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Playing Go

Last night, I stayed up until 1:00 am playing Go. I guess since I haven’t played for so long, I’ve forgotten how crazy I can get when playing it.
I got into it because of the manga Hikaru no go. To impress my grandfather, I practiced like crazy for months and then got pretty good. But for a month after that, I didn’t play at all for some reason. When I got back to the game, I was awful, and I felt so ashamed that I couldn’t bear going anywhere near the game or anything related to it. I didn’t touch or research go anymore and I deleted everything Hikaru no go in my folders.
But I got myself to play again, and I really like it again. I am still really jealous of my cousins in Taiwan who have go class in their school. >_< Why can’t America have go class!?!
But anyway, when I was playing last night, at first, I kept playing people who had no idea how to play at all. So I kept beating them. It was starting to get boring.
Then, one girl started to beat me. I got a little scared, here was someone who knew how to play!…then…after she had taken a couple of my pieces, she asked me how to play the game. I was really really shocked. Either she was really lucky, or I was really really bad.
She really did have quite a bit of natural talent, though. After I taught her how to play, in five games she was right up to my level, maybe past. In the last game we played, I beat her, but only by ½ a point, and only because I had a better grasp of the scoring system than she. That was scary. She’s so good.

In school, I discovered that actually, part of it was that I am really bad. I asked my history teacher about my playing. He doesn’t play go, but he plays a lot of strategy games and has a basic grasp of the rules. He said I was playing too defensively and reacted too much. I am getting better. I think I’m gonna practice even harder now! I want to learn to have a grasp of the board like really good players.
He also told me about four concepts about playing chess. He is a very good chess player. The four are: force, or the ammount of pieces; time, or how fast you can move; space, which is your attacking and occupying range, and opening moves. It was really interesting, and I think it helps with the Go too.

Yay! It’s the 28th! Khaos Komix should have updated!

I make an observation that here in America, that the water we have is incredibly clean. Even the water we water our grass with is so clean we can drink it! It makes me feel a little shocked at how nice we have it. In other countries, like when we were in China, we couldn't even drink the sink water, yet here, our grass has cleaner water than most of the world. Isn't that kind of scary?