Impressions

• The studio is hilariously modest within a high school (and sort of out in the middle of nowhere)… but it makes sense, as most people who play Starcraft II in Korea, minus the professionals, are in high school or younger. The high school that the games are hosted in was no fancier than my high school back in California. Hell, I had to walk through a basketball court to get to the studio. Here are directions on how to get to the studio if you’re in Seoul.
• The public seating is free, and maxes out at about 40 people.
• Half the people there were foreigners (ie: not Korean).
• There are 4 booths total so that 2 players can play their matches while the other two setup, allowing match sets to be played back-to-back.
• The player’s booths and light setup is pretty epic given how modest the studio size is.
• They give you thunder sticks for free and you can make the silly signs there for free as well. If you make a sign, you WILL get camera time at some point during the broadcast.
• There’s always a window of opportunity to take photos with your favorite pro players if they’re nice enough to chill in the lobby for a bit after their match set.
• Tasteless & Artosis (the english casters) are really nice guys and you can tell they get a lot of foreign fans coming in each season. They’re willing to stick around after the matches and chat a bit with the nerds lurking around. I said hello, got a photo, and asked one favor of Artosis: to please never stop asking Tasteless what happens when he gets on the ladder… fucking hilarious every time.
• Unfortunately for foreigners who do not know Korean, actually watching the matches live kind of sucks. You cannot hear the english commentary by Tasteless & Artosis the entire time (I wish I could channel them into some headset or something)… you can only hear piercing screaming from the 3 Korean commentators that are projected onto loudspeaker in the studio. The two guys commentating will feverishly make observations and analysis of the game, while the female caster in the middle repeatedly exclaims 내! (“nae” = yes/ok) in acknowledgement. I much prefer just watching the matches online.

Front and center seat right before the match of IMLosira (on screen) vs. SlayerS_Alicia. Screen shows Losira’s (Zerg) win record vs. Protoss players.

Dual player booths on each side. Left Booth: sCfOu (playing). Right Booth: SlayerS_Alicia (preparing)

Photo (albeit blurry) with Artosis (left) and Tasteless (right).

Despite the laundry list of drawbacks, I’m really glad I went. If you’re in Seoul and a Starcraft II fan, you should definitely check out the GSL live.

General Tip: If you’re a North American or European account-holding Starcraft II player visiting Korea, you cannot goto the PC방’s (PC room/cafe) to play Starcraft II unless you either bring your own computer or do some gnarly region-lock circumvention mentioned around the teamliquid forums (and of course, you cannot LAN either because battle.net is required). In order to play on the Korean servers at all, you must have a valid Korean Social Security Number and also purchase another license for the game specific to Korea! I sadly learned this the first time I sat down in a PC망 here.

Grocery stores and family markets around here are much lower key.

A really sick house that I found in the hillside “suburbs” surrounding. Each of the sheds on opposing sides of the house are little green houses for cultivating plants. These dogs were just chillin’ in the window, watching traffic and people pass by.

Main university boardwalk full of restaurants, PC cafe’s, coffee shops, and boutiques.

Beautiful alleyway. I realized really quick that these look the coolest when there are no cars to be found. Unfortunately, they’re hard to come by.

You can get anything delivered in Korea, including McDonalds. This is just one of their (probably hundreds of) motorcades.

Pleased Graham is pleased.

Then off to the brewery where they had a pretty kickass attic bar where we were served over 7 kinds of beer for free.

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Aside from the terrible service we got at this restaurant called Beyond the Glory thereafter, I would say the day was a complete success. Amit and I walked out of the brewery store with 2 cases of Cappucino Stout. Allen and Tim were in my car and within a half hour of getting home, all three of us inadvertently passed out for an hour. Allen somehow managed to sleep on my concrete floors for no reason.

Oh also and totally unrelated and continuing my obsession with the record label, the cover artwork to this new Ghostly compilation is killer; makes a great desktop wallpaper (and the release itself ain’t half bad either)–

Time for some throwbacks if there ever were some. For those who don’t know, Operation Ivy was the precursor to Rancid–

More occurred than this.