Europe Baby! Paris Pt. 1, City of Love, City of Lights

Ok, now I’m caught up on the first round of COVID Mexico, and I can finally start weaving the words together on my current adventures. I’m excited to share and a little bit wine drunk, so buckle in.

Paris. How did I end up there? To be completely honest, I’m doing this whole Europe thing on a shoestring budget. Call it a midlife crisis, after I quit Ubisoft (after working fucking seven years there), I got a job as a video game dev at Behaviour Interactive.

(If you wanna skip to Paris, hop down this post to the Paris – Day 1 Section; this turned into a bit of a ramble about work).

I did a year and a half there on a new IP. As a senior game dev, in Unreal (game engine), that they promised they’d train me in. Hired as a gameplay programmer, and they chucked me into a role as the UI senior dev. So take away all my gameplay experience, put me into a boring fucking job I didn’t apply for making buttons and menus, in an engine I don’t know, and ask the world of me.

But I was on a bit of a high. I had finally said fuck you to Ubisoft, escaped the monotony of five years on Rainbow Six Siege post-launch… I studied for a month for interviews, and got three offers to make about 35% more. You should all quit your jobs, they’re fucking you. They will bleed the years of your life dry, and give you the least they can. Welcome to capitalism.

I worked my ass off at Behaviour to catch up. I worked my ass off like I never have before. I actually fucking tried. And it wasn’t enough. Behaviour is known for exactly one IP, Dead by Daylight. It’s kind of a trash game to be honest, probably could have been cobbled together by four dipshits in their mom’s basement, but it found a niche amongst horror lovers and funded the whole studio.

So not knowing any of this, I took the job there. 7 weeks of vacation, staff kitchen cooking free lunches every day, and a flexible remote schedule, not to mention it was about three blocks from my apartment. Cushy as hell. I had a friend working there in the marketing department, and I was counting on him to introduce me to the cute ladies at the first 5a7. That’s a CINQ A SEPT, or happy hour, for you non Frenchies.

They fired him first. Before our first 5a7 sadly, so no introductions for me. I don’t think the dude is a genius, but he’s not dumb, and to boot, he’s super lovable, friendly, and works his ass off.

At Ubisoft, it was basically impossible to get fired; the only person I ever saw get laid of was a dev tester buddy, and he would regularly show up to work at 11am. Then Pokemon Go came out, and we’d go out on lunch break catching Pokemon… I’d come back to the office, but buddy would sometimes stay out the rest of the work day. Catching Pokemon! I guess he got addicted or something, wouldn’t surprise me if he actually caught them all. It took Ubi about six months of this to finally lay him off.

So my buddy gets shitcanned at my new company without a ton of justification, and that’s the first sign of trouble to me. Because the dude can obv crush a marketing job, it’s Dead by Daylight, everyone already knows the fucking game. Marketing, what marketing? They do collabs with famous horror movies / novels and rake in the cash. MTX, grind those microtransactions baby (oh how far the game dev industry has fallen into corporate bullshit since the glory days of early Blizzard, Westwood Studios, etc…)! Robo-pilot that shit and collect cheques, some corpo politics involved maybe, who fucking knows.

Anyways, I get to the first 5a7 a month in and have made friends already with a few of the devs. I convince half the programming team to come out to a local bar nearby afterwards, and we just get shitfaced. Including the team lead T. Fuck, I was going to tell the Paris story and this whole thing is a preface to it. Sorry not sorry.

So we get really fucking drunk at this local bar I love, Melrose, I get half the dev team wasted. We get some discounts, and everyone loves me for it. Putting the team in teambuilding baby! BUT, I miss the prog Teams call in the morning. I admit it was because I was hungover on death’s door (like a fucking idiot; I’m way too honest sometimes. though to be fair, T was at the bar with us so it’s pretty obvious what happened).

T has it out for me at that point. I mean, it doesn’t help that I’m frantically playing catchup with Unreal; my “training” was an online course they threw at me that I got fucking 2 days to look at before they chucked me in the deep end of the pool. “Please architect an entire feasible UI framework with zero Unreal knowledge, here’s a ten day course we will give you 2 to look at, GO”! I do like a challenge though.

Actually, funny story, my first day at BI was on the entirely wrong project; they didn’t even know what team I was supposed to be on. Instant chemistry with the lead for that project, he seemed like an absolute beauty, but sadly it was not to be.

