So here we are.

I’m going to write something on this here blog o’ mine.

Yes, that’s right. Something will be written here, on this here o’ blog o’ mine.

What should I write?

I just did a bunch of writing in my little notebook, my little Kroger $2 composition notebook that is exactly the kind of notebook you buy for your kids in elementary school. And here I am writing my genius adult thoughts down in the very same kind of book that I would have been so thrilled to buy when buying school supplies in the summer. These have been my go-to notebooks because they’re cheap, last awhile, and have the right proportions for me to write in. Not too much space between the lines, not too little, and they don’t have a metal ring, which are annoying for me. I hate the metal ring that goes through the spine of some notebooks. That has never been for me.

The things I have written just now are what you get when I write in this way, which is totally stream of consciousness. It’s like I’m talking to somebody, but that somebody is myself, and these are the kinds of things I would say to somebody in a conversation, where there is no real particular aim, and we are free to just chit chat. That’s what is happening right now, here on this blog.

I write this because I have spent more time thinking about the differences between typing and writing, and how it impacts writing quality and what I write at all, and this is the first time I’ve written a blog since July, apparently, and so I am particularly paying attention to how I’m writing, right now, as I write it. And the things I’m writing here, and the way I’m writing it, I would never be writing in my little notebook, with my Pilot G-2 0.7 blue ink pen. I wouldn’t be able to write like this because I can’t write fast enough to keep up with my stream of consciousness. But in typing, like in a conversation, I can type about as fast as I can talk, and so I can write down my thoughts to you, in a manner that is more like speech, and more conversational. Isn’t that interesting?

My thoughts are slower and probably of a higher quality when written down. They’re certainly of a more substantial nature. But after just doing a bunch of that, that’s not what I want to write about anymore. So, what should I write for you now?

I did have two main topics I thought I would write about, as I drove home from Starbucks today in the car. Let’s see if I can even remember them. Yes, I can. The first topic was basically an entire overview of my Overwatch gaming journey, and I’ll crack into this and see if anything interesting results from it.

I did write about playing Fortnite, and shared a little story about one of my thrilling Fortnite moments, of almost having a super-epic-heroic game-winning play and completely failing. Fortnite was a fun game for me for a few months, but I had to quit the game. My Fortnite saga ended in dramatic style, with me completely quitting cold turkey, and why? Because they ruined the game. I didn’t quit playing because I got bored, which is usually what happens. I quit playing, rather the game creator wizards behind Fortnite forced me to stop, because they introduced an item that was so destructive to the quality of the game that I couldn’t stand playing with it in the game. There was no way to play around it, and there was no way to enjoy the game while it existed, so I had to simply quit. I was getting too angry. I could not enjoy the game anymore. And this dreaded item, you may be delighted to know, was the Captain America Shield. If you just think about Captain America and his shield in the Marvel Universe, and imagine that you are one of the grunts in the Marvel world that try and shoot Captain America, just for him to deflect all of your bullets and then smash your face in with the shield, you will understand why this item was so horrible for the game of Fortnite, and why I had to quit. The only way to reliably beat someone with the Captain America shield, which required absolutely no effort or skill to use, by the way, so any regular noob and crappy, unskilled gamer with no tactics, can pick up the Captain America Shield and become invincible and smash your face in easily, unless you found War Machine’s Arsenal, which was a rocket gauntlet that fired a relentless stream of rockets that would blow up any pathetic, cowering shield user. Or, you decided to give up your entire strategy of enjoying the game, and picked up a Captain America Shield for yourself, and then you would enjoy freely demolishing any other player stupid, stubborn, or unfortunate enough to have not picked up a Captain America Shield, or if they did have one, you could then enjoy a leisurely and uninteresting, 50/50 shield fight coin toss, where you and your opponent would walk in circles around each other and alternate blocking and throwing your shield, which usually ends when someone just can’t stand how boring it is anymore, and switches to any other weapon, and then they lose. In a game where the final 1v1 would, in the good ol’ pre-Captain America Shield days be an insane, high-stakes battle between two hardened warriors who had clawed their way through the rabble, picking up legendary items, plungers, shotguns, rocket launchers, rifles, flying fists, and putting it all together in a final, epic showdown, to be watching now every 1v1 a yawning Captain America Shield turtle toss-off, I couldn’t take it anymore. It was driving me insane. I had to quit.

I’m triggered even now thinking about it.

