Yes I realize it's 3 am, what better time to start adulting than in the prime time for me when I am awake, have energy, am not too sluggish, am not too tired, am fulfilled, don't have much else on my mind, and am mostly thinking of what needs to be done before tomorrow?

Anyway. I do have a lot on my mind and a lot to do.

For medical stuff, I still need to return one test that I haven't done yet. I want to not make the trip be for just one thing though so I also want to accomplish some shopping. Things I want:
-Therapeutic Gloves and/or wrist immobilizer
-Chokers
-Thigh bands
-some form of Bra fill
-completing makeup kit.

Therapeutic gloves and/or a wrist immobilizer are due to how my right wrist keeps on flaring up, specifically at the wrist, right on the bend joint on the side. Pinkie-side rather than thumb side. This is a recurring issue, not new. It is also something that has a fairly obvious culprit: spending 16 hours a day in front of the computer using the mouse.

Basically confirming the source of the issue is how on days that I use mouse-intensive games, it is much much worse than on days that I use games that mix keyboard and mouse or are just keyboard or don't use the mouse basically at all.

Games like Epic Battle Fantasy 5 and Minecraft (both have a ton of repetitive clicking) tend to wreck my wrist, whereas games like Chrono Trigger (controller), League (half-half) and Stardew Valley (mostly keyboard with only a little mouse) seem to not agitate the, for lack of a better term, injury.

It's almost certainly a repetitive motion injury of some kind. Minor, but something that I deliberately need to force measures into place to mitigate and prevent from getting worse. I find that quite often, I need to alternate days for games that I play. If I play a click-intensive game I almost always need to wait one day or else face it getting worse.

I also try to elevate my elbow to match the elevation of my wrist. Right now my chair is up extra high, sacrificing some of the mobility I get from it being lower, just so that I have the armrest of the chair level with the keyboard where the mouse is, so that they're aligned, allowing for less necessary wrist movements.

I also pull out the keyboard so that there's less motion needed as when the keyboard is fully in, that requires a lot more motion, especially side-side motion which hurts a hell of a lot more than up-down (thus, extra-important to limit).

But these countermeasures are proving insufficient. I want to be able to game what I want, when I want, and not have the worry of wrist injury worsening. I looked up possible measures to counter this and found out about therapeutic gloves and also found a video from a professional who gave a quick fix of sorts that, while not 100% effective, should be basically 100% safe.

Basically, taking a single strip of electric tape wrapped once (not twice or more) around the wrist, to help immobilize it but not cut off circulation. I did give a minor modification (the video was applying it to bare skin, I applied it over my love), but while my modification means slightly less accuracy, it still seems to do what was promised. My wrist mobility is by my estimation halved. Not immobile, but still limited from the extremes, which is what I need. Plus, if I feel a tug, that's a reminder.

It's still a stopgap measure though. This DIY might help, and the exercise shown in the video may be useful, but there's still some sort of nerve, tendon, or something that feels strained and I need a better measure to prevent worsening of the injury.

On other might-require-doctor news, when the doctor drew blood for tests, it left my arm sore--normal, right? What's not normal is how a week or two later, there's still notable discoloration (many icky green spots) marking what is undeniably a bunch of very very obvious bruising in the area. I get the impression that is not the norm.

I'm glad that I don't have any lasting damage from my physical section of the interview, though. I made the mistake of drinking water while changing into my swimwear, as I knew I was already dehydrated. By the end of the physical in-water section, my legs were absolutely dead-tired, my head was spinning, I was lightheaded, terrified I would pass out, collapse, that I wouldn't be able to stand.

My legs felt like lead, I did indeed struggle to stand, I struggled to carry my bag to the changing room (and couldn't carry anything except the bag), every step I could have fallen over due to the imbalance I was feeling, and I basically ran into the changing room, heavily nauseous and exhausted and ready to collapse.

And then, the urge to vomit hit. At first I suppressed it, because I really didn't want to vomit, but ultimately, I gave in, and after vomiting a little bit of the water out (that's all there was to vomit), I felt good enough to take a cleansing shower. I wasn't 100%, but I was still passable.

Until I got out of the shower and collapsed again, the urge to vomit overtaking me once more. This time I didn't resist, and the rest of the water I had drank came up. But then, I realized something. Once all of the water had been removed from me...all of my symptoms just went away. No lead-weighted feet. No spinning head. No dizziness. No lightheadedness. I felt not only normal, but great. I felt arguably better than I had before the water testing.