Long story short BI busted on a game called “Meet Your Maker”. They met their maker, the game completely flopped, and BI missed annual revenue projections across the board by about 70%. Welcome to game dev. Except as a large, non-publicly traded Indie company, that tends to have some consequences.

So they’re just firing people left right and center… in the middle of an acquisition of 3 UK studios, that go through because the paperwork is signed. I’m training some of the UK juniors, and honestly, at least 2 or 3 of them probably deserved to get shit canned. I have no idea how they got hired in the first place; without being an asshole, objectively, reviewing their code had me thinking they should be flipping burgers at McD’s. We’re talking code that barely compiles, makes no sense, and doesn’t even come remotely close to closing the JIRAs. Those were the first to go, but the rest of the juniors soon followed… really makes me wonder why management wasted my time training them.

Game dev is saturated by kids with a glow in their eyes, happy to think they’ll be making their favorite game of all time, and ok getting paid jack shit for it. My intermediate and junior on the UI team were fucking rock solid programmers with plenty of Unreal experience, absolutely loving it, and making like 60-70% of my salary. Loved working with those guys; they definitely should have been Senior / Intermediate. At a certain point it becomes tough to compete value wise though, when it’s a race to the bottom. The guys could easily be making close to double what they are if they were valued properly; if I was running a company on a slippery slope, I’d be cutting myself first too.

Company struggling, cuts made, and in the end, I got snipped. Third broad round of layoffs, but at least I survived the first 2. T had said that she would have shitcanned me by Xmas (they actually fired my original team lead, who had spent the whole year telling me I was doing great, right before yearly evals), but she saw me working my ass off and decided to keep me around a while longer because of it. Very morale boosting, thanks T! Production schedule for an important milestone was a mess, and I pulled some long hours to make sure that we got everything on the in-game HUD running crispy clean; we pulled off the milestone UI side without a hitch, and I can honestly say I was proud of that.

I’ll say this one thing; all the nights that I was working overtime, T was right fuckin there in the office plugging away with me. Last two at the office every night, for about a month and a half straight. 8pm, 9pm, etc. I have no idea what she was doing; not sure who you can be emailing to make the work done better/harder/faster/stronger while producing nothing (don’t get me started on the management class in general), but she was putting in the hours as well, not asking anyone to do something she wasn’t willing to do, and I respect the fuck out of her for that.

So finally, laid off, as part of a cohort, with a very healthy severance. Might have been the final straw for me with the corporate world / management bloat. I had just tried my ass off at a new job, and failed. With me putting in 100% effort, which is rarer than it should be. Took about a month after that for L to break up with me, and we’ll unpack that nuclear bomb another time, but all together, I’d just had enough, and desperately needed an excuse to shake things up a bit. (I’ll fill in more on the interim period between then and Europe another time.

My friend from Uni / poker buddy D had invited me to come to Greece, but he changed his mind last minute and wanted to send Albania instead. I was initially skeptical, but I have a couple of really good uni friends here, cost of living looked promisingly low, and so I said fucki it, we booked an AirBnb for May, some flights, and my midlife crisis officially began.

Never been to Europe as an adult, but it turns out that with all the Frenchies flying back and forth, the cheapest ticket into Europe from Montreal is through Paris. Had at least one person I wanted to see there, so I decided to fly through Paris and see the Eiffel Tower. Which is how this story actually begins, holy fuck that was a big dump, but in the end we got there.

Paris Day 0:

You guys are going to ask how Day 0 can be a thing. I fucked up big time. I booked a flight, I booked a hostel, I told my Paris ex, C, that I was coming today. I get to the airport, try to enter my flight reservation, and can’t find it in the terminal. I’m trying to figure out what the fuck is going on, I’ve already subletted my place… and it turns out that my flight isn’t until the next day.

Cab back home, drive of shame, down eighty bucks, and remind myself not to be completely retarded.

Paris Day 1:

Ok. So holy shit, after all the hassle, I get on the fucking plane. It takes off, we fly in the air for a few hours, and all of a sudden I’m on the other side of the world.

