Not taking it easy enough

It's been a busy last couple of weeks. I had some assignments to do that I'd completely put off until the last minute, so I had to spend a few long days getting them done. That's not the half of it though, since I've been busy watching the first reveal of DotA 2 in that German tournament with the insane prize pool.


My first impressions were less than ideal - the huge lag issues on the first day really made the games hard to enjoy. I've got to admit, though, that a lot of polish had gone into the "Match Paused by Referee" splash screen that I ended up watching most of the time. In addition, the commentators were pretty bad. Their mics were terrible quality, and one of them keeps mispronouncing everything. I think I'm just spoiled by Tastosis.

Don't get me wrong though, the game itself looked really good. The lag issues were mostly sorted out by the second day (apparently caused by massive stream demand), and I got to see some good games. I'm really liking the art style, and the sounds are brilliant, even if some of the lines are pretty cheesy. I've signed up for the beta too, which should be starting fairly soon I hope.

I really can't wait for DotA 2. I might have said it before here, but I played DotA a lot. I started playing in 2004, if memory serves, and still play it occasionally. I tried to get into LoL but I didn't take to it, for a number of reasons. The lack of easy access to all heroes, the increased base mana regen and things like Flash just didn't do it for me. As for HoN? I'm not sure really. No one I played DotA with moved to it, so I never really tried it out myself.

Also, LoL has this. Enough said.

If anyone's interested in watching the competition, it's being streamed here from 10am CET. Conveniently, this works out to be 6pm for me.

Apart from watching that, I heard back about my placement allocations for next year that I mentioned. Luckily I did get my first preference, although I feel sorry for all the people who didn't. A guy I get along with put the same preference as I did, and he ended up in a suburban school about 20km away. That's really unfortunate, but I'm glad that I won't need to move or put up with a ridiculous commute to continue my studies next year.

I just got an email from Amiami letting me know that they've shipped my Lat Miku at last. It feels like an incredibly long time ago that I ordered her, I'd almost forgotten about it. For some reason, Amiami seemed to think I'd asked for unregistered SAL instead of registered. I'm pretty sure I asked for registered, but I didn't notice until after I'd gotten the notification of shipment so it's a bit late to do anything about it. I hope she arrives more or less intact.

Well, I'm going to go watch Kaiji S2 episode 20. I hope this episode resolves the arc, but I very much doubt it will.