You know what it would have been really useful the exact moment? A live updating profile of every player I generally worked with.

I could only see their stats when we were close by or playing online.

I can only hope that when I bought Basic Profile 2 it would let me do that kind of thing. But then again the shop had done me dirty so many times already and I was beginning to assign a motive.

If this shop kept it up, then it might be the death of me. It would turn me into a zombie where all I did was play in order to get points for the shop. I might be able to do that but that would definitely push my friends away.

It would probably do something silly like offer me a user's guide. It was going to be the end of September and I surveyed how everything had gone completely sideways since the beginning of the month. I had to wake up that Green Day guy, which was a thing as well.

I was still doing yoga with the crew but now it's finally getting cold out so we had to take it indoors. As I turned out we could just do yoga on the third floor of Stacy's building. She cleared out the gaming den and we all brought a yoga mats there. Lee finally joined us for one of these.

Seeing her and Jill together, it reminded me that they had a sneaky link that it was important that Amir didn't fuck with. As we went through our asanas, I got the sense that she was reveling in it.

Jill was happy that it was all happening. She was finally able to get on the same page as her sister-in-law.

I suppose that it was hard as an adult to get together with your friends that much. That's why we prioritized living nearby each other. Leigh lived close enough to walk so we invited her to join us.

But now it made it kind of weird because we were kind of paying her sister-in-law to do teach our class? We were all professional women save for Amir. She was doing us a great service. My hip flexors felt like they had been busted wide open, in a good way.

I was ready to dance. I had my fall to class that day my regular business classes and after that? I had a free night. I was going to go see if I could Get into solo queue.

"All right guys. One final stretch and ... you got it Kelly, let's hit child's pose. And then we're going to hit corpse pose," Jill said.

My breath steadied as I melted into corpse pose.

I lay there. I'm willing to accept the inevitability of me ever having to get out of the ground again. It was so comfortable there on my nice firm yoga mat. But I was a big girl and I had things to do. I sat up. I didn't have that long until my next class or rather my first class of the day. When I was out playing late until the evenings? I remembered why kids didn't like those morning classes. But our little session was done by about 8:00. A.M.

Twenty years ago if you'd told me that I would be up an exercising before eight, I would have laughed. To

See here's the thing about being an adult. People have jobs. People have lives. If you want to get together with somebody, you got to plan around it. The only way to work that into what you're doing is to work for yourself or set your own hours. Lee head off. I didn't start work until about 9:30. Stacy live Amir two blocks away and then he worked virtually. Jill? Well for Jill. This was her job. She wasn't here for a social call even though we were paying her and her sister-in-law was there.

But if I can get that feeling back being one like with my friends just because we're doing exercise class together? I would do that. I've read all these articles about how it's hard to make friends when you're an adult because you don't have that negative space of free time you used to have when you're a kid and like you don't have that time where you're getting into your groove at the beginning of a school year or a semester of college. There's a lot going on there. In adulthood? You got to schedule that s***. That's why I scheduled yoga with the fam weekly. Monday, Wednesday, Friday. It also kept me sane because if I didn't have my friends there, I probably wouldn't do it.

Hey Joe, for it? I probably wouldn't do it myself. But Amir and Stacy had arranged this and they had gone through with it. And my God if them being motivated to do yoga this early in the morning didn't make me want to go? And nothing would. The day that I stopped wanted to go out and exercise with my friends was a day that I probably needed to retire.

Or to get a cane and a walker.

Thank you so much for today's class, I said.

You're welcome, Joe said. I'm glad that Lee was able to join us.

Jill and Lee both smiled. I couldn't tell if they were being facetious though. From all I heard, things were just unfamiliar with it. They weren't particularly mad at each other. They just weren't really that friendly.

I'm sorry I forgot this but who is married to who's brother? Stupid question. I know because Lee is dating Amir.

It's official, Amir said smiling.

I'm so glad you guys are finally making it official. I know that my husband wants me to make sure that you're going to make an honest woman out of her.

There's only going to be dishonesty from here on out sis, Lee said. And my brother ought to tell take his nose out of where it doesn't belong.

Jill smiled at that. I was in awe of how she was still not sweaty at all. I had the underproof sweat. I had the crotch sweat. I had swamp ass and my armpits definitely were giving off biological problems vibes. I could probably smell the pH of my armpits just by waving my hands like I didn't care. I mean it was yoga so you were supposed to sweat and stretch. But I also did not want to smell myself that much.

All right guys. I think I'm going to head back to get something to eat on the way home. I said does anybody want to get some coffee? Several eyebrows shot up and I was instantly wondering if they had all made plans without me. But they hadn't.

Like beautiful friends, they decided that they tag along. As it turns out, when you are in charge of your Law firm, you can wear yoga pants to work. Don't tell anyone I told you this but the only time you actually have to wear pants is when you go into court. And even then, a skirt will be acceptable so long as it's business classy.

