But to not stray too far away from what I wanted to do here, or what my little corner of the internet has devolved into, Fall 2016 TV wrap up and best of 2016 arbitrary lists.

One Mississippi – I like Tig, and I love how dry the show was. I feel like I need to be very particular who I recommend this to because it is definitely not a show for everyone, but for the right people I know that this could very well be love.
Fleabag - It seems like Amazon TV’s strategy is just “take good BBC shows” and really, I’m okay with getting the best of Channel 4 free online. Fleabag wasn’t my favorite thing I watched, but it was short and has a strong point and great character acting.
Transparent – Season 3 delivered. Show keeps continuing to be strong as the focus shifts over to the rest of the family. Easily Amazon’s best show, who knows why they keep pushing Man in the High Castle.
Easy - A Netflix anthology about relationships. Some of them are good, most of them are okay, some of them are just bad. Great to see the crazy diverse cast, but I could only recommend a few of these episodes to people.
Atlanta - When I started not liking Atlanta I sat down with myself and had to ask “Hey do I not like this because I’m just a racist?” No. No I am not, I really just could not get into the show.
High Maintenance – Painfully “meh” nothing to see here.
Black Mirror – Okay fam, I love black mirror. I always have, I probably always will. Even the episodes that people don’t enjoy as much, I still love. I want to share this show with everyone, but I have learned that it is indeed not for everyone. My mother’s reflection after Watching Nosedive was “Well, that sucks.” and San Junipero “Well, that’s sad.” If you like analyzing your media or you like sci fi or you like refreshing short sorties, and you haven’t seen this show, please.
Quarry - I wanted to like Quarry. Cinemax show, gritty, violent, influence from Banshee, new story about Vietnam PTSD. But I could not get into it. Characters and environment on whole fell a little flat. Story was sub par.
Better Things – I know nothing about being a single mom. I know nothing about being a teenage girl. I know nothing about an all female progressive household. I know that I really enjoyed this show. It’s my personal favorite of the “Louie” style of shows and I think FX hit it out of the park here.
Insecure - I cared about the characters. That’s more than I can say about most shows. Get your shit together Issa.
Queen Sugar – Together with Insecure is probably how I helped reconcile the fact that I didn’t just dislike Atlanta because I’m some kind of a bigot. Probably one of the best new IP’s of the year, and the fact that it’s on OWN, well, good for them.
Planet Earth – I watched this for the pretty things.
West World - Could likely do a whole tirade on WW. I hated it, then I loved it, and that love came with time. I don’t care about the park as much as I care about the people behind the park. The clues for the reveals were smart, and I’m happy I caught most of them and made the decision to not look at the subreddit during the show. They got me, and while I think a lot of people are just fake fans caught up in the hype and HBO’s marketing, I really do appropriate the show.
Rectify - Some people have said that the series finale season was the worst of the 4. I would have to disagree, as we really get to delve deeper into the psyche of these characters we have grown to love. One of the most touching dramas of the last 4-5 years, a show that is powerful and raw and will likely not be recreated anytime soon. It’s not a lot, so if you have missed it I would highly suggest putting it on your list.
Shameless - Having ZP be Neil is such a treat. Having Fiona winning is great. Everyone maturing at a crazy pace, and you almost have hope for the family. I know that I just love Emmy, but this show will always be a favorite of mine until the end.

Normally I recommend stuff I’m watching next season here. But I’m not quite sure what’s premiering in the next few months. We’re in a bit of a lull it seems. But how about instead best of 2016? That’s what all the cool kids do right? I’m cool? Right?

Comic: Hot Dog Taste Test
Movie: Zootopia
Tech: Google Pixel
Artist: Alessia Cara
Games: 3. Firewatch 2. Uncharted 4 1. Dark Souls 3
TV: 5. Westworld 4. Mr Robot 3. Black Mirror 2. Rectify 1. Bojack Horseman

Good shit. Here’s to a crazy 17.

Dark Souls III – A game I fucking loved. I never played any of the other games from FromSoftware before this, even tho I have been recommended to play all of them. I watched some people play DS1 and thought to myself that I had to play three just to see what it is about. A lot of people complain that its too hard or frustrating. I experienced that at first. However the growth process of getting better at a thing was so rewarding for me. Its hard to find a challenging game, and I was not into dark souls for the challenge. The challenge accompanied the story, it accompanied and parallel personal growth. I think the mechanic was a beautiful explanation of why this game is such a cult hit with people. I wish I had the time to play it over again, but really I am not the person to play a game twice, I don’t have the time for that. Maybe I’ll go back and play DS1 now.

