I am PONG!!!!

Alright everyone, I've talked to a bunch of people about my blog, and the main suggestions seem to be better paragraph distinction (I have no idea how to explain that one) and most of all MORE PICTURES. I do try to put up as many pictures as I take in a day, but that's not enough. It's never enough!!! Is it!? So I'm going to do something that I already sort of do, but I'm just going to do it more now; I'm going to start inserting any kind of image I can think of when I need one, even if it makes absolutely no sense with what I'm talking about.

So here's what I'm thinking: Just to keep this a little more interesting, if anyone wants to they can put in suggestions for pictures I should put in my blog. I'll type the word/phrase into google or something, and pick the weirdest thing I find. I'll even go into InDesign and put a little border around it with word on it so you know what's going on. Sound good? Comment leaving starts.............now!

I didn't really feel like posting yesterday because....well to be honest I was just feeling kind of lazy. But, I will post about yesterday today because nothing really happened today anyway. Woo!

Yesterday was the last day of the Come Out and Play Festival. Since playing Journey to the End of the Night and Cruel 2 B Kind within a few hours of eachother had pretty much destroyed any desire I had to move, the only game I played was The Go Game. It was................................uh....................well, it was pretty crappy actually. But that wasn't entirely the games fault.

The Go Game was recently bought out by something called Think Geek, which decided to technologically enhance it by using mildly complicated cell phones instead of paper notes in order to get instructions. These instructions are generally things like "take a picture of someone in your group doing something they've never done before" or "go to (insert location) and find (insert random thing)." The game sounded pretty fun on the website ("Go Game, by way of the Come Out and Play Festival. Like a scavenger hunt, on completely insane technological steroids."), but I ended up getting grouped with some horrible people.

I arrived at Washington Square Park half an hour early, even though I thought I was late at the time. When I found my team, there was only one person from it there: an older lady (maybe in her mid-forties or fifties) named Reenie. She seemed pretty nice, and we talked for a while. But forty five minutes later, we were still the only people from the team who were there out of the eight that were supposed to show. A lady from the game came up to us and said that she was just going to stick us in another group- Team NYU (yeah, that doesn't sound like a group of....well anyway). That team consisted of three jocked out (but reasonably nice) muscular blond guys with puca shell necklaces and sandals, and the parents of one of they guys-a lady who looked waaay too unhappy with her life considering the clothes she was wearing (Trophy Wife), and an older guy who was so obviously bent on thinking he was better than everyone else that I almost left the second I heard him talk (Old Guy).

Eventually one of our original teammates showed up. He was a tall blondish guy who kind of looked like he belonged in a really fancy coffee house or something, but he was actually really nice and one of the only people I didn't want to kill by the end of the game.

To avoid ranting too much, I'm just going to make a little list here of all the things that were wrong. Otherwise this post will be as long as my last one.
(* means I'm actually going to write in more detail about it)

1. Our phone was screwed up and we spent about 10 minutes of the game trying to figure it out while the Old Guy told us stories about how "back in [his] day...."
2. Old Guy so obsessed with finishing the game before everyone else that we ended up half assing the whole first part of it.
3. Same problem as #2, but it led to lots of speed walking which was really painful for me at the time.
4. I morally objected to our first photo*
5. All of our missions were kind of lame and one involved doing a word problem....about pizza. PIZZA. WORD PROBLEM.
6. Trophy Wife complained about everything the entire time*
7. Old guy bashed Carleton*
8.Two of the younger guys had to leave, taking with them any hope of doing something interesting for our photos and videos.
9. Old Guy sexually harassed bat girl*
10. Did I mention speed walking?

So one of our first missions was to take a picture of one of our teammates doing something they'd never done before. Terrified that they were going to say something like "Let's have Julia get naked and dance in the fountain!!!" I decided to hang back from the group a little bit while they figured that one out. Almost immediately, a possibly homeless transvestite walked by us. Apparently no one in my group had any kind of sensitivity towards other people's feelings because they thought that it would be hilarious to do a "take a picture of me with the freak" photo. I ended up standing about 20 feet away from them staring in disgust while they did this and considered running over to the guy to apologize afterwards, but the were already speedwalking on to the next mission. Now that I think back on it, I should have either left right then, or stopped them before they even did it in the first place. At least I won't have to see any of them again.

Later on in the game, I was walking a little behind the group (I couldn't walk quite fast enough to keep up) with the trophy wife lady who also couldn't keep up. She walked up next to me and said something like "This game isn't very fun..." and I started agreeing with her and going on about how I thought it was so horrible that they took that picture, and that the old guy was so bent on winning that it was sort of draining the fun out of it, and she starts with "And its all in parks and I hate parks. They smell like dogs. I hate that! And all this walking! I really just need a soda." I suppressed my look of disbelief/horror/disgust, and walked on, hoping the game would get better somehow.

Not too long after that, trophy wife walked up to her husband (we were in a park again) and started complaining about how it smelled. He looked around, said something like "yeah, it does smell weird." then turned to me and said "remind you of Carleton?? Hahahaha." I just gave him a really dirty look and said "No."

Towards the end of the game we finally got hold of Bat Girl. Bat Girl was pretty much there to give bonus points. If your team could find her, she'd give you a special photo assignment that you could get points for. Our assignment was to take a scandalous picture with her for a fictional tabloid magazine. Old Guy jumped in immediately and said something like "I should be looking up her skirt!" and started getting down on the sidewalk to do it. Bat Girl was like "Whoooaaaa..." pretty much everyone did a kind of nervous giggle and I looked just about as horrified as the guys wife did. Old Guy tried to convince us that we should do his "looking up Bat Girls skirt" photo a little bit more, but we eventually got him to settle for making it look like he was paying her for sex.

There were a few good things that happened at The Go Game though. For one, we made a nice video of my team reenacting pong which you can find if you register on www.thegogame.com and look for the video by Love Parade. Also, there was free food afterwards (good free food) so once again I didn't have to pay for food for an entire day.

And just to quickly update on today, all I did was work on my project. Exciting. I'll try to get some more pictures up on here soon, it's just really late right now and I actually have to get up tomorrow.