Guess that means I get to blog today. I won't be able to blog every day I'm guessing, but at least today I get to blog. Took us 28 hours to reach our destination. We traveled along I-90 and stopped for rest stops, gas, and food along the way so if you were anywhere near Interstate 90 between Washington and South Dakota, in the time period of Thursday to Friday...you had a chance of seeing us!

I wouldn't be able to name the locations, tho. Just a vague awareness of Dairy Queen for lunch in our time, Burger King in mountain time at local-10 or local-11 pm with it being our-9 or our-10 at the time, and McDonald's for breakfast today at some town with a 20 mile an hour speed limit, speed traps, a sense of patriotism, perhaps maybe proximity to an air force base (just a guess on my part), and close proximity to the Missouri river, at about 11 am our time/1 pm local time.

At the meeting where we ate, they served spaghetti and meatballs. I had it with the spaghetti sauce. Mistake; the sauce kinda ruined it. It was edible, but not very palatable; I ate my share and no more than what I could actually stomach. Once, I was approached by someone, who commented on how I didn't seem to be socializing; I said I basically don't do talking well and pretty much killed the conversation.

Once back from the event, once more someone (probably one of my cousins) chastised me for being on my computer and not interacting with people. I don't think she really got that I was spending time as I wanted to be, with my girlfriend, rather than just pretending to pay attention to a conversation I still wouldn't have given input on.

So that was basically my day today.

​Seeya tomorrow.

Everything.
I had all the time in the world.
An endless amount of spare free time.
But.

To be honest.

I'm having a bit of a mental breakdown right now. Hard, hard depression hitting me. This morning, I was cheerful, energetic in spite of being exhausted from not having enough sleep, manic. Full of life even if full of tiredness. And yet, now.

Now I am the opposite. Awake, and yet in spite of being awake. Just...in a bad mindstate. And it just kinda...hit me hard. I don't know why. I mean.

I've wasted today.
This wasn't a day where I can look at it and go, "what happened to the time?".
This is a day where I know exactly what happened to the time; I know I wasted it doing nothing productive. Timewasters. Timekillers. Things that were useless, served no function. Led to nothing. Nothing, chosen instead of something. A hallmark of depression.

But I didn't recognize it as depression until just now when all the negativity, the "god I suck", the "god I'm an idiot", the "I want to curl up into a ball and die" mentality just slammed me.

Like.
I talked to people today.
They'd never suspect I was depressed.
People at work would've thought I was upbeat; I felt upbeat.
My counselor noted how I looked upbeat; I felt upbeat.
People who I talked to would've seen "same ol', same ol'" when it comes to me; rambling and talking and talking, the hallmarks of a better day for me.
And even when I talked to my girlfriend earlier. In our conversations today. I've been normal, even happy.

And yet.
Suddenly.
After the fact.
Before going to bed.
I just got slammed. Slammed, hard, by the self-loathing.
I'm a full week behind most of my duties.
I've slacked off on working out for tkd.
I've been doing nothing that I am supposed to be doing.
And I just.
I'm kinda.
Why am I so bad.
Why am I like this.
I know I should be better than this, that I can be better than this.
And knowing that's probably why me knowing that I'm currently not is hitting me so hard.
I feel like I'm failing at everything.
And I promise that I'll fix it.
That I'll work on it.
And then I don't.

So I'm just.
...Not in a good mindstate right now.

And it sucks that that's the mindstate that I'll be going to bed with.
Yet there's nothing I can do in that time to snap me out of it.
So my one hope.
Is that overnight.
Those feelings, instead of worsening, get purged.

​I feel like a failure.

I don't have the time to spend with my girlfriend because I need to go to bed due to working tomorrow (and it'll SUCK).
I don't have the time to write out the followthrough blog on SirPlus that I promised.
I don't have the time to do the duties that I have promised to do.
I don't have the time to live any life at all.
I just...don't have the time for anything right now and I hate it. I didn't even waste my time today! I just...had none. Like. When I think of what I did today...there's nothing there. And by "nothing there", I don't mean, 'nothing productive'.
I mean.
Nothing, not even unproductive time wasters happened.
There's just a void of nothingness because my day disappeared with nothing having happened within.
Like...what did I do? A single duel with my girlfriend in league? That's literally it. Literally the one and only thing that I can think of. And that match lasted, what, half an hour? If that? Calculating my day today. I should've, theoretically. Had 12 hours available.

But for the vast majority of those hours...I have no memory of doing anything so where the hell did that time disappear to?