But also don't let everyone ever tell you that you have to wear a skirt or a pair of pants. You do yourself girl. You just do whatever you think the judge will accept. Or whatever you think the law will accept.

So I found myself walking down to the coffee shop on Main Street trailing my friends behind me. Jill had decided to join us for that. Stacy and Amir both fought over who was going to buy her coffee before LHI, the class act that she was decided that it was all on her. It was her first time actually having a conversation with her sister-in-law that passed the Bechtel test

I resolved check my watch only every so often. It was going to take me about 30 minutes to get writing once I got to my house but my drive was only 5 minutes. There was a benefit to having faculty parking right next to the building you worked in. I almost stayed too long too. But the conversation was getting really good. Apparently, Jill was thinking about opening up her own studio.

Where you thinking about putting this? I said? There's several studios in here, but why aren't you thinking about those, I said?.

They're fine, Jill said, but then they have these predatory practices where they're like. We want you to to pay us per person that's using this space. I shuddered.

It was hard for a small business to get up and running. Especially one. Where was Word of mouth like Jill's. Allowing her to come in here to our space and teach was actually helping her out because she didn't have to pay for insurance and all that stuff. And since we were lawyers, we actually We helped review her business plan as well as make sure that she had a really strong waiver for people to sign.

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We offered that to her for free and because we wanted her business seed but also we couldn't run it for her. We could only help a little bit.

I've never really been engaged in these small town yoga studio startup business situation. But she may want to stick around.

Do you mind if I use your business plan as a model for my students in school?? I said

Please. And if they want to come for a free yoga class, you can send them to do that.

So here's the thing they don't tell you about business. There are lots of small businesses that you can just invest in or buy in. They would appreciate your money more and you putting in the stock market. But you're not going to be able to find that. Institutional Capital like those big Banks and those hedge funds. They don't care about small guys like Jill.

Even if her husband was apparently a nurse anesthetist, she still wanted to do her own thing. Jill and her husband had no kids on purpose as far as Lee can tell. With him going through a lot of time in school and Jill going through yoga teacher training, they didn't find it was going to be beneficial to either one of them.

They have two kids before. And now that he was finally making money, working the surgical Ward, they wanted to spend it on going on vacations and stuff. Jill is very got her dates when it wasn't when it was less than 2 weeks out. Let's just say that she had a plan to go on vacation sometimes a year and she executed that lawlessly but I had no problems with that because that was her rich life and that was how she wanted to live her life.

I was still researching options on how to get Mama into a cruise ship with Alice's. When she texted me that she found something. I called her up and she said that she found a company that was going to offer a cruise ride that had a dialysis package. I was like it was excellent. And it was going to be in the coldest months so we could plan to leave after finals and go. The only question I had was when were our finals going to actually be for class and when were the finals going to be for the season. Based off of those dates, mom was going to give me options on Friday. I squealed with the light when I told her that we were definitely commit this happen..

Then I texted the group chat about it and asked him if they might be interested in going on a ridiculous cruise in the coldest month of 2024.

Of course they had heard of this before, but her having to be bound to a dialysis machine was the context that they needed to really look at their calendars. On Friday, we would all lay our hands out on the table and when I went to see Mom at her dialysis appointment, we would make a decision. Either way, I knew my mom was going. The only question I had was if we could get the rest of the family on board.

I was thinking that I was already having a pretty good week. And that was when my other group chat started lighting up. Raquel was following one of the Union County streamers. And apparently he was damn good.

And when I say damn good, she forwarded A clip of his twitch stream. And that was the first time I'd known fear. All week. He added together the clips of his game. That in itself was a bit of a showboating style. Then it showed him going through the entire game and getting 18 kills and dying zero times. Although I don't know how you would show yourself not dying. Just showing the kill count at the end of the game would also be sufficient. But instead, he had a running commentary on each one of his kills over the 35-minute game on his Smurf account.

Smurf account is when a player who's been on the game for a while decides that they want to play against newbies again. So they make a separate account with a separate email so they can play with whoever. See after. While, you're very used to the game and the game is used to you. It assigns you an ELO. Which is something the algorithm picks as basically your level. And it's not like leveling like the way that my guys were doing. It's more like your level relative to other people. And Chester is this thing where there's a scoring system of who's got what rank and like the highest is like 4,000. So basically the algorithm is trying to match people to other people based on their skill set at skill level.

It's not fun to play against somebody who is a much higher level. Than you. So a new account takes a little bit to get set up. And then playing then you're playing . And for a long time, that's all you're doing. You're just playing as newbies. It'll take a minute to figure out what your level is. And then you get that placed in the queue with people that are about your level. If you're playing in a group of people in a party, it goes by somebody's ELO. Usually it's the lowest person's ELO.

It was hard to be certain exactly what the game was doing underneath the hood. The game makers had every reason to make it more competitive, which by all rights would mean that you would go with the highest person.

