EPThttp://www.sclegacy.com/showthread.php?t=566
Here are my pictures:
http://www.calbearmnm.com/starcraft/gallery/blizzcon05
![[image loading]](http://www.calbearmnm.com/starcraft/albums/blizzcon05_misc/kerriganmnm.jpg)
Here is the enormous journal entry I wrote:
*10/27, Thursday - I left work at 5pm and headed straight home. I got all my stuff together and managed to leave by 5:30pm. I hit rush hour traffic as expected and reached Anton's place by 6:30pm. We headed straight for SoCal right after. We only stopped once or twice for gas and to take a piss. We didn't stop to eat dinner so I'm glad I had a huge lunch thanks to the leftover pasta I had made. We got to LA after midnight. Anton dropped me off at Brian's place (after missing the exit twice because it was a weird small exit). I talked to Henry before I went to sleep, chatted with Brian for a bit, then went to sleep on the small padded mat that Brian's roommate sleeps on when he's there (the roommate was sleeping somewhere else on that day). I used my jacket and cardigan as my blanket. It was all good though SoCal's weather was warm enough to keep me comfy.
*10/28, Friday - BlizzCon Day 1 - I was expecting Anton to pick me up at 9am so we could get to the convention center by 10am which is when the invitational was scheduled to start. He got there at 9:30am because even though it took only 8 minutes to get from Brian's place to Anton's friends place where he stayed at, it took 40 minutes to get to Brian's place that morning because of LA traffic.
We got to the Convention center at 10:30am. Anton got his badge from XG3 at the entrance. After that, we couldn't figure out where to line up. There was one line going towards the convention center from the parking lot side to the Hall A entrance. Apparantly that was the line just to get inside when you had your badge already. There was a heckuva long line going towards the entrance from the opposite side of the arena and that was apparantly for the general public to get their badge. It was kinda confusing. We were heading to line up but we saw Excal and his coworker (Ben I think) and ended up lining up with them all the way in. It took about half an hour to get to the front of the line. I saw my coworkers Nate and Josh as we stood in line but they went ahead to go grab their tickets from someone. When we got there, Excal and his coworker got their tickets but I was denied. I was apparantly on the wrong line. I was told to go to the VIP line where the line was hecka short and anton got mad at me for making him line up for that long when we didn't have to =P. I didn't see the VIP line before!
Gallery: http://www.calbearmnm.com/starcraft/gallery/blizzcon05_misc
We got in and admired the area in all its Blizzardness. We headed straight for the tournament area. We passed by Nate and Josh who were lined up to try out the Warcraft expansion. We got to the tournament area and Mondragon was playing against Nal_Ra. Nal_Ra won. All the Koreans advanced to the next round while all the foreigners got sent to the losers bracket. (The other games were happening simultaneous at the Pro-Gamer Station. I saw Anton talking to Leg and I approached em and joined in. I got Leg to get me pics with Yellow, Nal_Ra and Reach. At around 2pm, Cypressman and i.sky)Syntax showed up. David aka Cypressman helped me get autographs from the KTF guys (Yellow, Nal_Ra, Reach) as they were having lunch at the table outside. At around 2:30pm, another match started. i.sky)Syntax had gone up to Leg saying "wanna fight" pointing towards the joust area. I was gonna watch them go against each other but I wanted to watch Reach vs Mondragon instead =x. Reach won this match.
http://www.calbearmnm.com/starcraft/gallery/blizzcon05_players
Between 3 and 5pm, Anton and I spent our time lining up for the Goody Bags and the BlizzCon store. The lines were hella long (later on they got really short but the store did run out of items so I'm glad I bought them early). We saw Excal lining up for the goody bag line and ended up lining up with him again =x. Cypress had to leave at 5pm. Sadly he couldn't attend the day after. After lining up forever, we toured the booths. I wasn't too interested in them. They were mostly wow stuff. There was newegg.. dont know what they were doing there, penny arcade was selling their merchandise, zboard had a contest the next day. There were card games and book booths, the silent auction and the warcraft board games.
