So here’s what I learned.

Game 1
Game 1 our Cassiopeia didn’t bother to connect for awhile, so I had to take my teleport/flash Shyvana mid. Against Kassadin. I played so poorly in this game there’s not even anything to learn from it.

Game 2
I took Morgana mid against a Malzahar. Now, normally, my Morgana is pretty badass, but I made a strategic mistake in this game that I don’t think I’ll ever repeat again, and our jungler made a rather large mistake that cost me dearly…but also because I played a bit poorly.

My mistake? Trying to keep up in a pushing battle with a Malzahar. Under most normal circumstances Morgana pushes her lane like a mofo, Malzahar not only does that, he does it using less mana. So while I managed to keep Malz below half health the entire time, I was running out of mana and he wasn’t, and he was always right up against my tower.

Now, many months ago, I used to get frustrated with junglers that never left the jungle and never ganked. Now I’ve learned to survive in more difficult lanes and I generally accept that the jungler can’t be everywhere at once, although I may disagree with where they are at any given point. What our jungler Skarner did, though was just stupid. He was queued with his friend in top lane, so what he did was…keep ganking top lane. When I asked him, hey, could we get some pressure elsewhere, his response was the rather unhelpful “I’m shutting down top lane. Deal.”

There are quite a few problems with this. First, the entire point of the jungler is to stop people in lanes from doing stupid shit. Malzahar could push my turret as hard as he wanted, because he knew that Skarner wasn’t there. The enemy team knew where Skarner was at all points, and if they didn’t, they knew he was only ganking top, so mid and bottom just didn’t have to give a fuck. Meanwhile, their jungle Warwick had far fewer kills than our Skarner, but he made me and bottom play safe, because he wasn’t just chilling in a lane. Essentially, they had a jungler, and we had a duo top that just happened to be farming jungle creeps. Very frustrating.

What I should have done was realize that he was never going to capitalize on the fact that Malz was taking random shots of turret aggro just to push the shit out of me and that I was on my own. What I actually did was keep going “Hey, look, easiest gank in the history of ganking! Malz no flash!” All that happened was that I stuck around my turret too long and got dived for my troubles.

Game 3
I actually think I did reasonably well this game. I’ve been practicing my AD carry and my Corki was able to shut down a Graves in lane. The problem was that I was on life-tilt from the previous two games so instead of pushing to go to a lane where I’m good (mid or top) I let our Kennen and Talon take them. Kennen went 0-7 and Talon 0-4. By the time the laning phase ended, bottom lane was the only one that had done reasonably well, and their Nocturne was 4-0-4.

Sometimes I start to feel like I’m getting good at LoL…and sometimes I have nights like this one. There was only one thing to do.

Game 4
Play a game of Dominion where Peter and Kenny carried and I ran around going I LIEK DRAGGGGOOOONZ. And we won it, obviously.

You’re welcome, Google.

I guess I need to get my constructed skills back up to snuff.

I didn’t have quite as much to work with this time, so I had to actually play games and win them rather than just wait to take home packs, but it ended well. I lost exactly one game all day, but that was to Peter, so that’s alright.

[deck title=More Fair than it Used to Be]
[Creatures]
*1 Adaptive Automaton
*1 Aegis Angel
*1 Assault Griffin
*2 Blood Ogre
*1 Bonebreaker Giant
*1 Goblin Piker
*1 Grand Abolisher
*2 Griffin Rider
*1 Griffin Sentinel
*1 Inferno Titan
*1 Stonehorn Dignitary
*1 Stormfront Pegasus
*1 Wall of Torches
[/Creatures]
[Spells and Equipment]
*1 Chandra’s Outrage
*1 Fireball
*1 Greatsword
*1 Incinerate
*1 Mighty Leap
*1 Pacifism
*1 Swiftfoot Boots
*1 Timely Reinforcements
[/Spells and Equipment]
[Lands]
*8 Mountain
*9 Plains
[/Lands]
[Honorable Mentions]
*1 Celestial Purge
*1 Combust
[/Honorable Mentions]
[/deck]

I give some honorable mentions up there for a reason. I played against 5 black decks in a row to go undefeated, so I played as many games with Celestial Purge as I did without it. I never cast my Swiftfoot Boots once, but I sure as hell cast my Purge, including purging my own Mind Controlled Inferno Titan.

3 of the black decks also had green. The other two had either white or blue. Hellooooo combust!

So this is the deck I piloted through the New Phyrexia pre-release in Huntsville this weekend:

[deck title=Seems Fair]
[Creatures]
Alpha Tyrranax
Bellowing Tanglewurm
Blind Zealot
Chancellor of the Dross
Geth, Lord of the Vault
Iron Myr
Pestilent Souleater
Phyrexian Metamorph
Phyrexian Swarmlord
Tangle Angler
Wall of Tanglecord
[/Creatures]
[Spells]
Beast Within
Dismember
Enslave
Glissas Scorn
Grasp of Darkness
Grim Affliction
Leeching Bite
Parasitic Implant
Slice in Twain
[/Spells]
[Artifacts]
Nim Deathmantle
Tumble Magnet
[/Artifacts]
[Lands]
*9 Forest
*9 Swamp
[/Lands]
[/deck]

The other rare that I opened was [card]Asceticism[/card], which means that it was on-color and just not worth using. The only cards I sided in all day were [card]Corrosive Gale[/card] and [card]Darksteel Sentinel[/card]. The Sentinel match was the only one where I lost a game: the guy had the new black Wrath of God and [card]Wurmcoil Engine[/card], which explains why he came in well enough I think.

