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Workpost 8: Crawling

Byjack

I did not wake up feeling good. I went to bed at 11:40 (much earlier to my credit! I ended up not working on one of my projects and didn’t play Valorant). However, I couldn’t fall asleep because I just showered and my body was too hot.

This morning, I went for a walk and I crawled for about 30 minutes. Crawling feels EXTREMELY good. I found a way to do it very naturally. I think it is funny how great hardship yet again provides so much value. I know how to crawl because I had to learn how to walk properly after messing up my knee so much that it hurt to walk. In learning how to walk I have a clear idea of how to shift my weight and do the same thing when I crawl. I’m going to try to crawl more throughout the day.

Other than crawling, I did feel extremely happy last night driving around but again in the morning I feel kind of lonely and depressed and I wonder again what I can do to soothe that.

Perhaps, I will play some Valorant today, do some art and music, and more crawling because those things all make me happy. I also reached out to a lot of friends yesterday and a lot of people wanted to talk today so maybe I will talk to them too. I am excited to go on the trip to California with my brother and sister!

As for the different projects, here are my thoughts:

  1. AI Consulting: I’m happy with the new direction, but nervous about shooting the videos
  2. Art Coaching: Really excited about my new ideas, interested in creating the materials that I’ve been planning for
  3. Art Coaching Product Research: Feeling pretty anxious about this since this is what I dropped yesterday due to time constraints
  4. Demo work: feel bored by it
  5. I also want to revist my knee challenge for my spar with my friend coming up and my knee challenge for the same reason

Sova Fanart 2: Class Unit 1 Day 2

Byjack

UNIT ONE: Sova Model Studies | Day 2 – Half Body

Today I was supposed to work on the upper body, but I found a really cool pose and decided to work on that instead. Unfortunately, it took a very long time to sketch out and I was also very exhausted from drawing until 4AM yesterday. I also had a lot of travel and work coming up so I was a bit stressed and overwhelmed.

I feel sometimes that I put too much on my plate for a challenge. I definitely felt overwhelmed coloring a drawing with this much detail.

This was the rough sketch:

And this was my attempt at more refined line art:

And for reference I used this pose:

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Valorant 29: My Valorant Fears and Emotions

Byjack

I wanted to do a bit of a post to understand how I am feeling right now about the Valorant challenge. I know I feel incredibly stressed, angry, and depressed because I feel like I wasted all my time on Valorant. So much time trying so hard to be good, but nothing seems to really come of it. Sometimes looking at my VODs I feel like my gameplay is the same as it was before.

I don’t really know what is going on and why it seems like I’m new to the game every time. I don’t know why I’m overthinking everything. Why is everything so hard?

I wish I could see major mistakes in my old gameplay.

I guess watching more VOD reviews will help me understand. But that takes so damn long. Maybe it means that there are still opportunities to play much much better. I feel that I maybe have gotten much better but it doesn’t seem to translate over to comp. Maybe it’s also something about understanding the maps better. I really get the sense that I got to plat last time by playing more comfortably on agents and on maps. I think I understood just how to play each map better. But I want to be a more complete player. I want to play with better movement and peeking.

Something else that I feel that I missed out on was just having more posts about the emotions I was feeling. It makes me sad that all my Valorant posts were about techniques and none of them were about emotions.

Valorant has a lot of nice emotions for me. I met my girlfriend on Valorant, I had a lot of friends on Valorant. These days I play mostly alone, but I still like the world. Cool agents and fun to get on to all these different teams. I love it when I have some really fun crazy game sense timing lurks. I guess that is one way that I got significantly better than before.

I wish I had VODs from when I was in iron. I feel that jump from iron to silver was the large one. The jump from silver to plat is weirdly small.

Ok. So I just spent a good hour or so just watching my VODs from bronze until plat then back to gold. I actually feel my overall movement is better and more consistent. The only difference in plat is that I was calmer and held an angle for longer. I also did more wide jiggles. I know for gold I held a lot more angles, and made sure to hold them wide because they would often wide swing everything.

Looking forward, I would be so happy if I kept calm and held angles for longer when moving around the map, held for the wide swing more often. Then when fighting an angle, I want to be more aggressive, swinging very fast and hard, but stopping at the edge and fighting, not leaving until I try to kill them, maybe just letting go of movement keys or crouch spraying. I would love to see my fundamentals get really really good, to a level I know they can get to.

Why I Loathe Feminists

Byjack

Today I was arguing with a friend about the popular streamer Pokimane, and I was getting really really angry. I wanted to know why. 

I realized recently that the reason why I hate her is because she represents everything I detest and loathe about women, feminism, and society. 

While I’ve always been sympathetic to women and women’s struggles growing up – I was always close to my sister (who is a year and a half older and very close) and has always felt closer to women as a whole growing up (I did a lot of art and often had mostly friends that were girls), when I grew older things changed. I still can appreciate the struggles that women face in terms of objectification by society and trying to find a place within male-dominated positions in society (such as the C-suite, IT, and sales) but my view on feminism has shifted from strong positive feelings to mixed feelings and sometimes outright hatred.

