A all my Fragapalooza videos can be found here

I don’t have much more to say about Fragapalooza this year, except that a week later I’m still recovering from the lack of sleep, and I can’t wait until next year.

UPDATE: Fixed the youtube link, thanks to the commenter who pointed out that I can’t spell

Day 3 of Fragapalooza started much like I started day 2, with a swim at the pool. I didn’t swim quite as hard as I only slept for about 5 hours, but it still felt really nice and woke me up.  I’ve always been an early riser so I was able to swim for almost an hour, and still be back at the venue at my computer at about 10am.  the day started off kind of slow, because most people slept until around noon or so, but when it did pick up there were lots of games to be played.  I wasn’t very good at starcraft II when the weekend started, but I played it so much I had to get good at it, really quick. I’m not going to say I’m amazing at the game, because I’m not, but at least I wasn’t getting completely destroyed every game by the end of it.  I also played a whole bunch of Team Fortress 2, which I like to think I’m pretty good at. It’s an older game now so everyone there is pretty good at the game, and it made for some really good matches. I could have played that game for a long time.  With the event being a bit smaller than in past years, there are less “uncommon” games being played.  When there were 800 people attending every year, it was easy to find someone who wanted to play pretty much any game you could think of. It’s been a bit different the past couple of years, as mostly newer and popular games are what everyone is playing, and it’s much harder to find someone to play those older games.

The highlight of Day 3 was, as it was last year, the Rock Band Tournament.  I’m still working on uploading all the video I took, but needless to say it was pretty awesome.

the scary looking staff band

After Rock Band I participated in an unofficial Team Fortress 2 tournament. We ended up making it to the final through the losers side, but were unable to pull out the victory. The tournament was fun, but I had to play a character I’m not *that* good at so I didn’t do as well as I would have liked.  Still it was fun to get involved in a tournament, even if it was just for fun.

The later parts of my evening I didn’t even game all that much.  I spent most of the time in the chat room for the participants, playing a trivia game. I didn’t intend to play it for that long but before I knew it 3 hours had passed by.

The last thing I did before going to bed was play in a track mania tournament. The staff set up probably the most insane track I’ve ever seen, and the person with the fastest time won.  It took me 20 mintues to complete the track on my first try, 15 on my second try, and the eventual winner was finished in it 9:30. Needless to say it was quite insane.

Sunday, the last day of fragapalooza, is always pretty quiet.  Everyone is tired, people tend to start packing up.  I played games for about 2 hours, and did a sommersault to win a case fan. There wasn’t a whole bunch to say about Sunday except for the closing ceremonies, and the final contest of the weekend, the wall sit.  In past years I’ve been pretty terrible at it, and this year I finished in the top 20 out of about 80 people that tried to win I’m impressed with myself, and hope to do better next year. 

the last competitors for the wall sit

I didn’t win any prizes in the closing ceremonies, for the 4th straight year, so that kind of sucks.  But the Fragapalooza staff did say one thing that made me very happy, after the difficulties last year and not knowing if we were even going to have an event, they were up front and said that they already can’t wait for Fragapalooza 2011. And you know what, neither can I.

This isn’t my last post about Fragapalooza, but I want to get all of my pictures and videos uploaded first, and then I’ll talk more about them.  I’m typing this on Wednesday afternoon and I feel like I’m still recovering from lack of sleep.

My only issue is 100% my problem; which is that I do not sleep well when it’s basically daylight outside.  When I am going to bed at 4:30am, that doesn’t’ leave a lot of darkness before daylight begins. I’m writing this post on 4 hours of sleep because it was too light for me to go back to bed.

Either way, I just appreciate the fact that I actually get a tent this year, as I didn’t get a “roof” over my head at all last year.  Small blessings, I guess.

These are a few of the tents in tent city. Mine is the small blue/gray tent to the right of center on the screen. There are about 8-10 more tents on either side of the frame, as well as a couple of trailers.

I want to stress though that the staff here at Fragapalooza did an amazing job in what was a very difficult situation. They got us power as soon as they could, did everything they could to keep us entertained and informed.  As much as people here have complained about not having any power for basically an entire day, I almost promise you that the staff feel even worse about it.  I was just happy that they were able to resolve the problem and get us back to gaming at a decent time.

This is what the event looked like on Thursday night. over 250 computers, all turned off, with no power.

