My Weekend: A Debauchery Like No Other

Seriously, last weekend had it all: Computer games, video games, big sandwiches, music, drinking, more music and drinking, bus rides, and the aforementioned total debauchery of Saturday night.
Friday, I get off class at 10:30. I decide to spend this time constructively, or, more specifically, constructing a global Aztec empire in Civ3. I rigged up a huge map, on easy difficulty, with only 3 AIs against me. It was glorious. I had obliterated the American tribes within the first 20 turns. However, that's where it got interesting. There were two things that were tripping me up: 1) Only the now deceased Americans and myself had spawned on the island I currently inhabbited. This meant that I would have to wait until I could navigate oceans to make diplomatic contact with any other players. 2) Much like the historical Aztec Empire I had lots and lots of gold making me tax dollars every turn, but I had no saltpeter. That meant that until I found some (either on an uninhabited arctic island or by taking it forcefully from another player) I couldn't build anything tougher than pikemen and very light cavalry.
Suffice to say, this game kicks ass. There's only one big problem, and it originates with Civ3's evolution away from table-top gaming: Where have all the ZOCs gone? For those who haven't played Civ2 or any tabletop wargames ZOC stands for Zone of Control. Every city and military unit in Civ2 had a ZOC, and it consisted of all the squares (or hexes in tabletop games) that the unit touched. It's very difficult to explain without a picture, but if an enemy unit enters your ZOC, they can only leave again or attack you, they can't move beside and past you. This allowed a more realistic game in my opinion. After all, how many times have two armies been parked on 2 sides of a road, and had the enemy march right past them on the road? But Civ3 must be like Hockey: Someone decided that there needed to be more goals to keep it interestig. So they scrapped ZOCs. I can now dance around my enemies without having to attack them. Building a coordinated border defense is a joke: It involves a straight line of units all touching each other, as opposed to guarding key points with ZOCs. Now, that's stupid enough, but as I said, the loss of ZOCs isn't the big problem, it just spawned it. To understand the big problem you need to know about moving your units around in Civ3. Infantry can move 1 square per turn, cavalry can move 2 or 3, and motorized vehicles and boats can move significantly further. However, if one builds a road, it onyl costs 1/3 of a movement point to go the same distance. Now Infantry can move 3 squares (assuming they all have roads on them), Cavalry 6 or 9, etc. Once your civilization advances further you can build railroad, which makes movement free. Yes, I can build a unit in one corner of my empire and move it to the opposite end of the continent for absolutely no cost, and use it's movement points to attack an enemy. Of course, in Civ2 I didn't put any roads or rails between my cities because my favourite method of disposing of an emey was to use his roads against him, not something I wanted turned on me. Once I had access to an enemy's railroad network I could go anywhere on it that wouldn't get me ZOCed. I could explore his entire empire in one turn, and then use the same unit to attack at full strength. Anyway, here's the problem: In Civ3 you can't use enemy roads or rails. It's retarded! Here's how I think it went: "hey guys, we should do something crazy and unexpected to make Civ3 new and different" "Yeah, I hated that whole 'strategic' part anyway. Let's get rid of ZOCs" "OK" (months later) "hmmm.... Now it's way too easy to swamp an enemy player if they have roads..." "Yeah... hey, why don't we just not let people use other player's roads. That makes perfect sense! And also, we can still keep our retarded no ZOCing system in place". fucking retarded.
