The Letting Off Steam Thread - Page 224

I AM TERRAN AND I WILL NEVER RESPECT VIOLET FOR HIS WIN AGAINST MARINELORD NOR FOR HIS PLAYSTYLE!!!

Nothing like losing to people with half my micro, apm and macro, most of them are even half braindead. Balanced game as fuck.

Nice, a cunty fucking terran massing air and it works cus its orbital fuckyard, thanks for giving me like 5 vetoable maps and 3 vetos

HOLY FUCKING SHIT BATTLENET WHAT IS WITH ALL THE TERRANS ON SHITYARD TODAY

Falling in love with someone you can't be with for years because reasons... FML.

Well depends on the distance, but it is doable though not really recommendable. My girlfriend waited 3 years while I did a PhD simply because we both agreed that 1) we wanted to move to where we met and thus it made more sense for her to get a job there 2) the alternative (not being together) was worse

... Seriously fuck Starcraft 2. This game is in the worst state it has ever been in.

Everyone is on a crusade to convince me otherwise.

Fuck buying shit from people on the internet. Buy a $500 thing on a forum from a guy who has 200 positive ratings and 2 negative (one of which is bullshit), he tells me "will ship thursday AM and send you the tracking number on Thursday PM. Thursday PM comes, and I receive nothing so I check in (without being too forward or annoying I hope), and he responds he'll ship Friday AM and update me Friday PM. Now it's Friday PM and I can see he logged onto his account at 6:13PM but didn't bother to PM me the tracking number.

With a track record of 200-2 (and what seems to be more like 200-1), many of which are big sales, the guy's almost certainly legit. He's either a bit of a dick with bad comms, maybe he's slow, maybe he forgot, but my brain says "this dick just totally scammed you for $500"

First games in a week and after just few I have enough. Fuck this game, I never ever quit because of balance even in times of gglord/winfestor, but now I had enough. Not playing SC2 till there's any resemblance of balance. Also fuck people who say "we need to wait more" and fuck terrans in particular.

I want to note that I mistakenly talked about my experiences in TLS 3 when really I was talking about the TLS Championship, the 4th tournament in the TLS series.

To begin where I last left off in my last blog post I want to talk about my run in the TLS. I had to play NW.mayyas and I prepared. He always went 2 gate on the 2nd map, Neo Medusa, so I just made a very specific build order to counter and practiced it a few times. When the games actually did come he tried going some proxy gate midgame speedlot attack on the map Fighting Spirit in the first game which failed. My followup plan for Neo Medusa sealed the deal and without a doubt I was gonna be in the ro32.

The next week the tiebreaker games were played which would determine seeding. I ended up losing but I wasn't too miffed. Anyway, when I knew judgement day was coming for the ro32 elimination stage I tried to practice hard vs. my Terran opponent Koget. I knew, however, that two days wasn't enough to train myself to excellency. Also, I couldn't find a Terran practice partner. I didn't even try as hard as I could have either. I ended up getting knocked out of the TLS Championship in the ro32.

What can I say, I flunked hard and once again forgot the tried and proven advice of remaining calm and doing what you practiced. Unfortunately, while I was playing I tried to go into an ultra state of pure mental focus. However, this wasn't the mental state I had while playing in my practice games so in a way it was detrimental and only caused me to feel more nervous and tense causing me to make careless mistakes. That was how I went down in history on the Liquipedia page for the TLS Championship as some no name who managed to make it to the ro32.

I thought I could make a name for myself. After all, how many times in history has an absolute no name ever dominated the scene out of nowhere, causing upsets against the more dominant players? That hasn't happened in the small foreigner sc1 scene for years. I thought in a way my life could play out like a novel where I become that one aspiring star who somehow achieves the fame, the skill, the pure prowess of becoming one of the best in the foreigner scene.

It's like getting trash talked by some guy who challenges you to a 1v1 to prove they are superior to you as a human being. Win or lose though, neither outcome matters. Although I have witnessed a bad manner player have to bathe in embarassment after losing, I've also seen the situation in reverse. Really though, at the very end, nothing is proven except one player played better than the other. The whole endeavor is fruitless, just a vast abyss of nothingness. You've gotta play for the love, the fun of the game.

My shortlived aspirations also wanted me to not meld in with the no-names but hey, I shouldn't feel strange about being one. If I was bound to the statistics that the player I'm going up against is way better than me and will probably win, that's fine. Predictability, sometimes that's a variable that stumps a person.

I remember watching an example of predictability in a reality tv show following amateur Sc1 players in a progaming house sponsored by Sonic, a renowned organizer of Sc1 events. They were visited by Larva, one of the higher tier players of the scene who told Olympus realistic, yet discouraging words. He said that he should accept that he'll be defeated by the player Hero so he should only prepare for the other two players that had the same race. I wasn't too surprised considering Larva's bluntness but his words had truth, Olympus wasn't up to snuff to battle Hero. Olympus said in a post interview that Larva's words made him angry but in the end he couldn't change the facts. Destined to fate he did lose to Hero. There are some parts of life that can't be changed, an unalterable course of events that you can only watch helpless as they unfold.

In the last blog I went on some spiel about the universe and no ulterior motive for living in the universe. None of that matters now. I don't really like to be optimistic or pessimistic, just a realist. I can only deal with life as it is now. I take back a lot of what I said in the last blog, or at least I take back the importance of some of those ideas that can come off as vapid.

I haven't really established a greater meaning for my life though. However, I did come across a man recently who has increased some of my interest in learning; Richard Feynman, a theoretical physicist has been a wonder to look towards. He's long gone now but his infectious love for all that is science permeates the air and soul. I've known about him before but now my interest piqued in him again and I feel more passionate about learning. Maybe that's what society finds convenient though, so do i want to learn because others around me would applaud me or is it vested within my own pure interest? The motivation could come from both. Richard Feynman on the other hand said he has a pure fascination with the world so I guess he wouldn't get caught up in societal drivel. He said he learns for the pure pleasure.

