The Crooked Cue

Today, I went with Hobo and Girlfriend to a new bar.

Hobo is so named because he once spent a week on my couch, and Girlfriend is called girlfriend because she is my girlfriend. It's pretty simple.

Anyways, we went to The Crooked Cue, which is in Port Credit, near the waters of Lake Ontario. Despite the stench of the dead-cat-polluted water, the bar itself is actually in a really nice location. I could almost say it's the city's 'club scene', but I won't because that would be an embarrassment.

The Cue is nice in the sense that it has over 20 billiard tables. That's the game known as pool, or snooker, or a variety of other stupid-sounding names, wherein you poke a ball at other balls with a long stick. This is starting to sound like a gay porn.

We didn't end up playing pool, but we did try a variety of drinks. I had a 'James Bond'. It's what James Bond drinks in the James Bond movies.

Hobo had a beer brewed in a local microbrewery. I tried some and it was surprisingly good for a beer I suspect has large amounts of water from the nearby lake.

[Local residents.]

FanExpo 2010

Today, I took Girlfriend to FanExpo.

For those of you who are cool and have a life (like Girlfriend), FanExpo is basically an annual event where geeks get together in ridiculous costumes and squeal over comic books, anime, scifi, and whatever. I am one of them.

There are typically very famous celebrities in attendance. This year, we had the original Batman and Robin, Adam West and Burt Ward.

We also had Summer Glau, the new Terminator, and also an actress in Dollhouse. And Firefly (I didn't want to bring up the F-word).

I also caught a glimpse of Stan Lee, creator of Marvel Comics (Spiderman, Iron Man, etc.). Excelsior!

I ended up buying silly things like a zombie hunting license. Girlfriend looked exasperated but I know that means she's secretly impressed.

Waitress Pickups

Today, I managed to semi-successfully hit on a waitress. If by accident.

I was at Jack Astor's with a few friends from high school. I arrived late, and in the middle of a warzone. One of my friends had already gotten the waitress' name wrong, and the others were busy drawing pictures of her various tattoos on the paper tablecloth.

What happened next was completely by accident. Which obviously shows that I can pick up girls without even trying.

Anyways, I felt bad for the girl - she was cute, after all - so I wrote an apology on the tablecloth, and when she walked by, I directed her attention to it. She smiled, gave me a playful shove, and said, "You're cute!" before walking away.

Everyone else at the table stared, before calling me a traitor. I have never been more proud to be an asshole.

Violet Hill

Today I learned how to play Violet Hill on my guitar.

That's about it. It's a pretty slow day.

Weed Whacker

Today, a friend and I spent two hours hacking down weeds in our backyard.

During the summer, our backyard went from a perfectly normal patio to a hideous tangle of vines resembling the darkest parts of the Amazon rainforest. I've never been to the Amazon, but I've watched The Jungle Book, and Disney is a credible source of information.

[Mustache of Authori-tay!]

Anyways, I used a machete. My housemate used a shovel. Together, we made like Wesley Snipes in Blade and carved a vicious path through the weeds. The plants will sing of the genocide we lay upon them for generations. Or they would, if any still lived.

Insane

Today I beat an insane computer in Starcraft.

Considering that the computer-controlled players in this game are at par with some of the best human players, I'm pretty proud of myself. I'm less proud because I exploited a cheap glitch in their programming. But I'm more proud because I'm a mechatronics engineer and exploiting robots is WHAT I DO.

[Especially insane robots who look like governors.]

P.S. If the robot revolution has occurred and this blog post is brought up at my meatbag trial: The following line is true. The previous line is false. Humanity, I'd like my statue to be made out of squirrel babies. Thanks.

Sleepover

Today I ended up at the WestEnd. It's the local bar. I don't know exactly how I ended up there, since I woke up about 50km away in another city. But that's beside the point.

Sunday nights is typically open mike night at the WestEnd. There's always one married couple that play together. They have 'residency' which is a fancy way of saying they own the place. Not literally, but through their heartfelt music and soulful lyrics and the heart-trembling strum of their guitars.

Did someone put Rohypnol in my drink?

Anyways, the new thing of the night was going back to my pad and lending two girls the use of my PJs so they could sleepover. Insert obvious joke about having two girls in my pants.

They slept on the couch, but my girlfriend was in my bed, so I wasn't too fussed.

London Tap House

Today I assaulted a security guard.

By accident.

He was pushing my girlfriend and she was crying! Why don't these guys wear uniforms or something?

At least I didn't get kicked out.

Kinda wish I had though. That would've been cool.

[This is the face of AWESOME.]

Umi Sushi

Today I went with a group of friends for sushi.

There was female friend who sells shoes, bisexual male friend with too many shoes, hobo friend who is obsessed with cars, token black guy with the hat, girlfriend with questionable sanity, and myself.

