Barcraft, Bronies and Black Sheep

There have already been several Barcrafts in Leipzig, but the Barcraft for MLG Summer Arena was the first that had been organized by our Starcraft Leipzig group.
All in all the event went really nicely, after a few internet connection problems at the start everything went well, good games and during downtimes we had showmatches and a Quiz we had prepared the day before. All questions Starcraft related of course.

It's vacation time, and our first stop was my girlfriend's aunt's farm. I got to meet her cute children (6 and 8 years old) and got to abuse them as photo models.

It's crazy to think how different these kids grow up compared to how I have. The boy's favourite topic by far is tractors, most of the toys in his rooms are tractors, he already drove the real ones hundreds of times, also drove a harvester-thrasher a few times. On the other hand he doesnt have a PC, doesnt have a console, has basically never really played a video game in his life, doesnt go to the internet and lives in a village with like 100 people in it, where everyone knows everyone while I grew up in a city of 3.5 million. Of course he's only 8, but I really dont think he will really get in touch with these things any time soon.
He couldnt believe that were I come from there's no tractors driving around everywhere, that there's no huge areas of crop, no cows, no horses etc. pp.
And he really doesnt wanna live anywhere else, is perfectly happy with his life and it's hard to imagine him becoming anything but a farmer. Compared to that I had no idea what I wanted to be several years into my medicine studies, almost three times as old as this little guy.
But on the other hand its not that surprising, their home is like a freaking vacation park, water slide, big ass trampoline, hammock, ice cream every summer day, 15 minutes to the next beach, and for her last birthday the girl got what every girl dreams of: two motherfreakin ponies


There they are

She's already pro at handling dem Ponies

She was at first a bit scared of our dog though, but they became friends pretty fast

Our doggy at the beach, wearing a ladybug instead of a nose piercing

Here's our little farmer, you cant see it but he is of course sitting atop a big pile of hay bales
could be sharper, but I love this picture nonetheless

Glorious Dog

There's clearly not enough pictures of six year old girls in this blog post

So here's another one

and another one

The next part of our vacation was to go the North Sea, to a place called Budjadingen.
But to be perfectly honest, it wasnt all that exciting, these days were the only vacation days that didnt have good weather, and it wasnt a particularly beautiful place. The first day we were there we actually „missed“ the sea, meaning we missed the high tide so the water was further away from the shore than we could see.

Did someone call the batman?


German dogs stick to the rules



But hey, I got to see a black sheep for the first time, so thats cool


Someone in this picture stands out.. so TL format cut his head off #BlameTLNazimods

My mom always told me i was the black sheep in the family so i really feel for this guy

Casual Sheep


Soooo, after Budjadingen we were supposed to go to my girlfriends parents place in Thüringen, but on our way there we made a stop in Bremen to meet up with a friend. Weather was super hot so we decided to go to a lake
I figured the dog could play with his toy ball, since rubber floats and all, but i forgot that theres a hole in it (to put food in) so it sank and was lost forever.
My dog went swimming anyways, but I'm not sure he enjoys it all that much


Natural Born Swimmer?


he looks so worried ^O_O^
Reminds me of joyless hitman monkey actually


this dog can dive


Me and the dog in a staring contest ^_^

So yeah, the last part was at my gfs parents place to celebrate her mothers birthday, they also live in a little village.
Her aunt and the kids came as well as a few other similar faces.
One of the kids, that I had already met a few months ago is always eager to use my camera, which is nice for me since it means I get nice pictures on my camera without having to do anything for it.
He's a really awesome little dude, 10 years old, smarter than any of the other kids in his class, apparently not bad at taking photos, and at a charity run a few weeks ago he actually managed to run more rounds than me (he ran 30 x ~450 meters, I only ran 25 rounds, admittedly this just shows that I'm in awful shape but still its certainly not bad for a 10 year old)
Oh and he was also better at shooting air guns than any of us.


talented little man

Here is a picture he took of his dad

mr. funny guy


the voluntary fire department also had a little party that day and we decided to take part for a little bit

firetruck!




