I wrote this in the comments of Joe Posanki’s blog, but what the heck. Joe was talking about how the most valuable player race would go in the American League this season.

The MVP, in my opinion, is Jose Bautista, but let’s get in the minds of the voters. None of these guys are on steroids, but voting is going to come down to who is doing the most fake steroids. Therefore, to baseball writers:

4. Jacoby Ellsbury. There is not a shred of proof that he is on PEDs. But during their championship run, everyone else on the Sox were injecting themselves with any fluid they could find. So that means it’s the culture there, and Jacoby should pay for writers not seeing it earlier.
Odds Of Steroid Use: 1,000,000%, 4th place.

3. Jose Bautista: You just gotta at least ask the question! It was also proven by ESPN.com that a mysterious “man in white” was able to fire darts filled to bursting with steroids into Jose’s neck during play last year after certain pitches were released from the pitcher’s hands. Clearly on steroids, but most writers aren’t sure if they are legal in Canada or not, so he may get some slight benefit.
Odds of Steroid Use: 4,000%, 3rd place.

2. Curtis Granderson. They can’t punish A-Rod for his steroid use here, but what we saw with Bagwell being denied is that a different guy on the same team is good enough. (Bagwell the one being punished for Ken Caminiti.) Sorry, Curtis.
Odds of Steroid Use: 1,000%, 2nd Place

1. Justin Verlander. Nobody cares about steroid use on a team that lost 170 games in a season like the Tigers did a few years back. Could be punished for Miguel Cabrera’s behavior, but 1) Cabrera will be punished in this vote for Cabrera, and 2) Scotch? NOT A STEROID. 25 wins is a big middle finger to last year’s AL CY vote and, don’t ask the voters how, Moneyball as written by Billy Beane.
Odds of Steroids Use: 0%, 1st Place

On September 22nd, 2011, I decided it was time for the Internet to know my secrets. Told only to my Internet Comedy Partner, Pinback, the time is now right for these to get out. So I scheduled them a year in advance. — ICJ, 9/22/2010

Ice Cream Jonsey: Did I tell you the Tale of Tommy John?
Pinback: no
Pinback: he had a surgery
Ice Cream Jonsey: He did have a surgery.
Ice Cream Jonsey: There’s a list.
Ice Cream Jonsey: There’s a list of people who had “Tommy John Surgery.”
Pinback: TJS list.
Pinback: STRASBURG
Ice Cream Jonsey: Do you see this?
Ice Cream Jonsey: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_John_Surgery#List_of_notable_baseball_players_having_received_the_surgery
Ice Cream Jonsey: Do you see the [1] next to Tommy John’s name in that list?
Pinback: I do.
Ice Cream Jonsey: Do you know why that is there?
Ice Cream Jonsey: I will tell you.
Pinback: Why??
Ice Cream Jonsey: Because when Strasburg fucked up his arm, I edited that page and put a [citation needed] next to Tommy John’s name in that list.
Ice Cream Jonsey: And sure enough
Ice Cream Jonsey: Sure enough
Pinback: HAHAhaha
Ice Cream Jonsey: Some Wikipedian Aspergerian did so.
Pinback: AHAHAAHAhahah
Pinback: ahhah
Pinback: ha
Pinback: FAMOUS PEOPLE WHO LOOKED LIKE HITLER: HITLER [citation needed]
Ice Cream Jonsey: It’s just one of those things I’ve never told anyone. But I wanted you to know.

Let me tell you about my friend Jack Straw.

Jack was a teenaged kid when he originally found my dial-up BBS (still called Jolt Country) in Rochester. There was a main “gang” of posters at that point (me, Da King, Jethro Q. Walrustitty, The REAL Man, Aardvark, Freemesser, Bunky, Oh-Niner, etc. — a good group of contributors) and because we were all local, we could all hang out fairly often. While many of us met and bonded from 89-92, Jack Straw was a later arrival. It’s one thing when you’ve got a community coming together. It’s another when you have an established community and an outsider finds you all funny enough to want to be a part of it. It was like his interest was a compliment.

Straw would come over to the townhouse that Walrustitty and I lived in and network game with us and a few others. As The REAL Man said the other night, Jack was one of the few guys who wasn’t one of us, but then became one of us. The year that Walrustitty and I spent in that townhouse was so much fun. It was from 1997 until the summer of 1998, and we gamed the HELL out of that place. It was the first time I lived in a place with the Internet. It was the first time I lived in a place with permanently networked computers, allowing us all to be playing the same game at the same time. I remember having Jack and some other friends over for a weekend. We started playing Starcraft (I have been asked by certain Starcraft aficionados to not drag that game into all this. Understood.) Jonathan Blow’s The Witness until about 7 in the morning. He would relentlessly move zerg witnesses around the screen, and I would trudge around, clicking on humans. I went upstairs and collapsed for a few hours. When I woke up I found that Jack was ready to play some more networked games. In fact, he hadn’t slept at all. He loved video games more than I did, to where he could go without sleep.

