Otra Covid Wave, Ad Infinitum

Hello ladies and gentlemen of the internet. Welcome to covid 2022 July edition. 

We're going on year three with this thing. It's a real drag. They're reinstating an LA mask mandate soon. I've only taken off some three months since covid began and surprisingly, I never caught covid myself from anybody. Talk about lucky! That being said, I wear my mask at work regularly and in crowded places just in case. However, I am double vaccinated. But I digress. 

The work gig is going strong. The work is heavy and consistent as well as the hours and pay. Decent, but it's never enough to really pull you out of the class of poverty to the middle class.

Covid at work is still a thing but much less so nowadays. However, the case rates are going up again, so we are seeing small increases here and there. One of my pet peeves is the loud yelling customers that don't wear masks that really spray it all over the place. Yuck! 

I mostly cashier and customer service. It ain't much but it's honest work. 

In terms of my free time, I'm doing all kinds of things. I've learned a good amount of Spanish and bits of other languages like French, Portuguese, Italian, and even Chinese. I'm reading a lot of books, mostly classics of the western canon. Tonight, I was just reading Vasari's Lives, the chapter on Leonardo Da Vinci. I'm playing a lot of guitar. I'm seeing friends here and there. Owning enemy players as the team healer. Working at least forty hours a week. 

As this next covid wave storms upon the shore, remember to plant your anchor and keep your grounding. There's a storm brewing within the land and a lot of people are being washed away. You have to have a steady grounding in whatever it is that you do, believe, feel, and think, ya dig? For me, the answer has been to stay inspired, whatever it takes works, anytime, all the time. 

In the beginning of the pandemic I was doing meditation about an hour each day because I was working less hours and had more relaxation time. Well, now I'm finally using that training to good use and using that TM to stay calm and relaxed even in my most stressful moments of my work day. Yowza, yowza! 

A new big thing for me has been to enjoy nature much more often. Whenever I go for walks now, I never put in earbuds. Just enjoy the scenery, the plants, the Sun, and the blue skies. I am a night elf druid. Nature thanks you. 

Also, for those who are interested I've kept a record of life since covid first began, you can read my plague journal, as I call it, here, http://ofigueroamusic.blogspot.com/p/blog-page.html.

See you later in time and space. 

How To Be A Great Healer in Competitive Video Games, An Essential Guide

 
Hello, ladies and gents. I've been doing a lot of writing exercises, mostly of a somewhat serious nature. Here I thought I'd lighten the mood up and write about how to be a great healer in competitive video games. 

This guide adheres to any kind of healing in any competitive video game but in this specific context I'm referring to healing in Heroes of the Storm [a Blizzard moba], Team Fortress 2 [class based shooter from 2007], and Overwatch [Blizzard's first-person shooter]. 

First, why would you want to play healers? Well, the reason I play healers is that I just prefer to be the backline of the team, not doing damage, not tanking damage [absorbing damage, and mitigating it], and healing the team, ensuring our victory by making sure that every player gets to survive fights more easily, making the entire team more durable, stronger. 

The other reason is that healers are naturally the playmakers of the team. If you're playing the healer you have the most important job, ensuring everybody's survival, mostly the tanks [the big brutes of games, that can take damage but can't dish it out as much as the DPS], but also the DPS [damage per second, the assassins of the team, getting the kills]. So if you're naturally a leader you'll gravitate towards being a tank or a healer, or if you're not naturally a leader but want to play a leadership role, then you'll gravitate towards being a healer. This is mostly of a personal nature for me, but it applies to other people as well. 

Or, you could want to be a healer because it just fits your personality. I don't have fun playing tanks and assassins, it's not my cup of joe. Girls gravitate more towards tanks and healers in online games, I've noticed, but other times they're on the frontlines getting the kills, so you can never judge a book by its cover. 

Second, it's all about positioning. As a healer, you're supposed to be in the backline of the team, making sure you don't get hit too much, or die very often, if at all. For example, the best thing you can do as a Mercy player in Overwatch is simply to not die very often and keep on healing as much as you can, and damage boosting if need be [don't worry about that for now]. The longer Mercy is alive and keeps healing, the better job she is doing. 

