Okay, I’ve mentioned IRC before but never really explained our weird situation. The short version is that there’s a very close group of friends who met online as far back as 1998, and now that group has a private IRC channel which sees activity pretty much 24 hours a day, all year. Three people I introduced to the channel after knowing them in real life; I’d met up with a total of nine others in real life after knowing them online for years. Shishka here, who you’ve already seen, was the eighth, and we hang out quite regularly now. Rushi, from near Salem, Oregon, is the tenth. He came up to Seattle for an anime convention; such things cause me fear, so I refused his invitation. After the con, though, he came to my place for about four days. Much Guilty Gear XX#Reload, R-Type Final, Evangelions, and Fatal Frame 2 was played. Tacos, katsudon, and curry were eaten. Happy times happened.
Andrew and Brian from Omni, Andrew’s friend Cheryl, Cheryl’s friend Patricia, and Patricia’s boyfriend Mrinal, and I, went to a cabin on the Olympic Peninsula for the weekend. The place was quite rustic, by which I mean we found about five spiders in the shower. It rained the whole time, which suited me just fine. Sitting by the wood stove reading Otsuichi and Five Star Stories by myself, playing Scrabble and Catch Phrase with everyone, or just sitting at the table long after dinner was over and listening to Mrinal describe life in India, I knew plenty of good times were to be had inside. We did discover that Brian, Andrew, and I are not a good shopping team. We are all the kind of guy who stands in front of the shelf puzzling for ten minutes, picks something, puts it back, picks something else, puts it back and retrieves the original thing, takes it to the checkout, then runs back to the shelf and gets something else entirely.
This guy–photographer, writer, butterfly-catcher, malaria carrier, TV reporter–is indirectly responsible for the past 5 years of my life. When I indicated some interest in Japanese language and culture, my roommate assignment for Freshman year at St. Norbert was changed to one Tetsutarou Soe. He turned out to be the most confusingly fascinating person I’d ever met. We lived together that year, and then shared an apartment in Nakano, Tokyo most of 2002. He came to Seattle for two days, and Peter came up from Portland, for some “spanning time”.
Shishka, being the video game art team person that he is, recognized this door as a fine type of thing to base some map textures on.
These days weekends are often spent with Shishka. We have a relaxed kind of camaraderie. We’ve both traveled far from home to work at companies we admired; we both have a kind of detached but bewildered admiration for the city of Seattle; we both desire Japanese-style curry-rice at least once weekly. On any Friday, Saturday, or Sunday, if we see each other in IRC, it’s only a matter of time before I’m on my way over to pick him up. So we tromp around the International District doing geeky things, until we get paranoid at all the humans around and hole up in my apartment for video games or DVDs. Anyway, here’s a bunch of people clamoring for Taiwanese independence. Their most incisive bit of rhetoric was “Taiwan Yes! China No!”.
