Sunday, June 19, 2011

Chip Damage Fight for the Future: Japan Edition Was Good Times, BUT--

Well, the big charity fundraiser video game tournament opened up fifteen or sixteen hours ago and I'm just now getting home, so obviously I missed the post-per-day for yesterday. Guess I'm doing two today! These are the trials a man must endure when a man makes a promise like this at the beginning of a month.

The modest event raised a fine bushel of cash for the Red Cross, a good time was had by all, and I did reasonably well in my on-again-off-again flirtations with the seedy underbelly of competitive fighting games. (Consistent Top-8 troll tactics, what up.) We also then recorded a new episode of the Chip Damage Control podcast, which I suspect is going to be our best episode yet. Out of seven, I mean, but humour me.

Still, though, a certain something was missing -- a certain element that I had quite anticipated, and one I was sorry to see unrealized. What I am about to say is objectively ludicrous, and I am well aware of this, but this is genuinely the kind of thing that bounces around in my head: a friend and I were going to have a lucha-libre-style hair-versus-hair video game grudge match, with the loser also having to donate a bill or two to the charity of the evening, but instead of hair we were going to put our facial hair on the line. The manliest of matches! Bigote contra Bigote! yo why you laughing i'm serious

The other dude's moustache -- shaved down from a beard only because his amateur boxing demanded it (look, I don't know) -- makes him look like Freddy Mercury, so I shaved my considerable combination-playoff-and-lake beard down to a surprisingly feasible Lemmy for the match (rock showdown!) and we mutually expressed interest in the concept until he actually showed up to the event, pulled three chairs together into a makeshift bed, and napped for several hours. He... he was tired? I guess?

So nothing came of the idea, which is fine; nothing really worth pretending to be perturbed about. As implausible as this next claim might be, I have had dumber ideas in my life. Except that now I'm a dude who happens to have a Lemmy moustache on his face for no particularly good remaining reason, and as such my credit rating is probably dropping like a stone right now even as I type this. I'm at the point mentally now, though, where shaving the whole thing off without a payoff to the angle would be admitting defeat, because -- being still unemployed (aargh) with nowhere in particular to be -- my reasons to shave at this point are limited to "I have another job interview" or "I have an idea for a novelty charity match at a video game tournament". And neither of those apply! A torn man and a tortured soul, truly that describes me best at the moment.

There isn't really a whole lot else to say about this development, except that it serves as a helpful character note for how I operate; one day I will be dead, and at my funeral they will look into my casket -- or into the cannon before it fires my ashes into Lake Winnipeg, or whatever -- and this will be the sort of thing they reminisce about. "He was crazy," they'll conclude, I figure.

Anyway! T'was a good event with a good turnout and a good bankroll for a good cause, and later today I'll come back with another post that has nothing to do with video games or facial hair. A sound plan, yes?

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