Misc and Etc with Cake: Dream Hack Summer

Finally, I'm posting again! I am currently sitting in one of the huge entrance halls at 6am in Dreamhack, Sweden. How is this even my life, so amazing! It's freezing as shit right now, and being the genius that I am I only have one piss poor excuse for a sweater. Currently sitting on a heater, with my computer on my lap just hoping for the best. I think after this post I might go casually stand in the massive hall with >9000 computers.

Anyway.

So, my epic journey starts at the ZOB am Funkturm in Berlin on an average summer's night at 10:30pm. I sit waiting for effing ages, until I am allowed to board the bus. On the way on the bus driver just starts to take my backpack and tries to pack into the baggage area. Pfft, please bus driver. I'm going to sit for 13 hours and twiddle my thumbs? I take a painstaking, embarrassingly long amount of time to take all the stuff I need out of my bag and put it into my teeny tiny karstadt shopping bag... that's already filled with food.

None of which matters because as soon as I get on the bus I take a sleeping tablet and immediately check out for quite a few hours. The bus ride was much like this the whole way. We stopped in Copenhagen for about 1.5 hours. I kind of just clung to two German people, both on their way to Sweden. One actually was coming to Dreamhack, but he wasn't into Starcraft but HON. The other was a girl going to some "no-borders" camp thing... typical Berlin.

Anyway, there isn't much else to say about to bus ride other than it was long and I slept through most of it, waking up hourly due to horrid pains in various muscles. The buses were relatively empty so I always got two seats to myself.

I arrive at Jönköping about 1:30ish pm on Saturday and exchange my money. Realise that I'm not a billionaire and will likely starve in Sweden as a cup of water is equivalent to half a months rent. Obvs, not really, but it's very expensive here.

Anyway... one excruciatingly crowded public bus and a merry chase later we (German Bro and myself) arrive at Dreamhack! Woo!!! I cannot accurately describe how massive this place is, the amount of people and computers here are just absolutely mindboggling. You have never seen anything else in your life, just huge, huge halls filled with nerds and computers. There are a surprising lot of children here, teenagers around 13 or so walking around with their glam-ed up girlfriends. It's so weird.

So I spent most the day just kind of walking around, trying to figure out where the hell everything was. The only thing I could find was the Starcraft 2 play area and Incontrol and Khaldor's stream.

I got super sick of lugging my heavy baggage everywhere so I put in the locker, and while I was knee deep in transferring things I needed to a bag... I see Hero walk past. I'm like "Hero!" "Don't go! Picture?". Look around the hall, it's just the two of us and my stuff is strewn all over the floor... awkward silence ensues for a few moments. Hero says he will go outside and smoke and come back, so I get my shit organised and then wait for him. Seriously, such an awesome guy - Good Guy Hero! He comes back, but we still have the dilemma of who to take the picture for us. Eventually, after some of the most amazing awkward silence interspersed with bad small talk, we go up to the players lounge and hero gets his friend from the room and takes the picture for us. But of course my camera being the troll that it is... doesn't want to take any good shots. I felt so bad, took so long to get a good picture. I keep being like "Oh, don't worry we can just take the picture with my phone!"... but Hero's friend was like, NO! We're getting this shot! I believe in it! And eventually we did...

Look! That's me! With Hero! Loooook at it!

Anyway. The rest of the day kind of went by in a blur. I met with a guy from reddit and his Swedish friend and have become a leech upon their generosity, and basically went back and forth between the two streams depending on who was play. In the comings and goings I was lucky enough to meet players and some people from twitter. Awesome day all in all, so far it's definitely been worth it. Even if it means sleeping on the floor and freezing my non-existent bollocks off.

Also, some random Swedish kids just came and asked for me to sign their arm. Seriously, wtf haha

And cue pictures. The lighting in here obviously sucks balls so it's super high ISO and even then most of them came out blurry. But enjoy them none-the-less