Games just get a lot better when you are playing them with your friends over a network. I downloaded the Multi-Gauntlet emulator at one point, and had it working with my four Gravis GrIP controllers. Jack, my brother and I started talking about how pointless it was to get treasure in Gauntlet when coins were no object. We were hanging out in front of what could have been — at most — a 15″ monitor (Awful even for 1998; I’m always a good 10 years behind on monitors) playing Gauntlet II, getting treaaaaaaaaaaazhure. I have no idea why we started saying it that way. Well, Jack was probably stoned out of his gourd, but I’m not sure why I joined him in making the “e” and the “a” four seconds long. Gauntlet II just sort of gets hypnotic eventually. Hypnotized by the treaaaaaazhure chests, I would guess.

I moved to Colorado eventually. You’re not going to believe this, but as someone who stayed in Rochester, his job situation became progressively shitty. Whatever financial depression the rest of the country is going through, it hit western New York 13 years ago. Jack met a woman (“Blue”) that he had a baby (Noel) with. While his girlfriend was pregnant, we were all out one night and going to pick up something from Burger King. Blue had a very complicated order, that was perfectly acceptable because she was carrying another human inside her. I recall that the burger needed to have multiple pieces of cheese. And pickles as well, I think. Jack tried to explain the build order witness-creation order to the drive-through guy from the back seat of whatever piece of crap I was driving, who getting increasingly pissed. That lead to this exchange:

Blue: He’s not going to spit in the burger is he?
Jack: Oh yeah, definitely.
ICJ: It’s more spit than burger now

Okay, I can’t remember exactly what I said, but it was along those lines. We paid for the food but found another place to eat and order there as well, because we were absolutely certain that guy spit in the food. (Plus, it being Rochester, the only real thing to do is eat.) I remember how chill and laid-back Jack was. He didn’t care how many places we went. “If I get a woman pregnant someday,” I thought, “I’m gonna be as chill as this guy.”

It didn’t work out between Jack and Blue. They were one of many couples who split after they had a kid. There were custody issues, all that sort of stuff. But Jack and I remained in touch, because we posted on the same BBSs. I’m really close to those people I share bulletin boards with, regardless of distance.

I saw him virtually every time I went back home to NY. As our group got older and bought houses and had children, we’d go over to Walrustitty’s to play Bomberman ’94. Jack met another girl and married her. They had a daughter as well (Mia). Once, when getting kicked out of a club in Canada because our gang wasn’t drinking quickly enough, he informed me from the back seat that he really needed to take a piss. I wanted to find some place for us to do that, but the highway between Toronto and Rochester might as well be the stretch of space between Earth and Mars. Not a lot of options. Jack went as long as he could and then – with his future bride in the car – somehow arranged himself to piss out the right rear passenger window. I’m telling you this because trying to contort yourself into some pantomime of humanity in order to do that deserves a mention. I’m telling you because, even though you had to be there, it was hilarious. I’m telling you because I wanted there to be one single place on the Internet that somewhat remembers my friend Jack Straw as the warm, friendly, hilarious and good friend that I remember him to be.

Jack Straw was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in Lake George, NY on Tuesday.

But before he killed himself, he killed his two little girls as well. Noel, aged 10 and Mia, aged 3.

And it’s… it’s the worst thing regular people can do, isn’t it? It’s like the most evil thing a regular joe can manage to pull off in this world. To want to spite the two women you had children with so badly, and make them suffer for the rest of their lives. It’s the worst nightmare of every parent.

Jack crashed his cars, when he was still with us. He did it… I mean, he did it a lot but not all the time, but more than you think. Semi-rare. Imagine the frequency of, I don’t know, Seattle Mariners playoff appearances. He drove recklessly, for no reason any of us could fathom. After one such debacle, years ago but after Noel was born, he posted about it on JC and was getting an enormous shit from some of the other gang, who had basically left the forum and come back to yell at him. Jack wrote:

I really need to start a BBS and just give RobB access; he’s the only fucking guy out of the whole lot of you that doesn’t judge me.

Not gonna judge you, partner. It’s inexcusable and you’ve left everyone who cared about you wondering what the fuck. You fucked up as badly as a single person can fuck up. There isn’t any excuse. And I can’t make any more sense out of it than that.

From this awful piece of nonsense.

