Hey all. Short and sweet post (I always say that but it’s probably true this time) today.

As you may know, lloD and I had to drop out of Smash’n’Splash at the very last minute due to a family emergency. In fact, we were in the middle of the pre-SNS bracket they were running… and lloD won anyways.

Huge bummer for a lot of reasons. I’ll state now that I won’t publicly be discussing the nature of what’s going on in our lives personally. Besides that, SnS is maybe the event I was looking most forward to this year, so to actually get to the venue and have to leave the hotel the next morning at 6:30am was pretty tough. But life calls.

The Friday before SnS was my last day at my last job, because I resigned my position. The week leading up to SnS and SnS itself was actually the transition time I was going to have before I started a new job. I decided to visit home in VA during that time, so lloD and I actually came to SnS together from there – he happened to ALSO have that week off between him finishing his first-year of med school and starting his summer classes.

That week we grinded really hard with Junebug and Zain in preparation for SnS. It felt really good to put Melee at the forefront again, and after me giving lloD a hard time all year about how bad he’s been playing, he finally pulled himself together. And he did it within a few days, too… it was pretty nuts. I mean he 3-0’d Zain at a local after not taking a game for almost 2 years, then won the pre-SNS tournament without dropping a set. So I’m pretty bummed that we didn’t get to show our stuff when we were both in such strong form. Plus, we were going to return to teams after a long hiatus. We entered 1 tournament in November that we won (House of Paign), and since then we haven’t entered anything as a team since June 2018.

Due to the extenuating circumstances after returning home from SnS, I ended up extending my stay in VA by two additional weeks. I don’t think this is the right medium for me to process the way things are going so I’m having trouble articulating in the way that I want. Basically, everything is pretty different now and we’re going to be dealing with things for a long time to come. So what does this mean?

I’m unsure if I’ll be entering any more majors this year. The stars might align for a couple of them, but to really commit to a 3-day event will be a bit of a stretch at this point. Right now my best bets are SSC and Shine… maybe Big House. Possibly all, possibly none. I can’t speak for lloD on this matter.

Additionally, I’ve just now completed my first week at my new job. Transitioning back to NYC from VA, given the circumstances, proved challenging. But I had a great first week at my job, which has certainly lightened the load a bit. For anyone curious, I’m now working at Take-Two Interactive. My expertise is still in analytics, but now I get to apply that to an industry I’m passionate about.

So I’m still playing Melee, still in NYC. But I’ll probably be coming home more often, and I won’t be committing as much time to traveling for tournaments this year. I’m excited about my new job and am staying optimistic. And especially given the landscape of Melee lately, I’m still feeling very motivated to get better. Knowing that tournaments are TBD for me right now and still feeling the drive to improve at Melee is a cool feeling. It’s like the motivation I have is pure and sourced in my love of the game. Axe winning Summit definitely helps.

Thanks everyone for the continued support!! It means a lot. Melee forever.