Well, the lining between my stomach and my throat wasn't good, it burnt from the acidic vomit, that was disgusting, but physically and mentally I was great. Lesson learned; drinking water before physically exerting yourself is a very very bad idea and WILL screw you over. Had I not drank that water, I'd have been much better off and wouldn't have spent 5-10 minutes vomiting. (Thankfully, the vomiting wasn't seen by the people interviewing me, as I imagine that wouldn't look promising for me to be able to do the physical aspects of the job. However, I feel like they could maybe at least understand that it was due to a mistake on my part of drinking water, but it'd still suck to explain that to them at the time.)

On that note. In further work news.

The interview I was meant to have today never happened.
I need to check on that and ask why, see if there was some form of mishap there. My own phone never rang. Other phones did, my mother's and our home phone, but my father answered the home phone and hung up so it couldn't have been that as the call.

I also need to follow through on the interview I had earlier since they got my corrected email.

Work to do, references to collect, busy busy times.

It's literally nine fifteen in the morning and I've yet to go to sleep...because I legitimately genuinely didn't realize what time it was.

I still thought it was like three am in the morning.

Maybe six am at the latest.

In my defense, my family never turned out the lights or said goodnight to me so I was under the impression it was still much earlier than it actually was.

Butstill.

I was already suffering from depression.

​And now I'm going to have one HELL of a time trying to recover.

It's nearly 7 am and if I write a lengthy blog that'll take me to like 7:15-7:30ish bedtime which is alarmingly late...
...But if I don't write a long blog I risk losing thoughts that I'd express in a blog and it's a return to copout blog entries I've made and loathed that I needed to rely on countless times.

Hmm, it's a tough decision, but ultimately, I think I value sleep more than the blog entry. I've got some making up to do, juggling everything is difficult but I am trying to do my best.

Well, in real life, anyway.

Four months without blogging should give you an idea of where my head has been; not great.

New, at the latest, coming out day: April 26th, 2022. That's a loose estimate, but an apt one, because I've worked on things a couple times or so, and this is what I loosely mathed it out to be, approximately.

​In addition to wanting to get back into blogging, I also want to clean up some other aspects of my life. Things will not get better unless I make them better.
Short list:
-Stay more on top of blogging
-Stay more on top of my emails (need to do this)
-Stay more on top of brushing my teeth (oof this is not going well)
-Actually do work on a project during times that I have felt 'bored' rather than wasting the time.

Now is one such time. I'm not feeling league/tft right now, I'm minecrafted out for the day, I am actually staying on top of mafia stuff (aside from tracking the queue forum), so now is the perfect time.

Well, admittedly.

I've lost two hours since I started that...

...But it was a really productive two hours, as I managed to sort almost all of my stuff on my desktop.

I'm still not sure what I will work on.

I'm thinking of attempting to write in a google doc the Phyrra and Cyrus loose script for the animation (which should be here in the notes written down what I did get done before), since I still remember my loose idea for every episode. I should also be able to find the notes reminding me of each episode's name.

It'll take a little bit of time to do, but hopefully I'll make progress.

Wish me luck on my endeavors!

​I definitely need it...

...And thus, technically speaking, not on today, but like. It was 12:45 when I did it, if it weren't for daylight savings time, it would've been on today anyway.

So I did get some more done, albeit basically nothing. (Just sketching out Phyrra's daggers. The plan here is more or less, sketch out her sword, sketch out her daggers, sketch out her gloves, sketch out her other clothes, etc., sketch out her face, then retry putting them all together.)

I was feeling really, really uninspired today so I didn't do much, but hey, I got some work done so...not doing nothing, therefore, deadline remains!

...In fact I was planning on it already but I realized I didn't make the blog entry yet.
Yesterday in my mega-blog post one thing which I neglected to mention--Phyrra and Cyrus continues to be something I work on. A while back, don't think I mentioned it, but I added something to Bard's character that made perfect sense and made a particular storyline feel more nuanced and natural (albeit having one necessary adjustment earlier in the story to accommodate for it).

Very, very recently, I did similar for Clara, adding a significant section to her previously-rather-underdeveloped (considering her status as a childhood friend of Phyrra and Cyrus) backstory which helps increase her role in the story ever so slightly, fleshing out an already-planned moment.

