My mind is all messed up from the things happening around lately that I've lost the ability to string together words sensible enough to post on this blog.

SkyClad came over to unwind with Mr. Frost and me yesterday. Unwind, meaning spend hours on the PS2 and trash-talking each other.

Funny. What used to be a weekend-long "geek" party with the Wednesday Group has been reduced to mere hours of PS2 pleasure with only three people. And nobody's to blame. It's an inevitable part of growing up.

Simon Woo has moved to Australia and is now happily married. Nocturnal Sun, the first to get married in our circle, has his own family obligations to attend to during weekends. Mr. Frost and I see him everyday at work, though. One of us, however, just vanished without a trace. Kojiki simply doesn't want to be found.

The place to be during those weekends was what SkyClad has christened "The Morales Dungeon", the place where Mr. Frost and I used to live. The place was a hell hole, but we couldn't care less. There was space for everyone to sit and set up his laptop, and there's enough pancit canton, Coke, and cigarettes for everyone. We were happy and having the times of our lives.

What we did during those weekends vary depending on our moods, but usually, it's a combination of one to three of the following:

LAN Games
Unreal Tournament is one of our favorites. A couple of times we are all on the same team, but most of the time, we set up two teams and try to blast the other team into oblivion.

We spent countless sleepless nights playing Diablo II, StarCraft, and several other games that we could get to work on our ancient laptops. The games we played were limited by the capacity of our sorry machines, but we enjoyed those old-school games any way so it didn't really bother us. We were satisfied being able to enjoy those games together.



PlayStation 2 face-offs

We kicked each other's butts in so many fighting games, took turns in completing quests in single-player RPGs, and tag-teamed up on the sorry asses of monsters in multiplayer games. Oh yes, we taught each other a couple of lessons, too. :)





Movie marathon
Mostly Japanese and Korean horror and gory movies, those marathons turned macho men into trembling little cowards, holding on to each other for dear life and calling for their mommies when a nice, scary scene comes up.

The guys had their moments during Ichi the Killer, The Audition, Wishing Stairs, and mostly every movie that we saw.

Magic: The Gathering tourneys
Simon Woo burned us alive with his red "I-wanna-win-fast" deck. Nocturnal Sun buried us with his black discarder deck. We hated being owned by Kojiki and his blue library-depletion deck. I screwed the guys over with my blue ninjutsu deck and, sometimes, my blue-white control deck.

Mr. Frost, had his white weenie deck and green-white control deck (damn his Plow Under and Rude Awakening cards!!!), but he creamed us with whatever deck he used, even our own.

We sometimes played one-on-one, but CHAOS IS THE WAY TO GO!!! Ah yeah!

One thing always worth mentioning when talking about our weekend sprees is Simon Woo's shameless hogging of all dropped items and gold in Diablo II. We would all gang up on this hard-ass boss, and when the monster dies, the first thing we hear is Simon Woo shouting, "Akin yang gold!" (The gold is mine!) When he hears a rare item drop, he shouts at the top is his lungs, "Akin yan!" (That's mine!) And if somebody else has beaten him to it, he goes up to the guy and says, "Oist, ano yung napulot mo? Akin na yan, hindi mo kailangan yan." ("Hey, what did you get? Give me that, you don't need that.")

He had his barefaced acts during our PS2 sessions as well. What he does during our Diablo games, he blatantly did in Champions of Norrath too. And during fighting games, we somehow had gotten used to his outbursts like, "Bawal combo! Bawal juggle! Bawal yang move na yan, whatever that is! Bawal ako talunin!" ("Don't use combo! Don't juggle! Don't use that move, whatever that is! Don't kick my ass!")

I'm saying those things about Simon Woo but I'm not complaining, don't get me wrong. In fact, his antics (aside from his santol) are some of the things that made those weekends memorable and worth talking about.

We had the time of our lives during those weekends. When we're all old and wrinkly, we will be talking about those weekends for hours.

I really miss those relaxing weekends. As I've said, it's nobody's fault that we don't have them anymore. It just means that we are maturing and moving on to the next phases of our lives.

Of course we still keep in touch. The fun still lives in our email threads and occasional YM conferences. It's not the same as having the guys around in person, but hey, at least I got something.

Ah, the joy of reminiscing. Off I go to the real world now.