When we got back to the family party we played some hide and seek, walked around in the corn fields and played some motherfreakin lego. Their parents were rather thankful they didnt have to take care of them ^^


„throw it all out, we need to build a freakin base“

„THIS IS SERIOUS BUSINESS GODDAMNIT“

mmmmh I like ponies


flowers for the birthday child


Yeeeeeaaah leegooooo

Uneven Strucutre – Februus
I've been listening to this band's debut album for a few months now. It belongs to the „djent“ genre, most well known for the band Meshuggah.
Similarly to Meshuggah's „Catch33“ and „I“ this album is basically one long, epic song cut up into different tracks, however the band is a lot more melodic and has some great clean vocals that add beautifully to this massive wall of melody, which then also helps the heavy aggressive shout parts just feel that much more epic.
Will still most likely not be anything for people who dont like „aggressive“ music

I mean look at these french hardcore motherfuckers, they get all the electrical power they need from the forests ground


EAIA – Me, Myself And I
This might be more something for everyones taste, fellow Leipzigian Starcraft enthusiast Doermi's recently released „Me Myself and I“ is a nice electronic album to relax to, sometimes reminiscent of Apparat, sometimes of 65daysofstatic („Highground“)
You can listen to the entire album here:
http://soundcloud.com/eaia/sets/eaia-me-myself-and-i/


And since not everyone here is German and might not know Apparat, here's a wonderful track by Moderat, the project of Apparat and Modeselektor. Just yesterday they've announced that they're working on a second album, looking forward to it.



Byebye – fünfkommafünf Lieder
The last recommendation is also the project of a friend of mine,
he and his former guitar teacher perform as the acoustic guitar duo "byebye" and they just released their first music video. It's the only song I know of them where they sing in English, rather than German. In my opinion it takes away some of the charm that their songs have, because their German lyrics are pretty brilliant and often quite humorous but musically its up to par with the rest


Video isnt amazing but does its job I suppose, obviously not a multimillion dollar production

Here are a few other performances







More of their music on soundcloud:

http://soundcloud.com/byebyemusik
anyone who understands german should check out the song "unklar", those lyrics r so gud

Almost forgot this one. A few months ago, for „Männertag“ („men's day“ / father's day I made a little trip to my friends vacation home. We do this every year, its a bit of a tradition by now, meet up there for 3-4 days, drink a shitload of beer, watch some good movies, play some football, american football and table tennis, have ourselves some bbq, make ourselves pizza in the stone oven (400°C ftw) , and of course make a big ass bonfire.
It's particularly nice since I dont really get to see my former school friends much nowadays, it's basically just this and christmas time.
So for this I finally used my canon not just for photos but also for videos, this is my first ever properly edited video. Some issues with brightness in some scenes but overall im happy with it.


(oh hello, there's Apparat again)

Just wanted to say I'm really looking forward to the event, it's always a good time (As I've already described here and here) and I have a feeling that this year its gonna be better than last.
Only thing I'm sad about is the loss of Bitterdam and that there's not many SC players im familiar with but oh well.
I got my press pass ready and I plan on bringing some good Coverage for TL, twitter live reports, video interviews (as camera man ^^) and of course photos.

So since I started writing this blog on a holiday night two weeks ago two things happened, Jinro retired and BW died.
Since I wont be able to do the latter justice with a bunch of words I'll just leave that out (or to people who are better at writing) and say something I want to say about Jinro.

The first PM I had ever gotten on TL, three and a half years ago, was from FrozenArbiter, that mod with over 30000 posts, one of the very first members of this community. It was actually just an answer to a question I asked him, something terribly unimportant about a finnish poker player.

Seven months later, I had a fun little ZvT on Heartbreak Ridge, it was quite even but in the end I gged after realizing that for some broodwary (yes thats an adjective) reason, the drone I had sent to build a defiler mound just sat there idle for minutes.The game ended with a 25.5k vs 25.4k score.

A few minutes later I got a PM with the title „I knew I recognized that ID“ from FA, turns out that I was playing a smurf of his, and he had recognized mine from the practice partners thread
Although this was just a small gesture it was one of those moments that made me feel part of this community, and one of the little things that ended up with me getting more and more involved in it.

During the SC2beta I asked him for some strategic advice a few times and he always gave a friendly answer (although asking pros for advice is not something I would do nowadays, they already have enough unknowns messaging annoying messages).

To me he always stuck out as one of the coolest, friendliest people on all of TL, and even though his successes in MLG and GSL brought me a lot of joy, I am glad that he retired, because for many months now it seems that he just didnt enjoy being a pro gamer anymore and most of his posts just seemed angry. I think if youre as nice a person as him, its hard to cope with all the needless flaming from the esports community, since he probably wasnt exactly used to things like that, unlike for example idra or incontrol who already had some experience with dishing out as well as taking some flak before SC2 happened.
It takes courage to let go of the dream you had and move on with your life and I'm glad he's made that decision for himself.
Here's to you Jinro/FrozenArbiter, 건배!