I never got any voice training, but I still like to sing. I drive my parents crazy singing songs over and over again trying to get the right voice for the tune. So I might as well combine my longtime obsession with my latest obsession, right?
The result is a parody video of the Eagles' "Hotel California", describing the misery of those stuck in "Elo Hell"--trapped below their skill level by terrible teammates and griefers. I named it "The Ranks of Elo Hell", found the Hotel California instrumentals online, bought myself a decent USB mic, and made this:
Amateurish production values, but I had fun doing it. Hope you like it.
Showing posts with label Fun Stuff. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fun Stuff. Show all posts
Friday, February 11, 2011
Sunday, December 12, 2010
But I'm not a noob!
Sorry, these are much more 'inside joke'-intensive than the 'you might be a nerd' list. If you want to know why I haven't been posting recently...well, here are some places to start. Yeah, new year, new unhealthy obsession. I know.
You might be a noob...if the post-game screen runs out of digits to display your number of deaths.
You might be a noob...if you're still playing four-bar Ashe forty minutes into the game.
You might be a noob...if you see everyone hit 18 while you're still in the single digits.
You might be a noob...if you think "map control" means the ability to unlock your camera with Y.
You might be a noob...if you have never bought anything from the Consumables section. Except health pots. So many health pots. Four hundred health pots.
You might be a noob...if you have 6 Doran's Blades because you heard that Blade stacking was OP.
You might be a noob...if you have recently abandoned Christianity to join the Church of Elementz' Tier Lists.
You might be a noob...if someone advises you to "smartcast" and you reply "So, aim my skillshots this time?"
You might be a noob...if you think you will surprise them with your decision, but fail because even stupid bird is here.
You might be a noob...if you think King Arthur's assault on the Rabbit of Caerbannog is a sterling example of how teamfights should work, so your battle cry is "Run away!"
You might be a noob...if you cannot find a hint of green anywhere on your 'Recent Matches' page.
You might be a noob...if you think Jungle Yi is the answer to any team comp dilemma. Even if there's a Warwick involved.
You might be a noob...if, when you see someone ping dragon, you think they're just trying to get the dragon to ping back.
You might be a noob...if someone types "mia" and you type back "yes, manliness is awesome."
You might be a noob...if you get killed by a Xin Zhao and think, "But my Phantom Dancers gave me 100% dodge chance!"
You might be a noob...if you think rage is part of this complete breakfast.
You might be a noob...if you get lost in the jungle.
You might be a noob...if the answer in every situation is "Push mid!"
You might be a noob...if you decide that Smite is a good summoner spell because it helps you last-hit uninhibited minions.
You might be a noob...if you wonder why anybody would use a 'minimap' when the big version is right there in front of your face.
You might be a noob...if you think hotkeys are for Koreans.
You might be a noob...if you think your teammates' roles are all the same: Cheer you on from the sidelines while you honorably defeat the enemy in single combat.
You might be a noob...if you think their Nexus can't be killed until you destroy the fountain turret.
You might be a noob...if you blue-pill by gray-screening and win by blue-screening.
You might be a noob...if the post-game screen runs out of digits to display your number of deaths.
You might be a noob...if you're still playing four-bar Ashe forty minutes into the game.
You might be a noob...if you see everyone hit 18 while you're still in the single digits.
You might be a noob...if you think "map control" means the ability to unlock your camera with Y.
You might be a noob...if you have never bought anything from the Consumables section. Except health pots. So many health pots. Four hundred health pots.
You might be a noob...if you have 6 Doran's Blades because you heard that Blade stacking was OP.
You might be a noob...if you have recently abandoned Christianity to join the Church of Elementz' Tier Lists.
You might be a noob...if someone advises you to "smartcast" and you reply "So, aim my skillshots this time?"
You might be a noob...if you think you will surprise them with your decision, but fail because even stupid bird is here.
You might be a noob...if you think King Arthur's assault on the Rabbit of Caerbannog is a sterling example of how teamfights should work, so your battle cry is "Run away!"
You might be a noob...if you cannot find a hint of green anywhere on your 'Recent Matches' page.
You might be a noob...if you think Jungle Yi is the answer to any team comp dilemma. Even if there's a Warwick involved.
