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Tags: birthday, games, lan
Current Music: Greg Horn (With CB Cebulski) Melbourne Saturday Podcast - Joffre Street Productions

I turned 23 today.

Over all the day hasn't been terribly out of the usual. I was given my present from my parents when I woke up (a new high quality laptop backpack), I headed to work, had lunch with arrch, then headed home and went out to dinner at a mexican restaurant with my family, my brothers gave me 2 books by Glenda Larke. The remainder of the series I started at Linderman Island.

I guess here would be an appropriate look back into how I spent my time as a 22 year old.

That was the first year I had spent the entire time employed full time. I will have worked for Logica for 2 years come the end of this month.

I went to 2 different friend's weddings. I was even a groomsman for one of them. It's a curious thought to be attending friends weddings when I've never even had a girlfriend, but they were both fairly enjoyable experiences.

I travelled solo for the first time (heading to and from iajanus's wedding) and even travelled for work.

I visited North America for the first time, allowing me to attend both GenCon Indy and the Penny Arcade Expo. That trip with arrch and Paul was remarkably well times and definitely the highlight of my year. It was fantastic and I would love to do it again sometime, unfortunately exchange rates and lack of leave will delay any trip I do.

It was great to meet tinted_glass, and with that trip I also have managed set foot upon all bar one continent, and that continent is ( SPOILER ).

One of my few defined goals is to have set foot upon every continent before I am 25. Thus in the next couple of years I plan to travel to ( SPOILER )

Other than that, I've spent most of my year having fun with friends, and I don't intend to stop that. I have my party/LAN on this weekend which I am really looking forward to. I find it awesome that an event that I used to hold that was once a school holiday for myself and at most 5 other people has managed to grow to an event I can manage to have almost 2 dozen people say that will turn up for at least some of. For those of you that plan to attend I really look forward to seeing you, For everyone else I look forward to communicating with you more during the next 12 months and beyond.

Tags: birthday

The last of my 21st celebrations wrapped up at about midnight last night, and so now seems like a good time to talk about it.

The morning of Saturday was spent getting everything together for the afternoon primarily family based celebration, cleaning off paths, getting the food together, getting the cakes and salads from Warringah Mall (as well as a present for Ben's birthday).

So the morning passed quite quickly.

Then as people started to arrive, I spent most of my time greeting people when they arrived, and moving around the party talking to various people. My brothers were the ones who got to move around with some of the trays offering food. Then of course, there was cake, and a speech from my mother complete with the required several embarrassing stories from my youth.

We had a photocake (a sponge one), and the picture chosen was one of me from preschool.

It was great, almost all of the people there were invited because they I felt that they had been important to me you know family, close friends and family friends. Some of them however, I had not seen in a quite long time. It was quite strange to see Hamish from Young Speakers, considering last I had seen him he was shorter than me, and now I have to look up to talk to him.

As things were drawing to a close, I started to field calls from friends coming to the evening celebration, checking what they should bring, my address that kind of thing.

I also in the break between the events opened my presents with my close friends who were staying for the evening event. I'm not going to list them all, but they ranged from a collection of strange fruits and foods to gift vouchers to a promissory note for a suit. I have made a list so I can properly thank everyone for their gifts.

Then, as things were being prepared for the dinner with the evenings events, my friends and I played the Wii on the main TV and chatted, with people joining in as they arrived, those who brought computers were directed to place them in the front hallway. I also was requested to give a quick tour of my home which I'd never done before.

We then had a large sit down dinner, followed by dessert in the form of another photocake (a mud cake this time) with a deliberately terrible picture of me, big floppy wide brimmed hat, giant fitover sunglasses, 2 thumbs up. And Narmio it turns out, had been asked to make a speech by my mother. So he winged a short speech and then there was applause and cake.

Once dinner was over and had been cleaned up, out came the games.
We split up into 4 main groups, Wii, King's blood (a game that arrch and ammonium gave me), WoW cards and Misc.

