2001-06-13 - 3:35 p.m.
#72: No Need for a Night of Surprises
Note to self: Need to find job.... Need to learn to drive car.... Focus.... FOCUS! NNNNNGGGGHHH!
Wow, like, wow. Last night was probably the BEST anime night we've had in quite a wee while. Total disaster in terms of technical level, but wotta turn out! Like, totally rad. Like, so cool it's even got me speaking like some leftover from the eighties. Wiiiiiiiiiiicked.... *leftover from the eighties handsign*
Ahem. Anyway, let's back up a bit and start from the point when I first arrived in the AEC hall where we usually hold our Tuesday AAC evenings. Which was about two and a half hours before the meeting usually starts. I'd thought I'd bus down and come early to avoid the rush hour traffic, but it appears I slightly underestimated the time the bus would ACTUALLY arrive in the city. *sighs* You'd think the system would be more reliable in its unreliability, wouldn't you? Hmph. Anyway, spent most of the waiting period reading through Esio Trot and The Twits (thank you again, Finn! You saved me from the madness of boredom! Mostly); and when I figured out that the projector was actually open and unlocked, I hooked up my VCD player and spent an enjoyable hour or so watching 2001 E3 game trailers on the really, really massive lecture hall screen. Bwaaaaah.... Even Daikatana looks good like that. But it's still not a patch on the others, admittedly. ^_^
EB turned up at about this point (interupting my private moment with Metal Gear Solid 2! Curse you! CURSE YOU!), followed by Amy and a friend of hers who was planning on becoming a member of the club. I specifically remember Amy coming in for one reason: She.... BROKE.... My Transformers: The Movie CD! @_@ Noooooooooooooooooooooo! *sobs heartbrokenly* Okay, I'm better now. Now that I know I can probably get it off Joe or James. I think. I hope. Grrr. *grrs at Amy* GRR! After this a sudden WAVE of bodies turned up.... well, it actually started with a trickle with three people I didn't know who were friends with Xavier (I think).... But after that lots and lots and LOTS of people showed up! So many in fact, that the usual counter in my head suddenly decided to go on strike because too many anomalies were showing up.
I'll just list the usual suspects first: David (kinda regular.... He's been turning up more lately), Fergus (allowing him to borrow my Bone TPBs), Finn (returned his Roald Dahl books), James, Joe, Josh (we have a lot of members with names starting with J, don't we?), Gemma (whose name sounds like it starts with a "j" too. Hmmm!), Matt, Nadea, Ronnie (for those of you who don't know him, he's a friend from University and he's been turning up to all the meetings since the first one except for one O.o) just, Zeb (who came VERY late.... so late I almost got out of paying money for the evening, but my sneakiness was not good enough! Got my tapes back, though) and the whole buncha regulars whose names I don't know or don't remember right now because of a slight overload to my frontal lobes.
And now, the UNusual suspects.... First off Clara! Yes, the Clara that hadn't turned up for a Tuesday meeting in the AEC centre since we showed Cowboy Bebop! Yes, THAT Clara! And, of all things, her hair was also slightly purple! Dear god, young lady! What would your mother say?! I'm using a lot of exclamation marks! I'll stop now. Until I talk about the next person. Which is Steve! No, not Steve currently in Japan, that would have caused my internal counter to go both on strike and a vacation for the rest of the year.... Rather it was Mac-guy Steve! The only guy in the AAC who proudly claims to own a Mac! Is he crazy?! I don't know! But he saved our butts with Castle of Cagliostro (I'll explain later)! And then.... Kunfei! Or Jeff! All round nice guy also from Malaysia (somewhat)! And my ride home (eheh. ^^;;;)! Ooooooooooookay.... No more sugar for me. And I think I've about used my quotient for exclamation marks this year, too. Erk.
