My Fighters Blog: OUCH, Right In My Soul!

 

It's EVO Time! and IM NOT THERE!!

    I wrote an entire entry last week about how excited I was for EVO. I had hoped my next blog post would be my stories of success and a drop of all the pictures I got with my crew; perhaps some selfies with my favorite players. But apparently it was not meant to be.

    I worked a normal shift on Thursday. Up at 6 am, bowl of Apple Jacks, and off to work. I knew that to make my flight, i had to leave home about 7 pm. So all day at work it was : 

10 hours until i leave for my flight.

9 hours until i leave for my flight.

I get an email - my flight has been delayed by half an hour.

Upsetting, but whatever. 9 and a half hours until i leave for my flight.

8 hours

7 hours

and so on.

When I finally left I practically skipped out the door. Its an hour and a half drive from my house to the airport in Belgrade. I checked my bag at the desk at 9 pm. Then i walked over to check the departures board. I did a double take, rubbed my eyes, thinking I must not know how to read, and look a third time. My flight, originally scheduled for departure at 10:09 was now leaving at 12:45.

This was when I started to worry. I booked a flight out of Belgrade airport on Allegiant. People who like to travel in confidence, who find things like arriving on time or having an airplane to ride, don't ride Allegiant. They take better, faster means of travel, like Southwest Airline, or a donkey. I had already been burned by Allegiant Air, and I got that disturbing sense of foreboding that comes with the knowledge you might be about to witness a disaster.

At that point I had to check in with the crew. Not only was I going to be late, I was going to be so late I would have to consider skipping my morning Tekken match.. The crew, having basic knowledge of American travel, had already arrived by other methods. They were comfortably set up in the room and already practicing. They told me what I already suspected: I was an idiot for putting an important trip in the hands of Allegiant air, and I get what I deserve for living in rural Montana.

A Quick google and some simple division tells us that Allegiant has 80 flights that are delayed or cancelled EVERY SINGLE DAY

After that I tried napping, thinking perhaps if I slept now I could still make my morning matches. I actually did manage to fall asleep against one wall, propped up on my stick bag like a pillow. When I awoke, I found more good news, plane was another half hour behind. I'd already been waiting at the airport for two and a half hours. Flight's new arrival time - 1:15 am.

Around this time, I was trying to make peace with the fact I wouldn't be making my morning match. Half the country away, a tech company I've never heard of started their nightly software update. Within an hour, this unknown fart of a company would cripple international infrastructure.

It was around 1:45 when the copilot made an announcement that there was some sort of trouble with software and we cant board yet. Being Allegiant though, they let us know how much we meant as customers - we dont know if were going to take off. we dont know if the flight is cancelled. we dont know if there will be a flight for you to take tomorrow. if you leave, you are not entitled to a refund.

At 3:00 (thats 0300 - 6 hours since I parked outside) the pilot made the announcement that something called Kr0wdStryK3 had forced an update and travel all over america has been grounded. we dont know if there will be a flight tomorrow, probably not.

Travel was disrupted across the globe. It takes a big BIG event to cause problems that big. In my lifetime all i can think of are Covid, and 9/11. We're talking once every few decades type of travel disruption.

I dont travel often, maybe twice a year. and that once-a-decade event happened minutes before my ultra-delayed flight came in.

If Allegiant was a competent, reliable company, I'd be at EVO. If CrowdStrike, a company I didn't know existed, had been a competent, reliable company, I'd be at EVO. The cascade of bad-luck-horseshit that had to happen to lead to me missing out on EVO has left me stunned and oh so bitter.

All my friends and family are sympathetic of course, they offer their condolences and they are sincere. But they really don't know how deep it cuts. It's not like I missed a vacation, it's more like a holiday got cancelled. Imagine a Hindu acquaintance tells you how upset he is because Navratri was cancelled. You feel bad sure, your friend is clearly upset, but you don't really know what Navratri is, and you can't understand how much it means to him. (Its a celebration of their goddess Gurga, and it involves alot of dancing)

I was going to give one of these to each of the people that eliminated me from the tournament. No idea what to do with them now.

I'll remember Friday July 19th as one of the worst days of my life. I was up waiting for the damn plane all night, but managed to get a few hours nap in  that morning. The rest of that day was spent feeling like my heart had been carved out. I was so tired and miserable that it physically hurt. If you've ever had your heart broken, you know the feeling.

Writing this has been therapeutic. I've been avoiding watching the stream, I'm afraid it will just make me more upset. But my crew played well, and good luck to everyone still in it!

My Fighter's Blog: It's EVO time again!

 EVO Time Again!