You might be a noob...if, when you see someone ping dragon, you think they're just trying to get the dragon to ping back.
You might be a noob...if someone types "mia" and you type back "yes, manliness is awesome."
You might be a noob...if you get killed by a Xin Zhao and think, "But my Phantom Dancers gave me 100% dodge chance!"
You might be a noob...if you think rage is part of this complete breakfast.
You might be a noob...if you get lost in the jungle.
You might be a noob...if the answer in every situation is "Push mid!"
You might be a noob...if you decide that Smite is a good summoner spell because it helps you last-hit uninhibited minions.
You might be a noob...if you wonder why anybody would use a 'minimap' when the big version is right there in front of your face.
You might be a noob...if you think hotkeys are for Koreans.
You might be a noob...if you think your teammates' roles are all the same: Cheer you on from the sidelines while you honorably defeat the enemy in single combat.
You might be a noob...if you think their Nexus can't be killed until you destroy the fountain turret.
You might be a noob...if you blue-pill by gray-screening and win by blue-screening.
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
You know you're a nerd when...
Since I made a nice long compilation of these, I figure I might as well put them somewhere convenient. Here goes.
You know you're a nerd when...
When you write page-long Facebook comments about *serious business*. Heck, when you write page-long Facebook *anything* about serious business.
When your choice of favorite hang-out ends with a TLD.
When Feynman is a household name.
When you verbalize your actions with Net slang. A laugh is just a 'lol', a sigh is just a *sigh*...
When the Rules of the Internet are more familiar to you than the Rules of Fight Club.
When you go to Sporcle to train.
When you prefer Primer to Avatar.
When Neo first shows off his powers irl and you think, "Oh shit, they're embedded in nested Matrices!"
When you are ashamed of your sesquipedalian loquaciousness.
When you decide that referencing xkcd for nerd cred is cheating.
When you bet on the inclusion of one preposition in one line of one book. (It's "Aragorn sped *on* up the hill." Obviously.)
When Twenty Questions really means "Keep asking till you give up."
When the food is problematic.
When you cannot get through the day without your fix of silly cats.
Alternatively, when you disdain silly cats, but think silly dogs are the shit.
When you're good friends with someone you've never met in meatspace.
When you're at the bookstore, and start riffling through a book to see if you want to buy it...and realize, a while later, that it would be pointless to buy a book you've already read, and also that the sun's gone down.
When you consciously verb nouns. Double points if that makes you think of Calvin and Hobbes.
When you make sure your [sarc][/sarc] tags are properly formatted.
When weirdness becomes a goal to attain rather than a quality to shun.
When you are a Timmy, Johnny, or Spike. Melvin or Vorthos? Okay, now you're just a smartass.
When the fate of your debate rests on a fictional planetary ecologist.
When you feel a compulsive need to use xor to remove logical ambiguity.
When you are familiar with the Laws of Poe, Sturgeon, Godwin, Moore, and Finagle.
When TV Tropes ruins your vocabulary.
When you describe Jesus as a subclass of God that implements the Human interface.
When the zeta function is elementary. (Except when it isn't.)
When you think that Transcendentalists must not have liked polynomials very much.
When you worry about the effects of drunkenness on your mental math.
When your response to use of the words pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, electrophotomicrographically, and floccinaucinihilipilification is something other than "Gesundheit".
When you worry about your use of the Oxford comma.
When your reaction to hearing about Homo floresiensis is to muse that Tolkien was telling the truth all along.
When you join a party by making a charsheet.
When you realize that the Ringworld is unstable.
When you consider the joke "there are 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't," and its higher-base variations, to be old hat.
When your chat with a friend bounces between nontrivial reasoning in philosophical thought experiments and appropriate balance for interacting feats/spells in D&D.
When you start dismissing nerdy pickup lines because the math/science involved is too elementary.
When, in your conversations, the term "lawyer" refers to a gaming pedant rather than the profession.
When the Chinese in Firefly breaks immersion because it's really BAD Chinese, or the dialect changes mid-episode.
When your bedside table reading pile is really a bedside table, three desk shelves, the top of your clothes drawer, and the lower bed bunk--and you leave the room at 3 AM to go find a different book.