Flight attendants chuck all the lights on paging for a doctor; they have oxygen out and a defibrillator on standby. Pretty lucky they didn’t have to use the defib, because I have some serious doubts that the EMT and Doc who answered the call actually knew how this model worked, based on the parts of the convo I could catch. Everyone in the section watching intently like it was a live theater version of Grey’s Anatomy. I’d call em sick fucks, but I have some dark, grumpy, sleep deprived thoughts of my own. If you’re going to die, you could at least die in silence and quickly, so the rest of us can get some fucking shut eye (yep, I’m burnin’ in Hell boys). Obviously didn’t really mean it though.

A little sleep deprived, we reach the other side of the world; except it kinda feels like we never left Montreal. It smells like Oldport. It sounds like the Oldport. It looks like Oldport. I went from a land of Frenchies to another land of Frenchies with proper grammar. Actually, funny aside; I realized that I can in fact speak French through pure osmosis, after living in mtl for 12 years. It’s the Montrealer’s who can’t speak French, tabernac esti, they cram four words at a time into one and make a beautiful language make zero sense. I spoke French in Paris about 80% of the trip and I fucking killed it.

C is at the airport waiting for me. She joked that she couldn’t make it last minute via text, which got lost in translation and made for a confusing arrival, but holy fucking shit, she showed up to play. We’d talked the week leading up, and she said she’d grab me from the airport… and she just looks stunning. Glowing skin, beautiful dress and heels, petite with pretty brown eyes. Oof. She did preface this trip by saying we would be “just friends”. But shows up dressed like that; to be honest, not sure she ever wore makeup or heels around me the entire time we dated. But now that we’re friends… Fackin’ women eh boys?

Brief history, we dated about a year total while she was studying abroad, but it was always with the knowledge she’d return to Paris after, so even though she lived with me, we always knew it’d have an end. Amicable breakup, and it’s the first time we’ve seen each other in over five years.

When you’re landing in a foreign country, the people who welcome you are everything. I didn’t understand that until I felt it myself; she certainly didn’t have to scoop me at the airport, but it was one of the sweetest things I’ve experienced in a long time. She also has an ice coffee and pastry for me for breakfast, which was fantastic; delicate, a little crumbly, touch of chocolate… Frenchies don’t fuck around when it comes to baking.

We figure out train tickets to get back into the city, and we catch up a bit; it’s been five or six years and we can’t possibly get through it all. She has to bail for a bit for a family event, and gets off halfway, but just the fact that she came all the way out to grab me speaks volumes about her. And I suppose us I guess. Fingers crossed!

Anyways, I get to my metro stop. I booked a hostel with a private room thinking it would be like Mexico. It was not, at all. Front desk and the public area is fine, but the rooms are trash. Right on the southside of Paris, Jo and Joe, Gentilly… nothing is gentle about the actual living space.

My “room” consists of a hallway door on the fifth floor, that leads into 4 separate doors to “rooms”. Rooms is in quotes because they are a 2×4 entrance with a bed. It’s a bunkbed, and I have a top bunk, with the lower bunk in the other “room”, and some person crashing directly underneath me, separated in the middle by the build of the bed. No aircon, one light, a very very tiny area to walk into, and a ladder up to the bed. Obviously the bathrooms / showers are communal as well. Still don’t know how nobody walked in on me ass naked, should have brought a soap bar just to complete the prison experience. Might be over hostels for a while.

I don’t have any super concrete plans in Paris. C won’t be free until later that night, and another extremely good friend of mine from McGill, Vidy, isn’t in town until tomorrow (super lucky that our trips overlapped). Obviously I have some ideas about checking out the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, etc, but I’m actually more interested in visiting a chess bar I’ve seen some of the famous streamers frequent, Blitz Society. I’m hoping to be able to play in at least one speed chess tourney and throw down.

The day is nice enough, so I decide to walk it up. Grab a quick bite at one of four shawarma joints just outside the hostel, and kick off what will be a forty or fifty minute walk. I do spend about ten minutes trying to figure out Velib, which is the Paris equivalent of Bixi (public bike rental service), but the app is designed poorly and the actually kiosks with the bikes are extremely confusing. Fuck the bikes, we’re walking boys.

It’s probably about 1pm, and my walk takes me through Luxembourg Park, where I’ve heard there are sometimes blitz games being played. Pass a couple of cool statues, and get a chance to try using one of the public urinals (they are very strange looking, extremely tight spaces where you piss into a waterfall; splash risk seems extreme, but I guess they get the job done).