So Phyrra and Cyrus is not a project I have forgotten about.

I also did today lay the groundwork of the simplified expanded Rise of Rome scenario, too, but that blog can wait.

...And in this regard, I was highly successful overall! I still have three, lengthy, videos to watch (one is two hours; two are each 45 minutes), but I watched about ten videos today to get entirely caught up there. There were a bunch of things I needed to get caught up on, though, and...I was...less successful elsewhere.

In Minecraft I did do some work but had the tilting experience of zombie death losing my experience and risking my items...again. And now I wasted a bunch of time for what amounts to nothing.

In Teamfight Tactics, I needed to play five games for the orb of enlightenment and play enough games to get the four quests done--this also contained extreme tilt of either lousy luck in the earlygame and by the time my fortunes were turning around...being eliminated by those who had the amazing luck earlygame and were just strong enough to beat me before I could make a comeback...

...Or godly good luck earlygame, but which was severely soured by the lousy luck lategame where I would spend 100 gold and not get a single T3, not get the key T2 that I was after, and in many cases, not get the 5g unit I needed to make my comp transition into the lategame, where I knew I had the earlygame crushed but I knew that I needed to go to a very specific comp to not get outscaled...and couldn't because no matter how much gold I spent in spite of being the requisite level and literally nobody else running my comp, the unit just. wouldn't. spawn.

Which lasted until I got a few games I considered passable enough. Still didn't complete the latter two quests but considering one of said quests requires me to play nine games to completion and each game is like 30-60 minutes long, an average of 45 minutes...that...didn't happen.

Then in League I had multiple misfortunes. I had my Ashe stolen from me; that game went predictably badly. I was assigned a game of jungle. I said that I don't play jungle, recommended a swap, nobody took me up on the offer, but fortunately when one of my teammates noticed that my champion locked in was Ashe and asked "can Ashe jungle" and I bluntly said 'no', they dodged. (I generally assume that most of the people who dodge have alternate accounts or aren't willing to play games that they know they'll lose. I do not have alternate accounts and I will play games that I know I will lose, because I figure that they might give me a learning experience.)

Then I got a game where I accidentally took the wrong runes--the runes I took were runes I use on Ashe, but in that specific game, I really really needed Sorcery, and yet I was stuck with Fleet Footwork. Sorcery would've allowed me to get a ton of kills that game that I didn't get, because I took the wrong runes accidentally due to the Vlad game. Even if it was winnable, it became unwinnable when two members of my team dc'd.

And then I got a game where my team did flame me for my build--to be fair. I was 0/8, but in this case, that legitimately was not entirely my fault. My "support" was Tryndamere. Tryndamere can be played in 4/5 positions, like Ashe can--top, jungle, mid, even in the right circumstances adc. (With Ashe's four being top, mid, support, and adc, obv.) He is very much not a support in any way shape or form.

He didn't take a support item--which meant that whenever he last hit, he was stealing my cs. Because he was stealing my cs, I had less gold than I should have had. He also took fights that would be fine for him to take, between his ult and his spin--but he criticized me when I went in and criticized me when I didn't go in because while he has tools to escape from death...I do not. And he was expecting me to have some magical get-out-of-a-2v4-situation.

Because, yes. We were 2v4'd. Repeatedly. Given that it was a 2v4, I did fairly well given the circumstance. I could burn my ult defensively and summoners to escape to safety, and did so repeatedly, which kept me from dieing like four more times than I did, and at least two of my deaths were due to me getting collapsed on by 3-5 people when I didn't have vision on them and thought that they were somewhere else. (Those are at least partially my fault, yes, but when caught out by 3-5 people, I'm dead; there's no escaping that.)

He wanted me to engage in fights that were 2v3, even 2v4. I could not, and when I tried, I died. He wanted me to engage in situations which I knew I wasn't in position to engage in--he has a spin he can use for a gap close; if he spins into a fight when we were previously together...I can't get in range to help in time because Ashe is much much slower than Tryndamere's spin.

Not helping was the fact that my toplaner lost hardcore and my jungler was also in on the flaming (the jungler and "support" were the ones doing the flaming), in spite of my jungler himself having done pretty terrible. And it reflects in their scorelines, too. I had the second-lowest number of deaths in the game, but only by one. (Somehow, the jungler had one less death than me.)

