Because I can't lose weight unless somebody presents the process as a game, just like everything else.

http://www.myfitnesspal.com

(real talk a looooot of people pay like $50 a month for this and have no regrets about it)

EDIT: link fixed

IF

DEEZ NUTS


ALLOOOOOOOOOOOOW

I just looked at the Valor Point rewards and breathed a great sigh of relief that they are for the most part pure unmitigated garbage for Warriors.

WHAT EXACTLY ARE YOU GOING TO CUT






























GOD

Hello friends.

I am bored at work this morning so I will post the first of what may be several installments of formal, premade v premade BG strategy if I don't get tired of writing them.  If this post is even completed and makes it on to the board, I'd consider it an accomplishment. 

Anyway, we'll start with WSG because it's my favorite, I have the most success there, and my favored strat seems to be the least commonly-applied.

Warsong is all about movement.  Well, all the BGs are about movement, it's true, but WSG is definitely the most mobile of them.  What does this mean, though, and why is it significant?  Well, probably the best answer is that at any given time, there is only one objective.  You are either protecting your flagrunner or killing the other one, so usually 9 guys on a given competent team will all be moving to one perpetually-changing position.  Inversely, 90% of your losses in WSG will in some way involve trying to do both at once.  But I'm getting ahead of myself.

In general, I find the winning strategies for most BGs involve setting yourself up in a way so that you have to move as little as possible, and this actually goes doubly for WSG.  A moving (or mounted) player is vulnerable; if he is attacked, he has an objective other than defending himself.  He has to either forget about getting where he was going for a good amount of time, or face unfavorable odds as he tries to escape.  The key to WSG is not to run down the other team; it's to identify the only two people on the whole map who matter (their flagrunner and yours) and be where they need to go.

Basically, the key to winning WSG every single time is to fight in the middle and win.

Fighting in the middle gets a bad rap because it usually slows up games and results in people not going for the flag, but I don't recall the last time I actually lost even a pug WSG when the middlefighters were actually succeeding in efficiently killing the other team.  Dominating the middle accomplishes three things:

1) maximizes the distance the enemy flag carrier has to cover in order to get to safety and forces him to run through your whole team twice while minimizing the distance your own carrier has to travel and allows him to pick up the flag at his leisure

2) forces the other team to either spend precious time regrouping at the graveyard or spend the whole game completely separated and unable to lauch an effective offense or defense when it matters

3) prevents you from ever having to engage in a meaningful fight with fewer than 8 people on your side

and these combine to actually have a fairly significant psychological effect on the other team.  I remember running WSG with HWL grinders back in Vanilla and using this general strategy; Alliance players hanging out on our vent would talk about how incredibly demoralizing it was to come up against our team, because even the ones who could beat us in a straight-up fight knew they were going to have to wrangle their guys for several extended team fights a game.

Anyway, specifics.

The general layout of this strategy is one player on defense, with the rest of the team in the middle.  Flag returning changes significantly depending on whether you have a stealther (or particularly a druid) but it's not a huge deal. 

General flow of the game is as follows:

Gates open and everyone but the D guy immediately mounts up and moves to intercept the incoming zerg.  You pick people off; again, they are vulnerable because they are trying to get to the flag, not kill you.  Assist as normal and kill a few; 4 or 5 is ideal, but 2 or 3 is fine.  DO NOT CHASE THEM INTO YOUR BASE AND DO NOT KILL ALL OF THEM.  This is important.  We don't chase because central field position is more important; the survivors have to come back through us anyway after they get the flag.  We don't kill all of them because if we did they would just rez and do it over again; it's way more advantageous for us to divide their team in half than it is to kill them. 

Lone defender scouts/separates (I will talk about the defender in a bit), but the stragglers succeed in picking up the flag.  That's fine.  The central group falls back to right outside our base and mauls them as they try to get away, moving across-field.  Anybody on our team who died can assist the defender in separation but otherwise it's more important to link back up with the main group unless you're absolutely sure you can wipe out the stragglers.

Now then, where are we?  In this setup, we have midfield and can stop to drink/rebuff, while the other team is hopefully mostly dead, but more importantly on different rez timers.  Ideally they are not in a position to come at us with 10 unless they wait a bit, which is a perfect situation for us to move downfield and camp outside their base.  We can GY camp a little bit but at this point we shouldn't overcommit; we need our first cap.

At this point, offense comes in to play.  If we have a stealther (particularly a druid), that stealther should by this point already be in position at some point within their base.  Once we take the offensive field position, he can drop down, grab the flag, and sprint to the speed buff; if it's up, he should be back within the safety of the group by the time it wears off, meaning the time between him even making his presence known within the enemy base and him effectively guaranteeing a safe return of the flag with a full escort is under 10 seconds.

We escort our flagrunner back with a team of 9.  The other guys will inevitably attack us; keeping the FR up is the priority.  Try to stop OUTSIDE our base and send our own runner inside with a small escort of 2 or 3; we want to get good field position whether our guy makes it the whole way or not.

