New Research Shows Fundamental Flaw in 1-10 Scaling!

Recent statistical analysis of the classic 1-10 scale of attractiveness has revealed a potentially game changing idea. Chief researcher of made up things and known truth speaker Jonathan Tollestrup made a shocking discovery while trying to pay attention to a particularly dry lecture last week. The discovery that absolutely no one uses the numbers one, two or three when asked to describe the attractiveness of a particular person. "It's baffling to think that absolutely no one seems to think of people as drop dead ugly." Eilidh Ward of shamanistic fame told The Critical Canuck. "Like come on, some people just don't got it, you know?"

With this new revelation Mr. Tollestrup has announced that a new system will be put into place to replace the fundamentally broken arbitrary system of describing attractiveness to your bros. The proposed changes would remove the numbers one, two and three from the system but leave the rest of scale intact. The alteration will take effect precisely 26 days from today in order to secure a smooth transition between the two distinctly different systems.

During an exclusive interview yesterday with the famed Chief researcher, it was revealed to The Critical Canuck that even with the delay the transition may be difficult for some. "Beginning the scale at four and ending at ten will completely alter our understanding of who is and is not a total bombshell. Those who thought they were reasonably attractive at a seven will have to learn to live with the fact that they are actually just  an average looking person now." After finishing the press conference researcher Tollestrup was greeted by hundreds of grateful people who were looking forward to being objectified in a more accurate manner.

Several critics of this new system have already noted that with these changes that there would be a forty percent decrease in available options for people to describe how good-looking another person is. Resident expert on rating people Kim Passey expressed her faith in the creative nature of those who use simple numbers to describe the attractiveness of a person. She even went on the record to state, "They are the most original and clever people I've ever met, I'm sure they will think of something. Maybe decimals?" Critics would quickly reply to Ms. Passey's comment noting how it made a lot of sense and that they had no further concerns.

Analysts of human attractiveness are anticipating a surge in reports of attractiveness as the new archaic and pointless system replaces the old archaic and pointless system.

My Night seeing Take Me to the Tempo and Going Nowhere

Last night I had the great privilege of attending a Young Single Adult (YSA) event in Edmonton which featured many talented musicians in Edmonton and I thought that I could take some time and write down my thoughts about the event. First and foremost it should be mentioned that I thoroughly enjoyed myself at this event as you can see in the picture below. There is something about going to see live music that just brings a lot more energy out of me. I don't know why I don't see more live shows or things of a similar vein because it's just so much fun! It should also be noted that all of the groups that performed were doing covers exclusively, and while I would have preferred to hear a few original pieces it isn't something one should expect when you know going in that they are cover bands.

That is me drenched in sweat. NO REGRETS

The night began with a group that I never actually got the name of so I will be forced to call them Those Three Guys that did Acoustic Stuff or TTGTDA (Pronounced teh-guh-da if you wondering.) Now there is no doubt in my mind that these guys were quite good, I couldn't help but feel that their set really didn't match up with the rest of the night all that well. Even at YSA dance events were slow dancing is pretty common five songs or so straight of it doesn't really match up as well as one might hope. Their front man for all I could tell was shining though, as much as the slick pants he wore to the event I'd go as far as saying. That's really all there is to say about this group though, very talented, but might have been better suited for another event. Nothing you could really fault them for. 

Cover band Going Nowhere took the stage next and almost immediately made their mark. Fast-paced and high-energy defined most of the set list which I personally felt was the most well chosen of all the groups. Joe Kastendieck shredded the guitar throughout the set in what I thought of as one of the best performances of the night. The bands cover of Fix You by Coldplay showed some great versatility but Beverly Hills would be my personal favorite song of their set. Overall this group was fun, energetic and I hope to see many more performances from them and even though there were times I couldn't really hear the vocals over the rest of the band it didn't really matter since I was too busy having a blast to care. 

Closing out the night was Take me to the Tempo and while they kept with the high energy theme Going Nowhere brought one couldn't help but feel a bit more of a professional sense here. Coregraphed dancing from Front-woman Shawni Tolman and Zachary Ayers displayed a more invested effort and it paid off in spades. I loved the energy this group brought especially from all those they had perform with them that were not part of the core group. Special shout-out to Brother Mandin who made me deeply regret having stopped playing saxophone for a short time before getting back to the dancing. The token slow song Take me to the Tempo was Aerosmith's Don't Want to Miss a Thing, and this song might have shown just how much darn fun this group was as myself and the girl I was dancing with couldn't help but continue to belt along with the song, something that would never had happened back in the awkward days of Junior High that most people remember that song for. If I were to launch a complaint it would be that like Going Nowhere there would be occasional issues with vocals being drowned out, primarily the back up singers seemed to be largely unheard for me. That is an incredibly small smudge on a otherwise brilliant performance. 

