I was just downstairs listening to the radio (Radio 2, of course) when Josie Lawrence (of Whose Line? fame) started to talk about a silent disco that she’d attended.

My interest was immediately piqued. You see, back during my wild, formative days at university, I developed a minor case of tinnitus. There was some kind of ‘local rock’ festival that ran for a week, and I attended every performance. It was a great week, and I took some great photos. The week culminated with Electric Six (of Gay Bar fame), a wild night out, and ultimately my only physical malady: tinnitus.

Looking back, I probably should’ve worn earplugs…

So, you can see why a silent disco would appeal to me! I’ve only been clubbing a handful of times since I left university, and I try to limit live music to once every few months; I know now that I have to look after my ears. I really don’t want to become a tired rocker like Ozzy Osbourne who can’t sleep at night due to the ringing in his ears.

At a silent disco, everyone wears a pair of personal headphones. You have a switch on the headphones that let you choose which of the DJs or audio streams that you want to listen to! You could listen to some euphoric trance, followed by some heavy metal, and then unwind with some Adagio for Strings.

Alternatively, you could also just turn the headphones off and have a conversation with someone. With your back to the bar, you could look on at a sea of dancers: some jiving, some flailing spastically and some just standing there morosely, perhaps just a few heartbeats away from a coma.

I think that’s the bit that most appeals to me. Optional silence. The incessant noise is actually what I hate most about going out (now that the smoking has gone), and why I refuse to ‘pick up’ girls in bars, or clubs — if you can’t even hear yourself think, how are they meant to hear you speak? For someone that relies almost entirely on weaving a web of sultry syllables, a noise-infested venue is rather undesirable.

Even if you’re not the kind of person to partake in gentle discourse at a disco (I am probably in the minority, I admit), here’s a video clip of what it might look like if you turned your headphones off and watched a silent disco singing — and most importantly, dancing! — to Nirvana’s Lithium:

Recently, my geekiness was called into question: ‘You’re not very geeky, Sebastian. All you talk about is sex. Sex, sex, sex. That’s hardly wholesome geeky talk. How about some Star Wars talk, or a list of all the comics you own?’

Let me tell you something, Little Miss I’m-a-bigger-geek-than-you : I AM A HUGE GEEK, THANK YOU VERY MUCH.

The thing is, like my sexuality, I am so confident in my geekiness that I don’t feel the need to constantly reassure myself, and you lot, that I’m a geek. So, please excuse me if I don’t always talk about a fantastic new range of marbled dice or if the digital Yoda was better than the original wobbly-eared bogey-coloured rubber model.

However…

This weekend I will be attending a LAN party.

A LAN party, for those of you that don’t know — for those of you not geeky enough – is a ‘gaming festival’. It can be small — just 5 or 10 people — or it can be huge. By huge, I mean thousands of people.

Click it for a larger version. Really, click it. It even amazes me.

DreamHack, the largest LAN party in the world, has over 11,000 (eleven thousand) paying attendees. That’s 11,000  people transporting their computers from all over Sweden and Europe. The one I attend, the i-series, ‘only’ has around 2000 attendees — but really, it’s not like you walk around and shake hands with everyone there. The point is: when you stand up — you know, to check if your legs still work — all you can see is computer screens. And towers of consumed energy drink cans. And pizza boxes.

If you were to take a walk around a LAN to check out what the latest ‘case mod‘ fashions are, or what the other gaming areas are like, the first thing you’d notice is just how well everyone gets along. There’s a constant roar of chatter, and regular outbursts of shouting and roaring when a team wins a tournament match. The overall feeling is very much one of friendship and camaraderie. Geeks, ultimately, are still social outcasts. LAN parties are the only place where geeks can be themselves. The ‘cool’ facade drops. Let it all hang out — literally, in some cases.

We geeks are beginning to emerge, but it’s happening slowly. The massive success of video games in the last few years has certainly helped — it is becoming more and more common to hear discussion of video games (like WoW, or COD4) out in the ‘real world’. It’s still mainly in the 19-35 male segment, but girls are catching up!

Until LAN parties become the social norm — and we still have a few years left, trust me — the antithesis, the polar opposite, of LAN partying is clubbing.