Work?!? – So I officially signed up with Attack Media this week. We are doing 2 shows with LionsGate and CCHQ which allowed us to move out studios and really expand the project I love, The Attack, a 3 time a week live Twitch verity show in the style of Attack of the Show. Moreso in just name, because I am working under Kevin Periera now, which is still just a mind blowing thing that I don’t think 13 year old me could properly comprehend. I love the people I work with and I can see so much room for personal growth through learning things from them all. Being in the new studio and getting my hands on everything is just great, I am becoming better at some many things and the positive affirmation is still throwing me for a loop. I am going to work hard to push forth things that I want to create on the network, while growing what we already have to be some of the most groundbreaking content in Twitch history. I could not be more hyped. At all.

BUT JOEY I JUST WANNA HEAR THE TV STUFF. Fine. Here’s what I watched:

House of Cards – Yeah it’s still fun and has some solid writing. However I can’t help but be less interested now. The Robin Wright character still makes me so angry, and I just liked the story pre-president as opposed to post. It’s still a must watch thing, but moreso because I feel involved and want to see it through than I do because I care so much about it.

Suits – More “Welp I just need to finish this shit” territory. On no Mikes in jail whatever will we do. Who cares.

Mythbusters – Now this is something I have seen every episode for, and I am just sad to see it go. When it ended for the last time I kinda got a little choked up. It is one of the few constants in my life over the last 10 years, so to just have it yanked away is a change that I am not comfortable with. The format for the last two seasons I liked, even if they did cut the secondary build team out. I feel like they did teach me a lot about science and critical thinking, as corny and passe as that is.

Shameless – I love Emmy Rossum. I’ll keep watching the show for her. I don’t know if I love the writers for making me hate Debbie now, or hate them for it. More Frank is a good thing, and Lips downfall is interesting. I’m attached to the show and feel like this season was stronger than the two before it.

Billions – I don’t know why I did not have the balls to just stop watching the show. Maybe I thought it was going to get better. I didn’t really enjoy it from week 1, and it did not get much better for me from there. I think I can safely say that I can drop this, and it is just another poor attempt from Showtime. What happened Sho I used to love everything ya did.

Girls – Best season in a few. Don’t know how I feel about the ending still, but I got to see evolution from everyone and feel like the interplay and growing up of the gals were just really on point. One of my favorite shows for a reason, and the Japan episodes were so yummy.

Better Call Saul – Season 2 was a letdown for me. Season 1 I was so excited for every Monday night to roll around to watch a new episode. Season 2 I went days before actually tuning in to see what was going on. Maybe as we see Jimmy slip a little more next season I will have elevated interests, but season 2 just spun a lot of wheels for me. Disappointing for sure.

Dice – Funny and easily digestible. What more could I really ask for? AYYYYY I recommend.

Animals – My favorite thing by far this season. Animated, non linear characters, no mouth animation and low budget but who cares! The writing is some of the funniest I have seen since Rick and Morty and I was just so happy for all of it. I don’t want to spoil, but if there is one thing that I would recommend it would be this show.

What I’m watching now:

W – Modern Family
R – Archer
F – Banshee / Orphan Black
Sun – Bobs Burgers / Silicon Valley

Grace and Frankie + Catastrophe on demand.

<3

Normally I don’t write too much personal stuff here. But really no one reads this shit unless I link to a big eSports article, so I feel relatively safe to talk about my life with a small veil of privacy still.

I like to think of myself as a hyper productive person. I am great at organizing tasks, doing them quickly and correctly, and working well with others in a team. I get my energy being with others as a pretty strong extrovert, and I am seldom overwhelmed. None of this feels true tho since school has started this year. While classes are not hard in the slightest, i have been having a serious issue sitting down and focusing on what to do. I don’t keep a consistent schedule, I am contently blowing off things like the gym. My to-do list is just growing and growing and I am feeling overwhelmed with this mountain of shit on top of me. I don’t even want to start to do it because it just seems to large.

I would find ways to start to sabotage myself. Excuses because plentiful where I would go into town for dinner or aimlessly do unimportant tasks as to push off the necessity in my head to do the more important things that were causing me this strife.

After playing fallout for over 10 hours a day for 5 days, I reached a breaking point. I cant keep doing this shit to myself, I need to get back on track and stop being a sad sack of shit. I started to talk about how I wasn’t feeling myself to some friends. One in particular responded with “You’re just dealing with what us normal people call STRESS Joey.” I don’t know if I agree with this or not. I feel stress all the time, but this beast was something else. I dare say depression, that feels exponentially too sever because of the stigma attached to that word.