​This is just...so...so...frustrating.

For a start, I thought of a really freakin' cool story idea which is ready to blog about, but which I should probably be more lucid to attempt to blog about. I did well in TFT today, both gaining points in ranked and also winning a match in unranked. I even performed adequately in League itself! I had to be carried pretty much, but I still managed to hold my own well enough in the games I won. Wasn't the best on my team, but helped contribute to the win both times.

My one regret for today: the day is over. Like, I did a nice workout this morning; I didn't have a hard time at work; I thought of a good story idea while at work; I had fun playing games once home from work; literally the only bummer about the day is that the day is at its end.

I've been up for 19.5 hours, and even though it's only just past midnight (12:30), I'm dead tired. I want to stay up longer. I want the day not to end. I want it continue. I want to still do stuff. But I'm just...out of energy, both physical and mental. And for most tasks, emotional. Doing the stuff I did was great, but it was also draining and I don't think I can handle any more of it for a while.

​So I guess it's to bed with me.

Mostly tilt at backwards progress on TFT. I started the day at 35 LP. I'm down to 24 after over five hours of playing straight. Probably more than that; I've been playing for basically the entire day. And every. single. time. I am being screwed over, pretty much.

If you had a T2 Tristana, T2 Poppy, were on the way to T3s for them, had a T2 Veigar, T2 Lulu, and had a Kennen...you'd go for Yordle 6, right? Easy enough! Gnar spawns in the carousel often enough and he's readily available in rolls once you're around level 6-8.

...Not. one. Gnar. spawned. I checked across the board. Not a single one of the eight players had so much as a single Gnar. Not on the field, not on the bench. Not a single Gnar appeared in the carousel. Not a single Gnar appeared when I spam rerolled 12+ times literally in a position where I went from 50 gold to 0 gold rerolling, looking for so much as a single Gnar to get the damn Yordle 6.

He. never. did.

I had another similar match with Sejuani. She always spawns. Always. And yet. When I needed her for I believe it was Glacial 6 Knight 4. She. never. appeared. In spite of that same level range, spam rerolling.

Another recent game I had literally zero T2 units and literally zero real synergies. I had like...wild 2 knight 2 shapeshifter 2 (you don't get the bonus until 3) and that was it. You know why? Because literally nothing was rolling which gave me any synergies at all. I couldn't make any comp work. I know how to make any comp I am given work, and work well...but none existed at all.

I had a ton of stuff on my bench, but none of it would create any synergies. I was picking up literally everything I could while still economizing and yet nothing I picked up could create any synergy at all.

And I've been having match. after match. after match. after match. like that. Where the game either gives me literally nothing at all (oh and by the way in about 90% of my games I got gold instead of items from creeps a good 75% of the time...and in the remaining 10% of the time, got items which don't combine into something actually useful, or which combine into something useful for a unit I don't have).

I work ridiculously well with the hands I am given.
I know what comps work and what items are needed to make any given comp work and what comps work best for which items. I can flex my items to my comp and my comp to my items. I know when a T1 is more valuable than a T2 and I know when an ability is better than a synergy and I know when a synergy is better than an ability and so on and so forth.

But when the game. keeps. screwing. me. over.
And literally nothing I could do would change the outcomes of those games.
Where there was no decision I could have made that would have made me not lose, where every path, every position, every combo, every comp, I could have run, given the rolls I got and my positioning in the carousel.

It's a little...shall we say.
​Infuriating.

I ended up playing Gauntlet Dark Legacy: the arcade version. Found out it's quite streamlined compared to the console version, which makes sense. I played it through the cloud level, and was facing the dragon (boss of the next level, the mountain kingdom) when there was a glitch with the coin machine; it would put the coins into the machine but then immediately spit them out the bottom, so I died because I couldn't restore my health.

Then came food, which we ate out at Denny's.
Then nothing, basically; we just...did normal stuff. By which I mean "family talked, while I gamed".

I just legit can't think of anything about today. I mean...I guess there's that I've climbed to Bronze I in TFT but that's not something I can really think of fleshing out into a blog entry proper. (For the record, if I had to guess the maximum level I could climb, it'd be "I'd require a TON of luck to get to even low gold", in that my skill's probably somewhere in Silver for TFT. For league it's solidly Iron.)

Not just any birthday, mind you. The last official "you are now an adult" birthday by legal standards. Everyone knows about the eighteen-year mark; everyone knows about the 21-year mark; some regions have other age marks for adulthood but those two are the famous ones.

