I randomly bought a ukulele around five years ago. I did want to learn to play the guitar but as my room was small, I'd have to get it out / pack it up each time I wanted to play it. With a ukulele, I simply placed it on a small shelf behind my desk chair.

This worked out well as I'd grab the ukulele on map changes / computer restarts / downloads and just, give it a little play (and I still do this). I'm not as good on the ukulele as I should be after this long playing it, but I've never really tried to get better. I just learnt all of the chords and when I hear a song I like on the radio, I look up the chords and just, play it. It's great fun.

My brother bought me an electric guitar which I did start learning, but it was just so much effort compared to the uke that I haven't bothered to progress very far at all with it.

I also play the drums and piano little, beatbox, and mess around with PC generated music. I hope to learn how to sing better as there's much more use for that than playing an instrument. Can use that in the car, shower, karaoke or find someone else who can play something :)

Haven't listened to the cast but I can kind of guess how it went. A lot of casters simply try too hard to be funny and attempt to use shit talking players / teams as a comedy weapon to get a few cheap laughs. Ipz for a while now has been jumping on the 'shit-talking bandwagon' and I guess he's thrown it into his casting? It's unoriginal, not funny, and makes him look like a douche. If that's the rep he's going for then he's doing a grand job!

Some people can pull it off when they use it in small doses, but other people just look like a prick doing it.

Throw yourself into as many uncomfortable situations as you can. Try to choose ones that have no lasting consequences and where you do not care about the outcome. For example:

Simple: Ask the cutest girl you can see on the street for the time.
Simple+: Ask the cutest girl you can see on the street for the time, when she tells you, throw a passing complement at her (By the way, you're incredibly beautiful) and then instantly walk away before she can respond.

The more times you have adrenaline kick in, and are able to keep it under control, the more confident you will be when you actually need to. It's a game of experience. The above might sound really easy but for someone with little confidence, approaching the girl even just to ask the time could be difficult. Still, once you have done it, walk away and have a little laugh about it. Yes... it was dumb, but you still pulled it off. Hell, even walking past a stranger, making eye contact and smiling at them could be a difficult challenge for someone with little confidence.

Practice makes perfect, so if you want to get better at being more confident, you need to put yourself into more situations where you need to be confident. The good thing about practicing this skill is that you can be selective and choose things that don't break you. Write a list of things that make you nervous, and see if you can come up with a harmless way to practice them. Then go actually practice them and have a laugh. They will get easier and you will be able to carry this experience into tasks of importance later on.

Focus on other aspects of your game. Potentially all of the following could help you out:

- Aim practice / modifying your technique.
- Movement / Dodging / Jumping / Role-outs.
- Map strategy / locations / timings / positioning.
- Game mechanic research / weapon & fall damage.
- Opponent player & team research.

A lot of people focus entirely on aim because it's the most highly sought-after skill as it is the easiest to see noticeable improvements in. The thing is, making yourself harder to hit could mean you get an extra free shot on your opponent which allows you to miss one of your own shots and still get the same result. Getting into positions quicker or more efficiently could result in a completely different outcome regardless of death match ability. It could be the different between you picking up an extra health pack before you fight, or getting to your medic faster resulting in a larger overheal before you're forced to enter combat.

Learning map timings is important. Sometimes you can predict (with a high degree of certainty) where a player is based on where he is not, because if he was coming that way he would have been there by now (hope that made sense). Also thinking about your positioning and advantageous map positions and then actively using that knowledge in combat to your advantage. It might sound like something you only learn once, but the more you spend time thinking about it, the more you will find yourself using it.

In a game like league of legends, professional players rarely enter into fights that are 50-50. Both players know in advance that either they will win the fight, or lose it based on their kit, their opponents kit and a number of other factors. Sometimes you see a player with barely any health left, still continue to fight and win when anyone else would have ran away. That's just game knowledge. Knowing if they dodged that one skill, they would have enough to survive and could deal out X amount of damage back at the enemy. You're never going to know exactly how much you can do, or how much health the enemy player has, but it helps to know that 'I could survive 2 rockets as long as I keep roughly _this_ distance from the soldier but if I go any closer I will die in a single hit'. Again, actively practicing this does help your main game.

Player research is a big one, especially if you find yourself playing against the same teams and players all the time. Some players only ever take a single route to middle and get there at exactly the same time every game. If you watch a couple of games and find one of these, maybe your demoman can land a completely blind, long distance sticky on them with just a little timing practice. Maybe as a soldier you can prefire players. Maybe a scout has a certain jumping pattern, always going left then right in the air but never the same direction. How good you are at the game is directly proportional to the competition you are playing against, so by reducing the effectiveness of your competition, your 'level' increases.