This is what happened in my earlier mentioned game of Civ3: Since I couldn't find the other players before I had good technologies, and I couldn't make use of my good technologies until I found sources of modern chemicals, I stagnated for along time. All I could do was build cities everywhere on my continent. I worried that the other 2 players had A) also spawned together and had formed an alliance, making them a serious threat to me or B) spawned seperately and were moving just as fast as me, building huge armies that would make them difficult to kill off. Neither of these options was appealing to me, and as it turned out, B was the one I got. Both civilizations, the Japanese and the French, had totally covered their islands in cities, but hadn't advanced technologically enough to find new ones to colonize. I decided to befriend the Japs and exterminate the Frogs. However, once I started landing troops on France 2 things went horribly horribly wrong. First, I couldn't set my units to fortify when they got off the boats. I was sending musketeers against archers (and later marines against the same) and getting stomped. Second, It was incredibly difficult to capture and hold a city because a) I couldn't use the roads to get to cities quickly and capture them, while b) France was pulling it's numerically superior forces from all over the map to push me off the island. This meant I would have to invade with an Island's worth, or more, of troops in order to get anywhere, and right as I was doing that (with the marines, landing in galleons because I also didn't have any oil to make real ships), the year 2050 in game time came and I was forcibly retired.
And that was just Friday afternoon.
The fayther got me on his way home from Laurier, and as soon as I was home I called Wolfgang and we went out to make baguette sandwiches. This is a tradition we started a year ago, and belive me, it's the best food ever. We each buy a baguette, 10 slices of some kind of deli meat, and provalone cheese. We take this to chez Bakes and add miracle whip and sweet onion mustard. The result is an orgasm. And indigestion for Wolfgang. While at Sobeys we saw Balek the Mule-herd, and he commanded us to come out with him the next night to Jordan Rudiger's birthday party, hosted by Alex McCready's uncle and mother. Apparently this was going to be the place to be on saturday night. We already had plans to see McKenna (no relation) at Molly Blooms, but said we would dorp in for a pre-drink (I love being 19, regular drinking is now pre-drinking). We returned his commands with our own, to join us that night at Foster's to see the Medium (Zach Logan is Wolfgang's drum teacher) with Brendan (who Wolfgang has been trying to get to jam with). So, at 9:50, full of sandwich, myself and Wolfgang go back to Sobeys and retrieve the aforementioned livestock specialist. The show was pretty good, but Blake was being kicked out at midnight, so we left with him and went to Bren's. While there Wolfgang managed to start de-spywaring Bren's computer and debate on Fingerprints of the Gods, a book I'm currently borrowing from him and won't get into in this post. Brendan also gave me the last 5th of a bottle of SourPuss which Michelle (the one who played Horatia...) had left at his house on New Years. At 3:30 I installed Blake in my basement where he read drunken emails from Dean while I rested my head.
I was just sitting up in bed when I heard Blake leaving (or rather I heard Mina notice Blake leaving) at 11:30. We confirmed Alex's uncle's address, he informed me that the party would be getting underway at 9, and he went his way. I refused to eat anything because I still had some sandwich left over at Wolfgang's place. he couldn't get a car until 1 and I resolved to wait. At 2 he showed up a my door and I stood in the middle of my living room pushing sandwich into my maw. Not unlike pushing manwich into Blake's mawm, but that's another story. We hit up the LCBO where we told Brendan we were going to the birthday before the show, and that we would call him later. He told us the show only got better with age, and we left. I was suspicious of this party, as it was hosted by parentals and Wolfgang and I were a good 3 years older than the birthday boy, so we only bought mickeys, another compliment of plastic shotglasses (This time 6 "twisted" ones and 4 regulars), and a fetching cloth bag to carry it all in. Then we went to his house and played video games until 5, whereupon we went to Julian's and retrieved my drums. Wolfgang did this for me in exchange for the borrowing of roughly 40% of my kit, which was fine with me because It meant less things for Jesse to break in my basement.
