i love being at the dmv because now i can write about something instead of going brain afk for an hour until my number gets called

its crazy how easily i can put myself down and say “im bad” or some similar phrase. 99.999% of the time i dont believe it obviously and its just a snap reaction to whatever mistake just happened in whatever im doing. i feel like its slowly eroding me though every tjme i feel that way though. the saying of “if you hear it enough eventually it comes true”1 has always been at the back of my mind lately, especially with me gungagrinding counter strike 2 with the city. i know this mentality works and gets results, but being in the trenches during a grind really gets to me every time (2021-2022 arb grind). with a game like counter strike, being in the trenches could take like several years for a guy like me (no good computer, perma high ping, genetics gap etc etc). taking that mentality into single player games and speedrunning hasnt really challenged me to the point cs has, since its way more complex to learn just from the multiplayer aspect alone. you have to go through so many situations and experiences that turn into gamesense over thousands of hours. in touhou i can get away with minimal route learning and brainless pattern grinding since thats all there is to it. fire up the game, run at the anime girls until they blow up, and thats it! always consistent, always expected behavior. even if theres variance or rng in a route, i can always blame it on solely me, in a Single Player Game. but not cs (not at my elo at least lol people are still doing crazy shit (12k)). its around like 30% of the time that i get shit on normally in a duel, which is fine; and the other 70% of the time i self sabotage myself in some ungodly way that always feels terrible. i might suspect it feels terrible not because i gotta wait like a minute every time just to get back in the time (i wonder how long pro players have spent dead in that game), but also because its a TEAM GAME; where your role as a player is all around helping the TEAM win. i always take extra pyschic damage when i realize how badly my death affects my teams round winning chances2. a part of why i quit osu tournies stems from (mostly)3 the same problem. if i just completely bottom score my locals when im expected to fc the map or at least top score in lobby, my mental is shot and i usually play worse because of it. i never really fc’d any nm1s because of that nerves problem… i guess cs vs osu is different in that expectation in osu and cs is wildly different at times. im usually the worst player in the stack due to inexperience in cs, and i was usually near the top end of most teams in whatever osu tournies i played. either way being on either side of the coin sucks hard, and contributes to why i never really grinded multiplayer games as much as i did speedrunning, because as i would say, “im bad”.

its not just video gaming that gets me like this either, its like almost all aspects of my life. for my sake (CODING LOLOLOL) i will spare you the details and hone in on my creative side. when i published my ladybug post yesterday, i thought it was nice! my first real post, it mostly had the points illustrated well enough, and i was still happy i even got that post out at all (i was playing cs and writing it in between games). when i reread it this morning, i did not fuck with the structure at all lol. there wasnt enough supporting evidence for why i loved kaguya, not enough explanation for some of the current evidence in monogatari, and the whole paragraph about ladybugs modern lessons just had a super weird flow to it. i didnt even proofread it enough man i had to correct some grammar errors (I JUST CORRECTED MORE ON THIS POST AS I PUBLISHED IT). i thought about it after i was sad for 5 minutes and called myself bad at writing; why am i judging myself so harshly for writing seriously for the first time in 3-4 years? i think being harsh on yourself is ok at best in a competitive setting or at least when theres a leaderboard/tangible goal to climb… but like this is me writing for fun on my own blog. theres not even a target “goal” that i have currently to push myself towards! its kinda insane to me that i keep forgetting this fact. i need to seperate this grinder mentality from some of the things (especially new things) i do for fun because it just makes me not want to do it most of the time. i do say most of the time because theres the rare occasion when i hategrind and make something way better because i disliked it so much4. what does it mean for hobbies that ive started years ago, such as piano and art? well, if i really put things into perspective, im very inexperienced at these hobbies compared to how much time i COULDVE put in. my piano activity wasnt that great while i was doing lessons, and it basically fell off a cliff after 2021. my art phases in and out every month but at least i get a drawing in weekly some years. does it mean im still “bad” at these? maybe! but maybe “im bad” just it means im not happy with where i am currently. i know for a fact theres no stopping myself from saying im ass at something even when im at the tippy top. but do i need to remind myself that im just bad? or instead should i remind myself that i can always improve? maybe a tiny word change could move mountains for me mentally. i think that would be really nice!

  1. the illusory truth effect ↩

  2. when i die really fucking early in the round no trade chance no damage done no info gained just jackshit nothing ↩

  3. big part of why i quit tourney was from not being able to experiment with tapping styles since matches were weekly. felt suffocating when my tapping at the time just hurt me whenever i played ↩

  4. maybe this post wouldntve spawned in if i wasnt going to the dmv today lmao ↩