My Lottery Winnings

So I sort of fell off there for a bit, but I am definitely not out of it! I've still got the need to give you something to read! (bad rhymes ho!) anyways I'm going to talk about what I would do if I won the lottery. Following some janky math I figured 35 million would be a suitable number to work with for this hypothetical. Now first things first. That is an unreal amount of money right? jeez, hard to even comprehend the idea of spending it all, but I will try for your entertainment. Also as a side note, for the sake of this post we will assume that this is AFTER TAXES pay out. Ok? ok.

The first thing to do when obtaining an massive sum of money is to make sure that you stay absurdly rich for the rest of your life. This for me would involve finding some sort of financial adviser to handle the task of investing the money I have safely and with intelligence. So I turn 30 million of my total winnings over to the task of investing and the likes. I'm not a expert but I'm pretty sure that much invested properly should keep me very rich for the rest of my life rather easily. Now we have 5 million dollars left, and I'd just one more responsible thing before I start goofing around, something simple like making sure anyone in my family has their debts taken care off, which shouldn't even put that big of a dent into my money unless there is some crazy crime debt stuff going on like on TV, but like come on, what are the odds of that? For the sake of numbers we'll say I dedicated half a million to this. I Definitely don't think I'd come even close to using all that but whatever.

What are the odds of my dad being Heisenburg? Zero, it'd be my mom obviously

It seems silly to say this, but I'd also like to move this blog onto a site of its own as opposed to being hosted here on blogger, not that I don't appreciate this service, but I'd like to have it be functioning on it's own. I'd also get some quality design people to come in and make sure it's well built looks nice. It's something that I would really like to have done.

Four and a half million dollars kicking around to just go be dumb with. (#TheDream) Even that is an absurd amount of money to spend. HOW DO RICH PEOPLE DO THIS!?!?!?! oh right yachts and things like that.. nvm figured it out. This is the part I think more people want to hear about since it we all love to indulge these fantasy fulfillment at least a little bit. First thing I would do for fun with my money would be to traveling. My plan for this would be to essentially attend a huge number of E-sports events around the world and  then spend something along the lines of a week after the event to soak in the place I am at. This gives me a solid start in destinations. Now that I'm rich I'll definitely be eating pretty good every night as well, prob not eating out every day, but being able to buy good food to cook for every day is nice. (RIP Ichiban) I'd buy a totally baller custom PC that I would probably have someone with more tech expertise than me set up just to make sure nothing is messed up. A new car would also probably be in order as well, but nothing super fancy. In fact I'd probably just stick with a Corolla, but have it be new. The last really stupid thing I would like to do would be to go to a fast food place, order so much food that they'll tell me that it's going to take like 15 minutes, and then tell them that I'll be going to another fast food joint and I'll be back. I really just want to see the looks on their face, plus with that much food I should be set up to throw a pretty nice party.

This party will require a great venue though, and I'll also want it to be my own place, so I suppose a new apartment/house will be in order. Not a bachelor pad though since I quite enjoy having roommates, I would probably still charge rent on them, but it would be at quite a discounted rate. I'm not really comfortable with just letting anyone free load off of me you know? Another aspect of a new place to live would be that I would have an office. There is something about writing in one's bedroom that I find... less than ideal. It would also give me a good space to continue to goof around and do creative things whenever I feel like it. Hold up. When did it become a priority for me to have space to be creative? I was never like that as a kid. Anyways, I'd stay in Edmonton for at least another year or so, but would be ready to move to a new city as needs be.

I don't have to be really attached to any one place since I won't have any commitments to a particular place. School would definitely become more of a hobby kind of thing, like I'd go just because I want to learn more, but only like part-time and I wouldn't be super concerned with when I graduate, since I don't really need to jump into the job field that early. I'd be there for the pursuit of knowledge and not the pursuit of a piece of paper to get me hired like university seems to be like for most people. Maybe I'd attend schools like NAIT (Northern Alberta Institute of Technology) to learn some of the ins and outs of specific jobs. Cooking classes for sure, things like that.

Lastly, I'd put money into E-sports. Most likely in the form of sponsoring a team since I don't have the know how to run a team, but I want to be involved. With the level of buying power I would have and since it would just be me sponsoring instead or a corporation that could potentially rival sponsors already in place I could probably work with any team/player I wanted to. It's not like there are teams that don't want more money to work with. Personally I'd like to put my money into two specific teams. Cloud9 for sure, I have a lot of respect for their League of Legends team and think the owner Jack Etienne is absurdly smart with how he's running the entire organization. Definitely think he would put that money to great use. I would also like to work with Axiom E-sports if given the chance. While they only operate in the StarCraft II scene, I think the team is amazingly well run and I would love it if they had the resources to expand their roster out. I think it's for the best that I would work with organizations rather than through sponsoring individual players mostly due to my previously stated lack of experience in handling business like this and I would much rather just entrust people, but I would have to go with organizations that are already established and trusted since I actually want the money to be put to good use rather than have it be used in one of those dumb scams that seems to frequent E-sports often. Plus how cool would it be to have something like a graphic for this blog up on a Cloud 9/Axiom Jersey? Only cool to me? Right. Don't care, it'd be awesome.

So try and wrap up this massive wall of text. Invest most of the money to stay rich forever, pay off family debts, buy new house/car, go to school for fun rather than constantly stressing, new place, blog on it's own site, lots of travel and my face on a Cloud 9 jersey or something like that. Peace buds. 

