Stories, tangents, or otherwise experienced.
Thursday night, we were playing Rock Band, and she was giggling again.
“What?” I asked between a break in the lyrics.
“Nothing, nothing!” Katie smirked as she kept banging on the drums.
But I knew what it was: my vocals were coming through too loudly, and they sounded ridiculous. A quick visit to the controller and my vocals were muted behind the lead vocals, allowing me to avoid being mocked for the time being.
When my first set of DDR pads got destroyed after nine months of abuse at the feet of college kids, I can’t say I was terribly surprised – but it made me sad.
When I got Rock Band, and stories of flaky hardware were abound, I wasn’t terribly surprised that the strum bar on my guitar got a little flaky. Not bad enough to send in, but causing the occasional miss.
I’ve had to retire two DSes (busted speakers and buttons, then a non-functioning touchscreen), a Mac Cube (optical drive motor), two Sidekicks (trackball both times), a lampshade iMac (optical drive malfunction), a G5 iMac (power supply), and there was that whole 360 thing.
Things break, I know.
Never did I think I’d be such a hardcore SingStar player that I’d break the blue microphone, but here we are. Color me surprised just this once.
I have a small subset of my home music collection on my work computer. A number of these tracks are things I purchased off the iTunes store, which includes a fair number of tracks that I can only justify owning as “for nostalgic value”.
Because I value nostalgia so deeply, many of these songs end up in rotation, and I’ve taken a small amount of shit from a coworker about the number of times he’s heard House Of Pain’s *Jump Around* in the last month.
After publicly threatening to purchase a copy of Wreckx-n-Effect’s *Rump Shaker*, Adam Kuban (a fellow crap music lover) gifted me the song on iTunes.
But this, I fear, is not enough. Two obnoxious 90’s songs are not enough to terrorize an office, and even the Richard Cheese albums have too much artistic merit to enjoy ironically. I promised my friends that I would out-crazy them in 2008, and if there was ever a resolution I intended to keep, this is it.
So to my coworkers, I apologize. My hand has been forced.
This is, as it turns out, the second CD I ever owned as a child (the first being the original C+C Music Factory album). For the years of 1991 through 1996, I lived on a musical diet of the sorts of things one would hear at a middle school dance (not strange, considering I was *in middle school* at the time). Regardless, my mom was throwing out some of my things and came across a pile of CDs. This one deserved rescuing.
Now if only I could find my MTV Party To Go CDs…