Im taking measures now to get things back on track. Fingers crossed by the weekend and by slowly tackling this mountain I get things done. I know even today, removing myself from school and going home, I found excuse to not work. Shit maybe this blog post is even an excuse to avoid doing things. I think I need to target specific things like watching and betting on eSports, to clear that obnoxious amount of time up to solve these problems.

The best thing that happened while I was on this shitty bender was that I found the time to read a book that comes highly recommended to me by a few people I highly respect: So Good They Can’t Ignore You! A lot of the messages in the book rang true to me, and I feel like the guidance ir provides in terms of seeking a deep career or job is so poignant. I need to keep these mindsets of doing little projects and building career capitol. The dream job hypothesis does seem like such a fake elixir which is impossible to truly obtain. I could not recommend the book more highly for those who are in school and will be getting out soon looking to do a thing they want while making money, I am very happy I read it and will pass my copy along.

Here’s to getting back on track.

Hey Now~

First and foremost a little apology for the time it took to finish this. Lots of re-writes happened. You’d thing that I was trying to publish a novel or something with the amount of red pen I took to this. But it took me a while because I feel as if I have a lot to say, and I didn’t want to write that novel. So here it is, in all of its glory. My photos and personal stories from my adventure to TI5:

When the GA tickets were released to the public for TI, I was hiding in the back room at work. I manage a Lazertag business, although it sometimes feels like reddit is a full time gig, and I vividly remember giving an unhappy customer like ten free missions because I really needed her to go away so I can run back to my cave and try to get tickets. I was on my phone, work computer, laptop, on skype with my friends, and really didn’t want them to slip away. Refresh, refresh, f5, refresh, f5 f5 f5 f5 f5. I got fucked. My other three friends got tickets, and this was a bit crushing. Valve previously denied press tickets for reddit when I sent them an email prior to the GA release. I knew even if I wasn’t going to be legitimately there as press, I was going to go as GA and work my tail off to do things for /r/DotA2. But more importantly it was going to be a vacation with three of my best friends, so I was kinda bummed.

However I knew that something would work itself out. Eventually it did, and through the magic of Reaver both him and I found ourselves on the press list. It was a little dicey, because I had a flight and airbnb booked before I had the conformation. I guess whatever was in the back of my head was right about it all falling into place. This is where the theory crafting started in regards to exactly what we wanted to do at the Main Event that would provide some value to the community. Yes we already finished the subreddit redesign, Hellspawn would be working his ass off on daily threads and the survival guide. Intolerable implemented a bot that allowed us to make live match threads much easier than before. But even with a new coat of paint, all of these things are just standard practice for any major event for us. To do something new and special for TI it was decided to do a Reddit Live thread.

Reddit Live allowed us to do a few things, in theory. We could provide text commentary of the games, live updates from the venue, break news about what’s going on that the camera is not addressing (say G losing his lunch), re blog the best content form other creators at the event, create a “second screen experience” (god I sound like some Apple exec), but most importantly for me, give people a feeling of what it’s actually like to be at the venue. Pictures and snippets from the Seattle Center that gives someone at work or sitting at home some realization of what the people at the event are seeing and doing.

People have told me through a myriad of channels that they absolutely loved the Live thread. However personally I feel like it failed quite hard. Honestly I feel like I did a much better job of doing this on my twitter feed. If you haven’t seen it and are interested I’d recommend a quick scroll-down. It did feel shitty that it was easier to do what I wanted with my phone on twitter and periscope than it was to share this experience on Reddit live. But why do I think it failed? Simply put we maxed out at 700 people having the feed open. With the sticky and promotion that felt real poor, and I attribute that a lot to just not providing something that more people wanted. Now it’s not like I wanted to have a Ferguson level of people with the tab open, but it did feel real lackluster. I do think that a Reddit Live feed could be really cool for some events tho (The Summit, ESL), and I do not want to trashcan the idea completely just yet. Fingers crossed I can try again soon, and iterate on the idea.

What was however moderately more successful, was our snapchat story that we got up and running. Thanks to the assistance of /u/theclothesthief for giving us the software to make this possible, we ran a live snapchat story. Yes it was not the official one that we all hoped Valve would pay for with official filters and being broadcaster to everyone’s app as a default. That would have been legit. But for those who wanted to see live snaps from the event regardless, we had over 5,000 followers and accrued a shit ton of seconds watched. That project felt like a much bigger success to me as we received oodles of snaps to push to the story. Between those two projects alone, it was quite a bit of work at the event just to maintain those in addition to the daily (heavy TI traffic) grind.

