I lose for free thanks to a misprint and my penis!

As usual I started off the weekend with a night of casuals at Akihabara. I played for a bit and had a small win streak that was ended by a beastly Zappa player. I looked around the other side of the cabs after I lost and it was Imo. I played for a little while and did pretty well, winning some, losing some. FAB was there and I played him once or twice and lost. Then I played him again and much to my surprise I managed to beat him. I beat a few more people and then FAB played me again and he won. After playing for a little while longer, eventually players became a bit scarce and it took forever for anyone to challenge me. I hate playing the damn AI so I decided to head to Shinjuku. As I was walking towards the train station I saw a group of top players including Imo and FAB that had left earlier, crossing the street and heading back to Club Sega. I didnt want to just like follow them back in and I already was on my way out so I just went to Shinjuku anyway. I still wanted to play some more though so I figured I would swing Vegas first and see if there was any action there. When I arrived at Vegas I was pleased to see that there were about 10 or so people there playing which is great for 4 cabinets. One of the cabinets had a seat opened. I looked at the screen and it was a Dizzy player with like 17 wins. I looked around the other side and it was H.H. I was eager to play him so I got on the cab. I played him in a few matches and kept getting really close but just not getting that last round. After about 4 games I finally beat H.H. and ended his long win streak. Unfortunately after I won he left the arcade. At this point it was almost midnight so i'm sure he wanted to go home. A few more people played against me but then it got stagnant and I found myself fighting the AI again for longer than I would have liked so I just said fuck it and headed to Current for some beers.

When I got to Current it was semi dead. There were only a few people there. I stayed for a few beers but then most of the people eventually left so it was pretty lame. I decided maybe I would have better luck trying to go to GODZ. When I arrived at GODZ, much to my surprise, the place was pretty lively. One of the bar tenders told me that tonight they were celebrating because the owner of the bar was going to be getting married. Not long after, even more people showed up. It was a group of people that came from PSY. Appearently they closed down PSY early because the owner of PSY is a friend of the guys from GODZ so he told everyone to go to GODZ and celebrate. Among the group that came was Heidi (the norwegian girl who is friends with Masami) along with the other guy who was there with us several weeks ago who was writing haikus, and this other girl that was friends with them who was from Texas. The haiku guy was already wasted. I said hi to him when he came in and he asked where im from. I was like.... dude wtf... and hes like OOOHHHH its you! Sorry man im wasted!!!! He sure was... The girl from Texas, Jessie (an ex Nova employee now living in Tokyo studying english) told me she had an extra ticket to the X-japan reunion concert that was going on at the end of next month. She said theres a good chance she could sell it to me and I was pretty psyched about that since X-japan fuckin rocks and getting tickets to this rare sold out event is pretty fuckin hard. Eventually shit got really crazy. They started busting out confetti poper thingys and like 50 bottles of free champaign. People were just fuckin shaking the bottles of champaign and spraying it all over the place. Everyone started taking their shirts off.. even some of the girls. I honestly hate champaign, i think it tastes like crap. Ill drink just about anything but champaign is at the bottom of my list. However, who am I to pass up free booze at a bar in Tokyo? I just chugged whole glasses of the crap at a time to avoid the taste and chased it with beer. The place stayed opened for extra late, till like past 6 am. Eventually Heidi got sick and started puking in the sink and they were starting to get everyone ready to leave so I just said goodbye and headed out to go sleeping at the usual place.

The next day I headed to the travel agency located not far from the manga kissa I slept at. I tried to make plans for my spring break trip to Thailand. It turns out that the plane ticket is going to cost about $600 round trip. Thats a bit more than I was originally planning to spend. At first I sorta had decided that I was going to go to Kansai for the first weekend of spring break and then head to Thailand from there, but the travel agent told me that unless my departure and return location were the same that it would cost a ton more... meaning id have to fly back to Osaka and then go back to Tokyo from there rather than flying back to Tokyo. Because of this, and the fact that I now possibly have an opportunity to go see X-japan in Tokyo on the 31st of March, I decided that I could just spend the first weekend in Tokyo and then go to Thailand from there. I had the travel agent reserve the flight for me but told him that I would call him early next week and tell him my final decision. However, the urge to go to Kansai is very strong and I really wanna play some Gear at A-cho. Because of this, and the fact that the Thailand ticket is a bit costly, I think I will just cancel the flight and go to Kansai instead from the 1st to the 6th of April. I can just go to Thailand next Spring and this way I will have more time to prepare. I will most likely call the dude tonight and tell him to cancel. He was really helpfull though.

