Your Stranger Than Fiction Quizo Update

So, like last year, it’s time to start making serious preparations for Charity Quizo at the Dark Horse. This also means that, like last year, I just got back from New York Comic Con. Now some of you may be thinking, “why, John is a year older and a year wiser, surely this time his trip to NYCC involved no misadventures whatsoever.”

If you’re reading this I’m not sure WHY you’d be thinking that, because thinking that would indicate that you are barely intelligent enough to parse a sentence, let alone actually play Quizo. While I suppose it is theoretically possible that someone reading this could have amnesia and somehow forget that I am the plaything of an angry trickster god, that seems fairly unlikely. More likely you are just, like me, an incurable optimist.

At the show I ran into a girl I knew ages and ages ago – just randomly saw her on the floor, because at a convention with 100,000 people you’re bound to just walk past folks you know and haven’t seen for years. We made the usual small talk and in the course of this conversation she mentioned that she was going to an afterparty at a bar near my hotel on Saturday night and it’s going to be GREAT and you TOTALLY have to come.

Some of you may recall that my experience with comic convention afterparties isn’t exactly positive in the first place, and this had the “added benefit” of being in Manhattan on a Saturday night. If you’ve never done extensive drinking in Manhattan, let me explain something to you: with very few exceptions, every bar on the island is exactly the same. It is a very long and very skinny room with a bar running along one long wall. Everything is done up in a dark hardwood that is covered in high-gloss lacquer.There aren’t enough lights, it is very crowded, and very loud. They all play the same 80s music, they charge way too much for drinks, and the people there make you think “you know, that Hannibal Lecter fella may have been on to something.”

As I noted in the story of the last comicon afterparty I went to, this is so far from my scene it’s hard to accurately describe the distance. But, I thought, old friend, comic book people, I’ll make an effort.

Late on Saturday night I met her at the bar, and the place turned out to be every other New York bar I’ve ever been in (except one, but that’s another show). Wood, dark, loud, full of people. Lots of people were wearing nametags, which I guess isn’t too weird at a convention party, but there was an odd bit: almost everyone’s nametag also had a Twitter handle on it. I figured this was some kind of 21st century communication thing, or at worst a way for a bunch of people to collect new Twitter feeds to follow.

Somewhere, when I thought this, that angry trickster god had a nice little chuckle, grabbed a handful of popcorn, and peered closer into his scrying mirror.

Now, here is what transpired from my point of view at this party:

I was there for maybe 25 minutes. I spent three of those minutes talking to my friend about comics, and the rest of the time making awkward small talk with other people who I had never met. Because, you know, I’m GREAT with new people. And new places. Yeah, good times.

The other 22 minutes I was there the girl I know was flitting all over the bar with her phone in her hand, running up to people and doing that girl-hello-scream thing. I figured, it’s a big show and she probably has people she knows coming from all over.

At the 25 minute mark my social anxiety got the better of me, I made the (true) excuse that I had to be up early in the morning, thanked my friend for inviting me, and headed back to my hotel.

This is what ACTUALLY happened at the party:

After talking to me for three minutes and then leaving me to make small talk with perfect strangers – which I suppose she may not have known is something that absolutely terrifies me – my old friend pinballed around the bar, running up to people and doing that girl-hello-scream thing and saying hi to them…

ON TWITTER.

I am not making this up.

She would walk up to someone, make the noise, and then, on her phone, fire off a tweet that said “OMG! HI! @soandso”

I say again: I am not making this up.

I learned this after the fact, last night, when I got home and took a look at her twitter feed and the time I was at the bar (and several hours thereafter) is just tweet after tweet of “[internet interjection]! [random greeting word]! @[Twitter handle].”

Now, don’t get me wrong. I like Twitter. I am a Twitter user, though not a terribly active one (@kozemp, if anyone cares). I think Twitter is great for certain things, especially as a sort of personal news aggregator. While my friends are all pretty universally smart people, not all of THEIR friends are, and Twitter spares me a lot of the idiocy I see on comment threads on my friends’ Facebook statuses. So, overall, I am Twitter-positive.

This, though? Saying hello to people on Twitter that you are literally standing in front of? That is a bridge too goddamn far.

That isn’t the worst part, though.

The worst part is that I started to click on some of the people she was hello-tweeting…

And they were all doing the same thing.

I sat there at my computer, staring at this hideous perversion of social networking, and thought, “I’m living in a bad William Gibson parody.”

Somewhere, in the bowels of the earth, Loki chewed on a pretzel bite and started planning next weekend.

Charity Quizo. Monday, November 14, at the Dark Horse. Doors open at 730. Can’t wait to see you there.