In any case, it'd actually probably be easier to list the regulars who DIDN'T show up: Chris (at Japanese lessons and learning the mysterious ways of kanji), JP, Michael (working at.... Burger King?) and Nick. Quite a packed house that night was.... The auditorium looked quite healthy in terms of attendance and . Though, uh.... Of all the nights it had to happen, we had.... Technical problems. -_-;;; Specifically Joshs computer, which had basically all the movies we were planning to watch for the night, refused to work with the projector.... After much fiddling around with it, including hooking up EBs Dreamcast to play a spot of Soul Calibur on the massive projector screen (if that line of reasoning makes little sense to you, don't worry.... It takes too long to explain. ^^;;;) and a brief showing of my E3 trailers on my VCD player (I have now tainted every member there with Metal Porn Solid 2! YES! Damn, I'm using exclamation marks again....), we finally decided on showing Castle of Cagliostro, kindly provided by Steve. Which may have been a lucky thing too, because some middle aged lady turned up with her daughter (presumably) and showing Photon with its uhh.... Rather casual stance towards female nudity (as well as male.... Though thankfully there are censoring circles over the offendings... bits) may have been a bit much for her senses. ^_^;;;;
Castle of Cagliostro was a lot of fun.... Even if for me it was a second time through, and it had just that kind of "magic" that I'm beginning to associate with Miyazaki films. Nicely contented, if you will. But still, it was rather short for the evening because by the end it was just 9PM and we had a half hour left.... and so had to break up early, which basically meant almost everyone piling into the cars to go to Open Late to have a big open session chat. And it was a damned big group that arrived there.... Some new people even turned up ("new" as in people I don't really know. They could have been there for a while but I never noticed in my semi comatose state. -_-;;;) but they kinda left a little later, I noticed, without really ever announcing their presence. It's too bad the big table in the middle was taken, or we could have had a big conference thing going. As it was, we sat on three seperate tables in the corner (Boo! hiss! to the people on the centre table! Boo! I say! More exclamation marks.... Bad! Argh! I did it again!) having decided that sitting outside would be a bit.... nippy. That was kinda fun, we hadn't had a "big gather around and just plain talk" fun fun session in a while. Just blabbing on about anything that springs to mind is neat. ^_^ I just wish I knew the name of the guy who was sitting next to me who may or may not have hailed from the Phillipines. @_@ Anyway, had some rather LURVELY chocolate cake and ice cream (and cream, I think) there which was very nice and nummily chocolate. Mmmmmm.... Memories of chocolate.
We all split up for home at 11PM.... Well, most of us did, anyway. Some of us weren't even feeling all that tired yet, so there was a brief conference outside regarding what we should do while the night was still young and the moon was shining a strange off-yellow colour. After a couple of suggestions (including: going to Borders bookstore, going to the top of No Tree Hill lookout, going to Eden Park to get mugged, going to Eden Park to do the mugging, going to the North Shore to start a riot, running through the streets of Auckland butt nekkid) we decided upon crashing at Nadeas place and using her small part of the house as our main base of operations for the evening and beyond. Only five of us took up on that offer: Amy, Josh, Kunfei, Zeb and myself, but even with such a small group we managed to enjoy ourselves once we got there. No, you bad people, get your minds out of the gutter. None of THAT now. O.o Though we did watch a minute or two of a woman redefining the meaning of "mile high club" on SKY 1. Hmmmm. Jubblies. I wonder how much it would cost to install SKY Digital? I mean, uh, A-HEM.
Watched the first two episodes of Nadeas Rurouni Kenshin DVDs.... Of which she'd only up till then watched the very first episode. BLASPHEMY! MUST WATCH SAITOH HAJIME KICK SOME SERIOUS BATTOUSAI ASS! (oh, there I go again with the exclamation marks....) Josh tried to hook his computer up to the TV so that we could watch some Blood: The Last Vampire, but like at the AEC lecture hall, no lack. Dang. Still, from what little we could see on the monitor hookup, it was mucho cool. Much blood and subtle horror monster morphing. Anyway, Amy had to leave "early" (at about 1AM) and since we were dropping her off, we decided to raid the 24 hour supermarket for supplies for Kunfei to cook for us. Specifically, some nummy Chinese noodles. Numminess personified. When we got back to Nadeas place (and setting Kunfei to cook in the mini kitchen) there was a brief debate about what to watch while we waited for the noodles to cook. Eventually we settled upon Fifth Element which was pretty okay.... But after being told that she also had Princess Bride I couldn't stop thinking to myself "I could be watching Princess Bride right now.... I could be watching Princess Bride right now....". So not a good frame of mind to be in while watching a sci-fi movie as weirdly.... WEIRD as Fifth Element was.
So there we sat, in the wee hours of the morning eating some VERY nice noodles and watching a movie on Nadeas TV. And it was quite fun, being out so late for no reason whatsoever. ^_^ Ah, the joys of being over 20.... But then the movie ended as all movies do, and it was 4AM in the morning (yikes) so we decided to toddle our seperate ways home, with me hitching a ride with Kunfei (again. eheh). And so endeth one of the strangeness nights of spontaneous decisions and fun I've ever been in. I should do more "out of the norm" stuff like this more often. It's a fairly new experience being awake in someone elses house so late (or early, if you prescribe to the great bards view of time and clocks: "To go to sleep after midnight, is to go to sleep EARLY.").... Discounting the 18 hours we spent at Nadeas old place for the 2000 New Years eve celebrations, that is.
Whew. Two long entries in quick sucession.... I hope that gets me out from whatever prugatory I deserved for neglecting my diary for a week. ^^;;;;