Favourite Band at the Moment

This post promises to be shorter than the last one, if for nothing else there really isn't a whole lot to be said about this particular question. Onto the question though, and man am I glad that I'm writing this now instead of in April/May. Back then I was in a stint of listening to 50 cent constantly, and that would have been such a pain to write about since in reality it's not that good. Instead I get to write about Keane since I've been listening to them a lot again. This is good since they are probably in the top 3 of my favorite bands ever and you know... they're really good.

One of their many great albums, give em a try if you haven't already

So why do I find myself always coming back to this band? Seriously, I go through these phases of listening where I'll listen to a couple of groups obsessively and then burnout (remember that term?) and find myself back on Keane, I never seem to burnout on these guys though. I think the simplest answer to that is that so many of their songs just connect with me on a very emotional level. More so than any other band I find personal connections in their songs. Not all of these emotion connections are happy ones though, let's get that straight. I think the best word to describe the feelings I have when I listen to Keane would be, "bittersweet."  The main reason would be that I was introduced to Keane by a very dear friend of mine, and one that I have not seen in a long time. I miss them very much and regret that we've somewhat grown apart. The music does remind me of those good times we had though and I appreciate it for that.

Welp. That's not really a happy note to end on now is it? I'm not going to use Corgis to fix it either, just wallow in sadness with me Kappa.

^ = Grey Face with no space

My Dream Job

I bet you all didn't see me getting another one of these things written up so quick eh? Well surprise! I did it and there ain't nothing you can do about it. Anywho before I get started on this topic. (12/30 if you are keeping count.) I would like to establish a "qualification" of sorts to the question. This said qualification is simply that money doesn't really enter the equation. When one talks about a "dream job" I feel like you should be looking for job satisfaction and not a fat cheque at the end of the day, because that ends up being the factor that deters a lot of people from pursuing these dream careers. So many of us would much rather, read/write, act, create art, music, or other similar activities, but the unsavory truth is that these jobs are rather top heavy in the sense that if you aren't the best at those things you will probably struggle to keep a roof over a family's head. So we compromise and choose careers that make us the money we need while hoping that we'll have enough time to pursue those interests in our free time. So with that in mind I decided that for this question I would assume that whatever I chose would provide enough to comfortably provide. Fair? Fair. Not like it matters whether you agree with this qualification anyways.

My dream job at this point in my life would be to work as a coach for a professional league of legends team. I figure the majority of people who read this blog are going to read that and think to themselves, "That's not even a real thing and therefore cheating." So I'll try to give a brief overview of what a coach does for a team. I'll also try to be a bit more general since this could easily be a post on its own. So basically a coach's job is to give their teams the best possible chance to succeed outside of actually playing the games for them. This can vary from a wide range of things from planning out team strategies and analyzing opponents games to find potential weaknesses to even to the role of mediator between teammates in solving internal issues within a team. These issues can be directly related to in game problems like two players not communicating properly with each other during a game to something as silly as two players not getting along outside of the game. The former can be a problem that easily bleeds into the game since the common practice at this time is to have the entire team live together under one roof. Another responsibility of a Coach is to find other teams to practice against or "scrim" with. It's actually quite similar to how coaching works in traditional sports, funny how the works out isn't it? Just on a smaller scale.

Like this, but with less yelling. 

Some of these reasons include that it would be a career in E-sports, something I'm quite passionate about. (See my previous post) It would also be challenging task to perform since there are a lot of things that need to be done and some of them, such as planning out a strategy for the team are evolving tasks that are never totally complete. A job like this also encourages my competitive side since I'd hopefully be working with a team that wants to be the best right? Now some might ask, "Why not just be a player though? Wouldn't getting paid to play the game be more fun?" In short, no you silly goose. Longer answer is that I think being a coach would be better for a few reasons and yes I'll explain it to you thanks for asking. Sometimes you play one particular game for a long time and then become so bored with it that you just stop completely, this is known as "burnout" and I'm quite prone to it, you know what you can't do if you play one game for a living? Stop playing it randomly. So that doesn't fit me. Players in the professional scene are also constantly up for ridicule on sites such as Twitter and Reddit, and I don't really want to be just eating hate from random strangers all day everyday. Coaches receive that hate as well, but not nearly as bad as the players do.  Lastly while a player must be well versed in the strategies of League of Legends they don't have the opportunity to fully immerse themselves in it since they have to spend a large portion of time practicing being good at the game. Since you know, the best strategy doesn't mean anything if you can't execute it and the strategy of League of Legends is what I appreciate most about the game.

So there you have it, my dream job. Why aren't I actively pursuing this? See the first paragraph. It's a massive risk and only the absolute best even manage to get paid positions and even then it's not some massive bag of money to be had. So I'll stick with what I'm doing because I do love it and it will at least land me a steady paycheck... hopefully. Peace out buddies.

You made it to the end! Here is a Corgi with a bow tie for your troubles. 

Misconceptions About Me

Before I get on to answering this question, (Yes I am going to just ignore the fact I haven't updated this in months, deal.) I'd just like to quickly mention what a massive mind game writing this actually is. Trying to not only see yourself in the eyes of others, but to then also try to see what people have wrong about you is a very surreal experience to say the least. Now on to the question!