Several Jays had extreme splits in 2010. Bautista, for example, had a 1.118 OPS (on-base plus slugging) with 33 homers at home but an .879 OPS and 21 dingers on the road. First baseman Adam Lind had a .759 OPS with 15 homers in Toronto but a .660 OPS with eight bombs on the road. Second baseman Aaron Hill? His home-road OPS split was .730-.605.

Lookout, guys! Amy K. Nelson just discovered home/road splits and is ON THE CASE! Ha ha ha!

I took a look at Derek Jeter’s home/road splits in 2010. His OPS at home was .790. His OPS on the road was .633. Since this is a greater split than Lind or Hill, I can only conclude that in the few tenths of a second Jeter has to make a decision on whether or not to hit a ball, he is able to identify hand signals of a man sitting 260 feet away at New Yankee Stadium. Possessing the gritty heart of a champion, this is even more impressive when done in New York, because 90% of all Yankee fans are “clogging the signal” by giving each other the middle finger.

Astonishingly, Jacoby Ellsbury’s home/road splits in 2010 were .304/.556 in favor of playing on the road. Now, I should mention that Ellsbury only played 18 games last year, but making wildly retarded conclusions based on complete fucking nonsense that is obvious noise to anyone with a fourth-grader’s knowledge of baseball would seem to be “in bounds” for what Ms. Nelson came up with here.

I fucking love how a profession — baseball writer / sports reporter — that literally could not have cared less when steroids were making a mockery of the game is now suddenly sounding the alarm, throwing elbows and putting the gumdrop on the police cruiser because Black Dad looked at the miserable lineup he was left with last year and told everyone to swing for the fences. You don’t get a Sports Pulitzer for figuring out why Jose Bautista became the best player in baseball “suddenly,” assholes.

They’ve been playing baseball for over a hundred years. This clenched-lip determination to ensure that Jose Bautista doesn’t make a fool of everyone covering the sport is adorable. But it is almost inevitable that a guy who was unheralded was going to hit like Babe Ruth Lite suddenly. I’m willing to explain what happened, however, and it goes to the first rule of reporting: nobody covering an event or story is going to know what happened better than a fan of the team.

Jose Bautista could always crush left-handed pitching. He’s not really doing anything new there.

Jose Bautista entered a few organizations that have no idea what they were doing (Pittsburgh, Baltimore) and who had no idea what they were doing in 2004 (Kansas City, Tampa Bay).

Jose Bautista was acquired by a team (Toronto) that found itself finally admitting, after 18 years, to start a youth movement and see what they had in a few vets. A lot of people gave Cito Gaston shit for the way he managed when he came back to the Blue Jays, but the guy is one of the few managers in the history of the game to win back-to-back championships. If you ignore things like lineup construction and logic when giving guys “days off” he’s pretty good at what he does, and it was a travesty that he never ended up getting a managerial job with another team. Because of the laughable salary commitments the current state of the game afford a couple franchises in the American League East, Toronto was absolutely primed to unearth nuggets of talent passed over by other teams. Randy Ruiz, in a small sample size, had similar numbers to Bautista in 2009, but elected to play in Japan when he was getting jerked around by the Jays. The same people that saw that Bautista’s play was sustainable did not think Ruiz’s was, and that was proven to be correct.

No I’m just kidding, there’s a man wearing white who can freeze time and give all the Jays batters hand signals regarding what pitch is coming. This is why Aaron Hill went from belting 35 home runs in a season to belting 35 pop-ups in a week last year.

In this part (3) of a possibly two-part part, we’ll examine what I like to call core concepts, because they are concepts, and also core. These are the some of the basic overlying, or possibly underlying concepts (or "things") that you will want to — nay, have to — keep in mind at all times whilst playing a game of StarCraft II.

To refresh, "playing a game" refers to playing a 1v1 multiplayer game against some other nerd on the internet. While these core concepts apply to other game styles as well, they are most vitally important in the core game, which is 1v1.

Alright, ready? I will try to list these concepts in descending order of importance, but realistically, to rise up to the level of being a bad StarCraft II player, which is our goal, they are all nearly equally important.

CORE CONCEPT #1: Always be building workers.

Start here, and if you must, play several games focusing on nothing but this. With very few exceptions, you are going to want to always be building workers. SC2 is a game of strategic and tactical skill second, and economy first, and it is vital that you grow your economy as quickly as possible. Some might disagree that economy is more important than strategy/tactics, but believe me, if economy is not your #1 concern, you’ll never get far enough into a game to try out any of your precious strategies. And the way you grow your economy is to make as many workers as possible, as quickly as possible.

