more wcg pics, recap

nyoken and dreiven having a micro battle with the easy buttons, dreiven is multi tasking his beer and button.


incontrol was out of control, breaking bottles everywhere. no one was safe.


the gays + aiurz


colbi drinking my rum, and puertorican eating my cookie --v


nyoken, puertorican, tasteless, testie, mnm, draco, mondragon, incontrol, dreiven


semioldguy, nyoken, incontrol, german doa player, tasteless, mnm, dreiven


incontrol destroying dreivens face with his miiiind


a horde of people around one of the progamers, semioldguy and fuddx on the right


lilsusie, nyoken, midian, incontrol, and testie in the back

*vmmmm vmmmmm... vmmmm vmmmmm*
shit, what is that noise? -- grumble grumble. /me rolls over
oh, my phone is on vibrate. 10:20, i slept in 2h20min, crap crap. oh yeah, phone call, its Juliet (my friend in Seattle, i would have most likely missed my plane had she not called and woke me up).

not a great start, but i wasn't late to the airport, but problems arise as i try to get my ticket. "it shows that you haven't paid for the tickets yet" the ticket guy says.
"I'm pretty sure i did, i used my card 3-4 weeks ago to buy them." says i.
"ok, let me call them up, maybe they can see something i don't"
crap this sucks, i think to myself, i don't want to have to buy these things again. oh well, I'm already committed, no turning back now.
"ok here's the problem, the connecting flight for you has all the information, they just haven't updated it in our database." ticket guy explained.
I got my ticket, nothing can stop me now.

this airport is small, 1 gate for departures, 1 gate for arrivals. it's like the size of a gymnasium, no joke. i might have gotten pictures of it, but i didn't want to seem suspicious. i guess being suspicious was shot to shit when i unknowingly went into the womens bathroom. There was a guy standing next to the sign for the mens room, and i just went into the first place i saw a restroom sign, and that happened to be the womens one. an older lady was in there, and said "what are you doing in here?" i didn't say anything since i was already on my way out, the lack of urinals tipped me off. thankfully she didn't say anything to security or someone else.

when i get off my first plane, i was under the notion that the connecting flight was in the same terminal. nope, super wrong. this was the first time i was alone in the airport so it was a new experience for me. I wandered around terminal 4 in PHX for a solid hour. I wasn't terribly worried since i already had a 3 hour layover here. So i told the little lady at the information booth that i was lost, and she helped me find my way to the right terminal. my bag was already being checked through to my plane that would take me to Seattle, so i wasn't carrying anything. eventually i find the right terminal and then the right gate, and not to be outdone, my plane is delayed 45minutes, fuck. I was so bored here in this terminal, it is very small for a larger airport like PHX, but it only had 15 gates, 1 snack shop, and 1 store, and to top it off, no one can go back passed the security check point once you enter into the terminal. oh well i, JLIG'd.

everything from here on out goes smooth

i get to the lobby after calling Trev and having him explain what i should do, since at this point i had landed at midnight, and i guess they had had a few drinks. i take the shuttle to the hotel and meet up with Trev, FuDDx, incontrol, testie, tasteless and white-ra. at this point, i was pretty tired, so i didn't add much to the conversations, i was just sitting back and listening. random people that played starcraft were walking around and stopped by to say hi to the group, good to see how friendly everyone is. everyone was having drinks, and white-ra goes afk for a bit, hes a really nice guy, like amazingly nice. hard to understand though, his Ukrainian accent was really thick, and his English was rofl to listen to. so yeah, he comes back with a bottle of champagne, best stuff ever; he brought it from the Ukraine even. cheers goes around, bottoms up! but then security comes by and says we cannot have open containers. boo them in the face. they let us finish it, which is nice of them, and we give them the empties. we chit-chat a bit longer, then head up our room for sleepy time. Sfydjklm was passed out in our room, so i figured he would be with us for the rest of the weekend.

