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Valorant 13: Advice From My Brother

Byjack

Today I had a strategy session with my brother who is almost at the rank I want to be (Plat) about major mindset shifts I need to do to get out of Bronze and Silver.

Here are the main areas we came up with:

  1. Learn to play off of contact better: 
    • Swing when you see teammates swinging
    • If you see someone holding, pre-aim and get ready to trade
  2. Crosshair placement and preaiming
    • Holding for wide swing vs close
  3. Methodical clearing
  4. Ability usage
    • Have gameplan for ability usage for the beginning of every attack and defending round
  5. Map awareness
    1. Look at minimap more

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Core Beliefs 3

Byjack

Today I was talking to someone who thought that reprogramming your core beliefs and I’ve given this some thought.

  • It can be cringe if it isn’t genuine (forcing yourself to believe something that isn’t true)
  • It isn’t actually meant to be mindless affirmations but rather trying to get your mind to see a more balanced version of the truth. 
    • Ex: We are bad and our emotions do push other people away sometimes. But it’s not all the time. When you have a core wound, it’s something you are deeply afraid of and look for evidence for instead of looking at things clearly.
    • For example, if you believe you aren’t attractive, if ten people say you look good, and one person says you are ugly, you will believe the ten people are lying and the one person is telling the truth without being rational or logical about it. It doesn’t mean you aren’t ugly to some people, it just means it’s not as simple as you think it is.
    • If you successfully reprogram, you will take negative things less personally.
  • Reprogramming your subconscious means countering your habits of looking for evidence for the opposite of what you believe so you can see the fuller picture.
  • It can also be cringe if it is very surface level (mindlessness listing out five things)
  • Perhaps I want to take a more artistic approach and revisit different memories that contrasts against my core beliefs that takes me back to the feelings

Today I’ll do a little poem.

Zubats

It was nighttime in the art studios

Brandon’s smiling face

Shiny in the lights from above

He told me that the zubats were talking

And that he asked 

Jack or Michael

Jack of course

He told me that they said

Even though

They thought

I was a bit too arrogant

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Fitness Challenge

Byjack

In this challenge, I want fill out my body and get a lot more energy and health before my girlfriend visits me on July 15th.

This means that I have approximately 2 months in the challenge.

UNIT ONE: Baseline health: strong enough to exercise bulk and be normal health (21 days)

  • Week 1: Regen from tiring out (no matter how tired, wired or drained)
  • Week 2: Big appetite (increase hunger throughout day)
  • Week 3: Enjoyable rhythms (finding pleasing routines that further my goals in health, wealth and relationships)

UNIT TWO: Bulking and buildup: Gain 3 pounds of muscle (21 days)

  • Week 1: Try everything (bulking trial and errors)
  • Week 2: TBD
  • Week 3: TBD

UNIT THREE: Pushing myself, weight, strength, energy (21 days)

  • Week 1: Decrease resting heart rate
  • Week 2: Double strength
  • Week 3: TBD
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Sova Fanart Competition

Byjack

A few weeks ago I started the Sova Art Competition listed here.

While I was really excited initially about this art competition because I get to combine two of my passions (art and Valorant), I started to feel really overwhelmed because I don’t feel that I have enough experience with digital art and drawing from my imagination to get to the type of painting that I want to submit.

I think I will need to embrace failure and discover what kind of art is coming out for me, but also, I want to break down this challenge into lessons or milestones, just like with the Valorant challenge. The mindset I want to take is to create a syllabus in such a way that it is impossible for me not to win.

Today’s date: March 10th 2023

Submission deadline: March 27th 2023

Number of days remaining: 16

UNIT ONE: Sova Model Studies

  • Day 1 – Portrait
  • Day 2 – Half Body
  • Day 3 – Full Body

UNIT TWO: Dynamic Figure Drawing

  • Day 1 – Explore figure sketching techniques/simplification
  • Day 2 – Copy a pose from memory, trace, and correct original
  • Day 3 – Animate

UNIT THREE: Inspired Starts

  • Day 1 – Random Line Start
  • Day 2 – Famous Painting Start
  • Day 3 – Disliked Painting Start

*All exercises have the potential to be a final submission.

