Let's Groove 3... or Be In My Paradise Bowling Lanes
So Saturday started out way early when I woke up to pick ![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
crackoon and Nemesis up at UW and head down to Tacoma. I got them at like 9:50. We got tO Paradise around 10:40. Most people were already there. (I was all happy and ran up to hug diskozombie and in the process tripped over the rope roping off the DDR machine and nearly fell on my face.) The tournament turnout wasn't particularly stellar; in the end I believe 27 people actually entered, and then maybe like 5-10 other people showed up to cheer/watch. A few of us got practice rounds - I went up with saenoda and totally flubbed Blonde Girl, which did NOT bode well for the day. Oh well. Anyway, so...qualifying got under way pretty much on time and was pretty much done within an hour or so. EOTC Heavy sucks ass. Ray and I qualified together and we pretty much did EXACTLY the same, like 100-odd greats, a few goods and a miss. So we ended up qualifying 21st and 22nd.
There were some tiebreakers in the seeding - everyone who tied had to play Living in America Heavy. I forget exactly which people tie broke - Tanya did, and Warren and Clint did, and Keevon and Lith did, and Jedi and Dyaus... I only remember that because Jedi got all perfects but no freezes so it wasn't even an AA. Whereas Kevin and Kevin played it with Freezes and so Lith AAA'ed it. (Tanya had one great on the first step, too). After tiebreakers, the first round immediately got underway. I don't remember much of it. For the most part it all went according to the seeding except that Pete beat Clint and Dianna won her round.
As I mentioned, my round was a LOT closer than I would have liked. I came in expecting to lose the first round, but I expected to lose by a LOT to a really good player, given how bad I am at EOTC. So instead I went up against this "Pacman" kid who, to his credit, got some generally good PA scores, but seriously... I think he must have been Zalf's little brother or something because Zalf came up to me like "Are you Deanna? You have to SCHOOL this brat, okay?" The first round was 5-6 feet. So I had worked on Be In My Paradise Heavy as my 6-footer, and had it down to 13 greats on Friday night. So I picked it and could immediately tell it was a good choice as he was like "WTF?" I did worse than I ever do on it, but it's okay, he did 4 greats worse than I did, so Yay! I won! Then he picked Legend of Max Light, which is also 6 feet, and of course I never play LOMAX. So I lost by quite a bit. Our tiebreakers... I forget the other two choices but we went with Butterfly Heavy. I was doing pretty well for 3/4 of the song and I seriously got like 5 greats in the last 10 steps.... and I lost 13-12 :( I guess I did accomplish my goal of winning Be In My Paradise, at least... ALSO I guess I'm cool for getting to play the slowest song in the game and the fastest song in the game in the same match.
(I'm not sure whether I'll keep the following paragraph in a public entry.)
Still, I was fairly crushed by this for a bit... like I went out to the lobby to collect my thoughts about it because I was so confused, I really wasn't expecting it to be so close. And a few minutes later a whole bunch of other people came out to the lobby to play cards and stuff... and I dunno, James sits down next to me like "THAT WAS SO CLOSE. I CAN'T BELIEVE YOU LOST BY ONE GREAT." And I replied, "Yeah... if I think about it any more I'm going to cry." Except as I started to say that, I realized I was crying... so I wasn't sure what to do about it so I ran outside. And I started seriously crying. I don't know why I felt so awful. It's like, I don't know, no matter how much I improve it's never going to be good enough.. shrug. After a while I realized I was being a big dork and I went inside to try to hang out with people and cheer up. And it mostly worked pretty well, I think I stopped faking smiles within about 10-15 minutes and was genuinely smiling again.
