Okay, I’m not going to lie to you. It’s two in the morning and I’m getting paid to be awake. I mean, I’m not even working, really, but I’m still getting paid. Every character I type is like another penny in my pocket (“On page 800, the results would be even higher, but I was exhausted.”). The fact that I’ve been “on the clock” since three this afternoon and I will be until eight (just six hours from now!) is meaningless to me. Let me explain my surroundings to you.

There are over two hundred people in this room. I’m guessing that seven hundred have passed through in the last four hours. I am sitting at a large table chock-full of Apple equipment: three PowerBooks, a 23″ display hooked to a mini, an iMac G5, and no less than six iPods of various shapes, configurations, and age. This table is located at the front door, right next to the food area, both of which are the very apex of population. Plasma televisions line the walls, with people sitting hunched in fours around them, slamming furiously on black boxes. In the middle of the room in pods of four, people stare into glowing LCD screens, grunting and screaming things like “Eat my ass, bitch!” (verily, an unhealthy prospect). Yes, I’m at a LAN party. This one. And yes, I have a demo table set up, blazing Apple glory forth upon the unclean (and almost certainly unwashed, given the state of most of the gamers here) masses. They’re playing a WarCraft III tournament exclusively on a set of some iMacs that Apple shipped in here. Most of the people are surprisingly receptive to Apple, although I think the really hardcore gamers are avoiding us (thank God, they smell the worst). Whoa… daylight savings time just kicked in… that was weird.

Anyway, I don’t have a lot else to say about it, I’ll post some pictures of it once I get them. A few notes, though, before I go: They kicked me off the DDR machine so they could play sports games. In Japanese. Who are these people? Also: the proportion of females in attendance is surprisingly high. I expected to see perhaps ten over the course of the entire twelve hours here, but that gender comprises perhaps 20% of the overall population. Not high, but a tremendous showing nonetheless. Oh, one more thing: Don’t play Green Day for two hours at insane volumes at an event like this. It really… gets old. Ugh.

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