So moving on… Fortnite was over, and after awhile, I got bored. I probably shouldn’t be gaming at all, and I have once again had thoughts on this, the perpetual ideological battle for the soul of gaming, whether gaming is really good, or not good, whether I should ever game at all, or whether there are good parts about it, and I have some thoughts this time around that I think are real definitive truth for me on this matter, and unfortunately, but also, it is what it is, that definitive truth is this: That gaming can be fun and good, energizing and enjoyable for me, but there is an everpresent chance that a gaming session can turn into a binge, and a binge is always bad, and so if I don’t game, I can’t binge, and so the best choice is to not risk a binge at all, and not game at all. Even if I am 1 for 5, where 4 gaming sessions are not binging, where I play for an appropriate amount of time, and have fun, and get what I think you are supposed to get out of any session of doing something fun, even if 4 in 5 are successful in that way, if 1 in 5 results in a binge, of me playing for too long, going over what I even want to be doing, tiring myself out, gaming mindlessly and staying up too late, sacrificing sleep for it, then it’s not worth it. The negative effects of a binge are too costly, compared to the benefits of gaming. That is my final conclusion, and my final take on my whole personal struggle with gaming. The other argument that has weight with me, that makes me lean in favor of no gaming at all, is this one: If I am gaming, there is no chance that I will end up doing anything else that can be productive for me. There is no chance that I will have any kind of good thought or idea, that I will end up exercising, calling someone, putting on a record, or anything that is better for me than gaming, and I say better for me because for me personally, I know from experience that all of those things are better for me and my life. If I am not playing a game, then there is a chance that I will end up doing anything that is better than gaming. And I feel that this statement then begs the question – why even game at all?

The whole reason why I do it, I think, after having analyzed my own behavior in recent months, is because 1. I’m bored or 2. I’m lonely. I never have any desire to game or want to play a video game if there are other things for me to do, such as people for me to play with. I say play with like I’m a kid, but guess what? We’re all big kids, and we all need to play, and I have learned that I need to play A LOT. Turns out that I am extremely playful and have a great appetite for play. I would say this about myself, at least, and based on the copious amounts of gaming I have done and my history of being popular with dogs and children, it must be true. That’s one major driver for why I turn to games. And video games are of course, often highly entertaining. Massive dopamine pumps, with learning curves, a social element, teamwork, glory, and uncertainty. And they’re colorful and stimulating and exciting. So, yeah, no surprise I have been sucked into game worlds and have had so much fun with them. But the problem with some of these games, the competitive games and the team-based games in particular, is that they tap into something in me that goes beyond fun, and they hijack something in my brain, that gets me to play when I don’t even really want to, and when the game isn’t fun anymore. That’s the bad part, and that’s something that doesn’t happen with pretty much any other kind of play that I do. There are natural limits on other kinds of play, such as sports, because your body gets tired, or with conversation, because eventually your mouth and brain get tired, or your partner gets tired, or you have to go home, or whatever. But with gaming, there is no end, it is complelely unlimited, and purely mental. You can just keep going and going and going, even when your eyes are burning and you know that you should have gone to bed 6 hours ago. It’s too much power, too much potential in the hands of someone as play-hungry as I am. And there is another element to it, that is part of the games that I get hooked on, and that is the learning curve. There is an element of mastery, and that is so stimulating for your brain. That combination of skill and randomness and excitement and spontaniety. It is hard to find ways in life to achieve this mix of qualities that make gaming so fun, but I would say that is also what you get when you play sports, and ALSO, what I am finding out these days, when you JAM with people in a band, or even by yourself, when you really get into it. The thing about gaming is that it is so low effort to do. You don’t have to schedule anything, you don’t have to find anyone else, and the games are often free. So it’s very easy to do, whereas these other ways of playing and using your brain and unleashing your inner warrior spirit are harder to achieve. I have wanted to have a band and jam with people for months and I still don’t have any real jam partners or band members. But, yesterday I came home and Smosh, my drummer roommate, said THE MAGIC WORDS THAT HE’S ONLY SAID ONCE BEFORE EVER in our almost year of living together. He said, “I’m in the mood to jam.” And sweet baby jesus, we jammed, and it was glorious. I want to do that all the time, for hours and hours and hours. And I am jockeying to get there. But it’s harder to make it happen. I can fire up the Switch and find 1000’s of Overwatch Smoshes battling their hearts out (or not, some of them, who knows what they’re doing) in an instant, and battle for as long as I possibly can humanly stand. That’s unhealthy, though. That’s the problem.

