My Success Story

I had my bachelor exam on friday (I study computer science). I don't know if it's like this on other universities, but here's how it works here: it's an oral exam in front of a committee that lasts one hour. You have to present your two bachelor theses and answer questions regarding them (which was already done at the end of each thesis) (30min), and then you have to answer questions on three courses of your choice (10min each).

First off, you choose three major subjects you want to be tested in, find two examiners and one chairman from among lecturers who are able and willing to do those subjects, and find a date on which all are available. This is already a difficult task in its own right and may well take weeks. Thing is, no lecturers really want to do bachelor exams. Everybody knows that the tested courses were already tested years ago, and the exam is basically just a useless obstacle (which is why there is no more bachelor exam in the new curriculum ).

So anyway, Friday was the exam. I was damn nervous. I was so fucking nervous that I had to take a psychosomatically caused diarrhea dump right before the exam. As always, I'd started studying for the exam way too late and I knew I was screwed if they posed evil, detailed questions. The whole committee consisted of real experts, which means you can't just start talking around when you don't know an answer. Fortunately, I was too busy to be nervous when my presentation started and forgot about my nervosity. I did the presentation in English because the original presentations were in English too and I wanted to save work when creating the beamer slides, and also because the chairman (who was also my supervisor for my theses, so much for selecting a good committee ) speaks little German. As I had expected, it all went smoothly, and almost no questions were asked. Probably because two committee members had already heard my palaver previously, and the third guy didn't seem to care very much.

Now on to the difficult part: the questions on the three selected courses. I almost forgot to switch back to German, which I only did halfway through answering the first question To my great relief, the examiners had no intention of torturing me with difficult questions, and didn't go into too much detail. So it all went really well. Once again, selecting a chill examiners' committee FTW!

I had to leave the room for them to discuss my grading. They shortly asked me back in and congratulated me. I got an A for my presentation and a B for the combined subject questions. Great success! I now have a friggin academic title, I am a motherucking bachelor of science! Woot!

I achieved D+ 2v2 on Iccup yesterday. My friend and I went 4:1 on friday and 7:0 yesterday, which is kinda hilarous considering we are both fucking noobs. Sure, we got paired up against even greater noobs mostly, but still 11:1 over two days is quite the hot streak. I now sit at 2088 points with a proud record of 13:4. Not too shabby eh?

It's funny what you can get away with at D rank. My friend went almost pure M&M against any race. I bashed him when he went for a quick academy and double ebay against terran/protoss, but he wouldn't listen. I couldn't believe my eyes when I then saw him beat the crap out of protoss armies on multiple occasions with his puny marines. I guess it's a lot easier to play when you can rely on enemy noobs never using psi storm. He even cracked a sieged up terran with his drug addicted infantry. The highlight was probably when he pwned no less than 4 reavers with brute force. I never would have thought. And it works against zerg too, obviously. He is also in love with the science vessel eraser trick I showed him last week, which routinely frags 15 enemy drones.

Myself, I enjoy expanding freely because nobody ever scouts before I have secured my new base with a dozen cannons, then macroing up. I also often use reaver drops because people are most often unprepared against them. Probably my most dangerous weapon is the manly Reachlike psi storm. Noone uses it at D rank, but I do with great efficiency and I have toasted more than my fair share of mutas, hydras, dragoons and workers with it. Oh, and carriers and BCs too Also, my macro is relatively good for my level.

My friend and I are the perfect example that APM doesn't matter. We are one crazy couple indeed. My friend has 65 APM mouse-only and refuses to learn using the keyboard. And I am probably the slowest D+ ranked player in the world with an average of 45 APM. I use the keyboard, hotkeys, macro like a madman, but no matter what I try, it just won't increase. Anyway, we routinely beat players twice as fast as us. It seems we use our actions far more effectively than other players. When another player is as slow as me, I can be sure to beat the crap out of him. It only gets interesting against players with 80-100 apm.

In yesterday's last game for example (which was the only game of the evening worth noting), we beat two terrans with 120 and 130 apm, respectively. It was quite a good game. Basically two parallel 1v1s in the same 2v2 game. My insane ally went for M&M as always, only to find that his foe had the same plan. Marines clashed and lots of blood were spilled, until relentless reinforcements finally overwhelmed the enemy.
In my own subgame, I found out that I was contained just when I wanted to move out (lack of scouting, yay!). I had to delay my reaver tech to go for observers instead against those pesky mines. I then broke out of my own ramp using a fucking gosu zealot bomb and nicely cleaned up the contain with only small losses. Man, that move made me proud. My shuttle was now finally free for a reaver drop, which slayed most of my opponent's fleeing SCVs at his natural with a few lucky scarabs. I then proceeded to kill two defending tanks with cute shuttle/reaver micro, all while finally taking my natural and adding a couple gateways. He GG'ed when he failed to tickle my reaver to death with his SCVs. Eat my gosu 45 apm micro, sucker!