We played video games again until dinner, which was excllently prepared by Wolfgang's mom, and then she offered to drive us to where we were going... no later than 8. So we went to my house. Ass Loads were there, and we got them to help us empty the shotglasses. After all, they had no idea they were drinking swill. Luckily Stefan wasn't there, so we all got 2 and no fights happened. Wolfgang dispensed gum to any concerned parties. We washed the glasses, listened to the boys for half an hour, and then went for a final meeting with brendan seconds before the LCBO closed. We confirmed that we would be coming to the show late, and he said we should call him when we were on our way. We said this might be difficult, but we would try. We walked to Mollys for a little recon, and saw that the show didn't even start until 10 anyway. After that, we took the long walk down Brunswick to get to Alex McCready's uncle's place. We walked for (what seemed like) 6 hours, then we hit the spot, the beat was a-bumpin, and the girlies was... underage. This is when the debauchery ocurred. I was ushered into the home by cries of "Liam motherfuckin McKenna", and introduced to the only pussy at the party: Jordan's girlfriend and her friend Charlie. I was pretty sure Charlie was a boy, but then she spoke and I had to check the she looked 16, not 11. Anyway, the liquor flowed, and after the guys (Blake, Jordan, Alex, and Tim Grapes) got seriously drunk, and stoned, and very very passed out I invited the very willing young ladies out back where I fed them more booze and mecilessly penetrated every orifice of their bodies. I'm pretty sure Jordan doesn't know.
Just kidding! (Ellen, are you sure you caught that part?)
We arrived at the place, and heard the bumpin beat of punk rawk being played through the second-floor windows. We rang the doorbell... 3 times. The door was answered by a frail-looking woman in a brown dishcloth dress. I'm going to assume this was Mrs McCready. I would have found out but she barely even let us in the door. Apparently there were ony supposed to be 6 people here, and she was "probably going to kick everyone out soon" anyway. Fucking great. Of course, by this time a steady trickle of drunkards were moving down the stairs to see who was at the door. Apparently someone thought it was "Ian", and there were numerous drunken chorusses of"Ian!" "Holy shit, it's Ian" and the like. Thus I maintained the element of surprise. Of course, that wouldn't have been very hard. Likely if I had announced my arrival with an accompanying marching band this load of half-pickled children wouldn't have been able to figure it out. Blake was no exception. The man was so drunk he was able to totally misinform me about the events upstairs. When I related that things seemed to be slightly less fun than he had described in the brochure the night before he said, "Yeah, man, it's a total debauchery". This clashed with my impression of the event, and caused me to go upstairs instead of just leaving. As I was about to ascend, Angie Smith appeared on the main floor of the house. I was stunned, and didn't know what to say. Hopefully she was not the source of this alleged debauchery. However, she just as quickly disappeared into the bowels of the house, never to be seen by me again. Upon arriving upstairsm I realized just how drunk Blake was. He had meant debacle, and that was exactly what this was. Think of the worst party you've ever been to, now add loud punk music and parents over every shoulder (not that they appeared to be stopping anything, they were just...there). So, yeah man, it was a complete fucking debacle of a shitty party, and, ladies and gentlemen, it was 9:30pm.
Wolfgang and I beat a hasty retreat and went to Brendan's. We buzzed and I said "Can we come up?" he said "umm... who?". Even though I hadn't had a single drink I managed to misunderstand the question entirely. I answered with an indignant "Me", and he opened the door. He was expecting company after the show, so we stowed the booze and helped him clean a bit. Wolfgang got back to de-spying his computer with a vengeance. We headed out to Molly's with Steve and a female of his acquiantance at about 11:30, and it kicked ass. Everyone should really see these guys, they're awsome. For the first time in my life I am actually seriously thinking about going to Hamilton (where they live). I can hang out with Carl, rail Krista, and see McKenna, maybe even in that order!
McKenna usually go back to Brendan's after their shows, but they didn't this time. I sat in Bren's drinking lightly until 4:30, and then I went home. It was still a good time as I got to catch up with Laura and Justyn. The only weird part was when Steve's girl started getting... out of control? Anyway, Steve got her to keep it in her pants until we all went our seperate ways.
And then I woke up at 2:30 on Sunday, watched an hour of Queen of the Damned, and took a Greyhound at 4:30.
Yup, like no other...