Yet what they don't tell you is that there's a third: the age where you can no longer be covered by your parents (on insurance, etc.). I'm not quite sure that's as universal (the age might differ in different countries and some countries might lack that restriction altogether), but here in the good ol' US of A, that age is 26. My age as of today.

So by the last standard in existence legally, I'm technically an adult. Sure don't feel like one tho.

Anyway, I have no clue when this is scheduled for, but APPARENTLY, to celebrate my birthday, the plan's to go to an arcade sometime vaguely soonish. My main hesitation is, I don't know if I'm expected to pay for my playing. If so, I don't want to spend my own money and it seems like a bit of a waste for me to go and do nothing but watch. But if someone else fields my bill--or rather, coins--heck yes I'll try it out. If not, well...I'm a cheapskate scrooge who hordes money.

I may or may not have more to talk about later, or maybe I expand on the above. Right now, I'm writing this up to be typed later, because I'm at work. There's an hour's gap between when I finish my TKD workout and when I start work, a gap I normally fill with browsing the internet (well, kinda; browsing one site specifically) on my phone.

There's just one problem:
My phone charger died/quit working. It was working two days ago on Sunday, but quit some time between then and now. Natural consequence of this?
Obviously...with my phone on for two days when it's a years-old phone that gets close to death within 24 hours of being uncharged...the phone itself died. It'll be fine once I get it recharged for a few hours, going from 0% batter to 100% battery, but that'll require a new phone charger, one that I currently obviously lack as the current one failing me caught me off-guard. (I suspected it'd eventually need replacing because of the exposed wires. I didn't suspect it'd need it so soon.)

That having been said...while I'm writing this blog out of boredom, I don't have any real topic to discuss (also, because I'm writing larger letters today, I'm running out of room on the paper). The story I want to blog about has its notes at home and I've nothing new to add to said notes. A new story isn't ready for a blog just yet; I'm still fleshing out the concept (short version: villain protagonist in a superhero setting, and trying to write a villain protagonist who ISN'T a Well-Intentioned Extremist, isn't secretly good, is just an actual villain but not motivated by typical villain ambitions of greed, revenge, or power, with the power set to allow for them to get away with it while not being story-breaking).

​So I just don't have access to anything right now.

I've got like almost two dozen videos that I want to watch.
I've not been playing many League games even though I have quests that'll expire soon and I want to complete them.
I've not been playing ranked TFT games as much as I want.
I've not been blogging with the blog entries on the stories I want to blog about.
And I have dozens of obligations beyond that.

I'm not going to be able to go to tae kwon do tomorrow from a combination of having basically-a-blister (it looks like a blister but was not a blister; I went onto the guard stand with a perfectly healthy foot and then by half-way through the rotation I looked at my foot and suddenly there was torn skin on my heel, so what probably happened is that I scraped it hard against the wooden chair) on a day where we were supposed to run (running and blisters, bad mix) plus me just generally not feeling well.

Which means in an area I am already incompetent in (physical fitness), I'll be falling even more behind because I can't do what I need to do to stay in shape.

There's just.

​So much I'm not doing, that I need to do.

...And in this case had a choice. Watch the TFT streamer championship thingymajiggy, or track down the channels to watch the LCS Academy matches. I chose the latter because while I do enjoy watching streamers play TFT, I have no investment in any of them whereas I actually have some investment in watching teams play League, in this case the match being Flyquest Academy versus Echo Fox Academy.

I watched on Flyquest; no commentators, but it's literally the only stream that doesn't have followers-only chat (and I'm not going to follow a stream I watch maybe once a month for a single game and then not again for like another month, just to chat), so I actually spent time in the chat. (Helps that the channel actually talks back, too! Most channels if you talk about something, you don't really get feedback but there I did!)

A few of the comments said that the match felt like a solo queue match, and made comments along the lines of the academy match basically being bronze compared to the LCS. It was a little hard to argue; there was absolute bloodbaths that in the pro play you don't usually see happening in the midgame and both teams made a fair number of mistakes.

I pegged the match's wincons for the teams fairly early; for Echo Fox to win, they needed Yusui's Qiyana to dominate (and for a while, she was!); for Flyquest to win, they needed Revenge's Aatrox to dominate. As it turns out, with Revenge winning lane and at one point almost winning a 1v4 against him...Flyquest achieved their wincon much easier, although at one point Yusui did destroy basically the entirety of Flyquest with Qiyana's ult (like I said, both teams made mistakes...and one of Flyquest's mistakes was grouping up...against Qiyana, one of the best champs at getting a pentakill for when you group up like that).