Okay, so the rest of the first round was fairly uneventful, I watched most of the matches after mine... James totally beat Allan, Ray lost to Zalf (he wanted to play B2UOG Heavy but since it was a 7, he picked B2U normal Heavy and it was pretty bad), and Pete and Clint played each other and it was close but Pete won. Then after that they just dived immediately into the rest of the matches. Somehow I ended up scorekeeping against after Natalia left, and... just kind of never gave up the clipboard I guess. Clint ended up with the other clipboard after one of Dianna's rounds I think and he also kept it for the whole day, so we were the scorekeepers for the majority of the tournament. He's also left-handed, which is cool - I don't think there are that many other lefties in the DDR community (laurii and arsenic44?). There were a few sensor issues again, several people got random unexpected misses on the 2P side, but they were largely irreproduceable, eventually most people agreed that the misses mostly occurred from people grazing one of the arrows, really, and that one sensor WAS a little broken and it got replaced.
So the rest of the day I pretty much spent watching matches, writing down scores, occasionally chatting with people, cheering for people (I felt a little weird as scorekeeper cheering for people, but it's not like I had volunteered for the position or anything, nor were we "judges"), sometimes taking pictures, etc. Everything moved fairly smoothly and there weren't really any major breaks, and somehow it didn't really matter to me that I was sitting there for like 6 hours or whatever. Another cool thing is that Paradise was largely smoke-free, so it wasn't so bad to hang out in there. I didn't really get to play much Beatmania, only like one game withcheesethrower right after I lost my match... and no percussion freaks, though I brought my drumsticks. Hmm. And Pixxiy and her crowd were being really, REALLY super-loud for most of the time, but I pretty much just ignored them. Anyway, a whole lot of people came and sat down next to me at various points during the day so I got to have a couple pretty interesting conversations, which was cool.
"Keevon, how do you have a Team Seattle T-shirt?"
"Oh, it's Foy's."
"Haha, make sure you get a lot of sweat on it then, okay?"
Memorable matches... well, let's see. Crackoon and Shakespeare had the most exciting match I think - Jeff picked Lovin' You, which James had never seen before but he managed to get 11 on it, and Jeff got like 13 or something. Then James picked La Senorita Virtual, and they BOTH got 8 greats on it and tied! It was so funny because both of them were like "I thought I had you TOTALLY beaten!" Then they played DXY as a tiebreaker, and James lost by like 2, and then their NEXT tiebreaker ended up being Gamelan de Couple and I think Jeff stumbled or something, and James won. It was a really tough match! I also remember that White Lovers was the tiebreaker in one of James's other matches and he got 3 on it :O (My best is 11 and the guy he was up against got 11...) Lessee, Waka Laka and Xenon and Sexy Planet Oni got played a lot, and Afronova a few times... Keevon got 3 on Xenon though, and Lith got like 2 on Xenon at another point... and I think he also got like 2 on Afronova! Oh yeah, and Keevon picked Twilight Zone on Lith and Lith AAA'ed it :) Lith and Keevon went up against each other twice, and though Lith won both matches, Keevon won a few songs against him and it was seriously close in most cases. Jerrad also did some AMAZING things, like he ended up eliminating Jedi, and I think it was in that round that he managed to get 5 greats on V Oni, it was INSANE. Jedi got like 8. Jerrad also got 16 greats on Vanity Angel at one point - I remember remarking "Dude, you would have smoked almost EVERYONE at B3 with scores like that!" James did manage to beat Jedi with Paranoia Survivor Max STD, that was pretty exciting. And Pete beat Keevon on one song like 16 to 16 and a boo. Laura also got some really good scores, even though I think she lost both of her elimination matches, I mean she pretty much sightread Hyper Offbeat and got like 30 on it, and she SDG'ed some other song though I'm forgetting what. Tanya AAA'ed some song against Natalia, I can't even remember what song it was now. Keevon and Jerrad's final match was kinda sad though because Jerrad rolled his ankle on Drop Out and then lost the next two songs - he wasn't in his best playing condition and that kinda sucked, but at least he got 3rd place. Oh yeah, and Pete vs. Carl was kinda weird because they played Miracle Moon and Carl got a miss on the pad and he pretty much stopped playing, and in the end Pete had 10 greats and Carl had 26 and a bunch of misses and other crap, so we were like "dude, you can't just give up like that," which kinda sucked, but oh well. Tanya had some pad problems during her match with Dianna like that too (11g to 9g and 2 misses on WWRY). Jerrad got a bunch of boos on KCET Standard, but they were all during stomps and he still won the song, so it was no big deal. It was so cool because he decided not to use the bar until like, the 8 and 9 foot rounds! There were quite a few normal bar-users that laid off it for a while, actually, which was kinda cool. Not that I can really talk, I ended up holding onto it during EOTC and LOMAX, but still.
