Henroid

That was surprising. I was expecting Team Liquid to give up at least one match in either of those series but they dominated the 2nd match against MVP. And that Lycan was like the best I'd seen him played ever.

So during the qualifiers I pretty much started calling Team Liquid the Oakland Raiders, because they choke a lot. But man, their matches against CIS just now were really well played. That was amazing.

Holy crap, the way that match ends is bananas.

Played literally the worst match out of all 140ish I've played ever. The enemy team: Timbersaw, Invoker, Riki, Rubick, and Lich. It's formidable as hell if they come bombing in abruptly. My team was like a bunch of misfits. Pudge, Shadow Shaman (myself), Mira, Bounty Hunter, and Sniper. Hypothetically good. Execution: God awful. At the start of the match Pudge calls mid, I call bottom. I reinforce my statement to go bottom again when I go out to ward before the match starts prior. Sniper goes top. BH says he'll go bot with me. Perfect. As I'm heading down to the 2nd ward spot / bottom, I notice that Mira is waiting there too. We keep telling Mira to go top over and over. My move speed is garbage and she'll get there way faster. No response. So we end up tri-laning for a couple minutes before Mira finally gives in. Not exactly a team player. Now I'm not an expert with SS, this was my first run with him. But I've watched him enough (and practiced on bots to get a feel on his skills) to get an idea of what to do and how to do it. During laning, I catch a couple guys in the hold and BH goes at them. Great, we have that much coordination at least. For the moment. But it fell apart quickly. He quickly picked up a case of "too timid to follow through on initiations" and would leave me and others hanging. Plus he didn't pick up on Riki having a gem of true sight and would keep doing failed stealth flanks, dying on his own. He gave no response to tips about avoiding stuff or following through on team fights. Sniper starts giving up deaths. I missed him playing the whole first half of the game but I realized he wasn't auto-attacking a damn thing. He was constantly burning his mana on his ultimate and at one point during a failed team fight declared, "I was out of mana" as to why he didn't participate in it. I dunno if he was doing it on purpose or what. He spent the entire match claiming he was being left hung out to dry, but was instead wandering off when we were pinging specific defense points. He also wasn't buying any items or farming at all. I mean, he had a Ring of Aq and Power Treads... 40 minutes into the match. WHAT. Mira was at least trying to play right, but suffered from timidness for team fights. Pudge and I go in, and Mira would literally run away. Just like BH and Sniper. Pudge was the one competent guy on the team. He scored a ton of kills, was just shy of 100 natural strength. His hook shots were pretty good. But for the first half of the match, he didn't seem to have any faith in me supporting fights. As soon as I'd show up, he ran away. It wasn't until the end of the match that he actually started following through. My problem was trying to be aggressive on warding, especially for sight on Riki. I got caught more than once alone, with nobody following me to protect me for 15 seconds. I was also trying to be aggressive on ganks. I can't number how many times I would catch an enemy alone with one or two teammates nearby, snare them, and then watch my team run away. Then as I would run away after snaring, the enemy team would reinforce. We would've stood a fighting chance together in each situation - making it a 3v2 for example since one would be dead. Instead it became 1v3 as I tried to run and NOPE. And defense on towers? My team would hover around waiting for the enemy to move up. They did so, I shoot some lightning, turn a guy into a chicken, I see one shot from Mira, then I'm alone and our tower gets pummeled after I die. THEN my team moves in. Like they would wait for me to eat it.

It took me three matches but I finally got a win as Naga Siren. Except for the second game, I was having a lot of fun. Great hero to play as. I thought the third match was going to be another loss because I was solo in my lane against Dark Seer and Faceless. I had to keep my distance and wasn't getting much in the way of last hits. But then things kinda turned around when I managed to catch Void, who wasn't terribly low on health, in a net right at the foot of my tower. I splashed him and he got some distance from me, but a couple of trailing tower shots finished him off. It felt so good enabling that. Dark Seer went down shortly after that. Also, apparently her ultimate stops all forms of damage ticking. Enigma and Venomancer each used their ults on a group of the enemy team, but my song was stopping the damage from either source. I stopped it immediately when I noticed but it was too late, wasted opportunity.

Nature's Prophet is total bullshit. Like broken and unfair. They need to nerf his warping around hard, like make it disarm him for a time. Edit - Like for every x distance traveled, disarm him for y seconds. For example, every 1000 units = 1 second disarmed with a cap of 6 to 8 seconds.