It was all-around incredibly frustrating. Ashe can engage in all-ins, but she is primarily a specialist at dealing poke damage. She is the queen of kiting--of hit-and-run. Hit, retreat. Hit again, retreat. And only after the enemy has been whittled down sufficiently, do you engage...preferably still with enough ability to leave room for a disengage or a finisher.

Being asked to engage engage engage without kiting, to go purely on the offensive especially when we were behind in every lane with only one player on our team doing even close to remotely well, is the exact opposite of what you're supposed to do on Ashe, especially when behind.

Heck, even the enemy team had a member who recognized that I wasn't the problem. And I believe it was my midlaner who shared that opinion, mentioning that Normals are a good place to practice or something to that effect, with at least one person in the game who wasn't the jungle/support saying that I could be pioneering a new meta.

Maybe they were sarcastic, maybe not, it's hard to say for sure, especially from vague memory, but if they were sincere in giving that benefit of the doubt then they were giving me far more than my own team did. (Plus at the beginning of the game I am fairly certain one or two members of my team dropped the N-word but since I was too busy playing the game I couldn't look up who it was. I have two very obvious suspects tho.)

And, heck. At the end of the game, I ended up with stats that were still some of the best on my team and I could tell that in teamfights where I was able to kite away from the enemy I was actually dealing significant damage, contrary to my teammates' claims of my build being worthless for damage. I was less than 400 damage away from dealing the second-highest damage on my team and I had the sixth-highest damage in the game; I did more damage than the enemy adc. I was one of the only two on my team to damage a turret. I earned more gold than our toplaner, which is an impressive feat mind you since, again I must reiterate: my "support" was stealing my cs so my gold income was halved. I was one point off of having the second-highest vision score on my team, and also one point off of matching the enemy adc.

I had the highest minion kill of my team...and had an exact tie with the enemy adc, down to the last number, for being second-highest in the game. The only player who killed more minions was the enemy toplaner. (Who, being Mordekaiser when Mordekaiser even post-nerf is kinda OP...was. Well. Mordekaiser.)

Are those good stats to have? No, not particularly. They are still not great. It still means that overall I was a little bit sucky. But in spite of my team having placed the blame on me and my build...I genuinely don't think that it was my fault? Like...toplane lost hard against a champion who can and did 1v5 us. Hard, HARD lost. Midlane was the best of us but even they in spite of getting the kills they did were barely going even with their counterpart and were losing against the enemy toplaner and losing when outnumbered.

My "support" didn't take a support item, took half of my cs (when I am already not good at csing), entered into areas we had zero vision of and expected me to follow, took fights that I couldn't engage in, took fights that I couldn't disengage from, and sure enough had the highest deaths in the game.

It is not an uncommon belief that in games, supports are the main difference between winning and losing--a good support might not win by 1v5ing the enemy team, so much as they win by setting their team up for success. A bad support directly loses their team the game, by setting them up for failure.

And, hey.
I didn't place blame on them in-game.
I never flamed back.
I never asked them questions about their rather-questionable tactics.
But I feel like I have the right to believing that that game was genuinely just not my fault? Like, sure. I admit. I made many, many, many mistakes. I did get genuinely caught out of position multiple times. I should have been smart enough to recognize, "I can't engage on that." I should have been smart enough to ping my teammates not to engage on that. I should have pinged when I was trying to engage on something.

And I made many misplays. Missed most of my ults. Missed many volleys. A ton of my volleys got minion-blocked where one minion (or if I were lucky, multiple minions) ate all of my arrows, meaning none of them connected. I did legitimately play a bad game, and I feel they had room to call me out on the mistakes I did make.

But they were calling me out on things that I genuinely don't think I was responsible for. Ashe needs lifesteal? I had it. I didn't have the full 12% because I couldn't farm it out, couldn't get champion kills, but I don't think that my inability to do those things lies on me. Ashe needs damage? I was dealing considerable damage when I wasn't instantly deleted. The only thing that they called me out on which I feel has merit is that Ashe needs crit, for a stronger slow. Crits double her slow and deal increased damage to slowed targets; my build didn't have the crit yet.

But honestly--in that game, I cannot think of a single time a crit giving increased slow would've made a difference. I was building defensive items that are designed to help keep someone alive, and which just so happen to on this build give me extra damage and a bottomless supply of mana. Would a stronger slow have allowed my team to kill an enemy who got away? No occasion that I can think of. Would a stronger slow have allowed someone to survive in a situation they didn't? Not when the slow would be applied to one enemy champion when someone is being dogpiled by three enemies. A stronger slow applied to one still leaves two in kill range.