When you lose The Game.
When you feel a little sad inside that someone, somewhere, knows more digits of Pi than you.
When hearing a relatively obscure mathematical term causes you to break out in song (Mandelbrot set, anyone? Bonus points if you started singing on 'Julia set' instead).
When you sit down to read all the goddamn codex entries in Dragon Age.
When you start min/maxing your Pokemon's attributes.
When you've been clicking on the 'random article' button for the last two hours.
When you find yourself having to choose between chess and go for the next game.
When you lol irl.
When people compliment you on your Renfaire or cosplay costume.
When you are genuinely outraged that Tom Bombadil got replaced by a random encounter with wood-elves, and then wonder whether those wood-elves were more likely to be Sindarin or Noldorin.
When you have tried to memorize the elements...lyrically.
When you show up to your school's traditional first-day hazing...wearing your self-made chainmaille coif.
When Quenya is your second language.
When you rack your brains thinking of ways to contribute to this list.
********************************************
(note: about 95% of these are actual self-reference, but not all.)
More will be added below when appropriate.
If, at any time during the last 525,600 minutes, you have mused on the diminishing cost of a gigabyte of memory...you might be a nerd.
Related: The probability that you are a nerd increases asymptotically to 1 with the number of arbitrary unit conversions you have memorized.
You know you're a nerd when...
When you write page-long Facebook comments about *serious business*. Heck, when you write page-long Facebook *anything* about serious business.
When your choice of favorite hang-out ends with a TLD.
When Feynman is a household name.
When you verbalize your actions with Net slang. A laugh is just a 'lol', a sigh is just a *sigh*...
When the Rules of the Internet are more familiar to you than the Rules of Fight Club.
When you go to Sporcle to train.
When you prefer Primer to Avatar.
When Neo first shows off his powers irl and you think, "Oh shit, they're embedded in nested Matrices!"
When you are ashamed of your sesquipedalian loquaciousness.
When you decide that referencing xkcd for nerd cred is cheating.
When you bet on the inclusion of one preposition in one line of one book. (It's "Aragorn sped *on* up the hill." Obviously.)
When Twenty Questions really means "Keep asking till you give up."
When the food is problematic.
When you cannot get through the day without your fix of silly cats.
Alternatively, when you disdain silly cats, but think silly dogs are the shit.
When you're good friends with someone you've never met in meatspace.
When you're at the bookstore, and start riffling through a book to see if you want to buy it...and realize, a while later, that it would be pointless to buy a book you've already read, and also that the sun's gone down.
When you consciously verb nouns. Double points if that makes you think of Calvin and Hobbes.
When you make sure your [sarc][/sarc] tags are properly formatted.
When weirdness becomes a goal to attain rather than a quality to shun.
When you are a Timmy, Johnny, or Spike. Melvin or Vorthos? Okay, now you're just a smartass.
When the fate of your debate rests on a fictional planetary ecologist.
When you feel a compulsive need to use xor to remove logical ambiguity.
When you are familiar with the Laws of Poe, Sturgeon, Godwin, Moore, and Finagle.
When TV Tropes ruins your vocabulary.
When you describe Jesus as a subclass of God that implements the Human interface.
When the zeta function is elementary. (Except when it isn't.)
When you think that Transcendentalists must not have liked polynomials very much.
When you worry about the effects of drunkenness on your mental math.
When your response to use of the words pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, electrophotomicrographically, and floccinaucinihilipilification is something other than "Gesundheit".
When you worry about your use of the Oxford comma.
When your reaction to hearing about Homo floresiensis is to muse that Tolkien was telling the truth all along.
When you join a party by making a charsheet.
When you realize that the Ringworld is unstable.
When you consider the joke "there are 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't," and its higher-base variations, to be old hat.
When your chat with a friend bounces between nontrivial reasoning in philosophical thought experiments and appropriate balance for interacting feats/spells in D&D.
When you start dismissing nerdy pickup lines because the math/science involved is too elementary.
When, in your conversations, the term "lawyer" refers to a gaming pedant rather than the profession.
When the Chinese in Firefly breaks immersion because it's really BAD Chinese, or the dialect changes mid-episode.
