The tournament comes to a close, and although we didn’t win the trip to Korea for the global championship final, it was still a decent experience.
Unfortunately, phone use was banned on stage and heavily restricted backstage, so it was difficult to get a lot of photos. We had a live feed of what was going on for both teams, so a lot of extra precautions were taken to ensure that cheating was not a possibility.
Luckily, I was able to see myself on the stream, so I grabbed a screenshot from there. This is me putting bunny ears on Zixz while cracking up with the team, because there were literally four cameras on Zixz at this particular moment.
Most of my fame came from doing general comedy a long time ago, and I’m not really too heavily involved in the Heroes of the Storm esports scene, so a lot of people didn’t recognize me when I appeared on the ESL broadcast.
Of course, the immediate reaction to that was to call me TrumpSC, a well-known HearthStone streamer who is also Asian, and has a similar hairstyle as I do.
Apparently, ESL thought it was hilarious that Twitch chat was spamming “TRUMP? TRUMP?? TRUMP???” so they kept on zooming in on my face and showing me in the broadcast at random times when I was on stage, for no particular reason. So, the VODs have a lot of me just standing there, doing nothing, and listening to the team talk while we were in picks-and-bans.
Yesterday was my flight back to Chicago. I snapped a photo when I was at the airport:
On the flight from ORD to LAX, I stayed awake for most of it and was on social media on my phone for literally about two-thirds of the time. On the flight back from LAX to ORD, I pretty much got knocked-out tired right away, and slept for a majority of the flight.
When I got back to Chicago, my buddy Josh, who dropped me off at the airport, was ready to pick me up.
After I got off the plane and left the airport, I somehow magically made it to the drop-off area instead of the pick-up area. If you’re not familiar, the drop-off area is usually a lot more peaceful than the pick-up area. Realistically, there are about 10 cars at the drop-off area at any given time, while in the pick-up area, it’s pretty much a constant flow of clogged traffic.
I thought I was doing Josh a favor by going to the drop-off area, so he wouldn’t have to struggle through the river of vehicles. Apparently, that didn’t matter, because Josh had already taken the road to the pick-up area, and he couldn’t figure out how to get to the second level of the airport, in the drop-off area.
So, after a nice struggle, I finally managed to make it down to the pick-up area, and watched about a thousand cars go by before finally finding Josh and getting in.
The strangest thing is that I got on the airplane in 80°F weather, but when I got off, I was in nice and freezing cold Chicago, where it was hailing and sleeting at the same time.
…
I’ll have all the highlight reels of Tempo Storm’s games cut, rendered, and uploaded to Tempo Storm’s YouTube channel soon, so keep an eye out for those if you’re interested in seeing how Tempo Storm did, but wasn’t able to watch the full games live.