The park is gigantic, with a couple sets of tennis courts, and I’m not spotting any chess, though there are a very large amount of people of working age that seem to just be loafing around, at 1pm on a Wednesday. I would chirp the work ethic of the French, but maybe they have it figured out better than us NA dogs, and it’s not like I’m working a “real job” right now either.

I do eventually spot a couple of chess games going. But it’s literally only a couple, there are a few old dudes slugging it out at one board, and about twelve youngers guys crowded around a second board. Tempted to ask them for a game, but it’s just way too many people and not enough boards. I watch for a few minutes and ballpark their Elo’s as being a complete waste of time for me anyways, and continue moving on towards Blitz Society.

It doesn’t open up until three, so I end up killing a bit of time drinking a beer on a terrace and smoking a cigarette. I was planning on quitting while out in Europe, but it’s going to be hard; they let you smoke everywhere, and terrace smokes feel damn good.

Blitz Society’s location is a little bit weird, it’s almost this hole in the wall in an alleyway off of one of the main roads, but the interior is quite nice. It sort of has a classy cocktail lounge feel to it, except that every single table has a board and clock set up. There aren’t too many people there yet, since I walk in about ten minutes after it opens, but a few games are going. I check them out briefly but the games don’t look that serious, and I turn my attention to the hostess / waitress. Fairly attractive blonde woman in her early thirties, slender with a warm smile, probably Ukranian or something.

Order a beer (obviously), and ask her what the tournament schedule is this week. It turns out that the only proper blitz tournament is actually happening later tonight (5+2 time control). She asks if I was interested in the Under-1400 tourney on Saturday (just a littleeeee below my level) or am interested in taking lessons, which are a requirement for the Sunday 10+5 tourney. I’m certainly not interested in lessons, I’m here to kick some ass, but I don’t give away my hand just yet.

I had really wanted to spend the first night catching up more with C, but the tournament runs from 7 to 9 this evening, and it’s going to be a bit of a stretch. I’m not crazy, if it was the last night chess would be taking a backseat, but it’s the ONLY tournament I can play in and I’ve got close to a week. I call her and check in with her, and she says that I should definitely play, and we can try to work something in after, maybe. Definitely keeping me guessing. So I obviously take her at face value and a green light, and let the hostess know that I’ll be back before the tourney starts; I’m exhausted and want to nap an hour or two so I can perform properly. At chess, obviously.

I end up cabbing back to the hostel, crash an hour as best as I can in the awful bed, and then make the return trip. Total damage is forty Euros; really need to figure out the metro and bike systems or this is going to be a short facking trip.

When I return to the club around 6:15pm, there’s a ton of action. About forty or fifty chess players are all milling around, running some skittles games, or making conversation and sipping wine. And honestly, it seems like a cool crowd; chess might still have a bit of a stigma attached, but I think there’s been a big improvement over the last ten years in terms of social skills and basic hygiene. This ain’t no basement D&D gathering.

I manage to get registered for the tourney without too much hassle (costs 22, 25 Euros maybe), and float around a bit. Make a few friends with some of the guys outside and chat with them hacking darts together. Some sort of Indian dude Sahit, and an eastern Euro type, Mikhail. Love meeting a Mikhail, Mikhail Tal is my favorite chess player of all time, and I take it as a good omen for the tourney. Both are good lads and we swap some short stories. Pretty sure both are in tech (what are the chancessss, at a chess tournament?).

Pairings are up. I have checked in with the tournament director already, they have everyone signed up with their official FIDE rating. I haven’t actually played a FIDE rated tournament since I was about 10 years old at the North American Chess Challenge (U-12), so my FIDE rating clocks in at about 1880 or something. Definitely some sandbagger energy; I’m pushing 2400, 2500 online. But other player’s ratings are similarly inaccurate, so I’m not going to sleep on anyone.

Prizes are a bit stingy; 1st is 100, 2nd is 50, and they have 2 class prizes for 50, but all 200 Euro’s of prizes are for gift cards to the resto bar we are playing in. There are about 35 runners in the tournament (over 700 Euros in entries), so these guys are just making a killing hosting these events. But I’m not here for the money, I’m here to bring Paris some Canadian justice.

I play some extremely good chess. I chop down my first 2 opponents with blistering attacks, straight out of my sketchy gambit opening repertoire. Some very nice games, it’s a shame I don’t have any of them recorded. But the games are a slaughter, just a barrage of pieces flying down the board at the opposing king and no quarter given; I’m feeling myself and that vacation energy.

