Bringer of Doom

Today was the first day of seminars at Strange Loop being held at Union Station.

Friends don't let friends go to Illinois College.

I always liked this view driving toward the arch.

There were plenty of contests for me to enter. 

Seago and I were checking out some booths when I spotted the keynote speaker for the whole conference: John Romero! He's a big ol' deal.

"Alfonso John Romero (born October 28, 1967) is an American director, designer, programmer, and developer in the video game industry. He is best known as a co-founder of id Software and designer for many of their games, including Wolfenstein 3D, Dangerous Dave, Hexen, Doom, Doom II and Quake. His game designs and development tools, along with new programming techniques created and implemented by id Software's lead programmer John D. Carmack, led to a mass popularization of the first-person shooter, or FPS, in the 1990s. He is credited with coining the FPS multiplayer term "deathmatch"."

One of the things I miss the most from St. Louis is the bbq. It seems to be pretty terrible in the Seattle area. So I went with Seago for lunch at Bogart's Smokehouse.

I was excited to hear what Romero had to say.

It was fun learning about his experiences in id Software's early days. It's funny as a kid I would play some of these games and imagine the building full of geniuses it would take to create them when in reality it was a few dudes sitting in their underwear in someone's mom's basement.

St. Louis' new professional soccer stadium seems to be coming along nicely.

Zoe was entertaining some random in town for a wedding. We checked out Takashima Record Bar. This place was funny because there's a DJ who plays records but you aren't allowed to make requests. Then there's a separate tip line for the DJ on the bill at the end. For the guy I'm not allowed to talk to. They apparently have a house collection of 8,000 LPs.

Parlor arcadey bar with the greatest game ever made: Tapper.

HandleBar is mostly chill and restauranty during the day but turns into da club at night.

I was numerous drinks in at this point but I believe the story with this was that there was a wedding after party in attendance, and one of this guy's friends told us that he had a special dinosaur dance. So Zoe was trying to get him to replicate it.

There was a man rapping in the middle of the street because this is St. Louis.

Zoe's random wedding man was still with us and I have to assume having the best day of his life.

Well we were already in the Grove so we checked out a couple of gay bars.

I mean, the place is called Just John, how am I not going to go in there?

I saw one of my old coworkers from PillarRx, Kyle at the bar. I'm sure this will result in zero gossip amongst our mutual acquaintances.

Fish Ice Cream then Chicago

I made some plans to hang out with my Chicago crew back when I lived in St. Louis. Obviously it was much less of a commitment than when I lived on the other side of the continent two time zones away. But being the actual best friend on earth I decided to stick to my schedule and just book a flight over there.

On our way to the airport we had some business to attend to. Lydia recently discovered taiyaki, which are Japanese treats consisting of waffle type dough cooked into the shape of a fish then filled with a delicious cream or bean paste. Well some friggin genius thought that wasn't going far enough. They crafted this waffle fish to have its mouth open so that we could put ice cream in there!

Matcha Man is a fantastic name for this place as well.

I had to get the classic matcha tea flavored ice cream with a red bean paste filling. It's a classic!

I told a tearful Lydia farewell and to not touch none of my stuff while I was gone.

Seattle's airport has one of those joints where you can use your Priority Pass lounge card at a real restaurant so I checked out this Trail Head BBQ Bar joint. The food wasn't terrible. Especially considering it was airport food.

The plane had a fun international trivia game I used to waste some time.

A Very European Stay at the Chase

In an amusing turn of events, we booked booked a fancy hotel in St. Louis with the points we had leftover from the Maldives operation. That reservation just so happened to fall a couple of days before we were about to leave St. Louis. It was actually kind of nice because we had been working so hard packing up all of our stuff that a little staycation was much appreciated.

There were some issues with mounting our tv above the fireplace there, so one of our missions was to delicately patch up the gaping hole in the wall well enough that we wouldn't be charged anything for damages.

With a name like The Chase Park Plaza Royal Sonesta St. Louis you know you're getting into some fancy pants hotel activities.

We booked a nice suite actually. The magic that those Expedia points were able to conjure will be missed. 

We've been jealously eyeing the Chase's pool for some time now. Now it was ours! All ours!

I was able to tie up another loose end just before skipping town. This is really turning out to be an exciting final episode of this season of John's Super Exciting Life. Lydia was kind enough to assist me at a local copy shop with a ton of copying. I've been working on gathering the paperwork for my Italian citizenship application since the opening battle at the Sangamon County Clerk's office in November of 2016. I've been wrestling with city, county, state, federal, and Italian government offices ever since, gathering up birth, marriage, divorce, death, immigration, and naturalization documents of every ancestor on my dad's side of the family all the way back to great grandfather Ernesto's birth in 1897. There was even an ill-planned lawsuit against Dickinson County, Michigan. It has been quite the undertaking, but the day to submit it all has finally arrived. Normally this would involve a trip to the Consolato d'Italia negli Stati Uniti, Chicago, but due to covid everything is temporarily being done by mail. 

Not only did I need to collect all of this business but I then had to send those documents to their respective secretary of state's office for an apostille. If you don't know what those are, then you clearly need to reread the Hague's Convention of 5 October 1961 Abolishing the Requirement of Legalisation for Foreign Public Documents.

After all that paperwork I had a hunger that only a large slice of an animal could solve. I ordered one last magnificent rack of ribs at Sugarfire Smoke House.

Back at the Chase we did some pool lounging.

The Chase has a movie theatre inside of it which is pretty solid. I used to come here a lot more in my early St. Louis days when I lived in the Central West End. If you came at the right time there would be a little man who would play the organ for you before the movie started. I assume that this was a throwback all the way back to silent movies where live musicians were the only source of sound that you got at the movies. Afterwards the same man would be waiting at the door to the theatre to thank you for coming and offer you a Tootsie Roll from a silver platter. It was very fun and I'm sure I'll never see anything like it again.

Our last order of business for the night was to pop down to the Chase Club to spend a couple of free drink tickets the hotel handed us.