another good week in the books!
thursday was games with @luminousillusion, worked on my Sol a little bit in +R. we've run the +R sol mirror before, which is fun because neither of us know too much about how to play the character well. this time, however, i came into the session thinking about how much more i know about sol after prepping for daveo at evo and DAGG, and so i was doing very different stuff specifically aimed at better understanding how sol works in neutral and pressure.
the sol practice was so fun that i ended up playing more sol in rev2 casuals at gamecenter on friday, alongside some jam sets and a good long set with chipp vs daymendou slayer. felt like i started going toe-to-toe with him OK after losing the first 30 games or so. been spending years working on learning this matchup and only recently has it felt like i am actually keeping pace at reading what's happening on screen. now i just need to make better decisions literally everywhere.
saturday was Caliburst! everyone had a good time as always, turnout was a little lower than usual so i shelled out for the good pizza. ended up playing MarlinPie in winners finals and lost a close 3-2, then made it back for the runback in grands and lost 3-0 (but close). got another casuals set in with him after the bracket was over. he's been dusting off his Rev2 now that Evo is behind us and was looking pretty good, so i'm mostly just glad that i can hang, and i'm looking forward to digging into the replays to see what i can improve.
i'm going to do another replay review for this week's matches (separate post) because i got a lot of good stuff in, both with bread during Rev2sday and with MarlinPie during Caliburst. however, i think that spending some time working on Sol to level up my understanding of GG's core attack interactions (strike/throw, recognizing jump-outs and air throwing them, identifying specific patterns in neutral and pressure and quickly adapting to call them out) would be really useful. guilty gear characters often do so many different things (especially Chipp!) that they kind of get to play whatever game they want, and as a result it's very easy to spend so much time learning to play your character's game that you end up with a deficient grasp of The Basics (or even a clear articulated understanding of what The Basics even means in guilty gear). Sol IS the fundamentals of GG, and i think working on him for a little bit should help my Chipp pressure.
also, i've continued ending my sessions with a little CVS2 netplay and it has felt like a real good way to cool down from the GG. definitely gonna keep that up.
now for the workout stuff!
hit all the sessions i planned to, going to keep the routine the same for this coming week except i'll be switching back to 3 sets of 5 reps to work on strength for a bit. i think the short, frequent workouts have been real good because they're a lot easier to just fit in when i have time that day instead of having to structure my day around it. just as with everything else in my life, i cannot go as deep on my physical training as i would like, so i think narrowing the focus of any given exercise session and just making sure i'm getting in some work in nearly every day i can is a win for now. i'm going to keep up the routine for the next two weeks, take a bit of a break when we head to NY for my SIL's wedding, and then get back into the 3x10 routine.
i did not get the stretch goal of adding yoga back into the routine (heh); think that's gonna take some more pruning first. i have a hard time reminding myself sometimes that just because i might have time in my schedule to do something, it doesn't mean that i'm in a good state to do that thing. in the last couple months i've stopped streaming outside of events and started scaling down my workload pretty significantly, and even despite all that i still generally feel a little overloaded. i think that's probably a good sign that i'm doing too much.
eventually i want to start adding more deliberate study to my martial arts maintenance work, mostly for my striking, since standup drills are things i can do reasonably OK on my own. i haven't been back to a martial arts gym for a while and i have no burning desire to do so while COVID is still a factor, but i've been treating my continued striking drilling mostly as a way to keep what i know active rather than try adding anything to my game via instructional video and self-study. it's just another fighting game, might as well practice it like one and make the most of the time i spend on it.
next week's project is gonna be re-adding some meditation back into the routine, thinking of using it as a nice end-of-workday ritual. it'll be like yoga but i get to lie down instead. also going to take a stab at learning to use an ergodox keyboard, hopefully that'll help my hands out a bit.