The Goonfather executed the con job of the year last night.

It’s all my fault for making him hooked to Liar Game (a Japanese manga that got made into a drama serial and movie). He must be constantly thinking of how to con people now.

We had dinner at Marché. You know how we each have our own cards to rack up our purchases on? So, towards the end of the evening, after the Goonfather had charged pver $80 on his card, he suddenly threw out a proposal.

“Hey!” he said, “I think it’ll be so funny if we mix up all our cards and redistribute them so no one knows how much he has to pay. Imagine the expression of the person who gets my card! Hahaha!”

Everyone started laughing about the nervousness during the qeueing up to pay, and the hilarity during the moment of truth.

All the excitement of Russian Roulette without the death.

CRAZILY, EVERYONE ACTUALLY BOUGHT INTO HIS GAME.

Well, okay, not everyone. Only eight out of 11 took part. The biggest spender of course happily bought in. He had $97 on his card.

Mostly, it was the guys who had between $40 and $100 on their cards. The girls were all in the $20s.

Us girls are just sporting like that.

But I’m still amazed that the Goonfather managed to come up with such a crazy plan and actually have people go along with it.

After everyone surrendered their cards, he mixed them up and got us to pick one each. Since he was the broker, he didn’t get to pick and simply retained the last card remaining.

Then we spent the next hour speculating whose card was the most costly and who had gotten whose card. The big spenders threw out clues, like, “Mine has dog ears,” or “Mine has a split,” which only served to increase the suspense.

And then, the moment of truth.

We all trooped to the cashier. The Goonfather bullied Wang Wang into going first.

PANDEMONIUM.

She got the $97 card.

There was much laughter and hooting and wailing and gnashing of teeth. Still, she managed to pay the bill with a big smile. Even victims can’t help being caught up in the fun.

Big spender Edwin paid next. He got the Goonfather’s card of $83, which was unlucky but still profitable for him.

I paid $41 although I’d only spent $22.

The Goonfather got a $30 card, which means he made about $50.

It wasn’t even a fair gamble to begin with but it was definitely fun.

Still, I think I should tax the Goonfather to cover my loss. Must come up with a better con to get him back. :P

So, the other day, Nanny Wen invited Unker Kell to bring his drill to her new place.

She needed one, she said, to make holes in her wall for her wall shelf or something.

The Goonfather and I tagged along to witness the making of holes. What we witnessed from the first was a half-mantled Ikea wardrobe (“mantled” being the opposite of “dismantled”, which I feel is the right word to use here even if it’s theoretically wrong) in her bedroom, lying on its side.

(Here’s Unker Kell attempting to save the wardrobe from being mishandled:)

On top of the budding wardrobe we saw a tool box the size of a mobile phone. WHEN IT’S OPEN.

Presumably, Wen had been trying to make furniture using screwdrivers smaller than her pinkie.

The guys made a big show of groaning at the outrage, after which Unker Kell set to work putting things right while the Goonfather found a new use for the baby tools — fixing his watch.

All was good until Unker Kell finished up with the wardrobe and was going to start on the drilling.

The Goonfather decided then that it was a good time to come to the rescue. He had a leveling tool he just downloaded on his iPhone called iHandy Level. It’s supposde to help you make, like, your wall paintings or whatever straight.

Excitedly, because this was the first time he was using the app, the Goonfather measured two spots on the wall for Unker Kell to mark. Once marked, the drilling started.

All this time, I was outside, working on blogs. And, suddenly, I heard Wen call out to me, “QY COME HERE!!!”

I went inside. Wen pointed at her newly erected shelf and said, “Does this look straight to you?”

It was an obvious no. It was slanted like 10cm off. The boys were giggling. Or, rather, trying very hard not to giggle.

The Goonfather said, “But the tool can’t lie. It must be straight.”

Wen said, “It is obviously not straight!!”

The Goonfather said, “Then must be your floor is not straight!”

Anyway, he later realised that iHandy Level has to be calibrated once before use. Fortunately, the slant was so pronounced that there was actually enough space for Unker Kell to drill another hole above the wrong one, so the shelf was put to rights without much incident thereafter.

It’s so good to have guys around to do all this man stuff for us, no?

After reading my blog about mutton tulang yesterday, Nanny Wen tweeted: “MY FAVOURITE FOOD in guangzhou!!!! it’s the best ever *salivates*”

I was, like: “So nice meh?”

She went: “Maybe yours wasnt that great but my soup was super tasty n fantastic.”

