Morning Ramble for May 1st, 2017 in which I gush over the greatness of The Leftovers and the new American Gods TV shows, I recognize I have to start warding in SMITE, and I learn that I’m not so far in 1st place in my fantasy baseball league as I thought.

Constable Odo’s Redshirts

My team performed well again this week but I was surprised to discover an emerging trend. While I’ve won most of my match ups, my nearest competitor has beat me 3 outta the 4 weeks we’ve been scoring. It’s not by much, but even this week, while I won 11 outta the 14 competitions, he beat me 13–5–2, sweeping me in the offensive categories and almost winning each of the counting stats in pitching. I’ve gotta look into things or I stand to fall outta 1st place.

SMITE

I managed to get in a bit of mid-lane Ra today and I think I did pretty well. One thing I need to work on is what I do after the laning phase. I’m usually pretty good hanging out in lane and knocking down the outer tower regardless of who I face, but I tend to get a bit lost after that. If I try to roam, I seem to fall behind in level and then start getting killed in the jungle. It’s probably due to a scarcity of wards. I haven’t felt comfortable running around without mana and health pots yet so I haven’t been placing many wards and since I’m playing with others that seem to be learning the game, they aren’t placing much vision either. I’m thinking I’m gonna have to bite the bullet and start playing with fewer potions and more wards. Vision is so crucial in MOBAs that I need to start taking on that responsibility myself.

TV Goodness

OMG! TV was great last night! American Gods premiered and was as good as I expected it to be. I think Ricky Whittle who plays Shadow Moon is turning out to be a better actor than I expected from just seeing him as Lincoln in The 100. He showed depth of emotion and I was impressed how director David Slade was able to tell a lot about his character by what he didn’t say as much as by his dialog. This is really gonna be a fun show to watch. I also watched what I consider the best episode of The Leftovers this season – Crazy Whitefella Thinking. Scott Glenn (Kevin Garvey Sr.) was great and I just love how the writers told such a good story that wove and circled and ended up being adventurous and emotional at all the right spots. The pacing was incredible and while the series’ main characters were not in the episode much, I still got a sense that things were moving forward significantly in the overall storyline – Australia makes so much more sense now.