Montreal meetup is just around the corner and It'll take me 2 weeks of solid skating to get there in time. I've packed my backpack with poptarts and gatorade. Maybe I'll find an epic half pipe or skate park or empty pool along the way.

gnarly!

Edit: now I'm skating home. Man my legs hurt!

U Mad?

No srsly. Wat?! Can't you see I'm busy? >:(

Oh hey, there was a Christmas break somewhere back there, huh?

I went home for almost a month to do the lame family stuff and to see friends from high school. I got a few days of skiing in by whoring myself out for free tickets.

Went skiing with Timmy a couple of weeks back and showed him around the ski mountain I pretty much grew up on and worked at all through highschool and half of college. It was a bit too much for him and we had to call it a day at like 2 in the afternoon.

I actually was able to get a last day of skiing in after that. The next day I flew back and had some sketchy moments on a puddle jumper plane and a relaxing flight on a half empty real plane the rest of the way. The next day from that classes started again.

And somewhere back there my NG account turned 8 years old.

Today I decided to undertake a very difficult task: try to see how many abusive reviews are made in a 24 hour period. Boy I wish being a review mod gave me a tool to do that quicker...but that's not for you to know or for me to divulge so we'll just leave it at: it was a pretty hard thing to do. In fact, I kept my search to just flash and audio reviews.

Time fram: ~4:00pm 11/5/10 to ~4:00pm 11/6/10
number of reviews made in that time: ~2900
Number of reviews I deleted as being abusive: 123
percentage of reviews which were abusive: 4.24%

Now, since I went through them after-the-fact starting today I can't account for reviews deleted by other moderators during that time. I was mostly interested in a snapshot of how the review system is holding up.

I think that 4% is an awesome number considering the size of the website, the number of submissions we have and the size of the community. I have heard people complain about how the reviews aren't used appropriately on this website or say that there are many abusive reviews that need to be removed...I don't think that is the case.

Of all the reviews I looked at today, a vast majority were positive and offering encouragement! That's awesome and fosters an enthusiastic group of animators who I can only imagine will continue to bring quality work to the site for years to come. Now, not all of them would be all that useful to providing the best advice to improve, but that is to be expected since not everyone can know the inner workings of Flash.

The vast majority of lower scoring reviews are actually very informative. People really know how to offer constructive criticism. In fact, I am more impressed by this number than anything else I saw today. Some people seem to think that if a review is giving a low score, then it has got to be abusive, but my discerning eye found few with enough fault to be deleted. That is awesome! You guys are really getting the hang of reviewing!

Contrary to what I have heard, the reviews are not split as either being all 10s or all 0s. People are rating flash as they see fit. Lots of 5s and 6s and 7s and 9s! I like that people might withhold a complete 10/10 or 0/10 because nothing is perfect and nothing that gets through judgment is totally worthless (even the spam flash takes some effort!)

I'm impressed with the quality of reviews on the website. It only goes to prove that we have one of the most encouraging communities for independent artists on the web!

Filled with awesome.

obligatory BBS thread about it

pic:

Items:

- 1 Medium women's green NG logo shirt complete with one pin left stuck in it. ouch. The wife refuses to wear it so I guess there's a christmas present for my sister this year.

- 2 Snow Snow for Lucy discs

- A copy of Soul Calibur 3 for PS2 with some "trans|mission" demo disk

- Mind Chamber patch

- Some toy from a TV show I probably watched as a kid. It's metal and looks badass.

- A very mini football with a Polaroid with "Go long, Josh!" written on it.

- Some greenish CD with Japanese all over it

- A fortune cookie that was eaten before I had a chance to take a picture (says: "Someone is speaking well of you.")

- Tankmen stickers

- New Kids on the Block trading cards

- Dr. Shroud sticker

- NG Postcard

- some "Plugirl maker online" card... I just don't want to know

- And my favorite, a paperback copy of Terry Pratchett's Soul Music. I have the full Discworld series already, but it is all in my dad's attic since I moved this summer so I may re-read it. One of my favorite of the series.

