Good Riddance 2016

What can I say about 2016 that everyone hadn't said about it already? People died, idiots were elected, we'll be lucky if we all make it to 2018.

Usually for end of the year posts I sum up what I did this year. For most of the big stuff, you can scroll down to the other 11 posts I made this year.

But here's some positive stuff that happened to me this year:

1) Finally got my two right wisdom teeth removed back in February.

Thankfully the whole process was a best case scenario - the teeth simply needed to be pulled and I was in and out in 15 minutes. I'll spare you the grisly pictures I took of the teeth, but they weren't pretty. I was mostly fine, just a weekend of slight pain and then phantom pains for about the next month. But other than that, I'm fine, It feels weird to not have a constant pain in my head.

2) I met internet friends!

I met up with @cuteordeath back in April, and @mikeyeddy at EternalCon in June and WinterCon in December. They were just as awesome as I expected them to be, and I hope to meet more friends in the new year!

3) Ecto Cooler!

Ecto Cooler finally came back, and sadly left again. But corn syrup aside, this is the exact stuff I drank in my childhood. It tasted exactly the same and I felt like I was back in preschool with every drink.

4) Crystal Pepsi!

Crystal Pepsi returned, too! I don't remember trying it when I was a kid the first time around, so I was excited to cross off another entry on the bucket list. Well...it certainly didn't taste like Pepsi. Did you ever mix Pepsi with 7Up or Sprite? It tasted like that.

5) A blizzard happened!

This was back in January. It was fun to look at, but not as fun to drive through.

I also ate a lot of Blizzards from Dairy Queen, like this one:

This was the "Singles Blizzard" they only sold on Valentine's Day. It had lots of chocolate in it.

6) Rogue One!

So the new Star Wars movie was pretty great. I'll admit that the first hour takes a little long to get going and I can't name any of the characters if you dared me to, but it finished spectacularly. Seriously, the last 15 minutes was some of the best Star Wars material I've ever seen.

7) I met Chewie at WinterCon!

Yeah, be jealous. I also met Peter Mayhew, the guy famous for playing him, He was super cool. I also met the guy who played Lord Humongous from The Road Warrior, plus the guy who voices Cyborg on Teen Titans.

8) I met Stan Lee...again!

With Stan Lee turning 94, he's announced that he'll no longer go to any more conventions, at least any outside of his own in LA. So with that in mind, I braved 3 hours in line at NYCC to have him sign this picture I got with him back during 2013's convention. It was $100 and he didn't talk to anyone, but it was worth every penny.

9) I met The Doctor!

Well, technically I met three Doctors. I already met Peter Davidson, the fifth one back in 2012 but this was the first time I got a picture with him. I believe I already talked about meeting Matt Smith and Peter Capaldi in an earlier entry, but it's still awesome.

10) Pokemon Sun!

The new Pokemon games are finally here and I must say Sun & Moon are some of the best games in the whole series. The series was admittedly getting stagnant, but the new angle of these games gave it the perfect shot in the arm. New Pokemon forms, new story structure, new mechanics, it all feels new and exciting.

11) The Simpsons 600 Marathon!

FXX ran another Simpsons marathon this year, starting on Thanksgiving Day. It was an odd day, I was watching the Simpsons on TV, and watching the MST3K Turkey Day stream on the laptop.

12) New laptop!

Oh yeah, nearly forgot that I bought a new laptop. The one I've been using had turned 7 and it seemed like it was on its last legs. This new computer simply blows that first one out of the water. It's faster, it has a terabyte(!) worth of memory, and it's a touchscreen. You have no idea how hard it is to find a laptop these days that isn't more than a glorified tablet.

13) Saw "Oh, Hello" on Broadway!