I’m really stream of consciousness writing here, but I feel like it is pretty juicy stuff, and this is interesting for me, personally, at least. This is some real meat and potatoes of my life. And I will share, with that bit out of the way, about gaming vs. not-gaming and also, which I didn’t explicitly state, why I think rock is basically my way out of ever having to game again, and my saving grace, and my ultimate perfect form of play and enjoyment in my life, and that is allowing me to kiss gaming goodbye forever

Oh, my other roommate (she who must not be named) has decided to rap and seems to h…

(Apply Buddhist techniques. Rise above your fleeting and trifling discomforts and emotions..)

I wanted to write about Overwatch, and my journey with Overwatch, and why the saga ended, because it has ended, and it’s interesting to see why, as I reflected upon today in my ride home. I’m getting typed out, but this important. For who? Great question.

I came home today to find a condom at the end of my driveway. It was unfortunately too far into my driveway to be considered in the street, but I don’t think I could have left it there anyway, because it never would have been picked up, and I could not stand walking out of my house to see that. On my second trip outside of my home, I used another piece of trash in my yard (they wash up like shells on a beach, coming in at a steady rate of 2-5 pieces of trash a day) to pick it up. I wasn’t sure if it was used or not, as in the condom, but on closer inspection that I had to do when I bent down to pick it up, it was thankfully not used. Extremely thankfully not used. That would have been hard even for a dirty boy like me. It was not used and I threw it away. I write about this because I was in an interesting mood when I found it, feeling tired from my intense shift of serving my duty on the frontlines of Cummins Station Starbucks, but also feeling humorous, and so when I had come home from a hard day’s duty and was walking out to check the mail, which we didn’t have any because it was Sunday, as I remembered immediately after opening the mailbox and finding no mail, I saw the condom and thought, “Man, it must be nice to live somewhere where you wouldn’t find a used condom in your driveway.” And then I thought, “But hey, at least someone is getting laid.” And that thought cheered me up and made me happy, and I thought, if I could tell this to anyone, they would think, you know, this guy (me) has a good disposition. Because that’s exactly what I would think if anyone found a used condom on their property and instead of reacting with disgust and rage, my initial reaction being a little more of disgust and displeasure, they reacted with digust and humor. Humor and the lens you view the world through is a very powerful thing. I do seem to have a good disposition. It has made me popular among the ranks at the Cummins Station Starbucks. My bff (codename Jessica) has said, “Why do I like you so much? Why are you so cool?” My manager again said today that “everybody loves you.” My other manager called me “the popular one.” And my other manager (I have a lot of managers) said, upon reacting to my new promotion, “You have the charisma for it.” It is strange to be so popular, for not being someone who is trying to be popular, or cares about popularity, and it is strange to be constantly reminded of it. I think it would be like being really beautiful, and people are constantly telling you that you’re beautiful. You appreciate it and it is nice to hear, but it’s also weird sometimes, and makes you feel different. This is something that I grapple with often these days, that I am somehow now, at least on my diminishing Starbucks team, so beloved. But I have been loved and popular before, as a sensei in Kumamoto, and I thought that was weird too. My lead sensei at Shoyo would say to me, “You are the best ALT I’ve ever had.” And she had had many, and after a few times that she had said it, I said, “Matsunaga sensei, why? Why am I the best?” I genuinely wanted to know, because it was hard for me to wrap my head around, as I did not think I was anything particularly special. I don’t think I had any extraordinary ideas or organized any extraordinary program, I did not start a club, or anything I could point to as being particularly extraordinary. I did help my students win the Kumamoto English Skit Contest, two years in a row, and I had a major hand in that, although the credit goes all to them, and I am proud of that as being one of my greatest accomplishments as an ALT in Kumamoto, particularly because of how much it meant to the students who won. Otherwise I did not think of myself as being an extraordinary ALT, but Matsunaga sensei seemed to feel strongly that I was, and she told me why. She said I was always pleasant and friendly, I talked with the students, I talked with the other teachers, I stayed late to help out, I never complained. So by way of just being friendly and fun, not causing any problems at all, and lending a helping hand whenever asked, that made me the best ALT. And I see that that is also now bringing me popularity and success at my Cummins Station Starbucks. Despite all of the drama, the unbelievable and unending amounts of drama behind these counters, despite all of the beefs and tiffs, I have been unscathed, and am a friend to all, and have no enemies.