So I think that a lot of people get the impression that I am an apathetic person. I can totally understand why people would get this impression of me since I know there are many times that I will vocally express my lack of care for a particular idea or thing. Even as some people would call it, "inappropriate" to blatantly express such disinterest in a topic but eh, what do I care? Now some people have the particular circumstance of seeing or hearing me express this disinterest of things in a rapid succession and have arrived at the conclusion that I simply don't care about anything at all! While I can understand why a person might have come to this conclusion, since it isn't the biggest jump to make I can assure you that this is far from true!

Than what is true one might ask? Simply that while there are many things that I really don't care about there are some that I truly and honestly do care about, and believe me I care quite deeply about these things. My family and friends stick out as people I care quite a bit about, but that much should be obvious though? I also have a deep appreciation for music, movies, games, E-sports, comedy, and funnily enough, freedom. These are just a handful of things that I care about, but are probably some of the things I care the most about. So the next time you are thinking about me (come on you do it all the time!) and your mind turns to apathy try to steer away from that line of thought. If you think I'm lying right now just be sure to try and cause some sort of outburst of emotion from me by saying really silly things like, "Attack of the Clones is actually a pretty good movie." or "Wouldn't it just be better if the government was in control of the internet?" I'm sure I'll have some sort of emotionally charged statement to give about that. Peace out buds.

Seriously, this movie is such garbage and don't you dare try to defend it. 

A Guilty Pleasure

Guess who's back? Nope, not Slim Shady but rather your favorite inconsistent blogger! I said I would finish this blog challenge and even though I'm like really far behind I'm still going to see this one through, mostly so I can tell myself that I actually did finish one of these things.

.So I'm going to tell you a guilty pleasure of mine today even though I'm not sure I really have one, since I don't really feel bad about anything that I enjoy a lot. Actually now that I think of it, there is something that I know I should feel much worse for liking so darn much. I take so much joy out of listening to people tell me that a movie is "bad" because the source material, (99% of the time books) is not being perfectly represented in their film counterparts. When people say things like this, all I can do is laugh and think of a quote from the YouTube channel Cinema Sins, "THE BOOKS DO NOT MATTER." and they don't, because your source material only gives you a basic idea of what the story CAN be and in no way determines the quality of a film. Having spectacular source material does not guarantee a good film and terrible books don't make terrible films necessarily. Yes this does mean that there was a real possibility that the Twilight movies could have been quite good actually,  but there would have had to have been a significant departure from the books in order to accomplish this, and that's something that you just have to do sometimes to make a movie work. Or you can always rely on the massive cult following to just carry you to box office success, whatever works.

The examples I like to bring up is Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit movies. Both of these series take some liberal departures from their source material, and you know what? So far it's worked pretty darn well. Also I have read both of these so people can't just claim that I'm totally ignorant of how amazing the books are and how that should shape my opinion of a movie. (don't do this by the way, it's really dumb.) If we can be realistic for a moment here and take a look at what the Lord of the Rings would have been like if they had stayed really true to the books. We would've had some sort of weird combination of a documentary about this incredibly detailed universe that J.R.R. Tolkien created and a musical. ( they sing ALL the time.) Guess what? That combo of Les Miserables and Planet Earth? Terrible movie. Guaranteed. Now with the Hobbit I jump on anyone that is still upset about the existance of Tauriel in the second part of the Hobbit trilogy needs to think about how silly it would be to not have ANY consistent female presence in the set of films, it was fine to just have the band of dwarves, Bilbo and Gandalf in the book because it was a very not serious children's book that also happened to fit into the canon of the Middle-Earth universe. The films however are major blockbusters that need to connect to as many audiences as possible and not including a minor character that is female at least does not bode well in that department.

I feed on your fanboy tears. 

Enough rambling on the subject though, my guilty pleasure is laughing (at least on the inside) at fan-boys who think that whatever book they like is above interpretation and change by a filmmaker trying  to make a FILM. Stay Salty and peace out buds.

Something I Miss

Alright, so I obviously fell pretty hard behind in this challenge, but now that I've got everything figured out and I'm ready to ease into the more slack summer times I can actually sink my teeth in a bit and hopefully keep steady on this challenge. So Last we left off was, "Something I Miss."

This one isn't terribly hard I suppose, I miss a certain aspect of being in high school, not actually being back because please now let's not ever do that again, but I do miss how trivial all my problems were back then. Like seriously nothing I stressed out about actually meant anything in reality. Random high school drama is so dumb and it would be sort of nice to go back to such a simpler time, however the back draw to that is that not a whole lot I did meant anything either, like my grades have some effect on me, but I did plenty well enough to get into University, and beyond that the only thing that had any real meaning on that was the relationships I built over those three years. Those have stayed intact for the most part at least, but I spend more of my free time with people I met/got to know post high school now then people I did go to high school with, and frankly I don't see that changing anytime soon. That's just something that should happen naturally as we all grow up and live our own lives. So yeah, I kind of miss how carefree high school was, but not nearly enough to actually want to go back in any way shape or form. Sorry that this one is boring and short, but that's all I really have to say on the matter. Peace buds.

An adorable puppy cause science. 

Photo Sourced from Imgur.

State of Mainstream Music.

Let's see if I can rattle some more people like I did with my last post. Today we're talking mainstream music, and when I think of mainstream my mind immediately drifts towards pop music so I'll be pretty much be focused around that genre, although I'm sure some of these ideas will apply to other genres as well.