When your bedside table reading pile is really a bedside table, three desk shelves, the top of your clothes drawer, and the lower bed bunk--and you leave the room at 3 AM to go find a different book.
When you lose The Game.
When you feel a little sad inside that someone, somewhere, knows more digits of Pi than you.
When hearing a relatively obscure mathematical term causes you to break out in song (Mandelbrot set, anyone? Bonus points if you started singing on 'Julia set' instead).
When you sit down to read all the goddamn codex entries in Dragon Age.
When you start min/maxing your Pokemon's attributes.
When you've been clicking on the 'random article' button for the last two hours.
When you find yourself having to choose between chess and go for the next game.
When you lol irl.
When people compliment you on your Renfaire or cosplay costume.
When you are genuinely outraged that Tom Bombadil got replaced by a random encounter with wood-elves, and then wonder whether those wood-elves were more likely to be Sindarin or Noldorin.
When you have tried to memorize the elements...lyrically.
When you show up to your school's traditional first-day hazing...wearing your self-made chainmaille coif.
When Quenya is your second language.
When you rack your brains thinking of ways to contribute to this list.
********************************************
(note: about 95% of these are actual self-reference, but not all.)
More will be added below when appropriate.
If, at any time during the last 525,600 minutes, you have mused on the diminishing cost of a gigabyte of memory...you might be a nerd.
Related: The probability that you are a nerd increases asymptotically to 1 with the number of arbitrary unit conversions you have memorized.
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Sicilian Defense, why hast thou forsaken me?
Chess has become a big part of my life since summer started. I began playing chess when I was six or thereabouts, but I had no idea what I was doing. I read a lot of books - my favorite was Hypermodern Chess, a commentary on Aron Nimzovich's famous games by Fred Reinfeld - but I'd just read the commentary and look at the pictures without figuring out what was actually going on. Then I spent about a decade forgetting how to play chess, until I found out that I was friends with the top two chess players at my school.
Now, I have a real competitive streak - anybody who's familiar with me is nodding knowingly right about now. It could even be argued that I started this blog because I wanted to keep up with Kelly and her blogging. So naturally I set out to catch up with a "nation's top 100" type (if anyone knows Jay Kumar at UC Berkeley, this is him) and someone who's been playing chess tournaments as long as I've been avoiding the game. One thing led to another, and soon I was the guy with his nose in an opening book and his free hand on a portable chessboard during a trip through Lamar Valley in Yellowstone. LAMAR VALLEY, f'chrissakes!
I'm actually pretty good at this chess thing, and I made the school team this year. I don't actually know how I match up with the other team members, because it's a ladder system: new members start at the bottom and work their way up with challenge matches. I DO know that I'm not in the top 3; there's a couple of CRAZY freshmen, plus one of the "two best at my school" people (he's not anymore, though - hee), occupying those slots. But for someone who's been playing chess for half a year, being in that nebulous area between 4th and 8th ain't half bad.
Anyway, I wrote this post pretty much for one reason, that being that I played my first game in an actual match today. We played French Defense (I need to study either that or Nimzoindian, since they're the two obvious openings after 1. d4 e6), and I was actually doing pretty well. I was winning positionally in the endgame - I had an unassailable pawn duo on the 5th rank - and my opponent only had 6 seconds left on the clock. But I lost! My opponent was moving really fast, in order to avoid losing time (if he moved within 5 seconds, he didn't lose any time), and instead of taking my time, I decided to give him less time to think by playing fast myself. BIG mistake. I broke my pawn line with an ill-timed advance, and his king tied my rook down, which allowed him to get a passed pawn and win. With 6 freakin' seconds left on the clock. Note to self: If you have 15 minutes left and your opponent has 15 seconds, you left that time there for a reason. USE IT. Blargh.
OTOH, I'm still happy that I outplayed my opponent to that point. And it's not like my loss killed our chances, since EVERYONE lost (except for Dittmer, and he only won on time after being down pieces). Monta Vista really is a strong team. I look forward to playing them again later this year; I bet I'll be stronger, and I definitely won't make the same rookie mistake I made this time. It's only the second time I've played a real-life timed match - I'll just have to get used to the fundamentals of time-constrained play.