Smosh just came into my room and shredded on the guitar. He commented on my guitar tone after several minutes of solid riffing out and said, “Also this guitar tone is horrible.” I said, “What!” He said, “There’s way too much chorus.” Thanks to my new Small Clone, there is a lot of chorus in the tone. Almost as much as there possibly could be. He is not the first person to comment on my love of chorus. I seem to have an intense love of and hankering for chorus. You really can’t have enough chorus. No shocker then that one of my top Nirvana songs is Come As You Are. That song is the entire reason why I have the thing, and it seems like the entire reason why any new purchaser of a Small Clone has the thing, because on the box was written in small white text, “your nirvana.” Just like that. They know who their audience is. Who their users are. It is just as good as I wanted it to be, this Small Clone pedal. Even better. The thrill that shoots through my spine when I step on that metal button and the chorus activates, my tone suddenly becomes watery and wavery, and sounding just like Nirvana’s Come As You Are. It’s magic.

Something is happening now that has been happening of late, and what I knew would again be happening tonight. This has recently been a major problem for me. I am hungry. The problem with this is that it is 8:47 pm here in CST, and that is two hours and forty-seven minutes exactly past the end of my daily intermittent fasting window. I’m not usually hungry, but my cycle has been thrown off, and so now I am hungry, just as I was starving yesterday at 8 am, when I usually don’t break my fast until 10 am, and I don’t usually have any problem. But I’ve broken the cycle. Things fell apart when I went home for Thanksgiving, and they have been made worse by the fact that I’ve now been closing at the store, so my schedule is all over the place, and then I haven’t been eating enough probably, because I’ve been working when I should be eating, and then I end up in a severe calorie deficit and have had to eat at night because I’ve been so hungry. This might make it sound like I’m starving, but I’m not, although I am about as light as I ever have been. But shockingly on the scale today I measured at 147.7, which is higher than my base, lowest healthy weight that I have been, which is around 144. I would say this is about the lowest I can go while being healthy and having muscle tone, because I have basically no body fat, and my muscles are not as jacked as they’ve been before, but I’m not emaciated. It feels wrong to say that “I’m not emaciated” so I must be doing fine, because we can all agree that there are steps between “fine” and “emaciated”, but I think I am fine. Maybe on some days though, working too hard, and not eating enough, on those particular days, there is some small starvation happening. So, right now, I knew this would happen, that I was going to be starving tonight, because I ate a bunch of bread at about 5 pm, after running and working hard all day, so I burned a ton of calories today, and totalled only about 1500 consumed, but I was stuffed with bread, and come 6 pm, when I had planned to eat some black beans, I was still so full, and I couldn’t eat the beans, and now here we are. That’s how I’ve walked into this again. Life can be so hard sometimes. You may be thinking now, “Steven, why are you doing this to yourself? Eat the beans!” Were it so easy, young one. Were it so easy. It’s never so easy.

If I eat the beans now, I am farther down my road of destroying my intermittent fasting habits. It will only be harder to recover. Except that tomorrow, I will be able to do better, and I can make a plan to eat enough before 6 pm, and ride it out. That’s usually the case. I should probably eat the beans. It is always helpful to imagine that the protein I get from the sustanence will be used to strengthen and repair my muscles. I am a vain man, even if I tell myself I’m not, or pretend not to be. We are all vain. Who is not vain? I am vain, sometimes. I will flatter myself, sometimes. Who doesn’t? Maybe some people really don’t. But I will catch myself in the mirror on some days, and think, “Damn, I look good today.” That’s generally only on days where I shower AND wear my contacts, so quite rare. But the last day, or one of the most recent days that I did this wombo combo, I had also had a beard at just the right length, that made me look manly and older, but not too long to be scruffy and unkempt, and this combo of shining fresh hair, no scratched and cloudy glasses obscuring my beautiful blue eyes, and my perfect beard made me looking sexy, I felt, and it was reciprocated by the reactions of the customers, who were giving me extra special attention that day, and so much that one guy (why only a guy? why can’t it be one of my Cummins Station loves?) at the counter immediately asked if I had a girlfriend, and said he would set me up with some girls. He was very eager to make my acquaintance. I could not match his eagerness and have decided not to pursue this new line of friendship, because I have now had so many similar encounters and have learned that they are generally not worth my time, and I don’t have time or energy for such a one right now, because I am on the Rock Quest. Will it result in meeting a potential band member? Will it result in meeting a potential musical bestie? Unlikely. He was only interested in me for my dashing good looks. He knew nothing of my personality, except he knew something of my charm and wit, that I had demonstrated before him asking me if I had a girlfriend because his name was Stephen and we bonded over that and I told him that I had always thought myself superior, being with a V instead of the inferior Ph, but then my manager, wise old owl ________ hit me with this: “You know the Ph Stephen is the way it’s spelled in the Bible.” I’m probably not supposed to use her real name either. I need a codename. We can call her.. Margeret Underwood. That’s not right. How about… Stacy Hamilton. Fine. Stacy Hamilton hit me with that, and since then I have felt much differenterly about the spelling of Stephen with a Ph. Much more differenterly. And after telling him about this revelation I had had for no particular reason, as I do have a habit of telling stories to any customer who is inclined to listen and I think will appreciate them, as I am not babbling but tactfully sharing anecdotes or information/tales that I believe will be appealing or entertaining or enlightening to the particular customer, he then asked me immediately after, if I had a girlfriend. Very direct, and I thought, now this guy probably gets what he wants. Being so direct like that. I wish I could be that direct, instead of mulling over everything endlessly forever, and plotting and planning to extraordinary lengths and charting a detailed course before taking any action ever. But I decided not to pursue this because such a similar thing has happened so many times before.

