Owned by a Bunch of Homos

On Saturday, Funksters casted (had mini-auditions) for two song pieces, both of which I liked, and both of which I did not get into.

I was thoroughly upset, but I understood why and I wasn’t too surprised either.

Watching videos of myself doing these pieces, I can still see that I have the same problems that I had since I started dancing: weird posture, which leads to overall weird form. And I could see that all the dancers who did get casted had normal/good posture (though other aspects of their dancing were really questionable). I’ve had bad posture all my life, and my whole family would continuously nag me about it. But I would always think, “If it really matters, then I can fix it later.” And now it matters.

I’ve been pretty good about standing up and sitting down and just chilling because all that doesn’t require a lot of thinking. I can use like ten percent of my thought process to frequently remind myself to adjust my posture and stand up straight, but when I dance, one hundred percent of my thought process completely goes into the dance. That’s where my posture fails and I look like I’m flailing around. I still need to make good posture come naturally to me somehow.



After each casting, the directors would work with the casted dancers to set up stage formations. I sat with the rest of the uncasted brooding silently.

For each piece I didn’t get casted in, I felt like how I did back then when I lost a DDR tournament. I know it seems ridiculous to compare DDR with actual dancing, but with dancing it’s the same emotion: feeling that I suck at doing something I love.

There are four pieces left to be casted, and I need to work my ass off to get into them. Breakthrough is officially over, so I have all my week to practice like hell. And I WILL get casted in at least one piece, and that will be the shit.

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“Owned by a Homo”
Written February 18th, 2006 (Excerpted)

[[Some background info: A good part of my life (June 2001-2007ish) was dedicated to four-panel stomping games, a.k.a. Dance Dance Revolution, a.k.a. DDR, and its spin-off, In the Groove, a.k.a. ITG. Nowadays when you go to an arcade, you might see someone “really” good going so fast that you’re wondering if they just memorized that shit. (The answer is no, they didn’t.) But back then, there was a lot more to DDR/ITG. There were communities, friendships, and tournaments. And I was involved in all of that.

[[The most popular place to play in the bay area was probably MGL (Milpitas Golf Land), which was home to a lot of DDR/ITG tournaments and memories, from long days of non-stop DDR/ITG to drunken vomiting messes. This particular entry is about an ITG tournament at MGL (sorry, drunken vomiting incident is for another time). I edited this entry heavily to eliminate a lot of ITG lingo and nitty gritty details about the tournaments, but there is still a bunch of shit that all you not-so-nerdy people won’t understand.]]

So there was a lot of pressure on me on the third song. If Mark won this song, he would win the whole tournament. If I still wanted to win, I had to beat Mark on this song, the song after that, and the song after that. For this match, Mark chose “This is Rock And Roll” and I stuck with the four forced mods. It was a close match, and I ended up winning.

So for my fourth, I decided on, of course, “Out of the Dark” Expert. (I've been whoring the Hard and Expert charts of that song way too much.) Mark drew like a million extra mod again, and they were c450, Hide Targets, Blender, Stream, Incoming, Robot, and... Great Attack. Actually, it's easier to get Greats because the timing window for Greats isn't as small as the timing window for Excellents. I was kinda happy with Great Attack because I'm pretty damn good at it, added to the fact that “Out of the Dark” is my song and I would not tolerate being humiliated by losing on my own song. I fucking won that song: My 400 Greats to Mark's 225 Greats.

So damn, I got to the tiebreaker in a best-3-out-of-5 round. It was definitely looking like a close match. The last song was “Walking on Fire” Expert, and the speed modifier 1x was forced, which really sucked because most charts are like impossible to read on 1x. Me and Mark added Accel to make it a little easier, but somewhere in the middle Mark totally fucked up and I pulled ten percent ahead of him and won [HELL YES!]

This comment that Andrew made a few weeks ago is funny. ("LOOKS LIKE SOMEBODY ISN'T WINNING A TOURNAMENT ON THE 18th.") Why is it so funny? Because I did win the tournament... Oh shit, I won Got Skill^2, Mark's ITG2 tournament at MGL [bitches].

I got $132 cash and a RedOctane Metal Pad; that's a $332 cash valued prize. [FUCK YEAH!]

It's also funny because just a few entries back I was talking how bad I would do at the tournament. [SURPRISE!]

[[Somewhere in my winning speech, I cheered out, “OWNED BY A HOMO, BITCHES,” hence the title of this entry.]]

So after getting my $132 and putting the metal pad away in John's car, we chilled for a bit at MGL. [After doing a bunch of stuff] I ended up at Red Lobster at the end of the day [with John, Peter, Miranda, Hoodie, and Andrew]. There, we wrecked havoc and killed the family theme. (Talked about penises, vaginas, sex, all the usual stuff. Among all the talk about sex and ITG, John stopped to ponder out loud, "What do normal people talk about?" That is a good question.)

So after dinner, we all went home. I'm still like in "wow" mode because I just won my first tournament today [after failing miserable in four or five of them within the prior two years], and I never expected that my first win would be a mod tournament [!!!!]

[[I think I failed to convey my true excitement in my entry, because I know that whole entire evening I was thinking, “OH MY FUCKING GOD YESSSSSSSSSSSSS!!”]]