Friday night was Andy Crouch’s birthday, so after the shows, a bunch of us descended on his house and forced him to make us crepes and watch the Fuccons DVD. This took far too long, and led to a bedtime that is usually only caused by a fresh dose of video game. This also caused a long period of unproductivity on Saturday, which was remedied - or treated, at least - by a short work date at Austin Java with Kristen. I actually managed to concentrate for a couple of hours and knock out all of my major outstanding bugs from my video player refactoring, and hung out and had caffeinated drinks and whatnot. So, yay working in coffee shops. Austin Java has a pretty miserable kitchen, though, so it was fortunate that I had taken the initiative to cook a super tasty chicken and sweet potato based dinner for Bernie and myself beforehand. Mmmm, yammy. That’s a lot of ‘m’s.
Saturday was actually busy - we got up early and went to the Hyde Park Theater for IFE’s tech rehearsal for our Frontera Fest show. We were actually underrepresented - the only people who made it out were Jason and Kristin and myself, but we got all of our sound and lighting cues set up for the show, which are actually pretty minimal, comparatively. The staff there is a lot more professional about that kind of thing than we’re used to, which was awesome. The shape of the theater space is a little weird, but that’s why we went to check it out - we’re pretty flexible, and we can definitely work with it and play around with the new geometry some. The Frontera shows have been selling out - it looks like the theater might hold a bit over a hundred people? - so I’m looking forward to the whole thing. I’m not sure, but I think the Frontera shows are maybe more “theater”-y than we’re used to, so I don’t know what the crowd will be like, but it’ll be fun either way.
After wards, the three of us went over to Trudy’s (where Jason used to work) for some breakfast foods, and then headed over to Jason’s place for an hour or so to hang out and play some video games before heading over to campus for rehearsal. We had a full complement again, minus our stalwart Mike, who suffered some kind of seizure that morning, and was out of commission for the day - but he said that he should be back up and ready to do for our shows this week. Everyone was kind of whooped - Nadine just ran a half-marathon, and most others were just tired from working too much and whatnot - so it was kind of a low-energy practice. We discussed and nailed down the new format that we’ll be doing for our February run at Coldtowne - “The Apocalypse”, which we performed a few times before as a kind of long-form narrative montagey thing, but has since been morphed into some kind of pseudo-armando format. We practiced some object monologues for the show, sat around and went over the details of the Frontera/HPT stuff for those that missed it, and broke a little early.
After rehearsal, we ran over to Roy’s house to pick up some chairs and stuff for game night, hit HEB for beer on the way, and I stopped home to grab some games and allergy medicine and check in on the girls. Then it was back to Kristin’s apartment for games - we had a decent little turnout, one of the guys from the juggling club, Matt, Asaf, Ratliff, and Valerie. We played some Deadwood (on Kristin’s badass homemade wood-burned board), some J-Speed, Cranium, Dibs (yeeugh), and finished up with a possibly too-long brain melting round of Taboo. I gotta say, I’m definitely used to playing games on the the more “German” side of things - and my own designs reflect that - but I guess I’m glad to get more exposed to the typical kind of “party” games. Some are super fun, like Taboo, some suck a bit, and some are basically just there to occupy yourselves while you’re hanging out. I guess I generally like playing games for the sake of the game more, but I’m starting to appreciate the more casual side a bit more now, too. (Ratliff quipped, “There’s really only one game, and that’s, ‘which one of my friends is a competitive asshole?’” That’d be me.) Anyway, there were beers and pizza and Val brought fizzy wine and good chocolate and a fine time was had all around. I look forward to more of the same.
But, I guess I stayed up too late again, and wound up pretty tired again all day today. Work, meetings, nap, hanging out with Bernie and Pai, and general futzing around. I’ve let my work desk and gmail inbox get out of control again, and I’m going to have to stake out some time to clean up and regroup and get my shit together again before I can become genuinely productive.
It’s also shaping up to be a busy week already. Tomorrow night is our flywheel game design and playtesting get-together. Improv For Evil has three different shows on three different nights at three different venues, and we’re doing three different formats. Wednesday is our “standard” IFE show for Frontera at Hyde Park, which is something that we’re all comfortable with, and should be fine. We’re debuting the new Apocalypse at our Thursday night slot at Coldtowne, which will run through February, and on Friday, we’re in the Double Barrel show at the Hideout - we’ll be doing a special Groundhog Day format which should be super fun, and something we’ve never tried before. Very exciting. Maybe we’ll all sign up for Maestro on Saturday or something, and see how long we can keep the streak going. Yeesh.
Anyway. Enough jibberjabber. Back to work.
