band hit the stage at 8. Tool hit at about 9 or so. They still hadn't got everyone in the door by the time Tool took the stage. Chris and I made it in to catch the last song and a half of the opening band, but what a fuck.

Second, Kelowna has an abnormally high concentration of douchebags and assholes. The idiots on the floor were breaking shit and hurting each other. It was bad enough that Maynard actually stopped the show at one point to clear things up. There was also some jackass with a laser pointer who kept shining it on Maynard. Eventually he tagged Maynard in the eye which, not surprisingly, pissed him off. All of this led to a couple songs being cut short and the set list being switched around and, sadly, no encore.

After the show we went to a club for some drinks, even though I was already totally stoned from the show. When we were done, we headed over to Denny's for some grub, but the taxi ride destroyed Chris and he was chucking for the rest of the night.

The rest of the trip was really good though. We chilled out at Laura and Dani's place the next night and played some drinking games. Laura and Dani even kissed which, suffice it to say, was totally rad.

For our last night, we went to Dan's place and had a few more drinks and watched a movie. We were all pretty trashed from the past few days, so we just took it easy and went and played some pool.

The drive back was brutal. It was snowing super hard. I couldn't see anything and the roads were terrible. I made a 4 hour trip into almost twice that.

Wicked weekend, overall. I got a new car stereo too. I'll talk about it a bit in a post in the next couple days.

You know what? Shitty month.

noreply@blogger.com (ddbrown30) — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 23:14:00 +0000

This just hasn't been my month. On top of all the shit that happened over the past couple days, one of my cats cost me about $150 for some stupid sore on his head, and worse yet, Greg told me he's moving out at the end of the month.

What a fucking pain. As if money wasn't tight enough, now I'm losing my roommate. I've got no one to take his place which means either letting some random stranger move in or just taking the hit. I was able to get some extra money on my cheques from HRDC to help me cover the increase, but it's not nearly enough. It'll be about a $200 increase a month, but my bills went up by more than twice that.

I doubt Greg will ever read this, so I'm going to vent a little. It really pisses me off that he's leaving. He knows how much this fucks me and I specifically asked him to stick around just until school was done. He's told me the reason he's moving is to be closer to work, but fuck that. At most, he'll cut 10-15 minutes off his commute. Big fucking deal. Ugh, I'm so pissed at him about that.

Fuck this shit. I am not having a good month.