At 5:45pm, we headed upstairs to check out some laptop building presentation but got sidetracked by the press room. Anton managed to sneak inside following me because the guy at the door was distracted. We got inside and grubbed on some really good food. There was chicken, potstickers, egg rolls, rice, veggies, chips, bunch of drinks, and cake. It was so good we were both full afterwards. We also met up with the gosugamers guys Colbi and the wow dood there.
http://www.calbearmnm.com/starcraft/gallery/blizzcon05_press
At 6:30pm, Anton and I were at Hall B for the contests. They had the dance-alike contest first. It was a contest with people trying to do the dances from the world of warcraft game so I was pretty clueless. The girl who wore very little and danced seductively won -_-. I believe her name was Summer. There was another girl who tried to do the same but she wasn't as hot, scantily clad, nor as confident in her dancing so she lost =x. They were showing movie clips from the movie contest (another wow thing) in between these. I thought every movie was not amusing and all of them were boring. I nearly slept through these parts. At 6:50pm, there was a song contest judged by that guy from Korn (he's apparantly a wow guy). All the songs sucked and were wow related and I was not amused with this either.
At 7pm, they had the sound-alike contest. There were two people who went up to do StarCraft sounds. One did the Battlecruiser and I cheered the loudest for him. (Actually this is the only entry I cheered for really). Some girl went up to try and do an infested terran. She sucked ass. I cheered initially when she said she was doing StarCraft units but when I heard her imitation, I buried my face in my hands in embarassment. Most of the contestants were doing a Merloc sound and I believe none of them won. Losers =P jk =x. There were about 30 entries I believe. The winners got an Alienware Laptop.
Gallery: http://www.calbearmnm.com/starcraft/gallery/blizzcon05_contest
At 7:45pm, they started the costume contest. They paraded all 87 entries through the stage area and down the aisle. There was ONE StarCraft entry. It was a Marine. I cheered for him loudest too. His costume was awesome. It looked like one of those marines from StarCraft ghost. He did end up one of the winners. He won an Alienware PC! Anton and I headed to the front area to get a pic with him afterwards. The contests ended at 8:30pm. We wandered around a little bit after and then headed home.
Gallery: http://www.calbearmnm.com/starcraft/gallery/blizzcon05_costumes
Now initially, I was supposed to stay with Jenny at her place in Laguna Hills. But when I called her she was extremely sleepy sounding on the phone. Apparantly she had to wake up at 5am the next day and had forgotten that I was staying over that day -_-. She was asking if anton would drive me to her place instead of her picking me up as we had initially planned but Anton did not want to drive 20 minutes south only to have to drive 40 minutes north after. I told her I would be staying with someone else instead. It wasn't safe for her to drive that sleepy anyway. I called Brian after but I couldn't reach him. He was apparantly at fellowship and wasn't gonna be back til 11pm. I called Tom/Froz after and he said I could stay over. Anton drove me over to Tom's place. It turned out to be different from the place I stayed over at last time. He was no longer at the dorms. He now shared an apartment with Sara. The place was pretty sweet and even more well furnished than my apartment =P. Sara was out at a party. Tom and I ended up talking about BlizzCon for a bit. I showed him all the swag from the goody bag and the store and the pictures from my camera. We watched Ever After on TV after. I talked to Henry for part of the movie then he dozed off. I went back to the movie. Towards the end of the movie, Tom had to go pick Sarah up. After watching Ever After, I switched to Family Guy. Sara and Tom got back. I slept shortly after past 1am. This time I slept on the couch on top of Tom's comforter and had Anton's blanket to cover me up so I was quite comfy.
