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Alright, so after taking way too long to do these, and having every problem with my computer under the sun, I present to you guys blizzcon photos. It's also my 10k, and a little way to show that after about a year posting on tl, it's possible to meet great people, and have an awesome time at blizzcon.
If you haven't seen them yet, I encourage you to look through:
zatic's impressions: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=102621
blizzcon reps: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=101190
blizzcon interviews: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=100654
skyhigh v nada: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=102478
Next year, i'm just sorting them and posting them, and not wasting too much time photoshopping and picking them. It just about killed me this time around. I took about 5k pictures, and choose 180 ish, including the ones of random people who were shooting with progamers.
Anyway, it was a total blast. Here is the images in chronological order, with commentary. If you want the full size images of anything, go ahead and pm me with a link to the full size one that you want.
Making easy buttons:
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Man, these things took way longer than I thought, and I still have stuff lying around. The basic idea was that we were going to make the easy buttons from staples say "ESPORTS" when you press them. They're pretty cool. I think that me and mikeymoo got around to delivering buttons to chill and kennigit, or possibly hotbid and kennigit. Not quite sure. Anyway, below are the build picutres, as we were trying to get our stuff together at about 10 pm the night before blizzcon. No rest for the weary. If kennigit or hotbid or chill would post picture/video of the finished product, that would be cool, as I don't actually have anything finished. I also made one that said "GG" for nada, and losingid8 was able to give it to him and explain what it was. no pictures of that either, but hopefully nada will win again, and show you guys what i made <3
Blabber mikeymoo, and josh working on easy buttons
generalnukeem in the corner, mikeymoo showing off the fact that we're watching iris get kwanrolled
me and mikeymoo pulling parts apart 1
me and mikeymoo pulling parts apart 2 (girl who decided to try to help us in background)
after we got the actual easy part sanded off (that was easy) we only needed to work on the electronics. This left blabber, generalnuekem, and my housemates with nothing left to do.
mikeymoo, breaking things
all of mikeymoo's broken things
wtf?:
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Alright: first day:
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This is what it looks like when you first get past security. Huge hall, really pretty cool. There were a bajillion dorks like me hanging around, and it seemed kind of overwhelming. They said something like 26k people there, which means that they need to rent out a bigger hall so that everyone can get tickets -_-;;
Skyhigh warming up. He had one of the first games
This was the setup for the various games, I have pictures of it in action later. basically, the left screen was used for an fp view of the left player, the right screen was used for the fp view of the right player, and the obs was the middle screen. Really really cool. Nothing like being able to see everything.
Ret and Idra, posing for pictures
This was the gaming area. Pretty large, but not actually large enough -_-; There were always lines to play stuff. It turns out that this was one of the three gaming areas, where you could actually play the blizzard games.
pictures of the crowd at the opening ceremony:
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This was the soundboard that they were using. Remember that it was going out over directtv, through the package, so they basically had cameras on pretty much everything, and had a full tv crew running around backstage.
Skyhigh vs (see next image)
zero was the first match. The way that the matches worked kind of sucked - the ones that they thought would matter were played on the main stage with commentary. The other ones, that somone didn't think was going to be as good, were placed in the progaming area, where basically no one was supposed to watch it. No obs, and no commentary in the progaming area.
Tasteless, artosis, and djwheat on camera
and in real life
they even had splash images for both players, which was pretty cool. Obviously this one was skyhigh
and this one was zero
I have no idea what sword this was supposed to be. obviously i haven't played enough blizzard games. It kept getting in the way though, and so i thought that i would get at least one decent picture of it.
Blizzard had camera guys who focused on the players the whole game, just like you see on korean tv. However, I guess that the camera guys didn't have anything to do after setting up the cameras, and so they probably learned something about starcraft.
Yes, the pro's use the same start screen us mortals do. This is just for reference, I believe that I have an example screen later that shows their name later
Nada vs ret
nada vs ret
extra points if you can identify all of the tl people in the picture. This really is why you go to blizzcon, as you get to meet these people who you talk to all the time on here. I spy hotbid, Idra, Incontrol, machine[usa], and azndsh. There are of course more.
nada
ret
savior waiting for the nada ret game to finish. He had already beaten either beckham or ret at this point.
skyhigh and savior
Idra- I believe that this was his game vs ret.