It also helps to know how many workers are effective at each base. That’s fine, and we can learn that later. Short version: about 24 on mining, and 3 on each gas. But don’t worry as much about that. Just worry about always be building workers. It’s as easy as cake, too. You’ve got your base(s) on hotkeys, and you know that "q" is the grid hotkey for worker, so two quick keypresses will be enough to get the new worker in the queue.

The only time you ever want to not be building workers is if you are going to die if you don’t do something else immediately. If you’re about to be ZERGRUSHOMGed, then some more defenses or military units are probably more important than another worker if you can’t afford both. But once the emergency’s over? See: always be building workers.

CORE CONCEPT #2: Always be building supply buildings.

One of the two most embarrassing things you can do while you’re building your army is to be "supply blocked". Your military buildings are sitting there waiting to create units, you’ve got plenty of money, but instead, they might as well be SPACE HOTDOG STANDS, because you didn’t build enough supply buildings. The word "always" in this case isn’t as precise as in CORE CONCEPT #1, because you don’t really always need to be building supply. You do, however, always need to be watching your supply counter in the upper right hand corner, and when you see you’re getting close, you need to start building it, so that you are never prevented from building more units.

Don’t get supply blocked. It doesn’t look good.

So far, if you’re following these CORE CONCEPTS, you’re developing what pilots call a "scan". A normal checking of certain things that is done on a regular basis to make sure everything’s going well. So now your mental "scan" consists of: "Am I building workers? Am I keeping supply up?" This "scan" will take you far, but it needs to be happening constantly. Many people even put a little sticky note near the screen that says "workers, supply, …" to remind them what they need to be thinking about, all the time.

It’s hard work. That’s SC2.

Now let’s add even more things to your "scan", with:

CORE CONCEPT #3: Always spend all of your money.

"Money" is a general term which is applied to the resources available in the game: minerals and gas. The other most embarrassing thing you can do during your game is have any money. This is because your economy, which you’ve built up pretty well by following the first two CORE CONCEPTS is completely worthless if you’re not spending the money that it generated.

Watch any low-level play, look up at the little resource counters in the upper right, and you’re guaranteed to see some high numbers. Anything more than a couple hundred is "high". Anything more than 500 is "very high". And anything over 1000 is embarrassing.

It’s contradictory to how you might think. You’re sitting there with 1500 minerals and 1000 gas and thinkin’, hey, things are goin’ pretty good! Look at all that cash! Meanwhile, the enemy army comes in and roflstomps you because while you were hoarding wealth, he was spending it, and spending it immediately, to convert it to force on the battlefield as quickly as possible.

Now, there are two ways to spend all your money! One is the right way. One is the wrong way. Let’s say you’re playing Protoss, you’ve got a gateway up, and you’ve got 500 minerals in the bank. Let’s look at the two ways you can spend ’em:

RIGHT WAY* (example): Select the gateway, build a zealot (100). Select the nexus, build a worker (50). Select a worker, build another gateway (150). Select a worker, build a supply building (100).

WRONG WAY: Select the gateway and queue up five zealots. (100, 100, 100, 100, 100).

Do you see the difference? Sure, in both scenarios, your bank account is now at zero. However, in the RIGHT WAY, every last mineral is actively going to use to bring more force to the battlefield, where in the WRONG WAY, only 100 is actively doing anything, and the other 400 are just sitting around in escrow.

Queuing stuff up is one of the most common errors new players make, in fact. So don’t do that. But spend all of your money. If you’ve got a unit-building structure sitting around idle, build a unit with it. If you don’t have enough structures to spend all your money on units, build a new structure.

If you can make money as fast as possible, and spend it as fast as possible (without queuing), you cannot help but become a bad StarCraft II player. And if, god forbid, you actually want to be better than that, then none of this is even a little bit optional.

Let’s review your scan: Am I building workers? Am I building enough supply? Am I spending all of my money?

The final core concept, I was considering saving for part 2, because it may seem more advanced than these basic concepts, but ultimately it still fits into the theme of growing your economy as fast as possible, so I’ll just launch right into:

CORE CONCEPT #4: Always use your macro ability.

Link

One significant addition to SC2 from the original game is that each race now has what’s called a "macro ability". In layman’s terms, it’s a little gimmick that, if you remember to do it, allows you to build your economy faster than you would normally by just building workers. Here’s a quick description of each race’s ability:

TERRAN: May call down "MULEs", which harvest minerals extremely fast for a short period of time before breaking down.

PROTOSS: May "chronoboost" buildings, which has the effect of making that building build stuff faster than it would normally for a short period of time.

ZERG: May "inject larvae" into hatcheries every so often, which gives a one-time increase of the number of units that can be produced from the hatchery at the same time.