My most recent engagement with a stranger that turned into a social event was with a neighbor that I had a pleasant conversation with, that turned into an invite to their house, that turned into me attending one of their semi-weekly gatherings and realizing 30-minutes in that I was basically at a cult party and they wanted to get me to join their cult. Several people took me aside and gave me the same schpiel about a French organization that in English means “the shelter”, or something like that that they were very fond of saying to me, that had taken them in and that they were now devout followers of, and I had also been tipped off early because two separate ladies had asked me, “So do you find yourself searching for answers these days?” And one lady straight up asked if I believed in God, and these are not questions that you are often asked at parties, at least not at the parties I usually go to. I started to see Bibles, and the texts of religious teachings, and I was talking with another lady who was an author and told me she was writing a book about play, which I was very interested in because I think play is a great topic to be explored, and then she started talking about how God plays, and how we can play with God, and I thought, “Dammit!!” I ended up getting so bored by the end of the night, and so overflowing with witty comments and off-color jokes and sarcasm that was generally not appreciated or desired by this serious French cult group that as the night drew to a close, I had to start letting them out, and see what happened, and I made a great joke/line about homeless people in Nashville being pests, which was definitely sarcastic and I feel strongly for homeless poeple and want to help them, and we have many in and around the store and it is sad and I wish it was not the case, but you know there are many people who I think view them only as pests to be gotten rid of, or look at them simply as an eyesore, and anyways that was the joke, but I knew that was 10 times too edgy for this group, but I had to say it, and then the thing that really did me in and put me on the outs and in the bad graces of the dad of the house was that I had made a joke reaction to this woman who was talking about her crazy ex-husband and that he was “homeschooling” their daughters and keeping drugs at the house, and I said, “Homeschooling? Now it all makes sense.” Or something like that, something implying that people who homeschool their kids are wacky, and then out of the side of my eye I saw the dad’s reaction, and he did not seem too pleased by that comment, and then I immediately remembered that the mom had told me that they had been homeschooling their 14 year old daughter, and I thought, “Well, I’m probably not going to be invited back.” Thankfully they did not invite me back, and I did not want to go back, so we were on the same page with that. But the mom did tell me at the end of the night, a terrible story that made me extremely outraged, because someone had asked how we had met. We met because I had stopped to admire her amazing flower garden that was out in front of their house, by the street, and I hadn’t noticed she was sitting out on the patio, and she must have seen that I was so interested in her flower patch, which was absolutely buzzing with butterflies and bees, and this was in October I believe, so it was later in the season. It was swarming and I was amazed to see so many pollinators here, as well as what kinds of flowers she had going on, and she came over and started talking to me, and then we found that we had more common interests, having lived abroad, and her husband working with parasites and infectious diseases at Vanderbilt, so I did know going into this that they would be some interesting people. At the party then, she told me a very sad story that I did not want to hear, which was that they had later had pest control people come by the house (already interesting for someone who is a nature lover to do, but I don’t know if she was really an insect lover as much as a flower lover), and after spraying the house with the chemicals, as the pest control guys left, they decided to spray the flowers in her garden on the way out, and they killed everything in the garden. That to me was the most infuriating story I have ever heard, and I thought that they need to be fined, and that she should have complained, but the really sad part of the story is that, why in God’s good name would you ever spray your poison on a bunch of butterflies and bees? On a batch of beautiful flowers? Why? In what world, in whose mind are those pests? Masochist sadist psychopath idiot. I don’t know. But that should be illegal. That should be criminal. Unwanton and reckless killing of anything should be punishable and illegal. Pesticides should mostly be illegal and banned. Humans are idiots and should not be allowed to have the power to broadly apply toxic poisons to the environment. Does that seem smart to anybody? No, it’s not smart. It’s a bad idea and all the scientists have been saying so for 50+ years.