Best crushings of the day include having my opponent cast [card]Galvanic Blast[/card], Grasp of Darkness, and use [card]Barrage Ogre[/card] to kill my Chancellor, which I responded to by paying 4 to my Nim Deathmantle. Me forgetting was his only hope, although it did [card]Fog[/card] for a turn.

Or against Scott, where I had out Geth, Enslaved his copy of the Chancellor, and then Geth’d back [card]Myr Battlesphere[/card] to fight for me, after slicing it in twain.

It was a good day. And then the almost-box of product that I won (32 packs) that we split between us had 8 mythics in it. Seems good.

(4:33:35 PM) Peter Rosconi: Holyyyyyy shit
(4:33:43 PM) Peter Rosconi: C# parralelism is the shit
(4:34:31 PM) Graeme Hefner: Explain
(4:34:43 PM) Peter Rosconi: List actions = new List();
actions.Add(() => LoadIdentificationTexts());
actions.Add(() => LoadAssociations());
actions.AsParallel().ForAll(a => a.Invoke());
(4:34:57 PM) Graeme Hefner: …wait, seriously, it just runs them all?
(4:35:00 PM) Graeme Hefner: In parallel?
(4:35:03 PM) Peter Rosconi: Yup
(4:35:09 PM) Graeme Hefner: That is the most badass goddamn thing I have ever seen.

(2:16:15 PM) Graeme Hefner: Right as you said that, the Silent Hill 3 theme started.
(2:16:25 PM) Graeme Hefner: I miss that series so much.
(2:16:32 PM) Graeme Hefner: 1-4 are my favorite videogame series of all time.
(2:16:38 PM) Graeme Hefner: Mostly because of how they fucked up Final Fantasy.
(2:16:39 PM) Graeme Hefner: :(
(2:16:49 PM) Kenny Knapke: dude, i hear the riff from my ringtone in everything now
(2:17:29 PM) Kenny Knapke: just like random song, i’ll hear those notes at random and be like ‘wtf’
(2:17:32 PM) Graeme Hefner: “You’re Not Here” evokes such strong emotions, just hearing it.
(2:17:42 PM) Kenny Knapke: yeah
(2:17:54 PM) Kenny Knapke: should play that again
(2:17:58 PM) Kenny Knapke: or 2
(2:18:03 PM) Kenny Knapke: or the original
(2:18:10 PM) Kenny Knapke: i should get it on PSN
(2:18:11 PM) Graeme Hefner: I’m thinking of rigging up an emulator
(2:18:15 PM) Graeme Hefner: And doing a “Let’s Play X”
(2:18:20 PM) Graeme Hefner: Of my own.
(2:18:35 PM) Kenny Knapke: we should do dual commentary!
(2:19:01 PM) Kenny Knapke: i’d be cool watching
(2:19:08 PM) Kenny Knapke: and just being like ‘zomg, i just peed’
(2:19:15 PM) Graeme Hefner: hehe
(2:19:25 PM) Graeme Hefner: My commentary would be “This haunted house is the most brilliant thing ever.”
(2:19:30 PM) Graeme Hefner: “Oh my god, it’s that fucking room.”
(2:19:33 PM) Kenny Knapke: no
(2:19:37 PM) Kenny Knapke: we won’t even go in the room
(2:19:40 PM) Kenny Knapke: fuck that room
(2:19:45 PM) Graeme Hefner: I have to go into that room
(2:19:46 PM) Graeme Hefner: Every time.
(2:19:54 PM) Graeme Hefner: It scarred me for life.

Probably until I upgrade to a Sense phone soon. My poor Droid.

BW Minimalism! I think I need to change the titlebar colors next...

Gingerbread is pretty sweet, by the way.

The answer, my friends, is simple. I sold out. And I’m happy with that fact.

Tonight I’m going to go play a game that requires me to spend hundreds of dollars on cardboard every year. A few weeks ago I took a rather pretty gal out to dinner and a movie without even thinking about the money it cost me. These are things that middle-class people can do at will.

A few years ago taking a girl out to dinner and movie required mental gymnastics to figure out what I was going to give up to make that possible. I barely had money to spend on food, much less games, books, or HDTV. I had a Netflix account, the internet, and my old game collection, and I had to make it count. What books I did read were for classes or research, and that cost thousands of dollars in non-negotiable money a year. Money I didn’t actually have.

So why am I not a historian anymore? Because, dear Internet, as much as I loved spending all of my time solving centuries old puzzles, as much as I loved my job being to debate with other smart people over minute differences in our views on the sociology of people who were dead before the languages we were using to discuss them even existed…I love my consume whore side more. It’s just true.

I like my job, and I love the people I work with, but I’m not going to pretend I’m changing the world by being here. For all that I was accomplishing intellectually as a historian, part of me was deeply unhappy that I couldn’t enjoy a lot of the simple pleasures in life. Now I can buy a Kindle book without even thinking, I can order a pizza without wondering if I can pay rent, and I own a house. Would I eventually have obtained all of those things in academia? Of course! The difference is the time frames involved. Five more years of living in complete poverty and another five after that of publish-or-perish hell? In another seven years here I’ll be making twice what I would have made even with tenure.

So yeah, I sold out. I sold my intellectual soul for my materialistic pleasures. Sometimes I still worry that I’m not the person I could have been because of it. But most of the time? Most of the time I’m just happy that on Friday night my friends & I can go out for steak and pool without requiring an act of congress.