Today: Grindstone

De-Briefing from Pre-Emptive Updates: There's a pretty big downside to updates in my particular situation that I probably should have seen coming. My boss gets excited when I tell him what progress I've made, and then immediately suggests something ELSE I could do, on top of what I already told him I was about to do. For every report I give him, I get twice as much work and half as much time to do it. The more I report, the more he'll say: "ok, then I'll plan to hear from you again in an hour, when you've got that done." This escalates until I'm emailing at midnight on Saturday, with: "No, you won't hear from me. I'm going to sleep now. And I'm not going to work on this until Monday, just fyi."

Today, it's Nose to the Grindstone.

I'm going to put myself to work today, and (hopefully) do everything right, just so I can feel better about taking some days off next week.

Today: Pre-Emptive Updates

Get To Work Early? Fat lady is warming up, and she's on in five... :(

Debriefing from Drink Water: I expected it to be hard, but found myself chugging water during late night gaming to try and make it to eight glasses, and let me tell you, that's not a good idea. LoL doesn't take kindly to bathroom breaks!

All totaled, I drank about 5 cups. I might come back to this one and try it again.

Today, I'm going to Pre-Emptively Update people.

This is in the same vein as Speak Accurately and Use Topic Statements that we've already discussed (see other posts).

Wait, let me talk about the Meyers-Briggs classification system a bit, first. I'm an INTP, which someone dubbed the "Architect" archetype. (Someone who does not know any actual architects, and was only using it as a semantic term, because trust me, I know real people who have jobs as architects, and NONE of them are.... entirely sane...). One of the stranger things I found while reading about my archetype was a description of how everyone like me (and I guess there aren't that many of us?) doesn't like to "repeat statements that INTPs think are already obvious, for fear of sounding condescending or, worse, redundant and inefficient." This seemed to me to be both very true, and creepily specific. I do hate doing that. I do assume things are already obvious, so I don't waste time on them, assuming everyone else already knows and understands 'obvious' things and we can all move on. This is the source of our Speak Accurately and Use Topic Statements problems. And it may be the source of my current woe: Updates.

I cannot assume my boss and co-workers know what I'm doing. And one of my co-workers seems to have an annoying habit of updating my boss on everything "we" are supposedly doing, except "we" do not do anything together. I do all the work, God knows what he does all day. But I just fielded a call from my boss (he's not in the office much) that seems to indicate that he thinks that the other guy understands and is doing the work, whereas I'm some kind of dumb statue who couldn't code in a straight line if my life depended on it? I'm not precisely sure what happened, but the conversation left a sour taste in my mouth.

So today (maybe this week), I'm going to pre-emptively update my boss (and whoever else needs it) on whatever it is I'm doing, even if it seems redundant and pointless to me. It's better than trying to explain a big situation to him later when I can keep him up to date on what's going on now. I don't like it - I'd prefer just handing him results that I've already tested, fixed and perfected on my own, like my last boss - but the current environs clearly demand some change of plans.

Today: Drink Water

Debriefing from Redouble Efforts: It's not over 'til it's over. Down 2-1, with 2 days to go, gotta keep up the comeback.

Today, I'm going to Drink Water.

You know how everyone, everywhere, seems to say you should drink 8 glasses of water a day? Did you also know that they count soda and tea as negative one glass of water? So if you have a soda and a coffee and a tea, you need to drink 11 (!) glasses of water? I always say to myself: sure, I'll drink more water and less soda, but today, I'm going to make sure I meet this weirdly high-seeming benchmark, which basically means drinking water from sunup to sundown...

Today: Redouble Efforts

Debriefing from Throw Down the Challenge Gauntlet: Challenge thrown, but we are losing as of right now, so it's time to:

Today I'm going to Redouble Efforts!

Someone signal the Rally Monkey, it's time to make a comeback!

LoL: Soraka Files Back in the Grave

Ok, it's not that bad. Don't commit her to a graveplot just yet. But it was a horrible weekend of gaming. Not just a day or a night. But all weekend was a constant festival of losing. And one of those last games, half our team (all those based in Houston) dropped just as we were ganking level 1 in the jungle, and somehow - SOMEHOW - the other team thought the free kill and free win was offensive behavior and needed to yell at the rest of us about it. I was super confused. I tried telling them that all of the Houston-based crew lost internet, but they yelled back in all caps what a rager one of them was, for quitting after a "failed gank". It was pretty obvious he wasn't moving or fighting back, guys?