If you're not aware of "Oh, Hello," it's a play about John Mulaney and Nick Kroll's characters George St Geegland & Gil Faizon on Kroll Show. Anyone who asked me what the play was about, I couldn't really describe it more than the adventures of two old Jewish men that live in New York City. And after seeing the play, I was mostly right. It turned out to be a play that was a parody of pretentious Broadway plays, where they start the show by making fun of New York and acting out various theater tropes. Like, you'll know when the play is near the end when everyone starts shouting the lines, and the theater goes black on the most random, awkward line possible.

And also, the characters host a prank show called "Too Much Tuna," where they interview a different celebrity every show, and then give them a sandwich with a crapload of tuna in it. Among people they've pranked were Conan O'Brien, Stephen Colbert, Leslie Jones, Henry Winkler, Amy Schumer, Fred Armisen, Matthew Broderick, Tina Fey, and Katie Couric.

My celebrity was Alia Shawkat, best known as Maeby from Arrested Development. What I liked about this part of the show was that the interview was all improvised, and then John & Nick used what they talked about during the rest of the show. She talked about the time she shoplifted a turkey from a supermarket when she was younger, and it was brought up several more times.

It's only running for a few more weeks, but I definitely recommend seeing it.

14) My name was on TV!

Well, kind of. My Twitter handle did, and on a rerun of Clarissa on The Splat many months back. It's blurry, but it was a short story I told about going to Nickelodeon Studios a few times when I visited Florida as a kid.

15) I won contests!

Holy crap, I actually won a few contests! The first one was getting this Conan funko pop during July:

And I won a raffle to get on line at the coveted Funko booth during NYCC.

That one wasn't much of a contest, but Funko Pops are still serious business and access to its booth this year was by lottery only. And if you told anyone you won, suddenly you gained dozens of new friends wanting you to buy something for them. One person aside I told all of them to go to hell. And getting a place in line does NOT guarantee you to everything, quite a few figures were sold out by the time I got to the front, like their set of Golden Girls action figures.

Yeah, that's a thing and they're sought after like crazy.

16) Christmas!

And here's the requisite post about my Christmas haul. I didn't ask for much this year, because I realized that I reached Peak Stuff. Mainly I now know that I'm running out of the room for all the crap I buy and I feel too attached to get rid of any of the old stuff. What you don't see are several gift cards that have already been spent.

First off, my Reddit Secret Santa delivered this Space Ghost pop:

It goes well with the three other Space Ghost pops I have:

I also got this Orange Bird plush & Nintendo epoints card from my friend Steve:

These Steven Universe Pint-Sized Heroes from my friend Cat (I got Peridot, my favorite! I'm happy):

And this cool stuff from my friend Vinny:

It's an awesome Tshirt, and it'll go great with the literal dozens of shirts I already own.

But I needed these new pajama pants, though. These were from my cousin, and without a moment to spare. I needed more than one pair of comfortable pajama pants, and these do the trick well in this cold weather.


So that's my 2016. It wasn't...THAT bad, but I can only hope that 2017 will be better. I hope.

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Boston!

A few weeks back I went on a long weekend to Boston! I'd never been before, and I gotta tell you, it was weird and exciting being in a city that wasn't Manhattan.

You see Manhattan's layout? That perfect grid, where directions go along an X and Y axis and include "if you hit water, you went too far?" 

Well, here's Boston.

Gigantic clusterfuck. It's like the streets are laid out like the spokes of a wheel. Overlapping with other wheels. Radiating a harbor. It was pretty confusing to drive around, but luckily I didn't do much driving that weekend. Hey, blame the colonials, they just paved over what trails were around at the time. Then again, Manhattan did that too, but like I said, it was all a grid, Broadway aside.

And while Manhattan's architecture is mostly either Art Deco or sleek modern, Boston's known for bricks.

Lots of brick, lots of red buildings and cobblestones. You really get a feeling that Boston is a working class city, with a few modern high rises here and there. Most of that brick is original, too. 

You read that right, that building has been here since 1755. Boston was where a good chunk of American history took place, and it doesn't let you forget it.

Pictures is a map of (among other points of interest) the Freedom Trail, a red brick line that goes through a good chunk of North Boston that guides people to famous revolutionary landmarks.