Yeah, so anyway, aside from scores, it was fun. They raffled off a 5th mix marquee and a 7th mix marquee, and James got the 7th mix one, heh. And then the three winners got money prizes and long distance prizes (Pete's company contributed them as sponsors). Oh yeah, so umm
1. Lith (aka "The Usual")
2. Keevon! (yet again! except this time nobody was surprised.)
3. Jerrad (yay!)
4. Dyaus (a really nice guy and scary tech player)
5/6. Jedi (He seems to always place 5th in LG tournaments?)
5/6. Crackoon (YEAH GO JAMES! I TOLD YOU YOU'D BE IN THE TOP 8!!!!)
7/8. Shakespeare (eliminated by Crackoon, but MAN was that a close match)
7/8. BemaniFreak (forced to play Waka Laka a billion times, hehe)
Laura sang Love Shine on the DDR stage between the Keevon-Jerrad match and the final Keevon-Lith match. Which was a nice CONCISE way to bring back the karaoke feature of LG2 but not take a billion years. And after that final match Keevon and Lith played PSMO as an exhibition, heh, and then Dyaus and Clint played it too, except Clint was like "WTF" and gave up after 1/3 of the song and about five people subbed in for him for the rest of it. It was pretty funny tagteam, and then the tournament was over over over.
So anyway, we were all like, "lalala let's all go somewhere to get dinner!" since it was early enough that the Portland people didn't immediately have to drive back south. We asked Travis for places to get food and he gave us complicated directions to South Hills Mall but we ended up just going to Denny's down the street. We had three tables, of Ray Tyler Clint, Jeff Dianna me and Pete, Amber Keevon James Joelle's sister and Stephen's sister. (Joelle and Stephen spent all of dinner elsewhere. And Tanya disappeared like right before we all went to dinner!) Jeff brought up the Wenis jokes and that pretty much took over for most of dinner, that and something about being a Bacon Tosser, which totally broke Clint, I mean he was turning purple from laughing so hard, it was kind of contagious. After dinner we went outside and said goodbye to people and made jokes about bending sticky sensors and whatnot, and then headed home. I gave rides home to James, Ray, and Clint, which meant I made a huge loop of Lake Washington. Dropped off James at UW, then went to Kenmore to drop off Ray, debated playing DDR for a bit but Clint decided he was too tired, and then went to Bellevue except that the 405 8th street exit was COMPLETELY fucked up so we ended up taking a huge loop around Bellevue. I guess it was kind of good though because it meant I got like an entire hour of talking to Clint about RPGs and cons and life and whatnot. He's pretty cool, I wish I knew him better.
I drove a total of 135 miles. Holy fuck. I got home around 12:30am or something, stayed up for a while anyway because I'm retarded, and then slept for 12 hours. Mmmm, glorious sleep.
OH YEAH
PETE GO LOOK! I HAVE YOUR SUPER COOL EXCITING LONG DISTANCE CALLING PRIZE PICTURES! AND THE SUPER COOL PICTURE OF YOU AND CLINT LAUGHING AND LOOKING DEMONIC!
