The whole evening was...grand, for lack of a cheesier word, except for one drawback:

NO DOUBLE SIDED TAPE

In other words, our pad modding progress got as far as tearing the old pads off the boards with our bare hands and nail polish remover. Oh well. That was still a good 20 minutes of fun.

After the initial shock of no-DDR-at-Gowdey's-DDRty, things eventually worked themselves out and people found stuff to do.

- Every TL sophomore stayed in my TV room, playing Guilty Gear X and this giant robot fisting game where giant robots knock over fake houses made of bad triangle polygons, and, occasionally, each other. There's probably a really bad typo in there somewhere but I don't feel like looking for it.

- Jeff, Sophie, Annie, Geoff ("G-hoff"), Tom and I hung out in the living room, playing piano/pretending to when the pre-set pieces on disk played (Jeff), completely rearranging my Magic decks (Sophie/Annie), doing nothing but eat Jelly Bellies (the rest of us), or cuddle under a blanket (all of us Sophie/Annie).

- I sorta wandered from group to group, trying to be the good host and all, but also found myself guilty of logging on AIM to chat with Momo (top left one) a lot. Oh well, not a bad trade-off. X)

After the record had been spun, cheesecake had been eaten, and Jeff had sneezed into my webcam for Hannah, the night was turned over to BOCA, who raided my leftovers and watched a Metallica DVD that I had no interest in. I watched some freestyle videos and, going over the "what and what not to do in freestyle" in my head, went to bed early in preparation for the UC Berkeley tournament the following day.

Tournament in a...big...nutshell:

- PA was jaw-dropping for us Marin boys, with people AA'ing everything handed to them--Tigger, arguably the #1 DDRer in the nation, AAA'd an "easy to AAA" 8 footer like it was nothing--yeah, I can do that...on keyboard. For the finals, he finished a Nonstop course with, oh, 18 GREATS out of 1700something steps. Shiat. -_-

- Since there was a stipulation of fail being turned off, freestyle was pretty much turned into a dance competition (and a spaz-fest by this one...spaz...Paolo). Fun for them, I guess, but bad for me, since all I'm used to is look-at-the-screen improv freestyle. I glad I got to see so many sweet freestyles by well-known names (Black Plague, Nado, Mr. Wendell, SweatyBoy, list goes on...), and was fortunate to record all of 'em. A judge, DDRGirl, asked me to encode the videos for her after I took the footage home, and it was good to meet someone new after mostly meandering around and not talking to anybody. You can watch all the videos here.

- I guess I performed okay, given my level of nervousness. I picked 1998 out of a hat, something I'd actually been practicing improv to the most, so I got lucky. It was one of the fastest songs out of everything picked that day, though, and I had a sorta hard time making it look good, but a few people I didn't know complimented me afterwards, and that made it all worthwhile. The judges seemed to like it, too (they said I looked like Lil' B X).

- Random: Randee showed up, but abruptly left before my freestyle, damn. Annie acted like my girlfriend and leaned on me when I went to talk to Nado (to give me confidence or something o_O), but it didn't work and I just stuttered how awesome I thought his last Highs Off U routine was. Sophie wooped my raver Panda with Christy "No-shorts" in Tekken 4...I can't believe I lost to a button masher. I also got beaten down by large black men (in MvC2).