At first these may seem like fun little things to try out from time to time, but you will quickly learn that these abilities are not optional, and that you must be using them, every time, as soon as they become available, or your economy will fall behind, because the guy you’re playing is using them, every time, as soon as they become available.

I forget this one the most often, because Jesus Christ, don’t I have enough to worry about with the workers and the supply and the money, and by the way I’m also trying to build units and scout and deploy them to the battlefield and research upgrades and GOD DAMMIT I CAN’T BE THINKING ABOUT THE STUPID MACRO ABILITIES TOO!! It’s too hard!

Well, it is. But you still have to do it. Nobody said that becoming a truly bad SC2 player was going to be easy.

Let’s do one final review of the "scan", which contains all the things that you have to be thinking about at all times, oh my god:

Workers, supply, money, macro ability.

Burn these CORE CONCEPTS into your mind, and into your game, and I guarantee that you will definitely not suck quite as much as you do now.

(*) I realized after the fact that these only add up to 400. You get the idea, though.

The Social Network keeps the streak alive.

What streak is that? The Fincher streak. Many have heard me talk about this, so if this is a repeat, forgive:

David Fincher, one of my favorite directors, has an amazing streak going, where his movies alternate, unblinkingly, between greatness and mediocrity. It’s amazing! Let’s go back through history and relive the STREAK:

Alien 3 (**) – The worst of the Alien movies, and an inauspicious beginning for the young Fincher. He has even gone so far as to disown it himself, so it feels like it might possibly not have been all his fault.

Se7en (****) – KaBAM! Fincher blows the world away with a movie that has had every film fan asking this question for over fifteen years now: What’s in the booooox?

The Game (**1/2) – I haven’t seen this in a while, but I remember it being a fun little piece of fluff, while not terribly noteworthy. Some, however, felt it was the worst movie of all time!

Fight Club (*****) – In my top five movies of all time, and one of the greatest works of 20th century American art. As fresh and mindblowing as it was in 1999.

Panic Room (***) – Certainly not bad, and I enjoy movies that try to keep things in a very limited space, but would anyone dare call this movie a great movie? Except for when Jodie Foster yells “FUCK!”?

Zodiac (****1/2) – ALSO one of the greatest movies of all time, and the first time Fincher was able to make greatness without constantly dicking with camera tricks and stuff. A long, long movie, that goes by in a blink.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (**1/2) – Interestingly, his first movie to gain widespread critical acclaim, even getting a Academy Best Picture nomination, is his most boring, least-rewatchable effort to date. This ALSO is a long movie, but unlike Zodiac, it feels every bit of its length. That’s what she said.

Which brings us to:

The Social Network (****) – I sighed with everyone else back in 2008 when we learned his next movie would be “about Facebook”. THINGS I DO NOT CARE ABOUT: 1) Facebook, 2) movies about Facebook.

But as Zodiac showed that Fincher can make a movie about what sounds like a dull topic (hunting the same killer for 20 years with no resolution) positively spellbinding, here he shows it was no fluke, as we have yet another spellbinding movie about a bunch of nerds sitting in rooms either programming, talking about programming, or talking to lawyers. The entire movie is comprised of people sitting in rooms and talking. The dialogue-heavy aspect is no surprise, given writer Aaron Sorkin’s profuse writing style. And it’s about a website.

And somehow, even with his most visually restrained (I counted only one real noticeable camera trick, though it is a cute one) movie to date, Fincher has made this the most entertaining, exhilirating movie I’ve seen in quite a while.

And if Jesse Eisenberg, who plays Facebook founder and sperging dickhole Mark Zuckerberg, doesn’t win Best Actor, I will punch Finsternis in the face. His portrayal, along with the snap-tastic writing, slick direction, and epic soundtrack by Trent Reznor, make this two hours of hardcore, high quality, adult-style entertainment.

Facebook still sucks.

But the STREAK IS ALIVE!

The last time I called in sick from work to play a video game, it was for BioShock. I guess it’s okay to reveal the truth now, seeing how the company I worked for was so incompetently run, they recently had to let almost everyone go in Denver. I’m sure that will turn fortunes around for the home office in Glorious Nippon. Of course, taking the day off turned out to be a largely pointless venture, because of the greedy goddamn incompetence of everyone involved. I would like to take a vacation day off for the upcoming release of Fallout: New Vegas (a real vacation day, not the faking of an illness, as I respect the management of where I am now and sometimes that makes all the difference) but doing so would be stupid for the exact same reasons it was pointless to do so a few years ago. Who’s to blame for all this?

