|

From New York to Austin: Dance Practice

Byjack

I found some cool walls in NYC and decided to do some footwork practice

  • Like it switching footwork and rhythm
  • Could work on integrating body movement more, play with isolation and connected movement
  • Could work on integrating elements like the spin more seamlessly
  • Practice without music is nice cuz you make your own beat!

Then I practiced in a store window on the street. You can see a guy in blue recording me in the background!

  • Great isolation
  • Need to work connection area around the hips (feel like the movement ends)

Next, I flew to Austin, Texas. I found this cool industrial area where they had not developed anything yet.

  • It’s really nice to play with the movement
  • I need to work on moving my whole body together then isolating
  • Specifically need to connect and incorporate the hips more

Then my sister and I were at a club and I practiced some dancing.

  • Felt self-conscious in the club, could have slowed down and played with the movement more
  • People in Austin are crazy…why is that girl stealing my spotlight??? LOL.
  • Really like the waving and smoother movements. Would have liked to see that lower down with the legs and hips instead of strict footwork.
  • Dancing to music is hard, need to feel it out.

Similar Posts

| |

Valorant 31: Class in Session – Unit 1 Day 1

Byjack

UNIT 1: VOD Review | Day 1 – TenZ

Exercise: Imitate Tenz and imagine I am him

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsgDk8ojQjg&ab_channel=ValorantDAILY

Lessons learned:

  • I’m exhausted – fell asleep for a long time after watching and imitating for a short period of time
  • Knife to gun transition – keeping knife out until dangerous angles, then switch to gun or do a jump peak while switching if no room
  • Hold for peeks – clear where they might peek, not where they might be, continue to hold it or switch to another angle they can push you from
  • Set graphics to low
  • Don’t push smokes unless with flashes or off of someone else’s contact
  • Spray with good spray control – pulling down
  • Fall after spraying to reload
  • Jiggle if holding close to an angle
  • Warm up at the start of each round by flicking onto teammate heads

In game what I did very successfully:

  • Spamming through smokes – I got many headshots through the smoke
  • Holding peekable angles – I felt I got a lot more intentional to where I was staring
  • Holding off angles when watching for the flank (specifically I utilized the place Tenz hid on Pearl in the first round to get kills
  • Being more intentional of when the knife is out, I rarely got caught out with my knife. I figured out how much time it takes to pull out the gun, and I always timed it so that I pulled out my gun before peeking anything.

What I can improve on:

  • Pulling out the knife more often when I know no one is close
  • Spam more boxes
  • Utilizing jump peeking more
  • Making sure my peeks are still tight and clean and fast
  • Being much more focused on holding specific peeks when slowly scaling up

From Mortal To God

Byjack

“Every man is a divinity in disguise, a god playing the fool.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

The last few weeks have been exhausting and emotionally draining. I came to Austin to find myself and focus on building myself up and I need to focus my energy on myself.

I need to focus on my physical and mental health and I intend to use my blog as a way to track my thoughts, struggles and progress.

Things I want to focus on:

  • Thais Gibson’s personal development school – to focus on healing childhood trauma
  • Self massage, gua sha and posture – to align body and remove tension
  • Dance – to regain body awareness
  • Food and nutrition – to feed the healing of my body
  • Sleep – to regain energy and heal myself

Now the next piece is to break down every bit of resistance or difficulty in every aspect.

Personal development school courses

  • Lots of long videos
  • Worksheets
  • Poorly organized

Love and connection: work with Jenny or someone else

Certainty: Timebox, skim through entire course to get understanding

Growth: Capture video blogs throughout to see progress

Massage and Posture

Certainty: Every morning and night, indulge in the sensations

Growth: Capture pictures to see progress

Dance

Certainty: Watch old lessons every morning, feel body

Uncertainty: Try to create something new

Love and connection: Share on social media or with friends

Growth: Create videos of progress

Food and nutrition

Certainty: Cook enough food in the morning to sustain throughout the day, cook food prep that will make it easy and fast, have ritual around eating food (no electronics)

Love and connection: Invite someone over for lunch, share on social media or friends

Sleep

Certainty: Start brushing teeth around 10 PM

Love and connection: write a core wound post before bed or a poem or do some art

 

I also want to focus on weekly health audits and setting up a really nice space to shoot videos and work and play games.

| |

Valorant 23: Hitting Plat

Byjack

It has finally happened. I’ve hit plat in Valorant. A journey that was supposed to take 2-3 months, but instead took a year and two months (14 months).

