01269: Trekkies, Drag Queens and Geeky Christmas Goodies

Well, this little Christmas vacation certainly kicked off with a bang between the Via Astris Christmas party and me being able to join Tobie for one of his Wednesday O Bar runs together with Mahar. Both events certainly included quite a lot of, well, consuming stuff, but it was all good fun for sure.

For those who haven't heard of the group, Via Astris is the Star Trek club of the Philippines. And in typical Trekkie fashion, the night's festivities were a combination of your traditional potluck party combined with watching the various Star Trek movies, singing along with a videoke mike and playing various card games. The group had been intrepid enough to manage to book a great room over at the Discovery Suites, which was a nicely spacious venue for all of the various geek activities.

And yes, clearly I really got a kick out of the Star Trek cupcakes. But of course by the time that Tobie and I had arrived, none of the red ones were left. Of course they had to be among the first ones to go.

Then we proceeded to O Bar Ortigas for what I expected to be a night light of drinking and dancing. But leave it to the folks at O Bar to make the night a heck of a lot more epic than expected.

First of all, some company had the bright idea of bringing their folks over to O Bar for their Christmas party, and thus the bar was rather full for a Wednesday. And not just full of your regular O Bar patrons but more a significantly above average number of straight men and women. Kind of weird, but hey it still worked. Plus clearly the ledge dancers were a heck of a lot more motivated to put on a show with the presence of all the ladies cheering them all. Fun times.

Also present were the High Voltage poi dancers, who have gotten a lot better at their routines. I know I've mentioned this before, but they really make for fascinating photography subjects and I think I'm getting a better handle at figuring out how best to take photos despite the inconsistent lighting and all the motion going on. If anything, my limited photography skills seemed to be focused on food pictures and making the most of photo opportunities at the bar. Tricky no matter how you look at it, but it's still a lot of fun.

Apart from the drag shows, the dancers and the rather energetic crowd, I was glad that Mahar was able to join us despite his rather busy and crazy day. While you could say that Mahar's ventures to the bar have a degree of "field work" to them given his project relating to his bar experience, but I'd like to think more than that he's having a good time, too. But I'll leave it to him to make any "official" declarations about how he feels about all these trips to O Bar with us.

Part of our discussions had me coming up with this little assessment of O Bar - that in Queer as Folk terms, you could think of O Bar as being closer to Woody's than to Babylon. With the various performers and the regular drag shows, O Bar is not just solely a dance club. And that really does add a different edge of character to the place, and it adds a heck of a major factor for why Tobie and I continue to patronize (and in some ways support) the bar.

Today's been nicely lazy. Apart from Tobie still dealing with work (family business never have holidays, do they?) we managed to step out for a bit and hit the mall for some good food and a little shopping of opportunity, for lack of a better term. And thankfully the malls in the area weren't as full as I feared - then again it was the afternoon and I assume a lot of folks still had work to deal with.



And we certainly found a few items of significant interest. Tobie decided to "cheat" by getting me another Christmas gift. This time it was The Art of Pixar: 25th Anniversary book, which I had been pining for recently. I didn't ask him to get it, but of course he insisted so go figure.

But what was even more stellar was finding the last box set of the complete Harry Potter movies on DVD, which includes a bonus DVD entitled Hogwart's Last Stand. It's a total of 17 discs since it covers the 2-disc version for each movie, which makes for a pretty cool addition to our DVD collection. At first I was wondering whether or not it was really worth it to spend that much on the DVD set, but when we saw someone else looking at the sole copy at the Odyssey branch we were at over at Gateway, we figured it was too good an item to give up on just yet. And later on I found out that it was their last copy of the day with the two others having been sold just the same day. Apparently a lot of folks figure it to be a great gift item for others, but of course Tobie and I had no plans of giving it away. It took our combined financing efforts to afford it well enough, but it certainly seems to be worth every penny.

We also found a copy of the "DVD edition" of a Kylie Minogue hits album, which features a lot of her music videos including the most recent one, Get Outta My Way. We had first seen one of these during our trip to Singapore earlier this year but didn't feel it was worth paying the foreign rates for. So it was nice to bump into it again, and at a really affordable rate, too!

I really need to take time to better document the interesting combination of Christmas gifts that we've received his year and those special purchases we've made for ourselves given the holiday season and accompanying bonuses and 13th month paychecks. For example, I finally ordered the Transformers: The Complete Series DVD box set via Amazon at the same time I had ordered Tobie's Totoro figurine sets for Christmas. This is another stunning DVD set that covers 15 discs with all of the original G1 cartoons and lots of bonus material including documentary features, the old toy commercials and those crazy hard to find PSA bits. Given my love for the Transformers, it's kind of funny how this is the first time in my life that I've ever invested in getting the original DVDs. To be fair, it's not like they've been on the shelves all that much and this particular collection was only released this year.

There are a bunch of other stuff out there that deserves documentation as part of our Christmas collection of geeky stuff, but I suppose that should best way for after the holidays to ensure it's a complete set.
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Comments

  1. This year has been such a wonderful celebration of love, rOckY.
    Thank you for reminding me that I too deserve love.

    ReplyDelete

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