The long California entry... or, What Happened When Deanna Followed Team Seattle to B3
Where to begin... Okay... Well, I'm going to img src some pictures in here. They shouldn't be TOO big, so don't kill me. I don't actually really expect anyone to read this whole entry anyway.
Well, on Friday I went to work, and I ducked out around 3:40 to take a bus to the airport. Got there like 4:10, went through security, etc, got Burger King food, went to the gate... met up with![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
saenoda and cls451 and keevon, and eventually keiohki. Despite some fun mixups with people going off to get food, we all boarded the plane successfully. Tanya and Charlie and Allan sat in row 15 and me and Keevon sat behind them. Keevon let me play Zelda on his GBA. That was cool. I named my main character "HI MO" and it was silly. The flight attendant making announcements was REALLY funny. He kept joking about having threesomes with the other flight attendants, and things like "If you mess with the smoke detectors, I will personally come over and tell you to step outside," and when we landed, he was like "Hope you enjoy your stay at SFO, and please refrain from smoking... EVER... AGAIN."
Eventually we got to SFO, got off the plane, andzqfmbg was waiting for us right at the security exit! Whee! So that was kind of cool because we got to see him, and also it meant we didn't have to squeeze 5 people into a rental car. So I-Gene and Allan started driving to RTA... and the rest of us took the AirTrain to the AVIS car rental place, and I went and rented a car. Then I attempted to drive us to RTA from the airport. It was an adventure and a half. The highway wasn't so bad but driving downtown was kinda annoying. I guess I sort of babbled a lot because I was nervous, although I wasn't nearly as nervous as I seemed, I think. Anyway, eventually we got to the Riptide Arcade...
...to find it was closing. WTF? Eventually we managed to get some people to let us in, when we explained "We're those people from Seattle, see."calibemani and some other people were still hanging around playing DDR and stuff. There were tons of free credits on the MAX2 and the BM3. So we played a couple games. In the meantime Lith and Jedi showed up. It was fun to get to play around with free credits and just hang out and talk to a few Cali people, although I don't really know who any of them were nor do I remember what I said. They were generally friendly though, all kind of like "Wow, you guys really came down here, that's so cool!"
Yes, we really came down there.
(From left: Me, Allan, Keevon, Tanya, Charlie, Jedi, Lith. I-Gene took the picture.)
Anyway, so eventually it closed for real, and we met up withazhp and liquidblueslife, since we were staying at Sean's house while in San Francisco. We got directions from him on how to get there and got into cars and drove across the city. That was fun too! Gosh, I love hills! Really I do! Anyway, we got there a tiny bit before Sean and Dezmond got there by bus. Now, man... Sean's parents' house is huge! It's in the city and it's like 2 stories and 5 bedrooms 3 bathrooms or something like that. Absolutely huge. And he has a bazillion consoles and games and stuff. So we sat around hanging out like a highschool slumber party :) We made pizzas and ate ice cream cake and watched PNM tatsujin videos and played IIDX and PNM and Tetris Attack and just lots of random games. Tanya and Charlie and Keevon went to sleep around 1, and I went to sleep around 2, and I think the other guys went to sleep around 4am or something.
Saturday morning... Woke up because it was really light out, around 8. We'd expected to leave around 10 originally, or something like that. I took a shower and changed, and everyone else slowly also got up and got ready for the tournament. We split up into two cars; I drove Keevon and Tanya and Charlie, and I-Gene drove Allan and Sean and Dezmond. There was QUITE an embarrassing moment of me driving across town where I didn't know how to drive over hills, and I'd elaborate, but to be honest I was so freaked out by it that I don't even quite know what happened. Everyone laughed at me, and I think it was probably funny, but I honestly don't know. Anyway, we got there okay, and parked, and went to the arcade, which was full of California people and B3 staffers getting things ready. Lith was, of course, fixing sensors on pads, and Charlie helped people put up the big B3 sign. They moved the MAX2 machine outside and people were warming up on it. (Look! It's Tanya and JSBlade99!) I actually ended up playing a set with Lith, which was cool (There was a huge coin line, and I said "Hey Kevin, who are you playing with?" and he said, "You." And I was like "Really?" and I got to play!) Of course, I sucked, but that doesn't really matter.
I also had an adventure in registering. I was preregistered, and I went up to the counter with Allan and some other guy, and they were immediately noticed and registered and handed papers, and I was just standing there like "Hello?" Eventually I said "Hi, I'm preregistered" and the guy at the counter was like "What?" and I said "For the DDR PA tournament. I'm Deanna. I preregistered a few weeks ago," and he was like "Oh, uh... really? Uh... oh, there you are," and gave me some papers to sign too. It was weird, like on ly 5 females entered anyway. (BTW, THANKS MAPLE!!!!)
After that we wandered around while things got delayed... and more delayed... and more delayed. We took pictures of Alcatraz and the pier, and wandered around trying to talk to people a bit (for example, I was like "Are you Tigger?" to this guy, and then there was this little kid there, he's like 8 years old and has a bunch of Heavy AAA's, which was really scary. And his sister had a ddrgirl.com t-shirt on or something. I dunno, I tried to talk to some of the people like JSB and Ver2 and all. The thing is that I don't really know who most of the California DDR players are, or more like I had no idea what any of them looked like, and since I'm a nobody, it's not like I have any real way to strike up a conversation with them. So I mostly hung out with I-Gene. He pointed out who some of the people were, like Nikari and the cute ponytails, and Chubs and Maple and whoever.
Eventually qualifying got under way... at like 1pm? 2pm? The qualifying songs turned out to be Hyper Eurobeat, La Senorita Virtual, Sync Oni, V Oni, and Mikkeneko Rock. Ugh. Also, they ended up having people qualify one at a time. Jedi was the first person up to qualify, but he wasn't actually there when they called him, so it was like "IS DANCING JEDI HERE? CAN DANCING JEDI COME TO THE STAGE?" and we had to hunt him down. Heh. He got 3 greats on Sync Oni. I waited around for all of the people in our group to qualify, which was done about halfway or 2/3 of the way through all of the qualifying. Lith got 3 greats on Sync Oni, Keevon got 5 greats on Sync Oni, Charlie got 13 greats on Hyper Eurobeat, Tanya got 11 greats on La Senorita Virtual, I don't know what Allan's score was, and I-Gene didn't enter. I did Sync Oni. It was kinda funny because I honestly hadn't decided which song I was going to do until I got up there. Mikkeneko and V Oni were right out... LSV I figured I'd screw up the stomps... Hyper Eurobeat I was getting sick of hearing... and everyone else from Seattle was doing Sync Oni, so I figured I would too! So I get up there and it's like "What song are you doing?" and I go "Errr... I don't know." "Do you need a list?" "Nah. I'll just do Sync Oni." "Okay. What speed?" "Uhhh?? What's its BPM? 167?" "I can check. Yeah. 167." "Uhh, okay. 1.5." So I stood there for a second being nervous, then just decided what the heck, and went ahead and did the song. Apparently I-Gene and Keevon say that I got like, the first 100 steps of the song all Perfects, until it gets up to the hard part in the middle. I seem to recall hearing someone mutter something about "damn Seattle girls" while I was going, but I don't honestly know. Anyway, I finished with like 261/64/1/0/2. Shrug. (EDIT> I saw the B3 spreadsheet, and I actually qualified 32nd out of 44 people, haha!) I only saw two other girls besides me and Tanya qualify. Kayleigh (ddrbot's sister), who did Hyper Eurobeat and FC'ed it but didn't do so great on the PA ratio, and Shayla, who played V Oni and I didn't actually see her score at all. I actually don't think I got to see most of the famous CA people do their qualifiers at all, come to think of it. After Tanya qualified, I bought a B3 t-shirt and went off to get lunch with Allan and I-Gene because it was like 2pm and I was starving.
