November 21 was a tough day. If you missed it, I posted two blog posts that day, one private one about something absurd that happened at work regarding international flights, and another one later that day after I discovered that Tesla’s pickup truck is a meme.

To recover from the absolute terror of that day, I made an impulse decision to join a bunch of my co-workers on a trip to Oakland, California to attend the 2019 PUBG National Championship.

I headed out of Las Vegas via JetSuiteX and took a quick flight over to Oakland International Airport in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The following day, Jordan King, Glen Tokola, William Lucas, and I headed out to Oakland Arena to watch the games. Here is Jordan King with his big camera looking like a tourist.

Edit (December 7, 2019): I didn’t mention this originally because it was still considered sensitive internal information, but it is no longer sensitive—another big reason I went to this event was because I knew that it would be Jordan King’s last esports event as a member of Tempo Storm. Jordan King’s final day at AVY Entertainment was December 6, so I wanted to spend time together with him at his last event.

The event was actually pretty impressive. The presentation was awesome, the opening ceremony was exciting, and the extra screens with additional gameplay information was very useful.

Overall, Tempo Storm didn’t do too well, but we ended up getting one Chicken Dinner.

I also have a random photograph of a burger and some chili that I ordered. It was actually an extraordinarily good burger (the chili was passable at best), and my experience was made even better because this was an outdoor restaurant that let dogs in, and there were a ton of dogs sitting around and woofing while I ate.

I was completely indifferent about the esports part of the trip because I’ve been to so many events at this point and they all just feel the same now, but meeting back up with Jordan King was pleasant. We also explored Oakland and Alameda a bit, which was an interesting experience.

Now I depart to Chicago to watch the family business for a week and a half while my parents go to Korea. I am going to freeze to death.

I feel like I travel all the time. I traveled a massive amount back in 2016-2017 when I first went full-time with Tempo Storm, because I was heavily in­volved in esports back then. But even now, I feel like I’m going all over the place to all different kinds of conventions and events.

When I went to actually map out my travel to see how many states I’ve been to… I realized that I don’t actually really travel that much. That is, I definitely do travel frequently, but I generally just go back and forth to the same locations over and over again. One of the most noticeable things that my travel map told me was that I had never been to the southeastern corner of the United States.

So when DreamHack Atlanta came up and our PUBG Mobile team was going to compete there, I seized the opportunity.

DreamHack and ESL only provided lodging for our players, so our PUBG Mobile manager needed to get a hotel room anyway. This functionally meant that I could share a room with our manager, and our only effective cost for me to attend would be my airfare. With most things aligning well enough for me to be able to experience the southeast for the first time, I hopped on a plane and made my way over to Atlanta.

I like taking very-early-morning flights out of Las Vegas, so I booked my flight to Atlanta to depart at 6 AM. When I went outside and called an Uber though, apparently nobody was around, so I ended up having to wait longer than anticipated, then also had to pay surge pricing. This cut into my time quite a bit, and I wasn’t able to stop by the lounge to grab some breakfast before I leave like I usually do. That, along with the fact that the cabin was unusually cold and my seat recline was broken, made for one of the most uncomfortable and sickening travel experiences I’ve had in a while.

Things got marginally better when I arrived in Atlanta, but like clockwork, I tend to feel ill for the first ~20 hours after arriving at a new location for travel. It wasn’t incapacitating, though, so I spent the first night taking the PUBG Mobile players out to dinner.

The next day was the actual event. This was my second DreamHack; my first was DreamHack Austin 2016 when we had a Heroes of the Storm and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive team competing.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to make it to the convention center early on in the day because I had a string of pretty important meetings lined up, but when I managed to finally wrap those up, I headed over to the Georgia World Congress Center. I made it just barely in time to catch the tail end of the PUBG Mobile team competing.

After tournament day was over (PUBG Mobile only played for a single day), I went with the players for a second team dinner, this time to all-you-can-eat Korean BBQ, which has effectively become a tradition at Tempo Storm at this point. I used to take the players out for a big, satisfying meal on the day that they arrived, but after a few teams got sick from overeating, I stopped doing AYCE KBBQ until after everyone was done competing.