As was mentioned, we didn’t get power on Friday, day 2, until about 11am.  Because of this, I actually went for a swim at the pool in the rec center where the event is located. I swam for about an hour, which was actually really nice, and made me feel really good to start the day. When I got back to the venue I was one of the lucky ones, my row was one of the first to get power, but there were not many people to play games with for a while, so I ended up playing a couple of online games of Starcraft II against people from somewhere until more people were online.  After about 1 pm though, things really started to kick into high gear.  Throughout the day I played a lot of Starcraft II, Team Fortress 2, and Alien Swarm. I finished off the night/morning with a game of Left 4 Dead 2.

There were also other events, such as the traditional rock-paper-scissors contest. This year there were 128 participants, I made it through the first 2 rounds, but lost in the 3rd, which is actually my worst result ever, so that was pretty disappointing. The gaming decathlon also started, which I failed to qualify for in another game of rock-paper-scissors. The gaming decathlon have 10 people face elimination challenges until a winner is declared. Each challenge eliminates 1 person, so there will be 10 challenges. The first challenge was playing an old game on a computer and seeing who got the highest score. The second was a paper airplane throwing contest, which I have a video of that I will post after the event. The last challenge of the night was forcing the participants to translate 7 lines of 1337 sp33k.  If you do not know what that is, I’m not going to explain it.

At the end of my night, which was about 4:30 in the morning, there were still quite a few people playing games.  And I must say, Day 2 was significantly better than day 1.

this picture was taken at 2:30am on Thursday night/Friday morning. Still going strong.

Now, I have one more quick post to write, then off to gaming!

The only thing I can say I’m bringing more of this year compared to last is food. Last year I relied a lot on eating out, and eating junk.  While I’ll still do that this year, it won’t be nearly to the degree of last year.  Sure, I brought candy and other junk food, but I didn’t bring any pop, sticking mostly with juices and Gatorade. I have also brought more fruit than ever before. I know I wont’ be eating as healthy as possible this weekend, and that’s fine, I’ll start working it off again next week, but anything I can do to make it a little better for me will be appreciated come Sunday afternoon.

There won’t be a picture of everything I’m bringing attached this year like last year’s packing post, because I actually have about half of everything packed in my car as I type this on Wednesday night. I’ll snap a few pictures of my packed up car and put them up at a later date, but it’ll work similar to last year.  My chair will somehow manage to squeeze into the back seat of my Civic, the tower and monitor will sit in the front seat, and pretty much everything else goes in the trunk. It’s a bit of a tight squeeze but I make everything fit. I just wish sometimes that my chair folded, it would make things so much easier.

That’s all for tonight for me folks, I’ll see you tomorrow from Fragapalooza 2010. Be sure to follow my Twitter feed for frequent updates, while I’ll be putting up a blog post at least once a day from the event.

As with last year, I’ll be taking a ton of pictures and video.  Most will be appearing after the event, but you’ll still get to see some of the pictures during the event.

This year I’ll be posting quite a few posts, and pictures to twitter, you can find my twitter account here.  I’ll also be uploading a few pictures on the go to Flickr, which you can find here.  All of the event pictures will be up on Flickr after the event, and video will end up on youtube, but it’s very unlikely that I’ll put any of the videos up until after the event is done.

Fragapalooza 2010 runs from 9:00am Thursday August 5th and goes until the afternoon of Sunday August 8th.

Fragapalooza 2009 was a fantastic event. This was my third year attending Fragapalooza, at a third different location. When I first learned of the location change, I was worried. However, Fragapalooza 2009 came away as my favorite event, except for the lack of a rock-paper-scissors contest of course. That was desperately missed.

I have already posted detailed accounts of what I brought, initial setup, Tent city, Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, and Day 4, which you can read. What I don’t necessarily convey in those posts is just how much fun the event really was. The smaller size of the venue actually made the event feel a lot more fun, and it felt like I was closer to everyone, even sitting near the rear of the venue.

The venue itself was fantastic. We were on the indoor soccer field at the DOW Centennial Center. Actually being on the field was nice. The turf was still down, and provided a us with a nice environment to walk in. The aisles were a little narrow, but nothing terrible. Overall the event felt very cozy, much more than my previous times.

The staff were awesome. I could say so much more, but there isn’t much more to say. Aside from a couple hiccups, which can be expected when you set up a network for 400 people in 16 hours, everything ran very, very smoothly. The staff pour hundreds of their own hours in to make sure we can have the best experience possible, and every year they pull it of beyond my expectations. They should be applauded for their near herculean efforts.

The contests this year were very good, except for the lack of my favorite, the afore mentioned rock-paper-scissors contest.  There were random contests like usual, a foam dart war, a dodgeball game, the wall sit, and the Rock Band tournament.  I participated in everything except for the Rock Band tournament, won nothing, but came out happy.

