I hope everyone has been doing well these last few weeks. Life has continued to be hectic for me with trips and work. I am sorry I have not been able to put a ton of effort into each post but I am happy I am able to still do these ones.
April 25th, 2025
THERE'S NOTHING WRONG WITH BEING WRONG
"If anyone can prove and show to me that I think and act in error, I will gladly change it - for I seek the truth, by which no one has ever been harmed. The one who is harmed is the one whoa bides in deceit and ignorance."
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditation, 6.21
What is means: " Someone once attempted to argue with the philosopher Cicero by quoting something he had said or written. This person claimed Cicero was saying one thing now but had believed something different in the past. His response: 'I live from one day to the next! If something strikes me as probable, I say it; and that is how, unlike everyone else, I remain a free agent.' No one should be ashamed of changing their mind - that's what the mind is for. 'A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,' Emerson said, 'adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.' That's why we go to such lengths to learn and expose ourselves to wisdom. It should be embarrassing if we didn't end up finding out if we were wrong in the past. Remember: you're a free agent. When someone points out a legitimate flaw in your belief or in you're actions, they're not criticizing you. They're presenting a better alternative. Accept it!"
Your Authors Take: They key to success is failure well handled. I have said it before in these blogs and I will say it again - a very important thing I work on often is the art of knowing what I do not know. I found myself, for a very long time, getting defensive anytime someone disagreed with my take on something or with an idea I had. It would go as far as even falsifying a narrative to present my thought or idea as better. This is a mistake. A major key to life is to know when you are wrong and to find alternatives to beliefs you have, even ones that are strong and you thought previously unbreakable. Life and opinions should be built on a foundation of facts and logic. NOT on the emotional response that is brought on by an idea. Emotion is important but should be tempered - it is crucial to let the initial outburst of emotion be tempered when making decisions so you do not fall into an action with less virtue. This will help you admit when you are wrong, even when you really do not want to be. We should always be open to changing our mind on something if the facts present differently than we originally thought - and we should always be willing to admit that we were wrong. I see this issue a lot in modern day politics, for example, and it never hurts to see how its effecting the country. On both sides of the system you have folks that refuse to divert from their parties beliefs no matter the facts laid out. They choose to stick with their original thoughts no matter the facts because of the emotion they feel behind it and often get stuck using confirmation bias. This has caused a massive divide in the population that I truly think would be fixed if people could just understand each others side and admit when one is wrong or right without villainizing it. This concept of accepting when you are wrong and understanding the angle of someone else, even if you may not agree, is the key to fixing this issue. Its simple, yet an undertaking too hard for those who do not wish to live their life to the fullest.
To keep the theme of childhood going, I am going to tell a story from my childhood, specifically when I was in middle school around the ages of 9-14. The timeline is fuzzy, so read with grace.
My first memory of CSGO is very fuzzy. From what I can recall, which may be wrong, I was playing on the map de_nuke with Quentin, Lucas, and maybe some others (asian john? [for those who know]).
I was horrible. I had no idea what was going on, and I felt humiliated because I'm pretty sure I did not get a single kill. But this did not sit right with me. I've played Cops n' Robbers on minecraft hypixel, and seen Youtube videos of CSGO, but I still sucked ass. I had to be better.
For the next few months, I would play casual on de_dust2 all day long. I learned the map, and with some courage I started to play competitive.
I still sucked ass, but I atleast understood the game. I tried my best, gave decent callouts, but ended up getting kicked almost every match for either being a squeaker, or for being complete dogshit at the game. Sometimes, it was both. Regardless, this cycle continued and eventually I begged my dad to buy me CSGO on an alternate account because I got so many 7-day comp bans for getting kicked.
I kept grinding, and started to queue with some friends. I started to get a little better at the game.
As my prefrontal cortex was early in development, I ogled at the site of shiny gun/knife skins that our occasional random player in our lobby had. I began to wonder, why would people every spend money on pixels in a video game? But even worse, I began to wonder, why do I want to spend money to get these shiny pixels for myself?.
Regardless of the reasoning, the inkling was swimming around in my adolescent mind, and I was hooked. I started to watch Youtube videos of CSGO players unboxing knives and screaming into their microphone. I did research on what made certain patterns of these skins more desirable and thus more expensive. I knew the case system to unbox these rare skins were literally just gambling, but truly I did not care. I was just a naive little squeaker.
On my 11th or 12th birthday I received a $50 Steam gift card from my parents. A spark was ignited in my mind instantaneously. I knew exactly what I was going to do. I invited an old neighbor to my house, Seth Merrill, and I ripped the entire $50 gift card into CSGO cases. I sat on the edge of my shiny bright red plastic chair, and Seth derped around in a random kitchen chair I pulled up for him next to my computer. It was time. Case after case, key after key, I essentially donated my birthday money to Valve (the creators of CSGO). I got absolutely nothing. My total unboxed skins totaled an astounding $3. I felt defeated. My birthday was ruined. The spark began to dim.
