7mk's blog

OK here we go, I finally took the time to do a blog I wanted to do since I returned from Korea over a month ago.

On the 21st of September I took off on a plane for a 2 week trip to Korea.
I'm half Korean, half German (can't speak korean though )and the purpose of the trip was to visit family and obviously to enjoy this beautiful country.
(A little warning right from the start: this blog will not be about progaming at all.)

The plan was to stay in Seoul for a little while and then to go to Gyeongsan, which is the place where my family lives, and from there to rent a car, and just drive north along the east coast (we eventually got to the north korean border), always close to the sea.
Then before October the third we would return to Gyeongsang, to celebrate Chuseok, a big national holiday, which some like to call the Korean Thanksgiving.
I'm pretty proud of the pictures I've taken, especially since I pretty much learned how to photograph with my camera on this very trip.
If you like the pics you can put in some nice music and watch them all in a very nice full screen slideshow here
(button at the top right) - thx to Artosis for recommending me the site.

However, I put in the effort and also put most of the ones I uploaded into this blog (I do have about 700 more on my hard drive) , so
here we go, lets start with Seoul:

+ Show Spoiler [Seoul Pics] +

View of Seoul out of the Hotel we stayed in


The Hotel room - this is how you sleep true korean style


Now that's an awesome chair

Pictures from Insadong:
On a rainy day





On a sunny day



On the way to the tower, from which you can see all of Seoul, there was a little show:



From the Tower:












The entrance of the love hotel my brother and I stayed at our 2nd visit :D

The Market

Grandma



Counting the number of grandchildren that she still need to get married (turned out to be eleven )


Taekwondo Kid


My uncle playing Baduk (/Go) against my brother




After the loss

monks on their way to the monastery

A long way ahead








Angry wall is angry!


In korea dogs are a bit more careful..




Inside a cave

Spring


Catwalk

Always lots of water at every temple




Samcheok by night







A monk's house




"Whatcha lookin' at, foo' ?!"

There's a hole in my stomach



Near the North Korean border




North Korea! Doesn't look so bad from here ^^


Walk with me

Pictures taken on the great Seoraksan:











At the summit of Seoraksan resides its king on his throne




tricky, huh?!






The Orange...


Spider attack!

Go-Stop - the Poker game Koreans like to play

Cheosuk

this:

tastes about the same as this:



not just a giant in starcraft...


STX bigger than CJ??? That can't be right

My Dad and his alter ego



Grandma with her son in law

The queen of Korea

And that's me, hi TL.
Thx for looking at my pics, I hope you enjoyed them

So I already had several dreams about playing starcraft and a few about pro gamers.
Last night though it went a bit further I would argue when I dreamt some pretty weird dream about teamliquid.
There's surely a lot of fractions missing, and I'll probably mess up the order in which things happened but here is what I remember:

It started with me watching some.. documentary about baby animals, dont even know what animal, so then I wrote about how cute it was in a TL blog/article.. and after a few moments..
BAM I was on the TL front page, after Plexa had put it there! Awesome!
Next thing I remember is I'm walking towards this huge tower, standing solely there in the middle of a huge grass field.
I walk up there, to the top of the tower, thinking
this is it... the TL headquarters..., I walk up into the one room that is up there, expecting to see Manifesto etc.pp.
There's about 12 people sitting there, looking at me.
The only one I recognise though is Chill.
I remember feeling a bit uncomfortable/being a bit shy... and not much else.

Flash forward back to the Blog: The TL blog/article is now in my hands, like some kind of magazine, and I see that there's a loooot of comments on it. Lots of laughing, and I don\'t know if people are making fun of my blog or if they love it.
For a large part because I don't even remember by then what I wrote in the OP.
But then
some how I realise
It is all an evil plan.
By non other than

*badam*
Psyonic Reaver

HE (for some reason it wasn't Plexa anymore) put my article up there - in the pages right after HIS advertisement of some new tournament he is starting, which is including - as he claims- a 22 000 $ prize pool (and starts on the 22.2. or something, there were a lots of twos.)

Flashforward, I'm with psyonic reaver and I see how he's talking to some really shady mafiosi like people, trying to somehow get some money - because the truth is: He doesn't even have those 22 000$!
He's starting to get pretty desperate, the atmosphere is pretty tense. Psyonic was in a LOT of trouble.

Then at some point I think I was back in the TL tower, or just outside it, talking to some girl I know in rl, but I'm not gonna get into that ^^ (this is NOT what my blog title is referring to though )


So yah that's what I dreamt this night..like I said it's only in fragments and pretty nonsensical but I thought I'd share

Some of my thoughts why I dreamt the stuff I did:
Before going to bed last night I did two things:
Surfing on TL and watching LZ's stream.
On Lz's stream psyonic was online as "DJ", providing us with music(/klazart style commentary) so that explains some of it I guess, I've never talked to him though, except on the TL stream (I'm Dr.Awesome btw)

Then the blog part in my dream.. I guess I was influenced by reading the ninazerg troll/attention whoring thread.
Plus landing on the frontpage of TL must be pretty cool hehe.
And the 22000 $ tournament... well I'm sure like a lot of others I'm just excited about the 8th of November 2009

OK I'm gonna go get a life now ;P

hey guys, it's been awhile
As I mentioned in my last blog I went to Korea for my holidays and as promised I took a lot of pictures.
More than 2000 to be precise (although when I got home I quickly cut that down to about 800)
However, I got lazy and never bothered to start another blog with lots and lots of pictures cause it seems like quite a bit of work but I feel like I should do this at some point so why not do it now

So my question is what are the best web sites to upload your photos too?
It seems like a lot of great photographers upload their stuff on flickr, should I do that too?
I already got an account there but you can only upload like 100 mb per month which in my case is about 20 pictures so that doesnt help that much.
Do you think I should upgrade my account (costs i think 25$ for one year) or is there a better, free website do upload it to?
Obviously 25$ for a year really isn't much but if there's something better already there's no reason to pay.


