Building a DXRacer Iron Series Office Chair (OH/IS188/NR)

June 6, 2019, 8:45 PM by Parkzer • Leather, Tempo

As part of Tempo Storm’s partnership with DXRacer that launched earlier this year, being a member of Tempo Storm, I was eligible to receive a chair. However, I wasn’t really that big of a fan of the Tempo Storm DXRacer chair.

There’s nothing wrong with it itself—it’s just a normal Racing Series chair with Tempo Storm branding—but I am quite peculiar when it comes to my furniture and interior design. In an ideal world, everything I own would be pure white, with black being ok as a secondary accent color and gray being somewhat acceptable, depending on the shade. As you can clearly see, blue is not on that list, and I wasn’t too excited about having a random blue piece of furniture that would not fit in very well with anything else I owned.

DXRacer came to the rescue, and although I had to wait a bit longer than everyone else to get my chair, they honored my special request and provided me with a black chair (though it has red contrast stitching because they were sold out of the all-black). Even better, they let me pick out a full grain leather chair instead of having to settle with polyurethane. That was huge for me, as I’m quite the leather goods enthusiast, and I love having full grain leather furniture so I can watch as the patina forms and tells a story of how it has aged.

You can check out its unique features in the close-up photographs below—it has all the natural pattern inconsistencies you’d expect from real leather, it has red piping along the edges, the seating surface is perforated, and more.

The start of the 2019 National PUBG League

February 2, 2019, 11:37 PM by Parkzer • Tempo, Travel

This post is over 5 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.

This is the culmination of the two weeks’ worth of travel I’ve done to California since the middle of January.

All the touring of properties, negotiations with realtors, reading of legal documents, coordination with contractors, and literal thousands of miles of driving was for this – the National PUBG League, or the NPL. In case you missed my references to it from my previous blog posts, I’ve been scrambling to get this team house set up as smoothly as possible because of our PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds team qualifying for this official league.

I’m not really a fan of live events anymore, as I’ve just been to way too many at this point, and they begin to lose their magic once you’re behind-the-scenes and see the clown fiesta that usually unfolds at each tournament. With that being said, it was still pretty satisfying being there in the front row of seats, especially on the very first day when we finished in first place overall.

This one cut it really close, and I got a good amount of help from a few people, but I think this is still considered another successful project under my belt.

Tempest Awards at Esports Business Summit 2018

October 3, 2018, 10:55 AM by Parkzer • Las Vegas, Photo Album, Tempo

The Tempest Awards, part of this year’s Esports Business Summit, conveniently took place at Esports Arena Las Vegas, just barely over 10 miles away from where I live. Robert Del Papa, Chief Business Development Officer of Tempo Storm, was nominated to receive an award at the ceremony, so I accompanied him to capture some photos of the event.

Full album: https://www.flickr.com/photos/adamparkzer/sets/72157671923743667

PUBG Pan-Continental 2018

July 15, 2018, 11:44 PM by Parkzer • Photo Album, Tempo

I’m not a huge fan of conventions or events, but our PUBG team came to Las Vegas to compete in the PUBG Pan-Continental, so I figured this would be a good opportunity for me to go out and capture some photos of them during the event.

The event took place at the PokerGO Studio, which is right by the Aria in CityCenter. However, just because I’m a Las Vegas resident now doesn’t mean I know exactly where everything is – especially on the Strip, because I live and always linger around the suburbs. I proceeded to roam around getting lost for a good half hour (nearly accidentally taking the tram to an entirely different area of the Strip) before finally making it to the studio.

This tournament was a multi-day event, and the manager (the one who ate the Fritos a few days ago) let me know that the studio wasn’t really that crowded. Keeping that in consideration, I showed up today… and realized the place was completely packed. After asking the manager why he baited me, he said that today was the final day, which is probably why more people showed up.

I began snapping photos of the venue and our players, and I eventually had to leave the competition area when the games started. The studio was literally so packed that I didn’t even have a place to sit, and I was actually considering leaving early… which I’m glad I did not, because Tempo Storm ended up winning the whole thing.

Full photo album: https://www.flickr.com/photos/adamparkzer/sets/72157697450001891

Escape rooms are not like what I thought they would be

June 27, 2018, 11:16 PM by Parkzer • Tempo

I’ve always avoided going into escape rooms because I thought my style of approaching an escape room would make it unfun for everyone else. I just assumed my inner maximum-efficiency and optimization urges would kick in and I would basically flip the entire room upside-down to try and figure out how to get out as quickly as possible, without really going through the actual puzzle process. Essentially, the thought process is that the room can only be so big, so I’m eventually going to “accidentally” run into a solution, possibly faster than just solving the puzzle (because the rooms are supposedly designed to take about an hour to complete).

I was catastrophically wrong.

I went to an escape room with members of Tempo Storm’s Heroes of the Storm team and staff, mainly because I was their ride, but also because we had a different appointment together shortly after the escape room. I was anticipating on spending the hour outside the escape room getting some work done on my laptop. At the beginning, I went into the room to grab some photographs, but while I was snapping pictures, before I realized what was happening… the room started.

Instead of just vigorously knocking on the door asking to be let out, I decided this would be my very first escape room experience. I immediately got to work flipping things over and trying to figure out the solution.

I rapidly realized that trying to brute-force the escape room was not as easy as I thought it would be, and it’s not just something you can “accidentally” do. We actually already knew the solution – to open a humongous padlock to retrieve the key – but it just happened to be protected by a 5-character lock. Now this wasn’t just a normal numerical lock… it was an alphabet lock. It didn’t take long for me to realize that just solving the puzzle would be easier than trying 11,881,376 different combinations. I’m a pretty amazing human being, but I know my limitations, one of which is the inability to attempt 3.3 five-character alphabet combinations every millisecond.

… and that was only the first part.

Eventually, we figured it out and got out of the room, but we didn’t really come anywhere close to setting a record. I’m actually pretty glad I got unexpectedly locked into the room, because it was an interesting experience.

Hello team

June 8, 2018, 11:31 PM by Parkzer • Tempo

A few of Tempo Storm’s staff members came to visit the Las Vegas team house and enjoyed the fire pit with the H1Z1 team

Hello team