PUBG Pan-Continental 2018

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

This post is over 8 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.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.

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

Literally Fritos

July 13, 2018, 10:21 AM PDT by Parkzer • Food

These are probably the worst photos I’ve taken in a really long time, but I found this to be so hilarious that I had to share it anyway…

One of our managers at Tempo Storm flew into Las Vegas from Los Angeles for a PUBG tournament coming up on the Strip. Before the games started, I met up with him and took him to get dinner at a location of his choice. He ended up picking a place called “Paid in Full,” which I still at this point don’t know what kind of restaurant it actually is. The menu and food options were strange, and I don’t even know what I ate (though I do have an out-of-focus photo of it):

Our manager ordered something that had “Fritos” in the name, so I assumed that it would be a dish that is flavored like corn chips or nachos – something similar to Fritos. I was only partially right, because the dish literally contained Fritos by Frito-Lay.

Below the food, though, I noticed something silver and shiny. I was curious as to what it was… then I realized…

Yes, that is actually a BAG OF FRITOS.

?__?

I go mini-golfing not to mini-golf, but to take photos

June 28, 2018, 11:44 PM PDT by Parkzer • Photo Album, Travel

The course looked nice, I couldn’t resist.

Also, we saw a peacock.

Full album: https://www.flickr.com/photos/adamparkzer/sets/72157698036346484

Escape rooms are not like what I thought they would be

June 27, 2018, 11:16 PM PDT 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.

How not to use a package locker

June 12, 2018, 6:51 PM PDT by Parkzer • General

Several years ago, being a deliveryperson was an actual full-time job for which you had to apply to a shipping company, wear a uniform, and operate their huge delivery trucks. However, in the past handful of years, Amazon started a new system called Amazon Flex where people can essentially be their own boss and deliver packages for Amazon during their free time on their own schedule – essentially like Uber, except you’re transporting packages instead of passengers.

Ever since this started in my area(s), package delivery has been catastrophically bad. Amazon Flex was a thing in Southern California where I lived before I moved to Las Vegas, and the deliverypeople had massive issues actually reading the address properly such that they would confuse unit and building numbers and think that the number 6 was the same as the number 8.

Amazon Flex deliveries haven’t quite been as bad in Las Vegas, but I had multiple instances of deliverypeople failing to deliver and saying they did not have access to my apartment building during normal business hours when there is literally a leasing office and an unlocked front door. I had even more instances of people not realizing we had package lockers, getting lost in my apartment building while trying to find my door, then proceeding to just leave the package in a random place on the first floor commercial area.

That brings me to the amazing feature my apartment building has that people don’t use – the package lockers. My apartment building installed Luxer One into the mail room, a system that essentially accepts packages on my behalf so we (theoretically) never have to miss another package again. For the deliverypeople who actually know it exists, it’s worked very well.

However, apparently this is still a somewhat new system that not many locations have, so beyond the people who just don’t know we have package lockers in our mail room, there are others who aren’t really too familiar with how the system works. For everyone who actually isn’t familiar with it, the deliveryperson registers the package in the little tablet computer that controls the lockers, holds the package up to the camera so the resident can see the package, then places the package into the designated locker for pick-up. The resident then receives an email with the photograph and a notification to come pick up the package.

The deliveryperson who delivered my package yesterday got all the steps right… except for the photo.

But he was close.

My first rabbit experience

June 9, 2018, 8:42 PM PDT by Parkzer • Food

(Photo quality is terrible because the restaurant was dark and I forgot my camera in my vehicle, so I used my ancient phone.)

Although I’m not really a food enthusiast, I enjoy having various different food experiences. When I buy raw meat from the grocery store to cook for my meals, I like to rotate across different kinds of meat, and immediately grab the “specialty” item if they have one available (usually not something completely exotic, but still something rarer, like swordfish or buffalo – stuff you usually don’t see).

Yesterday, I went to a restaurant with Tempo Storm’s H1Z1 team and a handful of staff members while they were in Las Vegas. Most of the items on the menu seemed boring and underwhelming, but there was one meat item I had never tried before – rabbit.

So, the answer to the obvious question of “how does rabbit taste”? I’m not sure if it was just because of the gravy and how this particular serving of rabbit was prepared, but it literally tasted exactly like turkey, so much so that I thought they were ripping me off and giving me turkey instead of rabbit.