WR #8 and #9 Late, lulz. [TJC, LS, JL, EW]

Poasting my last 2 weekend writings so you can comment if you don't want the wrath of Harris.

The Festival (WR#8)

The odd thing is the lack of customers. I’ve never seen the festival from this point of view. It’s very uncanny valley. I feel out of place, so I follow the yellow signs leading me to the volunteer “lounge,” which I soon discover is nothing more than two coat racks and a table behind a makeshift curtain at the back of the right-side hallway. Mildly disappointed, I set down my messenger bag (decked out with pins from the previous year’s festival) and look for the proper nametag, which I affix to my volunteer pass. I rummage through the giant GILDAN cardboard boxes under the table until I find a medium volunteer shirt. Then, mildly flustered, I sit down at the top of the stairs and survey the vile, stained paisley-patterned carpeting. The “lounge” is dimly lit and the walls and floor are all dark red. There’s a creepy glass door in the back left corner that opens into an anonymous concrete corridor lit with a single fluorescent tube in the ceiling.

LAN Party (WR#9)

The LAN Party has been around since the late 1990s with the advent of networked video games. Though the history of LANs is largely unknown due to antisocial gaming nerds and the impermanence of the events, it is generally understood that all serious gamers have been to at least 4 or 5 (I will not deny the implication behind this statement that console addicts are not, in fact, legitimate gamers [while console owners can sometimes connect their consoles over a local network, these gatherings are considered amateurish by people of real value]) and they are usually casual affairs, barring the occasional nerd rage as the result of a well-placed nuclear missile on the part of the other team. A LAN party can, obviously, run the range of size from only two people to five or twenty or ten thousand. Larger LAN Parties are organized events that look suspiciously like cult gatherings to outsiders. Gaming culture generally warrants making it bigger, faster, and more awesome, and thus the humble suburban dining-room-table LAN party has been evolved into multi-day events filling up entire convention centers with live music, hired security, and as many as just over twelve thousand unique attendants.

WW9, Fools, Group UNO

A shock goes through my arm as the mesh of my racket swiftly collides with the bright green hollow sphere flying its way. His serve was solid, sure, but nothing I couldn’t handle. I narrow my gaze in on the ball as it soars over the net, back onto my opponent’s side. I take a quick glance downward, catching view of my stance. My brand new, all white Nikes instantly take dominance in the court. Glowing brighter than the court lines, they extend from my leg, creating quick flashes of light as I dart from one end of the court to the other. Cut to the left- flash. Cut to the right- flash. Flash, like lightning- fast, dominant, bright, and beautiful. They should nickname me Zeus. How fitting.

WW9 Pho (linus, joe, margo, sammy)

Before leaving, our group stood in the hallway waiting for a couple people to use the bathroom. As one student came back to my buddy and me smiling, he proclaimed with joy that, “the bathrooms just have a little dish of detergent to wash your hands!” So we had to check that out before we left. Sure enough, right below the mirror, on the small aluminum shelf there sat a small, clear, plastic dish with only a miniscule amount of blue, viscous, liquid soap. “This also looks like a bathroom that someone would be murdered in” one friend said. It was a statement that may or may not have been appropriate for the overall sketchiness of the bathroom itself. It was probably a good time to leave.

WW8 (Sammy, Joe, Linus, Margo)

The motto life’s not fair is very appropriate for a man whose story you will have to try to imagine for yourself: You are detained as one of three suspects for the murder of a man whose body was found by a logger in a river. You have been leading a normal life until just two weeks ago. Today you stand in a court proclaiming your innocence. Although you may not know it, your prosecutors, including one of the other suspects who plead guilty and now stands as a witness, hold ten bits of information that would lead to your successful plea and the chance to go back to your family. You feel that your antiperspirant hasn’t worked and your light yellow dress shirt begins to soak up the sweat underneath your arms and on your back and neck. You wipe the top of your forehead and look at your glistening fingertips as you await a final decision. You have had the opportunity to control your own destiny and you have acted accordingly however, due to an unfortunate coincidence, your fate is in the hands of people who do not know you or what really happened. But someone was murdered and someone must pay.