I’m really rolling here. It didn’t take me long to hit my hot button topic of rage against people killing nature. I don’t ever write about that because I always get angry and write the same thing, and it’s not funny, and what’s the point?

I didn’t really tell you what I wanted to tell you about my Overwatch 2 saga. What I wanted to dissect with you, and explain to you in great detail, for no particular reason, is why exactly I stopped playing Overwatch 2, and what I had gotten out of it. I think that will be interesting for you, to detail this journey for you, and the lessons entailed. I stopped playing it for a different reason than I did Fortnite, which is that I seemed to have understood the game, and figured out how to play it, and with the character I loved, and that was everything I wanted. And once I did that, I didn’t care about playing anymore. This took me about three months of playing on and off, I would say, and many, many hours of playing. I don’t even want to know or say how many, but let’s say, many, many hours of playing. Still not as many as the hours I spent with the guitar, I will have you know, but too many hours for sure. And when I had very first started the game, I had been attracted to a character called Winston, who is a giant monkey scientist, and who has a very unique playstyle. He is classified as a tank, which is one of the three roles in the game – damage, tank, and support. In every match of Overwatch 2, there are 10 players, 5 v 5, just like basketball, and on each team of 5 there is a tank, two damage dealers, and two supports. The tank role is something like the point guard, I would say, in basketball. The game generally revolves around the tanks, and they set up their teammates, and fight for position. They are also something like the quarterback, because again, the game kind of revolves around them, and Overwatch 2 is an objective-based game, so kills do not really matter. The way to win the game is to achieve the objective, which is securing zones, or escorting a payload, as they say, advancing or securing territory until you have reached the endpoint or the total number of points. Well, anyways, the explanation is getting boring for me. The point is that Winston was unusual for a tank because he could make enormous jumps, and no other tank can do that. He has mobility that is unrivaled among the tanks. To compensate, he dies faster, and doesn’t deal as much damage as the other tanks. So, Winston is weird. Mobility is not inherently useful unless you know how to use it, because if you go to die faster, that’s not helpful. That’s actually worse. That is to say that if you are just faster at running into the enemy and dying, it’s not useful for you to be faster. In the wrong hands, Winston is just terrible, and unplayable, and in the beginning of Overwatch 2, that’s how Winston was for me. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing, and I would jump everywhere, all the time, and my teammates hated me, and I would die, so many deaths, and fall off the map, because I didn’t know the maps, and get completely decimated by the enemy tank, and jump into 5 people on the enemy team and die in a second, or just jump away and leave my whole team behind and vulnerable and they would all die, and just generally, I had no idea what I was doing. I just liked that Winston was a monkey and he could jump, but I was new to the game, and had no idea otherwise, what the hell I was supposed to do. So, I gave up on Winston pretty fast, because eventually you get tired of getting your ass kicked all the time. I then took a long detour of playing almost every character, and had some fun on a robot monk called Zenyatta that was a support but could “one-shot” people (kill them in a second) from across the map, and who had great and wise euphamisms that actually were really great and wise, and a big shoutout to whoever worked on his voice lines and character development, and you could just put a healing orb on people and heal them, and then you just could focus all on your energy on one-shotting and kicking people, and I liked being Roadhog and being unkillable and grabbing people with his hook and then blasting them apart at close range, but every now and again I would come back to Winston, as my game knowledge progressed, and I would think about him, and I would play with a Winston, and I would think, “Man, I want to be good at Winston.” And I would try him out, and still mostly get my ass kicked, and not know at all what I was supposed to do. So, I would watch videos of people who were good at their characters, and they would talk about how to be good at the character, and then I would go and try and do the things that they talked about, but this really isn’t that helpful. They say mostly obvious stuff, and there are a few major tips, but especially with Winston, I never understood still what I was supposed to do, and I was still bad at Winston, even when I had started to understand the game and how it was supposed to work. Then, one fateful night, I had had enough of playing everybody else, and I had at this point figured out how to be good on many of the characters, but the one character I still really wanted to be good with was Winston, and so I searched yet again for advice on how to play Winston, and I found a YouTuber genius Winston called Bogur. That changed my Winston life forever. This man, 24-year old Bulgarian Overwatch 2 genius, particularly a Winston genius, had two videos that were 2 or 3 hour long playthroughs of him destroying everyone in ranked and getting to the highest rank possible with Winston. And in these videos, he did something different from every other video I had watched that told you how to play a character – he just played the character, and gave educational commentary on what he was doing, while he played. He realtime verbalized his thought process, his decision making, strategy, etc., in every game that he played, constantly, throughout the games. That was basically like having a chess master play games of chess and explain in every scenario what they thought was going to happen and why they were playing the way they were playing and what pieces they were going to move and why. And watching these videos, I learned such an incredible number of things, my Overwatch 2 knowledge skyrocketed, and my understand of Winston and what was possible had overnight quintupled. I spent two or three evenings watching these videos, taking it all in, truly studying Winston from this master, and absorbing his teachings. Some characters can kill you, stay away from them. Take the high ground, always take the high ground. Dive anyone who is separated. Never forget about the objective. Almost never die. Someone is always out of position. Dive the backline. Dive the backline. Dive the backline. Now go kill the tank. Don’t overcommit. He showed me when to jump, what things to think about, and all kinds of mechanical techniques, such as jumping straight up in the air simply to buy time, and using your bubble shield to prevent the enemy team from healing their tank. Who to pressure on the enemy team, when to be aggressive, when to dive, when to sit back, how to be extremely annoying, and especially, how to slowly acquire territory. In sum, this man’s Winston knowledge was everything I wanted to hear, and to see it in action, to actually see the results, that his thought and action was correct, because he was winning literally every game, against even the best of players, applying the same principles, was incredible to witness, and my brain’s mirror neurons were firing like fireworks on the fourth of July, and the enormous gaps in my Overwatch 2 gameplay knowledge were now being filled with tomes of strategic and tactical knowledge, and I was ready. The next time I got on to play, I had gotten home from an espresso party with my sister and her boyfriend, who showed me all the wonders of the espresso machine and how to pull the perfect espresso shot, and we tried four different blends and experimented with temperatures and timings, and I probably had had 15 espresso shots between the hours of 2 and 5 pm, and as I sat in my room that night, more caffienated than I had ever been in my life, alone in my room with nothing to do, I decided, I’m going in. Because I had of course been thinking that I was playing too much Overwatch 2, that I had been binging it and I shouldn’t really be playing it, but I still loved it, and I was extremely caffienated, and so I made the call, that tonight, I would become the monkey.