So we did the touristy thing and went around the pier. I bought some socks in a sock store because they had piano socks. And we went to Chowder's and got chowder bread bowls, which were good but not as good as Ivar's, oddly. And we went back to the car so I could drop off my jacket and t-shirt. And we pondered ice cream but were pretty full so we went back to the tournament again... AND QUALIFYING WAS STILL GOING ON. Most people were sitting down to watch at this point. Of course, the Seattle gang were all hiding out in a Jurassic Park ride, since it muted the sounds from outside.
I hope the Riptide owner never finds this entry.
Qualifying FINALLY ended around 4 or 5pm!!!! I went around trying to talk to some more people because I was bored.skiecx complimented me on my Hello Kitty sneaker thingies, and I was like "Hey, you're the Orange Lounge Radio guy! I listen to OLR all the time at work!" So that was cool. I also met dj_celica, who I'd read some of the posts of on the DDR LJ community. They were about to take a break and look for some costume stuff, so I didn't get to talk to them for very long, but it was cool nonetheless. I also met some people Tanya was hanging out with, although the only one I remember is ShortyNC because he looks EXACTLY like one of my friends from highschool. I took some pictures of various people, and then they started the 16-person round. I'm trying to remember who all made it into that - I'm thinking it was Lith, Jedi, Tigger, Charlie, Keevon, DJ Trunks, Orochi, Ver2, JSB, Tanya, Chubs, Nikari, ShortyNC, Kayoss, TheSE, and uh... someone else.
EnoOn and Milton announce the 16 people for the first round
Orange Lounge Radio covers the event.
They had to play D2R and Vanity Angel for the first round. Ugh. Those are pretty harsh songs, and lot of people did relatively poorly on them. Charlie did really well, getting a combined 20 greats on both of them. Keevon did almost that well (30 combined?) Tigger got 36 greats on D2R alone! I don't remember a lot of the other scores. I sat there talking to Shayla for a while during it. She's really nice, she told me about how wacky it is to be a girl playing DDR in the bay area. I told her how wacky it is to be like the worst DDR player in Seattle. She was like "but you're really good!" and I'm like "no way," and she's like "I saw you do Sync Oni, that was great," and I didn't really know what to say besides "But dude, you did V Oni!". So we just talked about random stuff for a while, like Zelda games and other Bemani and whatnot. Eventually the 16-person round ended so there was another break.
I think this was the point where I got to talk to some other people like Eric and Maple and whoever. I moved all the way up front, and I remember catching Eric's eye like "Hey, you're Eric, right?" and he was like "Yeah, you're Crystal's friend Deanna, right?" Wow! I was surprised because it's like, he's that EnoOn guy I read about on DDRFreak years ago, and he said hi to me! And he turned out to be really awesome, too! Anyway, I was up front for the double elim thing because I wanted to be able to cheer for the Seattle people. And I got out my notebook and started taking notes on it all because I figured it couldn't hurt, and who knew when the matches would actually be posted. DJ Trunks actually turned to me at one point near the end of the whole thing to ask a question about one of the song results, and I showed him the notebook, and he was like "You're really taking notes?" "Yeah." "Can I recruit you for an upcoming tournament?" "Uhh... haha, I'm from Seattle."
Jeremy holds up the 8-person double elim bracket sign.
They made a really big deal over how the initial four matches for double elim were all Seattle vs. California, though. In short:
First round:
Lith (1) vs Ver2 (8): Lith won by 35 (Saints HVY 311-291, Trip Machine Survivor HVY 337-323). Charlie (2) vs. Tigger (7): Tigger won by 10 (Miracle Moon HVY 279/5-280/4, Yozora HVY 258-267).
Jedi (3) vs. Orochi (6): Jedi won by 7 (Pink Rose HVY 240/3-237/6, Dynamite Rave ONI 391/7-387/11).
Keevon (4) vs. DJ Trunks (5): Keevon won by 5 (Heaven is 57 HVY, 279-273, Sexy Planet Oni 288/3-289/2).
Losers 1:
Charlie eliminated Orochi by 3 (Candy* HVY 319/8-314/13, Dynamite Rave SOTA HVY 258-260).
DJ Trunks eliminated Ver2 because Corey had basically just left.
Winners 2:
Lith vs. Keevon: Lith won by 29 (Matsuri Japan HVY 442/5-438/9, Paranoia Survivor Max STD 369-342)
Jedi vs. Tigger: Tigger won by 14 (Gentle Stress HVY 271-284, Captain Jack HVY 336/24-337/23)
Losers 2:
Keevon vs. DJ Trunks: Trunks eliminated Keevon by 4 (Frozen Ray HVY 388/7-387/8, Rhythm&Police HVY 408-413)
At this point the crowd went WILD cheering. I figure it's because Keevon was the first Seattle person to get eliminated. But they were saying a lot of random stuff like "death to bar rapers!" It was kind of scary though. Like how everyone was shouting stuff like "LAKERS LOST *CLAP CLAP CLAP CLAP CLAP*" and Tanya and I would start shouting "TEAM SEATTLE *CLAP CLAP CLAP CLAP CLAP*".
Charlie vs. Jedi: Jedi eliminated Charlie by 4 (Paranoia Rebirth HVY 424/8/1-425/8, Graduation HVY 268/6-271/3)
Winners 3:
Lith vs. Tigger: Lith won by 6 (La Senorita HVY 284/10-281/13, Secret Rendezvous HVY 234-231)
Losers 3:
Jedi vs. Trunks: Jedi eliminated Trunks by 4 (Let's Get Down ONI 260-258, Ever Snow HVY 329/5-327/7)
Losers 4:
Jedi vs. Tigger: Tigger eliminated Jedi by 2 (Super Star HVY, 284/5-286/3, www.BlondeGirl HVY, 238-238 - both AAA)
And the crowd goes wild as there is not only a double AAA but a Cali person wins.
