EPTI left my house in South Carolina around 9:15 a.m. on Monday, and 9 hours, 570 miles, and $55 worth of gas later, I arrived at the Root House, where I was greeted with "'Sup dude?" from KiWiKaKi, drewbie, and CatZ. It rained the entire way, literally. It was around 6:30 and I immediately began settling in, getting out my laptop and hopping on their wireless. 50mb download, 10mb upload is pretty sick. KiWiKaKi went to bed not long after I arrived, trying to get his sleep schedule adjusted so that he could wake up and watch the GSL Korea vs. the World matches, and eventually be well-rested for our 6:30 a.m. flight to Dallas on Thursday. Good plan. I, however, did the dumb thing and decided to stay up alllll night and when we watched the GSL on their television in the living room, I was passing out. The games were SO SICK though, I'm glad I didn't miss them. KiWi, drewbie, and I cheered for TT1, since he is living at the Root House as well. Unfortunately, he didn't do so hot. KiWiKaKi cheered hard for White-Ra. He doesn't really like MC, but he respects him and says that he is good.... "at abusing all-ins!"
We watched the rest of the games and I finally got to go to sleep close to 9 a.m., 24 hours after I initially hit the road to come down here. I woke up around 1 p.m. to find drewbie and KiWiKaKi mass gaming against each other. Here's some footage from that:
Every game went pretty long, I saw some really impressive moves out of both of them, but KiWi seemed to have the edge. Eventually when CatZ joined us, we decided to grab some groceries, since the fridge was basically empty and we still had 2 full days until flying out to Dallas. Here's one of the few clips from the grocery store:
After we finished shopping, CatZ and I ate at a delicious sub place and I had perhaps one of the best chicken and honey mustard clubs ever. KiWi and I discussed our mutual hatred of vegetables, and we decided we would go see The Lincoln Lawyer after dinner. CatZ was too excited by the ladder resetting though, so he chose not to come along with us and instead played about 60 games in 24 hours. The Lincoln Lawyer was pretty entertaining! There was a good amount of suspense, and really good character development. After the movie though, drewbie admitted he had read the book a few years ago and forgot about it until about halfway through the movie, when he remembered the rest. Oops.
When we got back home, everyone played a few more games and I set up the green screen studio in their living room so I could get some sick interviews. Unfortunately, I learned that the Macbook with Final Cut Express that I brought along is basically horrible for rendering green screen on the go, so I kind of screwed myself over. I did an interview with KiWi that last 10 minutes, and the rendering and exporting took about 3 hours. Blech. And of course it didn't turn out quite to my liking, so I had to go back and do it all over. Oh well. There's essentially no way that I can get all of my footage processed before the event begins Friday. =(
I went to bed around 2 a.m. and slept 'til about 9:15, much better than the night before. KiWi and drewbie were playing Osu and Super Mario RPG... wtf? Turns out our Internet was out so they were forced to play other games. Thankfully, this downtime in training gave us enough time to actually do the green screen interviews that I set up for the previous night. Eventually the Internet kicked back on and there was great joy for all. KiWi and drew trained hard until we stopped for a corn dog lunch, and I did a quick tour of the house:
The rest of the day was pretty uneventful... I was busy editing green screen footage and sitting around bored while it rendered, drewbie fell asleep randomly from like 5-9 p.m., and KiWi played what games he could. CatZ did an interview and had a unique take on tournaments being pressured into inviting Korean players to everything, and how it could have a negative impact as well. Keep an eye out for that in the future, if my dumb computer ever gets it processed. Next blog, I'll be posting from the hotel in Dallas on Thursday night, I'll let you know how everything goes!