I'll probly password them sometime in the next few days but for now, everyone go get your tournament picture groove on! Direct link or steal them and I'll fucking maim you. :)
crackoon and Nemesis up at UW and head down to Tacoma. I got them at like 9:50. We got tO Paradise around 10:40. Most people were already there. (I was all happy and ran up to hug diskozombie and in the process tripped over the rope roping off the DDR machine and nearly fell on my face.) The tournament turnout wasn't particularly stellar; in the end I believe 27 people actually entered, and then maybe like 5-10 other people showed up to cheer/watch. A few of us got practice rounds - I went up with saenoda and totally flubbed Blonde Girl, which did NOT bode well for the day. Oh well. Anyway, so...qualifying got under way pretty much on time and was pretty much done within an hour or so. EOTC Heavy sucks ass. Ray and I qualified together and we pretty much did EXACTLY the same, like 100-odd greats, a few goods and a miss. So we ended up qualifying 21st and 22nd.There were some tiebreakers in the seeding - everyone who tied had to play Living in America Heavy. I forget exactly which people tie broke - Tanya did, and Warren and Clint did, and Keevon and Lith did, and Jedi and Dyaus... I only remember that because Jedi got all perfects but no freezes so it wasn't even an AA. Whereas Kevin and Kevin played it with Freezes and so Lith AAA'ed it. (Tanya had one great on the first step, too). After tiebreakers, the first round immediately got underway. I don't remember much of it. For the most part it all went according to the seeding except that Pete beat Clint and Dianna won her round.
As I mentioned, my round was a LOT closer than I would have liked. I came in expecting to lose the first round, but I expected to lose by a LOT to a really good player, given how bad I am at EOTC. So instead I went up against this "Pacman" kid who, to his credit, got some generally good PA scores, but seriously... I think he must have been Zalf's little brother or something because Zalf came up to me like "Are you Deanna? You have to SCHOOL this brat, okay?" The first round was 5-6 feet. So I had worked on Be In My Paradise Heavy as my 6-footer, and had it down to 13 greats on Friday night. So I picked it and could immediately tell it was a good choice as he was like "WTF?" I did worse than I ever do on it, but it's okay, he did 4 greats worse than I did, so Yay! I won! Then he picked Legend of Max Light, which is also 6 feet, and of course I never play LOMAX. So I lost by quite a bit. Our tiebreakers... I forget the other two choices but we went with Butterfly Heavy. I was doing pretty well for 3/4 of the song and I seriously got like 5 greats in the last 10 steps.... and I lost 13-12 :( I guess I did accomplish my goal of winning Be In My Paradise, at least... ALSO I guess I'm cool for getting to play the slowest song in the game and the fastest song in the game in the same match.
(I'm not sure whether I'll keep the following paragraph in a public entry.)
Still, I was fairly crushed by this for a bit... like I went out to the lobby to collect my thoughts about it because I was so confused, I really wasn't expecting it to be so close. And a few minutes later a whole bunch of other people came out to the lobby to play cards and stuff... and I dunno, James sits down next to me like "THAT WAS SO CLOSE. I CAN'T BELIEVE YOU LOST BY ONE GREAT." And I replied, "Yeah... if I think about it any more I'm going to cry." Except as I started to say that, I realized I was crying... so I wasn't sure what to do about it so I ran outside. And I started seriously crying. I don't know why I felt so awful. It's like, I don't know, no matter how much I improve it's never going to be good enough.. shrug. After a while I realized I was being a big dork and I went inside to try to hang out with people and cheer up. And it mostly worked pretty well, I think I stopped faking smiles within about 10-15 minutes and was genuinely smiling again.