I am fairly certain that there was no way I could have slowed them and made a difference.
But I am also fairly certain that I couldn't have done more damage with a different build.
The problem was that I kept dieing before I could deal the damage. There's no build in the world which can deal damage on Ashe when you're dead before you can so much as proc Ranger's Focus. If you get to only launch one volley and maybe one autoattack and are dead before you can launch a second auto...there's no Ashe build in the world which can get her a kill there. She can't oneshot like that.

And the build I go for is actually one of the best possible builds for trying to prevent being killed. It's a hugely defensive build with a metric ton of armor and a ton of MR in it as well. I was still being killed before I could get a full combo off, because I didn't have my teammates taking the damage for me. They were dead, they were fighting elsewhere, they were unable to stop the enemies from bypassing our frontline to focus on me, our backline. All three at different times.

I don't think there was any build I could have done. None. Which could have prevented that.
And sure enough.
I had a final game I played where I ended up hugely popping off.
I do admit--I had an incredibly competent support, and my midlaner won lane. I think my jungler and toplaner actually lost lane tho? I mean, I remember almost all of my deaths were in the earlygame and yet I wasn't the one who gave first blood; it was my toplaner. And I recall my jungler having died early, too. Might be mistaken tho.

And I will fully confess. Even if we didn't all play well early. There wasn't a single weak link later in the game. (The closest was us having an uncoordinated assault on the enemy base where when some of us were dead, the others were attacking, and when they died, the others who respawned tried attacking, but that was a collective int from everyone including me making miscalculations.)

So it's not like I singlehandedly won my team the game. I had the most deaths on my team and the lowest kills to my name, but almost second-highest kill participation in the game. (Highest was my support, second-highest was my midlaner, by a slim margin--they had one more than me. Though I admit, I only had one more than our jungler or toplaner who both were just one behind me. Suffice to say: we teamfought a lot and worked incredibly well as a unit.)

I had better stats than most of the enemy team and better stats than the enemy adc across the board, and overall I did incredibly well. My team was friendly, supportive, we worked together well, coordinated reasonably well enough, and even when we inted, we usually got something out of it. Securing a drake even if three of us died (not exactly worth), securing a nexus turret even if most of us die (probably still worth), the like.

And this brings the total games I've run this build in on Normals, with the runes and items, up to five. I thought it was more than that, but I could only find five in my match history. Three of them have been victories. Two of them have had teammates who hard-flamed me in the form of some combination of {jungle, midlaner, support}. 

I blooged about the prior defeat before, and this is my blog about the defeat here.

But so far I still maintain my conclusions thusfar.
It feels like the build's success/failure rate has less to do with the build itself, so much as it does, the team I am on. If I have teammates who are making plays that are blatantly mistakes who then flame me when those plays go south...it doesn't work, but I don't think any build would work for those games for a player of my skill level, which is to say, not very good. I will fully admit to being a trash-tier player and a significant portion of my losses are due to mistakes I made so I will own up to having been a significant contributor to the loss.
(Though, as I said last time: I feel like I am in the right to justifiably not take exclusive blame for the loss and that my teammates played equally as large a part in the loss, at a minimum if not more of a part than I did.)

If I have teammates who are chill, work well with me, synergize with me, are willing to own up to "whoops, that was my fault" when they make a mistake, accept me saying the same, and who have a plan to recover rather than running in and doing the same thing we just got killed trying to do...it tends to work. Mind you, I admit: given those circumstances, probably any build would work.

And I do confess, this game I had a little bit of an extra edge; the enemy team was all-AD (a fact I didn't recognize until midway through the game; I probably should have built tabis in hindsight, or rather, since I didn't notice the enemy team was all-AD until midway through the match, sold my Ionian boots for Tabis), when two of my items give some of the highest armor in the game. Frozen Heart gives the highest armor in the game (100 armor), and Iceborn Gauntlet is in the top...I think six? Maybe it's only top eight, but it still gives a ridiculously large amount of armor. (I did let my team know about this fact, which they found useful to know, because apparently I was the first one to realize the enemy team was all-AD and none of them had realized it until I pointed it out, so that was a good contribution of mine. I mean, not sure it made much of a difference; the two members who built armor were two members who are already tanks, and a third who was maybe building into tank is also sometimes albeit not always played as a tank, so it's hard to confirm for sure that their itemization was due to them taking note of the full-ad enemy team after I noted it, but hey, I'd like to hope that I made a difference in helping them.)

