Friday, July 5, 2013

Of Nerds & Men

Happy 4th of July, everyone!!!

So I'm hanging out here at the airport, waiting for my flight to Atlanta (edit - I started this at RIC but didn't actually get everything finished & uploaded until I was actually in Vegas). It's, how you say, remarkably empty here. I'm less than 45min before boarding & there are...4 other people visible in this terminal. And that's including the airline employee at my fate. Anyhow, it's a pretty chill start to what should be a really fun trip. Here's the simple breakdown of my weekend:

  • Leave on a flight paid for by the UFC
  • Check into a hotel paid for by the UFC
  • Tomorrow & Saturday, go to the UFC Fan Expo for free using the UFC Guest credential overnight end to me by the UFC
  • Eat food using the per diem given to me by the UFC
  • Attend UFC 162 & receive a paycheck from the UFC
  • Fly home (again: paid for by the UFC)
*insert psychotic giggling here*

That's the ultra-braggy, overly glamorized version of my weekend. Here's what's really gonna happen. I'm going to spend roughly the next 8hrs doing the air travel shuffle before crashing at the Embassy Suites around 3am "my time".
Tomorrow at 10am PST I'll enter (temporary) MMA-nerd-Mecca & spend 8hrs enjoying all the various sights, sounds & stereotypes that will be a convention of TapouT shirts. I mean, there'll be more cool people, but the TapouT/Affliction will be the ones being the ridiculous & the most fun to watch. I'm looking forward to also catching some of the addresses on the Main Stage, most notably Forrest & Stephan's HoF inductions and Matt Hughes/Chuck Liddell Q&A (duh!).


Throughout the day, my FightMetric coworkers will be arriving & I'll be doling out the UFC Guest passes which were given to us by the fine people at Zuffa. Saturday will be more of the same, right up until about 2pm, when we are due to report to the MGM Grand Garden Arena for our evening's duties. That'll wrap up by about 10pm PST (unless Anderson feels like leaving earlier), at which point I'll either end up heading back to the room or else hanging out with my coworkers if they decide to go out (unlikely). Sunday, I'll get up, check out & then head to back McCarren for my 11:30am PST flight out of Vegas.

Throughout it all, I'll prolly be spamming my Facebook & Twitter pages with updates about the minutia of my days, so feel free to follow me there if you want to. I'll do my best to post a daily summary here each evening/night, as well (the links for which will prolly spammed on the aforementioned social media networks).

**end MMA-oriented discussion**

Now, here's where things take a turn for the nerdy (don't act like you're surprised): I'm not a gambler. I also have no interest in the club scene unless I'm hanging with friends. Top that off with the fact that my budget doesn't have room for a show & it seems like I've decided to be pretty bored in the evenings, right? WRONG!! Has anyone ever heard of a little show called Doctor Who? Yeeeeeeeah, I'm a Whovian. I ripped through the entire modern library in about a month, just in time to catch the Series 7 finale (MAJOR spoilers in that link, FYI). I now have two problems:
  1. Doctor Who withdrawals - I binged on one of the greatness nerd shows & am forced to wait until Nov. 23rd for the 50th Anniversary before I get a new episode.
  2. Nerd OCD - I feel compelled to know everything I possibly can about the Whoniverse (did I just invent that? TM?).
Fortunately, both of those issues can be solved with one simple solution: CLASSIC DOCTOR WHO! You see, Doctor Who first premiered in 1963 & ran on the BBC for 27 seasons before being cancelled in 1989. It also spawned a TV movie in 1996, but it wasn't until 2005 that it was revived (dare I say, regenerated?) in the modern series. This means that I've got decades of episodes to watch in order to fully tank up on my nerd-cred. Now, even I realize that this is a ridiculously huge commitment of time & it would be impossible to watch all of though before my self-imposed deadline (11/23 for the 50th special), so I came up with the perfect nerd-solution, of course: SPREADSHEET!!!

I can't post the link here (have to wait until i'm on a non-mobile sevice), but here's what it is: a list of every single Doctor Who storyline, complete with links to season overviews, episode summaries & (most importantly) the Dailymotion playlist for each series. Here's what this allows me to do: for each storyline, I check out the synopsis & if it seems like a cool/pivotal/interesting series, I watch the playlist. Otherwise, I just read the episode summaries & move to the next. As you probably also noticed, I've got a couple columns there for me to take notes & to track my favorite episodes. That's mainly for my brother Ryan, who's a little behind me in his Who-viewing (he keeps throwing out his family & his job as some kinda lame excuse), as a but of a roadmap for him.So yeah: anytime I'm not actively involved in MMA nerding, I'll engaged in more traditional nerding. I'll be one happy nerd this 4th of July weekend!

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