I’ve clubbed. At university I clubbed and pubbed. I did the social thing, often 6 nights a week for 3 years. I get it and I understand why people enjoy it; why people enjoy drinking, and dancing, and losing their mind. What I don’t get is why people would club when given an alternative, like a LAN party, or simply going around to a friend’s house.

I’m going to list the pros and cons of each, so I can prove why LAN parties are so much cooler than the alternative:

Clubbing Pros:

• If you’re ugly, you can probably get laid, with enough alcohol (in you, and the unfortunate recipient)
• You can forget about all your troubles and woes — like Cheers, only with worse music — if you drink enough
• The endorphins (the euphoria) from dancing are actually quite good for you!
• A silent disco has a lot going for it but they’re not very popular… yet!

Clubbing Cons:

• If you’re female, you’ll probably get hit on by ugly guys that think they can get into your pants if they ply you with enough cheap alcohol (and date rape is no laughing matter!)
• You’ll get tinnitus, like me, which is permanent. Enjoy the ringing in your ears as you try to sleep. I hope you didn’t like listening to the quiet bits in songs.  Can you tell that I’m bitter?
• I hear the liver transplant waiting list is quite long
• You can’t hear ANYTHING in a damn club. Communication, other than the ‘point at the body part you want licked’ variety (which can be quite fun), is rendered completely impossible
• Often, you have to listen to really shit music (though it does vary)

LAN Party Pros

• You can hear yourself think — perhaps some clubbers don’t like having to hear their own thoughts? Or they don’t have thoughts… Empty, hollow shells…
• Interactive fun! Video games are healthy for the brain.
• Communicative (not, like, diseases) and team-building! Most of the games played at LAN parties are multiplayer games involving a lot of teamwork (read: shouting)
• You can make money doing it! Pro gamers can take home thousands of pounds/dollars. Eventually they’ll take home the girl too! When there is a girl to take…
• Headphones are required! You can even listen to your own music while you game! And then you can take them off to talk to people! How damn futuristic is that?

LAN Party Cons

• Your gear can get stolen (though it’s rare, and security is generally quite good at larger LANs)
• Sleep deprivation is rife (not quite as bad as liver failure though, is it?)

Wow, that’s a very short list of cons, isn’t it? That’s because LAN Parties are awesome. Clubbing only really has one thing going for it (the euphoria), something you could easily get elsewhere — on a roller coaster, or something!

From Thursday through Monday I’ll be at a LAN party. Admittedly, that’s less of a weekend and more of a ‘half week’, but a weekend sounds a little less geeky. Four of us will be going, and we’ll be sleeping in a 3-man tent. One or two of them actually read my blog, and I’m told they are slightly alarmed by my coming out. Wusses.

Ideally, we’d take some girls with us, but guess what — and this will come as a shock — LAN parties are about 95% male. It was about 99% a few years ago, with that 1% being ‘possibly female’ (it’s amazing how hard it is to differentiate between male and female geeks after a few weeks of growth and stagnation — even facial hair isn’t as much of a clue as it should be). Nowadays there are a few girls dotted around — proper ones, without beards — though they tend to be the token girlfriends of geek boys. There is the occasional bona fide geek girl, but they are rare. And coveted. I hope to get myself one, one day.

Geek girls, go to a LAN party! Don’t be afraid! Geek boys don’t bite — they just kinda… grab… when you least expect it. But don’t let that deter you! Even if you’re an anime girl (that’s only one step away from being a furry), you’d fit in at a LAN. LAN parties are like a modern-day Bohemian dream where everyone, no matter how weird and different from the societal norms can hang out and have fun!

I have a dream. One day soon the phrase ‘Hey, wanna go out clubbing?’ will become outmoded, replaced by ‘Hey, come over my place! We’ll crack open a few beers and play some Grand Theft Auto or World of Warcraft‘. It will be a better world; a world with less alcoholism and debauchery. Imagine, if everyone knew what it felt like to play on a Nintendo and grin like a kid, giddy with the magic of it all — wouldn’t that be a much more fun world to live in?

Sell your dancing shoes. Buy a console (and read my beginner’s guide to gaming!)