Each Summer, the best fight-gamers from all over the world gather in Las Vegas, Nevada to battle it out for the title of world champion. The Evolution Championship Series (known commonly as EVO for short) was founded to be the world finals for fighting games. But since its inception, it has grown into a full- blown fighting-game-centric Comic-Con. (good-golly that's a lot of hyphens)

Ever since my good friend Hola Bird introduced me to the world of competitive streetfighter 15 years ago, I've made an effort to watch as much of the event as possible. But this weekend, I will be attending the event in person for the first time. (I'm so excited I'm positively giddy.)

While I love to watch these matches online, I am downright mediocre when it comes to the caliber of play you need to participate in these tournaments.(I've stressed this multiple times in previous entries) I have attended exactly one other major tournament in my life, Canada Cup 2010. I am going to share that dismal experience here. (I've hinted at it in the past, but here comes the full story.)

You may have some major fiasco in your past, the type of event that you avoid recalling whenever possible, and when it does come up, you speak in hushed tones, changing the subject as quickly as possible. These are the moments you refer to as 'the insert-word-here incident'.  Among those of us involved, it is referred to as The Canada Cup Incident.

Your personal incidents may have left deep psychological scars that will never heal. But, most likely your shame was private, perhaps shared among a few old friends or petty enemies. The Canada Cup Incident was broadcast over the internet, and can still be found if you search deeply enough through the annals of YouTube. (I will post a link at the end of this post, something I promised myself I would never do, but perhaps the time has come)

The whole thing was Hola Bird's idea. "Come with me to Calgary", he said. "It will be fun!", he said.     

I wouldn't say it was no fun, but it certainly wasn't pleasant.

After weeks of preparations, planning and training, we set out for homeland of our northern neighbors, ridiculous dreams of championship trophies and internet fame in our heads. I got my passport solely for this event, it remains the only time so far that I've ever left the country.

This is the logo from Canada Cup 2010. I still have a T-shirt from the event with autographs of Mago and Daigo written on the sleeves

One of the events at Canada Cup 2010 was a team Street Fighter event. It was designed for 3 man teams, when one team member lost a match, the next would rotate in, and so forth until one team was eliminated. The winning team would move one, and the losing team just lost their entry fee. (No consolation bracket in team tourneys, losers!)

Hola Bird and myself formed a team with another Street-Fighter-loving Montanan, a fun guy that goes by the handle Bonzai Boomerang. Before our match even started, we all knew there would be trouble. We were called up to the main stage, and informed our match would be taking place on stage, streamed online, against a team named 'team third place'.

Why did they pick the name team third place? Because they already knew they would be taking third place. Third place behind a team that had Daigo and Mago, and another team that had Justin Wong and Mike Ross.

So, I just threw some names out that probably meant nothing to most readers. But allow me to equate them to some names you probably do recognize. If this had been baseball, the names might have been Babe Ruth and Mickey Mantle. In Basketball, it would be Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant. In cricket, Sachin Tendulkar and Sir Viv Richards. Icons of the sport, in other words. And we were pitted, round one, against the team that was expected could only possibly lose to these giants.

We...lost. and when i say we lost, I mean we LOST. In the three man team format, we did not make it beyond their point man. In between Bonzai Boomerang's vicious slaughter and my own, (Bonzai played first position, I was second, and Hola Bird was our anchor) there was a forced reset of the console, (there was some sort of sound issue with the stream) and that technical issue took much longer than it took their point man to wipe out our entire team.

As it turned out, the entire time we were getting our asses handed to us, the commentators for the stream were roasting our poor play for all of the internet to hear and laugh (and laugh and laugh). While it can't be argued that we sucked HARD, I would like to take this moment to point out this wasn't exactly a fair matchup. In Street Fighter 6 terms,  it was the equivalent of 2 silver-ranks and a gold-rank being matched up against 3 legend-ranks players. The layman might equate it to watching someone who jogs a couple times a week enter the Olympic trials.

These people play at a level I can barely comprehend, let alone achieve. So, while my play has undoubtedly improved since The Canada Cup incident, my expectations have vastly diminished. EVO doesn't have a team tournament, but I did register for the Street Fighter main event. It is double-loss elimination, so if I do better than 0-2, I will consider it a small victory. 

If you have any desire to track the progress of me and my crew this weekend, you can do so at start.gg.

My handle is Atmaweapwn. The rest of the crew is Hola Bird, Bonzai Boomerang, and Sammich. 

If you enjoy watching people get ridiculed as they are destroyed by vastly superior players, you can find the videos of Team Carne Crew vs Team Third Place here and here.

Wish me luck.