I find his knowledge so intuitive and smart. He explains concepts and articulates them well, after all he was given the nickname "The Great Explainer". He said if you couldn't explain something simply you didn't understand it.

I was reading his autobiography yesterday, "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" where he has a few short paragraphs about how some people have fragile knowledge. They have knowledge that isn't vested in a good core understanding of their subjects, they're just more concerned with the rote memorization of things, a knowledge that doesn't draw its own conclusions from the information already gained. I may have misinterpreted the words slightly but I also have the same thoughts about my observations about other people's and my own understanding of learning things in school.

I'm rather behind in math where I ought to be so I've been trying to play catchup in the current school year. I often find myself colliding into the common problem of not understanding what I'm doing to numbers, I'm just manipulating them and not understanding the patterns, not seeing the whole picture. I'm following little rules to get a result that I don't understand what it even means but I know it's going to get me a higher score. There's a lot of fundamentals that a person has to understand which I don't really know.

There's a lot to learn I've found out about math. Some of my recent interest in learning math comes from future prospects of a job. I've noticed a few people I've met have had aspirations to become some sort of engineer or fulfill an occupation that required heavy mathematics. Unfortunately, their actual study of math faltered and when they went from high school to a college education the reality didn't meet the hope in a moment of fruition. There's always a desire but maybe there's a disconnect from actual desire to do work and the reality of becoming your desire.

I've wanted to become a computer science major so I thought I should get better at math. I'm also doing a lot of math related things I feel. I signed up for an online computer science course 4 months ago but I only did 2 days worth of work. I'm only on the second assignment. The first one was much easier, really light, all you had to do was make a program in the Scratch programming language which was made for kids and based off of the way kids learn.

The next problem set was then much more in depth and more becoming of college work. I'm just speechless thinking about all of the material, the vast contrast of difficulty of problem set 0 and problem set 1. Ever since I've been stuck on the hump.

A lot of really inept people would think people who play video games are really good at computer programming and information technology which could not be farther from the truth. Somehow, I thought that maybe the computer was the place to be, after all I spend so much time on it but the experience has sobered me up.

There was a particular scene in a show called Nal_ra's Old boy that makes me think about the fallacy of videogamers being good at computer stuff. The show featured Nal_ra, an old former progamer who tries to enter the progaming scene again and in one episode he invites the progamer go.go over to help him practice. When they get over there go.go doesn't even know how to turn on the PC. He's looking at a monitor wondering why it's not working. Then, when he asks for something to eat Nal_ra tells him to make himself some instant ramen. He doesn't even know how to make instant ramen which is ,uh, unusual to say the least. He had the heat on way too low and he put only enough water in to barely submerge the dried noodles.

Anyway, I've also been wanting to learn electrical engineering after I saw the subject was taught on Khan Academy, a free online learning resource. I also want to learn physics due to the influence of the aformentioned Richard Feynman, to learn more about how the world works and what not. That's right, something like that. There are certain prerequisites that are recommended for electrical engineering which includes precalculus so I've been meaning to build up my fundamentals in Algebra to finally get there.

I feel like I have a lot to do strangely. There's so much to learn, almost to the point of feeling overwhelming, but not an anxiety inducing overwhelming. There's something more ecstatic, more beyond the limits of my own shell bound thinking that is stimulating me.

I've been trying to learn some metaphysics, the thing with philosophy that deals with substance, meaning, identity, reality, life, all of those things. I've interested in the study of the mind so I signed up for a psychology class next year. I've studied a few videos on Youtube on the Crash Course channel to get an idea of what I was getting into. There's a lot of science to it I understand, not so philosophical as I thought before but still interesting nonetheless.

Hitler did nothing wrong, he just had the wrong people explaining what his racist inciting speeches actually meant.

I fucking had it with this job. The head chef is working 6 days and a lot of us got our days cut to 4 because he got in trouble for not being efficient enough with his labor. You can get promoted, but you will still be on minimum wage with the only benefit being you get more tip, which means all of us gets less which shows just how little the company wants to pay. They only give us more when they are required by law and gave us some shitty health insurance for 200 dollars a month and gave us only 1 hour to decide due to procrastination by management whether we wanted it or not.
I love sushi and am passionate about it, but this job does everything it can to ruin your passion and make you cynical and bitter towards work when working fast and efficiently only means getting your hours cut, co-workers getting promoted is curse and not a happy moment, and serving 40 dollars worth of food all way but not allowed to eat any of it. And the worst part is that I cannot protest or talk shit about the company or the CEO for overworking our chef and cutting our hours in the name of efficiency. This is just outright humiliating, I feel nothing more than a tool and as if management thinks I am too fucking stupid to see this. And on top of that, we are forced to make so much food since it is a conveyer belt which leads us to throw out so much food at the end of the night which reminds me of overfishing and how little this company cares about the eco-system and how ruthless management is at keeping the belt full at all times to please a stupid boss while we do the same.
And for anyone who says just find another job, you have choice, this is America, fuck you, jobs don't grow on trees.
And please no #FeelTheBern, I am sick and tired of broken promises from the left. After the failure of SYRIZA, Podemos, Chavistas, New Labour, Third Way, Lib Dems(I know they are not leftists but close enough) and all the annoying sects MLs, Trots, anarchists, and postmodern feminists who can only preach elitism, how else should any person living under constant economic duress feel?

Why have we all been writing under spoiler tags like sheep for hundreds of pages? This is retarded.