An old slappers guide to the LAN

[smilodon]

Another year another mindless trek up to the backside of nowhere... why do I do it?

Wednesday. Decided it would be wise to actually fire up Counter Strike for the first time in six months, seeing as the LAN is only a day away. Discover I have no mic working. Mess about for most of the evening and fail to get a squeak out of the thing. Bugger. Manage to make the red bar in  'sound recorder' jump about a bit but absolutely sod all comes back out of the ear phones. Maybe I need new headphones?  Mine are the cheapest load of kak that was ever  stuck in a PC Worlds Bagain Bucket so I'm pretty amazed they have worked at all.

Thursday. By a nice set of Logitech Gamer Specials (put 'gamer' in the name and charge idiots like me an extra tenner). Plug them in and they make not a bloody bit of difference. I'm now the owner of 'two' perfectly OK sets of headphones and am completely mute on CSS and teamspeak. Decide to jump on Meathook and have a practice anyway. Maybe in the last 1/2 year I have somehow improved my I337 $killz without actually having played CS at all? Three minutes later I leave after being utterly pwnd by some six year old girl called Abominator or something.

Set my alarm for 6am and then decide at 11pm to get in a quick bit of WOW. Just do one daily quest and log off. It's now 1.30am and I log off WOW. I Go to bed.

Friday 6am. Alarm goes off. Wake up. Go back to sleep. Wake up at 7am. Load up the car. Set off. Turn round and go home. Put my monitor in the boot. Set off. Drive to the LAN. I have no trouble and no traffic. Great. Stuff is looking up. 9.30 am I arrive at the Griffin. The place is deserted so I walk into March. Depression sets in and so I decide to grab a Skinny Decaf Latte. I walk the length of March and find not a Cafe Nero, Coffee Republic... nothing. Not even a bloody Starbucks. I'd settle for one of their pretend coffees? I do find a Seed Emporium though!!! A great big shop that sells seeds. Just seeds. These aren't farmers seeds or  gardeners seeds. No, these are  'for eating' seeds. Wall to wall buggering seeds.  If you're a fecking Chaffinch you're sorted. If you're a human who craves caffine, then tough luck. I walk back to the hotel choking on Guatemalan Wild Sunflower seeds.

I sit in the lounge and within seconds I'm offered filter coffee by a nice old lady who I assume works there. Oddly after bringing me the coffee I never see her again for the entire weekend. Maybe she is a ghost? Maybe I'm just bored?

A few minutes later Gandalf Lord of Jelly arrives. Over the last year I have lost 3 1/2 stone and am feeling pretty smug about myself. Gandy sits down and I discover he has lost four stone in a similar time scale. I'm still erring on the tubby and he's looking lean and mean. Everyone who then arrives is congratulating him on looking really good. I get nothing. Bugger.

Head into the LAN room and start setting up stuff. I spend an hour or two shoving new sound cards into the PC, loading drivers, un-installing drivers and taking sound cards out again. Finally I discover that I have been plugging the mic into the wrong socket. It should be the blue socket and not the red one. I plug it in correctly and the mic works. Bugger.

Dinner time. It's Steak Night and I'm a vegetarian. :eyebrow: Still they do a nice Monkfish so all is not lost. Monkfish is off. I have tuna instead. All this meat eating is making me feel a bit odd. Big Fat Cat goes insane and decides to eat  24oz steak :blink: That's a pound and a half of oozy medium rare blood flecked flesh. And he's sitting next to the only LAN veggie.... me. I feel a bit sick. I'm also sitting next to Penfold. Sadly i am introduced to his dark side, he's a degenerate letch. Young Amy our waitress (Penfold got her name almost immediatly), who is seventeen at a push, has to spend the evening supplying Penfold with a continuous stream of bread rolls. This is due to Pen finding some perverse delight in asking Amy if she would give him "just one more roll please precious". I reach over for the wine and inadvertently put my hand in the small puddle of drool created by a combination of Amy's good looks and  Penfolds lust. I feel a bit sick.

Get a bit of CS in. I'm glad my mic is working. Now I can swear at people when they tell me I'm completely crap. Someone tells me I'm so crap that a six year old girl could probably beat me. My mic is working and I say nothing... :sad:
Sheepy appears and begins to stroke my head. According to his slurred drunken speech I am "lovely and like a fuzzy felt". Thankfully he soon leaves and passes out somewhere.

