Another Update

Hey, I made a video to give the update. I'm still here!

Updates

Yes, I'm a day behind on my positive experience blog, but that doesn't mean that I forgot about it. I'll just have more things to write about tomorrow.

Also, I've been doing more casting in Spanish for that Sixpoolgaming tournament. You can see them in all their glory on my youtube channel.

Also, also, I got a pass to try Guild Wars 2 for free this coming weekend. Let me know if you're interested. It's very good.

Mikey's Debut

Tonight's my first live cast for a tournament where people will be making money as a result. That's pretty exciting to me. I'll be casting the first match from my twitch.tv stream at 5pm Mountain Time (7pm Eastern) and again on Saturday afternoon at 1pm Mountain. Should be a whole lot of fun! The regular English casts will be on BaseTradeTV. Be sure to mark those calendars. Again, the tournament is sponsered by SixPoolGaming, a premium Starcraft training site, featuring training videos made by proven professional players. I haven't used it myself, but I understand it's some pretty good stuff.

I went ahead and bought a Latin America license of the game so I'll be able to be 100% legitimate with my casting. And so now I have two copies of Starcraft. Not yet 100% sure how I feel about that. At one time I wanted to have three copies so I could have one for each race. But, now I'm not afraid of just playing random if I feel like shaking things up. But hey, maybe this Spanish casting will go somewhere and it will keep on being useful. It's certainly good language practice, that's for sure.

My schedule's a little off today because my lady stayed home sick from work. Not 100% sure if I'll be casting more ReHacked today or not. Also, I need to make a decision on how much I'm going to do in Spanish as opposed to good old English. Either way, if I do something, I'll edit this post and link it here.

Positive Experience #4

Got it!

I was asked to cast some of the first matches for Six Pool Gaming's tournament! In Spanish! Ha! I love that it's in Spanish. I start tomorrow. Maybe one day I'll work my way up to English, but Spanish is still a lot of fun. I'll post a link when it's showtime. I'm really grateful that they're giving me a shot.

Speaking of grateful, I am so glad the presidential election is finally over here in America. It's just so long and drawn out and exhausting. I'm going to have to go through Facebook now and unblock all of the people who couldn't keep it nice over the past several months. My Dad's really lucky he didn't get blocked. He wouldn't be able to get away with that stuff on my Feed if he were anyone else. Anyway, I'm super glad it's over. Maybe now we can all just try to get along. I'm being optimistic there, but I really wish that were the way it worked. All we can do is try to find what is helpful for the most people. If people tried to see what they had in common with each other and actually treat other people like people, I think we would have a lot less problems.

Anyway, back to Starcraft. I cast my first series of games in Spanish today. It was a blast! I'm still in the process of learning the names for everything but it shouldn't be too bad. I'm not 100% sure that I'm ready for the matches tomorrow because I can't get my normal account to run in a Spanish version of the game. Blizzard's language support is apparently known for being kind of sucky, but I don't want to pay for another copy of the game. That would be kind of awful. Either way, I'm excited for my first real gig casting Starcraft matches. It should be a party.

Imma cut this post short so I can put in a few links. I hope everyone is having a great week and that we can all try to stay positive.

---------

Here's the games I did in Spanish. I was streaming it as part of my ReHacked series so all the technical goofs are still in there. Feedback is always appreciated!

Positive Experience #3

Happy Sunday, everyone.

Here we are, already onto Positive Experience blog #3. It's been a nice couple of days so far. I didn't get picked for the IPL thing but it's ok. I was watching MLG Dallas this weekend  (which was awesome despite the technical issues they were having) and was totally inspired to try out the ReHacked Valencia thing. I think that's going to be a whole lot of fun as well as a good educational experience. I made a post over on TeamLiquid about it and I haven't have many responses but the people that did seemed pretty positive about it. I'm looking forward to starting that up tomorrow.

Aubrey and I had a nice weekend together. I didn't have to work on Saturday (yay) and it's the end of term for her school so she didn't have anything either. So that meant we just got to hang out the whole time. We got ot just lay in bed for like an hour and a half after we woke up. It was amazing. I dont understand why people have children. Ok, I do understand, but it's really nice to just lay around and that totally wouldn't ever happen if we already had kids (the human kind, not the goat kind). We went to thrift stores that afternoon to look for a new microwave (as ours blew up) but we didn't really find anything great. They're super expensive new, though. We'll just have to wait it out for something good to come up. We did, however, find a like-new copy of The Best of James Herriot  I love this series (If you haven't heard of it, you must track down a copy of All Creatures Great & Small and start reading. The audiobooks are great, too.) and this book comes with a lot of illustrations and photographs of the area and is just awesome. New family heirloom. Bam.

We also found this cool little Italian place is Salt Lake for lunch. We got sandwhiches and mine was a beef brisket sandwich with brie cheese, tomatoes, and this tasty garlic aioli. It was great. I wanted another one right as I finished it. Then we went home and watched more MLG, cleaned up a little, and other hang out at home stuff. We've been watching this show called Raising Hope that's pretty good. Not like Modern Family good, but still good. 