So obviously I'm not a huge fan of mainstream music right now, if you were to ask me what kind of music I listen to I would tell you anything but pop and country. I don't particularly like the fact that to get big in music, and therefore be considered "good" by the masses you basically have to follow a simple formula and then promote the absolute crap out of the song. Step one: have a chorus that anyone can sing along with. Step two: Put it to a beat that would fit well at a party/dance/club/whatever. Step three: Make sure that stuff isn't too heavy, subject matter should always be about things like your swag, your money, your girl/guy, a party you are going to, or just having fun in general. Don't you dare write about struggles unless you are insanely confident in the song. That's it, three easy steps to create the next big hit, easy stuff. Now obviously there are exceptions to this guideline, but seriously just take some time and listen to the radio and see what's playing, these things are the three uniting factors for nearly every song on the radio.

Is there a solution? I guess hypothetically it would be really cool if people just formed their own taste in music and bought (BOUGHT, not downloaded.) music according to that and then who ever made good music would then succeed while the terrible artists would never leave their bedroom, but that's just not how it works. All I can say is that I think you should be looking to purchase your music legitimately if you really do like the artist. Vote with your dollars man.

Man, that's really all I have to say? How short and boring, oh well next time is confessions so that should surely produce something interesting to write/read about. Peace buds.

Here's a really cool song so there's something beyond the text here. 

My Favorite Place to Eat.

Well darn it all, this one is so much easier and light-hearted to do so let's just get right down to it. So picking my favorite place to eat was supposed to be a rather simple process, I already knew the place so a few quick words about it and we'll be done right? Wrong, the freaking place has closed since I was last there. whattajoke. Therefore I have decreed to forgo specifically naming one restaurant as my favorite entirely in remembrance for my fallen brother Ginza of Salt Lake City. RIP my good friend, you did honorable things in life.

So now what will I write about? Easy, What kind of place is my favorite to eat at? Pretty straight-forward since Ginza is a sushi joint, sushi joints are my favorite place to eat. The most obvious reason for this is that I love eating sushi. It's freaking delicious. If you are one of those people that are thinking to yourself, "Ewww sushi is so gross." but you've never actually had sushi. Stop yourself right there, try and then come trash talk it. Otherwise your opinion is totally invalid in my mind. You wanna know what's like the best part about eating sushi? It's insanely hard to really over eat it. Even at an all you can eat sushi joint where I've consumed an insane amount of food I've always been able to leave the place and not feel totally stuffed an needing to not do anything for a few hours while the food is digesting, I can always job right into the next activity. It's totally awesome.

Another reason I really like sushi joints also because I'm usually a pretty social eater, when I sit down for a meal with people I'm often more interested in having a conversation over the meal rather than actually eating the meal. I feel like sushi goes well with this. You can pick up a piece, eat it and then go on with your conversation pretty easily. You almost always have a ice-breaking tool in either your ability or in-ability to handle chopsticks. It's always been a social experience for me to sit down and eat some sushi with friends/family and that's something I really like. Sometimes when you go to a nice steakhouse you just get so darn focused on your steak you forget that you came with a bunch of people and don't talk to them at all. Not fun. Delicious, but not fun.

Man I really wish there was more to say about this, but that's all there really is. I like sushi, and the social experience that goes along with it. So know that I'm almost always down to go grab some sushi, even if you've never had it before, I'd love to show some people the delicious treat that is raw fish. Peace buds.

dang doesn't that look yummy?

New Blog Challenges. For Artificial Motivation of Course!

Alright so I'm going to be starting up another one of these old blog challenge things. It will be slightly different than other ones though, mostly because I'm not specifically using an already set one. So no link to a flowery little tumblr page that will neatly (or sloppily depending on the list) line out what I'll be doing. Rather I went through five to ten different lists and nit-picked the topics I could actually write posts about. So you hopefully won't have to endure through any posts that have absolutely nothing to offer in terms of anything interesting. No questions like, "Would you date someone with plains looks and an amazing personality, or someone with amazing looks and a plain personality."  Which could be better worded as, "Are you shallow? Yes or no?" Now I don't want this to feel to heavy, so I've set it up in a manner that will be something like two more light hearted topics and then we'll have a more serious thoughts. With this I'll be presenting a "schedule" that should accompany this challenge. If you read this blog at all you know why the quotations are around schedule. So enough nonsense let's lay out this schedule and challenge topic list!

Tentative Schedule: Posts on Tuesday, Thursday, and over the weekend. Simple as that.

The glorious list of great topics that will grant you ghastly amounts of knowledge about myself!
#1. Ten People who Influenced Me.
#2. Celebrity Crushes V2.0! Who will stay and who will go! Link for Lazy.
#3. A Big "What If" I've Thought About..
#4. My Favorite Place to Eat.
#5. My Thoughts on Main Stream Music.
#6. Three Confessions.
#7. Something I Miss.
#8. A Guilty Pleasure.
#9. A Misunderstanding People Have About Me.
#10. My Dream Job.
#11. My Favorite Band Right Now.
#12. An Embarrassing Moment.
#13. What I Would do With Lottery Winnings.
#14. Five ways to my Heart.
#15. A Popular Notion I Think Society has Wrong.
#16. Where my Blog/Gamer Name came from.
#17. My Favorite Movie.
#18. What I Would say to my Sixteen Year Old Self.
#19. My Death Row Meal.
#20. My City.
#21. Three Legitimate Fears.
#22. Nicknames I've had.
#23. Favorite Pizza.
#24. What Makes me Unique?
#25. My Perfect 1st Date.
#26. Ten Random Songs From my Phone.
#27. Thoughts on Drugs/Alcohol.
#28. The Process of Writing one of These Cringe Shows.
#29. How is my Relationship (LOL!) or How is Being Single.
#30. How'd the Challenge Go?

