When I was original planning a trip to San Francisco, I got a lot of useful advice that more or less amounted to "LOL GAY PEOPLE LIVE THERE LOL", which gave me the impression that the most I really had to worry about was maybe a roaming gang of rather fancily dressed men calling me a "silly billy" and commenting on my poor fashion taste and grooming.

It turns out that reality is, uh, slightly different from that. San Francisco is actually a kind of rough place.

For instance, Tuesday night while I was taking the bus back to my bed and breakfast, I saw some guy try to snatch some girls iPod and make a run for it while he was getting off the bus. Fortunately, though, he didn't actually manage to get it from her, so he ran off with nothing.

Of course, that set this old guy on the bus onto a long rambling rant about how all the guys on the bus besides him were cowards, because we didn't do anything to stop the attempted theivery. Nevermind that the whole incident was pretty much over before anyone even knew what was happening. Not to mention that he didn't do anything either, besides yell "what's going on back there?". Good to know Grandpa Longwinded is watching out for our safety though!

Then yesterday on my way to take the bus to the GDC, I saw a bit of a street fight going on at the stop I was planning on waiting at. Normally I would've used my exceptional Karate skills to break up the fight (after two weeks of training, I've attained a fearsome White Belt!), but about an hour earlier I had to tear off the nail on my big toe due to it losing a rather lopsided fight with the dresser, so I wasn't exactly in the "dealing with random strangers fighting at a bus stop" mood.

So instead, I went a couple of blocks west to another bus stop, except at that one there were about 5000 kids all trying to get on the same bus for some reason. Agh. It kindof reminded me of Lord of the Flies, only more annoying.

I don't mean to rag on San Fran, it's actually a lovely city, it's just terrifying is all.

Oh yes, also, I wrote up some coverage of the actual event (!), which I should be a able to publish soon once a few small technical details are out of the way.