Anywhoo, a lot of you noticed that the title said “Photoblog” and you might be disgruntled at all of that text with no photos. Well here have some damn pictures. I took 2,000 of them over the week and cut them down to 180 in the imgur album at the top of this post. Let me share some with you here, by giving you what I wanted to do with the Live blog; here are the sights of being at the main event.

Once one got to the venue you were greeted by the grassy lawn and the secret shop. The lines were actually short most of the time, probably because of the massive amount of pre-orders that people did. This made getting things a process that actually was not miserable. Additionally everyone got a legit backpack filled with extra goodies, and had the option to enjoy the games out in the sun.

HTC was around giving out demos of their new VR headset created with Valve. I was lucky enough to get to try it, which I will have a completely separate write up about.

Ontop of the secret shop you could go have some fun with the vendors. Steeseries, ASUS, Logitech, Redbull, and more were there with computers to play games, free gifts, music, and just a ton o’ cool things. There was also a beer plaza for those who wanted to drink outside and watch the games that was quite chill. Those brewmaster casks that you saw were up here being used as tables. The security guard made me delete a picture with him in it, he was old and grumpy.

Once you got inside (after the least-through bag check in the world, seriously I could have brought anything you could think of inside even with my bags being inspected) Key Arena was decorated quite well. There were informational signage about where things where, decorations for TI, and representation for all of the teams.

A lot of the decoration came from community artists / workshop artists concepts that were made into posters and slapped on the pillars.

DOTA was playing on every TV. Even the ten inch ones from the 90s.

A popular attraction was this panorama of the map that people were taking pictures in front of. It was located right next to the analysis desk and player elevator so this was a hot spot for loitering.

Said desk, sans talent.

It was much harder to find people for autographs or pictures, unless you were a VIP. But if you knew where to look, you could find most people who you were looking for.

You could also find preview cases of all of the merch by the bars. There was a strong positive correlation to beer sales and Secret losses. Fun fact.

There was always lots of cosplayers going around taking pictures and having a jolly time.

If ya keep making your way around the loop, on the opposite side of the analysis text there was the workshop creator area. Here people gathered around for art, signatures, live demos of creators making everything from in game couriers to loading screens. It was quite cool to take a break from the dota and see how some of the most popular workshop artists do their work.

If you got hungry there were always signs directing you to the food trucks.

Or you could pay out the ass for food from the venue shops. Special shoutout to this twat for making half the area smell like cinamon all the time.

Finally, upstairs, you could find the Juggernaut Plaza. This is where you would line up, so that you could proceed to wait in another line, to get your favorite pictures and autographs with pros and personalities. This was cool because as opposed to players being mobbed, there were scheduled metered appearances. You could get in game autograph codes, signatures, and professional pictures in front of the in-game panorama. A big improvement on previous years, even if there were less people around.

If you were confused, this is why it was called juggernaut plaza.

Most people really did spend all of their time watching the games in the arena. And who wouldn’t, even with all of the other cool shit we were there to watch some sick dota. Watching from the upper rows had a real nice view, as the four projection screens lead to a big viewing experience.

Downstairs was also nice, and what I perfected. The crowds came and went depending on the day and the interest in the teams playing. IG / MVP6 drew what might have been the thinnest crowd as everyone was bummed after the NaVi loss (and it was late, and it was like Monday). The section of seats behind the Chinese casters was filled with a majority of the Chinese fans. They got hype for their boys, and often times put the rest of the area to shame.

Sometimes sitting to close to the stage, while giving you a cool view of the stage, made your neck hurt like being at the front row in any theater.

You could however sit behind the three sets of casters which was cool. Seeing them work and their different little quarks. OD becoming manic, Blitz having coughing attacks and pounding around for his mute button, Capitalist standing, stuff like that. The other languages which were being cast had tables along the side that were less glorious, but they were still on the floor nonetheless.

If you had the perfect seats you could see what the casters were browsing between games. Owen approved of the dank memes while he was fending reddit, again.

The center stage aegis statue was cool too.

Except it did kinda look like Tiny had a giant rotating erection on the stage at all times.

Finally when you were inside you did get to see a lot of the players in their pods, pending their seat. The pods were all glass and had monitors on both sides to see who was who in regards to not just their names, but their heroes and status. Sometimes you got to look on and see happy moments.

Sometimes you got to see sad moments.

Remarkably every day was remotely the same. Not much differed from day to day except the cosplay, the autographs, and of course the games. With that being said, here are some extra fun pictures with some context:

Occasionally you get cute pictures of casters.

