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**** it, I'm bored (II)
 

[2:35 AM] dippa: wondering if i should throw together a blog
[2:35 AM] neon: do it !
[2:35 AM] dippa: **** it
[2:35 AM] dippa: i'm bored
[2:35 AM] raycey: Haha, yeah totally!

And so we find ourselves, once more, at this juncture at 2:30am in the morning.

Let's begin.

I. I'm a pretty stubborn idiot, and I felt like a complete douche earlier this week when I came to the realisation just how useful and more critically - essential - it is to practice builds, not against a practice partner, or even the computer, but on your own, just to get the timings down.

I thought, beforehand, that I knew how to do a reactor hellion build in the early stages. I figured the concept was fairly basic; 12 rax, 13 gas, couple of marines, factory @ 100 gas, reactor @ 50 gas, so on and so forth.

But no, as it turns out, I'm actually completely horrendous at the game.

You can do this test yourself, although I'd suspect that anyone whose heard of the words "replay analysis" and is masters or above has probably done this already.

I loaded up a practice game between Deth and Moonglade on Shakuras Plateau and decided I'd work on the first 10 minutes of the game: one must walk before they can run, after all. It was a basic reactor hellion opening, like I'd described, but this time I decided to open up notepad and start jotting down some of the finer details at certain points in the game.

(These are not exact figures from the game: they're made up for illustrative purposes only.)

After 7m 30s, old mate Deth had:

- 54/60 supply
- 30 scvs/2 mules
- x hellions/x marines
- 1 rax producing/2 rax building
- starport in production
- idle factory
- natural completed, x/y energy on orbitals
- 1 gas

And so on.

I repeated the comparison at 8m 30s and 10m: I find 10m is a nice even number and usually a good timing for a lot of attacks, although that's not as true as it used to be anymore.


As you can probably guess at this stage, my version of the same build - even without the prospect of facing the machine that is Moonglade - was nearly 10 supply down at 7m 30.

What the hell? How could I be so far behind so early in the goddamn game?

And so I set to work, taking particular attention to things like the gas timings, tweaking when I got a tech lab on the barracks (in order to maximise the marine count, or at least get it to an even stage with my source material), optimising my barracks' production (don't overbuild reactors, or should I? - a question that I'll have to return to when I actually get the build down pat) and just keeping focus on SCV production, although even in my initial, rubbish attempts that was something that I was nailing fairly decently.

Each playthrough vs the black void of nothingness got slightly better - I had more SCVs at some point, although occasionally my CC would be either too early or a little late, gas timings might be off, engineering bays weren't started yet, siege tank hadn't started building, forgot to start a viking, so on and so forth.

After a couple of nights of just plugging away - including one ladder game where I accidentally clicked find match, hit a Protoss and 2-raxed the hell out of him out of sheer frustration - I got to the point where I was executing the build slightly better in some aspects (more workers, bigger army, nailing all the right things) and still off in others, but not in areas that were critical (siege tank slower by one second or something like that).

I decided to hit up Jimdiddy for some practice; after all, I figured now was the time to test the build against an opponent. Therein lies the real trap: it's easy to hit all your timings when you're not taxed with the additional demands of keeping your hellions alive; many Zergs like to build a massive round of lings before going into muta or infestor play, and that led me to miss a few beats.

But overall the preparation was a success: my previous games vs the Diddy only lasted for approximately 14-15 minutes; this time, the game went for nearly half an hour, and even though I wasn't able to do any significant damage, I got into a position where my production was established and my 3rd was safely up, which has been a major problem for me in the matchup.

Not willing to stop there (one of my better qualities, depending on the situation - see the comments in Cute's blog for the reference) I started hitting up people on battle.net for practice. Eventually Petraeus from Winter Nights was kind enough to give me a few games. His ling/infestor style still made it annoyingly hard for me to take a 3rd, forcing me to lift, but when he adopted a muta/ling style everything fell into place much more smoothly.

That's the real question: how do I react differently to the ling/infestor style as opposed to ling/bling/muta play? There's only a few days before the ACL regionals and I'll have to pass through the group stage if I want a chance of making the top 16.

II. Picture of Eva Longoria to make up for wall of text.


III.


I've been listening to this song since Saturday, and when I mean I've been listening to this song, I literally mean this song, and this song alone.

It's one of my favourite songs to play in osu!, the freeware music rhythm game for the PC and smartphones (osu!droid is the Android version). I first came across it when I used to watch KawaiiRice's super-blocky-low quality stream back in the days when Livestream wasn't associated with the bubonic plague.

While other stuff like Dance Dance Revolution (or Flash Flash Revolution, the browser-based port) have a much wider scope of songs and so forth, osu! is all about your mouse accuracy - which is what makes it such a great warm-up game for Starcraft 2.

Before, I'd been using Super Street Fighter IV Arcade Edition; most of the action took place with my left hand, which was responsible for the kick/throw/punch/focus attack commands. But my experience with micro tourney has made me realise that most of my issues lie in the fact that my right hand is too immobile (probably a result of wrist damage caused by the hours put into Counter-Strike).

So I've turned to osu! to help things out a little. How effective has it been? Wouldn't have a clue, but like any "small tips" that we come across in gaming, the majority of it is all largely about making you feel better rather than actual improvement.

For reference, here's what the "insane" version of Pina Colada (Nightcore remix) looks like.