Went up to Montreal this weekend for the like millionth annual Montreal NG Meetup. The pretense was beerfest, but we only spent an hour or so there on Thursday.

I'll try to recap as much as I remember.

Thursday: 12:00pm

Gassed up the car and drove north toward the border. Stopped at the bank to take out some money and exchange it to Canadian, but they didn't have Canadian there and told me to go to another branch along my way. I get to the other branch and they tell me that I'd have to pay $3 to get it exchanged so I just asked for $50 USD instead. I was hoping there would be a cash exchange at the border, but the only one there was closed "for the season" according to a note left on the teller window.

Thursday 3:00pm

I arrived at Rig's house, or street. He told me the address and sent me a googlemaps view of his front door...unfortunately he lived in an apartment building where all the front doors look the same, so I wound up knocking on one of his neighbor's doors by mistake. I eventually deduced his house by looking into a bedroom window and seeing college student things instead of fancy candle sticks and dining sets. Those years as a peeping tom finally paid off!

We hung around his place for a little while and eventually walked to Beerfest where the rest of the group was meeting up. It was really crowded but we found our group. Rig and I were both short on cash for the weekend so some people gave us their left-over drink tickets and we promptly wasted them on cheap beers. Since the next event was karaoke, Rig wanted to run home real quick and get earplugs. I wanted to continue drinking beer so we parted for a short while.

[back story] last year rig had gotten a beerfest tasting glass and promptly forgot it somewhere and somebody picked it up. When we met up at the metro station, he was again reunited with his glass.

When rig went home to get his earplugs, he handed me his glass to hold on to. I almost immediately lost it when we all went to a restaurant to eat dinner (being short on cash I picked off 36holla's plate of onion rings and helped myself to the complimentary coleslaw until the waitress took my fork away when I only ordered water). Sorry rigsybabe! I was expecting at least another day at beerfest and was prepared to buy him a new glass, but we never went again and now I feel like a dick. So I'll just mail a box of poop to him to say sorry. <3<3<3

Thursday...wtf:lolol

We went to karaoke after dinner. Rig met back up with us. I had lost track of who else was there by now. There was an old cowboy flirting with DTG and Mike did an awesome interpretive dance for us. Somebody rickrolled the bar and we had huge pitchers of beer. At one point we had shots...and some more shots. It was fun.

Afterward, Rig and I stumbled drunkenly through the morning hours to his pad and promptly passed out....after harassing stickam and playing TF2.

Friday

We woke up at the ungodly hour of 1 in the afternoon and showered the previous nights stank off ourselves. Rigs cat chased some hair tie around the house and Rig had his porridge while I drank some coffee to rekindle my will to live.

At around 2, after some more TF2 and stickam harassing, we headed out to DTG's house for a BBQ. To save money on metro passes, we drove my car and rig showed off that even a resident of montreal can get the gender of a street incorrect and totally fuck with my tom-tom. We were fashionably late and everyone was enamored at our outfits and commented on them while we walked the red carpet. DTG's house is probably the cutest building in Montreal and if I were to live in Montreal, I'd want a cool place like that. She had a big deck and a grill to fill our meat lust.

After DTG tired of the shenanigans happening in her yard, Rig and I drove back to his house so we could begin to get our drank on. There was some serious bar-trolling to be had, so we split up into a couple of groups because no bar could handle our sweaty, engorged, mass. Eventually we all found ourselves at Micheal's American Pub. They were out of drink mixes (Oh EM GEE) so we all either chose rum and coke or beer. I tried asking for a mix drink, instead I got a few squirts of a lemon slice, some sugar, a little soda water and a whole lot of vodka in a snifter. The locals tried teaching us french and all that managed to be learned was how to call other dude's "beautiful" and to explain how one's mother has a penis.