I started typing this waiting for the CLGA versus 100 Thieves Academy match to start and it looks like it's getting underway soon. I can say that, draft-wise, both teams picked stereotypical power picks for the most part, but that purely from the draft CLGA has the better comp overall. That's by no means a victory, so we'll have to see what actual play does for them, but in the mean time, I actually came here to talk more about TFT believe it or not.

I blogged about it yesterday, about how you can be screwed over by just outright plan down bad luck. That does remain true (particularly egregious: every. single. time. I am among the first picks in the carousel, there's no spatulas for me to grab and often no champions I wanted to grab; every. single. time. that I am at the top and get last pick, there ends up being like three spatulas I can't get, recurved bows I don't get, and champions I want yet don't get), but there is some skill involved in the game.

If you are so inclined to, you can force basically any comp of your choosing, but this strategy is somewhat less viable especially if the comp you want is a lategame specialty one (e.g. six glacials, six nobles, six yordles, six knights). You need to survive to get far enough, and if you take too much damage, it is often impossible to win even with a fully online comp. If you have a comp that wins 9/10 matches but you've only got 40 health, you still end up losing because you're going to face 20 matches and lose 2 of them and in those two losses you lose said 40 health.

Usually, once you get the hang of it, it's better to just go with the flow; see what items you have and what synergies you can aim for on your earliest T2 units, more or less. It takes some getting used to, which is where the skill comes in, but it's something that I've more or less got the hang of.

Mind you, even if you have a fully online comp, every comp has a counter. You can have 11 units, five full synergies, most of your units T2, some T3s, even have items that theoretically are OP on your team...and hardcore lose against a team that counters you. For instance, assassins instantly deleting your whole team; glacials freezing your whole team; some comps have disgusting items combos that simply. won't. die. I've faced a literally-invincible Shyvana and a literally-invincible Swaine. Both of these, post change which theoretically nerfed the ability to do it.

But no, I had the misfortune of facing a Swaine who every time he transformed had an item combo that would bring him to full health and keep him there until he de-transformed and in spite of having my primary damage dealers alive he recharged his ult before I could knock him down, rinse, repeat. (Kinda regret not noting the items on said Swaine, because I love shapeshifters as a comp and if I could remember it then I could use it myself.)

The Shyvana similarly was fed with items that healed her faster than I could damage her. It was two different games this happened in, mind you, and once again I kinda wish I remembered what items were used. (I suspect the hex gunblade item was one in both cases but am not positive.)

MY POINT BEING, sometimes even if you have a bustedly broken comp which shouldn't lose...you face off against a bustedly broken comp which shouldn't lose...and in that exchange either one of you is wrong or you tie and both lose health and unless you have more health than your opponent, eventually, ties are still a loss for you as that chip damage adds up over time.

Also, placement can be a big thing; timing can be a big thing (I've lost matches because I was HALF A SECOND TOO LATE in buying me the champion who would've upgraded my carry; I've lost matches because I got my comp fully online in the last possible second...but ran out of time before I could place the units accordingly); you need to be fast on the draw and know where to place things to counter the enemy.

I can do that when I'm in a 1v1 or when every living player aside from me is using the same comp which theoretically has the same placement, but because I don't know who I'm going to face until I'm facing them I can't use optimal placement against my opponents because I can't figure out a universal best placement because there is no such thing, only a best guess at a generically-better one.

And that I'm PRETTY good at. Not perfect, I sometimes trap my units in areas where they can't attack (and thus never get to use their ult), so I do make errors (although sometimes it's not my fault and units which should attack and have literally no reason not to...don't, and I HAVE lost games from this much to my chagrin), and I kinda hate when I run a comp heavy in melee units because when I do they often run out of room to attack my opponents (on that note I also hate when I have no frontliner in my comp because you need SOME melee units to not have your ranged units instadie and yet sometimes I'll have matches where I have T2s for like six different ranged units and not a single T2 for a melee unit).

Butyeah. There's still skill involved, and there's skill that I am reasonably competent in. I doubt I'll climb up too high, and I might fall down back into iron briefly from a bad single game, but I do think that given the benefit of time and enough matches, I'll climb up higher. Probably to silver. I legitimately think I'm a better player than bronze would indicate, but I doubt I'm good enough to get beyond a low elo because while I'm better at TFT than I am at league and think I am reasonably competent, I'm not competent enough to be among the best.