Okay, time to stop for some commentary. Firstly, that last match between Jedi and Tigger was insane. Both of them got all of their greats on the run of 16th notes 2/3 of the way through the song. And Jedi only lost by 2. Then they both got the AAA of Blonde Girl and I swear the entire room erupted as a gazillion people went to take the picture AND to contratulate Tigger on eliminating the only remaining non-Lith "Seattle Person". For the record, Jedi didn't use the bar at all on those songs as far as I remember, so I don't think there was any bar-rape comments. And a whole lot of people posed with the AAA's, it was funny.
Deanna ends up on Stage... Between the Losers 3 and Losers 4 round, they wanted to give Jedi a chance to take a break, so EnoOn got up like "Hey, so who here thinks they are the most mediocre DDR player here?" And of course I raised my hand... as did a lot of people. So he's like "Well, to keep this as a Seattle vs California thing, I'm going to call up Deanna. And for California, I give you, the oldskoolness of oldskool... Loki! Now... what will you be doing? This is mediocre attack." So it turned out what we were doing was trying to get equal perfects, goods, and greats on Paranoia 180 Heavy Reverse Boost Left Hidden. AIEEEE! I was really nervous and totally regretted raising my hand, but there was no backing down :) Oh man. Well, I tried my best. And to my credit, I PASSED THE SONG DESPITE TRYING TO GOOD ATTACK, while Loki failed. Sadly, my good attacking skills suck ass, and I figured I'd just rely on the mods throwing me off enough to get them, so I had 14 goods and Loki had like 61. Whoops.
Then JSBlade challenged EnoOn to Paranoia KCET Mediocre Attack. They did it on like... sudden shuffle dark flat something, I think? It was really much more impressive... JSB had MAD good attack skills, and he actually had less Greats than anything! But he still had more Greats than Eric had goods, so he won. It was pretty wacky.
Between the two Lith-Tigger rounds (which I'll post the scores of in a second) EnoOn also had two fun spontaneous filler things he did. The first was calling up Lil' B and DDRBot and having them perfect attack Be In My Paradise Beginner 1x. It was REALLY funny. They were both being really silly... and the crowd started singing along and waving their arms like cigarette lighters or whatnot. (I have a short video here if you want to see, but I may delete it soon) It was awesome. Then he called up "Two really good improv freestylers"... I don't know who the other guy was, but Lil'B ended up there again. The song ended up being Hyper Eurobeat Light... they were funny as heck... doing lots of random freestyle stuff incoherently. ("WHEN WILL THE SONG END???") And of course, it was better than any freestyle you'll see in Seattle, hehe :) I was really entertained by it of course. And the crowd voted for Lil'B being the better one. Heh. Anyway.
Finals 1:
Lith vs. Tigger
1. Tigger +10 : Sweet Sweet ♥ Magic HVY, 357/11/2/0/2/32 to 367/5/0/0/0/33
2. Tigger +10 : Xenon HVY, 368/7/0/0/0/11 TIE
3. Tigger +13 : Across the Nightmare HVY, 351/21/0/0/0/0 to 354/18/0/0/0/0
4. Tigger +13 : Celebrate Nite ONI, 287/1/0/0/0/2 TIE
5. Tigger +12 : End of the Century HVY, 347/2/0/0/0 to 346/3/0/0/0
SSHM was weird, I think Lith kinda stumbled at one point, but it pretty much lost the match for him because the two are so close in skill. Since this was Lith's first loss, he had to play Tigger a second time for the win.
Finals 2:
Lith vs. Tigger
1. Tigger +1 : MAX300 STD, 364/8/1/0/0/35 to 365/8/0/0/0/35
2. Tigger +3 : Tears HVY, 356/4/0/0/0/6 to 358/2/0/0/0/6
3. Tigger +1 : Genom Screams HVY, 237/1/0/0/0/0 to 235/3/0/0/0/0
4. Lith +3 : Sakura HVY, 430/16/0/0/0/1 to 426/15/4/0/1/1
5. Lith +3 : [RANDOM] Secret Rendezvous STD, 146/0/0/0/0/3 TIE both AAA
Yeah, so Tigger stumbled a little on Sakura. And he did a bunch of weird offbeat steps in the pause of Genom Screams, but it actually threw him off more than it threw Lith off. But, a lot of people were really pissed about the last song... but, the card they got was Random Light, Random Standard, and Random Heavy. Lith eliminated Random Heavy, so Tigger eliminated Random Light, and they ended up playing SR STD. Seriously, there was a LOT of people saying how totally lame it was. And I was vaguely inclined to agree that it was a really anti-climactic ending to such a close tournament. But, eh. That's just the way it went. They handed out prizes, and said there'd be a 30-minute break before freestyle, and... it was like 8:30 at that point! PA was supposed to end at 5:30 or so.
So the others went to get food and I went to say goodbye to people. I made the mistake of saying goodbye toskiecx and he was like "HEY, DEANNA, WHAT DID YOU THINK OF THE TOURNAMENT?" and shoved a microphone in my face. Oh man, I'm so bad at spontaneous speaking AND I was really hoarse from cheering for Team Seattle. And of course Rob's like "Oh, nobody listens to this anyway..." but little did he know that like, a whole bunch of my friends (James, Farren, Robby, god knows who else) were all listening to the broadcast!!! So I babbled a bit about Seattle being cool, and how we have tons of girls who are really good at DDR tech, and how we suck at freestyle, etc. Heh. I'm such a dork. (I want to get a recording of the OLR broadcast though... I should ask about that sometime.) Then I said goodbye to Eric... I'd earlier offered him a ride to SVGL but since he was stuck there to emcee the freestyle competition, he couldn't come with us, but he said to tell Crystal hi and all. :( And I didn't get to say goodbye to Maple or the others because everything was all hectic, oh well.
Tanya and Charlie and Keevon got breadbowls of clam chowder and me and Dezmond got ice cream and then we all left to get the cars and go to SVGL. I got frustrated driving and let Tanya drive us to SVGL, I-Gene was driving Allan and Dezmond in the other car. We got to SVGL around 10pm.
Several hours late to SVGL... We had said we would be hitting SVGL around 7pm. Oops. It was okay though. I got to see a bunch of my friends there!shandrew came down from Palo Alto, and ryani and Carisa and sarahnade, and then I ran into Rem Svarcas playing pinball, I had no idea he'd be there! And some other people from the tournament were there too, and I got to meet crystalj! That was really exciting. Crystal is MAD good at all Bemani games but especially IIDX and DDR. And Andrew and I finally got to play DDR together :) And Ryan and I also played a game of DDR EX together, and I got to session GF9/DM8 with Ryan and Allan...