I said: “I also don’t like the tulang at Lagoon which TGF always eat…”

She said: “Lagoon got tulang ?? Where???! Let’s eat tonight!!”

So, there and then, at 4:30pm, we decided to meet for dinner.

I SMSed the Goonfather and Unker Kell to book them for dinner. They replied OK. I told our maid not to cook dinner for us.

Half an hour later, Nanny Wen BBMed me (paraphrased): “Oh shit I forgot I already have movie plans tonight.”

So, that’s how the Goonfather, Unker Kell and I went to Lagoon to eat tulang on behalf of Nanny Wen.

Actually, only the Goonfather ate it. I don’t like it and Unker Kell only likes the sauce. The dish comes with a plate of bread for dipping.

I ate BBQ chicken wings.

Unker Kell ate Roti John while making some lame joke about depriving John of his bread.

After dinner, he belched contentedly and said smugly with a cheesy grin, “John, you hear that?”

Kell is a nutcase.

AND SO IS NANNY WEN.

It’s always fun to have a group project, everyone working towards one goal together, whether in real life or virtually.

In EverQuest II, our group project is to buy a guild hall, a place where guildies can hang out and do many things conveniently.

It’s a massive project requiring a lot of money and a lot of time and, after a month of hard work, we finally earn the eligibility to buy the cheapest guild hall in the game.

The hard work never ends, though. The guild hall can be continuously upgraded and there’s weekly maintenance to be paid and amenities to buy.

Fortunately, in games, hard work is actually fun.

The first eager beavers to arrive at the guild hall at the momentous moment of purchase:

As we first entered the hall, everyone stood around gawking before going wild and running around the rooms, each person trying to claim rooms for themselves.

The Goonfather (Silvermist in the game) put a giant “ashtray” in one of the basement rooms and said, “This is the smoking room.”

That’s not really an ashtray, though. It’s just a very ugly fountain.

As we were coming up from the basement to gawk at the main halls more, we saw Kerrendor perched on the wall opposite the stair landing:

So we decided that Kerrendor was a better thing to gawk at.

More and more people came to gawk at him while he just stood there, unmoving. We waited to see if he would fall off the wall.

Then, seeing that he was not going to fall off, the others decided to go join him:

So, I don’t know what the Goonfather (Silvermist) said to Kerrendor while they were perched on the wall. Suddenly, they both started fighting and then tragedy struck.

The Goonfather’s tragedy, in particular. He was dead in, like, five seconds.

In the picture above, Kerrendor appears to be in a prostate position apparently out of guilt at this unexpected murder.

But I think he was just pretending. We all know his innate bloodlust very well. Later in the night, he tried to murder the guild hall hirelings for fun.

Hirelings which cost us a lot.

So much chaos happened that night I had a hard time keeping track of everything. And people kept messing up the guild hall.

Like, someone started putting magical piles of snow all over the place, making it snow inside:

The same someone also tried to disguise himself as a guild hall hireling in order to confuse people:

I shan’t tell you who Silverfox is. You can guess…

The hirelings weren’t very happy about him trying to steal their jobs.

To maintain some order, I ordered a group photo shoot so that everyone had to stay still in one position for an indefinite period of time.

Fortunately, people tend to be quite cooperative and mellow when you order a group shot. Well, most of the time, anyway.

It does takes some dedicated yelling to accomplish, at times.

Like, certain individuals would refuse to stay still and get in position until after you’ve yelled at them at least three times.

Example:

But I generally only allow everyone to disperse after we’ve gotten at least one good shot, so certain naughty individuals know that they must eventually comply or we’d be stuck there the whole night.

This isn’t everyone in the guild. It’s hard to get everyone online at the same time!

Which is just as well, I suppose. It would probably have taken me two hours to get a nice shot if everyone had been there!

Some reputations are enduring. Some of my friends have characteristics that invite teasings for years, long after the initial joke is gone.

(When I say “my friends”, I always mean Club Morte, the bunch of friends I met in EverQuest II four years ago.)

Unker Kell is our mobile Wikipedia because he knows everything about everything and he doesn’t seem to ever forget a fact.

We call him Kellpedia, sometimes, but that’s not very funny, so we also tease him about his “uncle-ness” (hence his nick Unker Kell – the mispelling due to his not technically being an uncle).

We often give him grief over his sometimes eccentric dress sense, excessive sensibility and choice of music and cars.

He was shopping for a car the other day and kept waxing lyrical over the Volkswagen Passat CC, vehemently disagreeing that it looks “uncle”.

