There’s This Joke…

About conjoined twin brothers, who share an asshole, and one of them is gay and the other is not.  In other words I feel like I’m getting screwed in the rear constantly lately.  (I’m aware I completely butchered the joke. Sorry.) I’d like to blame it on external factors, and say it’s just a slump I’ll pull out of, but I know it isn’t.  I’m just not focused lately.  It has become hard to sit down and put the effort in that I need to.  The consequence is me losing a shit-ton of games, which would be fine if I were working on something in particular, but I’m not.  And therein is part of the problem, I’m just playing not practicing.  I’ve been treating SC2 as a game, not as something on which to work harder. Letting this blog go so long without updates, not working on specific areas of my game, playing in less than super-focused mode, are all symptoms of my original failing that I”m trying to fix by playing for this year.

I’m still loving Starcraft, don’t get me wrong.  I have just gotten myself into a bit more of a spectator mode.  State of the Game, Day9, DjWheat, and all the tournaments (IPL3 is great) pull for my attention.  Tonight, after watching IPL for about four or five hours, I was tempted not to play at all and call myself good for the day.  It would have been perfectly okay at the beginning of my year, I think I did it for a day during an MLG, but not now.  Yes, all of this is great and the game is amazing to watch, but I want and need to get better.  It’s like I have to keep kicking myself to do what I know I should do.  My focus has to be my play, not just the game.  I don’t want to be incredibly lazy by White-Ra’s standards (see the last SoTG).

I had an idea the other day that I’d like to share.  It comes with some bad news, which pisses me off but spawned this idea.  Okay, now I’ll go ahead and say it, instead of just talking about it.  I’m still doing it, aren’t I?  First, I can’t go to MLG Orlando.  Scheduling at work screwed me (one co-worker out with surgery, another already had vacation taken then), and I’ve been trying to figure a way to still go before saying anything about it, but I honestly can’t get out of work for that long.  My idea, however, is to go to an MLG at the end of the year and compete.  Whichever one is closest in date and location to June 8th.  I’ll take about 10 days of vacation, practice non-stop, and go play.  I don’t care if I’m still platinum or whatever then, just the fact that I have to play with people watching.  I also liked the idea of having a sort of test at the end of the year.  I’m still unsure how to go about doing this, or if I could even get in, but it is kind of a fire lighted under my ass to get better for the end of year.  I don’t want to embarrass myself to badly.  I don’t even know if I’ll do it as LeTemps (I don’t want people to think I’m an attention whore), but it would be more meaningful if I did.  Anyways, that’s my idea.  I’m going to let it sit for a while and decide next week if I’ll do it.  Jesus, it’s scary just thinking about it now.  I need to practice so much.

Starting tomorrow I’m going to go back to streaming two hours every night.  I started to get back into that, then out of it when I got some BM that pissed me off (I deserved it, but felt like I was getting kicked when I was down), but I won’t let it get to me anymore.  This week, my night off will be Monday, as I have to travel that night for work the next day.

I’m not going to go into too much detail about my games lately.  Suffice it say, my play feels like an unfolding lawn chair.  If I scout, I don’t have creep.  If I make units, I don’t have drones.  I’m just missing so many little things that it’s all adding up.  So for this week, my focus is returning to scouting.  I’m going to learn the timings and scout to know what’s coming.  I don’t care if I have no units to defend, I will at least know what I’m facing.  My notebook is too empty, I need to rectify that by putting some actual work into it.

Goodnight and GLHF.