Life Updates: December 11, 2017

Life has had its ups and downs as it always does, but the my general well-being is improving in many ways. The biggest issues that plague me currently are inconsistent motivation, terrible sleep schedule, and stress management. I've also sometimes been eating poorly, but again, it is better than it was. With my winter track conditioning starting though, I will have more of a reason to begin eating a better diet consistently. I will be consistently doing cardio workouts instead of just the upper body and ab workouts I have been doing lately. This will be great for my physical health, which will hopefully allow for more energy and increased motivation. 

The sleep schedule has been a consistent issue since high school began. I don't foresee a fix for this until I am able to increase my productivity and decrease my feeling of stress. Homework keeps me up when I realize I have pushed off many assignments until the last minute and the stress kicks in when my grades suffer for it, which they currently are. They are all pretty bad at the moment, which has sparked a new motivation in me to fix them. 

Overall, it's been a rough road and fixing all of the issues in front of me is taking longer than I would like, but the result is going to be worth it. I've caught glimpses of it time and time again. I'm more social and perform consistently better in smash, so long as I am able to sleep well the night before. I'm slated to be PRed for the first time ever in two weeks, so wish me luck. Sorry these haven't been particularly smash-related, but I do have a few PM pieces coming soon, first and foremost my detailed tier list with explanations of my placings of characters. Thanks for reading.

My Mission

Over the past ~month, I've been embarking on a journey to attempt to better my life, as there are many things currently that I am dissatisfied with. I write this at midnight on the 28th day of this journey, and I'm exhausted. I want to write about the changes I've made, how they've affected me, and how they will continue to affect me. I'd like to talk about goals here as well. I've been quite unhappy with many of the events that have transpired over the last few years of my life. I've felt like I'd been taking a passenger approach to my own life, not particularly leading my own life very well. I'd just let whatever happened happen, and move on. I did not care very much about almost anything, and as a result developed many bad habits. Among the most degenerative were my excessive laziness and apathy towards others and the world around me. I'm now a senior in high school and realize that this is not a way that I can continue to live my life. I went through a terrible stretch of a few days in October 2017 and felt the most down I had in a long time. I decided from then on that I would attempt to feel like this as little as possible, and attempt to reverse the bad habits I'd accumulated over the past few years. I've put on some weight; not a ton, but enough that I felt unhealthy and that it would become a terrible habit over time. I have not done my homework in high school at all and I'm one of the most serious procrastinators of all time. I put off everything until it is a red hot emergency. I beat myself up over small issues that really don't matter. Finally, I have taken a huge hit in my smash progress because of this mindset and all of these issues that are causing a conflict in my mind.

Over the past 28 days, I've seen dramatic improvement. I began my process of improvement by writing down a list of things that I need to fix about my life and my habits. I keep this list on me at all times to serve as a reminder of my end goal, even when it seems difficult to stick to the game plan. For this plan to work, I decided to only try to add one new fix in at a time. I pondered for awhile what the first change I should make was, and that decision was my physical health and fitness. I have done an intense ab and chest workout 6 days a week, taking off only on Saturdays. I have dropped 6 pounds, from 201 to 195.2. This has been very encouraging, as it put me below 200 again. I'm not where I need to be yet, but this is progress. Another attempt I've made at fixing my life is being less lazy. The past few days have been some of the worst in that category, but as a whole I've done very well. My gpa for first marking period is a 96.3%, which is 3% above my cumulative average thus far. I have focus issues and cannot pay attention in class all the time, and do not have time to study due to productivity issues, but this is a great start. I just must keep my mind set on my goals to spark my productivity again tomorrow.