So yeah, you might find that one aspect of your game has hit a wall, but there's always more you can do to improve. It may look pointless on paper, but some of these things DO win games.

Comp BF4 will exist. The only reason why the comp BF3 scene was small was because there was no demo recorder and no spectator mode. Think what competitive TF2 would be like without demos and stv?

Players getting banned left right and center for cheating when there is no way of proving it (could just be good), but also players hacking with no way of proving that they cheat. Streams would be the only way to watch a match online (when TF2 was released there wasn't much streaming going on at all).

Battlefield 4 has addressed these issues. They have designed the game a little more for competitive, making squad sizes 5 instead of 4, adding spec, and I assume... battlerecorder. The game will be played 5vs5 but like every battlefield series (and a bit like TF2 highlander) there will be a larger competitive game consisting of anywhere between 8 and 12 players. The 5vs5 games will most likely be infantry only while the larger mode will be vehicle based.

I swim several times a week and while I'm no expert on body building / muscle gaining (I'm not a big dude), I do know that when I first started swimming I used to get really sore the next day, but if I'd had a whey protein shake straight after the swim, I'd feel perfectly fine.

One thing I would recommend is to buy it online instead of a retail store. I don't know what it's like in the US, but the markup here is ridiculous. I bought a bag of protein for about 1/10th of the cost, it tasted nicer and as far as I could tell, it was equally effective (if not more so).

Having said all this, I haven't been on protein for a couple of months now as I'm not really training hard, but when I get back to being more serious, I'll get back on it :)

I was writing out an essay about TF2 vs CS:GO (which favored CS:GO for the record), but then my tired mind snapped and realized that actually, there is no reason for Valve not to do this for TF2.

If we showed enough interest for the next Summer i-series (i52) early enough (or any other major LAN event that would have us), and then spoke with Valve, presented them with some community made in-game items (let's make something awesome), and said:

"look... can you place these few select items in your online in-game store and save a percentage of the revenue generated to be used as a prize pool for the next Multiplay event. We've been working our asses off but we need some help please".

Valve would surely be the head sponsor of this event (free coverage / exposure) and we can put them directly in touch with the guys at Multiplay. This wouldn't cost them a penny yet they would still earn a bit of cash themselves as they will take a cut of the sold item revenue. They might not make as much money off these new items as they normally would, but more competitive players would buy them meaning it would be pretty close even with the prize pool cut removed from their earnings. We would do all of the hard work, as we've been doing for a long time.

In fact, as much as I love UK LAN events (living in the UK), if we generated a large enough prize pool, we might even be able to get a TF2 tournament at Dreamhack. That could be the boost competitive TF2 needs being played alongside some of the largest LAN tournament titles to date. But if Dreamhack didn't want us, Multiplay events are still decent, and a large prizepool for TF2 is sure to generate interest outside of the game.

Maybe start a 'Valve show TF2 some Love' campaign. Get in-game sprays, steam avatars, frag movie outro's. Maybe something like:

http://arxandbeta.com/images/whereisthelove.jpg

No point in getting hopes up over nothing, and convincing a business to hand over a significant amount of money isn't as simple as described, but hopefully we could show Valve that actually, their input / effort is minimal, they still make money from it and the TF2 competitive community gets off their backs for a while.

Drop phone, blocks everywhereeeeeeeeee

It's cute that everyone in Europe seems to think we will now have Pyro's running around everywhere. I mean sure... I want to try it because that's what I do, but it's not going to become a standard meta :P

Not everyone reads reddit and things go viral because people spread it around so it's not such a bad thing. Still doesn't change the fact that the joke was shit, even if you ignore the insensitivity.

RIP to the victims. I remember watching it in school. It would have just felt like any other disaster you see on the news (bad, but you still feel a million miles away from it) but watching the second plane hit the tower live... that moment has really stuck with me ;/

http://www.collegehumor.com/video/6854026/european-see-n-say

While a lot of the stats are pretty much useless (but really fun to read and think about), the one that I really liked was the off-classing percentage. I'm wondering if it's worth sticking those results together for each team, so you find out that say.... TCM had an offclass player for 22% of the time played.

Well at least I'd be interested in knowing!

Payload can work in 6vs6 but I do not feel it is as exciting to play as the other game modes.

It's a lot more spectator friendly though (new people can easily work out what is going on) and as the majority of public players tend to play PL maps, it would bring the public and competitive scenes closer together (which is a very good thing for the competitive game).

With that said, I can't imagine I'd enjoy playing it very much, but the game mode certainly can work in 6vs6. The good thing about the game mode is that even if a map is extremely hard to finish, there's still the stopwatch for the other capture points, so it still plays reasonably well.

No! But thinking about it...

...Nah :D

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