Also, I got to play IIDX 8th Style! Unfortunately the monitor was REALLY dark, it was REALLY hard to read the scratch line on the left side. So I did a bunch of 7-key autoscratch. It's not a big deal since I was just playing for fun, really. Oh, and eventually we FINALLY rounded up me and Keevon and I-gene for some IIDX session. But since the left was so hard to read I suggested we play on the right... except I forgot that why we do the left scratch and left white key is for the rhythm. I am dumb. So, we played two songs I forget what, and then did MAX300 as our third, which was pretty dumb :) We utterly couldn't figure out what to do with it. It was funny anyway.
Keevon and I recruit I-Gene to sub in for James.
After playing IIDX I think they pretty much started shutting off the power to various machines in the place, so we all went outside. I stood around talking to I-Gene, Crystal, Allan, Andrew, and Dezmond for a while, despite that I kept saying "Ack, I should go to the car before Tanya and Charlie kill me". Andrew and Crystal both work at the same Yahoo campus but had never seen each other before! Anyway, eventually I got back into the car and Tanya drove us back to SF. I don't really remember the ride back except that my head hurt, my stomach hurt, my throat hurt, AND I really had to pee, so it was basically an hour of general discomfort. But, we got back okay, and Sean was there to let us in, and we pretty much all just went to sleep. I-Gene and Allan and Dezmond went to I-Gene's place in San Jose and also stopped at a Safeway and I dunno what else, but they got back a lot later than us.
Sunday in the park... Tanya and Charlie went to Great America on Sunday, but due to various reasons (I felt like crap, Keevon didn't want to spend the money, I-Gene doesn't really do themeparks, etc) they were the only ones to go. So the rest of us slept in and didn't leave until like 11something to get Dezmond back to RTA to run the Beatmania III tournament. I played a bunch of Tetris Attack with Sean and of course I got completely owned. Watching him play is really intimidating, but I think I've begun to pick up a little bit about combo technique, at least.
Our first stop after RTA was to go to Union City. They have a 3rd mix Korean Version 2 machine at the Century 25 theaters! YAAAAAAY! I was SOOOOO HAPPY to play on a 3K2 again! I made Keevon play all the Korean songs with me :) :) :) Like Beautiful 21C and Hogisim and Starian and Kakkai and Gyoung Go and... yeah. Unfortunately I also tried to get him to play Wonderland and somehow his side of the pad got put on Little so it was lame. Whoops. Keevon and I-Gene played a set of "hard" songs and Allan played some 3rd mix Trick songs and I did a set of 2nd mix Maniac stuff... Strictly Business and Hero and whatnot. BOUNCE! I was so happy playing. No bar, no caring about PA, just playing the songs for the love of the game. ♥ 3k2 so much!!!
I-Gene's pictures of Sunday Afternoon!
After playing DDR for an hour or so we headed over to In-And-Out to get lunch, because hey, we were in CA and that's what you're supposed to do. Mmmm, it reminded me of a Steak-and-Shake to be honest. There were no tables indoors so we snagged one outside. The food was pretty good and so was the weather.
Whoa, they have all these WORDS under my fries.
So we headed to an Albertson's for a bit so Keevon could get benadryl, and then got back on the highway and headed down to Milpitas Golfland to hang out and play more Bemani. Milpitas is SO COOL! If they had a IIDX machine, it'd be my ideal place to hang out at. They had DDR Disney, EX, MAX2, and 4th+, also a PPP2, HiphopMania CM2, DMX2, KBM3, GF9, DM8, and I'm probly forgetting something. The GF9/DM8 machines had really ghetto marquees (ie, they still had the GF8/DM7 marquee with papers up over them... I-Gene got some pictures of me on DM8 and Keevon on GF9), and we didn't get them to session together properly, which sucked. But, I passed Mikkeneko Rock Basic (it's kinda tough for a 33!) and I played Momoiro Kataomoi for James's sake, and of course Bayside Baby since it's a great Hysteric Blue song, and Destiny Lovers and whatnot. DM8 is sweet but really difficult! Eek!
Anyway, I played a bunch of doubles on the DDR 4th Plus machine too, and I was kinda sad because 1) I've just gotten sucky at reading the 1x 4th+ framerate and 2) the machine was set at HELLA HIGH DIFFICULTY. I mean, I was failing some songs I used to do really well on - at one point I was doing like Ninzaburo double trick and missed like 3 notes and BOOM I failed. Etc. Even Sung Suk double maniac was suddenly difficult, wtf? I played set with Keevon though and he did all these really hard songs at 1x with no bar! Go Keevon! We played Butterfly Upswing battle and I actually won, probly because I'd seen Battle Mode before and I didn't fail the song. And I finally got Keevon to play Wonderland. He got 10 greats, I got 17. It was fun, but I was feeling pretty worn out by the end of the day.
Someone has watched too much Initial D.
After MGL we drove up to Redwood City to where I-Gene works, and went into his office building to get some water and take a break and whatnot. Tanya and Charlie met up with us there and we transferred stuff between cars and then drove to SFO. We got there really early, like 6pm for our 8:44pm flight. I think we thought the flight was at 8. Oops. We returned the rental car and took the Airtrain to the terminal, and then we went to Burger King/Pizza Hut and ate food and hung out for a while with I-Gene, and then around 7:30 decided whee, let's go through security, etc. We get through security and then two things happen:
1) I run into my friend Todd Turco from college, totally randomly. He had just gotten back from Mexico. How exciting!
2) At the same time, Tanya discovered that she didn't have her keys with her... because Charlie left them in the rental car.
Ugh. So there wasn't really time to run back and get to the AVIS center and ask about the keys. I gave Charlie my AVIS papers, including the car rental info and the AVIS phone number and my receipt and all. He tried calling them but it was busy or something. Shrug. So we went to the gate and waited around for a bit and then began boarding. Keevon decided to switch seats with Allan for some reason (ostensibly to play Monkey Golf) so I basically spent the entire plane ride home listening to Ayu-ro Mix and playing Zelda on Keevon's GBA.
We got back to the Seattle airport and it turned out that CHARLIE LEFT THE AVIS PAPERS ON THE PLANE. WTF. Well, anyway, fortunately Eli showed up and picked me up from the airport and I just was like "whatever" and came home... when I logged into IRC and found the backlog of people listening to Orange Lounge on Saturday. Aieee! And I guess that's the end of my story. Or something. Well, not entirely. AVIS called me on Monday morning to tell me they'd found Tanya's keys. So I guess it's all okay.
