I would say he's enthusiastic about things but that's probably an understatement.

He's a nice dude and a good player, but you might hate yourself for thinking he's as funny as he is.

Yes. And yes.

Getting drunk with Counter Strike ESEA players was fun.

This guy is pretty cool, tbh.

I would love ftp.

I'm not offering you a ride (I'm coming from west of Harrisburg with 2 people in a 2 seater car), but it might be easier to bus/train to Philly and get a ride from there, just sayin'.

Yes. If need be, I would help chip in to sponsor a brief (maybe one day?) tournament ahead of the LAN with free tickets as prizes. IDK what format would be best to maximize competition - maybe an ultiduo tournament?

I've been to the last two. Might go to this one with a +1.

He's a solid player. As others have said, he's nice and doesn't rage.

The issues with his play aren't due to his mechanics or his personality, which is more than a lot of people can say. A solid team that offered him a chance to improve as part of a team and work on his gamesense would do him well.

Someone requested this, so here it is: a brief tutorial on the whole NickServ thing, using HexChat:

If I catch the message asking me to identify:

If I don't:

Not pictured: if you try and fail to identify too many times, what's essentially a lock might be put on your account 'cause it thinks someone's trying to brute force it. You can undo this by doing something like:
/msg NickServ identify accountname accountpass
/msg NickServ release accountname

If you need help, you can do /msg NickServ help

Alternatively, with HexChat, you can set up your network connect to look like this.

Or, using one of the three webchats offered:

smakers, your point's well made. However, while GameSurge is neither terrible nor abusive, it's a legacy system, the operators are incredibly slow to respond (in my experience), and small problems tend to persist for months.

GeeksIRC is new. It's small size and new status means that the operators are INCREDIBLY responsive (when #tf2.mix.nahl moved, the channel operators were there to resolve any hiccup with users' stats or client issues - GameSurge operators would've said "google it" or not responded at all). Small problems (even if they occur at incredibly odd hours of the night) are resolved nearly immediately.

This aside, both your point and brownymaster's point seem to be a call for a better webchat interface. atf2 did a lot to boost the usership of irc pugs by making them easier to use. Something like that but for multiple networks would be wonderful.

I did say "generally". I am aware there are stunning exceptions to this "rule".

In the US, teaching is a "backup profession". The saying goes "those that can't do, teach". That is, if you can't get a GOOD job, you decide to teach. In reflection of this, teachers make a godawful salary and often can't afford basic components of the American dream, such as houses remotely near the schools they teach at or cars that are less than 10 years old.

So, while many teachers are hard working, caring individuals, they're generally NOT the cream of the crop.

Some other countries 1) compensate their teachers enough that teaching is a comfortable profession and 2) respect teaching enough as a profession that even high-achieving students view it as viable career option. The result is that these countries simply have better teachers, which in many cases results in a better education system.

I had adblock off for ages to support tf.tv but when I went to look at this thread the ad made noise at me so now I turned it back on.

I compulsively read killfeed in frag videos, so I'd say some of the clips cut out a little too soon 'cause I couldn't catch the kill on the killfeed.

I went to high school just next door to Princeton, actually.

The only reason I survived high school was I had teachers who recognized my learning pace and let me goof off (or straight up told me to skip class if I was bored). I then did undergrad at a well respected university and am now 3 years into my 4 or 5 year PhD program.

I also tutored high school in Cleveland, OH. The experience was very very different. The kids I tutored didn't have the privilege that I had - at all. While it was hypothetically a "pre-college preparedness" program, the honest answer was that college wasn't right for most of those kids. For them, high school was a waste of time because of an education system that was failing them - their teachers couldn't be bothered to show up and one of my students was actually stabbed by her classmates. They learned no life skills (they had no sense of basic accounting/arithmetic/half of them couldn't tell time), but instead were surrounded by people straining to get them to meet the bare minimum of requirements while telling them to go to college.

In general, I feel like the high school curriculum is designed entirely wrong. I could go into details, but it's designed with the idea that EVERYONE goes to college in mind, so everyone's forced to memorize "transitional knowledge" - things that will help them memorize the next thing their professors tell them, rather than learning actual life skills.