Days remaining after sova fan art drawing class: 7

Vision Challenge 2: Making Things Easy

Byjack

So immediately after thinking about the eye challenge post I just wrote, I decided that I’m making things too difficult and over complicated.

I should keep things simple and increase my likelihood of success.

  • Don’t limit screentime, instead, increase outdoor time and sports
    • I love being on the water, go swimming and paddleboarding more
    • Take off glasses as much as possible when it would make things easier
  • Simple simple measurements for eyesight (see video below)
  • Try drawing stuff from really far away for breaks in between long computer sessions

Current approx eyesight:

about 6cm away from phone for clear vision

100/6 = -16.6 diopters

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Valorant 7: Embracing Death (and Improving Movement)

Byjack

I’ve been thinking about what small exercise I can do right now to level up my gameplay and progress in Valorant since I haven’t had much time to play or practice recently.

After meditating on it a little bit, I settled on something that I know has held me back in Valorant since I first started playing the game – the fear of death.

The fear of dying in the game:

  • Makes me stressed out, and not think clearly
  • Makes me shoot too fast without aiming
  • Makes me frustrated when I lose
  • Makes me exhausted after playing for a few games

I’ve decided to learn how to accept death in the game, and to understand it better overall.

For example, understanding the “time to death” from an intuitive sense (and knowing how to extend that time) could be a GAMECHANGER.

It will intuitively let me know:

  • When to peek
  • If I whiff, whether I should peek back, crouch down, or keep spraying
  • How much time do I have to aim before I get killed by the enemy
  • Stay focused even after dying a frustrating number of times

So I hopped into a couple of deathmatches and gave it a shot!

I started out just trying to predict when I would die, but dying stresses me out too much to tap into my intuition (you need to be relatively clear-headed to feel things intuitively). I focused then on saying “die” aloud every time I died or predicting when I died. This is taken from a sports exercise of intentionality (you vocalize what will happen, for example, if you are playing badminton, you say “hit” when you hit the birdie, and “miss” if you miss). This exercise is supposed to train your intuition and powers of prediction and anticipation.

Some takeaways:

  • Crouching can make most people miss if they are shooting at you.
  • The direction you run and bunny hop is very important, need to figure out the most evasive ways. Sometimes running directly at them has zero chance of success. I need to work on sometimes facing the side not just forward to be more evasive.
  • The timing of peeking is important, how they have been spraying bullets is important.
  • When you are running behind a wall, before you peek, you don’t need to bunnyhop, just run normally, feel out intuitively, the moment you should peek out
  • I should start just by shouting out dead, every time I actually die, then try to predict
  • I need to aim higher to knife to the head, I keep knifing the body.
  • What I should try next is to stay alive for as long as I can.
  • I should also focus on letting the shock and frustration from dying play out before going again so quickly.

 

My intuition also tells me that I should focus on what I’m missing or losing when I’m dying and focus on those feelings right after dying.

Knee Mobility Challenge: Zion National Park

Byjack

It is about high time that I create a syllabus around my knee challenge like I did for Valorant and my Sova Art Competition. I want to increase strength and mobility in my right knee that got injured twice (torn ACL, meniscus and reconstructive surgery). Specifically I want to make it so I can hike in Zion National Park on the week of March 20th.

I have the following symptoms in the knee:

  • Feeling of discomfort standing and walking for long periods of time
  • Pain when trying to bend fully
  • Feeling of instability and fear of overextending the knee
  • Pain when sleeping on my side

I did have a lot of initial success in reducing scar tissues using a lot of gua sha, massage and scar gel. I do believe a lot of my pain in my knee is from the sticky scar tissue that is reducing mobility. These initial efforts actually made it easier for me to sleep on my side without lots and lots of pain.

As per usual. I will design this class with one mentality. Make it so its hard for me to fail.

Days until Zion trip: 9

Unit 1: Mobility

  • Day 1 – Surface Tissues
  • Day 2 – Tendons and Ligaments
  • Day 3 – Muscles and Joints

Unit 2: Strength

  • Day 1 – Core
  • Day 2 – Hips and Butt
  • Day 3 – Quads and Calves

Unit 3: Recovery

  • Day 1 – Cooling and antioxidation
  • Day 2 – Cleansing and Fasting
  • Day 3 – Fortifying and Nuition