Racism and My Failed Journey to China, How Good Shaman Play, Residual MLG Thoughts

It's Been A String of Interesting Lessons Post-MLG
I find that life has a lot in common with PvP. I mean, you gotta set up the burst. You play it aggressive or defensive sometimes. You can choose to blow your load at the beginning and ride the momentum up or you can do it with finesse. Set up CC, set up the burst and then score the kill.

Sometimes, you make 8 different decisions every second and you have no choice but to be right on every single one because one slip up means you just ride the momentum down. I guess we as young men, we are at that point in our lives where we're trying to determine what strategy to use because the gates have just opened and some of us don't even know what comp we're playing on or against and others are playing with alt +z pressed without even knowing it.

There are differences, of course. For our accomplishments, here are no asterisks, only scoreboards. There's the Universal RNG factor of course. If I had a choice, would I have rolled gnome or human instead? It's not even worth considering. When it comes to things you can't control you just roll with what you've got.

Right now I'm at the top of my game. I work 60+ hour weeks, I travel often, I make a good salary in a flexible position that allows me to do pretty much anything in my life. However, I got a reminder that no matter how successful I am, no matter how much money I may have, how much travel or world experiences I have under my belt.....because of certain physical attributes I possess, I'll still be branded as no better than the negative stereotypes that walk the streets of my old neighborhoods. Stereotypes that I've fought against tooth and nail my entire life.

I have to face it, If I were white, I'd still be meeting Sophie in China on some reckless and romantic journey to find......something that wasn't in my little corporate office in Beverly Hills. What can I do when she tells me that because of her own naive views of her fiercely traditional Chinese parents that she lost out on something could have been amazing? Not a damn thing. It's like when I fight against a good RMP that trains me at the beginning of the game so I have to pop all cooldowns to live and they simply CC me and kill my rogue.

Sometimes, your own weaknesses and flaws get to you on top of the things that you can't control. A little while ago, I took out a woman to a nice restaurant to use my try and true method of setting up the Flame Shock so I can Lava Burst later in the evening or perhaps that week. She dispelled the Flame Shock immediately. She actually did it several times and I wasn't able to close the deal. Later that week it was revealed to me that I was too aggressive and overconfident months before I'd even gotten to that point, and it severely impeded my chances of grinding up the required reputation with her.

If you take away nothing else from this portion of the entry, take this: sometimes, you can find parallels in anything that's important to you. When we play WoW, it can be much more than an exercise in moving your mouse fast and trying to maximize your GCDs and effective APM with pixels that can be deleted easily. It's all in what you make it.

Stepping Up Your Game
I had the opportunity recently to play with someone very close to me in game and found myself in a situation where the person, while filled with great potential, was simply not used to playing the game at the level I'd become accustomed to. It's a common frustration many have expressed with real life friends, girlfriends and supposed Merciless Gladiators who actually bought their accounts.

So I'm left with the decision of continuing playing with this person and working with them to improve their play even as I strive to improve my own or....finding other people to play with who I'd be more comfortable with making that last minute Gladiator push with in coming months.

I'm already notorious for team hopping every week in 3s because I like to play with everyone so I decided to keep up with this, while concurrently keeping him on my list of players to rotate around with.

I'm far from being a perfect player. Having the opportunity to look over Douja and Tenderloin's shoulder at MLG it gave me a play by play view of how two of the best shaman play. I was shocked at how defensive they were to my (sometimes overly) offensive style. There were a few games where Douja barely shocked or purged at all, instead playing it low key and keeping his positioning to where it was very difficult for him to be switched to as he healed. There was a more deliberate patience to their shaman play that I found myself lacking.

You don't have to shock EVERY cast. You don't have to purge everything. But, when you do have the opportunity to safely play offensively, do so and do it better than anyone else. There have been times where I've been so tunnel visioned on shocking a warlock or mage and keeping myself in a constant position to do so and I end up in a bad spot to be switched to immediately. It was the first good lesson for me in what turned out to be a string of lessons in life for me this week.

I guess sometimes, when you feel like you're at the top of your game and you've never been this good before, that doesn't mean you stop improving and continuing to step it up.

I was talking to Vidra on AIM and he linked me to this video of some random white guy playing guitar. He's actually pretty ******* good.


And I found this link in Zilea's AIM comment. Fun facts about Zilea: he's made the dean's list several times before graduating college with a degree in poli sci and he reads The Huffington Post as his only news source.