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 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.

A Quick Look at the Fast-Push Strategy in League. Part one: Compositions.

Fast-pushing is a strategy that has become extremely prevalent in competitive League of Legends. The strategy revolves around taking enemy towers down early and fast in order to establish dominance over the map and snowball the game into a fast victory. It often relies around team compositions with strong early/mid games but suffer heavily into the late game. This puts an effective "Timer" on the team to create the overwhelming advantage before the opposing team accrues enough gold to buy the core items for their compositions which often rely more on the later portions of the game. Recently in the North American LCS there was a game that very well described how a fast push should work, and also what a team needs to do in order to stall the game out long enough for overcome the early disadvantage and win the game. I'll be going over the Curse vs Counter Logic Gaming match from Week three of the NA LCS to examine some of the in's and outs of Fast-Pushing, both pros and cons. Today it'll be just the drafting portion of the game.

So what I would say is the general rule of drafting fast pushing teams is that you want attack damage/speed, strong wave clear and mobility. You also want to try and bait the other team into picking champions with weak wave clear, as strong wave clear is the main method of stopping a fast pushing opponent. With that in mind let's see what drafting decisions Curse and CLG make in champ select. Starting with bans, where not a whole lot unfolds in regards to the fast push strat. CLG ban away a few champs that have strong potential to pick off individual champions, but that doesn't really matter that much to Curse because they aren't going for a team comp that focuses on picking people off like that, rather forcing them to back away from turrets through out numbering people at the turret with smart and fast rotations. Curse also doesn't ban away any really strong wave clearing champions, more of two all around strong picks with the Annie and Elise bans.

Moving into the picking portion of the draft we begin with Curse picking up Ziggs. Ziggs works really well with fast push strategy because it's very easy to push enemy minion waves out and shove yours up against the oppositions tower allowing you to either put damage on the turret or to roam to another lane and help shove turrets there. Shoving a lane like this also keeps at least one person pinned to the turret allowing for your rotation to become more effective. CLG respond to the Ziggs pick with a Renekton and Shyvanna. Now both of these champions have decent wave clear with Shyvanna's actually being quite strong, however picking them both of these forces the Shyvanna to play in the jungle, making her far less effective in stopping the fast push because when you are playing Shyvanna in the jungle, your strength comes from counter jungling, and not so much from moving into lanes and assisting/ganking. Curse then takes Dr. Mundo and Jinx. Dr. Mundo can hold a turret very well and Jinx might be the best turret pushing champion in the entire game with her natural attack speed steroid from her Q and strong wave clear from her Q as well. These two picks now are also very smart as they don't reveal that Curse is looking for a fast push strategy. The first three picks from Curse are totally normal picks that could also be used in a pick comp or a team fighting comp due to Mundo and Jinx both having forms of CC and strong late game scaling. Not knowing it's a fast push comp CLG take Vayne and Yasuo next. Both of these champions are really bad at defending the fast push as vayne has no real inherit wave clear and Yasuo needs a static shiv at least before he can clear waves easily. Knowing that CLG has now picked a team compositon that will struggle against the fast push Curse immediately lock in the Nunu and Janna picks. Nunu and Janna both have good synergy with  Jinx adding another attack speed steroid and an attack damage steroid with Janna's shield, not to mention the knock-up form Janna can also persuade people to abandon turrets form fear of the dive initiate she brings, Janna's ultimate also can counter-act the hard engage a Shyvanna ult brings to a team fight. So two very smart picks for this composition. CLG knowing what they are up against now have no real choice but to simply stick to the comp they are already bulding and lock in the Lulu for the last pick.

So in summary, Curse picked strong pushing champions that are also usable in other compositions to bait CLG into picking champions that are weak against the fast push. Once Curse knew CLG couldn't build a strong composition to counter their strategy they revealed their strat with their last picks. CLG at this point has no other choice but to stick to their guns and hope to out play Curse in game.

Later this week (Prob Tues/Wed) I'll be looking into the first twenty minutes of this game to see how Curse now execute this fast push strategy.

Obligitory Chauster picture. 

Image source from ibuypower.com

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

The Casual Fan's NA LCS Power Rank!

With the North American League Championship Series booting back into high gear this weekend, I'd thought I would share some of my thoughts on how the North American teams stand up to each other with their European imports. So without further delay, we'll proceed form eight too one!

#8 - Dignitas. Let's get something straight, I am a Dig fan, I love these guys and I sincerely think that Qtpie is one of the best AD's in North America, but at this moment there isn't really a lot else going on for them. Scarra is kind of just another mid right now, Kiwikid is still new to support, Crumbz has some moments of brilliance and Cruzer just looked totally outclassed against Wickd at the Battle of the Atlantic event. I hope to see this team improve and I think they can, but right now they are in deep trouble.