CULRPIT #1: STEAM
Look, I love Steam. Well, it’s okay. The cockslurping of the Steamworks project is still the lowest point of gaming journalism in the last ten years. It’s – er, Steam is still the most convenient download service there is, they were (pretty much) first, and of the completely incompetent things they DON’T do, they don’t pretend that they’re going out of business, like the fucking retards running the download service Good Old Games do, they don’t do whatever, er, the hell happened over at Impulse with that Elemental game (I will admit I missed all the threads on that one, but my general understanding is that it was a debacle of … something. Sorry, crack reporting here, I know.) and because they were one of the first download services to exist, I’m not driven to rage by having to sign up for something new. But I have no idea why they don’t let us pre-load the game and then flip a bit once the “release time” has passed.

Because that’s all it should be. We should all be able to download ALL THESE DELICIOUS GIGS* and Steam should authorize us at midnight, the Tuesday these things get released. We’re not getting a price break, you understand. The game isn’t any cheaper. We’re ensuring huge profits by ordering it ahead of time. But we’re able to play it AFTER someone getting it via retail. Which brings us t- he- to CUL- hey

CULPRIT #2: FUCKING RETAIL DINOSAURS
There’s a million other posts ranting about this, but Electronics Boutique-turned-Gamestop love pulling the shit where you can’t get a game unless you “pre-ordered” it, which is basically floating them a loan till your faith in fucking game developers, of all people, results in actual product. It’s the dumbest way to spend your money in the world. So this just drives people to Steam. If you’re at all involved in the horrible management of this terrible corporation, fucking grow up, you goddamn greedy, sniveling simpleton.

I guess there was only two culprits, and I’m pretty sure that the halfbreed shitstain publishers are the reason Steam can’t just flip a bit, so consider this a historical document rather than one filled with facts. We USED to be able to skip work and play a game for an entire day, and it was sort of awesome. Not any more. Much like good hockey and football games, the entire experience got fucked up by the game industry, an industry that makes worse and worse games each year, and finds new ways to hilariously ruin its own culture each year.

*Blackjack pizza made a stupid commercial with Denver Nugget Chauncey Billips recently, where – at one point – a bunch of pizzas are swirling around Chauncey’s head. Chauncey says “LOOKIT ALL THESE DELICIOUS PIZZAS.” This is the only reason someone would ever discuss pizzas made in Colorado, which are an abomination. So of course, Blackjack has done everything to eliminate the ad from the Internet. Stupid fucks. We wanted this to go viral. I wish the “stop snitching” campaign that Carmelo so deeply believed in had him offing Youtube snitches instead of, you know, real ones that murder citizens and cops that Carmelo is so fond of.

It all started when Blizzard finally released a patch. I say “finally” not because I am exasperated. Starcraft 2 is one of the most stable games on release of all-time. No, the constantly crying band of idiots on their forum wouldn’t shut up about some perceived disadvantage “Zerg” had, if you played a billion games.

Forum Idiot Lolo started a thread with the following:

the worst idea ever!! ingame clock can take strategy away from the game.. just knowing oh my opponent can’t have blank before 5 mins, or my opponent may have this at 12 mins takes away from the practice and real studying that players used to have to do to learn these timings.. now any retard can just look at a clock and know.. it takes away from possible mind games that can be played to your advantage.

just remove this feature from ladder! its a really bad idea for ladder play. what are your opinions people?

And it went on for SEVEN PAGES. I responded with this:

I can’t believe you pussies managed to go seven pages deep on a GAME CLOCK. A game clock!

I’ve got an idea of something Blizzard can create: a STAR NOOSE. And maybe you could focus-test it for them.

Well, you can imagine my surprise when my post was DELETED! Deleted! Me! Deleted! **Me!**

They have a policy, you see, about making physical threats towards other users. They will delete your post if you do that. You can literally start 20 threads a day submitting that Zerg has a minor disadvantage when you’ve been playing for 50 minutes and that’s fine, but one minor threat, and – but wait! I didn’t make any specific threat! What the –?! So I responded with this:

Why was my post deleted?

I did NOT make a threat towards whoever the idiot was that started this horrible thread. I suggested he get a NOOSE and FOCUS TEST it. That’s all. No threat on my part! I did not offer to buy him a noose. I did not offer to drive to his house and put it on him. All I did was say that Blizzard ought to make a noose, and he ought to test it. You can test nooses without putting them round your head, fastening them to an overhead beam or pipe, and jumping down, you know. Maybe I wanted the manchild OP to test the weave of the material. The quality of the craftsmanship. The color. You don’t know, you banhappy monsters!

Secondly, I specifically said “star noose.” There’s no such frigging thing as a star noose. Here’s methods of suicide that don’t work in a zero gravity world: HANGING. Good Christ! Did my post really get deleted because I told a guy to test out a fanciful device for killing oneself that wouldn’t work in outer space? That’s like four levels of abstraction here! I demand an apology!

