RAAAGE

Well first off, I must apologize for forgetting to inform everyone that I was leaving the morning after PAX to go to Richland until Thursday because I was going on a tour of the Hanford nuclear power plant. I forgot to mention it, but I didn't think it was important because I thought I was leaving on Tuesday until I found out Monday morning that I had an hour to pack and get over to my grandpa's house. I still beat my aunt there and she even lives on the same street as him. So anyway, I came back and checked some facebook news feeds and if you are getting the right feeds, you know why I am angry now, but it's ok because I know it's pretty much entirely my fault and I'll survive I guess. Well I don't want this PAX post to be depressing, so I'm going to go up and get some Captain Crunch and I'll read Sai's post to make me happy again. Brb.

Ok, thanks for bearing with me there. Pictures are coming later today. I still need to get some good pictures of the swag and I also need to touch up some of the ones we took that were of somewhat poor quality. Also, I just remembered that some of you have not seen my new PC yet, so I will be uploading some sweet pictures of that.

Anyway, let's get into the post.

Week leading up to PAX:
I trained on Starcraft with my number one goal in mind: do not get eliminated first round. I had to practice a lot, but with Steven's help primarily and the help of pretty much everyone else, I actually learned some new tricks and improved. Other than all that, I played some Mass Effect and made some money in Guild Wars. Now skip to Friday where the real interesting stuff happens.

Friday:
Each day, I had Davis, Steven, Sai, and Chris in my car and we met Eric and Ben at the Northgate Park and Ride. The first day, I picked up everyone around 10:45 and we took the 11:15 bus to Seattle where we went over to the convention hall to wait in line to get tickets. Sai, Steven, and I did not have tickets, so we had to wait in the line to buy tickets that was almost infinitely shorter than the will call line that Chris and Eric had to wait in. After that, we went to get Subway and Davis kept his tradition alive by getting mad at a food shop owner in the convention hall on the first day. The Subway guy was a total douchebag. Anyway, we got in the big line to get into the Exhibit hall and even though we got there early, Steven and I were still somehow too late to get into the 2v2 Guild Wars tournament which sucked hard because it would have been really cool to do and we stood a good chance of winning something. We both signed up for Rollerbeetle racing, but it's lame and we both totally forgot about them later on. We looked around and found the Blizzard booth where they were letting people try the beta of SC2. The lines were long and remained so until late on the last day, so we did not do it then. We looked around more and found the Brawndo booth tucked away in the corner. Brawndo is actually not bad, despite the disgusting appearance. Sai and I signed up to win a year's supply, but as far as I know, neither of us won it.

We all went to hit up the PC freeplay and discovered that they had Starcraft there along with CS:S, TF2, and CoD4. Chris played CoD4 mostly, but the rest of us got some SC going because as Davis said, "When you're at PAX playing SC, it doesn't feel like you're wasting time." It was fun being on a LAN for SC with little lag and we met a couple new people and even played with a guy who got 3rd in the SC tournament on Sunday (more on that later). After that, we went to console freeplay for some CoD4 at which Steven pwned, but I hung in there. After all that was done, we left around 8:30 because not much was going on and Sai was about to be in trouble with his parents, so we figured we would just leave.

Saturday:
I got everyone an hour earlier so that we would get to PAX at 10:30, just in time to miss the line into the exhibit hall. It worked very well. People actually got up on time (more on that later as well). When we got there, we looked around the exhibit hall for some more freebies, then hit up PC freeplay again before hitting up console freeplay for some CoD2 this time. CoD2 was more balanced than CoD4. After that, I think we did some more PC freeplay and then checked out the exhibit hall again. We didn't do much on Saturday because there were no tournaments or anything interesting we wanted to go to. We did play on our DS's a bit, but not too much. We were in PC freeplay during the WoW tourney, which was pretty annoying. After messing around most of the day, we left around 9:30 knowing that I was coming to pick people up right after 9:00 the next day.

Sunday:
I picked up Davis and he was ready. I skipped Steven because he got himself down there since he had to leave early to celebrate Ashley's birthday. When Davis and I got to Sai's house, I knocked on the door, but no answer. I knocked again, still no answer. I knocked a third time and waited a bit, then a very tired Sai poked his head through the doorway and said "Oh, hold on, I just need to get dressed." The story was pretty much the same with Chris. We also caught him asleep and we were late to the bus stop, but still just on time to PAX since I built extra time into the schedule. We had an hour before the SC tournament started, so we played Starcraft in PC freeplay. At 11:00, we got the tournament going and I already had a moron picked out that we had to beat and that I wanted to outlast, but wound up losing to. More on that later though. I shall now go over the tournament. I was very proud of myself during the tournament. I made it pretty far and I know that some people should have been there in my place, but I definately think that I performed far better than I usually do.