My girlfriend likes sushi, because it's small and neat. I think that's a subtle reference to my lil' guy but innuendo like that usually passes right over my head. Actually, it passes over her head more often than not, since I'm usually on top. BUT ANYWAYS.

The new thing wasn't the sushi, but the group of people. Most of the attendees hadn't met before, because half of them were my friends from high school, and the other half from my university, so I was the social linchpin holding the group together. You can probably predict how that turned out.

[Officer, I swear I just farted once.]

Streetsville Indie

Today, I went back to the area that Cuchulainn's was in. No, I didn't get beat up, mainly because I had the foresight (re: laziness) to write yesterday's post today, and backlog it.

I ended up going for coffee instead, at Second Cup (the hobo's Starbucks). I had... a vanilla hot chocolate? I think that's what it was, because it made me feel like buying Teva sandals and listening to Good Charlotte (c'mon hatemail).

I also wore a purple shirt, which I haven't done since I was in first grade. It is the most indie shirt I own:

[Imagine this, in purple. Hey, that guy sort of looks like me.]

We ended up wandering around in an empty parking lot talking about jazz and cars, then my friend pissed off some Mexicans at a burrito place, but I think my shirt scared them off.

Cuchulainn's

Today, I tried out a new pub with a couple of my friends. It's called Cuchulainn's, apparently pronounced, "Kuh-KUH-Linn's" because Irish people are crazy. It's okay, no one reads this blog anyways, and even if they did, Ireland doesn't have the Internet. I eventually ended up calling it Cthulu's Irish Pub.

According to their website, the pub is named after the Irish version of Hercules. I don't know what a pub like this is doing in Streetsville, where the average population consists of guys who think American Eagle pink polos and spray-on tans are a good idea.

I'm going to get beat up next time I go there, aren't I?

Starcraft 2

Today, I caved in and bought Starcraft 2.

I also helped someone assemble a coffee table.

Story: My housemate's coffee table was a ~$35 piece of tree junk that fell apart every time you put a glass/remote/porn mag on it. Tired of having to reassemble it every time we breathed on it just a bit too hard, he decided to go out to ikea and buy a sturdy, much more expensive, yet classy coffee table.

We ended up picking one that felt like it weighed more than the earth itself. Assembling it, like all things of ikea, was some sort of magical procedure that used a screwdriver in lieu of a wand.

The same housemate was also playing Starcraft 2 when I walked in later. He doesn't even play as many strategy games as I do, and he had it before me. That tipped the scales and forced my inner geek to go out and buy a copy.

So don't wait up for any new posts. I'll probably be too busy sexing up some zerglings.

Vectorizing

Today, I learned how to vectorize photos.

Don't judge me based on the websites I frequent, but I found the instructions for vectorizing on a notorious internet message board (Internet rules 1 & 2). Basically, this:

[In Soviet Russia, cartoon draws you!]

I took a photo of myself and my girlfriend on the London Eye (see posts dating about two months ago), and spent about an hour fiddling with it. Yeah, I have a lot of spare time, but hey, at least I wasn't watching the Nanny 911 marathon instead.

Anyways, here are the results:

[Please excuse the cuteness of this picture. It was the only one I could find that didn't include sex.]

Xenomorphs

Today, I watched Aliens for the first time.

[Mouth vagina.]

I was at a friend's party, and it came on the TV. For a self-proclaimed nerd, I've always surprised myself at how long it takes me to see the most popular sci-fi flicks. It took me 5 years to see The Matrix, I still haven't seen the original Terminator, and I just watched Alien a month or two ago. Fellow geeks, I know I'm an embarrassment (wow, geeks are ashamed of me?). But I'm working on it.

I mean, I'm working on being less of an embarrassment to geeks, and more of an embarrassment to everyone else.

The Crystal

Today I visited the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal at the Royal Ontario Museum.

Stalkers out there, now you can narrow my location down to within a few kilometers. For everyone else, the ROM is one of Canada's biggest and most extensive museums. They're also filthy rich.

[Must be all those 'special exhibits' they have.]

So is Michael Lee-Chin, who is supposedly the richest guy in Canada, and according to my friend, drives a Ferrari and owns 4 iPads. We suspect he uses them for frisbee practice.

The favourite hobby of the rich is to get together with other rich people and spend their money on something so ridiculously over the top it drives the common man mad with confusion. That's apparently what the ROM and Michael Lee-Chin did. This is the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal:

[It's like a church giving birth to an alien spacecraft, no?]

It boggles the mind what the architects were thinking. My guess is that they were playing with a bag of Doritos and too much vodka. Nevertheless, despite its obvious disharmony with the surrounding 100 year old architecture, I couldn't help but feel a modicum of admiration for the people who managed to make it stay up like that.

Inside, it serves as the lobby to the museum, so no, it isn't filled with candy/robots/strippers. It's just a very eye-catching landmark in an otherwise rather dull city. If this is what the future is like, I need to start drinking more.