So... that was my trip. It was... exciting, interesting, tiring, scary, cool, whatever. I would do it again (Cyber Beat Nation 2, anyone?) if the opportunity presented itself. I did enjoy meeting the Cali people that I met, seeing the good DDRers in action, meeting some people who were basically DDR legends to me before, getting away for the weekend, etc. It was wacky getting to talk to Keevon a lot, I always find out about more random weird crap we have in common. Same for me and I-Gene. It was good to see my other friends at SVGL, even if just for a short period of time. And now I'm going to learn how to be good at Tetris Attack! And I'm so much more psyched about DDR after this trip. I really should go to Cali more often -- it's not like it's that far away and there are seat sales all the time, and it's so pretty there. Just next time I don't think I'll drive at all. :)
Well, on Friday I went to work, and I ducked out around 3:40 to take a bus to the airport. Got there like 4:10, went through security, etc, got Burger King food, went to the gate... met up with
saenoda and cls451 and keevon, and eventually keiohki. Despite some fun mixups with people going off to get food, we all boarded the plane successfully. Tanya and Charlie and Allan sat in row 15 and me and Keevon sat behind them. Keevon let me play Zelda on his GBA. That was cool. I named my main character "HI MO" and it was silly. The flight attendant making announcements was REALLY funny. He kept joking about having threesomes with the other flight attendants, and things like "If you mess with the smoke detectors, I will personally come over and tell you to step outside," and when we landed, he was like "Hope you enjoy your stay at SFO, and please refrain from smoking... EVER... AGAIN."Eventually we got to SFO, got off the plane, and
zqfmbg was waiting for us right at the security exit! Whee! So that was kind of cool because we got to see him, and also it meant we didn't have to squeeze 5 people into a rental car. So I-Gene and Allan started driving to RTA... and the rest of us took the AirTrain to the AVIS car rental place, and I went and rented a car. Then I attempted to drive us to RTA from the airport. It was an adventure and a half. The highway wasn't so bad but driving downtown was kinda annoying. I guess I sort of babbled a lot because I was nervous, although I wasn't nearly as nervous as I seemed, I think. Anyway, eventually we got to the Riptide Arcade......to find it was closing. WTF? Eventually we managed to get some people to let us in, when we explained "We're those people from Seattle, see."
calibemani and some other people were still hanging around playing DDR and stuff. There were tons of free credits on the MAX2 and the BM3. So we played a couple games. In the meantime Lith and Jedi showed up. It was fun to get to play around with free credits and just hang out and talk to a few Cali people, although I don't really know who any of them were nor do I remember what I said. They were generally friendly though, all kind of like "Wow, you guys really came down here, that's so cool!"Yes, we really came down there.
(From left: Me, Allan, Keevon, Tanya, Charlie, Jedi, Lith. I-Gene took the picture.)
Anyway, so eventually it closed for real, and we met up with
azhp and liquidblueslife, since we were staying at Sean's house while in San Francisco. We got directions from him on how to get there and got into cars and drove across the city. That was fun too! Gosh, I love hills! Really I do! Anyway, we got there a tiny bit before Sean and Dezmond got there by bus. Now, man... Sean's parents' house is huge! It's in the city and it's like 2 stories and 5 bedrooms 3 bathrooms or something like that. Absolutely huge. And he has a bazillion consoles and games and stuff. So we sat around hanging out like a highschool slumber party :) We made pizzas and ate ice cream cake and watched PNM tatsujin videos and played IIDX and PNM and Tetris Attack and just lots of random games. Tanya and Charlie and Keevon went to sleep around 1, and I went to sleep around 2, and I think the other guys went to sleep around 4am or something.Saturday morning... Woke up because it was really light out, around 8. We'd expected to leave around 10 originally, or something like that. I took a shower and changed, and everyone else slowly also got up and got ready for the tournament. We split up into two cars; I drove Keevon and Tanya and Charlie, and I-Gene drove Allan and Sean and Dezmond. There was QUITE an embarrassing moment of me driving across town where I didn't know how to drive over hills, and I'd elaborate, but to be honest I was so freaked out by it that I don't even quite know what happened. Everyone laughed at me, and I think it was probably funny, but I honestly don't know. Anyway, we got there okay, and parked, and went to the arcade, which was full of California people and B3 staffers getting things ready. Lith was, of course, fixing sensors on pads, and Charlie helped people put up the big B3 sign. They moved the MAX2 machine outside and people were warming up on it. (Look! It's Tanya and JSBlade99!) I actually ended up playing a set with Lith, which was cool (There was a huge coin line, and I said "Hey Kevin, who are you playing with?" and he said, "You." And I was like "Really?" and I got to play!) Of course, I sucked, but that doesn't really matter.
I also had an adventure in registering. I was preregistered, and I went up to the counter with Allan and some other guy, and they were immediately noticed and registered and handed papers, and I was just standing there like "Hello?" Eventually I said "Hi, I'm preregistered" and the guy at the counter was like "What?" and I said "For the DDR PA tournament. I'm Deanna. I preregistered a few weeks ago," and he was like "Oh, uh... really? Uh... oh, there you are," and gave me some papers to sign too. It was weird, like on ly 5 females entered anyway. (BTW, THANKS MAPLE!!!!)
After that we wandered around while things got delayed... and more delayed... and more delayed. We took pictures of Alcatraz and the pier, and wandered around trying to talk to people a bit (for example, I was like "Are you Tigger?" to this guy, and then there was this little kid there, he's like 8 years old and has a bunch of Heavy AAA's, which was really scary. And his sister had a ddrgirl.com t-shirt on or something. I dunno, I tried to talk to some of the people like JSB and Ver2 and all. The thing is that I don't really know who most of the California DDR players are, or more like I had no idea what any of them looked like, and since I'm a nobody, it's not like I have any real way to strike up a conversation with them. So I mostly hung out with I-Gene. He pointed out who some of the people were, like Nikari and the cute ponytails, and Chubs and Maple and whoever.
Eventually qualifying got under way... at like 1pm? 2pm? The qualifying songs turned out to be Hyper Eurobeat, La Senorita Virtual, Sync Oni, V Oni, and Mikkeneko Rock. Ugh. Also, they ended up having people qualify one at a time. Jedi was the first person up to qualify, but he wasn't actually there when they called him, so it was like "IS DANCING JEDI HERE? CAN DANCING JEDI COME TO THE STAGE?" and we had to hunt him down. Heh. He got 3 greats on Sync Oni. I waited around for all of the people in our group to qualify, which was done about halfway or 2/3 of the way through all of the qualifying. Lith got 3 greats on Sync Oni, Keevon got 5 greats on Sync Oni, Charlie got 13 greats on Hyper Eurobeat, Tanya got 11 greats on La Senorita Virtual, I don't know what Allan's score was, and I-Gene didn't enter. I did Sync Oni. It was kinda funny because I honestly hadn't decided which song I was going to do until I got up there. Mikkeneko and V Oni were right out... LSV I figured I'd screw up the stomps... Hyper Eurobeat I was getting sick of hearing... and everyone else from Seattle was doing Sync Oni, so I figured I would too! So I get up there and it's like "What song are you doing?" and I go "Errr... I don't know." "Do you need a list?" "Nah. I'll just do Sync Oni." "Okay. What speed?" "Uhhh?? What's its BPM? 167?" "I can check. Yeah. 167." "Uhh, okay. 1.5." So I stood there for a second being nervous, then just decided what the heck, and went ahead and did the song. Apparently I-Gene and Keevon say that I got like, the first 100 steps of the song all Perfects, until it gets up to the hard part in the middle. I seem to recall hearing someone mutter something about "damn Seattle girls" while I was going, but I don't honestly know. Anyway, I finished with like 261/64/1/0/2. Shrug. (EDIT> I saw the B3 spreadsheet, and I actually qualified 32nd out of 44 people, haha!) I only saw two other girls besides me and Tanya qualify. Kayleigh (ddrbot's sister), who did Hyper Eurobeat and FC'ed it but didn't do so great on the PA ratio, and Shayla, who played V Oni and I didn't actually see her score at all. I actually don't think I got to see most of the famous CA people do their qualifiers at all, come to think of it. After Tanya qualified, I bought a B3 t-shirt and went off to get lunch with Allan and I-Gene because it was like 2pm and I was starving.