Occasionally you don’t.

NaVi walkin’ in.

They didn’t stay long.

Neither did Secret, amiright?

But VP was okay with that.

They actually got locked in their pod and didn’t know what to do for a bit.

I actually took more pictures of fng than anyone else.

Complexity got hype before every game by huddling up after the draft, chanting, dancing, and gettin in their zone.

People told me all week that I looked like Swindle. I don’t see it. At the pubstomp I actually signed something as Swindle because I thought it was funny.

Two non-Americans who just dun get it.

I tell you he’s a mad man.

Off to the right: Dank Stats.

It was hard to take good pictures of people inside the pods.

This was my fav cosplay.

Some of the staff members were trying really hard to understand what was going on. I saw people every day answering their questions about the game and such.

Bruno was always around the analysis panel. I think he was directing it? Regardless he’s the best.

I think Vlat cast every main stage game in Russian.

What a charmer.

That face when none of this was your fault and you just want to enjoy your birthday.

All Stars!

I also took this picture-

Shesstillsicking

When everyone’s gone home

Last day, walkin the red carpet

My favorite sign of the event

PPD leads the squad into the grand finals

When you win a cool six mil

Everyone wanted to touch it all week, but he’s the one who took it down.

If only he knew he would be handing that thing over for the last time

Hold it real tight

So many things wrong with this picture, but so many more right.

Finally we closed out with this mouse

Ya still with me? I still got some more words to say. I guess kudos if you want to keep reading tho, I just hope I’m being mildly entertain to you. As this is still kinda muh blog I wanted to round out with what it was like to be press at the event, some of the problems, and some personal stuff. Ready, set go.

Being press at TI5 was kinda shit. In terms of how we were treated in comparison to the VIPs. Now that’s not that I am ungrateful, lets clear that up right now. I would have done it in exceeding worse conditions, but the ones that were presented to us was still disappointing. I realize that the players are the ones who did not want the press on the VIP level. Makes sense, as you could tell that this year is different than ones prior. People were more serious, less interaction took place, and overall it was less friendly for the media, and less access to the GA. This lead to a really imbalanced level of content that could be created. If you did not have a friend who could sneak you into VIP, your content was significantly worse off. People who were with a team, or work at a studio, or are an old boy, could easily get the best content because they had all the access that was being blocked off to other people. Additionally they got full catered meals multiple times a day. I got to live on warm soda, water, nature valley bars, pretzels, and cheeze its. Not even pre packaged ones, just giant bags that everyone got to stick their hands in. Mmmm yummy. I had to bug friends or lie and sneak past guards when I was in need of a real meal, as I was trying to do this whole trip on a shoe string budget. I only ever made it to VIP to eat and chill, never to work because I did not want to abuse power. Originally I wanted to do a “twitch_chat_reporter” esque spin to the reddit live blog getting people who the community like on vine and posting it to the feed. However unlike said reporter, I did not have people who I could pass the account off to who had special clearance to do this work for me. While I love what that product was, it sucked that without others who had clearance to bug people (who probably did not want to be recorded in the first place, hence the restrictions valve put in place) it would have not worked.

Don’t even get me started on the conditions for taking good pictures. All I wanted to do was be on the floor, or have a lenses with more than 250 zoom. Anything less than that you could not take player pictures. Even with the conditions were so poor with the angles, glass pods, metal struts in the pods, valve staff with their own cameras swarming, and everything in between. Hardest event I have ever had to take pictures of. Not because I was ill equipped, but because the setup was just kinda shit for taking a good picture of everyone. Real disappointing on that front.

Also press had three areas in the crowd where we got to sit with tables and power strips. I chose the less crowded option because I was running in and out a lot, but the security team was so lazy at checking badges I was scared about leaving my stuff there. Felt like a gamble every time I ran down, as routinely people would sit behind me who shouldn’t have been there. Not that some of you homies weren’t cool, but ya know leaving my laptop (or worse being logged into /r/dota2 on it) it only would have taken one asshole to do something….malicious.

Oh yeah and the wifi was garbage. I tethered a lot of the time because it was faster. I know some people went back to their hotel to encode. The fun part tho was being able to sit underneath the Chinese boxes. The IG suite went hard for their friends.   Also being able to enter key area through the player entrance (basketball player, not VIP/dota player) was quite nifty!

