I rarely like Hendrix covers, but to be honest, I didn't like get smurfed on iCCup either. There's nothing wrong with smurfs, in my opinion just play whatever because whatever, and in short it's StarCraft so the more whatever in your game the more you are like Nal_rA the dreamer. But think about it this way, all Asians are the same person, except that it's really expensive to be the consciousness always inside the same body known as Lim Yo-Hwan. And that's the same way for me, really, I'm never the same consciousness inside the same body, and the reason is probably something to do with my StarCraft experience playing so many different opponents simultaneously.
Like Poker, you can play probably 50 or 60 up to 100 and even more players all simultaneously if you're willing to 16-25 table NL like 100/2/4/8.
And earnestly, this is the same point Jimi Hendrix was trying to make with his guitar. Yeah, it was the age of LSD, and free love, and most of us know next to nothing about that. If we did, of course, we wouldn't be StarCraft players, because what makes us play StarCraft is some kind of ill-concealed or thinly-veiled need to accomplish something mathematical or intuitive. Then the more psychopath-style players graduated to play more mellowing games like Poker where they could pursue their desires directly (at least those players with a bent to a game like Hold 'Em). This was pretty good, I think, for a lot of players; the passive like Bertrand 'Elky' and not so good for the more aggressive players (RekruL); but really good for lesser known players like Myth, Day, Baal, NonY, and of course GaYmE (David Kent).
My feeling is that these players eventually got matched up with local legends in Korea, Macau, and some of the siesta vistas in Latin America. Guys like Yellow mellowed Rekrul pretty quick; fiercer players like "lastgosu" and the four-time finalist UK's Midian found themselves crushed by cyber-style psychology gosus who brought to the table something that mechanics and strategy couldn't rival. In short there wasn't much to say about Brood War players making the transition to poker immediately except that they weren't much good, if they were anything like myself they didn't win much after a few weeks of play.
Anyway there was also the education pressure, and poker didn't remedy that. Not remotely, really, was there any chance of recollecting the glories of the Brood War life in the realm of academia (or so it seemed at first). There were a few isolated cases of Beijing U. students; MIT zergs and a few kids at Harvard who were like B- level on iCCup but none of them were really top-notch. So it was an alternative situation: either poker, StarCraft and a job, or neither and then school.
My own poker career wasn't that great it was thinly masked with drugs like Adderall and i guess pot or stuff that helped me relax and win lots. But then I never graduated past a success at NL100 and only then with coaching etc. I probably made like $6k in total over 200 hours of pretty serious play and then a lot more math homework. I remember vaguely writing some pretty important game theory trees about what I thought pre-flop play should look like, ranges, stuff like that. It never really got anywhere and I don't think I published it. I'm pretty famously glad that I never really published anything because what the hell.
Of course there were really no successful female Brood War players that powered the scene in Poker like they did in StarCraft: Brood War. The initial stages of the game of course were just a bunch of pre-teens playing around on money maps (a bunch of $$$ nonsense; spam, BGH, close mining maps and that kind of junk). And I guess that's why only a handful of Poker players ever really made it anywhere. I think probably the top 10 Brood War poker players make like annual 7 figures which is pretty good cuz that's probably top 1% perhaps even top .3%. But then there were a lot more people who tried and didn't get anywhere or just weren't stable in the long run, LOL.
Of course I'd congratulate the elder crowd: Rekrul Elky Boxer Yellow and Fayth on their WPT, EPT, WSOP wins but for the most part that doesn't represent the rest of us in any substantial way especially not today when it's been like 9 years since they released SC2.
Anyway like virtually nothing came of the poker attempts except a lot of stimulant abuse by a lot of talented young kids who previously had no idea about drugs. Sure most of that stuff is over-the-counter like everyone can get a prescription to Adderall, Vyvanse, and it's definitely a lot healthier than using cocaine daily if you really abuse that stuff you can get really high and it can interfere with your decision-making in ways that aren't really long-run stable. By the time all this was happening I'd pretty much lost interest in poker anyway as the scene had really dried up for new talent and which direction the RTS society wanted to go.
I also never really related to Warcraft personalities like Grrrr.... Moon or the crew that later transferred briefly to Wings and HotS. I think Warcraft offered something that other publishing houses lacked and that's the connection to a wider world of venues like what happened in WoW over the last 15 years. But again I think it's pretty controversial and you'd have to hear from someone who knows really strictly what happened with WoW.
