hmmm
…but they would if they could. Just as they’d spit on little girls for wearing skirts, and women for holding jobs. Don’t be mistaken - the Jews have their own fundamentalists, and they too are Fucking Assholes.
It’s a beautiful day in Taipei.
The image is a couple days old; it’s quite sunny today. Yet, despite the encroaching summer season, it’s barely warm at all - mild and comfortable, with a gentle wind passing through over the ornate Changfu bridge hanging over the Sansia river.
Imagine the scent of sweet, grilled sausages mingling with the fumes of fermented tofu, wafting up from Zushi Temple - perhaps not an olfactory sensation most comfortable to the Western palate, but to those of us with a foot stretched painfully over both ends of the Pacific, it is both intimately familiar and excitingly exotic. A friendly ghost of a promise of humble gustatory delights, sharp and sweet and biting and savory all at once. The flavor of citrusy pickled vegetables mingles delightedly with the almost cheese-like savoriness of the grilled tofu, accentuated with the glaze of chili rubbed roughly onto it by the woman operating the stand.
And it all washes down with the sweet, syrupy flavor of winter melon juice.
It’s a lazy day in Sansia, and the mind floats away with the late spring breeze. I stare blankly outward towards the river, not truly seeing as I am feeling the breeze. I’m blindly looking at the slow, molasses-like motion of contracurrent waves, blown across the river by the winds, wondering where the fishes are, and why those rocks look like funny, oblong ovals…
…and a flash of brilliant red fin wakes me up from my drowsy reverie. Delight and recognition; whole schools across the river, the greenish water clear as emeralds, the dance of polished scales across the flowing waters.
It’s a beautiful day in Taipei.
General Theory
- Aggro is Better Than Passive. Don’t play characters like Karthus or Nasus, who take forever to get optimized. Veigar, too, is a poor choice - though his stun utility may make up for it.
- Better to Live - Always. Champions with massive survivability and are inherently hard to gank can turn around even a bad laning phase.
- Load Up On CC. The more you’re able to roam and lock down a target, the more you are able to alleviate Solo Queue Syndrome from your failing lanes.
- Multirole Capabilities Are Good. It means they have stats high enough to survive in multiple positions, allow you to play them repeatedly regardless of solo queue calls so as to truly master them, and gives you options if your specialists are banned out.
Support Theory
- You Are The Carry (for the first 15 minutes). The support’s role is to make sure the AD Carry gets to their Infinity Edge or Trinity Force before the enemy does. The AD Carry should just farm as much as possible - you are there to prevent interruption.
- AGGRO THE FUCK OUT OF THEM. The support’s role is to also win the lane. This means repeatedly chipping at the enemy team until they’re forced to go back to base. Your carry then gets to build a huge CS lead.
- You Are Mission Control. If the Jungler is the general, having a full view of the battlefield and command of engagements, then you are the adjutant, tracking the details regarding timers, ward placements, and enemy intel.
Midlane Theory
- Gank ASAP. That’s not just the jungler’s job. If you can clear the wave and force the opponent to farm under the tower for a minute, do so and roam to the other lanes, looking for kill opportunities.
- Be Economical. Unless you’re getting Athene’s Unholy Grail (WHICH YOU SHOULD IT’S SO GOOD), it’s not actually a great idea to waste mana poking constantly. Save it for the burst - or the waveclear.
- Steal Wraiths. Just as you are able to win other lanes, so too can you deny the enemy jungler. Of the laners, midlane has the most overall influence.
So I’m stuck with a bit of a writer’s block, working on this Garena article. The one thing I find that solves most blocks is to just drop whatever I’m doing and brainstorm something else for a while.
I might have brainstormed a bit too hard.
What this was originally supposed to be is just a list of the sixteen-odd characters I need to start playing Garena ranked once I reach level 30 on their SEA servers (which I’m doing rather well on - a very solid win ratio thus far). Two or three champions for every role, right?
…now, I have them listed not only by optimal roles, but by alternate roles (8 total overlaps on 7 characters), what runesets to use (10 total), how many runes of each (…actually, pretty standard 9-9-9-3), how many runes I need total (132), the total IP cost to have all fifteen of the primary stable (with the 450 cruft to break past the 16 threshold.) along with the rune pages and runes (still calculating, but already past 50k with the runepages alone - better to just buy a bundle)…
…yikes.
This spreadsheet’s grown a bit cancerously.
People really liked my most recent Slice and Dice column. Its reddit thread’s ubiquitous with positive comments, and the casters seem to like it too.
…
Naturally, this means I get to spend most of today wrestling with impostor syndrome.