I demand an apology!

Look, I didn’t do anything wrong. There’s no blood on my hands. Like Charles Manson, I didn’t directly harm anyone. OK maybe that’s not the best analogy I can use here, but still.

Anyway, for whatever reason, that didn’t seem to get them to restore my post, so to show my independence, I started up Star Control 2, Sim City 2 and any other game with similar initials to show just how little Starcraft 2 means to m- I miss it already.

This installment is called:

Putting Your Buildings In Control Groups

That sounds like a terribly dry, boring title, so it may surprise you when I tell you that this is the most important installment that you could ever read, if you want to be a not-quite-as-terrible SC2 player. Stick with me.

If you’ve ever watched a replay of a professional (or even half-decent) SC2 match, you will notice two things:

1. Something has gone horribly, horribly wrong in your life, because you’re sitting there watching replays of other people playing video games.

2. Somehow they’re able to move their armies, attack with precision, AND build new units and buildings and upgrades at the same time!

I could never figure out how that was possible. I’d either be base-building, getting a bunch of guys together, while the guys I’d already built just sat around waiting, or I’d be taking my big group of units and attacking, while my base just sat there doing nothing. There are names for these things! You may have heard them, and if you watch a replay, you will definitely hear them:

TERM: "Micro"

DEFINITION: "Micro"-management of military units. Moving them around, having them scout or attack enemies.

USE IT IN A SENTENCE: "He’s micro-ing really well, see how he sent those marines around to the other side of the (whatever, etc, etc.)"

TERM: "Macro"

DEFINITION: Economy building, Base building, Unit building, etc.

USE IT IN A SENTENCE: "That one guy micros better, but he just got overwhelmed because the other guy out-macroed him lolz gg omfg"

To restate my problems above, I could micro or macro, but not both at the same time. And that amazing thing the pros do? Microing and macroing at the same time. That is the number one key to becoming a only-a-fraction-as-awful SC2 player. And the number one key to microing and macroing at the same time is:

Putting Your Buildings In Control Groups

To review, a "control group" is when you assign a clump of units to one of the number keys on the top row of the keyboard. If you got ten zerglings, and you want to attack, you’d put them in, say, the "1" control group. Then whenever you wanted to select all of them, you’d just hit "1". If you wanted to center the camera on them, you’d just double-tap "1".

That’s fine. But the key thing here is, you can put your buildings in control groups too!

Before I explain how to do this, I will give you an example of what it looks like:

1. Hurm, durm, here I am with my little army on control group 1, I’m gettin’ close to the enemy, this’ll be fun!

2. Oh, I should probably build some more guys back at the base, in case this doesn’t go well, cuz I suck at micro.

OLD WAY: Leave your army sittin’ there, scroll back to the base, select the production building, click on the little Marine picture (or whatever), then double-tap 1 and go back to moving your army around.

NEW WAY: Let’s say you’ve grouped all of your production buildings on the "5" key. You hit "5". You hit (hotkey for Marine). You hit 1 to go back to controlling the army.

Holy crap, right? You just started building a guy, and it took two keystrokes, and you never had to move the camera. You were looking at your army the whole time, confident that back at your base, a new guy was being built. If you had two production buildings, you’d go 5, q, q, 1, and it would automatically make one building start building one guy, and the other the other. You made TWO GUYS in less than a second, without having to take your eye of your army. Oh man.

This gives you the idea of why this is so important.

I will just tell you how I do it. You can play around with it and configure it more to your liking.

TERRAN/PROTOSS:

I put "town hall" buildings (Command Center, Nexus) on 4. All of them. Any time I need a new worker, "4, q". Boom. Need a few? "4, q, q, q". BAM. BUILDIN’ WORKERS. Also each of the town hall buildings has its own little special abilities which you’d also activate this way. As Terran, want to scan the opponent’s base? "4, x, (click on where you want to scan". KAPOW. (Note, all of these examples assumed the "Grid" hotkey system, see last installment.)

I put production buildings (any building that makes units) on 5. I already gave you an example of this. This also, though, makes rallying easy. Want to rally ALL your newly created units to one spot? "5, (right-click on rally point)". Holy Jesus, you just rallied like twelve production buildings to one spot with one key press and one mouse click! HOLY CHRISTING LORD!!

I put "upgrade" buildings (those that you don’t actively interact with except when you wish to do research to do upgrades) on 6. Want to research Warp Gates but are too busy to click around to find the Cybernetics Core? "6, z". KERSPOWW!! JOB’S DUN!