My own considerations have nothing much to do at all with MMOs cuz frankly they're pretty boring and outside of some really isolated context I don't see them to be the future or representative of really anything that's going to be interesting in the next three or four decades. Down the road a ways sure when there's some realistic virtual reality environment that provides people an in-depth look into the way societies and civilizations really work. But I don't think programmers have any insight into that, not really any at all except a bunch of abstracts and unintuitive spam that amounts to a lot of social awkwardness and feelings of inept failure.
Anyway before I get to the point of this blog I thought I'd share some basic opinions on what happened to life around 19 or 20 which is when most of us start to get interested in girls. The hormones have calmed down and most of the opportunity for a real life lays ahead of us in some important capacity like what if so-and-so had some really extroverted internal mental life. Which leads me to this Hendrix riff "Dagger" where we listen to Jimi's opinions on the female mentality. I'd disagree of course that women are at all are icy. That's either a really optimistic appraisal or Hendrix saw something in a biology publication that I wouldn't necessarily intuit.
Also women seem really resistant to the gamer mentality even in China Korea and Japan where women are pretty popular citizens on videogame clients. And a different clientele doesn't like absolutely improve the situation in my opinion especially given my own semi-limited experience regarding how we should handle the integration of the non-progaming public into the virtual experience. Like sure there are isolated instances of sex idol like "here's TossgirL" and what's your opinion about this. Mine of course is that being good at an RTS isn't really a sign of anything and that garnering a degree of support for yourself as an RTS gamer as a woman is no different really than garnering support for yourself as an RTS gamer as a male.
So in short the 19-20 questions and the 19-20 years converged for me considerably. I wasn't great with women and I didn't know what they were thinking most of the time, or whether they thought anything like me. I think they think pretty much the same, now, looking back in retrospect that girls and guys are essentially exercising the same rationality about the same questions from a different perspective. But that's more like simply an opinion I've developed not knowing much of anything about anything, and learning even less than I knew etc. Things were great for Jimi of course, if you examine the differences between yourself and Hendrix you'll probably find it to be almost exactly the same as comparing yourself to God, which is never really fruitful especially if you're interested in women.
LOL.
Now that I think of it women really do compare themselves to God quite often and I don't know if that's like a menstrual hold over thing or something that you could actually seriously bring up in public successfully without too much intuitive straining. Personally I think a nice car and some reverb (like 'style') or something like that is really what you want as far as integrating with the female community. Go about things looking to make friends and see if the girls are open to that idea. Again I LOL pretty hard when I look at most cyber-sex idols like Rekrul trying to make friends (what I have in mind isn't soul destruction or anything of that nature but I guess it works in isolated contexts). No, really what I have in mind is something like what if you were approached by a rational woman who had rational life plans and wanted something rational like self-idealization.
Then we're back to comparing ourselves to God, which as I said before women seem to do a lot more successfully and a lot more frequently than men. And of course that's just like my opinion which we both recognize as being more or less unfruitful. So what do I mean by trying to make friends outside the virtual world? Well, I mean if you're a StarCraft player or a Poker player or even a Hearthstone player or DotA player your biggest obstacle will be to identify something you have in common with someone else. Most of your friends are probably really competitive and roided up on testosterone which is a legitimate strategy if you want to win at forceful competition. But then again this is like transforming your competitive environment into drinking games, pissing contests, and questions about who really has more "money" (where money is basically skill).
And none of this is really food for a lasting relationship, but it identifies with us as humans at some primitive level. Like, "This is what it took for dinosaur-fighter'JOE' to survive in dinosaur-times where JOE fought dinosaurs for a living." (drinks, games, money and skill versus the dinosaur's aptitudes).
Eventually you find yourself beyond the drug realm, not considering drinks or what it means to be powerful in a real world scenario like you were playing at a trumped up Poker environment. That's not really what gamers are familiar with and not what StarCraft, Warcraft, WoW or whatever was / is about. So I'm just gonna gloss over that part of the story with 6///9 by Hendrix. I have no idea what he's really on about here or what he's suggesting with the demeanour of the music. Probably nothing he's just really high on LSD, lol, but that was the 60s and early 70s before the cocaine in the 80s. All this is pretty tableau these days and whatever.