Prior to this now infamous night, I had a losing record with Winston, and in general, a losing record on Overwatch 2. You did not want me on your team, if you were trying to win and climb the ranked ladder. I was a liability. That was mostly because I would get bored of being good and then pick a character that I was horrible with and then get destroyed, but I also still, even when I was good, was not so good that I could alone reliably win a game. Well, guess what happened? On this infamous night, you wanted Adventurer on your team, there was no other tank in Silver that you would have rather have had on your team that night, because I won every single game that I played. Yes, that’s right, a man with a losing record, a Winston loser, was 0 to hero, from watching Bogur videos for 3 nights, and with 15 espresso shots, I logged on, and armed with my newfound Winston knowledge, seeing the game with clear eyes, and having a burning passion for victory with this nerdy scientist monkey, I was unstoppable, and was blowing all competition out of the water. It was a completely different game for me. Suddenly, I could understand everything. All of the mistakes that my enemies were making, I was on them at once. All tactical decisions, all strategy involved, I knew the optimal choice and the correct decision. Take the objective, or go for kills? Make a pick, or stay back? Pressure the tank, or dive the back line? Use my ultimate now? Jump on Ashe or Anna? Of course I made mistakes, but I knew what I did wrong. And now I knew how to play Winston. Completely bypass everybody, and go straight for the objective. Cause chaos by getting the high ground and sitting on top of them. Cut off the supports. I could see the vulnerabilities in the enemy positioning, the weakness in their composition, the soft spots in their armor, the players that needed to be dealt with, and I was relentless and confident, and I won every single game. Winston’s power had now been completely unlocked in my hands, and I was enjoying it to the absolute maximum. The true most glorious moment of the night, was this right here: There was one extremely close match, that had been a slog throughout, and I had fought absolutely tooth and nail to keep my team in this game. We had gotten rolled in the first round, and had battled hard to win the second, with my team rallying and turning around, and in the third match, we were pretty deadlocked. My team had taken the lead initially, and we had exchanged control of the objective with the enemy several times, and we had made it all the way to 99% completion – that is we had held the objective for 99% of the required time, but the enemy had taken it back before we could get it to 100% and win. They had come in and wiped us, and reclaimed it, and they were shaping up to be the ones to get it to 100% and win it all. I had been killed first in that last fight, and the rest of my team then died later, so that I had come back before them, and before I respawned, I thought to myself, in a special moment of clarity, “I am going to try as hard as I possibly can to win this game. I am going to do everything in my power to make the other team earn this win.” I respawned, and had to make it to the objective to put the game into overtime, and I made it there with a second left, and the next thing I had to do was to stall for as long as possible so that my team could respawn and join the battle. I just had to be the most incredible nuisance ever, and not die. I landed on the objective, which was in the center of a pyramid-esque Egyptian sand tomb, that had a small chamber space to the right, high ground surrounding the room, with an open, bottomless pit on one side of the lowered floor where the main objective space was, and then two halls with open sides running along the length of the room. It was a cramped and awkward space. Not ideal for Winston. I landed in the smack dab middle of the room, on the lower floor, contesting the objective, and stopping the enemy team from reaching 100%. As long as I was within bounds of the objective, or if I did step off, made it back within something like 3 seconds, they couldn’t win. As soon as I landed, I