I wander back into the restaurant. Oldie and Tealeaf are leading a discussion into how we can sort out certain issues to improve some of the ways the Community is run. We agree however, that there seems no effective way to resolve the issues and as we are all drunk we should definitely not waste the whole evening talking about it now. But we talk about it anyway. Time passes. It's now 4.30am and we agree there seems no effective way to resolve the issues.... I go to bed.

Saturday. Was drunk last night and I set my alarm for 7am. Now I'm sober and now is actually is 7am. Damn. I go back to sleep. It's 8.30am and I wake up and go downstairs for breakfast. Breakfast is pretty good. It also looks nice by the window so I sit there. It is not nice by the window at all, In fact it's is an oven by the window. I have a hangover, the heat is not good and Tealeaf is working through a small mountain of Black Pudding for breakfast. I feel a bit sick.

I play some CS. We are having a CS Tourny. I' am on Lionhearts team. He has never been on the loosing team at a dMw LAN. Hurrah I can smell victory. I'm also on the same team as Fatbob. He has never been on a winning team at a dMw LAN. Bugger. So Fatbob cancels out Lionheart. Anything could happen. Penfold gets bribed to swap sides half way through the match and give away all our tactics. We loose.

It's BF2 time. I have BF2, I have both the disc and a real serial number. What can go wrong? Everything goes wrong. Tealeaf is trying to get BF2 loaded onto his Cray Supercomputer as well. BF2 blows his computer up. Now I'm scared. I install BF2. But it won't see the server. I re-install BF2. I can see the server but I cannot connect. I re-install BF2. I should not have re-installed BF2. I just needed to patch BF2. No one has the patch so I give up and un-install BF2. Someone now has the patch. I re-install Bf2 and patch it. I can see the server. I can join the server. I'm IN! I run towards the action. I flag Oldie down to give me a ride in his tank. Oldie runs me over and I die. I respawn and the round ends. We have won. Everyone stops playing BF2. I log off and un-install BF2....bugger

Dinner. Amazingly this goes fairly well. Penfold is having a curry with Benny and Smite or something and Amy is not working tonight... I think she has Guide Camp? So the table remains relatively free of bread rolls and drool.

I go back for some gaming. Everyone is playing some crazy game called Zombies. I think of my BF2 pain and decide not to bother. I later discover it's a simple CSS mod and would have taken a few moments to set up. Bugger. I go to bed.
Hotels don't do keys any more. They do swipe cards. Mine opens my door and then goes in a slot on the wall to make the room lights come on. My card is broken. The door will open but the lights will not come on. I'm busting for a leak and it's pitch black in the bathroom. I think I have a good idea where the toilet is and take a chance. It seems I have no idea where the toilet is and take leak all over the bathroom floor. There is a loud click and the lights come on so I can see to clean up the mess...... I go to bed.

Sunday. 9am. I have breakfast, pack up, pay up and leave. Another LAN finished. Roll on bloody October....

[Jabbs]

pmsl - loved that report

[Anonymous]

roflmao - that was an excellent read :roflmao:

[Gandalf]

and it's all true too, though you did leave out the most important event all lan. 'ding' 70 :narnar:

[BigFatCat]

I shall take it upon myself to mention the Twins, and then pass Oldie a large spoon.

[Carr0t]

One day, I shall make it to a LAN. And this just made me want to all the more, dammit!

[DuVeL]

Mhmmm, breadrolls...
A good read indeed.
 
See you at the next LAN.

[Jabbs]

A 'roll' with Amy comes to mind

[BigFatCat]

I think one of the Twins was called April, and Sunday's Lady of the Sausage might have been called Jo.







I am a rude old man.

[Salvatore Buttafacio]

haha great read.

I knew there was something dodgy about Pen but couldn't but my finger on it, unless it was his head in my crosshair :devil:

they did force those breadrolls on us though, everyone at our table had them thrown at us.

[delanvital]

Brilliant read. I vote sticky for this one

[DuVeL]

Brilliant read. I vote sticky for this one

Mhhmm, why not add all written stories into 1 and sticky that?
They were all nice reads and it seems that there were loads of new faces at the LAN this time.
Maybe if they'd type something about their expectations of it and how they liked it or not?

[Jamoe]

:roflmao: Great Read Smilodon.

[sheepy]

im lubbin this quote

Sheepy appears and begins to stroke my head. According to his slurred drunken speech I am "lovely and like a fuzzy felt". Thankfully he soon leaves and passes out somewhere.

[smilodon]

pah the second sig line I've given you. I just bet you don't remember it at all.