As a Mercy main myself, I've found that the best way for me to maximize my healing with the cadeuous staff is to simply not die. This is harder than hell, as most enemy players will be looking for you, Mercy, throughout the entire round to kill you, so that you can't keep healing. 

The trick is to be ninja-like. The less time the enemy team sees you, the easier it will be for you to survive. In fact, I know that the enemy Mercy is a really good player if I hardly ever see her throughout the entire round. The best way to do this is by using all obstacles in the map to your advantage; walls, monuments, buildings, ally players, and your abilities like your flight L-shift button. It should also be mentioned that you must know how to super jump to be an effective Mercy. To super jump, simply press L-shift and crouch at the same time while flying to an ally, and right before you reach the ally hit the space bar. This will give you a super jump, making it harder for enemies to hit you and making it easier for you to get to places where you can be ninja-like; hide, heal behind walls or around corners, or get to the high ground on maps so you can avoid fire on the ground level. 

Positioning by itself is a very simple concept. But, like playing healers or maining [I only play healers, maining is a term referred to when you only play healing characters as oppsed to tanks or DPS] it's easy to learn but hard to master. Steep learning curve. As a healer this is something you'll work on all the time, always improving upon. You'll never be a grandmaster of positioning as even grandmasters die out of position. 

Third, know your character. This is a given but you'll be surprised to see how many players out there will play their character the wrong way [their own way or just being clueless, which can be misguided and cause more losses in pug {pick up group} games].

There are so many players that think they've got their character down. They have hundreds of hours in the game, they keep perpetually playing the same healer characters, and then they wonder why they keep losing games all the time. Obviously, it's inevitable that sometimes you're going to lose games, but you can mitigate some of the percentages of losses if you simply know your character, so well, that you understand the mechanics of the character better than most of the other healers in your rank. 

How well do you know your character? Well, you simply play a lot of that one character. But that's only the beginning. The flip side is that you have to study up on your character; look up videos on how to play the character better, read forums where lots of different people give insight on how to play the character better, and lastly, learn from your deaths. If you know what keeps killing you and you utilize that knowledge to your benefit, you can lessen the number of deaths that keep happening the same way, and then start to learn more from the more random elements that kill you. Again, a very simple concept. But the meta for knowing your character is steep. 

Lastly, have fun. The whole point of competitive video games is to have fun. Yes, there will always be toxic players [people who can't restrain themselves, take their anger out on the team, cuss people out, are childish and stupid], and throwers [people who purposefully lose games because they're either not good players, or they want to make a point to the team that they're especially toxic] but for the most part, most players play for fun, and they play to win. Keep that in mind. Fun AND winning. Not just winning, not just having fun. The correlation between the two is strong as heck, but it should be noted yet again that if you aren't having fun you should simply log off the game and do something else. Fun is the one thing money can't buy and if you aren't having fun playing healer then you should definitely play a different class [tank/assassins] or take a break from gaming; perhaps go for a nice walk, or enjoy a nice novel. As a healer, your job is the most important to you and the team. With great power comes great responsibility. Use it wisely. 

Medic [from Team Fortress 2 w/ German accent]: Get on the cart dummkopfs!

They're giving away 500 free codes for Malthael in Heroes of the Storm

The good folks over at pc gamer are giving away 500 free codes for Malthael in Heroes of the Storm! Malth just came out in Heroes and he's a pretty cool dps character. I've been trying to earn him the good 'ol fashion way (doing dailies and earning gold) but I'm still sitting at about 8,000 out of 15,000. I hope I win! Malth is a melee assassin that excels in damage over time (like bleed effect from warrior class in World of Warcraft). He has a passive that deals damage based on a percentage of his target's max health, which means he's a perfect tank killer but he won't be great against heroes of smaller health pools like Valeera or Valla. Send 'em your email at http://www.pcgamer.com/were-giving-away-500-codes-for-malthael-in-heroes-of-the-storm/ and see if you win, never hurts to try to win something for free, especially for one of the coolest Blizzard games.