Progamers:
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savior
Thunk: "who is that"
Ghostclaw: "savior"
Thunk: "oh. He smiles?"
Skyhigh vs beckham, beckham was using a sunken rush with a proxy hat on hbr. Pretty cool watching skyhigh defend it. Next game, beckham 5 pools on colo II, and skyhigh walls and kills the sunken before the lings + drone even get there. Perfect timing. Pro.
losingid8 was really excited to get skyhigh to wear his usc sweater. I wonder if losingid has washed it yet. I wouldn't xD
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Savior vs zero, on the big screen
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I don't know who these guys are. Pretty cool though.
This is what the bracket looks like at this point. Just for reference.
Nada vs. effort, as skyhigh and savior watch effort play. Kind of sad, as both zero and nada didn't have any starcraft team mates make the trip over to blizzcon
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Man, effort's hands are so fast. This picture was taken at 1/6th of a second, and you can still see blur.
Fuddx was amazing. He can make balloon animals and do magic tricks. Meet him if you can, there are examples of his amazing balloon work later in this post
Nada vs skyhigh. Skyhigh is playing in the USC sweatshirt xD. iirc, Skyhigh still lost Nada played like a beast though, and it's amazing just to sit behind these guys and watch them play in real life.
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TL people watching Nada (idra, Losingid8, artosis, kennigit)
TL people watching skyhigh (hurricane, littlechava, Semioldguy)
Effort vs zero (there were way too many zvz's. blizzard, please invite a P player next time.)
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the names only get better, but tasteless had some...odd naming conventions xD
And Day 1 night:
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huge crowd of people in hotel room. Chill got us the room with his title being some sort of esports manager -_-;
The CJ team said that they had to leave early however. This left us doing showmatches on the big screen, before the disappointing osl final. At least the OSL final was short -_-;
ret and kennigit
I believe his sn was themango? anyone care to correct me?
vs incontrol. he was very drunk, as was ret. We gave incontrol the microphone to talk to everyone
intrigue of course was obs (becuase he's a master)
Ret was attempting to distract incontrol, but then...
he decided that it was going to be more effective to just take over for themango instead
ret killed his screen at one point, zatic was helping.
Incontrol's chair gets stolen, ret and inc wrestle, and then make up.
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for those who are curious, ret won.
Next game was chill vs ret, and chill was not very drunk. Doesn't quite seem fair really. Incontrol took over commentary after he determined that ret sucked at both playing and commentating (according to inc xD)
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Then we had machine vs idra, and we had incontrol still commentating, and finally we had day[9] commentating for the osl finals. Very nice. I think that someone was recording all of the stuff that was going on at the front. If you find it, it was really really funny. If it dosen't exist anymore...well then everyone dies a little on the inside, and wishes that it was recorded.
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Day 2:
Awards ceremony (effort won):
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savior, with nada and skyhigh watching, vs tasteless. Seems kind of unfair, dosen't it? (savior was playing protoss in sc2, which i thought was interesting. the person to the right of savior is somewhat important iirc - he played in the 2v2
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savior vs artosis
mbc game was there, which was pretty cool. apparently fuddx actually got to talk to them, which is also pretty cool (see his blog about 1.5 month ago for details)
I believe that this was when savior was playing against artosis.
Skyhigh vs nada.
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awards ceremony
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all of them standing in line for the awards ceremony
mbc guys filming the awards ceremony
warcraft 3 awards was right after, so i got pictures of that as well
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I think that this is nada playing with bonjwa david kim looking over his shoulder. what do you guys think.
Sc2 showmatch 2v2 was played. Pretty cool really.
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dunno their names, but they were team 1
three screen setup in action
team 2
resource counter - now we don't need to be a tv studio or tl to be able to obs and look at mineral/worker counts
obs screen T base
obs screen P base
the minimap looks exactly the same
building counter in obs mode
camera guy again watching the game. must be boring with a non-moving camera
last night, just hanging out:
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all of us eating
fuddx doing magic tricks
fuddx had us enraptured for the whole night practically
not only does fuddx do magic, he makes awesome balloon animals. How cool.
misc people with progamer pictures:
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Anyway, I hope that all you guys found something in there to enjoy, and that's the last time that I'm ever waiting for a k number. All the rest of my 1k, 2k, 3k etc are in live report threads, so i think that's what I'm going to do from now on. Taking a month break from tl.net is way way too long. Thanks for being patient!