Upon A Stage of Possible Giants

The Masters Party was an excellent mingle party. I met several folk, found out more about this wonderful industry, and played some games. Several people there have already been working in the industry, and we played games they worked on on respective consoles. One of the residents of the house works at Bungie, so for much of the night people played Halo 3, which was not yet released. After a few drinks, I found myself arguing the quality of the show Firefly and, more importantly, discussing Team Fortress 2 with an employee of Valve. It's pretty cool meeting faces behind games, I must say.

Anyway, one thing I don't think I've mentioned before is the variety of people in Seattle. I don't only mean a variety of cultures, which does indeed exist, but also a variety in level of sanity (This probably exists in most big cities). The Ozarks seems to have very few people with mental problems that don't allow them to funtion in the world, or maybe they don't leave their house in the Ozarks. If you visit Downtown Seattle, you will be certain to encounter at least one person who talks gibberish to themselves and laughs manically, seemingly unaware of any other person, and also jumping around and uses objects on the ground to tell stories that don't make sense.

I found myself waiting for a bus with one such fellow on the way to the TMBG concert. It was strange, because on appearance I would have guessed he was a regular dude. I was nervous at first, but he seemed to be too involved with entertaining himself to be aware of my existence. I've found out that the proper behavior for someone in my place is to exchange glances with nearby sane people and shrug. I learn a little ettiquette every day.

TMBG put on a great show, but I still had an unpleasant time. I've become aware of a secret society of large obnoxious guys who get drunk and go to concerts, ram their way to the middle-front area, and dance and lean on people and make annoying noises that isn't singing. When this happens, everyone around him glares, and then exchange glances with each other and shrug. But angrily. It seems to be this society's goal to ruin the show for other people though. On at least two occasions during the concert, I found one of these fellows in front of me, blocking my view. The first one... was the worst. TMBG shows are pretty mellow, but he tried to start a mosh pit to "She's an Angel", which is a love song of sorts. A girl attacked him for this, no lie. Anyway, I lost track of him for one half of a split freaking second and he was on stage. His unworthy blasphemis legs were wiggling on the holy altar of my idols. The stage is a forbidden holy land and he was a deviant invader of the devilish variety. I half expected the apocolypse. Fortunately, security prevented this and took him away, and probably chucked him into a dimension where inhabitants must suffer eternally without ever again being graced by a note of sound. The band? Didn't skip a freaking beat.

And today, I went to the Nintendo Store, in Nintendo. It's not an open store, just for special folk, and Digipen students must have an escort. I got a nifty jacket, the new Zelda game on the DS (it's not out yet), and some other swag, all for like 20% off retail price. I'm told they never run out of anything either, including Wiis when no other stores had them. I plan to get Brawl early. I am enjoying the perks of my studentitude.


PS. I forgot to mention, the surprise opener for TMBG was Harvey Danger with just a piano/guitar player, which was reminiscent of Ben Folds (In other words, quality). Upon some wizardnet research, I found that the band put their newest album up for free download here as some kind of wizardnet experiment. If you like Ben Folds (and you should), give it a shot!