we woke up bright and early, ready for some group stage fighting. we hop in the car, ready to gogo to qwest field. aaaaand we're lost. not too bad, we turn around and head in the right direction. it was a long drive there, you'd think the people in charge would get hotels that are close to the event, but the players hotel was a 20-30minute drive on the highway. not a problem since FuDDx got a rental car for us, a Mazda 3. we get there, buy our tickets and go inside to WCG. i first noticed several show cars on the right side of the entrance, and i haven't seen any pics of them yet from anyone who went. there was a newer ford gt, Shelby cobra, 2 bucati bikes and some other random exotic cars. we knew SC started at 10, so we made our way to the main stage and got really good seats for the 2 matches, semioldguy was in front of us, but we didn't know who he was at the time. even though they both were over relatively fast, it was my first time seeing starcraft on a big stage like that, and it made me miss starcraft that much more (as if being at WCG wasn't enough). however i was really disappointed with the first days matches since hardly anyone was there to watch, i had figured there would be standing room only since starcraft is the best, but maybe only 70 people were seated by the time the second match was over =[ after the main stage SC matches were over, we went upstairs to watch the rest of group stages. got to met more starcraft players here and people from TL.

after all these matches were completed, WCG got boring for us, so we went out to cause some ruckus in Seattle. we had no idea where we were going, we just knew that something had to be in the downtown area. well, no, i lied. FuDDx knew about a magic shop somewhere in pikes pier. so that was our main objective, find the magic shop. we drove around some blocks looking for a parking garage, and we happened to stumble upon the most ghetto one in downtown. the ramps to go up to higher levels were super steep and each level only had room for 10 or so cars to park. it was super dirty, trash was all over, windows in the building were broken, cars and motorcycles that hadn't moved in months were on every level, it was pretty bad in there. even going down the stair well was disgusting, it felt like many horrible things were done in there. bum sex and heavy drug use for sure were some of the not so clean things that might have happened here. we get outside and to the corner of the street and there's a huge parking garage there. bad luck. oh well, we found the magic shop eventually underneath the main tourist part of the pier. FuDDx gets some items he was planning on using for the rest of the weekend on people, and we walk upstairs where we find a fish market. i was told that this particular market was famous for being in several movies, so we stood around eyeballing the various seafoods they had on display, and we got to see the guys working toss some fish around and make loud noises. so me and Trev bought a nice sized leg of Alaskan king crab and had them throw it around. we ventured out for a few more minutes before decided that we (me, Sfydjklm, Trev, and FuDDx) needed some food in our bellys. we pass some nice places, but we turn them down for we see a place with 4 dollar meals. in we go! first thing i notice is that its a small place, bar to the right of the entrance, and the diner to the left. aside from the annoying lady that started a conversation with us about her son being in jail, we were the only white people in there. not a problem, I've been in places like this plenty of times in my hometown. the thing that i wasn't pleased with the most was the amount of traffic the bathroom were getting. this wasn't a bug place, so the amount of people using the bathrooms was staggering. must be a public one, oh well, JLIG. but i couldn't, it was being used almost solely by crack heads, and some of them were in there for a lot longer than it should take to do normal bathroom business, and it was almost a continuous stream of people using these 2 bathrooms, which required keys to open. oh well, we get our food, ate it, then were out of there, but not before we get a picture with our waitress, she was super cool and having her serve us made up for the bathroom situation.

we shoot back to the hotel and me and Trev now are all about this crab legs we have. we need butter though, so we head down to the lobby to try and scrounge some up. on the way to the lobby we see someone had their room service tray outside their room in the hall, and low and behold, some butter! score! but 1 small piece wont be enough for this amount of crab. we get to the lobby and check around the coffee stand, since no one was there to stop us, but no butter. we ended up at the bar since our search wasn't going too well, out of curiosity, Trev asks the barkeep if they had any. they sure did, they hooked us up with a small bowl full of butter, they even nuked it for us so it was in liquid form. we finish our drinks on the way back to the room full of joy that our mission is complete. that joy soon turned into oh shitness, when we realized our crab leg was frozen solid and we had no way of heating it up. no microwave in our room, so we did the next best thing. we filled up a sink with hot water and put the leg in there. after several attempts to crack it barehanded, i finally get it broken in half, but not before the spines on this leg nearly puncture my hand in 4 places. the pain was totally worth it though.

not long after we finished, aiurz calls me and says he just landed. at this same time, we had wandered back to the lobby to look for people to play some poker. no starcraft players to be found, they must all be in incontrols room (we didn't know where it was at this time) playing poker and drinking no doubt, so we waited for aiurz to get to the hotel so we could make a beer run.