had completed my first task, by just making it there in time, and then I took stock of the situation, and it was this – D.Va was in front of me, the enemy tank, and behind her to the right, on the stairs leading up to the high ground were two healers, and directly to the right of me in the small chamber was a little dwarf man called Torbjörn, a damage dealer. He was the one who was separated, and out of position, being in the chamber, and with me between him and the rest of his team, and so I immediately went after him, pushing him back into the chamber, and separating him further from the team. The supports could not reach him there, unless they dropped down into the chamber from above, which they wouldn’t want to do because you don’t want to be stuck in there with a Winston, or with any tank, with no escape. I couldn’t push too far in, because I needed to stay on the objective, and Torbjörn also does a crazy amount of damage, and I had to be careful I didn’t take too much, because I needed to live – but I had a secret weapon, which was my ultimate. My ultimate would reset my health bar and double my total health and let me slap the hell out of people and send them flying, and would let me do my mega monkey jump every two seconds, instead of every 5, so I was just trying to live for as long as possible before I would use my ultimate, and try and get them to think that they could kill me. Torbjörn was pushed back into the chamber, I was using my bubble shield to soak up damage and as no support dropped down to help him, this dwarf man was going down, but I had to stay on the objective, and I wanted to keep D.Va from coming onto to me and being sandwiched between them both, so I danced, using the corner of the wall as cover, soaking up damage with my shield, lasering D.Va after forcing Torbjörn back, just buying time, waiting, then D.Va jumps onto me, my bubble is down, Torbjörn almost dead, I use my ultimate Primal Rage and slap him into the wall, finishing him off, now D.Va has already used her dash to come try and kill me and she’s stuck with me, down in the chamber, now I’m slapping her further into the chamber and cutting her off from the supports, still touching the objective, the supports trying to get to her and kill me, I see my opportunity now, the huge opportunity, to jump behind the Zenyatta (support) and slap him into the bottomless pit, now that he has moved up and closer into the room, so I commit and jump away from the D.Va, right behind Zenyatta and slap him off the stairs and into his doom, now the D.Va is back on me, I have to get back on the objective or we lose, I jump back in, now my health is getting lower, enemy Hanzo has showed up and is firing at me, I drop another bubble shield, just holding on for my team, holding on, and then I see the Pharah rockets flying overhead, slamming into the D.Va, my Junkrat comes sailing in to blow the Hanzo apart, and our Mercy starts healing me, the enemy D.Va goes down, demechs, tiny D.Va jumps out, I lazer her down, the only one left is their Illari, who makes a desperate last move onto the objective, and she’s immediately melted, and the overtime bar goes down, and the enemy team is routed, we flip the objective, and the game is won. Victory.

This was the highlight, the pinnacle of my night of Winston conquest. That was the peak moment because it was the hardest I had to try, and it pushed me to the utmost of my abilities, and we still managed to pull it off. My Winston was unbeatable that night. Bogur’s teachings had left an indelible impact on my Overwatch gaming, and that was the proof. And since then, like magic – I haven’t wanted to play Overwatch anymore. I guess that that was everything that I wanted to do. I didn’t realize it exactly, but I had achieved my peak as an Overwatch gamer, and I could be done. I wanted to learn how to be good, and how to be good on Winston, and that was obviously complete. Then, I didn’t need to be as good as Bogur. I didn’t need to play 1000 more games just so I could have a higher rank. The rank didn’t matter. It was the concept. My hunger for Winston dominance was satiated.

I haven’t felt like playing Overwatch since.