I’m still chatting to Mikhail and Sahit in the breaks between rounds, and they are starting to realize that I might actually be good at chess. My opponents are also starting to take a bit more notice as well, though it doesn’t help them; I put down my 3th round opponent with relative ease.

Pairings go up for the 4th round in the seven round event, and at 3-0 I’m feeling like a million bucks. Starting to wish I wore my Chessbrah hat to represent the boys, but in the end I had opted not to. Sahit and Mikhail let me know that my next opponent, Axel, is the real deal; he’s got his name at the top of their classical tournament leaderboard, and is somewhere around 2100 FIDE, which isn’t particularly scary on it’s own; but he’s also apparently somewhere around 2600 on Lichess Blitz. Ok, we all know Lichess isn’t a real chess website, but 2600 is not an Elo to be slept on, and he’s also 3-0. We’re potentially playing for the tournament here on board 1.

I end up with the white pieces, and still manage to stumble and drop a pawn out of the opening. Fuck, one day I’ll put some work into my “real” openings. Some very light initiative as comp, but 5+2 plays a little like rapid, where these types of edges can actually be converted with enough precision. So I abandon my plans of playing a stable game and throw another pawn away to muddy the waters; minor pieces are dancing all over on both sides, but the action is taking place close to his king where I thrive.

Some more pieces come off, but finally he stumbles in the complications as we near a time-scramble type situation. My king is a bit loose, and I end up missing a killer, decisive blow, and am close to losing, but I find enough comp that we end up in a king-rook-1 pawn, vs king-bishop-2 pawns, and though we shuffle around a bit, the increment is enough for us to avoid serious blunders, and the game ends in a draw. I wasn’t happy to have missed the killing blow, but was lucky to save the game, my tiebreakers are looking good, and we have another 3 rounds vs the field to put some pressure on each other.

The next 3 rounds are all extremely messy for me. Solid play gives way to some loose pawns and blunders on both sides, but I’m finding a way to navigate the complications. I manage to flag a dude in the 6th round in a pretty drawn position despite the 2 second increment, and in the 7th round I flip a losing endgame with some precise moves to finish with a near-perfect 6.5/7.

Axel is still playing his 7th round game, after winning the last 2 for 5.5/6, and he’ll need to win to take it to tiebreakers. Any other result and I win the tourney. There’s not enough time to calculate who’s going to end up ahead if he succeeds, but I notice almost right away while sweating his game that he’s down 2 minors pieces for a rook, and his opponent has a very stable position with a nice edge on the clock. Their moves come in faster and faster, clock making that sweet “thwack” sound as each of them bangs it in rapid succession, big crowd of players who’ve finished their game watching intently to see if the local champ will manage to save his own game and the pride of their club.

And then it happens; in the time scramble, he manages to hang an exchange to a sneaky knight fork that just seemed like it was inevitable given the dynamics of the position, and just like that, the game is over. His opponent finishes 3rd on 6/7, and Axel is forced to settle out of the money on 5.5/7. Canadian justice is served, and we are 1-0 at taking down tournaments at the growingly prestigious Blitz Society. Next time I play there I hope to collect some properly titled scalps.

Plenty of the players congratulate me, I’m presented with my gift card, and I order a celebratory beer and panini on the house. The Ukranian hostess seems a little bit surprised that I’ve won, and dare I say it, a little impressed. Fuckin try to put me in an under-1400 section again, why don’t ya! Maybe I should have asked for her number (chess wheels!), but my mind is in other places.

The only dampener on the night is that after a long day out, C is feeling pretty wiped out. I had definitely set out for Blitz Society with a warrior’s intention to knock out the opposition across the board, and then ride the high into a conversation with Camille to sort out exactly where we stand.

But not in the cards. No biggie, I’m in Paris for six days. So we end up making plans to meet up the next day instead, and I stick around the club to hang out with some of the new friends I’ve made. I play a few 3+0 games with Axel, Sahit, and Mikhail. Much more casual now, I do drop a couple to Axel, and even the tournament director pops in for a couple games against me. I think it’s always fun to meet some new blood at the chess board; these guys have probably all been playing against each other for years. Exchange some numbers with the boys, and then decide that I might as well walk all the way home and get a good night’s sleep; Vidy is arriving tomorrow, and we have plans to all link up at some point.

Make the trek all the way home, sore feet be damned, and call it a night.