Like Faneuil Hall, a famous meeting place, now a gift shop and a museum.

Paul Revere's house.

The Old North Church where Paul Revere saw the lanterns that started his famous ride.

And Paul Revere's grave.

After Tom Brady, Larry Bird, and that Big Papi guy, Paul Revere is high on the list of people Boston holds in ungodly high esteem. He's also not the only famous person buried here.

Like Samuel Adams, of the famous beer (I got to visit the brewery, the beer is quite good)

And John Hancock.

Yeah, no shock that his tombstone was the biggest one there.

On a good day, you'll see lots of vendors and historians dressed in revolutionary-era garb, like this awesome guy:

I joked that he was a Team Fortess 2 cosplayer. Please don't make me explain that joke if you don't get it.

Boston's also known for being the final resting place of Cheers.

Of course this wasn't the real bar the one from the show was based on, that would be the Bull & Finch Pub, which is located in a different part of town that I didn't get to go to. This one was in Quincy Market, Boston's historic shopping district. But make no mistake, the bar was a pretty exact replica of the one from the show. If I actually watched an episode of it, I would've been impressed.

There's lots of old bars and pubs in Boston, and these things are EVERYWHERE in Old Boston, where I stayed.

See, here's the view from my hotel room. Around that one building there were at least five bars and pubs, not counting the one in the actual hotel.

Here's a pub I actually went to, the famous Bell in Hand Tavern, founded in 1795. Yes, you heard me, it's that old and it's one of the oldest pubs in the country. I don't think I sat in the original section of the bar, but drinking beer in a place that predates most of our ancestors was interesting enough.

Of course while I was in Boston I had to have some authentic "chowdah."

Or "shaudere" as certain characters from the Simpsons would say. It was quite good. 

Right next to it is the Union Oyster House, also one of the oldest bars/restaurants in the country.

1826. Damn. Sadly, I didn't go in because I wasn't in the mood for oysters, plus it was really tiny and crowded and I kept hearing it was overrated.

Turns out I was in the historic pubs district, I knew this because I was seeing people on a bar crawl with "Historic Boston Pub Tour" pins on them. I'm kinda jealous of those guys, that sounded like a fun tour.

That's not all the cool historical stuff I saw while I was there.

Like this old state house. Half of it is a museum, and do you know what the other half is used as? A subway station. I kid you not. That wouldn't fly in New York. I'm conflicted if that's a good thing or a bad one. At least the building's preserved?

It's also the site of the Boston Massacre:

Sorry for the awkward shot, but that was taken in the five seconds where there weren't a dozen feet on it. I've been imagining that ninja turtles would open that up like a manhole cover and crawl out of it, having Boston accents and everything.

This is only historical in the sense that I don't see 1980s fonts like that in signs these days. If I passed by that place when it was open there was no doubt I would've went inside to see if there were any other cools signs like that.

And I have to mention how much stuff there was to do in Pokemon Go while in Boston. I might not have blogged about it here, but I got into the game just as much as everyone else did, then lost most of my interest when Niantic fucked everything up. This just happened to be my favorite Pokestop. Yes, there were a bunch of bronze newspaper embedded into a road, and I was only able to get a picture of it via the game BECAUSE the road it was embedded in was covered in traffic.

And while typical towns like mine look like this: 

Boston looked like this: 

Pokestops and gyms were EVERYWHERE. This was only the tip of the iceberg. I went through level 18 just from going through Pokestops. There's that many. Hell, I was able to get to two just from sitting in my hotel room! And if I go to Manhattan again I know I'd encounter just as many. 

Back to the historical stuff, there was also a walkway that had markers for several odd events that happened in Boston over the years. This was my favorite:

A plaque commemorating the Great Molasses Flood of 1919. I can't believe there was a marker for that one, and as a lover of weird history that might've been my favorite thing I saw the whole trip.

All in all, I thoroughly recommend visiting Boston, I hope I can go back...eventually.

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