The AYCE KBBQ restaurant we went to was a bit different and strange compared to what I was used to, but the meat quality was surprisingly good.

… I was busy cooking and had no time to pose for photos.

The city of Atlanta itself was a bit uninviting because it rained for a majority of the time I was there, but it was an interesting experience. I feel like esports events and conventions are relatively sheltered from the outside world, so I didn’t really get to experience the true Atlanta… except for when we were in our Uber on our way to get KBBQ and literally four cars operated by some of the worst drivers I’ve ever seen proceeded to attempt to commit suicide by driving straight into us.

The view from my hotel—the AC Hotel Atlanta Downtown—was surprisingly good, as it had a nice mix between open and city views, and I was lucky enough to get a room on the eighth floor. The gloomy weather also made for some interesting photo opportunities of the tops of tall buildings com­plete­ly obscured by fog, which isn’t something that I’m able to see on a regular basis in Las Vegas.

The return flight was much better—the cabin air temperature was much more reasonable, and my seat’s recline worked—and although I was only able to stay in Atlanta for three days (two of which were travel days coming in and going out), it was still a pretty good experience.

I’ve become completely jaded towards conventions and esports tournaments now, but going back to another DreamHack-branded event for the first time since 2016 brought back some traces of pleasant memories from when I was still new to esports and every event was a new experience.

The photograph above is a picture of the sunrise at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), taken from the Virgin Atlantic Clubhouse. This is the last photo I took during my one-day trip, but I decided to lead with it because it’s the one and only photo I took on my real camera. Unfortunately, eve­ry­thing else I have is of potato quality from my ~6-year-old phone.

 
I feel like I should just go and get a real estate license at this point, because Tempo Storm is in the process of exploring other real estate options… which I am coordinating, of course. Back in November 2016, one of the first team houses that Tempo Storm set up was a group effort between me and the administrative assistant at the time. Since then, I’ve set up three more team houses, and this new property we’re looking at now will end up being the fourth that I lead myself (sixth total for the company). Each team house we’ve gotten has been an upgrade from the previous, and that trend isn’t ending anytime soon.

For this trip, I wasn’t able to spend 10 hours on the road round-trip because I was a bit too busy with other work, so I decided to fly this time. I flew out yesterday morning, making it into the airport by 5 AM, grabbing some free breakfast at the airport lounge, boarding the plane shortly after 6, and making it to Los Angeles before 8.

After arriving at Los Angeles International Airport, I realized that all the car rental companies were off-site, so I had to stand at a curb waiting for a shuttle to stop by and bring me just under three miles to Enterprise Rent-a-Car, which was where my car rental reservation was. After entering the lobby of the Exotic Car Collection by Enterprise to pick up an SUV, they queued me up to receive one of their Cadillac Escalade ESVs… except they couldn’t find the keys to any of them.

The first one that was most easily accessible in their garage was locked and just had the keys missing entirely. The second one that was behind another vehicle was unlocked and started up with its push-button start, except they couldn’t actually find the keys to this vehicle. Seeing as it started up, the key fob was definitely inside… they just couldn’t figure out where. Here is a photo of two customer service representatives flipping the interior upside-down trying to find out where the key fob was.

Eventually, they gave up and found a third Cadillac Escalade ESV that had its keys conveniently in the cup holder, and they gave me that one. It was a 2020 model, but I was able to see first-hand why Cadillac Escalades are often rated as one of the worst luxury full-size SUVs on the market today—they feel a bit dated compared to competitors. Enterprise comped me a half tank of fuel for the wait, which was nice, but I was only in town for a day and there was no way I would use 13 gallons of free fuel.

After I actually got on the road, picked up our CEO, and started going on tours, I forgot to take as many photos as I would’ve hoped, but I did take two from the Hills overlooking Los Angeles.

After wrapping up the day, I spent the night at my cousin’s house, and the following morning, I was up by 4 AM, out the door by 5, and at the airport lounge having breakfast by 6—which is where we can loop back to the first photo above. I was on my plane by 7 and back home in Las Vegas before 9, thus concluding a hectic one-day trip to Beverly Hills.