Long Time Coming

I know I have been absent from the blogging scene for almost a week, but a lot of things at the newspaper and over the weekend kept me from updating all of you on my happenings.

Over the weekend a day of making up for lost sleep kept me in bed until about noon, followed up by a day of catching up with the things I needed to do before noon. I did watch another Blockbuster movie and was planning on doing a movie review, but the flick was the 90's version of "Dick Tracy" and am hesitant to make references to genitalia.

I also spent the weekend handing out copies of the special section that my paper produced, which kept the editing staff in the newsroom until 6 a.m. I still think I have not recovered. In more interesting news, I got to go to a LAN party this weekend and have decided it would be wise to share my nerd-dom with all of you.

So we networked our computers together and blasted off into the junk food consuming world of first-person shooters and real-time strategy games. The occasion? Usually because the group has time to meet and our schedules don't conflict. The reality? It was our friend's girlfriend's birthday and she wanted to host a LAN.

For all of you who don't know "Geek," and LAN stand for local area network, which is a way for nerds to hook up their computers to one another and play games against each other, while having an excuse to eat crappy pizza and to drink a lot of soda.

Normally we would play through the night, switching up games based on energy level and amount of interest in the current game, playing straight on through the morning. We used to play for a couple of days, but the reduction in personal hygiene would get to us and now being sleep deprived as a college student we don't have the stamina ... for that kind of action.

So we played a couple hours of StarCraft, followed up by some Half-Life: Team Fortress "the Hunted." If all of this is over your head, then you probably aren't reading anyway. We drank more than five two-liter bottles of soda. Keeping us awake and ... focused?

At the end of the night we packed up our computers into our cars, cleaned up our messes and then traveled back to our homes to re-set up our computers and make it to bed before 2 a.m.

So, as you can see by the tangled mess of Ethernet cables and pizza boxes, we have a good time. Even though we play video games for hours, sometimes days, we at least have good, safe fun. At least we aren't out drinking and driving, or vandalizing homes. Besides we could be addicted to worse things in life. Right?