JLK

Your “Son of a BITCH” Quizo Update

This just happened. I mean literally, in the last two hours, just happened:

I’m seeing my GI for my regular visit on Friday, and I’m supposed to get blood tests done before I go. So this afternoon I went to the little lab right near my house where I get this stuff done.

Now, I had just been in there about a week ago to get OTHER blood tests, and when I was there I got what was easily the best blood drawing ever. It used some kind of tiny little needle attached to a plastic butterfly-shaped thing with a flexible tube that hooked into the vial. It was great.

Today, I walked into the place and it was easily 90 degrees in there. It was SWELTERING in this joint. I signed in and they immediately called me back to the little room. I sat in the room and the nurse came in.

I’m not a fan of needles – any sharp things, really – and in an attempt to make pleasant conversation I said, “wow, is it me or is it REALLY hot in here?”

The nurse gave me a nasty look and left the room for five minutes without saying a word.

I thought, that’s not a good sign.

She came back with the not-tiny gigantic ultra-painful blood test needle and proceeded to spend about 2.3 seconds finding a vein before jabbing the needle into my arm. The blood test was not, suffice it to say, particularly delicate.

I have since been reliably informed by two female acquaintances that my nurse was pretty stroppy because APPARENTLY my perfectly-innocent question is in actuality some sort of pickup line. The nurse regarded my question as a crude attempt to extract sexual favors from a health care professional in a clinical setting. I was actually making a legitimate request for information about the ambient temperature.

I can’t live in this world.

Assuming I can go two more days without accidentally provoking someone into sticking another sharp object into my guts, we are go for Charity Quizo this Wednesday. Doors open at 8, we start at 8:30, we have got tons of awesome stuff to give away from Reading Terminal, Best Buy, Taylor Made and others. If you have any questions and I haven’t been murdered yet I’ll be happy to answer them.

Until then, see you all on Wednesday night.

JLK

Your On The Run Quizo Update

Not a whole lot this week folks – busy busy busy running around trying to get everything ready for next week. Also, you know, I have to eat and sleep, and that takes up an awful lot of time. As does Netflix.

So, just some quick info:

- As you can see, there is a new prize listed up on the other page: a $50 gift card to Best Buy. You may of course use it at your leisure, but if I might suggest a lovely Rock Band 3 or DJ Hero 2 bundle…?

- On a related note, DJ Hero 2 is REALLY FUCKING HARD. Just, wow.

- I mentioned last week that I would talk this week about seating, and here it is. There will be plenty of seating. However, the earlier you get there the better. We’re going to have a whole big bunch of people (which is obviously awesome) and prime real estate is going to be… well, prime real estate. Doors open at 8PM. Dawdling is discouraged.

- “Dawdling” is a funny word.

- I am working on finalizing all of the raffle/auction prizes. The awesomeness of these cannot be overstated. What information about them I am willing to reveal before the actual event – which is not all of it – will be released next Monday.

- I’ve started working on the questions, which are going to be MOSTLY brand-new. I really can’t stop myself from tossing in some old favorites. I’m trying to lock down a speed round, though, and kinda hitting the wall on that one. Obviously we want something entertaining, but I don’t want to focus too narrowly at a one-time event. Suggestions?

All right, folks, that’s all for this week. See you next Wednesday.

JLK

Your Slightly Inconsistent Quizo Update

You may have noticed that there was not an update last week. You noticed correctly, and I apologize for that. There is, of course, a reason that there was not an update last week and that reason is, of course, hilarious.

Allow me to explain.

In the intervening time since leaving the Quizo fold I have, believe it or not, actually made a commitment to healthier living. Now, obviously, this isn’t really a NEW thing. My abiding commitment to healthy living goes back a ways, though it might be observed that my decision to stop drinking 11 years ago was more a commitment to “living in general” than “healthy living” necessarily. And the last time I quit smoking seems to have stuck – it’ll be two years come Christmas and I have ZERO desire to ever smoke a cigarette again. This amazes me; I actually don’t want to smoke MORE than I don’t want to spend twelve dollars a day on cigarettes.

Earlier this year, though, I decided to really take the plunge and tackle the last healthy living frontier: I decided, finally, to get in shape. I made this decision for two reasons. One is, obviously, that living healthily is, you know, good. That’s admittedly a kind of flighty reason, but thankfully I also have reason #2: my doctor is an evil little gnome, but if I show up at her office weighing less than I did the previous time she doesn’t bitch at me and I don’t have to answer a lot of stupid questions.

Yes: I am motivated to lose weight primarily by laziness. Sometimes I amaze even myself.

Now this, obviously, is a long process. Right now the best guesses are that it will take something on the order of 2-3 years to get where I “should” be. But, hey, no time like the present, right? So I went insane on getting healthy.