Salt aside, I had so much fun. I spent a lot of time on my feet walking around talking to people, taking pictures, and just hanging out with my friends. Every morning I would wake up in my tiny ass studio apartment and tip toe around my friends on the floor to make my way down from Capitol Hill to the monorail to take strait to Key. Some days I walked the whole way. Some day I took the bus. One night I took an uber because it was like 3am and I didn’t want to walk back with all my equipment alone.

The games were pretty good at the event. It was hard to pull myself away sometimes to go do other things. I tried to keep a low key profile when I was roaming around. Now I am a huge ham and totally dig talking to people, but when someone would be like “Oh hey it’s leafeator” and point to me, I was just berated with memes and necro love. When everyone wants to say the same thing it gets a little trying, so I’d rather just hide in the shadows. I did sign some things (which I promptly called my grandmother and told her about afterwards) and got quite a few necro plush gifts. Thank you to anyone who said you appreciate the work that we do to keep the sub running smoothly.

I was surprised that a few notable people came up and introduced themselves to me. Synd while we were playing pool recognized me from twitter which I thought was kinda cool/crazy. I had a bunch of good chats with a bunch of cool people, Toby, Redeye, Wronchi, now I’m just name dropping I’ll stop. Hanging out with people at the Weston was really fun tho, and one of the reasons that I loved starting to do these things in the first place. To shake hands and chat up people who you spend hours at home enjoying their work. While I feel like I did a damn good job over the years with Starcraft networking and bumping shoulders, I still feel like my dota Rolodex could use some work. Hands down my favorite moment when someone said hey to me was when I was taking a picture of the analyst panel. I felt a hand on my shoulder and then heard a voice say “Hey Reddit” and it was fucking Bruno. He picked me out of the crowd and we had a good talk and honestly it was one of the more memorable happy moments for me from the entire event. Three other people who I really enjoyed getting to meet that surprised me quite a bit was Turbo of reddit Empire fame, Toffees of podcast fame, and Noxville of stats fame. All three of those cats are super cool.

One of the more memorable nights was being invited to the Shitty Wizard Pubcrawl in downtown. It was kinda weird because they decided that I was a “noteable person” which felt all kinds of uncomfortable to me. Even tho I was on the list I did not party it up like the players or personalities that were there and instead just spent some good time talking to people. For the first time I got to meet both ReaverXai and Decency at the event. Weird finally saying hi in person to people who you have worked with and argued with and laughed with for a long time now. One IPA sends Reaver off the walls, and Decency has a fro that could win beauty contents. I really appreciate both of them a lot more now. Who knows what weird things they told their friends about me tho.

Another party I had to sneak into was the after party. Allegedly sneak into. I don’t want to incriminate myself, but apparently press wasn’t allowed in like they were in the past. It would take some fun lying and social engineering to get into that for networking purposes, I would imagine.

Speaking of differences at Internationals, I still do not know how I feel about TI5 vs TI3, the two I have been at. TI3 while smaller felt so much more homely. You got to connect and mingle with so many more people. It was intimate. TI5 while having so many improvements in terms of monetary backing, staff, and visual appeal, is just so sterile. Yeah it’s down right awesome to be at, but it is a completely different beast now.

All in all, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have the most fun getting to share the limited time I did with my friends who I stayed with. I think they are still sour that I took off for days at a time to network or do press things, but the time I had with them just walking around downtown or trying new food joints was simply the best.

Well congrats for making it all the way down here. Hope some of that was interesting for ya. I know that I enjoyed it all, so very much. I got a lot of encouragement to keep creating content and doing more than I am already doing. I will be doing probably two youtube videos a week, and streaming once I get back to school. I’ve always had a strong personal interest in those things, so I know I would be upset at myself if I don’t give them their fair shake and see if I can make things that people actually like. (I feel as if that comment about making more videos might just meme-trump whatever reddit comments this generates. No more satire builds. Maybe. ). It’s encouraging to have people tell you that they like your stuff and think you’re cool. Also having an active twitter feed for a week was supreamly addicing. I now know why people with lots of twitter followers can use that thing like a drug.

Finally, a huge thanks to all the cool people I met, again. Wil for being fucking awesome, /u/watbe (trackdota.com baby!) and /u/allthefoxes for helping keep the Reddit Live thread going with commentary and memes. Everyone else who I met because there are too many of you to name <3.

Here’s hoping we do a Major in Los Angeles so I can see you beautiful people again sometime soon.

Thanks for being awesome

<3 Joey “Leafeator”

It was kinda eye opening. Being someone or doing some thing on YouTube has been a goal of mine for a while. It’s on my list aptly titled “someday maybe.”