This follows on from last week’s entry where I told the sad story of my first adult crush. This story picks up from about 2 months before my first long-term girlfriend, and is a lot more fun than the story of my crush. You probably don’t know what I looked like back then, so I’ll start with a photo taken in the summer of 2004, a couple of months after this particular story. Don’t be hating the sunglasses; they weren’t mine. Other people’s sunglasses tend to gravitate towards me because I look quite cool — I don’t own a single pair!

It was February. It was cold and rainy. But this was university! And we were young! Weather is so unimportant when you’re young, dumb and full of cu– Anyway, I digress. The point is, at university, no matter the time of year, girls wear almost nothing. As one of the biggest fans of girly-girls — I love dresses, skirts, frills and strappy tops and PINK — university became 3 years of pleasure. 3 years of sitting in one of the main squares and skirt-watching. My best friend and I actually used to go and park up outside a local sixth-form college (16-18 year olds, for the non-Brits) and girl watch.

(Is that lecherous or fairly healthy behaviour for men? Don’t answer that one, I’d rather not know.)

I love skirts. They don’t even have to be short, though it obviously helps my crippled male imagination if they are. For me, it’s all about the flowery flowy flounciness that comes with cute and light clothing. A long, prettily-patterned summer dress can be as attractive as a mini-skirt. If you boil it right down, men love skirts because of the ease of access. I’ve actually lifted the skirts of a girlfriend’s dress over her head so that she couldn’t see and then… done things to her that I shan’t repeat here. That was hot.

So, that’s lesson number one: if you want to get into my pants, try wearing a skirt. Those militant jeans-wearers aren’t completely out of the running, they just better be damn awesome jeans — or a mighty fine figure better be eye-poppingly obvious through examination of your denim exoskeleton.

Lesson number two is: if a drunk girl in a short skirt asks you to carry her home, unequivocally and without allowing your brain a moment’s thought, say yes.  Read my journal entry from 2004, and I’ll carry on where it left off.

Chivalry, huh, my arse… — February 2004

Well, that’s the last time I carry a girl from the Underground [the university's main night club] to her house… about 500 meters.

All because she was hideously drunk, all over me, offering sexual favours of all sorts and wearing a rather pretty, short, hot-pink skirt.

Ho hum.

Thank God for honour and chivalry, eh?

And to top it all off, she had 4 friends staying over for the weekend. 4 very drunk friends…

Anyway, starting from the beginning… Marc and I decided to go out and have fun. We’re fast becoming going-out buddies. We thought we’d just go out, look cool… see what happens, that kind of thing. We get to the bar. Order our drinks. Strike a pose. Watch the women go by… Becki, Marc’s crush from last week is there… She doesn’t even make eye-contact with him. She’s obviously playing hard to get…

So, insert a brief foray into Mondo [a smaller nightclub], and then an extended stay in the Underground and you pretty much have my night, wrapped up in a nutshell.

But you’d have to gloss over the stagger back to the South Courts [her house], and the party that ensued, with Marc, the five girls (Becki and her friends) and I. Mad, I tell you.

Luckily they were drunk, really. Otherwise I might have done something I’d regret.

I mean, they all changed into their pajamas. At the same time.

…

First, I should explain the difficulties of carrying a girl in a short skirt. There’s simply no where to put your second hand. So, on her pert ass it goes. Hell, she didn’t seem to mind, and neither did I. I dragged out those 500 meters to her house by walking very, very slowly. For the record, that’s as close as I’ve ever come to abusing a drunken girl. I hope she wasn’t that drunk actually, as we did have a bit of a ‘moment’, with her there in my arms, blearily looking up into my eyes, my nervous, sweaty hand on her buttock. Anyway…

Secondly, and this is where it gets a bit messy (try to keep track!): Becki was the best friend of the girl that would soon become my first long-term girlfriend. I actually got close to Becki before I later got close to my soon-to-be girlfriend. In fact, I might have ended up with Becki, if she hadn’t crushed so hard on Marc, my housemate, and a slew of other beach bums! It was a very complicated 2 months which I don’t remember all the details of (so I shan’t repeat them here, in case I get things wrong), but let’s just say ‘Love Triangle’ doesn’t even begin to describe what was going on. I think, individually, I slept with Becki, my girlfriend-to-be and Marc and there was even some three-way action at one point. It was all a very confusing period, and I’m very happy with how it ended — and how my first proper relationship begun!

