Musings
an Online Journal of Sorts

By Alyce Wilson

This weekend, an old friend from college, The Court Wizard, flew in from Chicago to visit friends. A group of us got together and went out for dinner at a local Asian buffet restaurant. I'd had a pretty large lunch of a stack of silver dollar pancakes at a diner The Gryphon and I frequent, so I wasn't that hungry by dinner time. I just had a sampler plate of sushi and then went back for dessert.

People were in high spirits at dinner, joking around about all sorts of things.

When the fortunate cookies arrived, we got a number of highly amusing ones. Mine was eerily specific: "An admirer is too shy to meet you. Be on the look out and make the first move!"

"Yeah, and that might be a knee to the groin," I said.

"Ooh, you have a stalker," somebody said.

Then The Gryphon opened his, which said that an unexpected guest may come to visit soon. Considering we live together, this had an ominous ring to it. Then The Cheshire Cat read his, which encouraged him to "go ahead and take a chance."

"I must be your stalker," he joked. I laughed for about two minutes straight.

We all gathered back at the home of The Cheshire Cat and The Paper. She was feeling really under the weather, so she just went to bed. The rest of us chatted. There had been talk about playing Confed, but we didn't end up doing that. Instead, we talked about things like pop culture, Jackie Chan movies, recent news events and video games.

The Court Wizard told us about some projects he's involved in. He's a video designer. Of course, he couldn't talk about anything in development, but he talked about the marketing aspects of the games already out.

Somebody, I think it was the Court Wizard, had brought the sequel to the video game Katamari Damacy. It was called We Love Katamari. This is a really cute Japanese game where the goal is to create these big katamaris, these big balls made by rolling up whatever is in your path. Different levels have different challenges which involve targets that might be based on what type of object to collect, how big to make the ball or other more challenging goals.

One particularly fun level has you whipping around a race track at high speed, trying to get the katamari as big as possible. Agent Smith and the Court Wizard did this one as a team. There's a mode where you can cooperate, with one person controlling the left joystick on their controller while the other uses the right joystick on theirs.

It took them awhile to get the hang of it, so they frequently got the smack-down from the King of the Cosmos, who is the galactic ruler who is demanding that his prince and his cousins complete these tasks. He chides them in imperfect English, which varies each time with randomly inserted words at certain parts.

We had a lot of fun watching them, and because they got the smack-down so many times, it was that much more rewarding when they succeeded.

I think there were some allergens in the air, because by the end of the evening, my eyes were red and I hadn't even been wearing my contacts. The Dormouse had the same problem and had to use The Gryphon's eye drops.

At about 11 p.m. or so, we said our good-byes for the evening and headed home, the whole time imagining that we were rolling up everything in our path into a huge katamari.

Copyright 2005 by Alyce Wilson

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