Happy Thanksgiving Canada :)

Hello!

Happy Thanksgiving to all of you Canadians who read this blog, and a Happy Columbus Day to all of you Americans:)

(Scribblenauts hat… not really turkey-ish, but close?)

Last weekend a LAN I helped to organize, Battle Royale III took place at Carleton University. It was a blast, a lot of work, tiring (24 hours long + set-up/clean-up) and a great way to meet a bunch of new gamers- like UKM from the Uber Melons. It is always a neat experience meeting gamers in person after you have seen them around on the internetz. I was also pretty psyched that my Rock Band team made semi-finals, and my PC team won a game of Counter-Strike:Source, although none of us had played in ages.

I actually missed out on the first five hours of the LAN, as I was out and about with two other organizers buying about $900 more of great prizes, when we learned that our budget was actually in the green! I’m a fan of shopping, but not when it means missing out on a LAN! We ended up picking up a lot of great stuff such as an XBOX 360, Racing wheel for the XBOX, about 30 usb thumbdrives, and a Rock Band 2 set.

It is a little bitter-sweet now to have the event in the past… every week this summer I would meet up with the other organizers to brainstorm on how to make the LAN great, and I spent a lot of my free time contacting sponsors (ended up wrangling EA, Valve, Bawls, G4 Canada, and SteelSeries!) and coordinating details for the LAN. It was a really exciting day, and I’m sad that it is over now. I am looking to being more of a participant, though, at the next LAN 🙂

pinkNINJA la photographeuse 😀 want to see more? Click here !

Battle Royale LAN Party

I haven’t been blogging so much lately, because I have been spending most of my spare time helping to organize a huge LAN party that is taking place from January 24-25, 2009 in Ottawa, Ontario at Carleton University. I can barely believe how soon it will be taking place! I will not be able to attend, because I will already be in France, but I have been trying my best to help make this LAN a huge success.

I was able to get Bawls, the energy drink for gamers to sponsor the event with 200 free drinks. Steam is also donating us 100 free temporary accounts for those do not own Valve games, and want to try them out and/or participate in the Valve game tournaments.

My friend, Renegade, from Pwnage.TV will also be making the trip up to Ottawa to do shoutcasting for the various tournaments!

I wish so much that I could be there, because LAN parties are always fun, and I know this one will be truly great. Please spread the word to your Canadian gamer friends ^^

Battle Royale Site

“Prof Gets $100,000 Grant to Study World of Warcraft”

“As reported by the Orange County Register, Prof. Bonnie Nardi of the University of California Irvine, received the $100K grant from the National Science Foundation for the project.”

I’m wondering how she went about getting the $100,000, as it doesn’t seem like it would take very much $ to research WoW. It’s interesting, though, to see that video games are being taken so seriously in the field of science. I would like to read her report later to see if she observes any interesting economical trends from WoW that can be applied IRL.

The closest thing that I ever did to this was making a Counter-Strike:Source presentation in my second year of university for French class. It was really fun giving 1337-speak translations and showing my class a demo of some pro CS:S players.

Best presentation ev0r!

Game Politics: Prof Gets $100,000 Grant to Study World of Warcraft