Anyway. So deadly. Don't know how we still occasionally get matched with mouth-breathers.

Also, had to play most of the night with HRF, and somehow I long for the days of RagerFriend, who is on temporary sabbatical from games. That's messed up, that is. But maybe RagerFriend has confronted his ragey nature and is working on it, a little bit. Now it's a little less "WTF, you just lost us that game. Way to go" and a little bit more "Oh. Well, we're going to lose this one." Whereas HRF has just started to move into that small area of faith - where he believes we can be better than we are. That's a bad pace for us, because frankly, we aren't getting any better.

Is that a bad thing to say? Nan calls that 'lack of vision' or 'no ambition'. I suppose I can admit I have no ambition. I have no desire to be the best in the world at this, or any other, game. I'm sure it's a weird personal failing, to have none whatsoever, but that's what it is. Yes, I suppose I could quit my job, grit my teeth, and play LoL all day until I get better or die trying. But... I'm not going to. So the fact is, I'm not going to get that much better at the game, especially if all you've got is scathing comments, HRF.

How bad can it be, anyway? After all, an unambitious person with superpowers is, at worst, a waste of potential. Just enough ambition, and you may just save the world. But too much ambition, and bam! Supervillain.

Today: Throw Down the Challenge Gauntlet

Debriefing from Get Some Sun: Hooray for sun! Hooray for nature! Hooray for not being in a windowless office until all hours of the night! Appreciating small things may help me make it through the day. A +1 to the Sanity Recharge Rate.

Today I'm going to Throw Down the Challenge Gauntlet.

This week's challenge will be: getting to work early. Whoever gets to work (amongst friends) first the most this coming week wins.... uh.... well I haven't decided yet. But I will win! You can mark my words!

Lol: Soraka Files Arise From The Ashes!

Riot's weirdly over-active April Fool's celebrations aside, it was a great evening on the Fields of Justice.

Actually we started off with a bad game. I have a small network of friends to play LoL with, and they're online in something of a cycle, according to their time zones in different parts of the world. We're on skype, so you may be able to understand my confusion when one of my friends just wanders off mid-match with no explanation. Hey, you were supposed to be our carry, come back here. And then, of course, our High-Ranked Friend (HRF) is like: "why aren't YOU doing any damage?" and I have no answer for him except: I'm bad at carrying. He and Super High-Ranked Friend (sHRF) are always phrasing things like questions, when they really mean them as insults. "You really thought that was a good idea?" "Who rushes Lich Bane?" "Where were you guys?" That kind of thing. At any rate, it was a ridiculous loss, and I feel sorry for the random 5th guy who was forced to lose with us.

After that, our leaver friend properly left, and HRF also had 'things to do' (more likely he wanted to stop losing with us losers) and left. A few more normal-ranked friends came online, and we proceeded to romp. I'm a big believer in the ranking system. I don't think it's all my imagination, either. I think there's a substantially higher chance that you're matched with proper players when you're not smurfing around, and I definitely feel like I'm getting facerolled when we play with HRF or (heaven forbid) sHRF. More on that in another post. The point is, we joined forces with some other players more properly at our level (and had a bad w/l ratio) and we were properly matched with a really nice 5th man, and Soraka shone brilliantly.

Our random 5th carried us to victory, while Shen and I saved him at every turn. The other team was savvy enough to realize that the Kassadin was the only one worth hunting down (the Twitch was invisible!) and he got focused a LOT. But somehow, we'd always pull him out of the fire. And he was super grateful! Very polite. I always appreciate it.

After that we played a few more 20-min victories where I saved folks and never got targeted. Amazing fun. Xian practices some Nocturne (who he loves - the nerf bat is a-coming, though!), Z practiced his Twitch, and Lin continued his AP Sion.

What to theorize from this? Don't play Soraka with HRF or sHRF. First of all, enemy team is probably too good. Second, our random 5th is invariably bad. Third, HRF at least, is way OVER aggressive when Soraka is nearby. He quickly gets himself into situations that I just can't save him from.

Then the problem becomes... what to play instead when roped into HRF games.

Maybe the real answer is, to not play with HRF or sHRF...