there are several groups of people outside the players hotel doing beer runs. we are one of them. we go across the street, Sfydjklm and fuddx get some Heineken, but me and Trev need something good, something hard, something that they give you to trick you into joining the navy. rum. we set out on foot to find a liquor store, but little did we know Washington doesn't sell liquor past 10pm, and it was about 10:15 when we set out. so pretty much we walked 2-4 (depends on who tells the story ) miles to find a store, in a light rain, no, light rain is too heavy, it was a heavy mist. we called fuddx to have him pick us up at a safeway, no way we were going to walk back and have it add to the humiliation. we got back and played poker with a few people we found in the lobby, and stayed up way late, 3:45 was about when i went to bed.

i think those were the main points to day 2

we wake up later than expected, and we miss the first match completely. no worries, we find out right away it was a 4 minute TvZ. today though, both Koreans were playing separate matches on the main stage, and the seating was how i had thought it should be. standing room only, just like you see on the vods, too bad these matches on the main stage were very anti-climatic. we went upstairs again to watch the second stage of group phase. the Koreans come up a little bit after us, and all hell breaks loose, everyone is getting pictures, interviews, autographs with them. this goes on for 15 minutes more before it dies down to mild bedlam, along with the starcraft matches, they are taking a break for a while.

the 6 of us (me, Sfydjklm, trev, fuddx, aiurz, d4d) head down stairs to get some free stuff from the booths, and to play some of the games they are showcasing. we do some rockband, left4dead, and get some shirts and goody bags at the booths. after the festivities, we head back up to the awesomeness that is starcraft. but wait, wtf is this? they aren't allowing _anyone_ without a badge up stairs to watch. d4d and trev are the only ones with us, since they are reporting, getting interviews and what not. not only had they kicked us out of watching, but they said it will be like this until Sunday, which was the finals, so no one would be playing up there anyways. i argued with the 2 guys there about how stupid this was for a little bit, then walked away stunned. so not only did we pay to see 2 starcraft matches from here on out, we also just walked around to every booth so we didn't have anything else to do for the rest of the day.

we decided to go to get some food and try and hit up kinkos and make some fake business cards so we could get press passes for the rest of WCG so we can watch starcraft. pizza for dinner, then we went over to kinkos, but they closed 4 minutes earlier. GG. left over pizza, goody bags from WCG and some other bags we had, our trunk was full to the brim.

stuff happened that i cant remember and now its dark out and rainy, setting the scene.

we get back and find out about the party in nyoken and incontrols room. off we go, sober as can be. testie is in the hallway near the party and says there isn't any room for us, but being the nice guy he is, he told us to wait back a little and he would knock and when whoever opened the door, we could walk in. a lot of the players that everyone knows were in there. nyoken, midian, goody, mondi, testie, incontrol, dreiven, then there was the likes of my group, sfydjklm, trev, fuddx, aiurz plus energies, semioldguy, mnm, lilsusie, tasteless, colbi, peurotrican, d4d, and i know there were several other, i apologize if i left ya out. a lot of them had been drinking way before we got there *cough* nyoken and midian *cough* nyoken can bench a house, easy. finally it had to happen, incontrol had to call me out and ask why? why i chose binky as my handle. well it's simple really. its close to how you say my last name. benkendorf. bink en dorf. binky. easy right? nod ya head. and im not jewish, geoff --v

what else happened there... umm

midian throwing up and telling lilsusie to get out and close the door
nyoken being super drunk but giving one hell of a sober interview for lilsusie, with semioldguy as a narrator
nyoken and drieven having a micro battle with the easy buttons

d4d was expecting a call from his radio station ins Switzerland, and he needed a quiet room so he could call in. what was going to happen was, they call his cell to let him know they are ready, and he gives the station the number of the hotel and our room number (5274). he was to call about starcraft and all the exciting happenings in WCG. so the station calls him at about 1am. d4d and i go to my room, which is on the complete opposite side of the hotel. what we didn't expect was the phone number on the business card to the hotel to be wrong, so his station couldn't call the hotel, and thus couldn't calling our room for the interview. well about 30 minutes of phone calls from d4d and his radio station in Switzerland go by, and my group comes back. the 6 of us sit around making balloon animals and tell random jokes for a while, then we go to sleep at 3am+, again.