So we did the touristy thing and went around the pier. I bought some socks in a sock store because they had piano socks. And we went to Chowder's and got chowder bread bowls, which were good but not as good as Ivar's, oddly. And we went back to the car so I could drop off my jacket and t-shirt. And we pondered ice cream but were pretty full so we went back to the tournament again... AND QUALIFYING WAS STILL GOING ON. Most people were sitting down to watch at this point. Of course, the Seattle gang were all hiding out in a Jurassic Park ride, since it muted the sounds from outside.
I hope the Riptide owner never finds this entry.
Qualifying FINALLY ended around 4 or 5pm!!!! I went around trying to talk to some more people because I was bored.
skiecx complimented me on my Hello Kitty sneaker thingies, and I was like "Hey, you're the Orange Lounge Radio guy! I listen to OLR all the time at work!" So that was cool. I also met dj_celica, who I'd read some of the posts of on the DDR LJ community. They were about to take a break and look for some costume stuff, so I didn't get to talk to them for very long, but it was cool nonetheless. I also met some people Tanya was hanging out with, although the only one I remember is ShortyNC because he looks EXACTLY like one of my friends from highschool. I took some pictures of various people, and then they started the 16-person round. I'm trying to remember who all made it into that - I'm thinking it was Lith, Jedi, Tigger, Charlie, Keevon, DJ Trunks, Orochi, Ver2, JSB, Tanya, Chubs, Nikari, ShortyNC, Kayoss, TheSE, and uh... someone else. EnoOn and Milton announce the 16 people for the first round
Orange Lounge Radio covers the event.
They had to play D2R and Vanity Angel for the first round. Ugh. Those are pretty harsh songs, and lot of people did relatively poorly on them. Charlie did really well, getting a combined 20 greats on both of them. Keevon did almost that well (30 combined?) Tigger got 36 greats on D2R alone! I don't remember a lot of the other scores. I sat there talking to Shayla for a while during it. She's really nice, she told me about how wacky it is to be a girl playing DDR in the bay area. I told her how wacky it is to be like the worst DDR player in Seattle. She was like "but you're really good!" and I'm like "no way," and she's like "I saw you do Sync Oni, that was great," and I didn't really know what to say besides "But dude, you did V Oni!". So we just talked about random stuff for a while, like Zelda games and other Bemani and whatnot. Eventually the 16-person round ended so there was another break.
I think this was the point where I got to talk to some other people like Eric and Maple and whoever. I moved all the way up front, and I remember catching Eric's eye like "Hey, you're Eric, right?" and he was like "Yeah, you're Crystal's friend Deanna, right?" Wow! I was surprised because it's like, he's that EnoOn guy I read about on DDRFreak years ago, and he said hi to me! And he turned out to be really awesome, too! Anyway, I was up front for the double elim thing because I wanted to be able to cheer for the Seattle people. And I got out my notebook and started taking notes on it all because I figured it couldn't hurt, and who knew when the matches would actually be posted. DJ Trunks actually turned to me at one point near the end of the whole thing to ask a question about one of the song results, and I showed him the notebook, and he was like "You're really taking notes?" "Yeah." "Can I recruit you for an upcoming tournament?" "Uhh... haha, I'm from Seattle."
Jeremy holds up the 8-person double elim bracket sign.
They made a really big deal over how the initial four matches for double elim were all Seattle vs. California, though. In short:
First round:
Lith (1) vs Ver2 (8): Lith won by 35 (Saints HVY 311-291, Trip Machine Survivor HVY 337-323). Charlie (2) vs. Tigger (7): Tigger won by 10 (Miracle Moon HVY 279/5-280/4, Yozora HVY 258-267).
Jedi (3) vs. Orochi (6): Jedi won by 7 (Pink Rose HVY 240/3-237/6, Dynamite Rave ONI 391/7-387/11).
Keevon (4) vs. DJ Trunks (5): Keevon won by 5 (Heaven is 57 HVY, 279-273, Sexy Planet Oni 288/3-289/2).
Losers 1:
Charlie eliminated Orochi by 3 (Candy* HVY 319/8-314/13, Dynamite Rave SOTA HVY 258-260).
DJ Trunks eliminated Ver2 because Corey had basically just left.
Winners 2:
Lith vs. Keevon: Lith won by 29 (Matsuri Japan HVY 442/5-438/9, Paranoia Survivor Max STD 369-342)
Jedi vs. Tigger: Tigger won by 14 (Gentle Stress HVY 271-284, Captain Jack HVY 336/24-337/23)
Losers 2:
Keevon vs. DJ Trunks: Trunks eliminated Keevon by 4 (Frozen Ray HVY 388/7-387/8, Rhythm&Police HVY 408-413)
At this point the crowd went WILD cheering. I figure it's because Keevon was the first Seattle person to get eliminated. But they were saying a lot of random stuff like "death to bar rapers!" It was kind of scary though. Like how everyone was shouting stuff like "LAKERS LOST *CLAP CLAP CLAP CLAP CLAP*" and Tanya and I would start shouting "TEAM SEATTLE *CLAP CLAP CLAP CLAP CLAP*".
Charlie vs. Jedi: Jedi eliminated Charlie by 4 (Paranoia Rebirth HVY 424/8/1-425/8, Graduation HVY 268/6-271/3)
Winners 3:
Lith vs. Tigger: Lith won by 6 (La Senorita HVY 284/10-281/13, Secret Rendezvous HVY 234-231)
Losers 3:
Jedi vs. Trunks: Jedi eliminated Trunks by 4 (Let's Get Down ONI 260-258, Ever Snow HVY 329/5-327/7)
Losers 4:
Jedi vs. Tigger: Tigger eliminated Jedi by 2 (Super Star HVY, 284/5-286/3, www.BlondeGirl HVY, 238-238 - both AAA)
And the crowd goes wild as there is not only a double AAA but a Cali person wins.