Getting healthy, in case you haven’t heard, involves exercise. Lots of regular exercise. So, I bought myself an exercise bike and planted it in front of my television. That worked for a little while, but now there’s two problems. One, unless you’re willing to spend a CRAPLOAD of money on it, exercise bikes are incredibly uncomfortable, and two, even if you’re watching your complete run of The Muppet Show while you’re doing it, riding an exercise bike every day gets really boring really fast.

I had mentioned this to a friend of mine who told me, “why don’t you try lifting weights?” I thought, you know, why DON’T I try that?

So, I joined a gym. I joined a Bally’s up here near me, actually, which ended up even surprising me. I had assumed the experience of going into one would be some horrifying ordeal, so before I did I visited basically every gym within half an hour of my house. All of them either had no free weights – supposedly respectable gyms with not a single barbell to their name – or were very scary hardcore-type lots of grunting and screaming places, or were just dingy ratholes (you know who you are).

Finally, convinced I’d never find a gym I could stand, I walked into Bally’s and braced myself for what was supposed to be the legendary Bally’s hard-sell.

The legendary Bally’s hard-sell consisted of a five minute tour of the place – with its very well-stocked free weight room – and the manager telling me once how much my month-to-month membership cost. I’ve been sold harder by a newspaper box.

Over the course of maybe two months I went from reluctant gym visitor who occasionally maybe skipped a workout to rearranging my schedule to make sure I got my workout time in. I’m hardly a gym rat or anything – I am only in there three times a week, after all – but if you told me two years ago that I would eventually be someone who woke up three hours early on a Saturday morning so I could make sure I’d get to the gym before the Chelsea game I’d have sent the men in white coats after you.

Funny old world, ain’t it?

Anyway, flash to a week ago last Friday – the 15^th, to be exact. I’m still in the beginning of that day’s workout, which starts off with squats. When I lifted weights in high school for crew I used to love doing squats. Whether I loved them because I was in way better shape back then or I loved them because I was a teenager and thus an idiot back then is a reasonable question, because now I HATE them. I hate squats. Out of every single exercise I do that involves moving large masses of metal and rubber, squats are the only one I actively despise. I do them, however, and I do them without complaint because they are just about the most efficient weightlifting exercise known to man.

(Note: the without complaint part is not actually true.)

So last Friday, I’m onto my fourth set of squats. Close to done.  I’m already eyeing the guy at the bench press, figuring he should be finished by the time I’m done my fifth set. I step under the bar, hitch it up off the rack, and start my lift.

When I’m about four inches down I feel like I’ve been shot. There’s a sudden, sharp pain in one spot on my lower back that half a second later has exploded all over my lower back. I managed to get the bar back up on the rack and backed away from it, but even five seconds on I knew what had happened: I herniated a disc in my back.

Again.

I somehow stumbled out of the gym and into my car, and then once I got home I somehow stumbled into my bed, where I proceeded to stay for the better part of the next 24 hours. The next day I woke up and the pain was so bad I had to go to the ER, where they very cheerfully gave me prescriptions for steroids (not the good kind) and painkillers (very much the good kind) and wished me good luck sticking it out until I could see my orthopedist in three weeks.

All of this, then, is why there was no charity Quizo update last Monday: I wasn’t upright until about sometime last Tuesday night, and by then it seemed a little late to bother.

No new or pressing information this week, but remember: tell your relatives. Tell your friends. Hell, tell your enemies. Their money is as good as any. Unless they’re that counterfeiter guy I saw a special on MSNBC about last week, his money we don’t want. But everyone else’s actual currency? That we want. So spread the word, stay tuned next week for some actual information about prizes and seating, and I’ll see you on the 10^th.

JLK

Your Tenuous Segue Quizo Update

Did anyone else go to New York Comic-Con this past weekend?

I did, and let me tell you something: it was a goddamn ZOO. It was packed so tight that in some places you literally couldn’t walk. Just total pedestrian gridlock.

Here’s a frame of reference for you. Have you ever been to our convention center? Our convention center which, by virtue of having been to Javits this past weekend, I now recognize as total crap? Yeah, okay. So you’ve been in one of the showrooms at our convention center, right? You have an idea how big it is?

Okay, ONE of the showrooms for NYCC was about four times the size of that.

And the convention took up TWO of them.

The Javits Convention Center is absurdly nice. The only advantage ours has is that you can park right outside, and at a reasonable rate. I don’t know who decided to build a super-high-end convention center in the busiest city in the world and not put a parking garage anywhere fucking NEAR it, but there you go. I ended up parking about two crosstown blocks away and paying fifty smackers for my trouble.

(Side note: I hate walking crosstown in New York. I HATE IT. It’s irrational, I know, but there you have it.)

