EPT365 days to this day I finally joined, and wow what an amazing place Teamliquid has been. This is one incredible community I’m so happy to be a part of :D As is semi-customary, a blog for my 1000th post. Below will combine music and ranting for your viewing pleasure. Enjoy. ^^
P.S. I can’t even remember how I came across Stan SB, but wow this is a kind with some serious talent. If you’re into techno-electronic-y music, go ahead and use it as some background music to the ranting and randomness below.
P.P.S. If you're short on time, all I ask is you read #5, as it's the most important to me
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1. The Scientific Method (Obsoletes The Great Library, Parthenon & Monastery)
This wasn’t something useless we learned in middle school to perform some cheesy science fair project about “Does music effect plant growth?” It’s the system that defines the scientific community, defines our progression as a species. Over the months of Starcraft II’s release, everyone’s been aware of the massive influx of terrible posts claiming imbalance and overpowered strategies.
I thought that gamers (those involved in RTS, yeah I’m a bit racist when it comes to gamers) were smarter than this. Do even 5% of the people asking for help or claiming imbalance really even try to figure out their weakness? Are we so egotistical that we no longer believe it’s our own fault, but the game? Day[9] himself praises practice where he would play one build over and over again until he refined it, but does anyone even listen to that advice? It’s disappointing, seeing how we jump to conclusions before any sort of testing takes places.
My mistake, these OP-claimers do have a sample size. One game. Obviously a shining example of imbalance.
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2. The Progamer Dream
2. The Progamer Dream
Another great trend on the Teamliquid forums have been blogs about chasing the progamer dream. People willing to forgo school and jobs to try and make it as a pro. I feel somewhat bad talking about this just because of how little people think through these ideas. They’re leaving no fallback option, no contingency plan should they fail. Hell, it’s not even an easy job being a progamer. It’s something all of us gamers at TL love to read, watch and hear about, but at the pace everything is at now it’s not possible to just pick up a copy SC2 and go pro. Yeah, lots of new names have appeared on the scene. But so many of these new pros – Huk, TLO, etc – have experience from something. Experience that put them at a level capable of taking on the best Broodwar players at a new game.
Note, I’m not saying it’s impossible. I’m saying think before you declare to the world what you’re going to do. Think about the lifestyle you live, and then imagine losing every bit of free time you have to get even the slightest chance of hitting the pro level. Imagine the thousands of hours and games professionals have on you, and now imagine having to play those thousands of games just to be considered good, but still outclassed by many of the best and brightest.
You don’t go to business school and one day decide “I’m going to become an astronaut.” You don’t go to med school and say “Time to become a four star general.” Progaming, like anything, is a career. A fuckin fun one, but a career. Treat it as something more than a whimsical decision before you drop out of college to try and go from silver to Savior.
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3. Intermission
3. Intermission
Why the fuck aren’t toilet seats padded and fuzzy? By now, even when I’m home, I put down toilet paper on the seat so I don’t freeze my ass off. Fuck that.
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4. To be optimistic, or not to be optimistic?
4. To be optimistic, or not to be optimistic?
I love science and technology. If humanity holds itself together, I only see the general standard of living to rise continuously. But what if we reach that maximum utility? What if we become so advanced that we solve every human ailment? What if we modify crops to have endless food, find a new energy source for unlimited energy, what if we take a book out of alchemy and find a way to turn dirt into precious metal?
If we satisfy every physical and materialistic problem humanity puts up with, will humanity change? Will we stop fighting amongst one another even if resources become abundant? Will the world ever actually unify under one banner with the goals of just making the world a safer and happier place? It begs to question human nature, if we’ll always find something to kill each other about even when we have everything we could want. The episodes of South Park where Cartman travels to the future and atheists are at war is both hilarious and possibly realistic. We may always find some little thing to kill each other over, a very sad viewpoint.
My bet is one day humans will progress so far that we’ll solve every possible ailment to our species. But one the thing we can’t make more of is dry land, and if all those amazing technologies become available worldwide, land will become the most valuable resource. As Lex Luthor in Superman Returns said, it’s the one thing we’re not making more of. Obviously I’m a pessimist, I think no matter what we create we’ll always find some reason to kill each other off. It’s just a matter of time.
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5. Understanding
WARNING: + Show Spoiler +
5. Understanding
WARNING: + Show Spoiler +
To attain the true effect of the last piece, I recommend listening to some soothing piano music. Like this :D
Think about your closest and dearest friend. Someone that knows everything about you and you know everything about. There’s no secret between you. Now imagine they disagree with you on some topic. Maybe they’re a Democrat and you’re a Republican. Maybe they believe in ghosts and you think that’s retarded. But, at the end of the day, it doesn’t fucking matter if your friend believes the world is going to end in 2012, you still care about that individual and trust them. Why? Because you understand one another.
I believe strongly that if you truly understand someone it’s impossible to hate them. They can annoy you, make you cry or piss you off, but you can never hate them if you understand them. By understanding someone, you know where they come from. You know why they do what they do. There’s a reason people think or act differently than yourself, and knowing that reason can be the difference between reckless hate (What can we do against it?) and sympathetic understanding.
People, especially here on the Internet, don’t take the time or make the effort to understand one another, and it’s really killing us. Everyone goes through life wearing personalized glasses. Glasses that blur our vision and distort what’s there into something we want to see. These glasses effect how we receive news, how we perceive others, and most important how we judge other people. We get so caught up in judging others by our own standards, we forget that there’s more to life than our perspective than our own. We don’t desire to understand someone else’s perspective, where they come from, what they believe in. We sit behind our glasses and we judge.
Over the year at Teamliquid I’ve read a fuckton of threads, and most recently I’ve become very depressed at our inability to ever discuss religion ever again. When another thread opens up even remotely related to a religious topic, everyone scrambles to find their judgment glasses and turns what could be a productive conversation into a shit storm.
As I end this blog, I urge anyone who got this far to take off their judgment glasses and instead wear a monocle. Not only will you look like a total badass, but you’ll see things like never before. Maybe you’re a firm believer in nations giving charity to other countries and someone strongly opposes your viewpoint. Before you start bashing, maybe take some time to find out that they actually believe in providing homeless people with food and shelter, and they’re not heartless scum. You’ll learn new things about people and maybe even agree with someone else’s perspective.
Understand one another. Trust one another. We’re all human, and to me we’re all brothers and sisters. We’re all one big family on the Earth, but without understanding we’re no better than the warring tribes of our earliest ancestors. Love one another, and
you may find true happiness by taking time to look beyond what you perceive, and instead look at what’s actually in front of you.
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6. And most importantly of all…
6. And most importantly of all…
Guy: (approach cute girl) Excuse me, do you know how much a polar bear weighs?
Girl: No, how much?
Guy: Enough to break the ice, hi I’m *introduction.*
FUCK THE MOVIE HALL PASS. IT’S A BLASPHEMOUS LOAD OF GARBAGE THAT BY USING THIS HAS RUINED THE GREATEST PICK UP LINE EVER CONCEIVED.
Bobby & Peter Farrelly, Pete Jones, writers of Hall Pass… I shall never forgive you for your treachery. Fuck you.