IV.

Every now and again people in the chatbox ask me why I'm always up late at night, and most people know by now, but I figured I may as well share for those that don't.


Australia has a number of newspapers. Some of them are worth reading, like The Age, and some of them aren't, like the Daily Telegraph.

Whether it's for better or worse, the Reuters newswire - one of the global news agencies that produces stories and images which are then sold to newspapers around the globe - pay the company I work with to create a brief summary of the top stories in Australia's major papers.

So that's what I do - grab four of the country's biggest papers, pick the best stories from them each day and write a summary.

When I'm finished writing, I e-mail the stories off to Reuters' news desk in Australia and it pops up on their website each day.

http://www.smh.com.au/business/austr...skin=text-only (I don't know why it appears on the SMH site as well, but it does.)

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...8EI0ER20120318 (General News)

And that's what I do each night. There's other jobs too - I update the company website, send out a newsletter, but that's really the bulk of my role.

V.


VI.

I kind of hinted earlier that some newspapers in Australia are crap. That's not strictly true - the majority of them are depressingly awful (and I'm not talking about the basics of spelling and grammar, which is becoming alarmingly worse since Fairfax + News opted to outsource, although they're light-years above some of the trash you find in the United States.

Often you'll find that the best newspapers are the ones whose stories keep popping up in the papers you read every day, like Britain's The Guardian. I began following this UK paper largely because it has some excellent coverage of the EPL (English Premier League, aka soccer, aka football because it's actually played with your feet, but that's for another time) like this piece on how players like Fabrice Muamba, who recently had a heart attack in the middle of a match, can find their way in the English game and the utter lack of class displayed by one of the country's most senior sporting executives.

There's another painfully simple reason to not read Australian newspapers and their associated websites - the writing is just god-awful. Errors aside, the column pieces are usually angled in a fashion designed to infuriate, rather than illustrate: instead of walking away a smarter person, I just wander around in a ball of fury (Daily Telegraph columnists are particularly talented at this).

Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying I'm a good writer. I'm not. But part of the process of improving, like anything in life, is to emulate and absorb what the best do, and the British tend to place a much higher premium on eloquence in their journalism than us poor colonial folk.

Locally, Crikey is one of the better sources for analysis, mainly because Bernard Keane, the site's major contributor, worked as a public servant in a past life and therefore has a much better grasp on the machinations of government than someone plucked from the police beat and thrown into the roundabouts of Canberra.

Mumbrella's also a good source for any straight-up news and speculation regarding the media and marketing side of things, while Delimiter is far and away the best source of technology news and analysis, although the front page of Whirlpool is good if you just want an aggregated feed.

VII.

In other completely unrelated news, I've lost weight.

Most of it's been down to the discovery of an smartphone app called MyFitnessPal, which is just a calorie tracker you keep on your phone to remind you of how much of a fat arse you'll be in five weeks if you keep hogging down those Cornettos like Cornflakes.

My family's always been pretty large since I was born. Mum and Dad spent whatever money they had when we were little to make sure we were well fed; it came at the expense of a lot of other things (no brand name clothes or expensive toys).

I remember one breakfast as a kid that was the breakfast to end all breakfasts. It featured pancakes (massive plate-sized), jelly, french toast, cereal and a whole bunch of other delicacies in a single meal. I then, somehow, went and played backyard cricket for a few hours and managed to not die, which surprises me still to this day.


Anyway, back to the present, where I've managed to curb my eating my actually educating myself about how much damage I'm doing to my body with what I eat. Muffins, for example: I used to think those were a nice healthy breakfast. Then I started looking at the nutritional information - when it was listed, and it often isn't in plenty of cases.

Holy shit balls.

I now stick to a good old bacon and egg roll instead, which is far healthier than I thought it was. It's still not great, of course, but I've learnt to manage what I eat much better, and I've developed a great er sense of what I can and can't fit into my gut over the course of a day.

Started at 112kg's in February. I'm down to 106.5kg now, which isn't too bad considering I only walk 20 minutes a day and don't do any other exercise besides sitting on my arse. I'll have to work out eventually, but I was never going to keep weight off permanently unless I learned how to eat properly in the first place.

Which I'm still not doing, mind you - I think I'm much closer to starving myself than living a healthy lifestyle, but it's a world away from breakfasts with jelly and pancakes.

Re: **** it, I'm bored (II)
 

My god. That food porn is the most arousing thing I have seen in years...

Re: **** it, I'm bored (II)
 

WOW THOSE PANCAKES

Re: **** it, I'm bored (II)
 

Nice read, good to hear you're tightening up the early game. I remember ages ago I used to think my 4 gate was ok then I saw light's. All the little things really add up.

Re: **** it, I'm bored (II)
 

Good job on the build order refinement and healthier eating! I'm always amazed that I only weigh seventy-something after all the shit I eat. I really wish I had a better grasp on my diet.

Re: **** it, I'm bored (II)
 

Great Blog as usual. In spite of you saying you are a bad writer, I disagree, I'm no expert or any good, this is just from what I read day to day.

Good work with your health so far, keep it up!

The build order practice sounds good, did you use YABOT or just vs very easy AI ?

Re: **** it, I'm bored (II)
 

Neither. Made a game with no-one else in the lobby, pressed G when the game starts (because it comes up with the return to score screen/continue game pop-up) and then just played it out.