To work off of the link and topic provided:
The idea that the ultrarich are job creators is the biggest liar-liar-pants-on-fire bulletpoint in both the US Conservative and Libertarian ideologies. The assertion simply doesn’t hold up to scrutiny in any sense, and the ones in the GOP that actually have brain cells to rub together, and didn’t get their positions just from crass populism, are distinctly aware of the hypocrisy.
The ultrarich do not create jobs. They do not own capital. They do not hire workers. They do not sell product. The Smithian ideal of the source of wealth among modern nations does not at all reflect the average profile of the truly rich.
The problem is risk management. Business ownership is risky. Research and development is risky and ludicrously expensive. To own capital is to saddle yourself with the inherent risk of an electron-speed market that mutates wildly on a millisecond basis. Where the ownership of some land and farm tools was only subject to the slow and manageable risk of seasons and local demand, the world of modern industry is defined primarily by its turbulence.
If you want to get rich, the last thing you want to do is start a business and hire workers. The turnover rate for modern startups is 90% or worse. Entrepreneurialism is for two distinct demographics: the passionate and the lunatic.
And yet it is true that you can’t create wealth without creating capital.
So the ruthlessly rational rich invests.
They load the risk elsewhere. Onto the owners of capital. Onto the passionate and lunatic. But they don’t invest wildly, do they? They want a return. It might not be them facing down a massive multimillion dollar lawsuit, but it was their hundred thousand dollars that seed-funded the formula - and they want a tenfold return on it at worst.
So, among the world, who are the most reliable capital-owners? Who are among those where you’re most likely to get a nice, safe return for your money?
Not in startups.
Not in mom’n’pops.
You invest internationally.
You invest in the people that open dirt-streaked sweatshops in Indonesia. In limb-crushing petro equipment in China. In indentured servants picking coffee beans in South America. You invest in the people that fulfills the demand of a million-strong customer base in the cheapest possible way.
You DON’T invest in American. You DON’T invest in quality of life.
You do not lose sight of the end goal.
You invest to enhance your wealth.
The rich don’t provide jobs. The rich don’t offer trickle-down benefits to their homelands. The rich are incentivized to be rich. They are incentivized twofold to both keep jobs out of high-income nations like America and keep wages pegged as low as possible in third world countries.
Because to do otherwise… is to not be rich in relatively short order.
So this is why you need government, and this is why you need to tax the ever-stinking-hell out of the uppermost earners. They are rational human beings, after all - and because they are, it is only rational to assume that they’ll maintain a stable system of exploitation without outside interference. As long as a “middle” economic class, or the class that does produce startups and mom’n’pops and does invest in local businesses and employment, is seen as a social good - and it is - then you absolutely must have a governmental structure that punishes the rich.
If they don’t, the rich will punish us.
The morning after an article’s finished is not terribly unlike a hangover. The pressure emphasis is more on the back of the skull than front, perhaps. And it mounts the shorter the duration between articles.
Which is the real reason, I suspect, why I never actuallyfinish stories. Writing regularly fucks with my head really badly. Causes tangible pain.
…maybe coffee’ll help.
Which means I’m 50% done finalizing my new support style.
Taric was an easy start. A good, decently-ranged stun very easily sets up kills. Once it lands, all you need to do is run up, Shatter, slap Exhaust down, and suddenly the enemy’s armor is shredded, and your AD carry’s doing near-true damage.
Leona isn’t quite as safe, but her passive’s procs are even more dangerous, and can shut down an opponent in short order.
With just these two champs, and playing as a support, I’ve been carrying games. How else do you describe having less than three deaths, yet double-digit assist numbers, by ten minute’s time? How else do you describe both you and your AD carry being 2-3 levels above your lane counterparts?
But I’m only about halfway done mastering the new style. There are still a few components left: one more support champion to fully master, and the accompanying runes.
Both Taric and Leona are tanky supports. Both have means of leveraging burst damage potential, against the opponent. The obvious third “bruiser-support” would be Alistar, but Ali’s got a number of problems - his main form of engagement wastes two spells for a single jump-knockup, while even Leona’s Zenith Blade at least immobilizes an enemy when it hits.
Instead, perhaps Kayle.
She’s a bit more fragile than I’d like, but there’s no denying that she fits my intent. Armor and magic resist shred as a *passive* is exactly what I want - and the rest of her kit’s a great fit too. A powerful slow to engage, a movespeed and heal buff to keep the AD carry in range, and Righteous Fury lets her keep applying that passive at-range.
And then there’s the Absolute Hax known as Intervention.
Yeah, Kayle works. Now I just need to master her and get runesets for them, and we have a balls-busting support paradigm engineered.