Obviously, in terms of games to run the build in...a build where the enemy team has some difficulty bursting me down (though Pyke could still deliver killing blows with his ult, annoyingly enough, because many times where I thought I was high enough HP to survive, I received a nasty surprise that I didn't realize would kill me until it did) is going to be a bit more successful than a game where they can kill me even if I got to full-build easily.

And obviously, in terms of games to run the build in...having two tanky frontlines who have excellent tools at protecting their backline from being accessed, preventing the enemy champions from getting on top of me (with a third who, at least with their itemization, was also a tanky frontliner that had excellent tools at protecting me), is pretty much the dream. Gnar was building tank and he can toss people around; Sejuani has multiple ccs/slows in her kit; Leona has some cc in her kit and a gap-closer (admittedly, one-way--towards her enemy. But if the enemy bypasses her and she has the ability up, she can use it to again place herself between them and me).

I played it not as well as my other two wins, which is reflected in my final gold score and to some extent champion damage and similar stats. In spite of this being probably the best comp of my three victories for the build, it was my worst performance with the build of my victories.

But that wasn't the build's fault, that was me being tired, tilted, and making multiple misplays. I would've been those things with any build. In fact I would again argue: using any other build other than the build I used, would've resulted in me being the LVP, least valuable teammate, of the game, because any other build for this game would've had me still be tired, tilted, and making multiple misplays, but with a build not suited for perfectly working with my team's comp, to perfectly counter the enemy team's comp.

Overall, my faith in the build isn't being shaken by anything.
Briefly, in the game where I was being flamed for it.
I did consider it.
Of, "is it actually not that good in spite of my insistence otherwise?".
I did.
But after that consideration.
And upon reflection of looking at how that game went, the scoreline, how that game felt to me as a player, with how at the end I did feel like I was doing the damage I was supposed to be doing, how most of my problems were due to mistakes I made as a player with my team certainly not helping, and looking at the postgame to have an intuitive feeling for what my instincts had told me about my team. (My instincts told me that my "support" didn't have a support item; my instincts told me that my support and jungler weren't really playing well; my instincts told me that the enemy toplaner had hard-stomped due to how strong he was compared to the others on the enemy team.)

I just have the feeling that it really wasn't the build's fault we lost that game, no matter what my flaming teammates might believe. And feel like I am rather justified in that belief.

I feel like the build is working for me.
Heck, even if it's not a build which works for other players.
I think it is a build which works for me. And if it works for me.
It feels good to run.
My successes feel like a large part due to the build.
My failures don't feel like they're due to the build.

Then I feel like it is the right build for me.

But I digress.
I've been writing this blog for at least an hour; I suspect it is closer to two. It's 3:48 am right now, the game I finished I believe finished at 2 am? I don't think that I went straight from it to here, but I certainly didn't do much after it before coming here to the blog.

I have work tomorrow.
I get up at 8 am for a shift starting at 10.
And, oh yeah.
I still have a bunch of stuff I need to do.
I got some stuff caught up on.

I got most of my stuff, not.
Like, I still need to get caught up on my emails and to send one to my boss about trainings. They said that the ones available were full, and that they were "looking into" options. I need to give them a reminder of, "Hey, I uh...really need this?" Because trainings are a Big Deal to keep up to date on.
And I still have a ton of daily chores to do that I haven't done yet.

I half-considered writing a blog today saying "god I am pathetic" by listing all of the things I need to do, which I promised I would do (I promised to do judging today, after having previously promising to do it on Monday and failing to deliver on that promise), because...well, when you think about it.

I really kinda am pathetic.
I watched videos instead of attending to those matters.
I played games instead of attending to those matters.
I wrote this long-winded blog post that amounts to little more than a ramble ranting about my delusions of having a good build and complaining about teammates calling me trash when I believe that they themselves more than qualify for that term themselves, something which even if it is true leads to a dangerous road of me not acknowledging my own faults. (I try to take responsibility for what was in fact my fault, but if I think that it isn't my fault and is my team's fault, even if that is true, it can lead to me thinking it isn't my fault and was my team's fault...when it isn't true. And I want to avoid that.)