Were there hiccups? Yes. There always are. You cannot run an event with 400 people and keep all of them happy. The air conditioning broke, and the DOW staff were amazing at keeping what was left of the AC running, and allowing us to keep extra doors open at night for air flow. Tent city was small, and cramped, and not a great experience this year, but I managed.

Overall the event was the best one yet, and if at all possible, I will be there next year, without a doubt.

I took a ton of pictures and videos of the event. You can find the pictures at my flickr page here.

You can find the videos on youtube. The Pencil Sharpening contest has 4 videos, heat 1, heat 2, heat 3, and the final. The foam dart war can be found here. I don’t have a full video of the Foam Dart War, as I only started taking video after I got knocked out. Lastly, I took video of every single performance at the Rock Band tournament. Sorry for the ones that are not in HD, my mino HD was full and had a dead battery, so I was forced to use my digital camera for some of them. The playlost with every video is here. The staff band is here.

Waking up and knowing the rush to get out later on, I took a bunch of my stuff out to my car right away, to minimize the time it would take later in the day. I played my last bit of Team Fortress 2, but mostly just for fun to kill time until it was really time to pack up. I snapped a few more pictures, and took in the sights of the final day of Fragapalooza.

There was one contest held on the final day, the wall sit. The wall sit is a great exercise, and a good test of stamina. It is literally as it sounds. Each person has to put their back against a wall, and crouch down to their knees are at a 90 degree angle. I participated knowing full well I wouldn’t win, but it was fun anyway.

The final event of Fragapalooza is the closing ceremonies. The Staff take the time to thank the sponsors, participants, volunteers, etc, and talk about the event. This year’s closing ceremonies were particularly important because the staff talked a bit about how Fragapalooza almost didn’t happen this year because of the recession. Gil Amores, the President of Fragapalooza, made a truly heart-felt thank you to everyone who attended, and thanked us for our support of the event this year. Then, it was prize time. Closing ceremonies are where the majority of the prizes are given away, at random, to the participants. T-Shirts are thrown into the crowd, and there are draws for prizes, everything ranging from Mouse pads to keyboards to motherboards and processors. I didn’t win anything this year, in fact, in 3 years I’ve come away not having my number drawn. Still, that part is fun. Everyone enjoys free things, right?

After the closing ceremonies is the traditional rush for the exit. After the ceremonies the event is officially over, and everyone leaves. I had taken my computer out before the closing ceremonies, which is by design, since the security setup means that on exit each bag must be searched and photo ID must be shown to get computers out. The security is amazing, and why i feel safe at the event, but also causes massive delays trying to get out. Planning ahead easily saved me an hour of time this afternoon.

Fragapalooza 2009 was an amazing event, one I am very happy to say I was a part of. I will be posting a full write up of the event, as well as will be putting all of the pictures and videos I have taken online in the near future. I have some work travel to do this week so no firm dates, but look for it soon.

Other contests included a pencil sharpening contest, a contest that pitted two groups of 50 people in a 1700′s style “we’ll shoot at you as you stand in a line, then it’s your turn!” A couple “the first person to the stage wearing [insert random t-shirt here]” contests, a few random drawings, and one contest where everyone had to sit up in the bleachers, and random seats were picked for prizes. There was also a game of Deal or No Deal, with an actual banker, where the 20 “cases” were prizes ranging from a kick in the nuts, and a hug from one of the staff on the low end(although is a hug really a low end thing?) to an intel motherboard and an intel processor on the high end.

The most fun contest of the evening though, was the Rock Band Tournament. An elaborate setup was erected to make them look like a real band as much as possible, and a number of bands competed in a contest that was more about the actual performance than it was about technique. It featured special judges from a local radio station who scored the bands, and declared a winner. Some of the performances were just plan drab, but the finalists were very good, and put on very good shows. there were also performances by a band featuring staff members, and a band featuring event volunteers.

There was much gaming going on between these contests. There were quite a few people who chose not even to sleep, and many like myself stayed awake into the wee hours of the morning to get as much out of the last full day of the event as possible.

I took quite a few videos and pictures of the happenings on day 3, but to help save the internet here at the event I am waiting until after the event to edit them and get them on YouTube.

I have also agreed to have a guest author write a post about her experience this year as a volunteer. Look for that coming soon as well.

Day 4 here is already underway, and I’m going to enjoy the last bit of Fragapalooza. Look for my final daily report tonight, after the event has ended.