I think its time to take this goal off of that list, and put it on the to-do list. Things are just aligning nicely for it. I have to do a diffusion project for my social networking class. I have time to spend on YouTube. I have the slightest bit of name recognition that I could leverage. Most importantly I have the drive. I am scared of piling on another project, but I think that this is something that I can do to really prove to myself that something good can come out of hard work. So lets do it.

To cap off the motivation we got invited as students to the YouTube space LA. Here is where they have so much YouTube swag its overwhelming. Its like a full blown production warehouse with support staff from YT and the Google overloads. It was hip and inviting and super cool to just be there. We got to see a QA panel from mylifeiseva a YouTuber with almost two million subs. Everything was on point and seemed to be a friendly welcoming environment. I want to be a part of that family.

SO what am I going to do? I don’t exactly know yet. I feel as if it will definitely be gaming related. But what do I do that’s different. Something that’s not just a rehash of Total Bisquick or anything close to that? Now this is what I’m still working on.

Aside from Ice Cream, playing games is the closest thing to an addiction I could claim. While I would not describe myself as someone predisposed with an addictive personality, video games has been my one consistent bastion through, well, all my life. I bet it’s not a stretch to say something similar about you reading this.
Compounding the enjoyment of video games is this often times overwhelming competitive drive. I feel like everything in life is a competition. I don’t just treat every game of Starcraft like I am in a grand finals. I’ll turn things into contests that are just ludicrous. Sometimes walking to class I’ll just challenge myself to get to point X before person Y in front of me does. It’s a problem.

With that being said (yeah sorry that was a lot of personal ranting), these past six weeks have been a pretty dark time. I feel as if I was able to step outside my body and look at myself, sitting on my computer, and just wonder why I could not stop. Why? What was I so fixated on? 4k.

4-fucking-K. Dota 2 solo MMR 4k. I started playing Dota for the first time in invite-beta. Never played a moba before. My experience was CAL Day of Defeat and Counterstrike when I was 11-16 years old. From there it was Starcraft ladder where masters always seemed to allude me. I enjoyed Dota for the game and the camaraderie with friends, because Starcraft just got so lonely.

When Solo MMR came out for Dota 2 I was quite bummed out to get put in the low 3000’s. I knew I was better, and I could be better. As soon as I saw that number, 4k was a personal goal. I was embarrassed to be caste as an average player.

This should not be misconstrued as a guide to 4k. While there might be some advice you can take from my story; I do not have a Billy Mays pitch for you. You know there is no easy way to reach your solo goals.

I mostly played a strong offline, and a good one role. I knew that I could out farm most people in my bracket by testing the waters after a few ranked games. This was back in the day where there was no ranked all-pick mode. I would lock heroes like Lycan over and over again. I could jungle, I could safe lane, hell if I really had to I could mid. Before the end of TI4 in the summer this strategy worked pretty well for me. I could win games by 20 minutes with a necrobook and howl. It felt good to carry the team on my back, but at the same time it felt like I had no soul.

During this time I think I made it up to 3.6 with Lycan and Terrorblade. I would get unreasonably frustrated and tilted when we would lose games. It seemed like most losses could be attributed to: A lack of communication (read as: yunospeakenglishonUSW), team composition (because we all love the 5 core dual mid lineups), or having tilted toxic players on my team. I fell victim to the last of those three when I would lose a few games and play tilted. Odds are depending on how many eyeballs see this that I flamed someone reading this for feeding or just making poor decisions. I’m sorry. Seriously. Everyone needs to make those shit decisions to get better. I know that I have made a bunch and in order to improve really had to analyze them. When games were lost because of me I had to watch the replay and write down what I did wrong. I asked friends to watch and tell me how I fucked up. I kept notes. It really helped.

About 4 months ago I set aside three days when I was free from work, school, and all worldly responsibilities, to dedicate to Dota. I wanted to grind harder than highschool proms. Boy was this a mistake. I lost more MMR in that span than I even care to remember. I think I have PTSD from those days. I was so worked up, and legitimately angry, that it affected my game. I stopped playing carry’s because of the nerf, so this time was also my genesis of being a support player. I thought I would take the high road by playing the 5 when everyone else picked heavy farm heroes. I thought I could peace the team together.

I was wrong. I lost so many points. In retrospect however, I almost feel okay about it. During that time I played so much support that I learned a completely different side of Dota. While I love the glory of being the one getting the kills; I became a better all-around player after dozens of Jakiro, Witch Doctor, and Ogre games. I would read so many people on reddit say “learn to play support and it’ll make you a better carry.” I don’t know why I ignored that advice for so long. It’s great advice not to just make you a better carry, but a better player. Learning to play a role that I knew very little about did not help the MMR climb at all and contributed to the steep decline. It put me back with players where I could learn how to support better.

