A Groggy Recollection of New Years Eve

I'm very sore... my body hurts but my head is fine. I have remarkably managed to drink sufficient water before going to sleep (at about 4am) to avoid a hangover... But I did get very drunk. Let's recap:

I didn't have plans for new years eve until new years eve. I hadn't been invited anywhere (friend who normally brings me places left the state) but I knew of a party happening. A friend on the day kindly let me be their plus-one and off I went with my two pals Alex and Karim. We'd never been drunk all three of us in the same spot at the same time so decided to fix this. It was fun.

The party took place in the country. There was a section of the property called "tent city." I did not have a tent to sleep in. This isn't important until later but it just sets the environment... and the environment was perfectly suited to get crazy drunk and being super loud as neighbours wouldn't be able to hear us. Things that were yelled out during the night include: an explanation of the political situation in Egypt, bragging about our superior comic book knowledge, and "EAGLE! EAGLE!" before piggy back rides.

Alex tore my pants when he picked me up. The tear, of course, was right where my crotch is so my underwear was visible for at least half of the night. Thankfully I was drunk enough not to be crippled with self consciousness. Karim led me to his car (parked behind a shed of some kind so out of sight of the party) and offered me a spare pare of shorts. I didn't ended up wearing them. Somehow this led to one of Alex's friends suggesting I take my pants off...

Karim, Alex, and I all returned the party without pants with the idea of seeing how long it would take for people to notice that we weren't wearing pants. Answer: not that long.

Don't worry, I eventually put my pants back on... but the tear kept getting larger and well... those pants are pretty dead now. Oh well. Being pantsless was fun for a bit.

There was a thing of some kind. An inflatable thing with big soft poles that you used to fight each other with. The arena had four small platforms you could stand on and I suppose one kind of fight would involve four players seeing who could stay on top of them for long enough while being pushed. We sorta did that? But then it quickly devolved into just beating each other. The platforms themselves were just big plastic cushions that you could remove which left four big holes in the arena that went all the way to the grass. This + a lot of alcohol made the entire arena a troublesome place to stay upright in. It was a bit slippery to begin with and while rushing around in the dark we (mainly me) would frequently fall down into these holes and momentarily get stuck which was a perfect opportunity to get beaten. The new rules of the "beat each other up" game became "push them over the edge of the arena" and it was difficult but after a long fight with Karim I finally won... To be fair it is difficult to push your opponent anywhere if they spend half their time in a hole going "oh gosh not again."

I own a Nokia phone. You know the kind: small, no camera, no internet access, no interesting features except "snake", and no known way to completely destroy them. Whenever I show it to people I demonstrate that why yes, you can just drop it on the floor and it'll be fine. Look: no cracks in the screen. Screw you iphone owners! Well I finally got the opportunity to demonstrate to someone what happens when you throw it at the wall. The answer is the back comes off, the battery comes out, and the three pieces fly everywhere. This happens most of the time when I drop it anyway the only problem is I couldn't find the back plate so now I have a phone with an exposed battery. It works perfectly fine though. The screen didn't even get a scratch.

I smoked my first cigarette. Surprisingly not that bad? I was quite drunk at that point. I made an effort to make sure I was drunk for as much of it as possible and got most of the drinking out of the near the start. I actually quite dislike the idea of smoking. I don't want to become a smoker and I find it a really unappealing habit... but I hadn't ever done it so I figured I wanted to do it at least once. I'm not entirely sure if I did it correctly but I could hardly stop and ask the guy I got given the cigarette from. He was quite wasted and was telling me his opinions about The Hobbit movies ("I've read the book like 6 times...") and how he didn't like how the 2nd one wasn't that close to the book due to the inclusion of Tauriel ("I've read the book like 6 times..." he reminds me) but the 1st movie was pretty close to the book ("I've read the book like 6 times...") but he didn't like the 2nd one because you see it wasn't that close to the book (which he then told me that he'd read "like 6 times") and then he repeated everything all over again. He was thus too busy to go "ok how you smoke it is like this..." But I discovered that the deeper you breathe in smoke the worse it is. My breathing rhythm slowed while smoking and it continued on for a bit afterwards which was quite relaxing despite the fact that I now smelled freaking terrible. I figure I could probably still feel relaxed if I just did some nice slow breathing exercises instead and it would have the added bonus of not giving me lung cancer. Cool huh? Yay new experiences!

I was drunk enough to dance. That's pretty drunk. Some girl asked me to dance. I did so but after a while thought "...I actually want to leave now..." and there's no point where mid-dancing you just go "oh OK cool. I'm going to walk away from you now..." Thankfully at the same time she decided that she would go off and do something else so we just mutually walked away from each other. That was convenient.

After a night of running around, running up slides, fighting with plastic, drinking, and harming my body in new ways it was time to sleep. I slept in Karim's car which was an improvement from last new years where I slept in a tent (the ground is even more uncomfortable than a car) where it was colder and also more exposed to mosquitoes. This year I woke up without a bunch of bug bites all over me so huzzah! And just like last year I got about 2 hours sleep before I was awoken by the sunrise. I got a lift home with someone else who was leaving at 6:30am and I got home where I showered and fell asleep.

I'm tired, I'm sore all over (except the head, we've mentioned this), and I have only one new years resolution: take a lot of selfies. I mean, why not right? Here's day 1:

I had fun. I look forward to 2014. First year of not being a student... should be interesting.