There's a few more food ones than I remember putting initially, but whatever, I like food sue me. Looking forward to Getting this one going. See you on Thursday after when I'll talk about Influential people to me.

What Some of you are Thinking. 

A Quick Response to "Video Games vs The Brain"

A good friend of mine recently wrote a post on her blog titled, "Video Games vs The Brain" wherein she talked about a study conducted by a professor Akio Mori. In the study Professor Mori brought in subjects that fit into one of four categories: normal, (Those who rarely played games) visual, (Those who are avid TV viewers) half-video game, (Those who played played less than fifteen hours a week) and video game (Those who played games at least two hours a day.) Professor Mori then measured the brain waves of the subjects and found that those in the visual and video game group did not have much activity in the areas of the brain related to creativity and emotion. Shay (The author of the blog) Then extrapolated some of her thoughts on the results of the study and about excessive gaming and television watching in general.

Now before I get into my response I would like to say a couple of things, first off being that I quite enjoyed this post. It's an interesting discussion and I thinks its good to have discussion about it. Secondly, can we be real for a minute and mention how absolutely awful having the font, size, and colour of the text change seemingly at random throughout the post is? I love you Shay, you are a good person, but seriously that just looks so bad. Just painful to read. I mean I think I get why you changed font the first time as you transitioned from writing about the study to your thoughts, but it's 100% unnecessary. It makes it look like you just copy pasted a paragraph from somewhere else onto your post and it looks bad. Now that we got that out of the way, let's actually talk about what the words said an not the font.

There are already a bunch of Facebook comments that highlight the major problems with this post. The study doesn't say what games people were playing which could have a dramatic affect on what kind of brain activity the subject will show. Imagine a hypothetical situation where the game being played is pong. Everyone knows that game right? You move a paddle up or down to hit a ball back and forth. There is nothing else to it, you could sit Leonardo DaVinci down with pong and he's not going to show off creative thoughts because there isn't anything to that game. That's just one hypothetical situation though. The other problem with the post highlighted by Facebook comments was that it was a study of correlation and not causation. A study like the one conducted by Professor Mori simply can't offer itself as evidence that excessive games or T.V. stop your creative thinking, it can only be evidence that a relationship between the two does exist.

Another problem that I did not see mentioned was the fact that it was only one study. That's a problem. This study might show a relationship between excessive gaming and a lack of beta waves, (Which are thought to be related to creative thinking and emotion) but another study might show something completely different. I'm not saying that another study will, but leaving that question unanswered erodes the credibility of an argument. Also don't think for a second that this isn't an argument being made because it is.

Now I only have one more thing I want to bash at in this post, the last paragraph made me cringe. No word of a lie. To quote, "If you answered the same as I'm doing today, Then I'm sorry, but you are living your life not to the fullest, and that's where regrets come form." Not only does the wording feel awkward, (living your life not to the fullest? Really? How about but you are not living life to its fullest. Don't lead you reader into thinking your going to say one thing and then turn it around on them like that, feels weird to read.) especially since in the previous paragraph she stated to take things in moderation, and now she's saying it would be good to cut it out completely. The real problem though is that it's an absolute statement. What if I meet my long lost brother and the only thing we have in common is playing games? I'd say playing some with him would still be well within living life to the fullest, and I know that's a really extreme example, but you expose yourself to problems like that when you make absolute statements about subjective things. Honestly I was thinking this was actually a great post until the end of it, now I'm forced to call it just "good."

Alright I'm done, hate train has departed. There are definitely flaws with the reasoning in the post, but I applaud Shay for taking the time to open up a discussion about this. It's nice to see discussion in comments on Facebook rather than just a mass of likes. Keep it up Shay.

Just a reminder of some of the really great things about games.

Miss Wedding. Blog Instead.

My oh my Makinna. I thought I'd have some more time to put this little piece together, but as it turns out my procrastination got the better of me yet again. None the less I feel like it would still be a good idea if I celebrated marriage by boosting your ego with some nice words, also I'm kind of a bad friend and missed your wedding and need to make up for it a bit. That's not the important thing though! The important thing is that you had a wedding! So I'm going to stop ranting and just go on with the whole ego boosting bit I was talking about before.

If i only received one word to describe Makinna Kristensen with I would without a doubt in my mind go with wing-nut. Yeah... I really feel like that word totally captures everything about her. Wing-nut. Whatta word. Jokes aside though I'd really go with consistent. I use consistent because for the very limited time that I've known her, and no matter what the context of a situation was I could count on the fact that Makinna's attitude and behaviors wouldn't change.  She's almost always caring, kind and willing to sacrifice for others. Willing to lend her ear to a friend that needs someone to talk to, all that lovely jazz. Ninety-Nine out of a hundred times this would be good. Sometimes I'd be hoping she'd let me off easy for something stupid I said, but being ever consistent individual I would get slammed for it. She's surprisingly good at subtle slamming a person into the ground with a clever thought or phrase. I know subtle isn't exactly a word many would use in any sort of a description of Makinna, but it's true.