It would compare the average ELO of each person and it would basically tell you whether these two people would match up in the same Lane. Which one would win or which one is more likely to dominate.

A Smurf account has no preset priors. It's brand new. So for a little bit, it has to adjust to your playstyle and it doesn't know if you're playing really well because you're playing against somebody's really bad. Or if you're playing really well because you're already a good player. It just takes a few weeks of playing for that Smurf account to get back to where you are levels wise

It takes some time to get back to that ELO. And this is why basically every pro has a Smurf account where they just mess around with new characters.

Otherwise all the games would have to be super serious. This also has another effect of letting the game company pretend that they have an extra 10 to 25% of accounts active because if you're on two accounts in the same week, and they go by the accounts active then you being a person that's used to have increased their population by double. I'm not saying that's a great one to use as maybe day by day is great, but however they wanted to sell it to their investors, that seemed to be the thing that worked so far. If there was one thing that I learned from playing, it's that when there's a new patch and you want to play a different character, you hop into surf account.

You had one main account and that was the one where you played any serious games. Even though there was a casual play mode, kind of ceiling on ELO for a little bit. In those serious games where you're in a serious party, you play with your serious account. It wasn't like you had to pay extra for a separate account. Accounts were free. It's just buying skins and getting extra characters early cost a little bit. Yeah you could buy a pack or something like that but who would do that.

You could unlock most of the characters just by playing regularly for about a month or two. It was only that they locked away some of the more high School characters. Even then, they rotated which characters were free every week so you could swap in whatever churches you wanted. It made the game something that you had to lay through intentionally in order to unlock some of the more specific features.

So safe to say, I kept Smurf account for times when I wanted to try out something new and I didn't really care about how well I played on that one. If it was casual, I could play on my regular account or this one. One of the games where I was trying to get to the top tier, I would use my regular account. Stacy and Amir both at Smurf accounts as well, although they never use them.

Sure, I had learned my lesson. I couldn't just play on a Smurf account. I couldn't just play for fun. Sometimes. It sucked that I kind of saw the game as both my fun and also potentially my new hustle. Oh well, there was always Hearthstone.

The world needed to find a way to get me to manage a professional team somehow. If I didn't have a handful, I would be researching that all the time. But it wasn't. So I did what I had to do. So all day Wednesday, I took notes on our game. I spent some time trying to figure out where I wanted to place my training blocks next time.

As I continued my plans, I thought about how I was going to be able to pay Rachel long-term for this. If I just kind of jump some bucks, I would dig into what? My savings? My earnings from my last business venture? I would have to find something. When you wanted to recruit top talent, it helped to have incentives that will keep them on board I want her to be on board and I also wanted her to not go into debt to play with us.

She saws as an opportunity and I wanted to make it that. And there's a thing right? If we were on our own franchise team and I'd have a budget to pay her with. That was going to be my next research topic.

You see in major sports leagues, cities have franchises because somebody bought the rights to that. They have the right to print merchandise for that team to hire and fire the team and to do everything that a stadium has to do to operate. So these franchises that decades ago were split up between rich white men are no longer going to be giving out like candy. If DOTA went with the franchise model like League of Legends had, then we would have regional teams all over. The fact that the rumor is about that happening have been coming up more and more often meant that at some point in time, I was expecting them to have open bidding wars for the franchise seats that they wanted to give. Right now, there were eight franchise seats in America. This meant that all these tier 1 franchises had to have a regional place and they also had to have a owner, a manager, a coach and a staff. Now I could be the manager. I definitely didn't have the money to buy a franchise, but if there was another way, like a silent business partner to buy it for me and then running it on our behalf then I would work with that.

Maybe

Maybe Ryan Reynolds would want an esports franchise. But then again he would only want it if it was a great team and then there were all those other things about using a celebrities that I had no idea about.

I mean it'd be nice to have a dream boat like Ryan Reynolds but he was probably another movie where he played himself. It would only be proper for him to do so.

I spent way too long thinking about what billionaire or millionaire would come in and buy me a franchise so that I could run it. However I wanted to. If I wanted to run into the ground? They would let me. If I wanted a budget to buy Superstar players? They would let me. I almost started doodling Ryan Reynolds face but stopped at the last minute. That would have been really odd. It would have been an interesting use of my time in the computer lab as I was waiting for my shift to be done but I didn't have the heart to do him Justice.

Plus,with that third class in the afternoon on Wednesday now, I had to deal with less freedom. Oh well. It was about to be October and I was ready to celebrate like a great pumpkin. Now if only they would come to me so I didn't have to make all those phone calls to get them on board. Then I would be really happy. But who knew when that was going to happen or if.

I signed up for the Ryan Reynolds fan club on my Smurf email account just to see if he was interested in coming to Jersey. I doubt he was but girl has to know these kind of things.