Random stuff I think about at night

A lot of fancy dinners (for freeeee) and job training. Helping out a friend who has nowhere to live for a few days, so gonna be cramped but fun.
Evan (best friend) comes to visit me and I crash a bunch of freshman orientation stuff. Free food! Free stuff! Cotton candy and lots of blackjack!
Go to NYC to see Evan and for a weekend of being SPOILED! Yay!
Evan comes to visit the next weekend and probably will be a lots of nerdy games night.
Head to Canada all-expense paid trip to the International Animation Festival in Ottawa for my art studies. :D
IPL3 in Atlantic City! (Evan is taking me so free!)
Fall Break, possibly trip out in the country to Evan's grandma's farm.
My birthdayyyyy! :D
Evan visits for homecoming weekend!
MLG Providence! (Evan is taking me yay!)
Thanksgiving Break!
FINALSSSSS AHHHHHHHHH!
Christmas Break???? Idk where I'm going yet, but a friend I met gaming offered to let me stay with her and her fiance again. Stayed there last year, and basically we set up 6 computers on the dining room table and gamed for 2 weeks. Her fiance made us steak and homemade cheese cake. We went to an indoor water park. We got tipsy on New Year's Eve and had a big nerfgun fight with her cousins. We went to the mall and bought some fun girl things. Good times had by all. Otherwise might be headed to Colorado for a week or two on a ranch.

During this will be going to class and working my two jobs. CRAZY SHIT. I am excited.

Since I was little, there have been so many places I want to visit. Many of them are natural wonders. Many others are archaeological or cultural wonders. There is something absolutely incredible that sends shivers down my spine (literally), when I see some of these places. Something makes you feel so small, but so alive when you see something so beautiful in nature. That feeling of wonder is something I want to experience again and again.

It's a feeling I felt standing on the very edge of the cliffs in the Black Canyon of the Gunnison across from the 'Painted Wall'.

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It's funny, but my eyes couldn't adjust to the perspective. It's such a steep drop, everything below you looks tiny. But the canyon is so BIG. In that first picture, those are huge fir trees on top of the cliff-- looks like grass. Hard to describe, but it was trippy. And amazing.

It's the feeling I felt when I finally go to the top of the Great Sand Dunes after a god-awful climb in the middle of summer. (I rolled all the way back down.)

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It's crazy to think there are 750 foot tall sand dunes sitting in the middle of these mountains, looking straight out of Laurence of Arabia. Also crazy that there are a few species of insects that only live in these sand dunes and nowhere else in the world!

It's a feeling I felt when I got to sit in dinosaur footprints, made so so so long ago in the sandstone that runs along the river in Dinosaur Valley Park. Many of them are underwater so couldn't find good pictures, but when you can sit cross-legged in one of the footprints in the river, it's incredible how huge they were. And amazing to think you are sitting exactly where a dinosaur was once standing.

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It's a feeling I felt holding a goblet from the Royal Tombs of Ur, made by layering an ostrich shell in gold, and decorated with mother-of-pearl shell. Or holding a tablet with a cuneiform letter written by a man to his wife about the family business in ancient Mesopotamia. The amazing feeling I get standing between the pillars of what was once an Egyptian temple, and knowing that thousands of years ago, other people stood between them, and lived their life so differently, yet so much the same as me. (Love my university museummmm. <3)

I want to see so many things in the world. I have barely left the United States, and there are so many many things here I still want to see! Arches National Park, and the Grand Canyon, and the Redwood Forest, and the Appalachian Trail in the fall.

If I do not get to see at least some of the world before the end of my life, I would be disappointed in myself. There are so many places, so many things to see, I know I can't see them all. But I can see as many as possible, I hope.

I did not have a good childhood, but I also got the chance to work with many children who were much worse off than me over the years. I love kids, and I know I want to have some someday, but for myself (no judgement on other people), I absolutely cannot accept the idea of bringing more children into the world when there are so very many already here who have no one to love them. Every child in the world should have someone who loves them, a place they can go where they feel safe, food to eat, hope that they can do something successful in life with hard work. Adopting a few children will not fix the problem, but it will fix the problem for those children, which is a million times better than nothing.

And if I have the opportunity to do something bigger because of my own success, I want to do it. If I didn't, I think I would have a lot of regrets about it later. You can't take anything with you, only leave change behind. I want to change the world for the better. No need for me to hold back on giving when I can.

Growing up I did not have a good childhood. I didn't have a place I felt safe coming home to, or people who were there for me and loved me. I moved a lot.

I dream about having a home. A small house I am able to buy with my own money. Something older, something I can put time and love into making my own. Somewhere I can have a garden, and big trees in my backyard to hang a hammock from. Somewhere I can have a dog, and a cat, and they will have room to play and be happy.

I want it to be the kind of place that makes you happy to see when you open your eyes. The kind of place where you curl up with books and hot chocolate when it rains or snows, and where you can run around outside in the spring time.

