I want to rock and roll all night...
...and part of every day. (A funny childhood mis-hearing of "party every day" that was passed on to me and has now become stuck in my lexicon.)
It's been quite the go-go-go few days. Of course there's the usual end of the year/Christmas season craziness at work. Two products that were supposed to be delivered the week of Thanksgiving still haven't shown up, while another arrived ahead of schedule and without warning at the warehouse. Time spent fine tuning issues with our various webstore conversions and figuring out who to talk to at Payquake about strange transaction errors. Meanwhile distributors are tight with money/late on invoices/going out of business and need some personal attention as well. One distributor informed us he's closing up shop come 2008 (and since I've sold games to this guy going back to my earliest days in the industry, that was sad news indeed). Another called me to give me a heads up that they'd been bought and were under new ownership. Eeeya.
On the home front we had a crazy "game night" idea of trying to podcast our game group engaging in a round table discussion (as we game with a bunch of game industry pros) but I suspect we're not actually going to be able to use most of the material we recorded because of background noise, uneven voice pick-up and so on. It was a fine idea... maybe in a more controlled atmosphere. We'll see what we can do with it, I guess. This turns out to be the only "Kate-free" weekend we're going to have in December because Kate's dad is going to be traveling and can't take her again until January. As it happens, we're making the most of it.
Pramas and I had tickets to see Naked Raygun last night so I met him downtown before the show and we snuck into the last half hour of Wann's happy hour. Things were incredibly busy and it took almost twenty minutes for me to get my sake and we'd seen nothing from our order after half an hour but the waitress made sure everything came out asap once she finally she noticed the problem. Some chamame (like edamame but a different slightly stronger flavor), fried aonori potatoes (potatoes seasoned with dried seaweed), soft tofu (tofu with grated ginger & bonito flakes), an eel roll, a spicy tuna roll, and of course a Mecha Godzilla roll and we were happy. We topped it off with this fabulous dessert:
We rolled out of Wann and over to El Corozon where we saw four of the five bands on the lineup for the Naked Raygun show. We missed the very first band who, we gathered from the comments of other bands, were some young kids who were pretty good. We arrived just as local Ballard-punks Dreadful Children were setting up. The kids (and I mean kids... are they even old enough to drive?!) loved the Dreadful Children. They were followed by Chicago's Shot Baker. Their list of influences reads like a best of Pramas' record collection (if you leave out CCR and Cat Stevens, which you could more likely find in mine) and I wasn't surprised Chris considered picking up their CDs. They have the "Chicago sound" down pat. I was more excited about the Swingin' Utters who I've listened to for a long time but never seen live. Apparently they came prepared for a half hour set only to find out they were expected to do an hour, so there was a lot of stage banter and long breaks between songs. They played Tied Down, Spit On, which I love, but not Twenty-three which is one of my favorites but I guess it's too emo for their macho mosh-pitting testosterone crowd. There was one poor guy yelling for them to play it all night but they didn't. Naked Raygun came on and did a lovely long set with three encores. They were playing a lot of their "newer" (and by "newer" we're talking older than Kate) stuff that I didn't know at all but then they dipped into some of their older old material and everyone (including the band) seemed to perk up. By the end Pramas was pogoing like a young punk, singing along, shoulder to shoulder with the other old punks brave enough to push to the front of the stage. I sat up in the old punks' lounge and left the moshing to the kids and the fellas. Naked Raygun sounded great, though. If you're a fan, do try to see them on this tour! They're playing Tacoma tonight and heading down to Eugene and points south.
Tonight Pramas is heading out to see The Cops at the Vera Project but I'm going to see The Thermals. I've been waiting to see them since I missed them playing with Speaker Speaker at Chop Suey back in February. Busy busy Kate-free weekend for us!
It's been quite the go-go-go few days. Of course there's the usual end of the year/Christmas season craziness at work. Two products that were supposed to be delivered the week of Thanksgiving still haven't shown up, while another arrived ahead of schedule and without warning at the warehouse. Time spent fine tuning issues with our various webstore conversions and figuring out who to talk to at Payquake about strange transaction errors. Meanwhile distributors are tight with money/late on invoices/going out of business and need some personal attention as well. One distributor informed us he's closing up shop come 2008 (and since I've sold games to this guy going back to my earliest days in the industry, that was sad news indeed). Another called me to give me a heads up that they'd been bought and were under new ownership. Eeeya.
On the home front we had a crazy "game night" idea of trying to podcast our game group engaging in a round table discussion (as we game with a bunch of game industry pros) but I suspect we're not actually going to be able to use most of the material we recorded because of background noise, uneven voice pick-up and so on. It was a fine idea... maybe in a more controlled atmosphere. We'll see what we can do with it, I guess. This turns out to be the only "Kate-free" weekend we're going to have in December because Kate's dad is going to be traveling and can't take her again until January. As it happens, we're making the most of it.
Pramas and I had tickets to see Naked Raygun last night so I met him downtown before the show and we snuck into the last half hour of Wann's happy hour. Things were incredibly busy and it took almost twenty minutes for me to get my sake and we'd seen nothing from our order after half an hour but the waitress made sure everything came out asap once she finally she noticed the problem. Some chamame (like edamame but a different slightly stronger flavor), fried aonori potatoes (potatoes seasoned with dried seaweed), soft tofu (tofu with grated ginger & bonito flakes), an eel roll, a spicy tuna roll, and of course a Mecha Godzilla roll and we were happy. We topped it off with this fabulous dessert:
We rolled out of Wann and over to El Corozon where we saw four of the five bands on the lineup for the Naked Raygun show. We missed the very first band who, we gathered from the comments of other bands, were some young kids who were pretty good. We arrived just as local Ballard-punks Dreadful Children were setting up. The kids (and I mean kids... are they even old enough to drive?!) loved the Dreadful Children. They were followed by Chicago's Shot Baker. Their list of influences reads like a best of Pramas' record collection (if you leave out CCR and Cat Stevens, which you could more likely find in mine) and I wasn't surprised Chris considered picking up their CDs. They have the "Chicago sound" down pat. I was more excited about the Swingin' Utters who I've listened to for a long time but never seen live. Apparently they came prepared for a half hour set only to find out they were expected to do an hour, so there was a lot of stage banter and long breaks between songs. They played Tied Down, Spit On, which I love, but not Twenty-three which is one of my favorites but I guess it's too emo for their macho mosh-pitting testosterone crowd. There was one poor guy yelling for them to play it all night but they didn't. Naked Raygun came on and did a lovely long set with three encores. They were playing a lot of their "newer" (and by "newer" we're talking older than Kate) stuff that I didn't know at all but then they dipped into some of their older old material and everyone (including the band) seemed to perk up. By the end Pramas was pogoing like a young punk, singing along, shoulder to shoulder with the other old punks brave enough to push to the front of the stage. I sat up in the old punks' lounge and left the moshing to the kids and the fellas. Naked Raygun sounded great, though. If you're a fan, do try to see them on this tour! They're playing Tacoma tonight and heading down to Eugene and points south.
Tonight Pramas is heading out to see The Cops at the Vera Project but I'm going to see The Thermals. I've been waiting to see them since I missed them playing with Speaker Speaker at Chop Suey back in February. Busy busy Kate-free weekend for us!
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