Here's a little preview just to check out if it works and what it looks like:


P.S. it would be very nice if the site is fast at uploading - and if it automatically compresses the file size, does so BEFORE uploading the freaking picture (had some experience where it was the other way around)

Bye bye TL! I'll be cruising along the korean coast with my family for vacation, see you in 2 weeks, I'll probably be back with a blog with lots of pictures

weeeeeeee

Oh and Happy birthday TL in advance!

Hi, so I spent the whole day watching Lz's stream again.
At one point he's like "wtf I can't press anything, none of the hotkeys work"
everyone in the stream is like "lol haha, he held down the shift key or sth"

Then when all the streams went offline I finally played some iccup again, and the same fucking thing just happend to me over and over again.

Just out of the blue every now and then my hotkeys completely dont work, I think the mouse doesn't work either, I'm not 100% sure though.

Already lost 2 games with this.
In the games I won I was lucky it didnt happen in key moments. (Plus I was lucky my opponents were terribad)
I've never had anything like this before ever.
Does anyone have a clue what the reason for this is?

Yeeaaah it's just another one of those "hey everybody look at me, I don't suck as much as before anymore, but hey you saw the title, you knew what was coming.

Though I'll be honest I didn't know if I should write because noone would care.
However, I read GoShox's blog with his slightly more impressive feat and thought fuck it let's go.

Another reason is that I hadn't been feeling so great lately, which after playing some bad games against some koreans and some other players resulted in a dislocated shoulder
so I was particularly happy about this upswing.


So here's the story, I had been losing some games,as described in my first blog, until I decided not to play during korean hours anymore.
And when I realised that season 9 was about to end I set my goal to get to C- for the first time ever and I decided to get there the easy way.

So I opened up some games "D/D+ Destination, you P", as ZvP is my best matchup.
And boy, the skill difference between koreans and non-koreans is bigger than I remembered it to be, I played 4 games, and 3/4 were so one-sided and easy it was ridiculous. In the one game that wasn't - which coincidentally was against the only player who was D instead of D+, I got really lucky:
I had controlled the whole early game and it was looking good but I got a little lazy and let my macro slip so at one point he suddenly was in my natural with a huge army while only had little parts of my army to defend, he destroyed my nat, walked up to my main ---- bam, he lost connection to the internet. I get lucky, I win.

So everything was going right, I got two more wins against TL's own decafchicken and one more against some D player who seemed to be playing for the first time.
So here I am with 3038 points after a 7game winning streak right before the season ends.

Sure I didn't beat even a single C- player to get there so I'm not a real C- player, sure I got there by just playing my best mu, sure I would have gotten there much earlier if I didn't play such damn few games, but I don't care I'm just happy for now.
Also I just saw Inglorious Basterds, pretty fun movie

My goal for the next season is to get my ZvT on the lvl that my ZvP is, I've already beaten C- Ts with it, but I'm incredibly inconsistent at it and I still lose to D players as well.
So yeah I hope it'll be a fun season with me playing a whole lot more games than this one, and I hope I like the new pro league maps (tbh I'm not nearly as excited as I was when I first saw outsider and heartbreak ridge etc.)

Thx for reading

I'm not amazing at controlling my emotions.
Especially when playing starcraft.
Especially when my life isn't running so smoothly, which atm it certainly isn't. No girlfriend, I just failed my preliminary medical exams, and my mother already got on my nerves by bitching at me, about how much it annoys her that I get up so late all the time etc.. The funny part being that she did this before I was even at home, I was still in Leipzig, the city at which I go to uni and hadn't even arrived at my parents house in berlin yet.

But I'm not here to bitch or whine, I just wanted to give a little introduction.
So then I played a few iccup games, after a bit of thinking whether I should improve my ZvP (my best mu with an amazing solid D+ lvl..) or my ZvT (worst mu, D lvl).
And I got pretty annoyed.
I guess it was my fault for playing koreans but I got pwned by D players.. pretty bad.
And not in a nice kind of way, but in a series of losing vs 3 different P players with everyone going 2 gate/proxy 2 gate against me.
Then I played some more games, won against some really bad players, lost against some really bad players.
And I thought to myself "Fuck, have I really not improved at all?"
So then I played against another D+ korean Protoss (I see now he's C- with 27-18 stats)
And despite getting into a good early game position I get completely pwned the rest of the game and it was just ugly.

So then I lose it.
I walk to my bed and just pound my fists on them in pure anger, but only for about 1 second because then it happens.
The head of my left upper arm pops out of my shoulder and I lie there in pain, while there's nobody else at home.
So I'm rolling around, not really knowing what I'm doing, trying to get my arm in such a position that the head of my arm goes in there again..
it took a bit but after about 2 min it was back in there and I just thought
"...
Fuck I have a problem with anger control
..."
Then I went back and played some more games.. I also lost some of them but when I did, I managed to not go berzerk over it...


So there kids, take this as a lesson, it's just not worth it to nerdrage.

I'm gonna call my friend now and tell I'm not gonna make it to playing football cause my shoulder still hurts too much :/