today was the day i had been waiting for for about 2 months. i was finally going to get to see my friend since she moved away to Seattle in 2005. but before i could see her, i had to go watch some bo3 starcraft on the main stage! if you thought watching a single elimination game was exciting think again, bo3 play is super awesome. mainly because it takes longer than 10 min for a pro gamer to completely devastate a foreigner. the 2 bo3 that were to take place were scheduled for 2 hours i think. so we could have up to 2 hours of some sweet sweet SC action, but if you saw the vods, they were all short games and were completely one sided. again, same as yesterday the audience was packed to the brim. we got there pretty early in anticipation of all the people so we could get choice seats, and did we ever. aiurz sat right behind stork who was in the first row. here was where we met 1esu (he posts here on TL) and his girlfriend, who sat in the first row as well, luckys. we catch up with tasteless after the 2 bo3sa and he says that there will be another match casted on the cyber space stage in 10 minutes. awesome, since we are still locked out from up stairs from watching SC. we high tail it over there and snag some bean bags right in front of the screen. Tasteless and dj wheat cast again, and as always they do a great job to keep us entertained.

after the matches, aiurz and sfydjklm want to find the kinkos that was near qwest field so they can make business cards, and in turn, they can acquire press passes so they can go upstairs to watch sc without being stopped by security. this is where i leave the nerd fest and meet up with my friend.

+ Show Spoiler +
we had a really hard time catching each other on the phone (id call her and she'd be at work, or she'd call me and it would be charging, stuff like that) so we had only talked together 2 times before i actually landed in Seattle. third time we talked was when the group was at pizza hut, we made plans to meet up the next day at 3 at the market. so not only was this trip the first time id been at the airport alone, it was also the first time i had used public transportation alone. i took the bus to downtown (not knowing i had to pay to ride it), hoping it would stop at the right place, and thankfully this time it did. i got off and walked to our agreed meeting place. 2:45, I'm early, I'll just walk around and get a apple or something. she shows up 15min late, but so many things could have gone wrong, and she does live 4 miles away from that market, and she rode her bike there. we say our hellos, lock up her bike, and start walking out of the touristy part of town, she's gonna show me her Seattle. now, i haven't seen this girl in 2 years, we had 2 classes at the community college in our town, and we went to high school together. we didn't hang out that much, just at parties or if our paths would cross at school we'd stop and talk for a bit. first stop, the public library. i thought WTH at first, but she (her names Juliet, if you haven't been paying attention) said it was unlike any library i had ever been in. there was 11 levels with all sorts of various things on each, free lecture hall, a place where people could ask questions to people who knew a lot about certain topics, a level where you could rent music instruments for an hour (everything was there) we walked through each level and stopped to talk again at the top level, well the whole time we were talking, we stayed up top for like 40 minutes and looked out the windows, i caught someone out of the corner of my eye taking a picture of us leaning on the rail and talking, we're probably going to end up in some shitty B&W picture that this guy made thinking its very artsy. what a fag. we make our way downstairs and onto the streets of Seattle, her leading with me in tow. we go back to the market to fetch her bike since we had planned on going back to her place. we head up towards capitol hill and volunteer park, there's an Asian art museum, a botanical garden, and a water tower. well, both the garden and museum were closed, so we made our way to the water tower, and the climb up, holy shit, that was a hard climb. it wasn't that tall, but it still had way too many stairs. once we got up top it was totally worth it, the view was 360 degrees of Seattle and the surrounding towns. we got up there about 15 min before sunset, and i made a joke about how if we were dating this would be pretty romantic and a great first date. we head out of the park, eventually hitting the old neighborhood she used to live in, really nice there and a small park across the street from her house. since we haven't seen each other in way too long, she said she'd like to come to the hotel and hang out for a bit more. i warned her that she would most likely be the only girl there and that it was a huge nerd fest, but she said she could handle it. on our way back to a bus stop that would take us there she takes me through the super gay part of town. i forget what she said it was called, but it was really close to the school she was attending. there were fliers all over promoting various gay activities and what not. it was like a 3 hatch ling rush, the gays were everywhere! we find the bus to take us to the airport, since the hotel is like, right there anyways.