*10/29, Saturday - BlizzCon Day 2 - I woke up at 8am again as the day before but I didn't get out of the couch until 8:30am. I took a shower and got ready. Anton got to Tom's place by 9:30am. I finished packing up and we left by 9:45am. When we got there, we headed straight for the players area. There was a pvp on screen - Reach vs Nal_Ra but I ended up going to the pro-gamer stations and I was able to watch Yellow vs Nada right behind their computer screens! That was awesome! To have a first person view of YELLOW and NADA! To be able to watch Yellow play seeing his keyboard action and him going on different parts of the screen. I noticed Yellow used the same hotkeys and also did the two handed hotkeying thing to create units out of different hatcheries thing that I do sometimes. ^^ In one of the games where the min patch separated opponent bases, Yellow went fast lurkers but Nada did a crazy marine/bat/medic push of units with his barracks through the minerals and raped Yellows base T_T. Yellow was morphing 2 lurkers while he was being attacked but Nada managed to kill them off. Yellow did end up winning against Nada 2-1 though so I was overjoyed because the others expected Nada to win.
After the match, I told Nada "sign he ji se yo" which is what David taught me to say to get their autographs. I also got a pic with him after. Later I saw Testie and Assem and got their pics and signatures too. Anton and I ended up hanging out with Testie, Assem and Leg. We were pretty much just chatting, standing around and walkign aimlessly. Leg pointed us out to the art area where there was this gosu drawing of a zergling that he wanted. We ended up taking a group picture in that area. After that, we separated and Anton and I headed for the press area. I went to get us food (hot dogs this time). I also took some pics of the press area and also a pic of kerrigan to use as reference for the caricature guy. I smuggled the food out so Anton could eat too. We headed to Hall B to eat.
After, we watched part of the war3 match but I couldn't get myself to interested in it. I headed for the caricature guy and waited and waited and waited for the girl to finish her caricature. After her the other people sitting there went next. They wanted their caricatures too. This kinda sucked because there were two to three other people in line. They were trying to save places so that we wouldnt have to stick around forever. I saved my place after the lady with the baby. I went back to the tournament area and the wc match was ending. Endurance, Anton, Excal and I took our seats toward the front of the stage where I was able to get better pictures. The match was between Nada and Reach. The games were surprisingly short as Reach cheesed nada with dual proxy gates both games on different maps and ended the match under 5 minutes each!
http://www.calbearmnm.com/starcraft/gallery/blizzcon05_onstage
The next game was the final match - Yellow vs Reach. We had front row seats and there was a humungous crowd behind us. Excal, Endurance and I screamed out "Hong Jin-Ho fighting!" at the beginning of every match. Reach tried to cheese Yellow the first game and succeeded T_T. He built pylons and cannons behind yellows first expansion. Yellow cancelled and tried to build at the top part of the map but Reach cannoned that too. Yellow was not able to cancel that one. He again tried to expand at the place he originally expanded to as he killed off the cannons with his lings. He later lost this to speed lots. By this time Reach had a fully functional expansion and was way ahead of Yellow. Yellow put up a good fight but lost.
In the second game, I believe Reach was building corsairs and had a few lots out. There was one partition of the map that he was protecting against a drop. Yellow had hydras and drop researched. He managed to micro the ol and hydras so that the corsairs wouldn't give him too much damage. Finally Yellow was able to sneak hydras into Reach's main base and went straight to attack the robotics facility. Right before that building died, a reaver popped out and the hydras killed the reaver before it did any damage. Reach started building more cannons to defend himself. Yellow proceeded to send more hydras. He dropped a bunch more hydras and later switched to mutas. He ended up winning that game with domination and ease.
The last game was a good one that I totally called having seen Yellow doing the same slow lurk drop technique used on Nada. Reach had blocked off his base with cannons and very well placed buildings so that yellow couldn't go through with an early attack. yellow was able to sneak 3 lings in earlier but they died early on. Reach had one corsair out as he saw Yellow do a slow lurk drop onto reach's expo's cliff and right before the corsair killed off the ol, the lurk was able to drop and get in a good spot to kill off a forming cannon and kill off peons on that expo. At the same time, yellow had dropped lurkers at reach's main at a perfect distance to stay away from cannons but still be able to kill off the nexus. Reach t.t'ed and gged. After Yellow won, I took a bunch of pictures of him. A bunch of other people did too and he was surrounded by people and cameras.
