Yes, the title of this post is “The weekend in review”. Does this mean I did a lot this weekend? The answer is, “No, not really.”

While I was on my way back from lunch on Friday, Louie called me and asked if I wanted to go to a salsa club called “Club Tropicana” that night. I didn’t have any problem with doing so, but I’d be lying if I said I was dressed for it. (I was wearing blue jeans and a white polo shirt.) Anyway, after work, I headed over to his place; from there, we went to dinner at the Cheesecake Factory in the Galleria, and then went over to Club Tropicana. We got there just in time for the second half of the salsa lesson, which I watched but didn’t participate in. (There weren’t enough partners there.) After the salsa started, I basically spent the evening walking around the club, watching, and having a couple of drinks. From there, we went back to Louie’s apartment so I could get my car, and then headed home.

Saturday morning and afternoon were rather uneventful. The most I did was watch episodes of SG-1, Atlantis, and Battlestar Galactica that I had recorded on my TiVo. Then, I headed back down to Louie’s apartment at sometime between 5:30 and 6:00. From there, we hit P.F. Chang’s for dinner, and then spent a little time at Barnes & Noble before going back to Club Tropicana. Basically, from there, it was a repeat of the previous night.

I’m not sure I’ll go back, really. Unfortunately, my brain is wired in such a way that dance clubs are an absolutely alien and incompatible environment for me. It’s a nice club if you’re into dancing, don’t get me wrong. It just… didn’t click for me. It never does. Hell, Dementia/Jesse will tell anyone that the one time I went out onto the dance floor, I had to be dragged out.

Anyway, I had planned on going to the mall today, but unfortunately that idea got nixed for various reasons. I’ll need to get a couple more pairs of khakis, plus a new CD tower or CD cabinet. I’m out of space in my CD towers, and I already have one CD waiting to go in (Nine Inch Nails’s With Teeth). I might also get a new pair of shoes. Oh, well… I can always go sometime after work this week. Then, on Sunday, I leave for Las Vegas. It’ll be good to get away from it all for a few days.

Anyway, time for me to order dinner… Chinese again, but something other than General T’so chicken this time around.

“So, if monotheists can believe in the Big Bang, can polytheist believe in a Gang Bang?”

— Trail Mix on FARK

Ugh, I feel like shit.

The trip to Chicago was a great deal of fun. This weekend was much less so, but that was mainly due to the work I had to do with the videos I took at the Chicago event. As for now… I’m not really sick per se; I usually have allergy issues whenever I return to Houston from far out of town. Also, the fact that I vacuumed the upstairs (which hadn’t been done in a while) exacerbated the problem. So, I spent most of the night snuffling and sniffling and being absolutely miserable. I’m still achy and have a stuffed up nose, and it’s not likely it’ll clear up anytime soon. *sigh* Fun…

Anyway, Thursday morning I arrived in Chicago to find Scott Howell already at the gate waiting for me. We hopped a cab to the Chicago Peninsula hotel, only to find our rooms weren’t ready yet. So, we just waited around the lobby until the Midway presentations started. I got video of several presentations, including those for Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks, L.A. Rush, The Suffering: Ties That Bind, and Blitz: The League. After the presentations (at which I got a nice sports windbreaker with the Midway logo on the left breast), we went and finally got our rooms. DAMN, those rooms were nice… everything was button controlled, the bathroom had separate shower and bath (which had its own TV), a minibar, a fax machine, a safe… we were quite content. :-)

From there we went to House of Blues for a few hours of gameplay. I’ll admit… as much as I wanted to try L.A. Rush and Blitz: The League, all of my gameplay time went to Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks. I also got to speak to a number of MK team members, including Ed Boon, Shaun Himmerick, Steve Beran, Tony Goskie, and Mike Taran. One of the highlights of the night was when Scott and I were playing ko-op mode on the X-Box version of MK:SM; suddenly, we noticed a commotion at the PS2 next to us. We turned, and saw a blind teen being led to sit down next to Ed. It turned that this was Brice Mellen, who had made national news recently with his ability to play fighting games. So, I quickly grabbed my camcorder, and had just enough tape left to film three matches, all of which Brice won. The final tally was Brice 4, Ed 1. :-)

After House of Blues, Scott and I returned to the hotel to drop off our equipment, and then wandered the city briefly trying to find the Sound Bar where Midway had a room set aside for drinks. We got there, and stayed for a half-hour… and realized it wasn’t our thing. So, we went back, and worked on videos, images, and updates.

The next morning we got up at about 9 AM, did some more work on the site, and then headed to the airport at about 11:30 AM. We had lunch at Chili’s in the airport, and then headed to our respective flights. I got back in Houston around 5 PM, and from there went to Denny’s for dinner. The weekend itself was slow, and I spent it getting the videos I took ripped, watermarked, and encoded, and also giving my impressions of MK:SM.

If you want to see the videos I took, well…

• Mortal Kombat Online: Midway Chicago 2005 Shaolin Monks Presentation and Photos!
• Mortal Kombat Online: Midway Chicago 2005 MK: Shaolin Monks Impressions and Videos!
• Got-Next: Midway Gamer’s Day 05 Videos

And now, well… I’m going to get back to work here. Fun fun… I might post back later with a couple of pics of goodies I got at Gamers Day.

I’ll be back sometime Friday evening.

I’m posting this link and the relevant part of the comment from it simply because it reminded me so much of someone I know. Said person will remain nameless, but a number of people who read this blog (whether on darquecathedral.org or LiveJournal) know who it is.

http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=158566&cid=13283316

Bad Guys are Shmucks.

Bad Guys don’t like to fix the problems within themselves, because that’s hard and scary work. So instead, and this is what makes them Bad Guys, they pretend that they’re perfect and that the world outside them is imperfect. This is much easier to do, probably because it doesn’t actually change anything. Changing things takes work. Wishful Thinking only takes Wishful Thinking.

Where it gets ugly is when the world says, “Uh, no, actually. You’re living in an illusion and you’re the ugly one. Sorry, but that’s the objective reality of the situation.”

When faced with this, the Bad Guy has a problem; S/he has to either fess up or fall into even more aggressive denial of the subject in order to placate themselves. Fessing up gets progressively more difficult to do as you train your brain to work in certain ways; those synaptic pathways get wider the more you use them. So typically, the classic Bad Guy will then villainize the people or things which are telling them how things really stand. And in the end if it goes far enough, the Bad Guy will actually go out and try to destroy the things or people which are making them look stupid as stupid as they are. –Usually while crying, “Evil!” or some such clattering nonsense.

The fascinating thing about it is that the Bad Guy has practiced hard at pretending fake realities into view while deliberately not seeing what’s right in front of them. They are adept ignorers, and thus have horribly atrophied senses of awareness. This is they miss the obvious, like embarrassing code in their own products while hypocritically crying foul. The more Bad a Bad Guy is, the more incredibly stupid and weak-minded they become.

But even more interesting is the fact that when faced with evidence of such blatant crimes, the Bad Guy is no more able now than before to fess up to the fact that they are Bad Guys. They’ll try to rationalize, and indeed lie outright that they are the ones being maligned.