Saturday morning saw me wake up and move out of my dorm for Spring Break. I had to be out at 10 a.m., so I ended up getting breakfast at Starbucks, picking up a few new reviews games (Conflict: Denied Ops and FIFA Street 3 for the 360… yay?), cashing my checks in, and going to the video game store once more before I left. I ended up buying Goemon for the Game Boy and heading out around 12 p.m.

Most of the trip was just driving down the Ohio Turnpike and Indiana Toll Road. I did stop in Elkhart, Indiana at a Steak and Shake for lunch and got to Lark’s place around 2:45. Mrs. Lark showed up at about that time. Oddly enough, I didn’t see her the rest of the time there. Was she just a figment of my imagination?

A couple minutes after I showed up, most of the rest of the party did. Tazar, Calvin, Chee, Grim and Aertyr all arrived in the Tazarmobile (complete with Ohio Dtoid plate) and we proceeded to start setting up stuff. In the meantime, Egg showed up and everyone was there.

Tazar and Calvin look a bit different in person than I thought, and Grim looks nothing like how I pictured the dude. But everyone was cool and it was awesome to meet everyone.

I started off playing a bit of Brawl and getting the basic ropes on it. Apparently, as I learned:

- Pikachu’s final smash sucks and his Thunder attack loses some of its range, but he is much, much more powerful and better balanced.

- Dedede is a hundred times harder than people said he was, dammit.

- Lucario’s no Mewtwo clone

- Pokemon Trainer is fun to play as, especially Squirtle and Charizard.

- Captain Falcon’s really no different.

- Jigglypuff… well, I apparently am now very, very, very good as the Puff.

- The Mario Kart stage is my new favorite, with the Animal Crossing stage a close second and Port Town a close third behind those two.

- The level editor is limited, but good.

- Lark has way too much free time on his hands to play this game

- Sonic’s final smash is broken. End of story.

- Luigi’s final smash is as trippy as advertised

- I still hate the Ice Climbers.

Other than that, I ended up playing Rock Band for a bit with Tazar, Calvin and Aertyr. I took the bass section and proceeded to rock it. Tazar spent most of the NARP ripping it up on the vocals and doing a very impressive job, and Calvin failed the last song on drums to cause us to lose the entire set.

As a side-note, Ninja (Lark’s dog) is insane. Docile one moment, jumping all over and barking the next. He was cute, and it was fun to see Lark throw him, but damn… I got tired of that dog until it fell asleep. Then it was cute again.

We did have a few people who showed up uninvited. Now Lark’s brother? Cool guy and a welcome addition to the party. He’s also pretty good at Rock Band and Guitar Hero.

But Lark’s nephew? Oh dear God… we wanted to kill him. Jake the Snake annoyed the hell out of us and kept wanting to show his YouTube videos he and his dad made. Worst off, we could’ve gotten rid of him earlier but we thought he lived really far away and couldn’t get a ride. At least we showed him Naruto yaoi and Aertyr kept punching him in the back.

Speaking of that, Stickam was in full force. What did I learn?

- Genki-JAM brings the porn on demand. Just ask him.

- I concur with Chee, Sheep will have sex on Stickam with his wife. We all wanted to see her boobs. Also, he’s got a red rabbit vibrator.

- Chee and Egg should not be left alone on cams. They’ll just keep showing their nipples to everyone.

- Everybody! Everybody! Everybody! Everybody!

- Gotta go faster!

- Reaprar is loud as fuck on his camera

- Droobies is awesome

Though it didn’t happen to me, Calvin told me that while he and Lark went to get pizza, Lark put his knees up on the wheel, opened up a box of pizza, and drove with his knees while eating, effectively scaring the shit out of Calvin. Would’ve done the same to me, to be honest.

Eventually, things degenerated into us sitting around, watching Youtube Poop for an hour or so and just laughing our asses off. I almost passed out because I couldn’t stop laughing. Seriously. Even Jake shut up and watched, though it all went over his head.

Maybe it was around this time that I learned to log out of Dtoid when done. For the record, Chee, Egg and Tazar were all in a similar position at one point, and only my niceness kept me from posting under their names.

At some point, we all got tired and went to bed because Tazar wanted to get up early in the morning. I ended up sleeping on the floor while Chee cuddled Calvin (it happened, I was a witness) and later wanting a kiss goodnight from Calvin. Calvin also got tucked in by Lark because he’s an admin, I got a pillow put on my face for snoring, and Aertyr probably took pics of us while we were sleeping.

I woke up in the morning and drove home, which would not be a story if:

- My driver-side windshield wiper almost didn’t snap off and go flying across the median and into westbound traffic on I-94

- The gas station I filled up at in Jackson hadn’t overfilled my tank and caused gas to come flooding out of it as I was washing off the back window. Thankfully, I stopped it in time.

And so, some 7 hours of travel and 400 miles later, I’m at my parents place for spring break, just trying to relax. All in all, things went well and it was awesome to meet everyone. Everyone at the NARP is a cool motherfucker, and hopefully, there will be more NARPs to come.

Just don’t bring the kids.

(Also, all pictures and videos will come in Aertyr’s post. He has a ton.)