I want to be able to share it with someone who loves me. Someone who is just as nerdy as I am, who loves games, and technology, and books, and cooking, and animals. Someone who is really excited about what they do, and who is happy for me to be doing what I love. Someone who will eventually be happy to adopt children with me. I want to share my life with a best friend-- the person you want most when things are bad and you need someone to hug you and cheer you up, and the person you want most when something amazing happens and you just have to tell someone right now! I want to share it with the kind of person who loves long walks, lying in the grass on a summer afternoon, or building snowmen in the winter time. Someone who will cut down a Christmas tree with me each year, and build gingerbread houses.

That's my idea of a home, and I hope I don't miss out on any part of it by being afraid-- afraid of committing to one place, or the money, or risking my heart to try to love someone.

Maybe this is a skewed sampling, but it seems of all my friends who play SC2, so many of them get pissed about race/balance issues. They begin to have trouble in a particular match-up, and sudden there is an explosion of bitching about how ___ needs to be changed to make it more balanced.

I understand people get frustrated when they lose and blow off steam-- it's natural--but I feel like I'm the only person in the world (exaggeration) who honestly believes that even if something really were imbalanced, it shouldn't matter, to you, the player. If you were just a better player, you could still win. No one plays perfectly. There will always be some hole you can exploit, or some new strategy you can find to beat whatever it is that is giving you trouble. If you don't chose to look for that solution, you deserve to lose. Bitching about it won't change anything, only Blizzard will change it (by adding more destructible rocks). If you learn to beat something while it is overpowered, how much better will you be when it's fixed?

Another thing I hate is when people complain that they lost to a worse player than themselves (usually because of cheese). I'm sorry, but that's bullshit. If you lost, you weren't the better player. Maybe you are better in terms of macro, or in terms of knowledge of the metagame. But unless your computer bluescreened right as you were killing the last refinery, you lost because some aspect of your game-play was worse than your opponent's. And that makes all the areas where you were 'better' not matter. If you lose to cheese, learn to defend it. If you can't defend it, keep practicing until you can.

When I was in bronze league, I remember a ZvZ where my opponent 6 pool spine-crawlered me. This was before the worker AI was improved, and you couldn't just a-move them. I had really bad control, and I lost. I was mad about it, but I started another game. I played the exact same guy again. And he did the exact same thing. And my control was still just as poor, and I lost again. So instead of bitching about how only bad players cheese and I am a better player so I would have beaten him in a macro game, I went and practiced. I had a friend 6 pool spine-crawler rush me over and over and over again until I could hold it off. I have not lost to an early pool spine-crawler rush since then. A few weeks ago I was playing a ZvZ in gold league; my opponent's drone kept hanging around my base, and when it went just out of my vision on the edge of my creep I sent a drone to check, which I always do now. Sure enough, there was a spine, and I held it off and won the game. And I know I won that game because that happened to me in bronze league, and I was so determined it would not happen again that I practiced until I could recognize it and beat it.

Another thing that annoys me is when people get to a certain league and then believe they are now good. League promotion is like your birthday. You're actually really not any different than you were yesterday. Why would you ever become satisfied if you are looking to improve? If you honestly want to be a better player, you should never think to yourself that you have reached your goal. If you were the number one player on every server, and winning every major tournament you entered, and hadn't lost a single game in the entire season-- you should STILL not be satisfied. There is always something that can be improved, and better will win you a game, but it will not win you games forever. If you don't actively seek to develop new ideas and styles in your play, to improve the tiniest things in your mechanics, and to practice constantly, you will eventually be left behind.

If you are really improving, you will continue to see the ways in which you are a bad player. It is like being wise-- the wiser you are, the more you are aware of all the things you don't know. The better a player you become, the more aware you will be of the imperfections in your play-- imperfections that others may have a hard time seeing at some point. If you ever stop seeing those imperfections, then you are in danger, because you are no longer improving.

I know this is a very strict view of improvement, but I feel like it's the view you should have if you are very serious about getting better. Not everyone plays to be spr srs about improving, and I completely understand and applaud people who play for fun. To me though, I want to be the absolute best I can be, and I have high standards for myself. The harder you work, the more rewarding it is to see yourself improve, and that's something I really love. To me it's a lot like my art-- the more time and effort you put into it, the better the output.

It starts with attitude. If you want to get better, you have to accept that each and every time you lose a game, it's because you were not the better player-- not because of imbalance, or because 'cheese' is a valid excuse for losing. Then once you can declare that, you have to be willing to work to fix whatever flaw in your play made you the worse player. Bitching is for people who will never be the best.

Last week, I got promoted to plat! I started in bronze, and this is the first game I've ever played. I am proud of myself for improving so much in just the past few months, and I celebrated with my friends about the promotion. But I am REALLY bad at this game, lol! I SUCK! And I am going to keep working my ass off, because I am never going to be satisfied with a league or ranking. I want my own level of perfection.