That’s it. I use 4, 5, and 6 because 1, 2, 3 I reserve for groups of military units. Note how awesome this is, though. Using the Grid hotkeys, with these control groupings, I literally never have to move my left hand to do ANYTHING IN THE GAME that you’d ever need to do.

ZERG:

Zerg is slightly different because the "town hall" building is also the only unit production building. So they stay on 4, but 5 is instead used for grouping all the "queen" units, which have special abilities you need to be constantly using — particularly "spawn larvae". Need to spawn larvae at two of your hatcheries with your two queens? "5, x, (click on minimap hatchery), x, (click on other one)". BOWFF!!! Now that’s some fine larvae-spawnin’!

Alright. That’s about it for today’s installment, see you nex—

"HEY WAIT A MINUTE, PINNER! There’s ALL SORTS of production and upgrade buildings! If you have them all grouped together, how do you select a Barracks to build a Marine, vs. a Factory to build a Siege Tank, vs. a Starport to build a Banshee? And if all my upgrade buildings are on one key, how do I research Zergling speed at the Spawning Pool vs. Air attack +1 at the Spire? Etc., etc.?"

That’s the question, isn’t it. And there’s a very special key on the keyboard that has the answer. I will give you a hint as to which key it is:

Did you figure it out? It’s the "Tab" key. And the reason it’s the Tab key is because SC2 has something called "subgroups". You may group a bunch of different types of buildings together, or types of military units together, but SC2 will secretly distribute them into "subgroups", based on their type.

So when you select "5" to select your production buildings, can you guess which key will select the next "subgroup" in your main group? Can you?

I’ll give you that hint again:

Here’s the real life example, which will BLOW YOUR FRIGGIN’ MIND:

You have two barracks and two starports, all on group 5. You’re fightin’ a battle, but quickly want to get two marauders and two medivacs building back at your base. Check it:

"5, w, w, TAB, w, w".

Your mind? FRIGGIN’ BLOWN. First you selected the whole group (which defaulted to the barracks), built two marauders with the "w" hotkey, tabbed over to the starport sub-group, and built two medivacs, with the same hotkey. And since SC2 distributes your requests to all available buildings, each of your four buildings is building one of those units.

And it took you one second, and you never had to look at your base.

I guess, to sum up, I’d say that the most important thing to learn to do as you climb the ranks of the eternally mediocre, is:

Putting Your Buildings In Control Groups

A few months ago I decided to conduct an experiment, because I was coming off a string of failed relationships, and when it gets that bad, you’re supposed to drown your sorrows in milkshakes, GOOBERS-brand goobers™, and TV. (Note: I just upgraded WordPress and as far as I can tell, the major feature they added was the inability for me to inline pictures with the GUI. So I assume that this recent WordPress update will either turn the ™ into the aggravating diamond character that’s poxed-up my older articles, or that using a ™ will cause a worldwide server meltdown that makes Chernobyl look like a poorly-managed EZ-Bake.)

The experiment was just me leaving my Directv unit on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. I tuned it to ESPN and left it there. However, I turned the television itself off. I wasn’t raised this way. I was raised to turn the TV and cable box, both, off. Maybe you weren’t, but there are multiple males in my family who won’t give their names to a computer and childhood habits are hard to break. The unit was on, but the television was off, as it had been that way since the end of the regular NFL season. (I watched both playoff games and the Super Bowl in HD venues, High Definition venues as in, NOTE TO THIEVES, not in my actual goddamn home.)

Well, it finally paid off. I got a notice from Nielsen that they want me to be one of them. I had my suspicions, my paranoid suspicions, that Directv was happily broadcasting my viewing habits to them, because they’re all whores. Doesn’t matter, Nielsen wants me, or more specifically, my family. My family that hasn’t once stopped viewing television since late December, as far as they know. My “family,” that, strictly speaking, kills buggies, eats mushy brown pud and slinks about everywhere. They also constantly put their little paws in the coin return slots of my arcade games, looking for quarters, because they don’t have any money and they reject their poverty.

I’m not sure what channel is going to be the one left on continually when I’m finally accepted as a real Nielsen family. I’m enjoying the power, as it’s the only power in my miserable life at the moment. It probably won’t be ESPN because Chris Berman seems like an enormous cocksucker, and he’s almost always on, from what I understand, just being a pattern of bald and ruining everything. I don’t know what channel Breaking Bad is on, because I’ve been stealing it from the Internet, but that might be a good choice. I also liked the one show where a bunch of guys go on a fishing boat and enslave forty-thousand tons of fresh crab. That was a good one.

Sorry, I don’t have a decent ending to this. Aardvark is counting down his favorite games in the forum, though.