EPT
![[image loading]](/staff/Plexa/Apple_Pie/applepieslice.jpg)
For someone as young as myself, I am very lucky to have done quite a bit of traveling. I've literally been around the world and seen some great places. Perhaps my favorite trip was to Hong Kong last year with a group of friends who were graduating the year above me. It was awesome just to let loose in HK (and later Japan) and essentially live in a completely foreign place for us for a solid month or two. But no matter where i went in the world, coming home and eating home baked apple pie was always something to be cherished.
Well not so much literal apple pie
more metaphorical in this case. I suppose the literal version of my metaphor is my Dad's bastardized Butter Chicken which is roasted and is not a curry which he would cook every single friday night when my brother and i returned from boarding school. There is a certain comfort within this realm of familiarity. No surprises, no eccentricities which could catch you off guard, no disappointments - just getting what you know and love time and time and time again. The metaphorical apple pie is just this, the idea that life is good within your comfort zone. But sometimes we are thrust out of our comfort zone and into circumstances we would have rather avoided. Progaming is such a beast where upsets are increasingly common and disappointment runs rampant through the hierarchy. It's not hard to list events where we have all been thrust out of our comfort zones and into places we dare not tread. say for instance Boxer's crushing loss to Shinhwa after his 14 game TvZ winning streak and his subsequent loss to FireBatHero to knock him out of the OSL. Or even when Yellow was denied his rightful OSL title by Xellos all those years ago. Or perhaps more recently when Bisu destroyed Savior in the MSL.
Change is something most people on teamliquid don't accept too well - and who could blame them. We take pride in knowing that for the past 10 years we have had one solid game that we can rely on for our entertainment, and this really hasn't changed much for a lot of us. We also have our favorite progamers who we wish will never suck and will always dominate - but even the best have to come falling down. But change is obviously inevitable in both cases - we have SC2 coming out soon and progaming legends die young.
September is going to be funny month for teamliquid, and one event to mark on your calender is TL's birthday (22nd!). But in addition to our own growth over the following months there is going to be large changes in proleauge where new legends will be born, new formats will be tested, and sadly, some of the greats will come crashing down. We'll also see the first few weeks of the OSL and MSL which invariably brings its set of drama and change to the world.
Change is coming in every form possible from possibly every direction. It could be as small as a simple cosmetic change or it could be as large as an entirely new full scale project to make the community a better place. Things will be upgraded, things will become better - even if there are a few growing pains to begin with. Change is something which we have to accept, even within our comfort zones like Teamliquid, if we are to excel and get ahead. And well, teamliquid traditionally hasn't taken well to these things; just look at the icons on the side bars - people got incredibly angry when we changed those! Let me assure you, the magnitude of changes in coming months will be bigger than that.
Change is all about, well at least hopefully, bettering yourself and changing how your comfort zone operates in one such necessity. Indeed I've progressed on from the bastardized butter chicken into my own little rituals and classic dishes - such is the nature of growth and change. It's easy for me to look at my situation now and complain and remember the good old days when things were so much better than before. But really, were they? I was young, trapped in a boarding school, got about zero respect from everyone anywhere, no gf, no life, terrible at starraft, doing above average in school and the food was alright. But now, although I have more things on my plate, I've never been happier with how everything has turned out.
Nostalgia is a funny thing like that, which always makes events of old look warm fuzzy and friendly to us. But if you get right down to it - the position we are in right now as a site and as a community has never been better. Here's a thread i picked out at random. And well have things really changed that much? Well the posting quality is certainly up, and we celebrate the greatness of the best casters like Artosis and most of the crap is filtered out to "lesser" sites. So yea, I would say that on average we have come a long way and improved our forum. And well, the terrible threads in the past were significantly worse than today
Even in progaming nostalgia is an annoying thing. I remember this time two years ago thinking that the serious of Shinhan OSLs were pretty terrible compared to the likes of So1. But two years later I'm looking back and thinking "Hey the shinhan OSLs were pretty damn good!". The same is starting to happen with 2007 as well, but yea, that's nostalgia for you. And seriously! Watching some of the "legendary" games of old that went longer than 15 minutes gets painful after a while purely because of the stupidly high standard of games we have right now.
Nostalgia may be something which we can run to and dance in to stay within a place where everything makes sense, but it is a very skewed perception of a former reality. When looking back on the glorious history of teamliquid try to keep this in mind as we move forward. Things are going to become the best theyve ever been yet people are going to hate the changes and prefer to live in the nostalgia of old. But i hope in time, that even the naysayers will become used to the changes and love tl once again. Indeed, I can't remember what the old sidebar headers looked like
I guess thats some kind of proof that change can quickly become a new comfort zone if you're willing to make small concessions 
