Back to Activision. Dinner was held at the swanky DC3 restaurant which was steps away the office. The buffet was a passing memory because I was anxious to start gambling. Yep, that's right. They had one of those kooky fake-money casinos going and we each got $300 to blow. Well, I sidled up to a blackjack table and went through my money pretty quick. Ah but, "it's just fake money!" I kept screaming to myself.

Some funky DJ appeared and the dance floor lit up like a Turkish bazarre. I hit the floor with Anna Kang, Lowtax (formerly of PQ), David (id Software's tourmeister), and a couple other hip Activision people. Lowtax and I showed `em what dancing is all about. We were up, we were down, we were all over that grooving scene in what was either the most fantastic demonstration of hip hop ever, or the most embarrassing display of two grown men trying to look cool. But Anna kept laughing so I think we were doing okay.

Here's a funny tale. I asked one of the waitresses if she would be dancing, and when she responded that she had to work otherwise "would love to!", I grabbed her tray, shouted, "Ok go!" and proceeded to race around the tables collecting empty bottles and glasses. Well she almost screamed but chased me for a good 2 minutes before she caught me and her tray (I was going pretty fast). But now she knows. Never bluff the Radmeister.

Somewhere I dug up another $300 (now THAT doesn't happen everyday does it) so I hit the blackjack tables again. With only minutes to spare, I decided to see how quickly I could lose the money. I kept dropping $100 chips on other folks' bets, including loonyboi, Blue, Sharky, and a few others, but danged if I just could not lose everything.

At the end we got tickets based on how much money we had won, and there was this big prize giveaway, but for some reason I can't remember much of it. I talked to Todd Hollenshead for a bit and then Christian, and things were pretty much coming to a close. The rest of the night was pretty hazy, but I do remember walking for miles and miles down Sunset Blvd at 2:00am in the morning. What a great town LA is.

Saturday morning was kind of neat. I managed to make it back to my hotel just as David was getting up, and we jumped on the bus and drove it back to Activision. There I had the distinguished honor of helping to pull the guts out of the bus. We pulled out the machines, the nifty Q3 eye-pleasers, all the black padded foaming, and quite a bit of the wooden frame holding most of the innards together. It was fun but kind of sad. I think it was worse for David though, because he had ridden the thing since launch, a couple of months earlier.

I managed to grab a couple of hours of sleep and then hit the town with two wonderful folk. Paul, the Office Manager from Activision and his friend, shoot can't remember her name, took me through LA and we had a wonderful day together seeing the sites. I got to walk the Promenade, the Santa Monica peer, and even dunked my head in the ocean. Kind of a geeky touristy thing to do, but hey, I'm a computer nerd. What do you expect?

That was pretty much the end of my stay in LA, but I can't end this without sending a huge thank-you over to Anna Kang of id, who asked me to be apart of it. Um, so, thanks Anna. Was fun.

- Russell "RadPipe" Lauzon is some guy who just walked into the loonygames office and started calling himself Features Editor. The position wasn't filled so we kept him.