Greetings,

In general, I try not to post much so that whoever is following me doesn't end up getting annoyed with me needlessly cluttering up their inbox here. I realize that it's been 4 years since my last journal. Not much has changed. I guess the biggest thing that is different is that I've become rather obsessed with a character in the Tekken franchise of games. Since I'm gay and a furry, anyone who knows the franchise can probably guess that the character is King. Oh yeah ... dreamboat city. Anywayyyyyyyy .....

When I first saw how he looks in the new game, I was floored. How had I not heard about him before. He's been around since the first game 30 years ago. But then I saw the way he looked in previous games, and he's nowhere near as gorgeous in those games. Now ... WOW. So, needless to say, I instantly became a fan. Then I saw people playing him, and I realized that he was likely going to be well beyond my abilities. I'm 54 years old. I've never been good at games anyway because my reactions are slow, uncoordinated and clumsy. I also can't think quickly on the fly. So I was thinking that I'd just enjoy watching good players. Then the game went on sale, so I thought I'd give it a shot and see if I could learn it.

Fast forward to today. I have put 80 hours into the game so far. I've done the story missions, and the character missions. I'm only now starting to get through the training for punishment. I am only now beginning to get some of the combo training finally accomplished. I've basically only won one online match in the whole time I've been playing. The embarrassing thing is that, the one guy I did beat in ranked matches, I sent him a friend request. He accepted. Today, I looked and he's now 11 ranks higher than I am ... I'm still down where I was when I beat him. That's ... very discouraging. At the rate I'm going, I'm probably gonna be the only guy on the planet who has 300 hours of play and still can't get out of the beginner ranks. Yay ... I'm special.

As most of you already know, I have zero self-esteem and absolutely no confidence. What the hell am I doing trying to learn arguably THE hardest fighting game known to man?

Is this where I have to try to put things in perspective, and start trying to learn positive self-reinforcement? I mean, if I want to try to focus on the things I'm doing well, I could go ahead and try to focus on things like this:

*** I made a goal to play 5 ranked matches a day. The first day, I did 5 matches. Lost each and every one, and I think only won 2 rounds in those 5 matches, but I did meet the goal.

*** I am starting to complete the training practice for my character in the combo training. Only a few months ago, I couldn't get past the third combo no matter how hard I tried. Today ... I failed at it repeatedly, moved on to the fourth one, did it and three others (after dozens of tries for each one), came back and actually completed the third one.

*** I practiced breaking throws from one of the opponents I struggle mightily against. It's on "easy" difficulty, so it prompts when to hit the button. This is nothing like it will be in the battle itself. And the problem with the throw training is that you focus on the writing instructions more than being able to watch the cues in battle, so how does that help??? It teaches me which button to push, but then I'll have to get it right, and the timing and which throw do I have to break is where I struggle anyway.

These are the positive feedback things. As you can see, I still can't help but keeping things real and bring up the failures. It's so hard to stop myself from saying "Fuck I'm so slow" or "damn, you're uncoordinated and can't hit the right buttons"

So as you can probably guess, I'm a total mess mentally and emotionally. Every time I get the slightest high from thinking that I'm making improvement, that completely falls apart with the very next failure.

Sorry for adding some needless clutter to your inboxes folks. I ... guess I just needed to vent a bit.