indiana

I'm about to embark to Indiana for the Stryker LAN (held quarterly, I think) that somehow turned into our big OMM LAN for the year.  There's over 20 people descending on Stryker's house in Indianapolis.  I believe we'll all be rolling up in Formula 1 cars w/ paint jobs we purchased w/ Microsoft Points.

This week, i was struck by how strange it is that I've become so close to a bunch of random people in the clan called Old Man Mafia.  It's not random that we're in the clan together - we came together originally through Halo 2 - it's random how different we all are, and how unlikely it'd be for many of us to be friends outside of a site like 2old2play.  I know this is not ground-breaking, but personally it strikes me that I have a comfortable home with a bunch of people that trash-talk and call me names, yet still call when my world is falling apart around me.  It's an amazing thing that I look forward to spending money to fly across the country to play video games (which I can do at home) because of these "random" people.  I look at what they do for a living, or what religious beliefs they have, or how they view our political landscape and I see great vast differences, and somehow gaming became an equalizer that enabled us to always start there, then argue about the rest under a safe umbrella.

So, this weekend should be a blast - I feel for Stryker, trying to cram that many people into his house.  But, I understand that he has a spreadsheet....