Content Creators to Watch!

February 18, 2022

Aside from actually playing the games Valorant, Overwatch, etc., I like to spend my time watching content creators for the games on Twitch and YouTube as well! I’m assuming everyone knows what YouTube is, but Twitch is a platform where people stream their live gameplay for an audience. Twitch also has a live chat with emotes that make watching more fun, enjoyable, and interactive.

When I get food or chill in the library before doing my work, I usually put on a stream in the background to watch for entertainment. Watching these streams will help you learn more about the game, and observing pro players will expose you to more areas and strategies about the game which will help you improve! My favorite streamers to watch are supertf (Overwatch), iiTzTimmy (Valorant, Apex Legends, + other games), TenZ (Valorant), and xQcOW (Variety).

I watched a lot of supertf when I was starting to play Overwatch, and I literally went from the worst rank in the game (Bronze) to the average rank (Gold) in about a month and a half. Supertf is really entertaining to watch and he is also Overwatch’s best tank player, which made it very easy to gain game sense and quickly improve.

Also, I used to watch xQcOW a LOT, who is Twitch’s most popular livestreamer and he is mostly known for being pretty funny and entertaining. Watching him is good for exposing yourself to many games, as he usually plays a different game every day! All of these content creators also post their streams on YouTube if you don’t have the time to watch live, or you’d rather watch reruns.

Overall, if you would like to start getting into games or get better, watching these entertaining streamers on either Twitch or YouTube is a good start!

How to Deal with Toxic Players!

February 11, 2022

I mentioned this clip in my previous blog, and I’m going to explain the backstory! Also, the clip I included in last week’s blog was from an unranked game, however, this one was from a trio purposely throwing my competitive ranked game.

I was queuing into a competitive game with my best friend, Selin, and we are talking in voice chat normally for the first few rounds, and then, these two players start commenting on how annoying we are and calling us fat, ugly, and more insults. We were doing perfectly fine and winning the game until these two players started becoming more toxic and then their insults started to progress into more sexist comments.

While I was ready to mute them as I always do, Selin started messing with them by playing into their insults as you could tell from the clip. If they started calling her fat, instead of getting mad, she’d be like “YEAH, you’re right I’M FAT… keep going…” and then at some point they literally didn’t know what to say. She kept repeating it in such an obnoxious tone that the people who were being toxic to us just seemed shocked and couldn’t respond… LOL.

They kept continuing spitting insults every breath they took and it lasted throughout the entire game, but the most comedic part was that we were both on the top of the leaderboard.

(side note: my rank has gone up a bit after this game… this was right after the rank reset which lowered my rank an entire tier)

The ones who were the most mean to us were Jett and Raze, the two players with Japanese names. However, during the game the Omen (Garlic) was playing good cop for the entire game, defending us and telling the two off. This was only an act as when the game ended, the omen started yelling at us and calling us E-Girls and saying how he never liked us this entire time, which we thought was actually hilarious.

(definitely don’t watch this without headphones)

Selin was calling them out at the end where she was yelling and saying that they were bottom of the leaderboard and she just spewed the same insults back at them. Overall, games like these are not uncommon at all for us, and we just needed to gather the confidence to yell at them back. 🙂

P2P – The New Dangerous Superdrug in the Spotlight

February 10, 2022

Within the past decade, a cheaper form of methamphetamine, P2P, has been created in Mexico with the help of biker gangs and local organic chemists. P2P has been mass cooked and distributed from Mexico to all over the United States. This new form of meth causes side effects of deteriorating, severe mental illness such as P2P-induced psychosis, schizophrenia, and severe cerebral damage.

Addicts of P2P mental health has been seen to be instantaneously deteriorating within hours of use, referring to hallucinations, delusions, and simply psychotic behavior. This new superdrug now readily available on the streets has caused addicts to turn to psychotic desperation to have more.

New York Times opinion writer, Jay Caspian Kang, explains his belief that this single drug has caused the entire homelessness crisis in his blog, “Is Our Homelessness Crisis Really a Drug Problem?” by stating that “battling homelessness requires us to confront rampant drug addiction…” by not throwing all drug addicts in jail.

Taking all the homeless people on the streets who are drugged up on P2P (or something else) and incarcerating them will not be a simple solution to solving the homelessness crisis. In the blog, Kang stated that P2P causes paranoid, erratic people to walk the streets which inevitably causes more police shootings. This could be shown through the larger amount of police shootings in the city of Albuquerque after the spread of P2P in the city.

