Bonus story : The TF2 Charity Incident

So, some of you may have gathered pieces of the disastrous story from a variety of streamers, who were live when I briefly described what happened but I think it'd be a good idea to just write it in full here as well.

You know how it goes, one man's tragedy is another man's comedy.

Additionally, terrible incidents make great stories.

Yesterday was a series of "those" incidents... 

For context, TFConnect is the annual charity event I participate in and always look forward to every single year. It's always a lot of fun, the organizers put a lot of effort into the event and at the of the day, we get to raise money for those in need.

In the past the panel I was normally featured in was the MvM panel together with content creators & TF2 devs. This year my panel was featuring 1 hour of TF2 50vs50 together with content creators.

TFConnect is set around EU timezone, so my panel was supposed to be at 9 AM local time (PDT), check in is generally about half an hour before the panel, so I was aiming to be fully ready by 8:30 AM. 

Completely separate from that, my Japanese friends were hosting a gathering in VRChat @ 8 AM (my local time) that was supposed to have 50+ people. They really wanted me to swing by and I don't get to hang with my Japanese friends very often due to timezones, so my plan was to wake up before 8 AM, spend a bit of time with my Japanese friends while I'm still waking up and then be ready for 9 AM TF2 charity panel.

For some odd reason I was still fairly awake at 2 AM in my bed, so I figured I'll just set up one of those tablet holding stands for my SteamDeck I just got from Amazon, so I play it until I get tired while in bed.

I set it up, booted up Tekken 8 and began customizing my character.

This was is the last photo I took before the disaster struck -

Let's put it this way, it's not fun to get hit in the face with a brick. Unfortunately, that's exactly what happened, as after about 5 minutes of play, for some odd reason, the SteamDeck just suddenly fell out of its mount and hit my nose.

Due to how physics work, it fell on my face from a great height, not with its screen panel side but the sharp bottom one, right on my nasal bone, slicing it up. Hurt like a bitch and I knew there was blood, so I went to the bathroom to see the wound in the mirror and to take care of it.

Situation:

It's 3 AM. I just got hit in my nose with a modern equivalent of Nokia 3310. I can barely see shit because turning on bathroom lights to see the wound at night is like walking out the Vault in Fallout for the first time.

Like a blind mole, I hectically try to scavenge whatever I have by the sink to craft a temporary solution for the bleeding bruise and to disinfect it. I managed to echolocate some Neosporin that probably expired like 4 years ago and an aerosol spray designed for numbing limbs in seconds when it comes to severe injuries. So, I grab the aerosol and bring it to my face.

In that 3 AM moment my thought process went something like this :

"If I bring the spray this close to my nose, at this specific angle and gently tap it, none of it should go in my eyes"

I was never this wrong in my life.

I guess I didn't really think about aerodynamics of my nose that night, because not just some but ALL OF IT went into my eyes. To give you perspective on how much it hurt... I work on old cars and I've had fuel in my eyes a couple times, as well as carb & brake cleaners. This hurt more than all 3 combined, tenfold.

I am bleeding in the middle of the night, blinded by the bathroom light and now blinded with numbing spray. This couldn't get any worse... or so I thought. I can't open my eyes at all due to insane pain and I'm just wondering if I will even be able to see at all after this. In the event of emergency, I can't call 911 because my phone is somewhere in the dark room and even if I could open my eyes, the room light would blind me far more than the bathroom one. So, I tried to hectically wash it all out under the sink while my nose is still bleeding but the issue now is that due to the menthol content in that numbing spray, I'm not only spreading all that menthol all over my face, I also have 0 idea if I'm currently boiling my skin off with hot water or I'm about to turn myself into an icicle with freezing water. In simple terms, it burnt & felt painfully cold at the same time.

15 minutes of eyewashing and I was able to somewhat open my eyes again. The vision was blurry but I could at least tell where I am moving forward. I bandaged my nose with the first bandaid I could find and dropped back on my bed. I was just simply upset that it's nearly 4 AM, I still haven't gotten any sleep, yet I have an event in 4 hours and a charity event in 5 hours. To distract myself from pain, I just ended up playing games in my bed until the shock wore down and the fatigue got overwhelming to the point where I just passed out.