we meet up with Trev in the room and start drinking. by this points exhaustion is settling in with me and all i wanna do is lay down, but Juliet is with us now, and she didn't come all this way to watch me sleep. i mention cookies in the lobby and we walk there, and then trouble comes. testie and someone else are leading a huge mob of people our way, to our room! ahhhh!

first thing anyone says, comes form tasteless's mouth. OMG a girl, don't look at her! we pass the mob and get our cookies and make our way back to the room. we get back in and holy monkeys, so many people there. but plenty or space for all these people to move around. our room was a suite, we had 2 rooms and 2 balcony, we spared no expense. by now I'm sure you've all seen the pictures and the 3 movies Colbi has posted about the party. everyone was hanging out, and most everyone was drunk by the time security came and broke it up. i remember me and draco yelling at each other "fuck you", and the next day we met we did this again. he is a class act. incontrol was being crazy, mondragon was winning money on a rigged game of high card for 10 bucks a go (not really), so much happened, and so much alcohol was consumed that i cant remember that much from that night.

quote of the trip by mondragon, it went something like this "im going to piss on his face (on draco)" fuddx replies, "dont do that inside, mondi" mondi says, "why you care, hes fucking polish"

afterwards we cleaned up and went to bed, under our sink was loaded with bottles and cans from that night. GJ sc nerds, you know how to party.

woke up again with little sleep, but whatever. don't need to be coherent for closing ceremony. the finals of starcraft was between pj and stork, and this place was packed! more so than any other day. you all know how it ended up, and after the match we walked around a bit, stole some mice, and went to the mall. i found a bouncy ball on the way to the parking lot, and i tossed it up and when i went to catch it, i hit my finger and bounced away. i half assed it and ran after it, but some guy snagged it first and asked if his daughter could have it, since she wanted one really bad. he said the expression on her face would be totally worth it, i tell him sure i didn't really want it anyways. but yeah, the look on his daughters face was so cool, it was really heart warming to see.

we got some grub at the mall which was utter shit, world wraps made them. i had to force myself to eat it, for i was too hungry to throw mine away. we walked around the mall, which was really small and was just like every other mall you can go to, unless you've been to the mall of America in Minnesota, which is awesome. after the mall we head back on foot to qwest field and check out closing ceremony. now the thing with closing ceremony is that they are super boring to watch. i had watched the first 20 seconds of it one year on the live streams and it was absolutely boring, and i expected it to be no different now. and it wasn't any better. we lasted a while, but only to the part where they awarded team usa the 40 large.

we left in a hurry and ventured into the city again, this time we attempted to tame what is known all over the world as the space needle. we get there and all the fun stuff to do there had just closed, there wasa science fiction museum and a rock and roll museum, whatever, we head to the space needle and get our tickets and head up in the 41 second elevator ride to the top. as you'd expect, it was a nice view of the city, we walked around a few times, snapped some pictures and headed back down. the 5 of us hit up the gift shop and then we head back to the hotel. we got back into the room and i hide under the covers, im exhausted. a friend of fuddx who lived in the area stops by and i fail to fall asleep, for i am interested in their conversations. well they leave and a few minutes later d4d and tasteless stop by. we all hang out and watch some crazy cartoons on adult swim, talk about wcg and other things. everything is moving pretty slow and eventually d4d crashes in our room, and tasteless runs away to where ever his room was in the hotel. a nice calm ending for my WCG week.

i set my phone alarm for 8am, since my plane was leaving at 10, but i slept in, and missed the alarm that was in our room as well. i wake up aiurz and we head to the lobby and catch the shuttle to the airport. he say our good byes and split up since our flights are on different airlines. everything goes great until i land in phoenix. i read the map, and it says to take the green bus for inter-terminal travel. so i go to the inter-terminal bus stop and i hop on the green bus, i thought. turns out it was teal, and it was the rental car bus and i end up taking a 15minute ride somewhere away from the airport. shit shit. no problem, I'll just grab a bus at the rental car center back to the airport. well, there weren't that many buses there and only a few of them were going to the terminal i needed to be at, so i had to wait another 10 minutes for one to get to the rental car place. i suck at public transportation.