pulling all nighters

[Duff-e]

i recently heard about this thing called "endurance wake" where you train yourself to stay up 2 days in a row with complete alertness....and all you can have is water (ie no food or caffine). ive been thinking about it and it sounds fucking cool, so im going to give it a shot. who better to ask for advice about pulling all nighters than the crunch time workers of the gaming world and general computer nerd? so this is the post

btw besides advice, include how late you've managed to stay up / why / weird effects you felt

for me it was just about 31 hours, from 5 am to 12 am the next day playing counterstrike. i was so out of it that my friend said to bring my computer to his house at like 8 am and i was like "sure". i lugged this gigantic fucking case all the way there and we sat around for like 10 minutes playing games then sat down to watch a movie on the couch and both just passed out

[kleinluka]

why no food?

[Zyn]

Once on a LAN-party, I was awake for 3 days straight, and still I could bring my computer to the car, and wait for my brother to get his stuff into the car also, and drive all the way home (just about 45 kilometers, but hey!).

The only food I had : Coke and a bag of pizza-buns (made by mom).

When I got home, I even brought my computer and stuff inside, pluged it in, and then I fell into a deep sleep...

[DanielAragon]

i have never heard of that no food, only water thing, but the longest i have ever stayed awake was about 65 hours

it was a monday night (been un sinse 6 am) and i stayed home from school for some reason. i went to bed around 11 but i couldnt sleep, so i figured what the hell and didnt sleep...its really wierd. like you go to do something and usually you think of what you are going to do and you remember it. but if you havent slept for like 24 hours prior to that, you're like on autopilot.

i went to a friends house the next day after school and the ride was about 20 mins long on bike...that ride was sooo weird cos like you dont think on the was..kinda hard to explain, but ....well lets say you're about to cross the street, and you see a dont walk sign. you stop, but dont realize it and you say to yourself...why the hell did i stop...and realize the sign...weird...

well i didnt eat much and drank plenty of soda and water....

anyway those are my stats

[Izuno]

in college on my junior year "thesis" project i stayed up for 52 hours straight getting it done with my team of three. it was hell cause it was formatting word/excel docs plus doing layout, typos, etc...

god that was hell.

[TomWithTheWeather]

I'd never put myself through needless torture. God I love sleep.

I have pulled an all-nighter during crunch but it was fairly relaxed. I really didn't have to do any work, as my mapping responsibilities were finish and locked down, but I had to be there because the programmers were crunching hard and I had to be on alert in case I had to tweak something in a map that changed because of what a programmer changed. It was cool though; me and some good friends/coworkers staying up all night, goofing off and fixing very minor bugs. Then about 7:00 am the next morning Steve Polge annouces that we've gone gold we all cheer and go to the Waffle House for pancakes and then home to sleep the rest of the day. I'd stay up for days just to hear that word "gold".

[von*ferret]

god tom, with that story I'm just giddy to start work.

Only times I pull all nighters were for my first term of college. I spent all night trying to make my traditional art the best. Probably wasn't the best method over all because after a while you start fucking up a lot, but it was needed at that point. I just drank vanilla coke. It was during those nights I realized the requirement for food during all nighters. Otherwise I got really sick feeling and had to go to bed.

[madcow]

Coz i work night shift, my body has trained itself to survive on minimal sleep. I can work a full night (2 till 10:30), stay awake till 9 or 10 at night and wake up the next morning at 1 ready to go.

I still love to sleep tho

[Minos]

I cant stay awake that long, I'm really lazy (not lazy actually but I love sleeping heh). But we usually go to cafés (me n friends) and play all night long (from 12 am - 6 am) and then I come back and play a little bit more. Dunno, after 30 hours I cant resist anymore .

Oh forgot to say that sometimes when I had exams by morning I used to stay awake all night long as well, cuz if I slept I wouldnt wake up the other day

[The Postman]

Pulled all nighters while working on James Bond: Nightfire. Josh Jeffcoat at Gearbox remembers. We went and bought juice and food for breakfast at like 7am. It was ridiculous. He was mapping and I think I was translating text on textures into Spanish and Italian.

[Fletch]

Let's recount some of the more amusing sleepless nights:

Prom night in senior year we all stayed up. crashed around noon watching a movie. Yeah that night sucked...

Freshman year I had a few all-nighters for finals. Also, one night I had a date that got canceled. She then called me up at 11 to see if i still wanted to hang out. So we watchg a movie and then got coffee (which turned into a 4 hour conversation). Then we went to Perkins to get pie and more coffee. I eventually crashed at like 3 in the afternoon. Sleep cycle was fucked up for days.

Junior year my friend and I drank through the night until the sun came up. Then we got McGriddles (aka God's Candy). I eventually fell asleep on the couch on their porch at like 11am

Senior year number 1 I was working on a video editing project through the night. Finished around 8AM, went to class, turned in the project, and went to sleep around 3 or 4. The project was riddled with time gap errors because i was so unfocused.

Last summer I did a short biking/hiking/kyaking endurance race where basically because we were slow on the first day we only had like an hour to get sleep, so we all stayed up instead. Kyaking on no sleep when you're completely drained is funny. You litterally go in zigzags.

If you want to stay up, work on keeping your mind focused. Don't sit in dark rooms. Don't sit in the dark. Don't do a repetitive chore. Keep your mind engaged by lots of things (music, light, activity). From my endurance race I learned some people play solitare because it makes sure that their mind and body are communicating and that they can count and recognize patterns.

[Urban]

24hour lan partys are fun

but... the longest ive ever stayed up was like 47 hours or so.. then slept for like a day

[insta]

63 hours or so in the army, on some shitty exercise.

Hallucinations, always cold, hard to focus my eyes on anything. Good times.

[mike-0]

About 30 hours at some party thing. I thought i was gonna fall to sleep standing up.

Ive had days where i stayed up til 3 playing video games.

[st0lve]

I always fell asleep at school (like 1hours after I woke up), and I like to sleep when I get home from school.

The longest I've been awake is prolly "just" 18hrs..