By now it was late and so Rig and I stumbled drunkenly home again.

Saturday

Another early start at 2 in the afternoon.

Rig and I farted around his place eating porridge, laughing at the BBS and explaining the fine points of dubstep. Today was laser tag day and we were to meet everyone at laserquest by 5:00. I guess last year there weren't enough people who played so they wound up being stuck in games with little kids. But this time we had plenty and got the course to ourself for 3 awesome rounds. 2 games of team and one game of free-for-all. In the final game, since luis and jonas had been pussy campers in the free-for-all we convinced the guy to make them their own 2-man team. At one point a bunch of us from both of the other teams stood in a circle shooting at the campers to get our much deserved revenge. Lasertag was awesome and I got some good scores (plus a blister!). In the final game, I was the top player. I had gotten 13th and 6th in the other games.

I wound up spending my final bit of cash to pay back DTG for making and paying for our reservations, so it was up to my handy dandy debit card to do the leg work! As pox warned, if you don't have enough cash for the trip you wind up feeling like an ass. Luckily it was my last night and I was perfectly fine not drinking.

after playing some bomberman and street fighter at the hotel, we wound up in the french section of bars in town and had a lot of fun. At some point while shooting the breeze outside the bar a bottle of vodka found itself in front of me. Sorry Chris for downing it like water, but I was out of money and I felt bad drinking from pitchers everyone else paid for! Luckily there was a lot of vodka in the bottle and I was good and drunk for the rest of the night.

Rig and I had a falling out at the bar when he wanted to leave and I didn't, so he caught the last metro home and I stayed, hoping to sleep like a real bum in Montreal that night. At around 3:00am the bar turned on it's lights, burning our retinas and told us to get out, there was a communal drunk mumbling of the song "closing time" and we filed out. Apparently all bars in Canada close at the same time, so the streets were packed with people. Also a steeped Canadian tradition is going to the late night poutine fast food joint after being forcibly removed from bar stools. Amazingly poutine had not found its way into our trip yet, and being the last night out

DTG and Chris took pity on me and let me cuddle with themasterkid (phil) on their couch. YOU GUYS ARE SUPER NICE AND I CANNOT EXPLAIN HOW AWESOME THE BOTH OF YOU ARE FOR HAVING US OVER FOR THE TRIP. We took a cab back to their place and talked until it was light out.

Sunday

Woke up next to Phil when Chris woke us up at 1pm. It was the last day and we were all pretty beat from a few straight days of partying. Sunday was a low key day. We took the metro to the mall and hung around for a bit. I walked with Rig back to his place, packed my things and said our goodbyes.

Sunday, 6:22

I remember, half an hour outside of town that I had not packed all my things and left a pair of eye glasses on a desk in Rig's bedroom.

Sunday, 10:00

I arrive safely back home after a 3 and a half hour drive, and begin getting emails of pictures I was tagged in and comments made on them. The emails are still rolling in.

This was an awesome trip and I have always loved meeting newgrounders in real life. You are all way cooler in person than I could ever expect and the folks in montreal have been at it so long they know how to throw an awesome meetup. I want to personally thank Michele, Chris and Rig for having me at their places on short notice and even paying for a cab ride or metro token here and there along the way.

This may be my last summer on the east coast, so I am happy i was able to attend at least one more meetup in Montreal. It is always a pleasure and worth it to make the trip up, no matter how far away I am.

I'll add more to this later I am sure. For now, a picture.

didn't notice but I've been review modding for 2 years now or so.

you're all still B&

And you all still suck.

Today Evark traveled up to ski with me at the mountain I work at. We had some fun on the slopes and later tonight Timmy arrived. I set them both up for the night and while Evark is going to have to work Monday and Wednesday he might come back up Tuesday for some more skiing and Timmy is going to stick around until Wednesday. We're going to do a day at another mountain on Tuesday and I'll spend at least one day at my mountain with Timmy tomorrow.