Never play ranked games tilted. That’s the most key piece of advice that I learned While I would identify as a fun easy going guy, stupid shit in ranked games, seeing that -25, would get to me like not many other things would. I did embarrassing things. Scream, slam my fist on the bed, throw a water bottle. I was worked up and quite frankly embarrassed. I took a break.

Then I had a shift in my personal life. I started school at UCLA. I became the captain of their CSL team. I was playing with players who were legitimately good, and I was again embarrassed by the number attached to my name. I also had to play the support role. I started to climb the ladder once more. The team didn’t care. I cared. I went into ranked with a new mindset. I am going to be helpful to my teammates. I am going to be relentlessly nice to them. I am going to pick last (at this point Ranked All-Pick was now a thing) and play whatever role we need.
I started every game with:

“Hey guys! I’ll wait to pick last, and play whatever we need <3” The plan worked for a while. Sometimes I was a mid. Sometimes I was in the offline. I very rarely got to play my favorite 1 position, and instead got stuck with a lot of position 5. I was never upset at having to pick last and play the support now. I knew that by building a good composition and creating a good environment on the microphone with my team was infinitely more impactful to winning this game than just my individual play. I needed to facilitate my team however I could. That was my goal. This plan worked. I had fun games and was very infrequently frustrated. Yes it sucks to lose a game because the guy who picked Void or Medusa does not know how to last hit. That’s the burden you sometimes have when you’re chilling on Lion just enjoying your ward life. Games like that made increasing my MMR harder, and became the leading reason for losses. When I would lose two games, I instantly stopped playing. I knew it would be no good for my sanity to lose that third game and then dwell on it when I get out of that chair for the rest of the night. Often times I balanced losing with doing a piece of homework, or crossing something off my to-do list, before I went looking for another game. Unfortunately this story doesn’t have a happy ending here. After grinding and grinding I found myself stuck at the 3.5-7k range. I could not get over this hump after weeks of my strategy. 4k was so close that reaching it started to become a serious problem in my life. I found myself withdrawing from social situations, and procrastinating on real work just to play one more game. Just to get 25 points closer. I thought I would mix it up over this last week and conform to the meta. I would drop the Jakiro, drop the Venge, and play……….Juggernaut. Ya know what? I hated playing Jug and thought he was overrated. Actually couldn’t stand it. I then went to Axe for a few games, who I enjoyed a bit more. Really tho, the third hero of the holy spinning trinity was the one who grabbed my heart. Troll Warlord. I loved Troll upon his hero release. I always have done really well with him and enjoy his core mechanic of attack speed and being both ranged and melee. He was also doing very well in this meta, and by playing Troll I found I could just win games. In 6.83b and 6.83c I won 70% of my Troll games. I felt bad being that guy who just picked the carry, but it was working. Sometimes, we did have rage inducing compositions because no would play support and I would kick myself for not waiting and filling that gap. Sometimes I lost games for having poor farm relative to their cores. But most of the time I was winning. 70% in dot air really good. Unfortunately when you have to net 20 games in dota to reach your goal, that’s still A LOT of work. Last night, I did it. Almost a year later I found myself win 4 games in a row under my own power with a team who I enjoyed to hit the dream. While part of me feels dirty because I spammed an “OP Hero,” at this point I don’t care. The joy that I felt when I knew I was going to win that last game was overwhelming. I legit stood up and did a little dance. I smiled for hours. I went to get some of that aforementioned ice-cream. While I know that 4k isn’t great, hell I’d argue it’s not even good, I am so happy. I don’t know if I will ever quest out for 5k. I know that I can with some dedication and work. I always want to be better at everything I do. While today I say no to the thought of ever pressing that ranked button again for fear of a single loss, I know in time it will happen. I also know that I will never be as fanatical about reaching the next goal. I can relax. I can focus on other things for the first time in weeks. It’s a great feeling. If you’re reading this to try and gleam tips for your own ladder climbing experience, I think I would boil it down into two things. Be nice to your team, always. Bite your tongue. Don’t get in fights with them. Understand that if your goal is to gain MMR because you know you’re better, than your teammates are worse than you. Help them get better two. One friendly voice on your team telling you good job and calming people down when things get tight makes all the difference. Be that guy. Second, never play tilted. Just don’t. You will want to, bad. Just don’t. I wish you nothing but luck on your journey up the ranks. <3 Leaf