Photos: League of Legends World Championship, Season 6

[2020 note]: this is unposted content from 2016, photographs from mythical and I’s trip out to Los Angeles for the 2016 LCK Fall Championship AKA Worlds, the season 6 world championship.

It also dawned on me that this trip capped off a span of two months where I visited Europe, Korea, went to Disney Food & Wine, and then Worlds, so basically an insane amount of leisurely travel in a short amount of time.

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The LCK Fall Split Finals AKA Worlds 2016

For the second year in a row, mythical gf and I decided to go see the finals to the League of Legends World Championship.  For the second year in a row, the finalists were both teams out of Korea; hence the renaming of Worlds to League Champions Korea’s Fall Split, since for the fourth year in a row, Korea has run roughshod over the competition and would be champion of the game.

Thankfully, 2016 would be a year in which Worlds was held in the United States, absolving me from making a third international trip within the span of six weeks.  Instead, it was merely a leisurely weekend trip to Los Angeles, which saw a miserable flight out to LA, lots of junk food and Pikachu Game on top of League-related activity.

But for simplicity sake, we’ll stick to the Worlds experience, because honestly, there’s not a whole lot to talk about in regards to playing Pikachu Game on the Santa Monica Pier, and being sat next to a 400 pound blob on a flight.

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Well, that was obvious

Like finding out water is wet: Affidavit states “strong odor of alcohol” emanating from Jose Fernandez and his friends’ bodies at the scene of the incident that took all three lives

Edit: confirmed to be legally drunk.  Also, cocaine. 

Honestly, I’m more surprised that this news didn’t come out like a week or so after the World Series.  With the Cubs and Indians being the two participants, the media has no shortage of rhetoric and fluff about curses, streaks and baseball tragedies to talk about to fill any and all baseball coverage.  More coverage about Jose Fernandez would’ve been great filler to bridge the gap between the World Series and the start off free agency as well as awards season.

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Quite possibly the most useless vehicle ever conceived

Mercedes-Benz getting into the pickup truck market serves about as much purpose as Victoria’s Secret getting into power tool production.

But before I can really dial up the snark about how yuppies would love this vehicle for hauling groceries back from Whole Foods or how it’s so luxurious, they wouldn’t let day laborers from The Home Depot parking lot ride in the bed, and other inevitable privileged American misnomers, it turns out that Mercedes-Benz doesn’t plan on selling it in America – yet.

I equate the deliberate denial as something of an attempted power move, for Mercedes-Benz to exclude the one country in the world that loves pickup trucks, especially ones that are kind of useless for actual utilitarian purposes.  Try to get Americans to be envious and drum up demand for a giant status symbol with wheels, but it has a truck bed, so it would be perfect to haul paint quarts, samples of crown moulding, and meticulously reconstituted wood.  Or a litany of yoga equipment from Lululemon.

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So I’m kind of dieting

Looking through some pictures over the last year or so, I’m feeling an increasing resentment at how I’m looking in them.  Simply put, I feel like I’m looking a little more rotund than I’m typically comfortable with; and I can’t help but wonder if this is age catching up with me, or if I’ve just been letting myself let my guard down with general eating rules, or perhaps it’s a combination of both.

I’m not working out any less than I used to, and I still do a variety of weight training and cardio, and as long as I go to work, I’m also going to the gym, typically five days a week.  I’ve probably just gotten too lax with food, choosing poorly when it comes to what I’m eating, and probably eating a little too much of it, because food is awesome.

But I’m also 34 and not 24, when I shed a lot of weight, with a pretty strict diet, so I guess I should probably start watching what I’m eating again, and hope that some of the unsightly flesh on my body goes away in a few months.

Dieting isn’t really that hard to me, since it’s basically just conditioning, but getting to that point where eating choices and habits become normalized that’s somewhat aggravating to the point where it’s brog-worthy.

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The sexy, red-haired, rain making elephant in the room

Every Worlds, there’s always a not-popular/meta champion pick that emerges from some team, usually from Korea, that takes the tournament by storm, or is effective enough to surprise out some critical victories.  Sometimes they’re picked against lesser opponents so that players can hide their hands and not reveal their A-games to those stronger challengers scouting in the wings, or sometimes they’re busted out at a critical juncture of a series to catch the opponent off guard, and by the time they understand what is happening it’s too late.

Every year, there’s always one or a few picks that are remembered for its breaking of the meta, and outside the box thinking, or sometimes just plain goofy audacity, that sometimes works because nobody is expecting it.  In Season 3, OMG’s LoveLing bust out a jungle Volibear that completely blindsided TSM en route to a 43-13 drubbing.  In the Season 4 Finals, Royal Club’s inSec selected Rammus to jungle, and although his line score didn’t look that impressive, he most definitely contributed to Royal’s only win before ultimately succumbing to Samsung White.  And then there was last season SK Telecom T1’s Faker going all the way to Jupiter to select Olaf to play in mid lane (link above), and then still throttling a completely lost Bangkok Titans squad who inexplicably tried to go bruiser-vs-bruiser against Faker by picking Irelia mid.

It’s a legit strategy when it comes to League of Legends, since there are just so many available champions to pick from.  No matter how infallible or statistically reliable some champions are, out of 150+ available, there’s going to be one that’s an effective counter somewhere.  And the players that hide them in their hands until critical points are legit risk takers, choosing to unleash them when the stakes are high.

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Another Wolverine movie and the sky is also blue

Man, FOX is really milking their Wolverine hard-on all the way to the end, huh?  I think I’m more surprised that Hugh Jackman is completely okay reprising Wolverine for the ninth time with Logan, but I guess he really likes money and is completely okay with being typecast as Wolverine for the rest of eternity, no matter what else he does with his career.

Seriously though, Jackman has shown up in literally every single The Wolverine Show Movie Occasionally co-starring the X-Men, and just about every single one of them revolves around him.  Aren’t the fans tired of the character being ret-conned over and over again?

Wolverine hijacks all three of the original X-Men films, gets his own origin film, then his own stand-alone film.  He makes a cameo in First Class, before being thrust back into the spotlight in Days of Future Past, which I’m convinced existed solely to reset the Wolverine timeline so more Wolverine and Wolverine-centric films can be produced.  This is confirmed with his cameo in Apocalypse that takes him straight back to Weapon X.  And now Logan will be Wolverine in the far future.

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