[Bond]

One time, I stayed up all night trying to complete a paper. As it turns out, the paper won a couple of awards...

[Mirithorn]

I've actually pulled relatively few all nighters, mainly because the only thing that works to keep me up all night is ingesting two pots of coffee, or terror. (And my access to coffee is restricted.) This can easily be acheived by either final exams, or having lots of long term assignments due on the same day and being the procrastinating type. I also find that it's more efficacious to have lots of assignments, because that way when you get stuck so barely concious that you find yourself unable to type the word "parallelogram" (I could get the p, but everything after that kept drifting into different words) you can switch to a different essay and write some gibberish about a book instead.

[Bond]

Very true; I've actually tried that a couple of times...

[Mirithorn]

I may be on my way to an all nighter right now, in fact.

The school's resident mental health professional volunteered to do the schedules. The only problem was, she had never done it before, and, in fact, had no idea how to do them. Cue about a week and a half of faint bemusement, five days of full blown confusion, and being switched into different classes at different times every four hours. Today the random switching landed me in an English class that had had a particular essay assigned. Due tomorrow.

If I get moved into a different English class tomorrow, I will be upset.

But yes, in short, we'll see how long this takes to write. It may well be all night.

[Bond]

I did some of my best essays during all-nighters.

[Mirithorn]

Well, writing does start to flow around midnight.

In this instance, though, by the time I was finishing my essay at around four, I was so groggy I couldn't tell what I was writing about, and started incorporating totally random ideas that were only tangentially related to my thesis, and, in fact, my thesis became one of these not well thought out tangentially related ideas. Fortunately, I've begged an extention, so I can fix some of the more gruesome bits, redo the conclusion, write a reasonable introduction, and ... something. I couldn't tell you because the end of the story is that I then did different homework until five and then jogged for an hour and then went to school again, so now I'm half asleep and I don't know what the heck I'm talking about .

[Bond]

That's all right; you still sound pretty coherent.

[wrathiron]

I used to work for EA games 2 years ago, probaly the worst fucking job I ever got paid for. I remember before release I went 64 hours without sleep with another dude I used to call the Mr.Robot. he could go 90hours and still smell like he just had a shower with rosepetals. After 43 hours he changed a perl script I wrote at 6:00am I had just created for a rendering farm. I almost had a nervous breakdown.

A good few things to keep you awake.

1. Blink alot.
2. Listen to polka music
3. Don´t think (seriously)
4. Don´t sit comfortably (easy at my office, they used to give us bar stools turned upside down.)

[Slade]

... Who creates perl scripts for rendering farms? Video games are flakily put together enough without trying to throw perl scripts into the mix. I hope your script just told a bunch of machines to start chugging away with x.file and not much else.

I stress having a reason to stay up. (Meeting frantic game coding deadlines works well.)

[wrathiron]

dude...you´d be surprised. I used to get all the audio marks in excel. I was so disappointed after working there that I became an exchange admin.

[reiner]

my las job as a DBA for a small gaming company had some pretty weird hours. had a real nice all nighter during a security breach. couldn't sleep till 2 was woken up with a phone call as i was just drifting off, and then stayed up the rest of the night listening to our idiot sys admin fumble around through los. i ended up getting the next day half off because i needed sleep and i ended up getting pretty sick too as an added bonus. plus the random testing and tournament nights that would drag on till near daybreak. or the weekend releases... ugh. the gaming industry as a whole seems to think no one needs sleep it appears

[Ninja Duck]

Hm. On overnight shifts, can they work you for a long time without any overtime because it's technically two separate days?

I tend to avoid all-nighters, preferring to draw the line at 4. I figure if I can't finish my math homework by then, I'm never finishing it.

On that note, I'll give anyone a dollar if they can prove that f(f^-1(A)) contains A.

This post has been edited by Ninja Duck: 12 September 2007 - 08:40 PM

[Jane Sherwood]

But...the A's right there...in the parenthesis...and I am mathmatically retarded.

I've been thinking I'll need to pull an all-nighter to get a good chunk of my Technical Writing assignments done (because how the hell have four weeks gone by some fast?!), but then I remember how it always wrecks both physical and mental havoc on me and reach for my nightly dose of Ambien and melatonin.