A year or two passed, but I continued to play CSGO pretty much all day everyday. My prefrontal cortex was developing rapidly and I was beginning to realize that cases are literally just a scam. But that did not stop me. It's gambling after all. I watched more CSGO on Youtube, and lots of these Youtubers would also make gambling videos. Some would just open CSGO cases, and others would post videos of them winning thousands of dollars on online gambling websites that used CSGO skins as their form of currency. As the sands of time revealed the truth, it turns out many of these Youtubers actually owned the sites they were winning on, essentially creating false gambling advertisements targeted towards children. But again, this did not stop me. The fire raged on.
I am not trying to frame this as if I am a victim of this. In fact, I believe I got the good ending of this story. For this next part, you will see how my good ending may have come at a truly sinister cost greater than I could ever fathom.
I'd like to zoom into one specific Youtuber: McSkillet. He was a pioneer of his time, creating the infamous "Top 10 Most Expensive Skins & Rare Weapons 2015! Counter Strike Rarest Knives & Skins". This video put CSGO skins on the map, and from the day this video was uploaded the skin community exploded in popularity. People could not wrap their heads around why people would spend millions of dollars on purely cosmetic pixels in a video game.
Much like other CSGO youtubers in his time, he would also go on to make his own gambling website and help a lot of other creators with their sites. His site was called CSGOKingdom. A fun little trick that these websites would use to to make gambling an actual habit of its users, would be to introduce free daily cases for every user. These cases were pretty much guaranteed to pay out a grand total of a few cents per open, but I believe the real motive was just to get as many repeat website visitors as possible.
And therefore, it worked. Everyday I would play CSGO and find a new gambling website to open my free cases on. Everyday I would get a few pennies richer. CSGOKingdom ended up making McSkillet hundreds of thousands of dollars every single month. Its gambling after all.
But one day, something was different. I did my usual routine. I go on CSGOKingdom, open my free case, and click around to the live opening feed of what is being unboxed currently on the site. I vicariously won and lost thousands of dollars through the live opening feed.
But after scouring this live feed for some time everyday, I always I watched the same user, open the same case, and receive the same outcome. On this day I decided to click on this specific live opening and see what it was. As it turns out, CSGOKingdom had a neat little feature where you could actually make your own case and choose the skins you wanted to unbox, in which the site would calculate the odds for you. Of course it was still rigged heavily against you, but its the same little gimmick that carnival games use to make you feel like you have more control than you really do.
But this one case was... different. By some miracle, whether he was a site administrator flying under the radar, or he just found some bug in the calculations used to create your own case, the odds actually favored you. To be specific, the case had a 99.9% chance of unboxing a $50 skin at the time, a Desert Eagle Blaze. The weird part was that this case costed $40 to open. Therefore, you were almost guaranteed to profit $10 every time you open this case. Being a little wiser at this time, I assumed nothing of this, and went to bed.
7 days passed.
Roughly a week later, I was playing duo-queue with Kyle Musto and I nonchalantly mentioned this funny little case I found to him. He instantly asked me to find the case so he could see it for himself. So, I went back to the live feed, and there it was. The same guy, opening the same case, getting the same outcome. I sent Kyle the link and without hesitation he goes "alright I deposited my knife into the website lets open these cases". I was dumbfounded, but watched his screen in disbelief. It actually worked. Every time he opened this case, he profited $10. Without much thought I instantly deposited my knife as well, worth around $70 at the time.
We were fucking ecstatic. The fire was not just raging, it was a fucking inferno.
CSGOKingdom had a feature where you could open 10 of the same case at the same time, so we were essentially making $100 every single time we clicked the yellow "Unbox" button. Our balance on the website grew to thousands. I couldn't believe it. As soon as I hit about $3,000 of site balance, I withdrew one of the most iconic CSGO skins from the site, an M4A4 Howl in field-tested condition. This skin is really something special but that's for another blog. Regardless, it was fucking working. The only thing between us and 100 more dollars was waiting on that stupid case unboxing animation to be over.
Kyle was a bit more timid with his withdrawals, and he was simply just stacking up site balance. I need to fact check with him, but I believe his site balance peaked at around $7,000.
Editors Note: As stated before, a single Desert Eagle Blaze was worth around $50 back then. Today, a single one is worth $700. If we just simply decided to withdraw the $7,000 worth of Desert Eagle Blazes, they would now be worth $98,000. Oh well, we all should've bought bitcoin too.
But alas we were blinded by the inferno. The live opening feed quickly turned into chaos. This case was not only being spammed by us, but now with it littered all over the live feed, I'm absolutely sure that others caught on as well.
Our site balance was frozen before we could withdraw anything else. But the damage was done.
A lingering thought I have always have to this day was: who was the Robinhood that created this case, and how much money has he made? He was disciplined, not cluttering up the live feed, and I can only imagine how much money he stole from this online casino.
The truth is, I felt guilty. Casinos are not the most ethical business, however being so young my moral compass was spinning. But truthfully I did not care because I was able to make more money than I knew what to do with. I was like 13 what the fuck do you even do with $100 at that age?
