Date: December 28, 2002

Time: sometime in the afternoon to sometime the next day

(I was there from 7:30 p.m. to 5:45 a.m.)

Participants: 11

Girls present against their will: 0

Systems refusing to run OpFlash: 5

Systems Fixed: 5

This was even worse than last time. The evening started off on a geeky note as Shawn paged me through my website to check if I was coming. I was already heading over at the time, and I pulled off the road to find out who was making my watch ring.

We were in the same location as last time, but with 11 systems now instead of 7. The layout was well planned though, and it worked. It was also freezing outside, so there was no need for air conditioning to keep the room livable. I brought the LCD monitor from my Linux box, and with my wireless keyboard/mouse combo, I was pretty much set to game anywhere. I was kind of amused that I was hitting 3DMark scores in the same range as systems with twice my processing power. Dennis' Dell system didn't play well with others. He couldn't join our games, and after troubleshooting all the complicated crap like network cables, connectivity, routing, IP addresses, drivers - it turned out Norton firewall was running. As soon as we destroyed it, he was good to go. We also expressed how disappointed we were in O and BJ for their addiction to digital crack (aka TSO). Though, I did have fun watching BJ piledrive some n00bs in the game. Who knew we'd be saturating our local 100 Base-TX network?

We'd been waiting until 1 a.m. to order pizza, but apparently all the places closed before then. I ended up heading to Super Fresh (or something like that) with KnowZ to buy $50 worth of food. Four pre-cooked, heated chickens, four bags of pizza bites, and two boxes of White Castle burgers later, we returned. Now THAT, I should've taken a picture of. Later on that Sunday, I found that when I grabbed something a certain way with my hand, or pulled a finger a certain way, my wrist would give me a spasm of pain. I must still be gaming n00b.

A few lines from the night, just to make everyone happy:

"I'm doing the black thing."

"He said we wouldn't play CS anymore because we feared his 1337 skills. He actually pronounced 'leet'."

"Yo, we got $50, how much food you giving us?"

"It's running, but we got two errors when starting." "That's good, it's supposed to do that. We want errors."

And, of course:

"Original games do not fade."

In addition to the pictures, this time there's a movie too. It's an MOV, so you'll likely need QuickTime if ya don't have it.

9:50 p.m. - 674 KB The room is set, nearly all the players have arrived. I kept myself busy with WC3 games on B.net during the slow parts.	11:52 p.m. - 699 KB Our goal was to get OpFlash running on everyone's system by midnight. We barely made it.
12:19 a.m. - 673 KB "I'm sorry Mr. Blackbeard, we're low on chairs and this is the only one left." That looks like a comfortable subwoofer. KnowZ does what he has to in order to game.	12:36 a.m. - 683 KB It's on. Most of the time the teams were actually fair. Letting Shawn, O, and Pantz on the same team was a mistake though. At least I finally learned how to use a chopper well - I could actually land the damned thing now. But we quickly found out to stay away from the planes. It always ended badly. Very badly.
12:37 a.m. - 4.3 MB A 320x240 movie of the scene - no sound.	12:47 a.m. - 712 KB Partly because we wanted to conserve power, partly because we just wanted to, we turned off all the lights and just lived off our monitors. Besides, we were driving up Shawn's electric bill enough as it was.
12:49 a.m. - 712 KB A shot without the flash to better show the illumination in the room from the monitors. No flash means it's much harder to take a clear and steady shot, so deal with the blurriness.	12:49 a.m. - 553 KB And one from the other side of the room. It's not like we needed to look at anything other than the monitors anyway. We pretty much kept our asses in these seats for the remainder of the night/morning.