Beyond her consistency I've always thought of Makinna as a very intelligent sort of person in the sense of understanding her surroundings and the people that filled them up. There is this unspoken ability to just understand how another person thinks and know what their action will be based on that. Makinna has it. I think that's probably what allows her to be so consistent, because she is able to predict very accurately how a situation will play out and react accordingly.

Alright, that's enough of the ego inflation for one sitting. I'd like to kinda wrap this mess or words up with thanking you for being nothing short of an absolutely fantastic friend to me. You truly are one of the shining examples of what I think a person aught to be like. (Here I thought I'd stop inflating your ego!) This is normally where I say something like, "I hope you have a very happy and successful marriage!" But I don't have to because I've seen you and Calvin together, There can be no doubts that your marriage will be fantastic. Congratulations on progressing forward with your life and here's to me one day joining you in the married club! (ROFL good one Jonny!) Sorry again for missing your wedding today, but I'm sure I'll apologize for that like a hundred more times at least.

Why I Stopped Playing Competitive Games.

Let's talk burnout. I don't really know if this is a term used like it is with gamers, but burnout is pretty straight forward, you play one game a lot over an extended period of time and then you don't enjoy it like you did when you started playing and that causes you to stop. Occasionally you burnout on a game so badly that you never play it again. Most of the time it's just temporary lasting from a month or two to as long as several years before you return to a game. I'm really burnt out when it comes to League of Legends, I honestly can't even boot the program up and stay in a good mood. Nothing about playing the game is fun for me right now. I still absolutely love watching League be played at a professional level though, but I can't play it. To extend that even further I really haven't enjoyed playing StarCraft II as much lately either, even though I feel like I'm at a peak of sorts with my level of enjoyment as a viewer. I think right now it'll be good for me to simply take a step back from playing and focus on being a more informed viewer. That means goals, which I've been really bloody awful at finishing on this blog, but you gotta keep trying ya know?

So the new goal will be to reach the point as a viewer that I can write informed and decent quality preview and review pieces on the 2014 Season of StarCraft World Championship Series (WCS) and League of Legends Championship Series. (LCS) In order to accomplish this I'm going to have to become a little more focused on what I watch in terms of streams. I think for League I should be focusing on watching a decent amount of at least one professional in each of the five positions and for StarCraft a pro for each of the races.

So basically in summary, I'm not going to really be playing games right now, but rather focus on getting better at writing pieces for Esports which I'll post up here. I'll write another post "soon" TM where I'll go into detail about the streamers I'll be focusing on. Until then, good luck and have fun peeps!

The biggest weekend of Starcraft in 2013! (Part 1 of 3)

I've legitimately thought a lot today about writing a post where I do something beyond just talking about E-sports and in particular talk about things happening in my own life. I know it'd be a crazy stretch to do that, especially on my own personal blog, but hear me out! The thought crossed my mind. Thats all it really did though, no talk about me today, on to video games!

Some of you know this weekend as American thanksgiving. While that is certainly true, this year its actually the busiest weekend for StarCraft II. We have 3 separate major tournaments running with the World Cyber Games trying to remain relevant, the Intel Extreme Master's stop in Singapore where Acer.Scarlett will attempt to win her first premier title, and finally we have one of my personal favorites, the Annual awarding Liduid Hero with a check festival Dreamhack Winter. I'll be giving my own brief thoughts on who I think each of these tournaments are going to play out. We'll start with WCG and then talk about real tournaments tomorrow and Thursday. #ShotsFired

First up the World Cyber Games in Kunshan, China. This is going to be a weird tournament, because we have 4 groups of 7-8 players that are all going to play each person in their group in a Bo3 with only the top two of each group advancing. That means over two days, nearly 100 Bo3 series are going to be played. Thats at least 200 games! That is an ungodly number of games, I feel so sorry for both the casters and the players here, it's going to be grueling to say the least. Especially if you lose the first few and are essentially eliminated half way through the day. There are going to be pointless games being played and that just shows that the tournament format is bad. Never the less, out of each group I feel there are 2 favourites to come out of each of them. Group A will have PartinG and Sen completely out classing the rest of their group. Group B might be the closest, but I feel that France's Dayshi and China's Jim will be advancing, (That doesn't mean I won't be cheering for my fellow Canadian Desrow!) Group C will be dominated by Sora with MacSed following behind, with maybe the American Xenocider making an upset. Group D will be Korea's Soulkey wrecking everyone and the German protoss HasuObs picking up the pieces of the wreckage to advance in 2nd.

Into the playoff stage it will become like every other tournament in that the Koreans will likely dominate. I think PartinG looks to be the most likely to take the whole tournament, Soulkey could also take it, don't be shocked if its those two in the finals.

If I can throw some real talk down about now, WCG is a relic and not really that rel event of a tournament anymore. The only part that seems to matter is the Korean Qualifiers, since none of the foreigners (Non-Koreans) that would have had a even play this anymore. It's just like a charity to for the 3 Koreans that make it to the global finals. If your thinking of watching your first StarCraft Tournament this weekend, don't have it be WCG, not while there are two other very high quality tournaments going on at the same time.

RIP on WCG. Plz. 

Source of picture World Cyper Games. Plz don't sue me.