After that, it was time to head over to Chiba. In the back of this month's Arcadia, they have a tournament listed at Messe102 for 2/23 (Saturday, as in the day I am talking about right now). After a long train ride and accidently getting on the wrong train and having to backtrack because the damn destination sign on the train was mis labaled, I arrived at Messe102. Immedietly I knew something was wrong. There were only like 4 or 5 guys there playing and the tournament was scheduled to start in less than 1 hour. I asked one of them if there was a tournament today and he told me that it was actually yesterday. I dont know who fucked up, if Arcadia printed the wrong date, or if the arcade changed the date of the tournament after advertising in Arcadia, but either way I sorta got poked in the butt on this one. The place only had 2 cabs and the players there were decent but not spectacular. I would get on the cab and win about 10 matches and then lose one and then the process would repeat. Eventually I was getting tired of playing there and it was about 7 pm. I wanted to play some more games in Tokyo so I left. When I got to the train platform I noticed there was an unusually large ammount of people waiting for the train. Then I noticed that the sign said that the next scheduled train was scheduled to arive over an hour ago... meaning there was a massive delay. After waiting for maybe 30-40 minutes the train finally came. When I transfered trains at Chiba station there was another delay and it took fuckin forever to get back to Shinjuku. I headed to Vegas again for some more casuals. Played for a little but nothing extremely note worthy happened. There was a female HOS there and she played against me about 10 or so times, failing to beat me. Eventually she stopped playing and then no one else was really playing against me so I called it a night and headed back to Current.

Current was a little more lively this time than the previous night. I just pretty much drank and talked to some people for most of the night. Later at around 4 am some of the Cirque guys showed up with some random girls. They said it was one of their birthdays. As a birthday gift, Sushi (the owner of Current) gave the guy this gigantic gin and tonic in this huge fuckin test tube bottle that looked like a giant bong. They stayed open a little later due to it being his birthday and then eventually the place was closing so the guys headed out with their group of random girls and a full bottle of classy gin that the guy got as a gift from someone at work. Seems like they probably had a nice night. I left and went to sleep as usual.

I woke up the next day excited to finally play in a tournament since there was one scheduled at Shinjuku sportsland. I headed to Vegas first for some casuals but it was kinda dead. Then I figured maybe everyone was playing at Sportsland so I went there. When I got there, only 2 people were playing. I played against this one Millia player and beat him and then he left.... Then I noticed a few girls show up. Then it instantly clicked. I checked the flyer for the tournament on the wall, and once again my dumbass managed to overlook the fact that this was another ladies only tournament. Bummed out, I imedietly left and headed to Akihabara for a long day of casuals. As I was exiting Akihabara station, I saw Osaka B far in front of me on the escalator. He was heading to Club Sega as well. When I got there the place was nice a full of gear comp. There were a few top players there. I played for a while and did generally well. I played against Osaka B and lost, but then after waiting for 2 other people to play I played him again and this time I beat him in a mirror match. After beating a few more people I eventually lost and went around to the other side of the cab. There was a open seat on the cab next to Osaka B so I played there. Shortly after I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned around to see Ogawa grinning cheerfully as usual and he said hi. I played like 2 games and then all of a sudden no one was playing against me. I made a comment to Ogawa that this is boring and no one wants to play me. He jokingly said its because im too strong and they are afraid of me haha. Eventually I got to like stage 9 on arcade mode and just said fuck it and got off the machine and went around to the other side to play against Osaka B again since no one was playing him at the moment. I lost this time but played him once more and much to my surprise I managed to win another mirror match against him. Then for some reason he picked HOS on me a few times and lost and then I think he just started playing on a different cab. I also noticed that after I had moved to the other cab, about 5 mins after a bunch of people suddently just appeared back there and 2 people got on the cab that I was using before which was now completely empty. Bad timing I guess. I played for a bit longer and eventually it was time to leave. I never got around to playing against Ogawa.

Thats about it. I was pretty psyched to play in some tournaments and ended up just playing casuals all weekend unfortunately. As far as next week goes, I have no idea whats going on. The current Arcadia only has listings up until next Friday, so Saturday and Sunday are a mystery right now. I probably wont know if there are any tournaments until I get to Tokyo next weekend. Hopefully there will be something, but if the current trend repeats itself, there wont be much going on during the first weekend of the month.