Now, the defender.  The defender's primary job is to kill or at least heavily slow people trying to ninja the flag (if he can't solo a runner, he should slow him long enough to allow GY rezzers to come in and mop up).  Warlocks and Hunters still work great for this.  For group offenses, any assistance he can give with separating flag runners from healing support is great, but his main job is to just be there and force the other team to commit multiple people to getting the flag; a divided team is a losing team.

I would get John Madden on your ass with MSPaint but I now have shit to do.

Normally I would just say "read the damn bill yourself" but I realize nobody has that kind of time unless they're getting paid to care about it, like me.  So, ask away about any specific questions and I will reply to the best of my ability, as time permits.

I am probably months behind on this but I just watched it thanks to netflix.  I had heard it was a step above the typical hipster romance but I was still expecting Reality Bites or Garden State or some other weepy bullshit movie all over again.  I am happy to say it defied my expectations; it's more like a High Fidelity that doesn't automatically assume its audience 1) is in on the joke or 2) enjoys hating the protagonists.

If you have not already, you should probably watch it.  It's one of the, if not the smartest, most sympathetic movie about immature people being immature I've seen in a very long time.

OCTOBER 20TH

I HAVE NOT BEEN THIS AMPED FOR A GAME IN UHHHHH


DO IT FUCKERS

The Credit Crisis is one of the most (if not the most) significant economic and political developments of our lifetime, as I'm sure you all realize, but it is unfortunately rather complicated and not a lot of people seem to have a clear grasp of how we got into this situation, who's responsible, and what it means for the future.  I've been following it fairly closely for the past year and would humbly submit the following narrative of how things got so royally.  Correction and comment are most welcome; in the end, I'm hoping everybody who follows this thread can come away with a clear way to explain this to friends and family, as it affects us all in a number of ways.

ANYWAY


THE CREDIT CRISIS, PART I: OF INTEREST RATES AND LEVERAGE

After the twin body blows of the dotcom bubble burst and 9/11, Alan Greenspan was presented with a problem.  The 1990s had seen an unprecedented level of worldwide growth but a lot of that had purely been on paper, so after the Silicon Valley bust and global nervousness about terrorism and the U.S. response, a lot of the money tied up in actual investments had simply evaporated.  The U.S. in particular was headed towards a recession, and it was Alan's job to stop it from happening. 

Potential private investors, still sitting on piles of wealth generated since the Reagan Administration, were the major source of remaining capital in the U.S. but were a bit skittish about spending their money after seeing several colleagues go up in flames with tech stocks.  Alan figured he wasn't going to be able to coax them out of their bearishness before the stock market crashed, so he took a different tack: he severely lowered interest rates to encourage spending, and the Federal Reserve's went down to an absolutely silly 1%. 

While this antagonized some investors further (if they weren't inclined to invest before, they sure as hell weren't going to on a 1% rate of return), banks loved the hell out of it.  At a 1% interest, investment banks, with way more capital on hand than other investors, could borrow like crazy from the Fed for ridiculous profits with much less risk than they ever had before.  The reason why this was the case is a principle called leverage. 

To explain leverage simply, let's say I have $10,000.  I buy a $10k widget and turn around and sell that widget for $11k, making a $1k profit.  In a leveraged example, by using my initial capital as leverage to get a loan, I can use my $10k to borrow $990k from somebody else (another bank, say, or the Fed), buy 100 widgets with my $1 million, and sell all 100 to different people at $11k a pop, making $1.1 million.  I give my $990k, plus $10k in interest (at the 1% interest rate), back to the bank, and now I've made $90k in profit instead of just $1k.  While this was always the driving force behind credit in high finance, the 1% interest rate threw it into overdrive because now the interest to pay back was so low that profits were higher than ever before.  The potential profit drove increased borrowing and the actual increase in profit cushioned banks against the odd cases where they COULDN'T turn around and flip widgets, encouraging them to borrow even more money from the Fed.  In short, banks HAD to get into a borrowing frenzy and they had to do so immediately for fear of missing out on the 1% interest rate, which they figured was unlikely to remain around for long.  To miss that opportunity was to risk death at the hands of those who had, most likely foreign banks and investors, particularly Europeans, who at that time were prepping to move to the Euro and were feeling really bullish about the whole matter.

It was the perfect setup, but there was one piece missing: the widget itself.  In order to make this happen, the banks needed something that could be counted on to steadily increase in value, so they could be assured that the widget bought for $10k could usually be sold again at $11k.  In the economic doldrums following Silicon Valley, there was one investment that still made a lot of sense, however; one whose value had consistently increased over the years and showed no signs of dropping off: U.S. real estate.  Or, in more practical terms, mortgages.


PART II FORTHCOMING LOL

I want to give Dissidia a bro-hug. :3