Blood sweat and tears went into this challenge, and I learned something interesting at each rank.

IRON

Iron was an interesting rank because it was the rank when I was first learning how to use my mouse and keyboard in a game. I had never played a shooter game on the pc, and haven’t played many serious games at all on the PC. 

Getting out of iron was simply learning how not to make extremely basic mistakes such as reloading out in the open, not getting stuck on walls, planting and defusing the bomb.

BRONZE

Bronze was also an interesting rank. I started actually enjoying the game more here since I had a better idea of what was going on. Bronze rank was still stressful because I would get killed out of nowhere all the time.

I don’t really remember what I did to get out of bronze rank, but I think it had something to do with playing off of my util and learning how to check corners where people hide.

SILVER

I was stuck in silver for a long time. Silver was where I learned a lot about aiming and movement and got quite good at it.

What eventually got me out of silver was learning how to preaim angles.

GOLD

Gold is not a very interesting rank, everyone is pretty much like silver but with slightly better util and aim.

However, perhaps the most interesting thing in the whole challenge is how I got out of gold. I got out of gold primarily by getting more confident.

I did this in two ways:

  1. I focused on a few agents and learned how to get reliable value out of their util (Chamber tp locations, Brim lineups, Sova lineups).
  2. I dealt with some of my underlying negative self talk

I hear lots of things that people say about confidence:

“Stay positive”

“Imagine you are the best”

I always thought these ideas were bogus since I always thought confidence was about one thing: Feeling comfortable in your own skin.

But I started to doubt myself when I say professional Valorant coaching advocating (SEN Zellsis) for the “cocky confidence” mentality and I was stuck in silver.

But I think in the end, I was right. In order to be confident, you need to feel safe and at peace. The real question, is HOW?

Here are the main ideas:

  1. In order to be confident, you need to be ok with not being great (not being smart, successful, attractive, etc.)
  2. In order to be ok with those things, you need to process your traumas and limiting beliefs.
  3. In order to process, you must welcome in your limiting beliefs and incorporate it into yourself.

My limiting beliefs were:

  • “If I don’t succeed, I don’t think I’m worth anything”
  • “I need to beat myself up for every mistake and always think I’m worse in order to not mess up”

Simply by saying those things in my head, made me feel clarity every time I started to stress out and I suddenly felt calm. I gave myself permission to continue to berate myself (or not) but simply welcoming these parts in instead of avoiding them (and having them show up as unresolved stress), made me have a clear mentality that made my rise to plat.

I learned I have a huge amount of power, intelligence and creativity that are locked up by stress and fear. Slowing down, focusing on a few things at a time, and embracing my fears allows me to operate at my fullest potential.

What I thought confidence was:

  • Fake it until you make it
  • Cocky
  • Don’t care
  • Aggressive

What confidence actually is:

  • Ok with failing
  • Calm and clear-headed
  • Balanced
  • Trust yourself

The Way Star Signs Might Work (A Theory)

Byjack

One of my good friends is obsessed with star signs and by proxy, I’ve gotten pretty into them as well. However, I’ve had my doubts. While it seems possible they actually tell you about what kind of person someone is (although I find it to be far less precise than systems like Myers Briggs and the Enneagram) one thing has always bothered me. Star signs make no logical sense.

How can the position of the sun and the moon determine your personality? Do all people who are born at the same time and place have the same personality? Where did they even come up with the correlations? Isn’t this based on mythology?

The first thing you should know about star signs is that everyone has multiple signs. The sign that most people focus on is the “sun” sign (basically the positioning of the sun when you are born) as it is supposed to be the dominant sign. However, there are signs for the positions of all the planets and the moon.