Onwards! To adventure!

City Adventures

Yesterday I went on an adventure in the city with a bunch of fellow nerdfighters. Perth nerdfighters aren't well known for their gatherings (I've never been to one) so we decided that this counted as one, just a small one. I didn't know them and I'm not sure if they all knew each other either but we were all summoned there by Mia, a visitor from Canberra, who we all decided to say hello to and lead around Perth.

We started our adventure by congregating around the giant cactus. Every Perthian knows of the giant cactus. Thing is I only knew Mia, and when I got there she wasn't there, so I saw a large group of people and headed towards them... but wasn't sure if they were The Group so I stopped short and awkwardly chilled off to the side. They saw me and went "you're probably with us." They were right. I'm glad we got that sorted out.

Mia arrived. The adventure begun... after we had stood around talking for a bit and deciding that even though the shade was nice we did want to see something in the city even if we weren't quite sure what that was. It ended up being nerd stores (for nerds... like... us). Then we encountered a Dalek:

Don't worry we survived. It was a placid Dalek that did not mind photos.

Adventures continued through various nerd stores - one of which I had never been in before. I felt somewhat inadequate as a nerd having no idea about it but then again doesn't it add to my stereotypical nerd cred if I don't go out to the city enough to know about it? Nerd-paradox! No one bought anything which was probably unfortunate for the shop owners because you'd probably be expecting good business if nearly a dozen people walk into your store. By this point we had collectively agreed that when we accidentally split up the code word to yell out was "group!" and hope it is answered so we could reunite and continue onwards like the oncoming storm of "just endlessly browsing" that we were.

Swag.

Then we got food. Food was good but Jake (pictured above) bought a pizza that they did not want to finish. The problem was that none of us wanted the last slice either... so he started offering it to random strangers who walked past. They didn't take it.

Who wouldn't take an innocent slice of pizza off this guy?

It became a competition. We would grab it and offer to someone, get rejected, and pass it off to the next person who would similarly have no luck. Note: if you are to repeat this try not to offer it to small children. It makes you look creepy and probably will get you kicked out of the food court by security...

...so after we were kicked out by security the next thing we did was try and give Jake's number on a piece of paper out to people in the street. Because passing out things to random strangers is not at all suspicious and has worked really well for us thus far? Screw logic this is an adventure. We went into another comic book store where people were browsing (with real intention to buy) and Mia whispered "offer it to that guy over there..."

"That guy" heard us and went "hmm? Sorry were you talking about me?" What remarkable ears. She explained how we were trying to get people to accept Jake's number. He accepted as a joke but on our way out someone pointed out that Jake's handwriting made it difficult to understand that his 7 was a 7 and not a 2 so he called out "I wouldn't call someone who can't write a 7!"

Will this burgeoning romance flourish or crash and burn due to Jake's substandard handwriting skills? I fear this ship will never become canon...

In the background firetrucks were driving around. There were a lot of police present. Someone was getting arrested. The police/firetruck presence was on for a while so as we walked in and out of stores we would occasionally see them.

The natural response is to take a group selfie with the firetruck in the background right?

Next was Myer where we discovered the comfiest couch in existence. I could've slept on that couch. It costed 6 grand. No one agreed on the best way to steal it or who would get ownership (I voted me, Jake voted himself, Mia wanted it for herself etc).

The natural response to any situation for out generation is to take a group selfie.

We chilled there for quite some time and no one kicked us out. No staff even bothered to ask us if we would move on instead of sitting on all the furniture. It was disappointing. The worst thing the staff did was when they asked if we needed assistance and we said we were looking for the toys section (for nerf guns). They looked at us and asked "aren't you a bit old for that?" but helped and then we found LEGO DARTH VADER:

Awwww yeah.

Can we stop for a moment to talk about store mannequins? I know they're infamous for not being good representations of the female form but those discussions rarely ever centre around things like necks. This is totally not how necks work:

That's not quite right. It's too long.

Something's wrong...

AEEEEEEEERRRRRRR!!!

Kill it with fire!

Things were pretty chill from then on. Some point during this adventure we were all sitting around and someone was looking at photos on their phone that the person next to me had taken. I leaned over and saw their name (Matthew Cabrera) and recognised it. I had somehow spent a few hours with this person without learning their name (that's not that unusual) only to discover that I knew who they were. We had a bunch of mutual friends (oh Perth), I'd watched a music video the other day he'd worked on, and he even follows me on tumblr! Now why he didn't mention that earlier I don't know. Isn't the appropriate thing to say when you first meet someone "I read your blog"? Seriously, if you bump into me and you follow my blog or youtube channel please tell me. Someone else in the group did. They got a sweet high-five. It was great. After a while I realised that basically everyone there knew who I was in some way or another (mainly Facebook. We're in a giant group of 2700+ people together and I contribute regularly) even though I had only heard of a few of them.

We sat on a bench outside of a place that did piercings for $15. Jake dared someone to get one but no one did... and by then it was reasonably far into the afternoon so we parted. The group had thinned by then and there only a few of us left. I said goodbye to all the new people I had met, Mia had discovered the wonders of wandering around Hay Street (rock candy!... and comics), and I had gotten my exercise for the day.

All in all it was a fun day out and remarkably I didn't get sunburned. Huzzah! Really that's the true measurement of success for a day outside.

DFBTA fellow Perth Nerdfighters.