#7 - Curse. Curse probably isn't actually as bad as I'm saying they are, but thats mostly because I haven't jumped on the Quas hype train. Dominate and VoyBoy seem to be meshing well together in play so they've got that over Dig at least. Cop and Zekent will almost guaranteed be one of the most average bottom lanes in North America, and with the upcoming changes in patch 4.1 almost forcing the 2v2 every game Curse's bottom lane will have to lean on their solo lanes even more if they are to start winning games.

#6 - CLG. I don't get it. I just don't. CLG has everything in the right place to be top 2 team material. They have one of the best strategic minds in League with MonteCristo coaching them, one of the two most mechanically gifted players in North America with Doublelift and Link who are both very capable of carrying games. I'm particularly fond of Doublelifts preference to playing Jinx, a champion I think can carry games infinitely better than other top picks such as Cait, Lucian or Sivir. On the other end of the bot lane, Aphromoo seems to have become very comfortable with supporting and is enjoying it, and Nien continues to evolve into a high quality top lane player. Finally, they have the super strong European jungler now in Dexter. They should have everything going for them, but things just don't seem to work out. I wouldn't be suprised in the slightest if CLG challenged for Top 2 in NA, but until something magical happens that makes this team work they'll continue to wallow in mediocrity.

#5 - Coast. Coast looked really good playing against the other challenger teams during their relegation period, but those are only the challenger teams. Coast suffers from the same problem that Curse does in my mind in that they are good players, just not great. Nothing about them really stands out, but their bot lane doesn't make me cringe with how passive they are at least so I'll rate them a fair bit higher than Curse. Someone's gotta be the middle of the pack team I suppose.

#4 - XDG. I honestly didn't know whether to put XDG or EG here, ultimately the recently renewed commitment to swapping Xmithie to AD and Zuna to jungle forced my hand though. Xmithie is a great jungler, and I really don't think he's going to fully adapt to the bottom lane until very late into the split or even the summer split. Zuna's positioning as AD was well... pretty awful, he just seems to want to go in deep all the time, so I guess Jungle will suit him better, but really this move overall is a mistake I feel. Despite this bad move within the team, I still think XDG will be a strong team that will give people a good run for their money. If they can stop throwing games I think they can beat anyone really.

#3 - EG. All hail the European rejects! Seriously though, this team has a really solid line-up. Snoopeh seems to be back on the rise getting his mechanics back together. I do thin Yellopete is way to passive, but the bot lane makes up for it with Krepo being willing to go balls deep at a moments notice and on top of that the team seems synced up with Krepo well, diving right with him. Innox seems to be a solid top laner, but I do hope to see a bit more from him over these next few months. Lastly there is Pobelter. He's super strong, I'm not going to lie, but EG cannot afford to fall into the trap they did with Froggen. They cannot rely too much on their mid, they must realize that other people on the team are totally capable of carrying the game as well. regardless, this team looks to be solid throughout the year. How ironic it would be if they made it to worlds from NA and Alliance failed to make it...

#2 - Cloud 9. The biggest debate I had with myself over these placements was the top 2. It seems pretty clear but who are the two best teams in NA right now. (I'll give you a hint, its the ones that WON Battle of the Atlantic matches.) The real question is which of these two is better than the other though? Ultimately I had to put the boys in light blue in second, but really I can see either of these two being number 1 easily. Cloud 9 absolutely dominated the last split of  the LCS with strong team fighting oriented compositions and decisive decision making. Having one of the best Junglers in the entire world acting as the spearhead certainly helps as well. Coming into this split Cloud 9 have to prove that they can still be the best consistently. I again criticize the bottom lane for being passively oriented, however Cloud 9 plays that as a strength by having Sneaky and Lemonation play utility oriented bottom lane that allows for the solo lanes to shine. I don't think its optimal, but it works pretty darn well.

#1 - TSM. Team Solo Mid has only made one change, but boy was it big. Team Owner Reginald stepped down from the starting roster to coach the team. Replacing him is star European mid laner Bjergsen. This not only makes what I thought was TSM's weakest point one of its strongest, but it also removes the massive power dynamic issues that plagued the team during Season 3. In game I feel that TSM is now actually in a position to communicate in a healthy manner. Combine that with TheOddOne's recent surge in performance and we have a scary scary TSM. Just how strong is TSM now? Strong enough that I think Dyrus is the weakest player on the team now. Yes Dyrus, the North American All-star that consistenly performs and often would be large factor in TSM's season 3 wins is now the weakest person on the team. They're like SKT K lite now, thats honestly not even a real dig at TSM. They are scary and I expect great things from them this season.

So there you have it! Some random fan's opinion on how the LCS teams are going to do in NA this split. Hopfully I get at least a couple of them right.