Gallery: http://www.calbearmnm.com/starcraft/gallery/blizzcon05_win
After that, Anton and I headed upstairs so I could get us some food. The food was great again. There were a bunch of pasta dishes. I cut anton and I slices of lasagne and brought it outside so we could eat at Hall B again. After we walked around a bit, I had the cake in mind and just had to get dessert, so we went upstairs again. On our way up, there was a bunch of people going down the escalator coming from apparantly some Penny Arcade seminar thing. The escalator was full of people and all of a sudden it stopped and people grabbed on to the handrails and lunged forward. They apparantly killed the escalator =x. Anton and I headed for the press room where I got us some hella yummy cake. We ate it right outside the press area. We went downstairs after to wander around more. We hung out with Testie, Assem and Leg again and Leg ended up jousting a bit. He dominated the joust area. He was a tank with great balance. People found it quite difficult to knock him off. Testie waited until he was tired before he went up against him. He was knocked out pretty easily too. Assem went up and tried as well but got knocked out with Leg's basic swing swing poke maneuver.
Gallery: http://www.calbearmnm.com/starcraft/gallery/blizzcon05_joust
After that, I headed towards the caricature guy and the group followed me. There were still two people before me. phooey. We walked around a bit around the exhibition area and also towards the store. We walked back to the caricature area. and it was finally my turn. I got the guy to draw me on Kerrigan. It was awesome. The drawing turned out pretty cool. I ran out of memory on my camera so I got the guys to take pics instead. I tipped him $20 bucks for that one. After that, we separated from the players again and Anton and I wasted time in the world of warcraft expansion demo area. I got bored. I tried it and didn't like it at all. I don't see what the fuss is all about. A little after 6:30pm, we dropped off our stuff at Anton's car then headed towards the arena for the concert.
We were again in a humungous line. And again, we saw Excal in line ahead of us =x. Anton just pretty much pushed me towards Excal so we could join them and I realized what had happened only when we were already lined up with them. We went in and had seats at one of the higher sections. We could see the stage clearly but the people were very small and blurry to me. Regardless it turned out to be a great show. They opened up with a hard rock band of Blizzard employees. Samwise, the famous Blizzard artist was the lead singer and the president was on bass. They were really good. They had a bunch of songs that were WOW related and even incorporated the Merloc sounds in them. After that a comedian, Chris Finnegan or something went on. He was ok. He was amusing enough I suppose. He did make me laugh a bit. He just pretty much threw out a bunch of geek jokes out there.
We waited quite a while for The Offspring to come up on stage. I talked to XG3 for a bit in the meanwhile and even talked to Henry on the phone as he walked to Times Square to check out people in costumes n such. The Offspring went on stage and started out with some of the songs I didn't know and ended with their classics that everybody loved. Midway through the show I tried to go to the floor area but apparantly we needed a separate floor pass for that. phooey. It was a great concert overall and I had a lot of fun. We tried to follow Leg/Assem/Testie back into the Main Hall but we were no longer allowed back in. Apparantly they had something for the players after.
On the way back, I saw Joe from LucasArts. Was cool seeing him again. We headed to the car and Anton started driving back home to NorCal with Offspring playing from his cd for the beginning of the ride. I took a nap at around 1am, woke up at 3am to say good night to Henry and stayed awake the rest of the way. We stopped once or twice for gas. Anton managed to stay pretty wide awake throughout the ride. We got to his place at around 4am or so. I headed home and got to my place by around 5am. I crashed shortly after.
*10/30 - I woke up at around 2pm. I was supposed to go home to do laundry and perhaps wash my car but I got too lazy/tired. I had BlizzCon updates in mind so that was what I did instead. I posted all my pictures up and I am attempting to give as full a recap of what happened as possible. I'm updating now so that I could spit out what is fresh in my mind before I lose every single memory I had from the event =P. I'm starting this at 6:30pm. Ended the journal at 8:40pm.
Pity I couldn't go. Are you going to WCG World?
![[image loading]](http://www.calbearmnm.com/starcraft/albums/blizzcon05_players/BlizzCon05_055.jpg)
![[image loading]](http://www.calbearmnm.com/starcraft/albums/blizzcon05_players/BlizzCon05_057.jpg)
