We ended up doing big tasks on each day, but I think we sort of underestimated just how difficult all the smaller tasks would be. Now that our final full day is over and all we have left for preparation is the morning of the first day of the convention, I’m realizing that the tedious tasks actually take a whole lot longer than the tasks that everyone would assume would be harder.

All our merchandise shipments are in and we mostly have everything set up, but the final polish is taking some time. I actually ended up leaving sort of on time, but our merchandising director stayed back later to get even more work done on our booth.

Today was also the day that most people came into Long Beach, and convention badge pick-up started today, so the outside of the convention center was pretty busy, putting additional pressure on us due to the fact that the start of the convention now feels much more salient.

This is our first time running an exhibitor booth at a convention, and my background when it comes to events is hosting them as a broadcast personality instead of actually taking care of all the logistics of how the event should work, so I’m sort of new to this and this has been a pretty good learning experience for all of us. I’m also a speaker at the panel, so this isn’t the only thing that I’ll be doing, so I still have some ways to go before I can call this TwitchCon a success.

Today wasn’t quite as productive as yesterday, because the only thing we really had planned was to receive a shipment from Red Bull.

No, the shipment wasn’t only just Red Bull beverage … Red Bull’s offices in Santa Monica agreed to help us liven up our booth a bit by letting us borrow their Killer Queen arcade machines.

After we received the shipment, we also set up our Red Bull refrigerator and wired up some stuff in the background to make sure everything would be powered properly. We also needed some more stuff to get everything set up, so we stopped by a hardware store, and tacked on a trip to Costco Wholesale.

Costco is known for their amazing food, but I actually had never been to one before because my parents always had a membership to Sam’s Club (which is very similar to Costco, and is a competitor). Our merchandising director had a membership to Costco, so I was able to go inside, try out all the samples, then eat one of their famous cheap hot dogs.

The quality of the food wasn’t over-the-top or anything, but it was very good. However, what does make the whole thing over-the-top is the fact that it’s so cheap – it only cost US$1.50 for a hot dog and a drink with unlimited refills, which is probably the best deal I’ve ever seen for a hot dog.

We have one more day of set-up left tomorrow, then a few hours in the morning before convention day on the 20th. A lot of this is being done on-the-fly as we go, but it’s looking like our exhibitor booth is going to end up pretty nice.

I was the first one around the convention center today from Tempo Storm to scout out the area. I explored the convention center and snapped some photos as I went. I’m not exactly sure how much of the Long Beach Convention Center is going to be used for TwitchCon, but it was actually pretty big.

I thought I was early, but apparently, the construction crew has been at it already for a while now, because everything was set up inside and ready for us to get started. We’re booth #437 towards the back-center of the exhibitor area. Our Merchandising Director Ryan Wagner stopped by a bit later to help out; we spent today erecting our custom walls (because we didn’t even realize that Twitch would be providing us with these walls that you see in the top-right photo.

They also set up a lot of the Twitch Partner Lounge as well. Apparently, the mobile game Arena of Valor is sponsoring the Partner Lounge, and it’s basically a restaurant that is normally inside the convention center, but is being taken over to be a partners-only area. The rest of the convention center wasn’t air conditioned because most of the garage panels were open to the outside for moving in equipment, but the Partner Lounge was nice and cool, so I snuck in here to relax after I discovered it was open.

And of course, it wouldn’t be a real blog post nowadays without some food photos. I went out with our merchandising director and executive assistant for lunch, and got myself a burger. Our executive assistant got herself a massive salad that probably had more calories than my burger.

I’m lodging in Huntington Beach (which is nearby Long Beach), and I went to a place called Sushi on Fire for dinner. I got a refreshing roll upon recommendation by our executive assistant (which was a good choice, but it had too many lemon peels which I personally thought sort of conflicted with the rich sushi flavor), as well as a magic mountain (which was a lot more food than I thought it would be).