Today we went to church and took naps (yay naps!) and went to Aubrey's parents for dinner and to help her brother with his homework. He...didn't pay a lot of attention in high school so now he's in college and need some help from time to time. He's trying really hard though, so that's good to see. He's taking an English class and a Math class so that means he's always looking for me and Aubrey to help him out when he's in a pinch. It's nice to be helpful though. 

While we were there I read about another Starcraft tournament that Six Pool Gaming is doing and they were looking for foreign language casters for their matches. It just so happens that I speak Spanish so I emailed the guy about it but haven't heard anything back yet. I'll take just about anything I can get at this point. Lol! I take that back, I think casting in Spanish would be a lot of fun. I'll probably yell a lot more though and want to shout "Gooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooaal!" when one of the players GG and leave the match. That's not a problem though, right?

Also I took my quiz for my computer class and got a 96% on it! I haven't gotten that good of a grade on a school assignment for a long time. It's sad to write that, but it feels good to be back on the up and up. The one question I missed was total crap, too. I should have gotten that one. 

My productive adult schedule got kind of thrown off last week because of Halloween and trying to cram for the IPL contest. So this week I'm looking ward to getting a lot more reading done (and treadmilling while reading) and getting my school work done a lot faster. We have plans to hang out with my sisters in Park City this coming weekend as well and they're always a lot of fun. 

That's 20 minutes. Everyone have a great week!

ReHacked Valencia 2012

I haven't heard anything yet but I'm pretty sure I didn't get picked for the IPL contest. That's okay though. I totally get why I didn't get picked (I started the day of the announcement) but I'm not going to let that get me down at all. I just need to keep on playing and keep on casting. 

Speaking of casting, I've been watching MLG Dallas over the weekend and watching the casters and I had an idea. Casting a full on tournament is pretty hard work. There's time between matches they have to fill and everything's live and if the caster straight screws something up they have to save face and can't restart the video and try again. So I've decided that I'm going to cast a major tournament. The tournament is going to be DreamHack Valencia 2012. I know this already happened a couple months ago, but I didn't watch any of it and DreamHack made all of the replays for the entire event available for download (like a bunch of sweethearts!) So starting at the round of 32 I'm going to go through the entire tournament match by match until the finals as if it were live and unfolding as I watch them over the course of several weeks. And that I was the only person there to commentate. That could totally happen. 

This will (hopefully) give me a more realistic tournament-style experience. I'll be taking some notes to remember what each player did during their matches as well as what maps they were on to help me with commentary. This will hopefully help me to be more cohesive through the entire event. I'll be doing it live on my Twitch channel and I might even have my webcam on and dress up as if I were at a real event. That's to be determined. 

All in all I think it'll be a lot of fun and I think it will be a great learning experience. Tournaments generally have two people watching together (and a third person controlling the observer camera) so I'll really have my work cut out for me trying to get it all done myself. I feel up to the challenge, however. Frankly though, if anyone wants to join me and try to co-cast it some we might be able to figure something out with Skype. That would be fun too.

I'll get started on Monday. I'll tweet when I get started (@mikeysce) and it'll be on my Twitch channel. I'll also edit them into match-by-match videos for YouTube. Links to all of those pages on are the sidebar. See you there!

Postive Experience #2

Yesterday was a big day. It was Halloween. That's not necessarily my favorite holiday but I do like Fall and now that I live somewhere with fancy leaves it can be really refreshing. Instead of giving out candy last night, Aubrey and I both had a on of crap that we had to do. She's been grading essays like a madwoman and I was trying to get my crap together to apply for that caster position with IPL. Once we got all that worked out, we played some Amnesia: The Dark Descent together. That game is freaking scary. I know it's kind of an old hat now and has been around or a few years but we really enjoyed ourselves.

Also, it's November now. That means Thanksgiving is coming. I love Thanksgiving. I love the food. I love having the days off. I love playing the video games I generally play on said time off. I love the leftovers. And family. Totally love spending time with family too. I have a blog post from a couple years ago entitled "An Ideal Thanksgiving" that I'm totally going to repost here and I'm really excited about it. Also, my old roommate proposed to his wife on Thanksgiving in a hot air balloon a couple years ago and Aubrey and I totally saw it on the way to buy rolls at the store or something. Also, it was that same day I ate like 7 slices of pie at Aubrey's grandparents' house and I've been well-liked ever since.

Anyway, to be a little more current. I finally got some good casting experience in practicing with some profession replays. It was amazing how addictive it got. Also, it was strange how much I felt like I was noticing now that I was actually looking for things to talk about. All and all it was a lot of fun and definitely a learning experience. I'm totally going to switch to Random now when I ladder so I can really have a better grasp of each race. That's going to be awesome.

Tomorrow I should know if I made it into the running for the IPL job. I'm super excited to see how it goes. And I'm looking forward to keep on playing and casting even if things don't work out. Then I'll be ready for the next time. 

I hope everyone is having a great day!