I woke up at around 9 AM, quickly realizing that I missed the small Japanese friends' gathering and I'm late to check-in for the TF2 charity event. I felt absolutely terrible about it and I immediately rushed to my PC, still in pajamas, without checking my face or anything, just to see if I could check-in late.

Fortunately for me, the panel was running just a tiny bit off schedule and the organizers were very understanding (god bless you guys), so I managed to join the 50 vs 50 game server and check-in on time for it to start.

So, there were 3 active voice chats for participants in the discord server of the event and I clicked on one of them, without realizing that there will be around 50 streamers in it, all yelling over each-other lol. I had an immediate audio sensory overload.

Meanwhile, the whole charity event had a feature that allowed donators to temporarily activate random effects for the whole server. Kind of like !RTD / Roll The Dice but with much larger pool of the possible effects, both visual and gameplay stuff.

Here are some examples (the actual full pool of random effects was huge) -

Now I just want you to picture this :

I'm in a ghoulish-husk barely-awake state, running on little to no sleep, staring at my tf2 screen while still in my pajamas, with a bloody bandaid over my nose, my eyes are still fucked up from the spray, I haven't eaten anything and haven't consumed any water or caffeine yet, there are multiple streamers yelling in both of my ears, I can't visually or mentally coordinate my hands to reach the volume slider on my computer...

All while I'm going through a dozen visual status effects in TF2, like earthquakes, 45 angle camera tilt etc...

If you open the VOD of the stream, you can see the majority of my gameplay after I joined the server, has consisted of me aimlessly wondering around the spawn room, bumping into every wall like a broken roomba and just being outright terrified of every in-game noise. At a certain point some donator rolled "flashbang" effect for the entire server without a warning and when that happened, I thought I'm gonna puke on my keyboard.

I don't have any other way to describe what I was going through other than this discord chat screenshot from my Barotrauma video (6:16)

As I was still waking up, I opened the livestream in the background, to see what's going on. The stream wouldn't show the visual effects the players would be seeing, as it'd make the viewing experience pretty rough but here's some examples of what I personally saw nearly 100% of the time-

Due to the stream delay, when I opened the broadcast I was unfortunate enough to witness the camera person spectating me from my first perspective (still without the visual effects though). You could clearly see that the way I'd move in-game wouldn't be by utilizing all of my fingers, as I'd essentially walk in one direction at a time, due to the sensory overload.

The worst and perhaps the most hilarious part was that I was somewhat aware of my state but I was completely unable to do anything about it in the beginning.

After experiencing the shellshock from screaming streamers, I moved myself to the other voice channel with less people in it, where I wouldn't get overwhelmed as much, which made it all more manageable.

I still couldn't really play, so I figured I should get some food, water and caffeine before I continue, otherwise I'd get way too nauseous. I got out of my chair and went towards the stairs...

I now have a badass indoor security camera footage of me tripping down the stairs, by accidentally slipping like a looneytunes cartoon character on a banana peel, violently hitting every stair step and rail in the process of my forced descent. I spent a bit of time on the floor wondering what on earth just happened. I was simply scared and confused at that moment.

Anyways, the rest of the event went relatively smooth as I refused to un-glue myself from the seat, in fear of accidentally doing something dumb and injuring myself further.

There are some funny clips that came out of it too, like when someone rolled noclip for the server and I switched to spy, hoping to noclip into the enemy spawn and killing a few people... What ended happening is that I just got lost flying halfway through the map and accidentally doing 180 turn, ending up back at our own spawn and killing multiple of my teammates before realizing I wasn't killing the enemy, it was just "friendly-fire" donation effect.

Anyways, I just wanted to to share this hilarious (to me) story, as once again, one man's tragedy is another man's comedy. Thank you for reading.

I'm alright and all jokes aside, I'm extremely grateful to TFConnect & all the people who attended. It's always a lot of fun and I always look forward to the next one.

PS even when the streams aren't up, you can still donate to charity by going to the website - https://tfconnect.org/