My sister and I have this joke about the empress. According to a tarrot reading, my sister needs to rely more on her “inner empress”. What does this mean? Well apparently the emperor card stands for searching out and controlling the world, while the empress waits for the world to come to her.
This actually is in line with a thought process I had myself about being yourself.
Feeling free to be yourself = happiness. Feeling like you cannot be yourself is the root of ALL unhappiness. But how to be yourself is another very difficult story.
One way is a method I like to call, “Letting the empress take the wheel”.
I’ve been doing pretty well on the social front of the Sales conference, keeping in touch with myself and keeping my boundaries. But the same problems that plague me at home, plague me here.
Specifically, sleep, or lack thereof. I’ve been exploring the feelings that keep me distracting myself with games, videos, and other things. I’m trying to understand this desire, this hunger for stimulation that I have within myself.
It feels like a hunger, and hunger comes from emptiness. I wonder what I am missing in my life. I feel that it might be blood flow. I want to feel like this amazing warmth and flow to my body where my mind and body is open and stimulated.
Meditation has been a great boon to me, I’ve used it to calm down, to get answers and to reduce the inflammation I feel from lack of sleep.
I’ve also explored other physical avenues such as stretching, warmups and self massage.
My feeling is that self-massage comes first, then, mobility exercises and finally stretching.
Here are some of the videos I did today that were pretty good:
But my journey in this has just begun.
I really feel the need to understand what is the appeal of gaming and watching interesting videos internally. Perhaps that isn’t even the key. Perhaps the key is to give myself more freedom and permission. Perhaps this is a trigger for caging myself in and shaming myself so I’m not fully in touch with myself.
I’ll at least give it a shot. I realize there is a big fear in me that if I let myself do what I want, my life will go off the rails. I am going to face that fear and feel it and see where it leads me.
I’ve been killing it on the aim front. In deathmatch, I absolutely own.
I have been working on a new aiming mechanic, what I like to call the strafing clear. First, I went from silver all the way to gold simply off of working on my site clears. A few things I noted:
Practicing in custom matches is extreemly helpful
Way more helpful than DM flicks
Close angles call for very small clears, big angles are for big wide swings
I’ve been trying to pair this with the counter strafing mechanic and I think I figured out something.
Simply by paying attention to which side of the head you expect your crosshair to be on, you can get a much better strafing shot when you peek/clear an angle.
When you clear, you shoot like normal, if your shot is off, you adjust in the direction you need to.
I'm clearing CT, getting ready to clear the other side of container.
I see the Omen when I clear, I know my crosshair is on his left. So I need to adjust right.
I strafe right onto his head.
Instant headshot.
Let’s say you are clearing one angle, and an enemy pops up on your right. Your crosshair is far to the left of your target, so you quickly adjust, while strafing to the right to line up the perfect flick.
This is extremely useful because not only does this mean that your shots can be super accurate, it means you are moving a lot and making it extreemly hard to hit you (or atleast headshot you).
I think the coolest part, is when you strafe out in one direction, realize the enemy is to the other side of your crosshair so you strafe in the other direction to get the shot.
I also abuse the hit slow (how you freeze if you are hit) to get better accuracy and try to tap the enemy down if I am stopped midstrafe.
That being said, I think that there are a couple of different types of aiming mechanics in Valorant.
Spray control – used for wall spams and smoke spams and long gun fights
Strafing – used for clearing and gun fights out in the open
Distance shooting – used for really far fights
Holding – used to hold again specific peaks
Spray control
Got no real strat. Just try to watch the bullet tracers
Strafing
Watch the relationship between the crosshair and the head (whether left or right). Details are above
Distance Shooting
Use a lot of movement-based aiming for really accurate shots. Tap fire.
Holding
Prepare to duck behind cover, spray a few shots and duck back.
I’m thinking ahead to my next goal in Valorant. I think the next step is getting to Ascendant. It is going to take a lot of work just getting back to plat. Here is a VOD review where I got 1 kill the entire game. I reviewed the VOD with my brother’s friend who is a big brained diamond player.
It’s actually interesting, I think I need people who are higher elo but not too much higher because I need someone who can explain a few things, not everything all at once.
Some of the main takeaways from the VOD review on areas I can work on:
Playing off of teammates (using the analogy of treating them as a sky dog / sova drone / skye cabbage)
Follow them in
Use them as a distraction and to gather information
If they die, no biggie, they aren’t worth anything to me dead
If I cannot trade, I can just fall off
Gather notes on what the enemy patterns are
Think about how they play worked for them in the past rounds
Peek and clear more confidently
Don’t be afraid to make noise and util to clear a site, even if they know I’m there, it’s better than planting with no knowledge of where they are
Use skye binds to peek, don’t waste the util
Any information on someone in the vicinity or at the areas of no control (at the start of the round, or when we give up control) should be treated with extreme caution
It’s been officially four months since I posted about this challenge, so I think it is safe to say that this challenge is over…well not over per se, but evolved.
So what happened? First, I got very sick on the tail end of the fitness challenge. It was the sickest I’ve been in years and I lost a lot of weight.
Second, I have split this challenge into about 3 other challenges, two that I am tracking and one that I didn’t track but sort of is successfully completed.
Those challenges are:
The posture challenge. I literally came up with my own posture exercises inspired by some of the most common and popular posture exercises and I’ve literally done it. My posture is much much better than it was before and I continue to improve it every day. What is the best part? I now can tell and feel uncomfortable when in a bad posture. I didn’t document anything and may never do so.
The bedtime challenge. This is a version of a sleep challenge. My latest attempt involves ignoring the whole sleep side of it. Ignoring falling asleep, ignoring getting enough hours, or even habits of turning off electronics. I’m going to make it simple for myself. In the next 66 days (Dec 12, 2023) I will go to bed by 11 pm every night.
The jiujitsu challenge. This challenge was a couple of things but I haven’t completely formed my goals around it so clearly yet. The main ideas I have right now are: getting comfortable and confident in moving and utilizing my body to defend myself, getting stronger and more fit, and mastering a lot of jiujitsu techniques.
So, it is a bye for now on this challenge, but there might be some future retrospective posts analyzing some of the biometric data I gleaned from this challenge.