That whole mess somehow ended up with me in a happy, healthy relationship that would turn out to last for the rest of my days at university. She wasn’t a geek, but that didn’t stop me from turning her into one. I didn’t want to completely geekify her — I wanted her to continue wearing those tiny skirts and strapless tops. I did manage to get her to dress up, but not as a character from her favourite anime or sci-fi film. Actually, she didn’t like anime at all (phew!) She had a rather awful (you can imagine the grimace on my face…) habit of turning up at my house in just a long coat and lingerie. Damn her.

The rest of that story’s for another day though, next Thursday perhaps!

Please note how I refrained from taking advantage of five (5) girls in the smallest almost-there pyjamas that I’ve ever been fortunate enough to witness. The whole drunken-girls-trying-to-woo-me would be a recurring theme throughout university. If only the sober ones had tried…

This continues on from my brief introduction to Poland, which actually turned into a bit of a history lesson, oops. I’d been invited to Poland for a weekend of excess: food, women, alcohol and video games. It would soon be apparent though that Polish food is a bit shit, and their women are veritable cesspits of disease and damnation.  At least the video games and alcohol were OK. I’ve scattered a few random photos of mine from Poland throughout this entry, don’t try to make sense of them — they’re completely unrelated, but pretty!

When I’d boarded the plane in England it had been sunny, warm, breezy. I’d been promised lovely weather — continential Europe, when it gets warm, gets really warm. I’d been promised a lot of things actually and the weather was going to be the first of many broken promises. The door to the plane opened with a hiss as the pressure dropped instantly. Snow. Frackin’ snow blew into the cabin and into our faces. We’d been promised sun and warmth! If we wanted precipitation, we’d have stayed in England.

Mike met me after I’d collected my bags. ‘I thought you’d sound more British.’

Seriously, do I really not sound British? 24 years — a quarter century, next week — of speaking English. The Queen’s English. And a Canadian, a fellow member of my Queen’s Commonwealth said I don’t sound British?! Not one to punch my host in the face — always better to do that on the way back to the airport, after they’ve kept a roof over your head — I let it lie. Britishness is in the heart anyway, right? In the crumpet-shaped heart…

We headed outside to his car, trudging through a few inches of sludgy grey snow. After slighting my accent, I made sure he carried my bag — it’s good to remind the colonials who still rules the Commonwealth roost. His car was a race-tuned BMW M3 (a really fast car). My face cracked into a grin. ‘I haven’t got around to putting winter tires on the car yet, Seb… so it might be quite a wild ride back to my place.’

‘We hadn’t anticipated quite so much snow…’ REALLY?

So we skidded and careened our way along the crappy Polish highways in an automotive example of Brownian motion. Mike’s car was pretty crappy too. The dash kept falling to pieces, and the rubber seals around the doors ‘needed to be fixed, but last time I sent it to the mechanic, they kept the car for 8 weeks without fixing it.’ Poland is not a highly functional country. It’s drab and grey. Driving through the slippery streets of Gdansk, we turned onto the road leading to Mike’s flat. Street after street of poorly-maintained concrete apartment blocks. They had been painted once, just after being built, back in the 60s — there were traces of pinks and greens and baby blues — but since then they’d just been left to dilapidate and wallow in their own crappiness. Gdansk was probably quite pretty once, but not today.

Fortunately, Gdansk belongs to the Tricity of Gdansk, Gdynia and Sopot — the latter two being both a lot more charming then Gdansk and not quite so… drab. Sopot is where we would spend most of our time: eating, drinking and carousing. Sopot is where we spent hundreds of pounds on sushi and saki, where we entertained the company of beautiful, chisel-cheeked Slavic beauties and where I threw up for only the third time in my life.

It started, as these things do, with an idea. In a group of guys, that idea isn’t usually very intelligent or sensible: ‘Let’s get naked and run around campus!’ or ‘Let’s inject our testicles with fish paste and dangle them in a hungry pool of piranhas!’ — men are not the most deep and meaningful creatures at the best of times, but when you get 2 or more of them trying to agree a course of action by consensus, there are only so many possible outcomes.

‘Let’s get DRUNK!!!’