I split off from King's Blood in order to give Liviu some anime and cartoons, and then joined the WoW cards and played Onyxia (the deck was a 21st present) against all of the others. The game was quite close, I got down to 20 hit points left on my stage 3 form when I finally killed them all. It was a lot of fun, though there were a couple of points where I really annoyed them due to well timed burninates and the like. Situations where they were just set up to start doing a lot of damage and I in one move took it all away.

As the people who were not staying the night had headed by the end of that game, we then set up the LAN and everyone got started leeching, which is how these events always start. Talking, leeching and single player gaming continued through the night, various people ducked off to get some sleep (I slept between 5am and 7:30am).

Most of the multiplayer gaming occurred on Sunday afternoon after a few people had left.

The LAN wrapped up around 7, and then I headed into the city to watch Children of Men at the open air cinema with lonelyrabbit, unruly83, Baloogy and his younger brother as part of my 21st present. It was a lot of fun, a bit different that watching a movie in a normal cinema, what with being able to look away from the screen and see the city skyline.

And so that was my weekend, hope yours was just as good.

Tags: birthday, lack of sleep, lan, party
Current Mood: happy
Current Music: TVG #27: The Fool’s Errand - The Vintage Gamer - Jim Van Verth

Today I turned 20.
To celebrate this fact, I held a LAN this weekend, and had a total of 9 friends over for the entire duration, with another just popping by because he couldn't attend due to work.

It was reat to catch up with friends, show friends from uni my place, because it always seems to be a lot of effort to get people to my place.

The LAN ran surprisingly smoothly it was the largest one I had run at my place, and we only just managed to fit with 7 computers on the pingpong table, (2 laptops) and requiring the restriction of access to a family machine, and an extra small table. But it worked, and I am proud of that.

It was much fun, we played DOTA, a little TD, and some Worms World Party, and besides that there was the consumption of a fairly large amount of soft drink (at least 40 cans, and half a dozen beers), lollies, bread and other sandwich related products.

DOTA was fun, I really should pay more attention to #dota, because I never end up playing, and so only really got any experience in the last couple of days.

Presents received were:

• $100
  
• $20 gift voucher for Dymocks
  
• An antenna for my new monitor
  
• An IOU for a munchkin related product
  
• and an IOU (or rather, an excuse of the product that had arrived being faulty) for some other present.
  
• Retroactively, a bookcase in my room which is used to store DVDs and figurines was made a present by my parents.
  
• A present from my brothers which will be negotiated tomorrow, some TV show on DVD.

It was amusing though, when it came to opening presents at 12am this morning, I found out that Liviu has thought that it was my 21st, as evidenced by the card he gave me. It never occurred to me to put how old I was turning on the invites, but even I would not have a LAN for a 21st. Perhaps I might hold one conveniently close, but not as part of my 21st. Speaking of which, I will have to look into how I will deal with that, less that one year to go.

In summation, my birthday was awesome, save for the lack of sleep, and people complaining about the chaos that are Downloads C-H and J-K.

In other news, I finally managed to get that monitor I had wanted (19" multimedia SXGA LCD Philips monitor, 190G6FB/97), after seeing it demonstrated at SGL. Managed to get it for $1099 from Harvey Norman, and I really like it, it is nice and shiny.

I tried out various features of it, including the Picture in picture thing, which was one of the reasons as to why I was so enamoured of it. It was kind of funny to be playing Prince of Persia: Warrior Within while having 1960s Astro Boy playing in the top right hand corner of the screen.

With regards to resolutions for this year, I intend to lose weight, and become at least marginally fit, as currently I am in a pathetic shape, being fairly overweight, and completely out of shape.

Tags: birthday, friends, lan, resolutions
Current Mood: Awesome
Current Music: BLC Podcast 15: Joey Manley (www.moderntales.com) - Blank Label Comics Podcast - Dave Kellett, Krist