So my father would listen to a bunch of different music when I was growing up. I listened to rock and roll as a result of my older brothers being, well, older and exposed to it, but my father would listen to rock, jazz, hip hop, soul, soooo much stuff. Which is weird because he's all up on his Mexican heritage / culture (surprise; mariachi music was another thing of his). Anyway, flash-forward to a few years go when House was a TV show people were into and people became aware of Massive Attack for the intro. I didn't realize it, but my dad was listening to Massive Attack in my youth, the most prominent track being this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2e72HPwrhE

Another thing I don't like: Playing with "friends" who spend all game nitpicking over shit that I do. I don't even know how they find the time to do it during play. I'm playing a match as Spirit Breaker, who is my best hero. I'm in the 60-70% win ratio range with him. I like to think that I know what I'm doing. So I queue with some friends for Random Draft and SB is in the pool. "Oh my best guy," and it's okayed that I take him (for whatever strategy we had). What do I get from the start of the game? A fucking guy I know breathing down my back about what I'm doing and how it's wrong and should be doing this or that instead, etc. I'm already stressed enough as it is playing with friends because I'm afraid of my awfulness at the game showing, being having every detail of my playing being commented on is just too much for me to handle. I can't take that shit.

Happy Independence Day. https://twitter.com/geekfitgirl/status/485089698692751360

Nothing makes me want to punch people more than purposely feeding. I just played a 'match' where two guys on my team called top lane early and proceeded to throw their bodies over and over to the enemy. So fucking mad. That's 25 minutes of my life just wasted.

Holy shit.

Naturediaps, for video game babies.

Yeah this was a good episode. I like the discussion about Shadowblade vs. Blink Dagger, because everywhere I can talk to people about DotA 2 has been discussing that over the last few days. I posted this in the DotA 2 thread but over the last few days I've also seen a surge of Shadowblade over Blink Dagger, which I think is just a matter of people trying to play against the expected curve. It can be obnoxious when Kunkka suddenly appears to track you back and smash a ship into your face, and also get away from all that. I played a match a couple days ago where everyone on the opposing team had Shadowblades and they were just ambushing us (because it was all-pick random queue, my team wasn't organizing to defeat that tactic). Also liked the question about favorite lord to watch and favorite to play. I love playing as Lycan, who was my best lord (until recently when I jumped into a new bracket of players to queue with). He can't do much at the start to kill other players, and probably throughout most of the game. He's not the kind who can just go gank, which I hate because some people are under the impression he can - he has no natural disables, he's just damage output. But split pushing is what I love about him. He's kind of my favorite guy because I can push with my team if it's a team that knows how to team-fight, and in the instances where my team is antsy about team engagements I can just go do my own thing to split push and give them a better chance (since my push will draw one or two enemy players away). Puck is my favorite to watch, and it has everything to do with his mobility.

Tegan is quickly becoming my new favorite.

I'm not sure about "everybody" buying Blink Daggers. Over the past week, I've actually played against a lot of teams that had nearly everyone get Shadowblades. Which, yes, it can be countered, but it's expensive to counter against and it's unwise to make it a gem of true sight (because that investment is just lost, unless you always wander as a team, which destroys your farming ability).

I'm listening to the email read again and it's so fascinating. I love how lawyer-driven the questions are, over sponsorship. I've been getting increasingly hostile toward corporatism and it's so bizarre how strong the barrier is toward product endorsement. I just hate it all. Gah. Anyway. The most awkward questions though were like the ones about hispanic / black demographics. I can understand in specific contexts where that sort of data can be important, but when it's coming from a marketing angle it just puts me off. I'm not a parent but now aligned against Pampers brand products. Long live Nature Diaps.

Actually if you look at the meta-data (album, track #, etc) it says HIDEO.

I'm getting to the Sonic discussion and, forgive me everyone, but I feel obligated to point out the "Bad Sonic Fan Art" Twitter account. Disclaimer: internet wtf will be found.

It isn't taking much to sell me on Shovel Knight. For the last week or so I've seen people talking about playing the game a lot, but I got no details.

I don't think we've had an episode of Nick and Danielle sitting in so that'll be a cool dynamic to see. Or hear, whatever. Also I think I made a joke in an email once about the host seating rotating.

And I'm Nick Breckon.

Or "Super."

I'm not decided on whether or not I like the rarity we hear about the significant other Thumbs. On the one hand it makes it more of a treat. On the other, I listen to talk radio and consider that standard.

All this talk of older Idle Thumbs reminds me of the episode when Nick was just on this war path of saying every game he played for that episode being bad, culminating with a "And Fat Princess was terrible too." Just this huge shotgun of "pffffffffffffffffffft." Loved it. Also I miss Nick. And Steve needs to make more appearances.

TRIPLE POST. Playoff predictions are available now. A minimum of 120 games are gonna be played during them. I feel confident with some of my choices but I know plenty I'll be changing up. One thing I have no idea how to pick on is the biggest gap in GPM. The largest sum is 50k+. How the hell, does that actually happen?