CitySport at the CityPlace

We only had a little time left in St. Louis before our flight home to Seattle so we mopped up a few little odds and ends before heading to the airport.

We checked out the light show in the Grand Hall of Union Station. It's so fun and really reminds me of the amazing light show above Fremont Street in Las Vegas.

The several shows I've seen have been random but this one was a full on Queen rock performance. These people are getting fancy.

We checked out the new stadium for the confusingly named new professional soccer team St. Louis City SC. I hate that name so much, it is so stupid. I pretty much refer to them as "the St. Louis soccer team". They doubled down on the stupid and named the stadium CityPark. Please get a sponsor quickly, these names are terrible. I didn't have much time to linger as I would soon be taking StateHighway to CityAirport.

You can find me in the lounge

bottle full of bub'. Look, mami, I got the brownie bites if you into takin' drugs

We unfortunately did not have a direct flight home and had to stop at Chicago Midway International Airport.

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.

Tacoma: the Aroma of Fun

Before we moved to Washington we looked into living in Tacoma as a way to cut living expenses so it's amusing to think about what our life might be like now if we had. I'm extremely happy we went with Kirkland. 

One of the funnier reasons that I'm glad I don't live in Tacoma is the famous Tacoma Aroma, a sulfury stink that people blame on the Simpson Tacoma Kraft pulp and paper mill. Wiki: "During a concert stop at the Tacoma Dome in the mid-1980s, Bruce Springsteen reported the odor was so overwhelming that he was forced to leave town early."

Today our main objective was to visit the Washington State History Museum, which lives in a building adjacent to the 1911 Union Station building.

Puget Sound was named after Captain Vancouver's lieutenant.

There was a good section about the various industries that helped the area grow. Lumber was a big one, and I think that's a reason the airplane industry succeeded here as well, since planes were initially made of wood.

Dale Chihuly was born in Tacoma and they seem pretty excited about that fact. That conical thing is the Museum of Glass, and we crossed the Chihuly Bridge of Glass to get over there.

There's a courthouse operating out of Union Station now.

We did a little brewery crawl after that, starting at E9 Brewing Co.

7 Seas Brewing was one of my favorites, as they had a lot of cool historical objects to look at and the beer featured some fun flavors.

Sig Brewing Company

They had a fun little wood fired oven happening back there.

I watched some video about the making of Myst and got fascinated with the 1993 game all over again. I don't think I ever beat it back in the day so I roped Seago into playing it with me.

Things got out of hand and we stayed up super late playing it.