But you get inside the convention center, and even before you get to the floor you’re overwhelmed by the awesomeness of the place. The lobby area, which I estimate is roughly the same size as the University of Pennsylvania, is practically a mall unto itself. There is a bank. There is a Kinkos. There are newsstands and coffee kiosks spread throughout. Before you even get onto the convention floor – which on its own has funnel cake and roasted nut and fruit smoothie stands – you can amply supply yourself with coffee, soda, chips, etc etc.

If that isn’t enough for you, if you’re looking for something more substantial, there is a food court. The convention center has a built-in FOOD COURT. Now, admittedly, this doesn’t really compare gastronomically-speaking to having Reading Terminal Market just across the street from our convention center, but it is at the very least (slightly) more convenient.

But, you know what? Convenience isn’t everything. Having the bountiful feast that is RTM right across the street – and, really, what is that, 20 yards – is pretty awesome. In fact, the Reading Terminal Market is pretty awesome in general.

So you have to admit that it is also pretty awesome that one of the prizes given away at the upcoming Charity Quizo is a gift certificate to the Reading Terminal Market.

That’s right, at Charity Quizo you will be able to score yourself a gift certificate to Reading Terminal that you can use at the spice shop, or the tea shop, or the Flying Monkey bakery or… uhm, the butcher shop that sells fresh duck, or… er… that place with the milkshakes.

Okay, so I actually only ever go to five places in the market, but they are AWESOME places. The tea shop alone is ten different kinds of awesome. If you’ve ever set foot in a Teavana it’s about fifteen different kinds of awesome, three of which are, “wow, the nice lady who runs this place is WAY less annoying than the whoremongers who work at Teavana.”

Trust me from experience, though: fifty bucks at Reading Terminal Market will, if nothing else, buy you the makings of an insanely excellent holiday dinner. And at Charity Quizo it can be yours for WAY less than fifty bucks.

See you at the Dark Horse.

JLK

Your Back From The Dead Quizo Update

You may have heard the rumors.

You may have heard the frantic, frightened whispers among the drunk and the mad of the local underclass. You heard the whispers and thought, well, that can’t be true. This person is drunk and/or mad. Clearly anything they say would be, at best, the raving of a mind long addled by Hoegaarden or lithium – or, worse, both.

Obviously, there was nothing to worry about.

Then, though, you probably thought about it some more and realized how terrifyingly plausible the whole thing was. The signs were all there, after all. The weather became bizarre and unpredictable. Mars aligned with Saturn. Joey Votto had more than 100 RBI. Clearly, something awful was afoot, but in the grip of fear your rational brain chose not to comprehend it, lest your feeble human mind be torn asunder by the knowledge.

I’m sad to say that I’m here to tell you that the rumors are true. The whispers are accurate. Your fear is warranted.

I’m going to be hosting Quizo again.

And not just any Quizo. One – and only one – very special Quizo.

Here’s what’s happening:

On Wednesday, November 10, at 830PM, I’ll be hosting a Quizo at the Dark Horse Pub to raise money for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. A $10 donation will get you in the door and into the game. There will be the usual Quizo prizes of gift certificates, but I’ll also have a number of other prizes with me that I guarantee you’re going to want to get your hands on. And I don’t just mean the usual thing where I’d show up with a bag full of candy. Actual non-candy prizes, and let me tell you folks: some of these things are FUCKING AWESOME. I’m not going to talk about the extra prizes just yet – I’ll be slowly and tantalizing releasing more details on those as the event draws nearer – but believe me when I say that you are going to want these things.

(In fairness, it is almost certain that I’ll show up with candy as well.)

Believe me also when I tell you that you’re going to want to bring more than your tenbux to the bar. There will be other opportunities throughout the night to donate money, and let’s just say that all of them lead to desireable outcomes, and every penny that comes in will go to LLS. Come on down, be hungry, be thirsty, know trivia, and bring your wallet. The point of all this, after all, is to have fun while raising money for a great cause.

Don’t get me wrong, folks – we are going to have a LOT of fun. This is, as one former DH player has already described it, going to be “a Quizo for the ages.”

Here’s the best part: even at this early stage it looks like we’re going to have a great turnout. I’m super-excited. I want to pack the place with as many people as we can to raise money, but I’m also REALLY looking forward to seeing and hanging out with some of the old Quizo folks. I’m hoping we can get as many of the old teams to come as is humanly possible to show all the new folks how it’s done.

As the date gets closer, I’ll be using the Facebook page and this website to get more info about the event out to everyone. If you’re on there and we’re not Facebook-friends already, hit me up.

If anyone has questions, please don’t hesitate to ask. I hope to see all of you at the Dark Horse on the 10th. Can’t wait.

JLK