Emptyeye

Yep. It’s my new obsession, again.

Anyway, as fun as it is, I’m of the opinion that the Campaign Mode of StarCraft really doesn’t do a very good job of preparing you for online play (Whether or not it should is another subject, I guess). Most of the missions that are the traditional “eliminate your opponent” variety can usually be won by amassing huge amounts of one given unit and going nuts all over the map, which will generally get you steamrolled in online play.

Oh well.

This video will be of no interest to you whatsoever if you don’t play StarCraft. It’ll be twelve minutes of overenthusiastic Koreans shouting things as someone gets destroyed in the game. Nonetheless, I’m going to attempt to give it context anyway.

Imagine if, in Super Bowl XLII, rather than merely defeating the mighty juggernaut that was the New England Patriots in the last minute or so of the game, the New York Giants (Whom you may remember had “no chance in hell whatsoever” of winning that game according to the blantantly pro-Pats media) instead humiliated them from start-to-finish, running up the score on them to ridiculous levels and continually going for two just to humiliate them. Now imagine you got to see this carnage from the view of one of the Patriots players. That’s essentially what this video is in StarCraft form; it’s from the point of view of a player called “sAviOr[gm]“, then considered the best StarCraft player in the world, and it’s game 3 of a 5-game final in one of Korea’s major StarCraft leagues. In this particular series, his opponent, a then-unheralded “Bisu[Shield]” (Who would himself ascend to the title of “Best StarCrafter in the World” for a time), has already won the first two games by essentially showing sAviOr a gameplan he has never seen before, and that sAviOr either can’t, or stubbornly refuses to, adjust to. The third game plays out pretty much the same way, as you get to watch Bisu make sAviOr look like a complete chump through sAviOr’s eyes.

If you don’t want to watch the whole thing, skip ahead to about 11 minutes in when you hear shrieking that seemingly rivals that of a Beatles concert. Completely insane. Also note the final insult to injury as the game for some reason refuses to allow sAviOr to save the replay.

This past week here on the site, not much happened, though if you pay close attention you’ll note I updated the about pages to make them more current (The About the Site page had a reference to the long-gone donation button). And other than that, I’ve really been pretty lazy.

Neil Peart once wrote “If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice”, and I suppose that’s what I’m doing at the moment with The Six Day Exile–rather than decide to forge ahead without my Echo Indigo, or see if I can fix the problem (Outlined here), I’m just sort of letting it sit in limbo and playing lots of StarCraft, which I continue to be terrible at. I’ll have to eventually find a style and stick to it; I actually found a neat little map that trains your multi-tasking abilities, which I’ll have to practice a bit until I can improve those skills.

Until next week…

-EE

There are enough blogs out there about companies giving awful customer service–Verizon Math, which spawned from Verizon’s inability to tell the difference between “cents” and “dollars”, is probably my favorite–that I wanted to share one customer service call that was actually as pleasant as could be, given why I was making it (Which was to make sure I actually got my electric bill. Yeah, I could’ve played dumb for awhile, but fear of ultimately having some collection agency at my doorstep told me this was probably not the wisest course.).

So yesterday I called the customer service line of Connecticut Light & Power, to have the billing address changed to something that the post office will actually deliver to. After wading through the various automated menus, and attempting to pick the option closest to “get billing address changed”, within literally seconds, a very nice young woman named Hannah is on the line helping me with my problem. As a bonus, she spoke very clear, unaccented English (I don’t want to sound racist/ethnicist/whatever here, but to heavily paraphrase Daniel Day-Lewis, if your accent prevents me from understanding you, and my completely different accent prevents you from understanding me, and we have no other method of communication….this…screws…my…customer service experience! IT SCREWS IT UP!)..hooray! After I sheepishly admit that I don’t know my account number (An effect of having not yet received an electric bill), I proceed to give her my service address, and in about two minutes, I’m no longer a dirty energy thief (As it happens, they hadn’t sent out my first bill yet anyway, but better safe than sorry when it comes to something like this.). One of the easiest service calls I’ve ever made.

So hooray to Connecticut Light & Power for actually employing competent customer service people whom I can understand without effort!

Yep. I’m working my way through the campaign mode, again, and saved once in the middle of Terran Mission 9. After realizing that my previous strategy wasn’t working out (Hooray running out of minerals), I re-loaded from the save and tried a different tactic: Mass Battlecruisers. I managed to have just enough resources to make 4 Battlecruisers, which got me just enough land to grab an expansion that formerly belonged to the computer-controlled Protoss. I then lifted off my command center to the area and dropshipped my SCVs there to get more mineral collection going, made more Battlecruisers, and completed the objective.

It’s funny that most of you won’t know what I’m talking about, and those that will no doubt agree with the topic title. Oh well.