So to get to the meat of the post I was doing some PC work today and I was looking through all this shit I have in a box at my parents house. (I've got a special storage box where I keep a bunch of illicit shit from expensive jewelry to receipts, beer tabs, rare Japanese coins, two dollar bills and half dollars).
Anyway in the box I also have a bunch of USBs. I used to collect USB hard drives and paint them etc to give them a sort of flair that we don't get outside the novel settings we so infrequently frequent (to use a turn of a phrase LOL).
Anyway so I was looking through some old SC2 reps where I smash oGs)TOP and some other famous dudes and followed my first career efforts in Wings where I got to #1 in the world (which was just #1 in USA cuz of server split but it still felt good).
I realized I didn't like SC2 much at first and that really it would take a lot to make the game up to par with StarCraft: Brood War which was you know in its own right pretty good even compared to predecessors.
But finally in the end I found what I was looking for which was a collection of BW games on the old map pools from 2001-2009 where I raped all the best players in the world with the exception of MidiaN (who outclassed me) and Yosh (the guy who taught SC at UC Berkeley). Still, those guys had a lot of potential and a lot of skill compared to the amount of time I could afford to practice. Unfortunately I'd had my wrists broken playing arcade games in Texas because I'd started using performance enhancements like caffeine pills etc to up my videogame acumen. In hindsight it reminds me of Paul Newman in 'The Hustler' which is an old flick with Paul Newman where he gets his wrists broken because he's one of the best pool sharks outside Atlantic City (at least hat's the plot of the movie, LOL).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMkdhVQMBHY&list=PLMKA5kzkfqk2GEImRCIqGqWmQvKYygUhG&index=20
So anyway here I'm looking through all my old reps on BW chart (which I still have on my ancient 2006 laptop).
I all-kill every American gosu from NonY to IncontroL to Day9 Artosis Idra and even lastgosu (the Korean Pro)
I even snipe a "wanna-be" BoxeR on iCCup and that amused us to no end.
like I said I struggled with a few opponents not necessarily posting perfect winning records against guys like lzGamer and Machine (at least not after high school graduation) and then there were my crushing series against ninazerg and a few other female gamers. Some old reps where I 5v1 high school kids from the rival high school in our bi-city area.
Wins against Testie, Mondragon, Androide, one isolated incident where I nuke Rekrul to death in Race Wars (ROFL™).
But like I said there were some embarrassing losses too. JulyZerg snipes me on iCCup and I never got to play rA but I feel like I did pretty well in most 1v1 scenarios against JF, [stim]Jamers and Grrrrr's various teammates like Firebat.
Probably my fondest moments were all-killing various colleague teams smurfing illegally (inspired by the Hexatron scandal with Skew and Assem when they were just getting back from Korea).
I also had great series against G5, siz)KaL, "o.ov", Gayme, and sMi. Symphony the SC2 perma-GM.
There were some other no tables like SaddleS, NookS, "RaveN" and Tempest the guy who beat Nada 70-5 on NFZ (rofl so ridiculozzz).
Alright so seriously I was like 300 APM when [6699]Slayer was growing three hands.
I was nuking and EMPing before the singleplayer AI was nerfed.
I was averaging 20+ PvP-kill Reavers before Jangbi
I was mineral swapping pylon blocking and gateway finessing before Bisu defeated Savior
I was massacreing interceptors on Stim before BW
I was GARIMTO probe recalling before Valhalla
I was basically the best Brood War casual there ever was and I never got anything for it. I've got a lot of theories about metaphysics and shit about why StarCraft and its competent 500 APM actions per minute (see Jaedong, Zero, Effort, Kang Min, XelloS) are the solution to every world problem (like neurological chess bitcoin in a wireless digital environment except way more than 20 games at once, basically 500 APM, HAHAHAHAHA).
Anyway I was like pretty much the greatest foreigner basically ever but never got to compete in anything because I overdosed on caffeine and broke both wrists falling from a 5 story building. Suffered from carpal tunnel ever since until last year I finally got a nerve replacement surgery. But yea it's fucking shit basically to be the best ever at the most difficult game ever and never receive any recognition. It's not much difference than being Jimi Hendrix and whatever.