Okay, time to stop for some commentary. Firstly, that last match between Jedi and Tigger was insane. Both of them got all of their greats on the run of 16th notes 2/3 of the way through the song. And Jedi only lost by 2. Then they both got the AAA of Blonde Girl and I swear the entire room erupted as a gazillion people went to take the picture AND to contratulate Tigger on eliminating the only remaining non-Lith "Seattle Person". For the record, Jedi didn't use the bar at all on those songs as far as I remember, so I don't think there was any bar-rape comments. And a whole lot of people posed with the AAA's, it was funny.
Deanna ends up on Stage... Between the Losers 3 and Losers 4 round, they wanted to give Jedi a chance to take a break, so EnoOn got up like "Hey, so who here thinks they are the most mediocre DDR player here?" And of course I raised my hand... as did a lot of people. So he's like "Well, to keep this as a Seattle vs California thing, I'm going to call up Deanna. And for California, I give you, the oldskoolness of oldskool... Loki! Now... what will you be doing? This is mediocre attack." So it turned out what we were doing was trying to get equal perfects, goods, and greats on Paranoia 180 Heavy Reverse Boost Left Hidden. AIEEEE! I was really nervous and totally regretted raising my hand, but there was no backing down :) Oh man. Well, I tried my best. And to my credit, I PASSED THE SONG DESPITE TRYING TO GOOD ATTACK, while Loki failed. Sadly, my good attacking skills suck ass, and I figured I'd just rely on the mods throwing me off enough to get them, so I had 14 goods and Loki had like 61. Whoops.
Then JSBlade challenged EnoOn to Paranoia KCET Mediocre Attack. They did it on like... sudden shuffle dark flat something, I think? It was really much more impressive... JSB had MAD good attack skills, and he actually had less Greats than anything! But he still had more Greats than Eric had goods, so he won. It was pretty wacky.
Between the two Lith-Tigger rounds (which I'll post the scores of in a second) EnoOn also had two fun spontaneous filler things he did. The first was calling up Lil' B and DDRBot and having them perfect attack Be In My Paradise Beginner 1x. It was REALLY funny. They were both being really silly... and the crowd started singing along and waving their arms like cigarette lighters or whatnot. (I have a short video here if you want to see, but I may delete it soon) It was awesome. Then he called up "Two really good improv freestylers"... I don't know who the other guy was, but Lil'B ended up there again. The song ended up being Hyper Eurobeat Light... they were funny as heck... doing lots of random freestyle stuff incoherently. ("WHEN WILL THE SONG END???") And of course, it was better than any freestyle you'll see in Seattle, hehe :) I was really entertained by it of course. And the crowd voted for Lil'B being the better one. Heh. Anyway.
Finals 1:
Lith vs. Tigger
1. Tigger +10 : Sweet Sweet ♥ Magic HVY, 357/11/2/0/2/32 to 367/5/0/0/0/33
2. Tigger +10 : Xenon HVY, 368/7/0/0/0/11 TIE
3. Tigger +13 : Across the Nightmare HVY, 351/21/0/0/0/0 to 354/18/0/0/0/0
4. Tigger +13 : Celebrate Nite ONI, 287/1/0/0/0/2 TIE
5. Tigger +12 : End of the Century HVY, 347/2/0/0/0 to 346/3/0/0/0
SSHM was weird, I think Lith kinda stumbled at one point, but it pretty much lost the match for him because the two are so close in skill. Since this was Lith's first loss, he had to play Tigger a second time for the win.
Finals 2:
Lith vs. Tigger
1. Tigger +1 : MAX300 STD, 364/8/1/0/0/35 to 365/8/0/0/0/35
2. Tigger +3 : Tears HVY, 356/4/0/0/0/6 to 358/2/0/0/0/6
3. Tigger +1 : Genom Screams HVY, 237/1/0/0/0/0 to 235/3/0/0/0/0
4. Lith +3 : Sakura HVY, 430/16/0/0/0/1 to 426/15/4/0/1/1
5. Lith +3 : [RANDOM] Secret Rendezvous STD, 146/0/0/0/0/3 TIE both AAA
Yeah, so Tigger stumbled a little on Sakura. And he did a bunch of weird offbeat steps in the pause of Genom Screams, but it actually threw him off more than it threw Lith off. But, a lot of people were really pissed about the last song... but, the card they got was Random Light, Random Standard, and Random Heavy. Lith eliminated Random Heavy, so Tigger eliminated Random Light, and they ended up playing SR STD. Seriously, there was a LOT of people saying how totally lame it was. And I was vaguely inclined to agree that it was a really anti-climactic ending to such a close tournament. But, eh. That's just the way it went. They handed out prizes, and said there'd be a 30-minute break before freestyle, and... it was like 8:30 at that point! PA was supposed to end at 5:30 or so.
So the others went to get food and I went to say goodbye to people. I made the mistake of saying goodbye to
skiecx and he was like "HEY, DEANNA, WHAT DID YOU THINK OF THE TOURNAMENT?" and shoved a microphone in my face. Oh man, I'm so bad at spontaneous speaking AND I was really hoarse from cheering for Team Seattle. And of course Rob's like "Oh, nobody listens to this anyway..." but little did he know that like, a whole bunch of my friends (James, Farren, Robby, god knows who else) were all listening to the broadcast!!! So I babbled a bit about Seattle being cool, and how we have tons of girls who are really good at DDR tech, and how we suck at freestyle, etc. Heh. I'm such a dork. (I want to get a recording of the OLR broadcast though... I should ask about that sometime.) Then I said goodbye to Eric... I'd earlier offered him a ride to SVGL but since he was stuck there to emcee the freestyle competition, he couldn't come with us, but he said to tell Crystal hi and all. :( And I didn't get to say goodbye to Maple or the others because everything was all hectic, oh well.Tanya and Charlie and Keevon got breadbowls of clam chowder and me and Dezmond got ice cream and then we all left to get the cars and go to SVGL. I got frustrated driving and let Tanya drive us to SVGL, I-Gene was driving Allan and Dezmond in the other car. We got to SVGL around 10pm.
Several hours late to SVGL... We had said we would be hitting SVGL around 7pm. Oops. It was okay though. I got to see a bunch of my friends there!
shandrew came down from Palo Alto, and ryani and Carisa and sarahnade, and then I ran into Rem Svarcas playing pinball, I had no idea he'd be there! And some other people from the tournament were there too, and I got to meet crystalj! That was really exciting. Crystal is MAD good at all Bemani games but especially IIDX and DDR. And Andrew and I finally got to play DDR together :) And Ryan and I also played a game of DDR EX together, and I got to session GF9/DM8 with Ryan and Allan...Also, I got to play IIDX 8th Style! Unfortunately the monitor was REALLY dark, it was REALLY hard to read the scratch line on the left side. So I did a bunch of 7-key autoscratch. It's not a big deal since I was just playing for fun, really. Oh, and eventually we FINALLY rounded up me and Keevon and I-gene for some IIDX session. But since the left was so hard to read I suggested we play on the right... except I forgot that why we do the left scratch and left white key is for the rhythm. I am dumb. So, we played two songs I forget what, and then did MAX300 as our third, which was pretty dumb :) We utterly couldn't figure out what to do with it. It was funny anyway.
