blakerson.com

Wow.

And wow again. I lost all my updates. Fuck you, blogger. But Adam, Michelle and I all went to see JM play tonight at the Erwin Center, and a fantastic time was had. We found random people, old friends, and I have a nice long-sleeve shirt to prove my presence.

Set list (not in complete order, but Sarah nabbed the actual list so she'll post it and have lots of pics): Clarity, Bigger Than My Body, Something's Missing, No Such Thing, New Deep, Come Back to Bed, My Stupid Mouth, Daughters, Your Body is a Wonderland, Why Georgia, closed with Wheel. Encore: Comfortable, St. Patrick's Day, 83. Amazing bunch of songs (I love every single one except New Deep, wth is that).

Seats: About 15 rows back from the stage, on the floor of Erwin Center. Three girls from my dorm got randomly bumped from Section 77 (nosebleed) to front row center, massive congrats to them.

Opener: The North Mississippi All-Stars were a surprisingly good blues band with a harder backbeat. I enjoyed their set quite a lot.

During the Show: Again, John is a ridiculous improvisor both on guitar and on vocals. He didn't pull any really cool stunts like last time I saw him in Dallas, but altogether he definitely showed his talent and made good use of it. Lots of songs had extra verses, so I'm really hoping there are good bootlegs from the show and lyrics to go along with. The rants between songs were hilariously witty. Oh, and he had to stop Bigger Than My Body and restart it because the soundboard guys seriously fucked up his guitar. Very funny.

Photography: Michelle and I got some pretty good pictures. Her camera's got a higher resolution than mine, so I'll have a complete post when her pics go up. But for now, click this.

I really love good concerts. Sitting there I thought to myself that there would just be nothing better than being a musician as stupidly famous and successful as Mayer, but I'm really not sure that I'm cut out for that kind of thing anyway. But hey, it makes for a really good Sunday night. Except it wasn't: "It's not a Sunday night," Mayer remarked after Bigger Than My Body. "You may think it is, but it's not."

Update: The photo album is online! Surf on over to files.snagger.org by clicking the link on the right, and enjoy pics taken by a) my blurry S200, b) Michelle's less-blurry S230, and c) Scotty Crowe from JohnMayer.com. Proof once and for all that a good time was had by pretty much everyone in the Erwin Center Sunday night.

This shit has to stop. XD is a retarded European take on emoticons, probably because their fingers can't reach the colon key due to holding their cigarettes in some weird fuckass fashion.

STOP USING XD. STOP IT.

:D is permissible. Eyes and grin.

XD is not. No eyes.

So stop using XD. Really.

So this time I'm actually going to *burn* the damn game. Can someone send it to me? Pweeeze? I still have my cdkey memorized (how sad is that...) Since people have gotten back into it recently I'd kind of like to have the game so that I can come destroy all of you.

Love,
b

Update: Got it, thanks to none of you people! But I jumped on the UNT server last night and got my game on, and it was good.

What the hell are we supposed to do this year? For the last four years, it's been a given: do some stuff with the family, then go to Aroon's house for the annual Thanksgiving LAN and stay up until some ridiculous hour playing Rainbow Six games.

Now, there's no Aroon's house to go to, sadly. The holidays were always less "family and friends" for me and more "friends," mostly cause I've never been close to my family at all. Lots of friends are still around, but it's a real shame to see one of my favorite traditions go.

Of course, Thanksgiving means my birthday is right around the corner. So, I'm thinking of doing the following:

For UT people, I'm going to throw a small get-together in my basement and give away cookies to anyone who shows up. There will be Super Smash Bros. among other wonderful activities. My birthday falls on a Wednesday, which would make for a great South Park party, but sadly I have two major projects due the following day, so I can't really promise anything at all. Push comes to shove, weekend celebrations will happen. Mongolian, or Pluckers?
For Non-UT people, I have no idea, but I'm planning on hanging with pretty much all of you around the holidays anyway. There will hopefully be much Mario Kart playing, considering that game should be out pretty darn soon. Leslie and I contemplated a combined birthday celebration for a while, in which case there could be like... boyish things (video games and sports) combined with girly things (really good food) in addition to our usual gender-neutral insanity.

Man, I'm really pretty excited about heading home. I've been dying for my usual foods (pasta, On the Border, Chili's, Cheddar's, Mac's...) and I could really stand some free time to a) play through these games I still have stacking up (On part 2 chapter 6 of Max Payne 2, just started Call of Duty) and b) enjoy how absolutely gorgeous it is for me at home at this time of the year, and do all that silly reminiscing and driving business.

It's no Rainbow Six, but I'll probably have a good time nonetheless.

So I refreshed the template for my site since I was getting a bug where the scrollbar ended at the bottom of the archives. I restored everything I could think of, if I've forgotten something please smack me and remind me.

What's even more interesting is my bugged-out stick of RAM. After running my new comp for about 5 days I started experiencing random crashes, reboots, and no functional games at all. At Habib's advice, I ran MemTest3.0 (a great program) to check my stuff, and sure enough one stick had gone bad. I'll be returning that stick tomorrow, and no longer messing with my RAM timings ever again.