In general, being inside a homeless center, Skid Row, or walking around Kensington will open one’s eyes to the psychosis and mental health deterioration that P2P causes as the supply of the drug is increasing around these areas. This superdrug that is heavily contributing to the homelessness crisis in America could be helped by closer monitoring of the supply of this drug as well as being open to providing rehabilitation resources for these addicts.

Criminalizing the possession of these drugs will not fix the homelessness or drug crisis in the United States.

2 photos: meth paraphernalia including glass pipe, hypodermic needles and caps, knife; city street with tents crowded along both sides

“Meth and paraphernalia (above) inside a tent on Skid Row, in Los Angeles. The area encompasses about 50 square blocks of the city; tents (below) line many of its streets. (Rachel Bujalski for The Atlantic)” – Picture taken from The Atlantic

Further on this topic, Sam Quinones’s blog on The Atlantic, further explains the history behind the creation and spread of this new form of methamphetamine and explores the impact this has on the homelessness crisis.

Quinones interviews two former P2P addicts who state that they needed to relearn how to speak and it took over a year to recover from the severe brain damage the drug had caused. The abundance and low price of the drug has been causing more and more users to become addicted to the drug, especially in a time of desperation such as dealing with homelessness.

The meth crisis in Los Angeles has rarely come up in civic discussions because people treat it as the “Elephant in the room” which no one wants to mention. Legislators would rather talk about the price of housing rather than stigmatizing the homeless as drug users, however, this topic should definitely be talked about more in city conversations.

Quinones interestingly compares the tents on Skid Row to a physical retreat from the world where they can find approval in their use of methamphetamine. Also, the addiction to P2P can also be related to alcoholism, in a way where both substances are widely available and abundant, while both being very hard to quit.

The reason why this link from the meth crisis to the homelessness crisis is so invisible to the American public is because media is more focused on the opioid crisis which kills much more people than meth. Again, the main reason why the meth crisis has gotten so bad is because of an increasing supply being distributed to, quite literally, everywhere.

Overall, the continuing homelessness crisis can be attributed to the abundance of a newer, cheaper drug, P2P methamphetamine, as well as the ongoing opioid crisis and other synthetic drugs such as fentanyl. Rather than throwing all addicts in jail for possession of an illegal substance, the more helpful solution would be to provide rehabilitation services for addicts and lead them to recovery.

What’s with All the Sudden Toxicity?

February 4, 2022

Recently, almost half of my games have people start being extremely toxic the second I use my mic. The video clip above is an example of an unranked match, not even competitive play! This past week, I would queue into a game, talk how I normally do, and suddenly if I mess up ONE play, the entire lobby starts talking down on me even if they have done worse.

A little backstory for the clip above, I was solo-queuing an unrated match of Valorant because I was waiting for my boyfriend to get on so we could duo-queue competitive, but Valorant’s matchmaking system put me in a game with a 4-queue of men all in a Discord call together outside of the game.

Round 2, one of them yelled at me to watch a certain angle, I said no (an unrated match does not affect my rank, therefore I don’t care about winning), and then he said “Do what I say, you’re a woman” and I wish I was joking. The amount of people I have gotten like this in my games this past week has actually been more than ever before.

He was being toxic to me the whole game, and at certain rounds he would say “[Player name] wants to know if you [would do vulgar things]” as if they were all talking about me in their Discord call, which they definitely were. The same man also kept telling me to shut up every time I spoke. Also, similar to another situation I will definitely cover in my next passion blog, one of them was playing “good cop” and was buying me guns, complimenting me, and asking me to join their Discord.

I honestly was fooled and I thought that that person was solo-queued into our game, but when I went on Valorant’s tracker.gg website to see my match history, I saw that all of them were infact, queued together.

The clip is also from the very last round when the game was ending, and the entire team waited until then to talk trash at the end of the game which is the general pattern of the misogynistic guys I get in my game all of the time. I have a lot of content for future passion blogs just from this week, one of which I’ll cover next week where I was in a competitive game with my best friend, and since we were both together, we just messed with them the entire time.

They would call us fat and ugly, and my best friend would go along with it and make it known she was not offended, and they were literally stunned and didn’t know what to say, LOL. That’s a sneak peak for my topic next week. 🙂

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