Some Review of WCS 2013, and my Thoughts on WCS 2014 Plans

In case you did not know, Blizzard released their plans for their World Championship Series (WCS) for two thousand and fourteen. Fans, players and hecklers alike were in anticipation of this news, particularly if any nationality or residency requirements would be introduced to help prevent the mess that was the WCS America region where they top eight throughout three separate seasons had only one person native to North America, (a Canadian) tying it with Australia and Norway for the year. 

Blizzards first step to fixing this problem is allocate the number of spots available for challenger league qualifiers (The tournament that funnels into premier, the highest league.) shall be limited to certain numbers based on nationality. fifty percent of qualifier spots are guaranteed to those who call North America their home, (whether by birth or legal residency) while only two will be available to their main competition, South Koreans, and even those sports are actually wildcards open to anyone. If you are wondering, while 1 Canadian made the top eight over three seasons, eighteen Koreans made their way to the top eight, possessing 75% of the top spots, and always claiming the title and runner up spots. This will probably prevent many Koreans from making their way up to premier league spots, while giving many more North Americans opportunity to attempt to make the jump. 

However, these changes do not affect the seven Korean players already seeded into Premier via their previous seasons performance, nor does it affect the Twelve Koreans who will be looking to make the jump to premier in the challenger league best of five matches that will take place early next year. It is highly likely unless several Koreans are matched against their countrymen that we will still be seeing as many as 16 Koreans in premier league, and with the new format, it will be difficult to remove them. WCS America looks to remain GSL* lite for the time being. 

You will notice I have not mentioned how this change will affect Europe`s own WCS competition. This is because Europe does not have the problem of being totally overrun by Korea. While it is true that the top 4 spots are still very Korean, there has been at least one European in the top 4 each season. There was even a French player who made the finals in season one! (RIP in peace Stephano) 

What has kept Europe safe from the invasion though? Are Europeans just better players and therefore more capable of repelling the coming invaders? while I do think Europe is ahead of North America overall, that's not really what kept them safe. The almighty wall that is Europe to Korea lag has kept them much safer than their own level of play. Harsh lag has made it very difficult for Korean players to surge forth in the 2013 year, and its simply not cost effective for the Korean teams to send their players over to Europe just to attempt to qualify for a tournament now is it? Most of the Koreans that made deep runs in WCS Europe were part of European teams where it made sense to bring them to Europe to play. Only IM.MVP (who won a season) and MVP.duckdeok (also won a season) were members of Korean based teams and also made deep runs into WCS Europe. 

To close my thoughts somewhat randomly. I think Europe looks to be in a good spot for WCS. North America might need some more time before they are able to showcase North American talent. At least there's some hope so the NA players will continue to try. Also did not mention the changes to the Korean region. Going to be good to have GSL back, looking forward to staying up way to late many nights to watch it again. Peace out!

Hopefully this guy and win a tourney soon. Couple of 1st places would solidify him as the best in the world. 

Why Picks and Bans Could Decide Season 3.

Tonight, possibly the largest event in E-sports history will talk place. Scratch that, this will be the largest event in E-sports. At Nine P.M. Mountain time, at the Staples centers in Los Angeles SK Telecom Team One of Korea will face off with Royal Club of China for the League of Legends Season Three championship and the Summoner’s cup. The clash will be for the ages, as vastly different styles of play clash against one another and I am absolutely hyped up about this.

Oddly enough, the part of tonight that I am most excited about will probably be the Picks and Bans phase of the game. Since this is my favourite part of the game I’m going to go pretty in depth about how this phase of the game goes. Ready for a pretty in depth look at what is only a 5 minutes portion of the game?! Yeah you are! Let’s go! I’ll be using some terminology you might now be familiar with so I’ll explain them at the end.

First off we look at what sides each team are on. There is the Blue side and the red side. Blue side bans and picks first. So Blue selects a champion (character) to ban away from play. Then red side team bans a champion and this goes on two more times and we have three cham

pions banned on each side. Then the blue side again takes the 1st of five picks. After that the red side takes their 1st and 2nd pick, blue then takes 2nd and 3rd picks, red 3rd and 4th pick, blue 4th and 5th pick and finally red takes the last and 5th pick for their team. After this the picks/bans portion of the game ends and the actual game begins.

So why on earth does this interest me so much? Because games are won and lost at this phase. Im serious, sometimes teams outpick their opponents and the game pretty much ends right there. Not really, but anyone with a brain thats seen league played before can see what's coming. This could be especially true in tonight's matches because both teams are so good that if they do outpick their opponents they will not screw it up. This is why I believe that this phase of the game will be so crucial tonight. So without further ado lets go into what I think will be important bans and picks tonight!

I’ll go through this position by position. (There are 5, top, jungle, mid, ad carry and support.) First top lane picks and bans. From SKT T1 I expect to see Renekton banned away, Royal Club’s top laner GoDlike has shown excellent proficiency with the champion and it fits Renek fits in so well with a dive/fighting focused team. He can jump headfirst into big fights or towers and often come out the other end alive because of how tanky he is. With picks I think SKT T1 will be looking for either Shen to give a solid tank/split pusher with a global or Jax to become a split pushing monster. Royal Club will probably be required to ban out Jax in nearly every single game unless they want to make a move with GoDlike playing it himself.

The jungle is going to probably be the most boring part of picks/bans tonight. Both Lucky and Bengi of Royal Club and SKT T1 respectively have shown a huge preference to play differant junglers and neither one of them has been game breaking enough to require a ban. So Expect to see Bengi play Lee Sin and Lucky on Elise unless something weird happens.