My biggest issue of all over these past few years though has been mindset and outlook on life in general. This is quite an issue, so it gets its own paragraph. I have always been pessimistic and had a negative attitude towards everything: school, people, relationships, adversity, things or people that contradict me, anything really. I would see everything as a negative and never take anything positive from anything, including positive things that happened to me. This will be the most drastic change I make, but will be the most worthwhile in the endgame. I decided that one way of trying to fix my mindset is through meditation. I use the headspace app for meditation, and say what you will about it, but it does calm me personally. I think meditation is something I should do twice a day as opposed to once a day. I think I could benefit greatly from doing it in the morning and at night instead of just at night. As a whole, my mindset has gotten better through conscious positive thought and the aforementioned meditation. It has shown in my smash gameplay. I play more confident, while also playing more safe. I'm open to help and criticism, and I'm able to get over losses more quickly and rally in the losers bracket even if I suffer a hard loss in winners. I beat my first PRed player on Saturday, Quinn. It was my first Melee PR win; it was a monument occasion for me. I didn't think it could happen, but it did. This positive outlook was certainly a large reason that I can maintain composure in stressful sets like that. These past 2 days have been extremely rough for me in terms of keeping this mindset though, and I've gotta work on that one hard. Productivity was zero today and motivation was too. I've gotta keep my eyes on the prize and do better tomorrow.

The final piece of this is going to be a quick statement of my goals. I want to meet the qualifying times for track at tryouts this year, so that I can feel like I deserve to be there. I want to drop another ~5-10 pounds by the time the season starts, as I feel that's a perfect weight for me to be at. I want to be PRed in Melee, and be undisputed #2 in region for PM for short term goals. I want above an unweighted 94 in all of my classes for the second marking period, and I want to be able to enjoy my life more for the rest of this year. I want to continue to see success with this method, and I just want to be happy.

Thanks to anyone who wasted their time to read this rant about me and why I need to get my shit together.

Everyone's favorite scrub

~Ronan/Bionis

Who am I?

Hi guys, my name is Ronan and my tag is Bionis. This blog is here to archive my thoughts, guides, and experiences tied to smash. To preface myself a bit, I live in a semi active region in the US and I play Melee, PM, and Smash 4. I'm most notably good at PM, where I have the different belief that once you have the basics of the game down, you can play multiple characters at once. I don't believe in solo maining in PM, but that will come in a later post. I myself do play many characters in PM, I'm a cloud main in Smash 4 and I'm looking at picking up Lucario as a secondary, and in Melee I am in a sort of character crisis. I play a couple of my PM characters in Melee and it translates extremely well, but I'm not sure how it will work in the long run. Either way, I have been playing for a year now, since October 2015 I've truly played competitive. That was when I went to my first tournament. Before that, smash has always been a part of my life and I've wanted to go competitive for a long time before that, but I was unable to. I have an old Wii that can't read brawl, my Melee disc didn't work in my Wii and my GameCube died years ago. I didn't have 64 and this was well before smash 4. But, while my Brawl still worked I was a Wifi warrior and I always tried to get better. But I never really took to Brawl like I did to PM. It all looked so fast and clean and I watched some of the same tournament sets over and over until the next tournament was streamed. I armed myself with tons of game knowledge, and watched it all the time. When I wasn't watching I was playing other games. Overall, I'm really good at video games in general. I did ok at speedrunning, but I didn't practice enough to be amazing at it. One day I hope to get better at speedrunning battletoads. But back to smash. I would watch PM sets all the time, and my favorite player to watch was and still is M2K. This is because when he played PM more often, he sort of fulfilled what I have thought all along. You can play multiple characters at top level and win major events. He played Mario, Fox, Falco, Marth, Mewtwo, Peach, Falcon, and more. It was insane to me that he was the only one doing it. All of the other good players seemed to be character specialists. In most games, I believe this is a good course of action for most players, but PM is different to me, and so I watched every M2K set I could find, and broke down punishes, since that was all I could really understand at 12/13 years old. Neutral was harder for me to comprehend. I've now at 16 also broken down his neutral and mind games, and expanded to other players as well. As you may have gathered from this, I'm a lab monster. I'm working on learning frame data and hitboxes, as I believe that will be beneficial to my growth as a player.

That's just a bit about me and my smash history. This post was a bit of a rant style, which some of my posts will be, but if you're not a fan of that, I will have organized guides coming in the future as well.

Thanks to everyone who read!

-Ronan/Bionis