So if that was the point, why the title, you ask? Simple: Sicilian was the opening I wanted to play as Black against e4. It was awesome and cool and complicated and...and...and I was horrible at it. I never really understood the rationale behind some of the common elements (like the e6-d6 pawn center) and I had no idea how to take advantage of the opponent's mistakes. Plus the kingside fianchetto always fell apart in ways that didn't happen when I played King's Indian Defense off d4 (though I wasn't great at that either). Although Sicilian is notable for being an aggressive counterattack on Black's part, I always got locked into certain positions and my mobility fell to zilch as White attacked my pawn structure (the e6-d6 pawn formation often left the d-pawn weak, plus White got to advance his f-pawn a lot, which didn't help my constricted formation). I might experiment with it a bit now, since it's been a month or so since I last seriously played it and I might have some new insights, but I'm still annoyed at how badly I played that opening. Any hints from any experienced chess players who happen to read this post would be appreciated (I'm looking at you, CEETTN of the pit of malice).
Now, I have a real competitive streak - anybody who's familiar with me is nodding knowingly right about now. It could even be argued that I started this blog because I wanted to keep up with Kelly and her blogging. So naturally I set out to catch up with a "nation's top 100" type (if anyone knows Jay Kumar at UC Berkeley, this is him) and someone who's been playing chess tournaments as long as I've been avoiding the game. One thing led to another, and soon I was the guy with his nose in an opening book and his free hand on a portable chessboard during a trip through Lamar Valley in Yellowstone. LAMAR VALLEY, f'chrissakes!
I'm actually pretty good at this chess thing, and I made the school team this year. I don't actually know how I match up with the other team members, because it's a ladder system: new members start at the bottom and work their way up with challenge matches. I DO know that I'm not in the top 3; there's a couple of CRAZY freshmen, plus one of the "two best at my school" people (he's not anymore, though - hee), occupying those slots. But for someone who's been playing chess for half a year, being in that nebulous area between 4th and 8th ain't half bad.
Anyway, I wrote this post pretty much for one reason, that being that I played my first game in an actual match today. We played French Defense (I need to study either that or Nimzoindian, since they're the two obvious openings after 1. d4 e6), and I was actually doing pretty well. I was winning positionally in the endgame - I had an unassailable pawn duo on the 5th rank - and my opponent only had 6 seconds left on the clock. But I lost! My opponent was moving really fast, in order to avoid losing time (if he moved within 5 seconds, he didn't lose any time), and instead of taking my time, I decided to give him less time to think by playing fast myself. BIG mistake. I broke my pawn line with an ill-timed advance, and his king tied my rook down, which allowed him to get a passed pawn and win. With 6 freakin' seconds left on the clock. Note to self: If you have 15 minutes left and your opponent has 15 seconds, you left that time there for a reason. USE IT. Blargh.
OTOH, I'm still happy that I outplayed my opponent to that point. And it's not like my loss killed our chances, since EVERYONE lost (except for Dittmer, and he only won on time after being down pieces). Monta Vista really is a strong team. I look forward to playing them again later this year; I bet I'll be stronger, and I definitely won't make the same rookie mistake I made this time. It's only the second time I've played a real-life timed match - I'll just have to get used to the fundamentals of time-constrained play.
So if that was the point, why the title, you ask? Simple: Sicilian was the opening I wanted to play as Black against e4. It was awesome and cool and complicated and...and...and I was horrible at it. I never really understood the rationale behind some of the common elements (like the e6-d6 pawn center) and I had no idea how to take advantage of the opponent's mistakes. Plus the kingside fianchetto always fell apart in ways that didn't happen when I played King's Indian Defense off d4 (though I wasn't great at that either). Although Sicilian is notable for being an aggressive counterattack on Black's part, I always got locked into certain positions and my mobility fell to zilch as White attacked my pawn structure (the e6-d6 pawn formation often left the d-pawn weak, plus White got to advance his f-pawn a lot, which didn't help my constricted formation). I might experiment with it a bit now, since it's been a month or so since I last seriously played it and I might have some new insights, but I'm still annoyed at how badly I played that opening. Any hints from any experienced chess players who happen to read this post would be appreciated (I'm looking at you, CEETTN of the pit of malice).
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