Alien Swarm

Today I downloaded (for free!) and played Alien Swarm.

It's a fun little online game, where you control a space marine and shoot aliens, while trying to discover what happened to the infested military base.

[Obviously, his testicle is his weak point.]

It's entirely free, so I suggest that you go download it. My Steam name is Jokeslayer, so feel free to look me up if you feel like playing with a total noob.

Perseid Meteor Shower

Today, I went to another back-country, abandoned road in the middle of the night to see the annual Perseid meteor shower.

It was the same group of amateur astronomers I went with to catch the Aurora (see previous posts), and our trip was just as eventful as last time. Which means, we didn't see anything.

Oh, we saw one shooting star. But for something as famous as the Perseids, where a meteor supposedly falls every minute, the night sky seemed oddly inanimate. Maybe we were just in a bad location, or arrived at the wrong time, or maybe all the meteors were eaten by a space octopus. We'll never know.

Casino Night

Today, I went to a Casino for the first time. I also spent more money per second than ever before.

[Sad face.]

Holy crap guys, gambling is expensive.

A friend and I went down to Casino Niagara (It's in Niagara Falls) on a spur-of-the-moment whim. Actually, no - we've been talking about going for a while, but spontaneously. So I suppose it was a planned spur-of-the-moment. Anyways, the Casino itself is pretty small - just two small circular floors - but there are a lot of shiny machines displaying various types of fruit and very, very large and tempting amounts of cash.

I decided to play it safe and put aside a set amount of money to spend, and no more. I've never gambled before, and I don't believe in spending money I haven't earned, so I wasn't looking to make a profit. Instead, I thought of it as paying some money to have fun and learn something about black holes.

I played some slots to get acquainted with losing my money. And yeah, I ended up losing 5 bucks to the one-armed bandit. Eventually, my friend convinced me to try out the card tables. I was wary because everyone there looked pretty high class in their suits and dresses, plus the dealer looked like a Nazi from his frozen expression and robotic movements. We ended up playing Blackjack, in which I put down $45 dollars in chips, which is about 3 rounds.

I lasted about 6 rounds, which wasn't too bad for my first time, but I made the mistake of playing my winnings when I should have just hung on to them. It was interesting though, as I ran my hands through empty pockets. The guy next to me was dying, which made me feel much better about myself.

Anyways, moral of the story - don't gamble unless you're prepared to lose. We ended up going to an arcade afterward, where I spent $10 to shoot a lot of targets and play with a plastic sword, so I guess I'm a much better gamer than a gambler.

L4D Expert

Today, I beat a stage in Left 4 Dead 2 on expert difficulty.

To give you the scope of this feat, consider that each zombie hit takes away 1/5th of your lifespan, and that you're surrounded by at least 6 zombies for about 50% of the game. Also consider that you're rarely given any healing items, and that the biggest zombie, the Tank, has over 8000 hit points. This ends up with a team of four people taking at least 45 seconds to mow it down, while it can kill each person in one hit.

[Also, it looks like this.]

So yeah, it's pretty difficult.

Luckily I had a good team with me, some high school friends that play the game fairly often (probably too much). My computer isn't top of the line so it has some difficulty rendering frames, which causes me to lag out on a regular basis like an overweight asthmatic running the Tour de France.

Hobo Bag

Today I slept in a plastic garbage bag.

Okay, so I was camping, and it was raining. So I used four black garbage bags and duct tape to waterproof my sleeping bag. Unfortunately, rain got in anyways and I ended up sleeping in a sack full of water. So much for a pleasant night's sleep.

I was actually inside a tent at the time, but the material of the tent walls are too thin to block the torrents of rainwater. I ended up duct taping another set of bags to the roof of my tent, until a puddle began to form above my head and I had to funnel it out of the door.

I know some homeless people that sleep in bags, except theirs are made of much thicker material and lots of scavenged rubber that are haphazardly sewn together. The problem I found was that the material is entirely airtight, which makes sweat and skin respiration really uncomfortable.

It was like I was marinating in my own fluids.

Aurora Hunting

Today, I went on a road trip to find the Aurora Borealis.

For those of you in my area, you may have read in the papers that the Aurora was going to be particularly strong a few hours ago, due to a solar flare or something astronomical like that.

[I wanted to see this.]

A friend called me up and asked if I'd be willing to hop in his car and head towards some backwater, middle-of-nowhere country road so that we could see the sky without the interference of the city lights. Nothing sketchy about hanging out in the middle of the night in a pitch-black, back-country road right?

Unfortunately, we didn't get to see the Aurora, because the lights are caused by solar particles entering the earth's atmosphere. Emphasis on solar, which means the lights are paradoxically visible only during the daytime, when the sun is still up, but during the evening, where it's dark enough to view them.

[Instead, I got this.]

Even though I didn't get to see the Aurora, I still caught a rare view of the night sky that we don't get in the big cities, plus, I got to take a detour out of everyday life.