Now it's much easier for someone to really shine when they are surrounded by performers that just aren't as talented as those around them. The real test of a performer is to shine even when you are surrounded by people who are also very talented and Kris Strangeland and Shawni Tolman passed this test with flying colours. Kris brought an superb level of play that took several of the bands numbers to the next level. Shawni brought an energy that simply would not be matched. Her presence on stage was one that was totally unafraid of what could happen on stage and that was most noticeable with the bands rendition of Jamiroquai's Canned Heat from Napoleon Dynamite fame. Jamiroquai is a voice that I would under normal circumstances advise people from trying to cover but Ms. Tolman pulled it off without a hitch and even looked like she was having more fun with it than the crowd. 

All the groups that performed gave splendid performances and I want to personally thank them for giving me one of the most fun nights I have had in quite a while. Unfortunately Going Nowhere and Take me to the Tempo do not have Social Media pages for me to link you to, but if you ever hear about these groups giving a performance somewhere make sure to do yourself a favor and check it out! Peace buds. 

Confession Time!

I bet you all thought that since I started falling behind on these posts that the challenge was for all intents and purposes over? Wrong! I'm still going to get through this, and we're even going to get back on schedule, just not immediately. Something about having the majority of my finals in the next two days makes it harder to sit down and spend a considerable amount of time thinking about these blogs. So the plan for the next two weeks is to write a post for today, then write posts Wednesday, Thursday and Friday to get back on track. Simple right? So now that that is out of the way let's get into the fun part. Me confessing things, which I thought might be a bit difficult since I try to not have things to confess, not like I don't have bad habits or embarrassing stories, just that I'm pretty willing to tell people about them which leaves not so much to confess to people.  I think I've got three for today which should be good.

#1. I don't actually hate puns that much. I mean when I first started saying that I hated puns I really did hate them, just couldn't stand them, but I suppose I got desensitized to them because once people heard about this particular hatred they seemed compelled to tell me all the puns they could think of. So I've gotten used to them, and I even laugh at some of them from time to time. They are cheap laughs and I will never sway from that opinion, but they are laughs none the less and who am I to get in the way of a laugh?

#2. Birds are really just ok. I think my family will be the only ones that actually get a laugh out of this one, because I know that the easiest way to drive my mother bonkers is to say the simple line, "I like birds" The truth of it is that the line comes from a song by the Eels with the unsurprising title of "I like birds." Birds are still pretty cool cause they FREAKING FLY, but they are not the end all be all of creatures.

So at this point, most of you are probably thinking that this post is just a joke now, so I'll hit you with a real confession now so you don't feel like I was just messing around the whole time, cause it was really only like 84% of the time that I was. Anyways, this last confession is going to sound kinda sad, but I`ll try to explain my thinking of how it`s kind of ok. Ok?

#3. I generally put the blame for anything that doesn't go my way on myself. Even things that seem like really obviously not my fault like walking down a hallway and some runs into me I'll think to myself, "Well I could have been paying more attention to where I was going." Something like that. This is probably why I get really frustrated playing games like League of Legends, because you have to coordinate with a team in order to win in that game, but if I lose I will certainly blame it on my own personal play. This thinking works out ok for me right now because I use it as a drive to constantly improve at anything I do. I also don't particularly like blaming people. I just feel bad about it after, even if it's totally justified. It seems so much simpler if it's just my fault cause it's easy to legitimately criticize myself since I know all myself pretty well. In short, if something I'm involved with goes downhill I'll probably blame myself, but not in a dopey self-destructive kind of way, more along the lines of "That sucks and I suck, but I know how to do better now at least."

Right, so I'm pretty darn far behind right now, I think I need two more plus one on Thursday to catch back up. I probably won't do another one till Thursday though, so Thursday, Friday, Saturday and maybe Sunday to catch up? Who knows. The next one will be

My bald head cause why not?

Ten People Who Influenced Me?

 Alright so I didn't get this done on Thursday, but I'm going to say I have a good excuse so it goes up on today instead. So I'm supposed to go over ten people who have influence me today. Thinking of ten people who have influenced me and how they influenced me might be a bit difficult, none the less I will give it a shot. Let us remember that the number on the list does not indicate level of influence just which ones I wrote first. The exception being #1/2 since that's just true.

#1/2. My Parents. I'm going to put the two of them together unless I really can't think of ten specific examples, then I'll cheat and count them as two. Beyond that I couldn't imagine having a list like this and not mentioning them. They raised me for crying out loud! Like how much more influential can you be on a person's life? Like seriously, they gave me all the basic foundations that would later lead into pretty much any good characteristics I've developed in my life. My negative ones are likely a result of me not listening to them either so there's that.