The three most “important” signs according to astrologers at the Sun, Moon, and Ascendant signs (in that order), and actually gave me this idea of why star signs are not completely bogus.

The Sun, for example, is dependant on the month of the year you are born, the moon the time of the month, and the Ascendant the time of day and location of your birth.

What first got me thinking was that it occurred to me that the personality attributed to each sun sign seemed to match the general climate and weather of the months the signs were connected to. For example, Capricorns are people born between December 22nd and January 20th the coldest times of the year for many places. Capricorns are incidentally known for being cold, calculating, and driven by a need to succeed. Taurus, known to be easygoing and mild are born April 20 – May 20 the most warm and mild times of the year. Leos are known for their fiery passion and confidence are born between July 23 – August 22, the hottest times of the year. 

I asked before how everyone born at the same time in the same place had the same personality – perhaps they DO in some small part. Perhaps the climate and the time of day and month, the location on the planet have a profound effect on who we become and what we like because it determines the environment we are born in.

It is not inconceivable to me, for example, that babies born in winter may grow up to be harder colder, and more driven people (as a large generalization). And it’s not inconceivable that people born with the same Ascendant sign (with the same time and place of birth) might share a thing or two in common.

Even more beautiful is the thought that just as the position of the sun affects us with our seasons, perhaps the position of ALL the stars and planets affect us in some way – even if the effects are unseen and mysterious. Perhaps we are more a people of the stars than we know. I know I’d love to believe that.

Matches: First impressions of this technique

Byjack

Match 1

Reflections:

  1. Need to operate on a meditative state and trust strong intuition in order to reduce brain effort
  2. Warmup felt a bit unfocused, maybe want to try specific thinking strategies, especially involving exercise
  3. I have a bit of a headache now, but I don’t think it is because of the way I worked, I think it’s because of how tired I am, maybe need more rest + exercise, would like to try with a more exercise heavy strategy.
  4. Felt like MUCH longer than an hour, felt like I have been working for 3 hours.

Result Calculation:

  1. How much do I think this work is worth? I feel this work was worth maybe $200-$300. Rather tedious coding type work.
  2. How difficult intellectually was this work from 1-10? Maybe a 7.
  3. What percentile do I place this work in terms of innovation? 30% percentile
  4. Gains in communication and charisma? A little since I am making the code more readable and clear.

Match 2

Reflections:

  1. A lot less tension, with additional movement and breathing
  2. Still trying to get my mind to cut through problems like a knife through butter, not sure how
  3. Also felt like I was working for hours

Result Calculation:

  1. How much do I think this work is worth? I feel this work was worth maybe $150-$200. Lots of grooming, project management, some architecture, some coding.
  2. How difficult intellectually was this work from 1-10? About a 7. Maybe 8. Grueling but not that difficult.
  3. What percentile do I place this work in terms of innovation? 40% percentile. Not that innovative but definitely clever and requires some knowledge and experience.
  4. Gains in communication and charisma? Definitely helped make my flow much more clear. Will help with communication in the future.

The Jiujitsu Challenge

Byjack

I honestly don’t really know what I want to say about this challenge.

I know I wanted to learn jiu jitsu but it was for a number of reasons.

Firstly, I could feel myself falling apart and I couldn’t bring myself to work out. I’ve always loved martial arts and jiu jitsu was always something that I wanted to learn as a martial artist because of its practicality and strengthening an area of fighting that I am particularly weak in – which is grappling.

Secondly, I wanted to see more people in real life and make more friends. My girlfriend joined a running class and it helped her get into exercising more and also just interact with more people. I wanted to do the same with something that I love, which is fighting.

So I signed up to a jiu jitsu gym, one that I was really excited about because it specializes in no gi grappling (10th planet), but now that I’m rolling a few times a week, I kind of don’t know where to go.

I worry about my knee a lot, and that actually has given me more motivation to continue working out.

I feel much happier and have more energy after going to class. I feel myself getting stronger and having better posture.

But I still don’t know what to challenge myself with.