Similar Posts

|

Valorant 6: Feeling Out Aiming

Byjack

I realized something today. While deathmatch and the practice range are a time to focus on hand-mouse-crosshair connection (basically pure aim), that doesn’t work in competitive game practice.

When I practice Valorant in a comp game, I should be feeling out everything including game sense, movement, and ability usage. See, aim in a real game only matters if the other aspects are set up correctly. It matters which agent you play. It matters how your enter, what your ability usage and game sense tell you. I was able to get so many more headshots when I was starting feeling out the entire game not just my aim.

The one area I realized I need the most practice with is game sense – feeling out where the enemies are hiding and being ready for multiple to peak out at once. I either don’t check corners, keep my crosshair super low or lower my guard after killing just one enemy.

I was able to ace with just game sense, ability usage and a little aim.

In the clutch clip, the one area I can clearly see room for improvement is the use of my ult. It was good for the first shot, but the next two shots should have been very intentionally trying to clear out the enemy hiding spots.

Also, in the clip below for the last round, I can see my decision-making skills need work.

  • I need to do something with phoenix and reyna inevitably who were going to rush me. I also had my ult.
  • I could have jiggled the wall, then try to make my way to long.
  • I could have dodged the phoenix flash by hiding in the corner and facing the left.
  • Or I could have peeked hard and try to make my way to long.

Here are the full game clips.

|

Fitness Challenge 3: Sleep and Pills

Byjack

So I’ve fallen off the weight challenge a little bit due to losing my phone and having some serious trouble with routines.

But here are some updates.

In terms of appetite, I realized that stuffing yourself with food simply doesn’t work with me. I tend to feel stressed and bloated, and end up somehow losing weight as my digestion falls apart. A major tip for me that seems to work is eating enzymes. They always seems to help me a lot when breaking down food and I definitely seem to gain weight after that.

In terms of routine, I started implementing daily walks morning walks with a cup of tea and that has been working great. What hasn’t been working great is getting enough sleep and going to bed on time.

The main blocked appears to be Valorant. Today I thought about how I always focus on the problem itself as the issue but I was wondering whether or not the issue actually manifests earlier.

For example, I know in Valorant, I always blame my aim for losing gun fights, but I never think about what led up to the gunfight and how that might have put me in a unwinnable situation, or at least, a very difficult to win situation.

In terms of going to bed on time, I always blame gaming late at night. But thinking about it more deeply, I theorized that the issue actually occurs much earlier in the day, specifically during noon and afternoon. This is when I start to feel discomfort and turn to Valorant to start numbing out the pain.

Fix noon and I fix bedtime.

Today I tried taking a nap at noon and it seems to work. It’s 11 PM and while I feel pretty shitty from playing Valorant, I actually feel like it was easier for me to stop, and I may go to bed around midnight instead of 2 or 3 AM.

Today is actually the end of unit one (Baseline health: strong enough to exercise bulk and be normal health). The next unit starts tomorrow (Bulking and buildup: Gain 3 pounds of muscle).

I’m excited to see how I can start to use the rhythms I’m starting to build up, with the energy exercises and increasing diet to greater effects.

|

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

| | |

Profit in Peace 2: First Day

Byjack

Today is not the first day working on the Profit in Peace challenge, but it does FEEL like the first day I am living it.

Today is the first day when I dedicated my morning to finding my magical life. For some context of what that means:

Something that I still don’t really understand or feel comfortable with applying is the values that I believe in every day.

I think that writing honestly and focusing on myself in this blog every morning might actually hit all of these points:

  1. Honesty – well, this blog isn’t called unfiltered for no reason! I do remind myself all the time of the “if they don’t like me please leave” mentality.
  2. Imagination – for me, this blog is dedicated to all my imaginative parts: art, YouTube, philosophy, poetry etc.
  3. Intuition – this is the place where doing things “my” way is celebrated and I tap into what is the best way to do something (according to my intuition) rather than how everyone else does it.
  4. Empathy – this blog is a lot for my feelings where I process feelings through words, video, and images. It is a part of honesty too, honest emotion where this is my place to express everything imperfect.

I also like using the blog as my way of living out all my values and being the person I want to be because it really feels like I am sacrificing something to do this…in a good way.

JT Franco talks about if you aren’t willing to sacrifice for what you want, what you want becomes the sacrifice. In the end, I had no idea whether I would sacrifice time talking to my girlfriend, going on YouTube, working, playing games, or making YouTube videos. Those are the things I spend most of my day doing anyway. But none of those things seemed right. It was too blunt on an idea, how could you sacrifice all of YouTube? How could I sacrifice all of work?

But by sacrificing my mornings, in a way, I am also sacrificing all of those things. I resist the urge to listen to audiobooks, watch YouTube videos, check messages, or work in the morning. I dedicate all my time to working on my blog and all my challenges, thoughts, ideas, and philosophies.

I also feel a deep unease and anxiety keeping pace with me this morning:

I’m Afraid I My Boss Will Check

I’m afraid my boss will check

See I’m not working

It won’t matter that I have bigger dreams

it won’t matter if I did a bunch of planning

On the weekend

Feverishly, desperately trying to

Make my workday

Productive, efficient enough

To make up

To make it easy

For me to balance

I remember the look on his face

When I told him

I like to meditate

Skeptical

And

I also wonder

If finding my magic

Will make me feel sad and lonely

Like I did yesterday

I feel tired as I

Let go of trying to change the feeling

And accept it instead

Another anxiety that I have about this challenge or this “morning commitment” is just the sense of lack of clarity. I don’t know what I should be working on, or what I can work on. I think is the pressure of time. Or maybe its because I completed all the prework for the challenge and I don’t exactly have something to work on right now. I’m afraid every action is not “right”.

Is it the right thing to:

  1. Work on challenge videos?
  2. Work on editing videos?
  3. Work on reaching out?
  4. To focus on my body?

Wow there is so much here and I feel that I may be stalling. Scared to make a decision so I’m just rambling on a super long blog post that doesn’t really say anything in particular.

Well all I know right now is I feel like doing a bit of freewriting, fantasy writing or something of that nature. So I’ll go do that.

|

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

Vision Exam Challenge 1

Byjack

Today I booked at eye exam.

The date of the exam is Tuesday May 25th, which gives me about 6 days to prepare.

What I’m looking for this exam to do is to validate where I am visionwise and jumpstart my journey to better vision.

I’m going to be using the following ideas.

  • Feel the feelings
    • Don’t need to try to relax or try to tense, just notice the feelings and sensations
  • Feedback loop
    • Lots of vision tests to understand whether or not I’m improving or not
  • Analogies
    • Understand how vision works and try to strengthen and stretch where needed
    • Use the same knowledge from stretching a good posture here (muscles work in groups)

Understing the Eye

According to this article, it says:

“When you look at things that are far away, muscles in your eye relax and your lens looks like a slim disc.

When you look at things that are close, muscles in your eye contract and make your lens thicker.”

So the key is to relax right? Well, yes and no. Muscles always work in groups. If certain muscles are constantly too tense, then there are certain muscles that must be weak (since if one set of muscles never relaxes, the other set must always be weak).

After researching further, I found the muscle responsible for focusing the lens of the eye. It’s called the ciliary muscle and it looks like it doesn’t actually work in pairs but is like smooth muscle tissue of the stomach.

An interesting article is here and I signed up for the guys course to see what was up.