I basically started today thinking, "today will be a day where I get everything I need to, done...or close to, knocking out almost everything on my immediate to-do list!".

I ended up realizing that while I did do some things and while nothing I did ended up in a complete and total waste...
...Due to tilt, I ended up doing just about none of what I set out to do. Some, I did! Most I did not.

So yes.
I do suck and am a piece of utter garbage for failing like this.
No wonder I prefer to focus on writing the gaming entries like on League.
Because at least on those I feel like I am writing about things I'm not​ a failure on.

...Since, in spite of the date displayed, this is just an actually-really-late addendum blog to my previous blog.
In my previous blog I mentioned the build I am currently running, the mana/cdr-focused build. Well. I already knew that in theory it could work having done well in botgames but botgames are a poor example of it working in an actual game so I was not convinced it would work in practice against actual people.

Except.

It did.

Not only did it work, but it worked so well that the game I ran it in was literally the best game of League on Ashe I have ever played, ever.

No, seriously.

I checked my stats.

I viewed my record on the web, listing every single Ashe game. I narrowed it down to games I won, games I had similar end gold to, and games where I had reasonably low deaths. And while there were three games that were at least vaguely comparable...this game that I played was literally better in almost every way. I've had games where I've earned more gold, but usually slugfests that lasted longer than they had any right to that in one critical teamfight we ended up losing. But those games weren't me playing well; those games were both sides having screwed up enough to let everyone even their deadweight members (read: me) get to basically-or-entirely full-build.

This was a game where I actually played well. Better than I have ever played before. Was it perfect, no. I made mistakes. I did get caught out a few times (albeit once I knew I was probably overextending and another time if my jungler had been with me rather than pressuring botlane turret we would've won and it was my fault for knowing my jungler wasn't there yet still trying so at least half of my deaths were easily preventable), about 65% of my ults missed even when they had every right to hit (I once missed a point blank ult on Yi--which ended up allowing him to steal a drake he had no right to steal because if I hit my ult he'd have been killed. Granted, that was the aforementioned time that our jungler was right there near us and easily could've helped but chose not to, butstill, feels bad), I often was too far away from the engagement and didn't autoattack as much as I should have, being overly safe and staying too far back so I didn't help my team quite as much as I ought to have.

But in spite of those mistakes.
I played incredibly well. The stats tell the story; I had almost the top damage in the game (the only one higher than me was the enemy team's Xerath, due to Xerath, like Ashe, being a very very heavy poke-based champion and he was only higher by like a few hundred), had top turret damage, one of the highest objective damages in the game, had the third-highest cs in the game (second only to my own team's jungler and for whatever reason the enemy Vayne who somehow had a bunch of CS in spite of being utterly worthless), had the second-highest gold in the game (beaten only by Qiyana)...

...I was fed. I was incredibly fed. Remarkably, I think I only got a bounty on me once, a small one at that, which was collected by the enemy Yi when I overextended and got chain-cc'd (again, that was the aforementioned time where I knew I was overextending but decided to greed for it for no real good reason), but I had every reason to be proud of my performance that game. I got first blood, I got first brick as well, I collected a number of tower plates, I was heavily winning lane and basically made the enemy Vayne be useless all game long (Vayne out-csd me all game long, somehow, in spite of me hard-winning lane, probably because she split-pushed and farmed while her entire team was being wiped out across the map in a 4v5), I was doing a ton of work.

It was everything I had ever hoped to achieve.
And I did it with the mana/cdr build.
And played as best as I ever can.

Now, admittedly.
I won the lottery.
We got a four-cloud drake soul. This, combined with my 40% cdr, meant that my ult was literally on URF timing--every 20 seconds. So I could spam it. Fire it at the beginning of a fight, fire it again in the middle of a fight, and fire it a third time near the end of a fight. No joke, I had fights where I shot off three enchanted crystal arrows!

We also had an incredibly competent team which won or went even across the map. My support was a good 65% of the reason I was able to win lane (I won't pretend that was me); my jungler had a bit of a weak start but was a monster in teamfights; my midlaner hard-stomped the enemy midlaner; my toplaner did a bunch of work in teamfights and I didn't see them die very often so presumably they did well toplane, too. (Given how the enemy toplaner was basically a nonpresence, that suggests my toplaner won.)