Mid lane is one of the most interesting because of what a huge emphasis has been put on this slot throughout the tournament. In the beginning of the world championships everyone was talking about Assassin Champions in the mid lane. That being Champions that were very adept at picking out a single target of a team and eliminating them quite quickly. Many games occurred when every single popular assassin was banned out entirely because of how dangerous it was to allow it onto the opposing team. Fizz, Ahri and Zed, and even Kassadin if you were playing the European Fnatic squad were heavily banned out. I expect this trend to continue. Three of the six bans will probably be spent on teams making sure those champs are not played. Both teams have created strategies that fix this problem though. Faker of SKT T1 has found two solutions actually. The first being a rapid expansion of his champion pool to include unconventional assassins like Lissandra and Riven, and the second being to focus on more utility like mid champions such as Gragas and Orianna. Wh1t3zZ of Royal Club more on utility champions solution more with all three of their wins against Fnatic coming from him playing the Utility champs like Orianna and Kayle. I expect Orianna to be a very high priority pick from both teams tonight and would even go to say that it will be likely to see the red side team banning the champ away every time. That will mean that most likely 4/6 bans will be devoted to mid laners. Huge impact on the game.

The bottom lane with AD carries and Support I’ll talk about together since they go to the same lane. This will be a very interesting lane to see played out, but I don't think many interesting things will happen with picks/bans here. There simply aren't enough bans to go around with so many going to the mid lane. I think a contested pick will be Caitlyn just due to how safe she is, with all that range and solid scaling into late game I won't be surprised if either Piglet or Uzzi pick her. However, I also wouldn't be surprised to see Uzzi and Tabe of Royal Club to go with the Twitch and Annie lane if neither of them is banned out. Piglet will play Ezreal, Cait or Vayne. I don’t think Corki is going to that important of a pick, but I could be wrong. Uzzi will be looking for Twitch, Vayne or Cait. Tabe will play Annie if available or Sona if not, Poohmando likewise will play Zyra if available and probably thresh if not.

So there you have it, my thoughts and what champions are going to be played, banned and be critical in whoever is going to win tonight. Good luck and have fun to both teams! PS I’m on the Korean hype train and think SKT T1 will win in a 3-1 score line.

Dive - When a player pushes forward into a enemies tower to initiate a fight, its dangerous because enemy towers do a lot of damage to your character and quickly.

Split pushing - When one member of a team goes into a lane and attempts to force the other team to react to it. Usually done by either a champion with a global or one that is a very strong duelist forcing the enemy team to send more than 1 person to stop it and that puts that team in a bad posistion.

Assassin - A champion that specializes in picking a specific target out and eliminating them very quickly. Didn’t really need an explanation did it?

Champion Pool - Every player has a list of Champions that they feel comfortable playing in a competitive setting. That is their pool.

AD carry - a character designed to inflict very large amounts of physical damage but is very weak on the defensive. Think glass cannon.

Yes, I'm aware that SKT T1's bot lane is named Pooh and Piglet. I am aware. Its adorable.

Lots of Small Rants and Birthdays

               Well it’s been a bit of time since I really sat down to write something, mostly because I haven’t; felt like I really had anything worth saying on the blog, but a good friend of mine in Chrissy Williams asked about it today and since it is her bloody birthday after all I guess I can muster enough motivation to put at least one post together.

               So what to talk about? This is kind of the problem eh? I usually want to write about just one thing but I suppose writing on several things isn’t that bad right?

               So let’s start here. This is the going to be the computer I build later this summer. It`s almost entirely based on this build. I excited to build it. There were a couple of parts I thought about changing up, but ultimately this would be the best bang for my buck. I like my laptop and all, but let’s get serious; you need a desktop to get the performance I want without paying like $2500 or so. This build is about $1000 and should be able to play any game I want and record/stream it with at least passable quality.  So yeah, building a computer like this is like way way way worth it because I’ll save hundreds of dollars that would have had to be spent on a pre-made computer. The only real downside to this is that when it’s done, everyone that I’m related to will think I’m some sort of expert that can fix any of their computer problems for them. Which might be true, but only because I know how to use this site.

               Quick note on my thoughts about Yeezus and Magna Carta Holy Grail. Yeezus not that good. Magna Carta quite an enjoyable listen. It seems to me that Kayne feels like he still needs to prove himself, which he totally doesn’t. Jay-Z though just makes stuff he likes and it sounds like that. Thus fun to listen to. Magna Carta is not a very deep album in all honesty, buts I like listening to it. Don’t take these criticisms to seriously though, cause you know. I’m not really qualified in any way. (Pseudo-intellectualism at its finest!)

               As a final note let’s just briefly mention that the United States government recently recognized players of the League of Legends Championship Series as professional athletes with the same visa privileges as players of the NFL, NBA, NHL and other organizations. This is huge. It means that E-sports is really here to stay. Huge numbers at the Evolution championships this weekend are also another great sign for the community. All in all, I’m super excited for this fall so I can watch The International Three (Dota 2) Season 3 Worlds (League of Legends) and WCS finals at Blizzcon (SC2) Gonna be a huge time for E-sports this fall. One can only hope to see my boys Dignitas make it to Worlds for League. If your intrested in reading more about the whole League players getting recognized as pro athletes you can read the article here. 

So Good!