Round 1:
TvP RunningInSquare vs. Darryl on Lost Temple:
Darryl was the only opponent I never saw, but it was ok. I got a good early scout on him and proceeded to harass him with tanks. I eventually discovered he was dark templar rushing me, so when he killed my tanks, I used the remaining vultures and marines to outrun the dark templar to go and screw over his economy. Meanwhile I was getting detection and a bunch of tanks. The battle was ended when I sieged up 5 tanks by his base and killed his only shot at beating me, air units. When his stargate blew up, he gged and left. I was very happy to have accomplished my goal of surviving the first round. When I met up with Davis and Steven, I was shocked to learn that they had not made it. I thought they would have, but it turned out Steven had a pro matchup and Davis got killed by mutalisks I think. Ben showed up soon after me and told us he won and I don't think any of us were surprised, but we sure were happy. So we all watched Sai and he did pretty good and won his first match.

Round 2:
TvP vs. AduIncarnate on Andromeda:
I was particularly proud of this game. It was a quick one. He must have had a noob opponent in the first round. My highlight of the game was definately the part where I had 2 vultures and he had 12 zealots and I killed 10 of the zealots, then chased them back with my still 2 vultures and mined up his base. He didn't really get out after that and I did a 2 tank and 8 vulture drop in the back of his base, almost losing 4 vultures from a dragoon to the dropship, but they all made it and he gged because I killed his expo on the way to his main base. After that, I met up with Davis and Steven and Sai who were watching Ben and I found out that Sai had been zealot rushed or something. After that, we watched a forced turtle protoss win over a zerg player that should have won. The protoss guy just got forced into a corner and not finished off and got 12 carriers.

Round 3:
TvR on Blue Storm:
My guy went random which worried me, but in the pregame lobby, he said "thank's, I'll need it" to GLHF, which instilled confidence in me. I scouted him and he had wound up as terran. I proceeded to take and hold his gas for 5 minutes. He must not have noticed it, but when it was about to die, I cancelled it and got a refund. I tanked up his expansion, lost the units to his bunkers, then tanked up the bunkers, then his base. It was over in about 7 minutes.

Round 4:
TvP vs BndWgnPatriot911 on Colosseum:
This was the guy I wanted to beat because he was so annoying. Due to an odd number of people, my match happened to be the only one going on at the time, so everyone was watching, which really didn't make me nervous, but I sat without my screen facing them just in case. I started out fine, or I would have if he had gone with the strategy that he had been doing every single other game. He tricked me good though and once that shuttle hit me the first time, I never fully recovered and I regrettably lost to the ONE GUY I wanted to beat. I was looking forward to the final four too because I wanted to play Ben because we agreed if we were going to play each other, we would just worker rush for fun. So anyway in the end, I got 5th place and that means that if I had won one more game, I would have gotten a prize. Steven pointed out that that was now the second year in a row that that has happened (last year my Guild Wars thing with the pod finals and I lost that). Regardless, I was proud to have made it that far.

Ben went on to play some really good matches and avenged me by beating BndWgnPatriot911 and then some. Ben went on to win and he got 250 points, which was good, but the good prizes were taken by that point in PAX. He does get something from Blizzard that is a secret, but everyone pretty much assumes it's SC2 beta. So all in all, gratz to Ben.

After that, we hung around the exhibit hall because it was 4:00 and PAX ended at 6. I got to play some SC 2 and I think that there's definately some work to do still, but I am happy to know that they have come this far. After PAX, I just hung out at home and for some reason watched Silence of the Lambs, which was probably not a good idea right before bed.


So that's PAX. Pictures are coming later. Below is my post about the power plant tour, but it is not detailed because I don't know how much I am allowed to say since I couldn't even bring a camera or anything.

We drove down monday morning and met up with my second cousin at her house and we hung out there. The next day, we went to the museum for the power plant in Richland and I got to try the mechanical arm that people used to pick up stuff behind a glass wall so that they were safe from radiation. I learned that I am pretty proficien with a robotic arm. The next day, we went on the tour of the B-Reactor where my grandpa worked and we went to cleanup sites too. A guy at B-reactor actually recognized my grandpa, which was pretty cool. The whole tour was cool even though there were some n00b guides and it was a beastly 5 hours, but it was still cool. The guy sitting in front of us on the bus works there currently and he was very knowledgeable, so we got some cool answers from him of what stuff was. That night, my aunt took all of us to a boozer that was at a winery because one of her friends was singing at it. It turned out to be SMOOTH JAZZ NOOOOO, but luckily I brought my gameboy. Also, the gay waiter was checking me out, which was confirmed by both my aunt and second cousin. He kept trying to get me to try wine, but I did not want to because I really want to win that bet of not trying alcohol without my parent's knowledge until I'm 21. Only 2.5 years left. I am so close. Anyway, it was pretty boring, but I got some good progress done on pokemon. On the way back from the Tri-cities, we stopped by my great aunt's house since it was her birthday and we took her grocery shopping. She also showed me a picture of my great great uncle standing next to the shortest man that you may remember the marking on the wall of from this post. It was pretty cool to see that guy and to see that my family actually knew that guy. I feel sorry that he was killed in a dwarf throwing incident.

Today, I am not up to much. Steven gets his wisdom teeth out soon, which kind of sucks because that means he probably won't be up to much for this weekend, but we should all try to hang out next week and next weekend for sure. For now though, peace out.