Keevon and I recruit I-Gene to sub in for James.
After playing IIDX I think they pretty much started shutting off the power to various machines in the place, so we all went outside. I stood around talking to I-Gene, Crystal, Allan, Andrew, and Dezmond for a while, despite that I kept saying "Ack, I should go to the car before Tanya and Charlie kill me". Andrew and Crystal both work at the same Yahoo campus but had never seen each other before! Anyway, eventually I got back into the car and Tanya drove us back to SF. I don't really remember the ride back except that my head hurt, my stomach hurt, my throat hurt, AND I really had to pee, so it was basically an hour of general discomfort. But, we got back okay, and Sean was there to let us in, and we pretty much all just went to sleep. I-Gene and Allan and Dezmond went to I-Gene's place in San Jose and also stopped at a Safeway and I dunno what else, but they got back a lot later than us.
Sunday in the park... Tanya and Charlie went to Great America on Sunday, but due to various reasons (I felt like crap, Keevon didn't want to spend the money, I-Gene doesn't really do themeparks, etc) they were the only ones to go. So the rest of us slept in and didn't leave until like 11something to get Dezmond back to RTA to run the Beatmania III tournament. I played a bunch of Tetris Attack with Sean and of course I got completely owned. Watching him play is really intimidating, but I think I've begun to pick up a little bit about combo technique, at least.
Our first stop after RTA was to go to Union City. They have a 3rd mix Korean Version 2 machine at the Century 25 theaters! YAAAAAAY! I was SOOOOO HAPPY to play on a 3K2 again! I made Keevon play all the Korean songs with me :) :) :) Like Beautiful 21C and Hogisim and Starian and Kakkai and Gyoung Go and... yeah. Unfortunately I also tried to get him to play Wonderland and somehow his side of the pad got put on Little so it was lame. Whoops. Keevon and I-Gene played a set of "hard" songs and Allan played some 3rd mix Trick songs and I did a set of 2nd mix Maniac stuff... Strictly Business and Hero and whatnot. BOUNCE! I was so happy playing. No bar, no caring about PA, just playing the songs for the love of the game. ♥ 3k2 so much!!!
I-Gene's pictures of Sunday Afternoon!
After playing DDR for an hour or so we headed over to In-And-Out to get lunch, because hey, we were in CA and that's what you're supposed to do. Mmmm, it reminded me of a Steak-and-Shake to be honest. There were no tables indoors so we snagged one outside. The food was pretty good and so was the weather.
Whoa, they have all these WORDS under my fries.
So we headed to an Albertson's for a bit so Keevon could get benadryl, and then got back on the highway and headed down to Milpitas Golfland to hang out and play more Bemani. Milpitas is SO COOL! If they had a IIDX machine, it'd be my ideal place to hang out at. They had DDR Disney, EX, MAX2, and 4th+, also a PPP2, HiphopMania CM2, DMX2, KBM3, GF9, DM8, and I'm probly forgetting something. The GF9/DM8 machines had really ghetto marquees (ie, they still had the GF8/DM7 marquee with papers up over them... I-Gene got some pictures of me on DM8 and Keevon on GF9), and we didn't get them to session together properly, which sucked. But, I passed Mikkeneko Rock Basic (it's kinda tough for a 33!) and I played Momoiro Kataomoi for James's sake, and of course Bayside Baby since it's a great Hysteric Blue song, and Destiny Lovers and whatnot. DM8 is sweet but really difficult! Eek!
Anyway, I played a bunch of doubles on the DDR 4th Plus machine too, and I was kinda sad because 1) I've just gotten sucky at reading the 1x 4th+ framerate and 2) the machine was set at HELLA HIGH DIFFICULTY. I mean, I was failing some songs I used to do really well on - at one point I was doing like Ninzaburo double trick and missed like 3 notes and BOOM I failed. Etc. Even Sung Suk double maniac was suddenly difficult, wtf? I played set with Keevon though and he did all these really hard songs at 1x with no bar! Go Keevon! We played Butterfly Upswing battle and I actually won, probly because I'd seen Battle Mode before and I didn't fail the song. And I finally got Keevon to play Wonderland. He got 10 greats, I got 17. It was fun, but I was feeling pretty worn out by the end of the day.
Someone has watched too much Initial D.
After MGL we drove up to Redwood City to where I-Gene works, and went into his office building to get some water and take a break and whatnot. Tanya and Charlie met up with us there and we transferred stuff between cars and then drove to SFO. We got there really early, like 6pm for our 8:44pm flight. I think we thought the flight was at 8. Oops. We returned the rental car and took the Airtrain to the terminal, and then we went to Burger King/Pizza Hut and ate food and hung out for a while with I-Gene, and then around 7:30 decided whee, let's go through security, etc. We get through security and then two things happen:
1) I run into my friend Todd Turco from college, totally randomly. He had just gotten back from Mexico. How exciting!
2) At the same time, Tanya discovered that she didn't have her keys with her... because Charlie left them in the rental car.
Ugh. So there wasn't really time to run back and get to the AVIS center and ask about the keys. I gave Charlie my AVIS papers, including the car rental info and the AVIS phone number and my receipt and all. He tried calling them but it was busy or something. Shrug. So we went to the gate and waited around for a bit and then began boarding. Keevon decided to switch seats with Allan for some reason (ostensibly to play Monkey Golf) so I basically spent the entire plane ride home listening to Ayu-ro Mix and playing Zelda on Keevon's GBA.
We got back to the Seattle airport and it turned out that CHARLIE LEFT THE AVIS PAPERS ON THE PLANE. WTF. Well, anyway, fortunately Eli showed up and picked me up from the airport and I just was like "whatever" and came home... when I logged into IRC and found the backlog of people listening to Orange Lounge on Saturday. Aieee! And I guess that's the end of my story. Or something. Well, not entirely. AVIS called me on Monday morning to tell me they'd found Tanya's keys. So I guess it's all okay.
So... that was my trip. It was... exciting, interesting, tiring, scary, cool, whatever. I would do it again (Cyber Beat Nation 2, anyone?) if the opportunity presented itself. I did enjoy meeting the Cali people that I met, seeing the good DDRers in action, meeting some people who were basically DDR legends to me before, getting away for the weekend, etc. It was wacky getting to talk to Keevon a lot, I always find out about more random weird crap we have in common. Same for me and I-Gene. It was good to see my other friends at SVGL, even if just for a short period of time. And now I'm going to learn how to be good at Tetris Attack! And I'm so much more psyched about DDR after this trip. I really should go to Cali more often -- it's not like it's that far away and there are seat sales all the time, and it's so pretty there. Just next time I don't think I'll drive at all. :)
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