The way I see it, feminism is the reason for the following experiences I’ve had in my life:

  • Seeing all myself and other male colleagues who were above average intelligence struggle to find employment after college while all the women I knew had offers through the wazoo (even when they were average). What is even more interesting about this is that I work in a STEM field (I suspect recruiters try to hire an even number of men and women, but since women are so rare, they are in higher demand).
  • Learning that the “wage” gap between men and women was about 1 cent to the dollar when correcting for the same years of experience (women naturally have less when they have kids) even though they most common statistic cited is 18 cents to the dollar.
  • Getting constantly ignored and rejected in the dating scene without a hint of empathy from women (who seemed to have no idea the privilege that they had in this respect).
  • Literally felt afraid to ask women out because of experiences that made me feel like a woman might accuse me of harassment (nothing happened, but it’s a constant fear most men share after Me Too went from exposing some serial harassers to just talking about guys women think are “creepy”).
  • Seeing many women in my career perform average or below average claim that their work is not appreciated that they suspect discrimination is the reason that they are not promoted or raised.

It’s ok for women to reject men. It’s ok for women to want equality and to question why they were not promoted. It’s ok for women to point out times when they feel harassed and uncomfortable. Also, it is a valid concern that women have to choose between being a mother and being successful in their careers.

However, I hate the fact that feminists simply don’t understand or don’t care how hard it is for men. They support toxic women and toxic behavior as if women are always right. They often condone dismissing and invalidating problems that men face today. Men never talk about this because we feel like complaining is weakness and we should just “man up”. 

Here are the types of things I hear women say:

“Oh, so you were afraid that it would be seen as harassment? Just don’t harass you’ll be fine.” (Are you fucking kidding me? I know many great women but are you literally suggesting every single woman has perfect morals? Why even have innocent until proven guilty? What if she misread something?)

“Are you SURE she is actually mediocre? Maybe it’s just your bias?” (Yes I fucking know, they aren’t able to get the same work done at the same quality).

“Suck it up, everyone gets rejected.” (Have you ever considered that it is waaay MORE rejections than you can imagine? How about a bit of empathy?)

“It’s men’s turn to get discriminated against.” (So we are taking turns now? Should we resume discrimination against women again in a few years for payback?)

“He’s disgusting and creepy.” (Ok some men are…but sometimes this is just used as a way for women to justify hurting the feelings of someone they cannot be bothered to empathize with).

Men surely have many advantages and privileges in society, but so do women, just in different areas. As Jordan Peterson says (yes I know he’s a bit extreme but he’s the only one speaking the truth sometimes), men are much more likely to be lonely, depressed (commit suicide), unemployed, and go to prison. Women have lower expectations to perform than men (although this can backfire into mansplaining as people assume women know less) and have a much bigger selection when it comes to dating. Also, if they are attractive, they can get away with almost anything. You name it – being boring, rude, incompetent, even immoral.

I highly suspect that MOST women, if they lived a day in a man’s life would find it is significantly harder (despite gaining a number of privileges). They would realize how so many “nice” people are so much meaner when you are a man, that no slack is given to you or your feelings (crying will only get you laughed at), and that women can be extremely cruel and manipulative to men.

This brings me back to Pokimane. I don’t know her well enough to say for sure, but she strikes me as someone who gets away with fake and toxic behavior because she is famous, attractive, and a woman. And I fucking hate it.

Recently she announced getting to Immortal in Valorant on her own and lashed out against people who said she was boosted (got a rank via help from other people). 

Looking at the gameplay (below) she herself uploaded to Youtube, it’s very clear she is boosted. BY A LOT.

What I see:

  • Gold level utility usage (ok placement, uses util a lot)
  • Silver/Gold Aim (good crosshair placement)
  • Iron/Bronze Movement (absolutely no jiggling, strafe shooting, or creative movement)
  • Bronze Gamesense (horrible decision making, passable map awareness)

In other words, Pokimane is AT MOST platinum (which 2 whole ranks away from Immortal). Her skill level is honestly closer to Silver or Gold in my opinion.

However, people are still defending her, calling her critic “haters”. Some people even use misogyny to explain why people think she is boosted. This boggles my mind and makes me furious.

Why? Why not just hold her accountable? Why isn’t SHE just honest and try actually climb to Immortal?

When will people stop using feminism as an excuse to praise women who are dishonest and incompetent? When will they realize the tremendous privilege someone like Pokimane holds as a young attractive woman?

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Valorant Challenge 1: Spike Rush Cypher

Byjack

Today I didn’t have the time or the pc to play competitively. I played a couple of spike rush games as cypher.

Impressions:

  • Hot damn it’s hard to play cypher. So much to put down in so little time. The cages are HARD to use as well.
  • I don’t know if playing different agents will help me play. Maybe I should just refine my mains.
  • I think agents like cypher play around their utility (they almost never peek unless they have to). I wonder if I should do that more with all agents (play around flash and grenades, shockdarts and mollys)
    • Makes me think flashes are waay worse at getting info. It’s all or nothing. The timing needs to be right and you need to be able to push with your team to gain ground rather than flashing randomly.
  • To counter a cypher I need to guess where the camera is and shoot it out. Requires knowledge of common cam spots. Dunno how I will get that knowledge without watching tons of videos. Poopers.
  • Cage + wires can be OP since wires reveal and cage block their vision.
  • You need to be f*cking fast on the camera or they will shoot it out.
  • Crouch and shoot wires head level to get wires you cannot jump or crouch over or under.

I feel like my posture was pretty terrible after the practice. My left shoulder blade was hurting and my stomach was clenched.

I need to work on processing the emotions better and feeling my body more (using the sensual feeling technique I will discuss later). I will also need to work on posture exercises way more. After working my body for about 20 minutes with shaking, stretching, and posture exercises, my should mostly doesn’t hurt anymore and my digestion feels much better.