Fortunately, we (mostly the Goonfather) put so much pressure on him that he agreed to give the Mazda RX-8 a try, which resulted in him buying it because it’s one of those “love-at-first-drive” cars.

In EverQuest II, Unker Kell has a reputation for spending hours and hours sorting inventory.

In the game, we have personal and bank inventory slots to keep all our treasures, and in each slot we can place bags or boxes, each of which open up to more slots to keep all our treausres.

This is how mine looks like, with all my bags and boxes open up. Each tiny square can hold one item:

As you can see, this has the potential of providing many hours of sorting entertainment, especially when you have several alternate characters (like Unker Kell has) and you want to share items with them.

In the past, whenever we agreed to meet for an adventure, he would be the last to arrive because he’s always busy sorting inventory at the bank.

He’s also often late for real world outings so the joke carries over into real life as well. Unker Kell is his name and “inventory sorting” is his thing.

He’s better now. I think maybe now he spends his lunch hour sorting inventory so that he doesn’t have to sort it when he’s playing with us. (But we still tease him about it.)

Now we come to Morte, our group’s namesake.

Our group bears his name because he is our class clown. And also because he always irks everyone so much we all want to club him. (But he’s very good for laughs so we keep him.)

In EverQuest II four years ago, we used to call him the paper tank.

In MMORPGs, a tank is the group’s warrior assigned to absorb all the enemy hits (because he has strong defence but weak offence) while everyone else concentrates on actually killing the enemy.

Tanks have special abilities to keep enemies’ attentions on them.

This was our tank in my old guild.

Morte is a mage in game and has powerful nukes that can severely pulverize an enemy. Unfortunately, it angers the enemy so much it will turn its attention on Morte. Unfortunately, also, mages can only wear cloth armor so they’re especially fragile.

The mage’s job is to nuke a mob just enough so that the combat can end quicker but not so much that he gets its attention. When a mage overnukes, he will override the tank as the punching bag. And Morte loves to overnuke.

Calling someone a paper tank is like saying, “You paper-wearing nuker, you think you can be a tank? Hur hur…”

Here’s a picture of Morte being a paper tank. He’s in the middle of the screen being surrounded by angry mobs:

A few months back, Morte was all excited over buying 120 rolls of toilet paper for like $12, and his nickname became Toilet Paper. And when we returned to EQ2 last month, he became Toilet Paper Tank.

His most-uttered words ingame now are “Save me~~~.”

Next…

The Goonfather has a reputation for being a chiongster because he enjoys rushing the enemy and has no patience for tactics. As a result, he has like the highest death count among our group (next to Morte).

But he has no nickname for that because I’m probably the only person who gets annoyed by it since he always drags me along to his doom with his impulsive habits. To the others, he’s probably just a source of amusement.

There was this time in the past when two of us needed to kill some gnolls and, out of impatience, he went to aggro all the gnolls in the immediate area all at once.

He really enjoys flirting with death in games.

Nanny Wen (aka Davienne) is the bimbo of the group (ingame) because she’s always getting lost and making silly mistakes due to being blur.

She’s also a bimbo because she enjoys comparing clothes and appearances and laughing at people for being short. She plays a high-elf, which is a very tall race, and she enjoys saying, “I am looking down on you.”

Unfortunately for her, she can’t do the same in real life.

The other day, she was teasing Unker Kell about his looks (he plays a cat-like humanoid and was wearing a stupid Santa hat). She asked him to shapeshift into Billy the moppet because he looks better that way.

(In EQ2, we have abilities to turn ourselves or other people into all kinds of funny things, which is fun.)

And this was Unker Kell’s reply:

This is Billy the moppet:

Billy is actually a mob we had to kill several times in the past for a very tough quest. I guess the game developers thought it would be funny to allow players to shapeshift into Billy.

EQ2 is more fun than ever because there is now a built-in voice chat feature. It makes it feel like we’re physically together, enjoying a fun activity together.

The downside is that now I can’t take screenshots of people saying funny things anymore, since people hardly type anymore.

No more such screens. :(

In another post, I’ll share with you some of the funny adventures we shared together. I can’t wait to tell you about the one where the Goonfather and Unker Kell voluntarily did a “You jump, I jump” and fell to their deaths amidst much laughter from the guild.

Another time!

Right now, I’m having so much fun reliving the good old days with the same bunch of friends. Isn’t it such a rare thing being able to actually relive fond memories for real?

I’m making the most of it by playing the game obsessively. So don’t think I’m a nerd. It’s for the sake of friendship! =P