#3. Bishop Boyes. I can't think of any particular characteristics about Clay Boyes that really made him so influential to me, I know that if I'm ever in a lost in the wilderness type of situation that he's the person I want with me though. I think though it was his humility that always stuck out to me though, despite being a pretty great man you would've never guessed it from his mannerisms, he seems the perfect example of someone who is leading a regular life and is then thrust into the spotlight. After being pushed that far though, he never faltered, simple grew at his own pace and flourished because of it.

#4/5. John Spencer/Brad Smith. I'm only lumping these two together cause they've both influenced me in the exact same way. They both seem to completely lack social inhibitions that would normally keep a person from expressing themselves 100%. This leads to both of these individuals being completely themselves at any given time and that level of drive to be yourself is something I can truly appreciative and seek after myself. Here's to becoming less #Filtered.

#6. Keane. There had to be a band in here somewhere right? Keane wins my personal award for having the most influence on my thinking out of any musical group and therefore I award them this prestigious spot on this arbitrary list.

#7. Duncan "Thoorin" Shields. This guy is probably a tool, but he does incredible journalistic work in E-sports and I hope that one day I can give this kind of quality content out in whatever field I work in. I'll lump in Slasher in here as well cause that guy doesn't give a care in the world if people hate him, so long as they still let their players take interviews from him.

#8. Alysa Lybbert. This crazy freaking girl will without a doubt in my mind stick to her guns no matter the situation so long as there is a chance that she's still correct. It's not even out of stubbornness (Usually) but a sincere idea that she's correct. Wait a minute. Yeah it's just stubbornness. Oh well, I said she influenced me, not that I intend to copy her methods. Still good.

This is where the list actually gets a bit harder, because I can think of several people that influenced me, but now I have to decide who I put on the list. I'd probably just be safer putting whoever might actually read this so they can feel good about themselves/not feel snubbed by me. So I'll do that regardless if they would've made this list of ten. I'm not ranking who is the most influential just ten people who are/were influential on me.

#9. Samara Dewey. This woman ( I think I have to say woman now that she's married) taught me an awful lot of things, but the biggest one I think is simple loyalty. She's a fiercely loyal person and I hope that I can one day reach that level of commitment to those I care about.

#10. Kim Passey. So maybe she's here cause I think she'll tear me a new one if I included Samara and not her, but regardless I have learned quite a bit from her. The biggest lesson I learned from her though was that thinking objectively doesn't mean that you can hold grudges/not forgive a person. No matter how far you think a person can fall don't be shocked when they not only get back up, but are even taller than they were before.

Wow didn't that get a little heavy right at the end there, but I unfortunately don't have time to dwell on that because I have to get a whole new post done today in order to keep on track with this challenge. So I hope you enjoyed or at least didn't hate what I had to say. Peace buds.

New Goals

So It's been awhile since I talked about anything that wasn't League of Legends related here and I thought I'd kinda go over some of my goals for this upcoming year so that if nothing else, there is a place where they are recorded that I can easily find and remind myself about. I'm some specific ones like do x number of y task, but also just really general and frankly vague statements. So let's jump right into them.

First off a specific one. I want to become a better writer in general, so I figured one thing I can do is simply practice right? So I decided that I would do one-thousand words of writing every week that did not involve my school work. Whether that be writing on the LCS, WCS and other E-sports related things, friends, family, or even my woes in the world of dating, but just something! It seems obvious that this would fit well into making more regular content for this blog so this is where I'll put it. So TL:DR writing 1000 words a week, posting it here.

Right, next I have one of those vague ones. "Be Proactive" Like really? I just wrote that and I'm sitting here thinking to myself, "How stupidly cryptic!" but I need this to be a really broad statement for it to work in several areas of my life so I went with it. Deal. The most prominent component I can think of for this is dating, for the last.... like forever I've taken an incredible passive approach to dating, you know what? it really doesn't work. For some weird reason girls in western society just seem to think that you, the male, should be the one to initiate things of romantic nature. Blah, how lame. None the less, I can't really force society to adopt a new trend where Females initiate these kinds of things so I just have to play the current meta-game of dating and make things happen myself. I don't want this proactive thing to cause a massive shift in my behavior though, I like the fact that I'm flexible enough that when someone presents something to do for an evening activity I'm usually pretty good with just doing that thing, maybe it would be good though if every once and a while I was the person who presented the idea for evening plans.

It took me some time to actually come up with a third goal, mostly because the second one is so darn broad that it covers pretty much everything I could think of! But if you know me you know that my diet is at times normal and healthy, but more often than not pretty atrocious. So I'm going to cook things more often. Cooking takes time and effort though which sucks, but I have a lot of time on Tuesdays and Thursdays so I figure I should be able to manage to muster up the effort to do some real cooking those days at least.

Well, that's about five-hundred words for this week already! good work team, and by that I mean me. Not to be to high on myself though obviously. I still have another five-hundred to go this week so I really shouldn't be getting boastful too quickly.

Do or do not, there is no try. #YOLO