We had remarkable coordination and good synergy. There were a few instances of not ideal interactions (Singed tossing an enemy out of the trajectory of my ult for instance where we both targeted the same person at the same time but he caused me to miss--whoops!), but by and large we were able to chain abilities one after another to lock them down, deal a ton of damage, and just...dominate.

That game shows everything I want to do with my games.

It will never happen again!
I will never do that well again and if people expected me to perform that well every game they would be sorely disappointed. That game is the exception to the general rule of me sucking hardcore. And I was only good because my team was good as well. I'd say that I wasn't good because of my team, and my team wasn't good in spite of me; I'd say that, yes, I have the right to say my team was good in part because of me, if I can also acknowledge I was good because of my team. 

That is to say, I was not carried, but I did not carry; we all played an equal part in that victory and I easily could have honored any of my teammates. (And two of them honored me!)

Most games...won't have that.

So I will never do this well again.

But this game showed me what I could do.
What I can do at my best, when the stars align, when everything goes right.
It shows the theory can work in practice.
It shows that the build, given the right circumstances, can pop off.

It's hella fun and can still perform remarkably well and it suits my playstyle and I think given all of that I will continue to run it in future games, with the hope that those games will go as well as this one did.

Most won't!

But who knows.

Maybe.

If I keep practicing.

Honing my skills, refining them.
Keep on trying this out.

It will end up being my thing and working.

​Now if you don't mind I am going to bed now.

Yesterday I got caught up on almost everything. In Minecraft I knocked out most tasks I had set out for myself; I got caught up in videos; I did a bunch of stuff, not that I remember it now (it was a full 24 hours ago and I am already immensely tired), but I remember yesterday being an incredibly productive day.

Today I've done nothing.

I played one game of TFT, but I didn't feel like playing even that one and certainly not playing more than the one--I still have a quest to complete. Heck, I accidentally cheated myself out of 25 beta pass points by not realizing I hadn't played 5 games and had only played 4 and I need to not do that again.

I don't remember doing anything productive in minecraft.

And I've done literally nothing else.
No videos.
None of my duties (aside from a quick check-in and answering a question, but I was supposed to attend to something today but it'll have to be done tomorrow).
No progress on my secret santa gift.

A big.
fat.
pile.
of nothing.

Nothing to show for it, and no clue what I was really doing. There wasn't any stream I was watching to distract me/make me think I was more busy than I actually was. (Okay so there was earlier in the day, a charity stream, but that ended like six hours ago and after that there wasn't any streamers I was following online at all.)
There wasn't some game I was playing.
There was just...nothing.

I know I did have a slightly busy day. Work and then family night. But while work was my morning and afternoon (a 5.5 hour shift), family nights I basically automatically tune out and ignore, so family night is not an excuse for me having gotten nothing done today.

Yesterday I was doing so well.
And today I slacked off and ended up getting nothing done.
​And any day that I end up getting nothing done, is a day that I end up falling behind during.

Okay so I did play a little Minecraft (trying to document and fully explore my mine's terminal points--I didn't even get remotely far but I was still mostly successful in this endeavor), and I did play one game of League (only one game because the client has a weird error where it's frozen on the 'concluding game' screen and restarting the client didn't fix the problem), and I didn't fully finish getting caught up; there's a few videos I've still got to watch (three?), and there's still three Kongregate games I need to play (this is the first week where I've had four games I needed to play for their badges; usually, it's one or two, at most three, but this week I had almost none of the badges).

But I did watch like...a vog I needed to finish, about 20 youtube videos, one of the Kongregate games, and that's on top of other stuff I did today.

Admittedly, I did waste ~2 hours of my life researching Carol of the Bells covers, citing 20 of them (which I listened to in their entirety, plus about 20 more which I listened to without citing), all for the sake of making the stupidest of stupid arguments.

Basically, my argument was that with the right arrangement of an instrumental/orchestral version of the song (that is, the song sans its lyrics), you could turn it from being a traditionally-Christmas-song into a Halloween song ridiculously easily--or, alternatively, into a year-round song not tied to any holiday, an epic tune which could be used for, sayyy, as an example, epic boss battle music, or something along those lines; something which would be appropriate at any time, not just at the holidays near the end of the year.

I have very good backing behind this, a fair argument which as I mentioned, cites 20 videos' worth of evidence demonstrating the aesthetic I am talking about. (Apparently, it has something to do with the key the song is in?) The silliest, stupidest of things to argue about.

​Gonna say worth tho.