EPTI didn't attend a single live StarCraft event in 2012. Apparently a year is just long enough for me to forget the amazement associated with an experience. In 2010 I attended the Greenforest LAN in Ventura, CA--the first Southern California LAN for StarCraft II. Somehow I managed to convince my parents to drive me 100 miles on the second day of the LAN and I got to experience a few hours of live SC2 goodness. In 2011 I attended MLG Anaheim, which back then was one of the first foreign events with Korean progamer attendance and when BoxeR had a substantial performance as a competitor.
Yet every event brings something new and completely unexpected. For Green Forest, it was the mere shock of being at a live event. For MLG, it was the big stage and seeing Boxer play in person for the first time as well as meeting the Kiwiclones. This time around it was my decision to finally make a cheerful. I decided to do a cheerful for the CSL finals because I feel the closest association with CSL players. It's natural that identify the most with my peers: college-age StarCraft players. Given my lack of artistic ability and my supplies being limited to a laser printer and whatever I could buy at my university's store, I made do with what I had and harnessed the powers of mankind's greatest weapon: rasterbation.
The subject of the (front side) of the cheerful was clear from the beginning. The Goddess herself. After much debate in chat over which picture would be the best, the best in black and white, the best in a 4:3 aspect ratio, and so on, a source image was selected (thank you Socratics). Since this was the Goddess we were talking about, I chose a 1mm dot-size for the rasterbation. Such a computationally intensive tasks brings modern multi-core processors to their knees (partly because of the fact that the process is not done in parallel). At this stage, I had produced a glorious 190MB pdf file.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/BBhS9ok.png)
The Image Selection Process Was a Rocky One
Because most printer/printing protocols are not usually designed with 190MB of pdf data (spread over only 16 pages) in mind, I had to print out the pdf in chunks as something on either the printer or computer side would crash after a few pages. After the laborious printing process during which my laser printer screamed "low toner," I had my work cut out for me. That is, I had a lot of cutting to do ahead of me. Cutting the borders off of 16 US Letter size pages is excessively labor intensive and almost unbearable for someone with OCD (no paper cutter). The cutting process took around three hours followed by the nerve-wracking positioning and gluing marathon. My glue of choice? Elmer's Washable School Glue Stick gEL, preferably after being aged for an unknown and possibly lethal about of time. Because of my exhaustion at this point (tail end of a 14 hour day and it was getting close to 1am) and my utter lack of cutting prowess, I really botched the positioning in a few places. Fortunately, I was aided by my close friend the dry-erase marker who helped to conceal some of the gaps between pages.
At the end of this really long day, the front side looked something like this:
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/iGbUpbk.jpg)
My doom room has never been graced by the presence of a vacuum.
I had just over another day to decide what the other side was going to look like. After 26 hours of thinking while asleep and awake, I had no good ideas. Fortunately, I turned to the chat once again and settled for an idea that was much better than what I had come up with on my own--and the results speak for themselves.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/ylMQV3O.png)
I am among geniuses.
More or Less About the Actual Event
Because I spent pretty much all of Thursday night making my poster, I missed the post in my school's Facebook offering rides to the event. In leiu of a ride provided by one of the few members who still cared enough about StarCraft to attend, I had the privilege of taking the CSL shuttle to the event. I figured that this would be a good way to interact with other people from my school who were into StarCraft, but not necessarily heavily involved with the campus organization. Boy, was I wrong. I turned out to be the only person on the a shuttle (shoutout to Ivan, the shuttle driver for convincing me that there were still people interested in E-sports). The footnote on the backside attempting to attract more members to UCLA StarCraft is self-explanatory at this point.
The first person I met at CSL? KawaiiRice. The first thing he noticed? Guess. After being ambushed by KawaiiRice and photographers (whom you can thank for the timely post in the live report thread), I caught the end of Berkeley's series with Aarhus and hung around the teams for a while.
Washington's match against Chunnam was one of the hardest things for me to watch in StarCraft II for a long time. I had been anticipating a UW vs. Cal finals since the start of the season, to the point where it had become a fact in my mind. Even as a die-hard Kiwiclone (and Kiwicone-derivative) supporter, I cannot even begin to imagine the effect that series had on UW's team.
And the final match? Luckily, my 13 years of education paid off as I had been carrying around a photo of Suppy and the glue stick in case my hero didn't make it to the finals. I can say that I have never seen a CSL team act in such an deliberate, cohesive manner. Even after being given Washington's invaluable knowledge of the Chunnam's tendencies and vulnerabilities, Berkeley overlooked nothing and it showed (minus the paused game of 2009 NATE MSL power outage proportions). Some of my favorite moments were MnMDayaL's clutch scout of the natural in Game 5 (dat audience reaction) and Suppy's hold at the 4th in Game 4. Game 7 was yet another example of Suppy as a cold-blooded murderer.
Cool people I met at the event:
- Froadac, whom I've seen around TL for roughly two years now . Most notably, he volunteered his phone as a tether for Berkeley's last minute scouting of Chunnam and took a bunch of photos (which he probably won't upload to this website).
- SuperiorWolf, though his presence was a bit underwhelming after all that hype following his debut on the first episode of the first season of Teamliquid.net Attack! 2008.
- The rest of Berkeley's team, who collectively proved that Koreans are not invincible. Or at least that you need for have at least one Korean on your team to beat a team of Koreans.
- Washington's team, who embodied "yolo boys" in every sense of the phrase.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/evxFZSV.jpg)
It was really nice meeting you btw, thanks for supporting our team :D