Okay, so the rest of the first round was fairly uneventful, I watched most of the matches after mine... James totally beat Allan, Ray lost to Zalf (he wanted to play B2UOG Heavy but since it was a 7, he picked B2U normal Heavy and it was pretty bad), and Pete and Clint played each other and it was close but Pete won. Then after that they just dived immediately into the rest of the matches. Somehow I ended up scorekeeping against after Natalia left, and... just kind of never gave up the clipboard I guess. Clint ended up with the other clipboard after one of Dianna's rounds I think and he also kept it for the whole day, so we were the scorekeepers for the majority of the tournament. He's also left-handed, which is cool - I don't think there are that many other lefties in the DDR community (
laurii and arsenic44?). There were a few sensor issues again, several people got random unexpected misses on the 2P side, but they were largely irreproduceable, eventually most people agreed that the misses mostly occurred from people grazing one of the arrows, really, and that one sensor WAS a little broken and it got replaced.So the rest of the day I pretty much spent watching matches, writing down scores, occasionally chatting with people, cheering for people (I felt a little weird as scorekeeper cheering for people, but it's not like I had volunteered for the position or anything, nor were we "judges"), sometimes taking pictures, etc. Everything moved fairly smoothly and there weren't really any major breaks, and somehow it didn't really matter to me that I was sitting there for like 6 hours or whatever. Another cool thing is that Paradise was largely smoke-free, so it wasn't so bad to hang out in there. I didn't really get to play much Beatmania, only like one game with
cheesethrower right after I lost my match... and no percussion freaks, though I brought my drumsticks. Hmm. And Pixxiy and her crowd were being really, REALLY super-loud for most of the time, but I pretty much just ignored them. Anyway, a whole lot of people came and sat down next to me at various points during the day so I got to have a couple pretty interesting conversations, which was cool."Keevon, how do you have a Team Seattle T-shirt?"
"Oh, it's Foy's."
"Haha, make sure you get a lot of sweat on it then, okay?"
Memorable matches... well, let's see. Crackoon and Shakespeare had the most exciting match I think - Jeff picked Lovin' You, which James had never seen before but he managed to get 11 on it, and Jeff got like 13 or something. Then James picked La Senorita Virtual, and they BOTH got 8 greats on it and tied! It was so funny because both of them were like "I thought I had you TOTALLY beaten!" Then they played DXY as a tiebreaker, and James lost by like 2, and then their NEXT tiebreaker ended up being Gamelan de Couple and I think Jeff stumbled or something, and James won. It was a really tough match! I also remember that White Lovers was the tiebreaker in one of James's other matches and he got 3 on it :O (My best is 11 and the guy he was up against got 11...) Lessee, Waka Laka and Xenon and Sexy Planet Oni got played a lot, and Afronova a few times... Keevon got 3 on Xenon though, and Lith got like 2 on Xenon at another point... and I think he also got like 2 on Afronova! Oh yeah, and Keevon picked Twilight Zone on Lith and Lith AAA'ed it :) Lith and Keevon went up against each other twice, and though Lith won both matches, Keevon won a few songs against him and it was seriously close in most cases. Jerrad also did some AMAZING things, like he ended up eliminating Jedi, and I think it was in that round that he managed to get 5 greats on V Oni, it was INSANE. Jedi got like 8. Jerrad also got 16 greats on Vanity Angel at one point - I remember remarking "Dude, you would have smoked almost EVERYONE at B3 with scores like that!" James did manage to beat Jedi with Paranoia Survivor Max STD, that was pretty exciting. And Pete beat Keevon on one song like 16 to 16 and a boo. Laura also got some really good scores, even though I think she lost both of her elimination matches, I mean she pretty much sightread Hyper Offbeat and got like 30 on it, and she SDG'ed some other song though I'm forgetting what. Tanya AAA'ed some song against Natalia, I can't even remember what song it was now. Keevon and Jerrad's final match was kinda sad though because Jerrad rolled his ankle on Drop Out and then lost the next two songs - he wasn't in his best playing condition and that kinda sucked, but at least he got 3rd place. Oh yeah, and Pete vs. Carl was kinda weird because they played Miracle Moon and Carl got a miss on the pad and he pretty much stopped playing, and in the end Pete had 10 greats and Carl had 26 and a bunch of misses and other crap, so we were like "dude, you can't just give up like that," which kinda sucked, but oh well. Tanya had some pad problems during her match with Dianna like that too (11g to 9g and 2 misses on WWRY). Jerrad got a bunch of boos on KCET Standard, but they were all during stomps and he still won the song, so it was no big deal. It was so cool because he decided not to use the bar until like, the 8 and 9 foot rounds! There were quite a few normal bar-users that laid off it for a while, actually, which was kinda cool. Not that I can really talk, I ended up holding onto it during EOTC and LOMAX, but still.