When the English, Irish and French settlers headed over to North America, did all of the enthusiastic people go with? Put an American, Canadian and Brit in the same room and it’s hard to believe they all came from the same common genetic line.

‘Sure… let’s get drunk…!’ That was me, trying to echo Mike’s enthusiasm. The last time I’d got properly drunk was on my 20th birthday, at university, 3 years ago. That was also the last time I’d been sick, and I’d avoided alcohol abuse since.

As an aside, what gives with having to drink everything that’s bought and placed in front of you?

‘I’ve had at least half a litre of spirits and a bottle of wine… I’ve swilled and gargled 5 shots of Aftershock… I’m on my last legs. When you’re tall like me, you have a long way to fall if your legs give way… ‘ (Read the linked Aftershock Challenge — alcohol and the membranes in your cheeks/under tongue =  nasty)

‘But… I’ve just paid money for this drink!’

I knew that a night in Sopot would be the same deal, and there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. Apathetical drunkenness. Drunkenness Induced By Benevolent And Generous Host.

‘Can we at least get some food in our stomachs first? There was that nice sushi place…’ Forever the Jew, I can spot a good restaurant from well over 200 yards.

That nice sushi place turned out to be awesome. A tiny little exclusive restaurant with 15 stools placed in a circle around a central food preparation area. In the middle stood 3 proper Japanese sushi chefs — I have no idea what they were doing in Poland, so don’t ask. Perhaps some Poles had kidnapped their families, who knows. Each one served whoever was sitting in front of them — you pointed at an item on the menu, and they prepared it, right under your nose.

But, it gets better! There’s a moat of of water between you and the chefs, with little boats in it, each one carrying some kind of side-dish. I sat and watched in awe as the little boats made their way around the restaurant. You don’t want to know how much it cost for that single, appetite-whetting mouthwateringly delicious tiger king prawn that floated by on a little bamboo raft. Or the next one. And the next.  In fact, after I’d taken 4, the couple sitting to our right started to get a little angry when no prawns had made it past me for 10 minutes…

Anyway, this story is about when I got drunk, not how I spent way too much of my host’s money in a snobby sashimi sushi saloon. We finished up our food, polished off the large bottle of aged red wine and headed down to the club.

The club was… cosy. It was only about 20 feet across — 5 meters — but it was deep, and on 3 floors. The ground floor was just a bar, the middle floor had some heavier rock music and the top floor was the dance-like-a-spastic cheesy-euro-disco zone. It was April, off-season, but this place was obviously the most popular club in town: shoulder to shoulder, nut-to-butt, gropefestingly jam-packed — FULL. Really damn full. We shouldered our way through the busy ground floor, hoping to find more space upstairs and guess what? It had a spiral staircase.

I guess fire regulations don’t exist in Poland — or at least, they’re not enforced. A 3-storey club, with perhaps 1000 or more wild, passionate Poles, all ascending and descending a tiny, wrought-iron spiral staircase. One thousand drunk and angry Polish people (and even a few Mafioso-looking types that everyone made way for). Making my way down that staircase at the end of the night, drunk out of my mind, struggling to put one foot in front of another — not even sure which feet were mine — is not something I want to repeat… ever.

A drunken stumble across town (cobbles are really not the best friend of the woefully inebriated) and a 5 minute drive later (Mike wasn’t drunk, I swear…) we arrive at the flat, me considerably worse for wear than him. He’d been giving me his drinks, instead of drinking them himself. Bastard.

‘I think I’m going to be sick, Mike…’

He just grinned at me. The cretinous Canadian cockmongler just grinned at me. ‘The bathroom’s over there.’

If you’ve ever seen the toilet in student accommodation, you’ll know that they’re dirty enough to cultivate at least three bacterial conurbations.

‘I think you’re getting close to recreating the conditions required for the genesis of multi-cellular organisms, Mike. This is pretty primordial down here!’ My voice was muffled and slurred, what with my head being almost fully in the bowl of the toilet. [I wanted to work in a joke about being pissed out of my head here, but I couldn't quite make it fit...]

‘What?’ I’m obviously more intelligent than backward backwater Canadians, even when drunk.

‘Never mind, come and hold back my hair…’

Sushi really doesn’t taste great the second time around, even the posh stuff. Mike and I came out of the weekend worse for wear, but closer friends than before.