Yeah, so anyway, aside from scores, it was fun. They raffled off a 5th mix marquee and a 7th mix marquee, and James got the 7th mix one, heh. And then the three winners got money prizes and long distance prizes (Pete's company contributed them as sponsors). Oh yeah, so umm
1. Lith (aka "The Usual")
2. Keevon! (yet again! except this time nobody was surprised.)
3. Jerrad (yay!)
4. Dyaus (a really nice guy and scary tech player)
5/6. Jedi (He seems to always place 5th in LG tournaments?)
5/6. Crackoon (YEAH GO JAMES! I TOLD YOU YOU'D BE IN THE TOP 8!!!!)
7/8. Shakespeare (eliminated by Crackoon, but MAN was that a close match)
7/8. BemaniFreak (forced to play Waka Laka a billion times, hehe)
Laura sang Love Shine on the DDR stage between the Keevon-Jerrad match and the final Keevon-Lith match. Which was a nice CONCISE way to bring back the karaoke feature of LG2 but not take a billion years. And after that final match Keevon and Lith played PSMO as an exhibition, heh, and then Dyaus and Clint played it too, except Clint was like "WTF" and gave up after 1/3 of the song and about five people subbed in for him for the rest of it. It was pretty funny tagteam, and then the tournament was over over over.
So anyway, we were all like, "lalala let's all go somewhere to get dinner!" since it was early enough that the Portland people didn't immediately have to drive back south. We asked Travis for places to get food and he gave us complicated directions to South Hills Mall but we ended up just going to Denny's down the street. We had three tables, of Ray Tyler Clint, Jeff Dianna me and Pete, Amber Keevon James Joelle's sister and Stephen's sister. (Joelle and Stephen spent all of dinner elsewhere. And Tanya disappeared like right before we all went to dinner!) Jeff brought up the Wenis jokes and that pretty much took over for most of dinner, that and something about being a Bacon Tosser, which totally broke Clint, I mean he was turning purple from laughing so hard, it was kind of contagious. After dinner we went outside and said goodbye to people and made jokes about bending sticky sensors and whatnot, and then headed home. I gave rides home to James, Ray, and Clint, which meant I made a huge loop of Lake Washington. Dropped off James at UW, then went to Kenmore to drop off Ray, debated playing DDR for a bit but Clint decided he was too tired, and then went to Bellevue except that the 405 8th street exit was COMPLETELY fucked up so we ended up taking a huge loop around Bellevue. I guess it was kind of good though because it meant I got like an entire hour of talking to Clint about RPGs and cons and life and whatnot. He's pretty cool, I wish I knew him better.
I drove a total of 135 miles. Holy fuck. I got home around 12:30am or something, stayed up for a while anyway because I'm retarded, and then slept for 12 hours. Mmmm, glorious sleep.
OH YEAH
PETE GO LOOK! I HAVE YOUR SUPER COOL EXCITING LONG DISTANCE CALLING PRIZE PICTURES! AND THE SUPER COOL PICTURE OF YOU AND CLINT LAUGHING AND LOOKING DEMONIC!
http://www.dr4b.org/pictures/Bemani/LG3
I'll probly password them sometime in the next few days but for now, everyone go get your tournament picture groove on! Direct link or steal them and I'll fucking maim you. :)
no subject
no subject
intresting picutres O_o ,i look like shit.