We made some good money, and this loss was really nothing compared to the millions of dollars that McSkillet would go on to make with various different gambling websites.
But now, we have to talk about McSkillet. This is where it gets grim.
He was only about 16 when he started making youtube videos, and was millionaire from creating gambling websites at 17. He bought a 2014 McLaren, and on the outside, everything seemed fine. But as the world would soon be horrified to find out, he was not fine. Maybe it was the fame, maybe it was the money, but his mental health deteriorated very quickly. His family started to notice, and even tried to get the police involved after he started to imply he was invincible and how he can do whatever he wants, stating "the cops bullets cant hurt me anyway". Despite this, the police did not do anything, somehow stating that there was no clear intention to hurt others or himself.
On August 23rd, 2018, 18 year old Mcskillet, real name Trevor J. Heitmann, purposefully drove himself onto the wrong way of a highway and quickly reached speeds of over 100mph. He crashed, resulting in not only his death, but the death of a mother and her 12-year old child. May they rest in peace and I truly hope all the surrounding people and their families are remaining strong to this day. This should have never happened, and it's a shame that the police department did not fully grasp the severity of the mental-health situation that Trevor was in. Regardless, I think such an act of negligent endangerment of other people is not excusable no matter the circumstances. He should have gotten the help he needed, but of course its never truly that simple. Again, rest in peace to those who lost their life.
Now I do not want to be insensitive to the tragic loss of life that happened by making my blog about this subject, but after this news came out in 2018 I had no idea how to feel. Was I somehow to blame? Was he secretly in debt and I contributed to his monetary losses? He was making millions of dollars, surely I didn't contribute to any potential losses, right? What was the real cost of that M4A4 Howl? Was it really just a mental health issue that went unnoticed for far too long? Am I somehow an accidental accomplice to this horrific event?
These questions used to haunt me everyday. It wasn't until about 8 months ago when more information came out on his mental health situation that gave me some clarity. If you are reading this and hate my guts and/or you are a certain someone with connections to federal investigators I urge you to please watch this video(embedded below) for more information on the topic. In reality I am in no way involved in this event and I just wanted to selfishly mention that to clear my name. Since then, I have came to the conclusion that I was not an accidental accomplice to this, and that his deteriorating mental health was the sole contributor to his horrific actions.
But no one will ever truly know. All we know is that McSkillet's passing and influence will forever be remembered by those that played CSGO in the early days. As for the mother and daughter killed, and their family, my heart and the CSGO communities heart will aways be there for them.
Back in the early 2000s, my world revolved around video
games. One minute I was Princess Peach in Mario Party 8 (the best Mario Party),
the next I was shifting from wolf to human in Twilight Princess. Saturdays were
for Wii Sports showdowns, and weekdays were for hopping onto Minecraft and Club
Penguin. As I grew older, and obviously more mature, my thirst for turning
games into real-life experiences hit me hard.
Level 1: As a kid with Windows XP and a taste of responsibility,
I had the perfect lineup: Avenue Flo, Wedding Dash, Cake Mania, and Purble
Place. I was obsessed with organizing chaos, clicking fast, and keeping
everyone happy. Looking back, it was less gaming and more early workplace
conditioning. Still, this fed into my early childhood dream: to have a job.
Like a real job. I wanted to clock in, take orders, and serve up results.
Level 2: When I turned 15, I landed my first job at my mom’s
boyfriend’s (now stepdad’s) restaurant.I was living the Diner Dash dream: taking orders, bussing tables,
brewing coffee, and giving pastries to extend customer patience. He was the
only chef, which meant I was stationed at the counter (just like Flo) waiting to
deliver dishes before the customer bar turned red. This was fast paced, stressful,
and totally perfect.
Level 3: In high school (16 years old), I decided one job
wasn’t enough. This was when my Papa’s Freezeria training from middle school
kicked in (thank you Coolmath Games for giving me a part-time job before I ever
paid taxes). I had the prep, the toppings, the build station, and the clock always
ticking in my head. Multitasking orders and customizing sandwiches outside of
Mike’s Way? That’s sandwich artistry under pressure, just how I like it.
Level 4: After about 10 months, I swapped subs for sweets
and joined Crumbl Cookies (while still helping my stepdad, shout-out me at 17
years old). This wasn’t just baking; it was co-op survival mode. Think
Overcooked, but with real ovens, and no margin for error. iPads tracked
decorating time, no freezers, no shortcuts, chill-thaw-bake-cool-warm precision
and recipe memory work that would have made the Onion Kingdom safe a thousand
times over. I made a mental game to beat the timers and remember orders before
they even printed. Managing dozens of cookies and preparing for rushes? This
was easy, my controller thumbs have sweat harder.
Level 5: After taking a break during my first summer of college
(call back to the last post), I got bored and decided to work at a Universal Studios
hotel (18 years old). I was a retail attendant, running the mini mart before, during,
and after Halloween Horror Nights. Clock in at 3pm, clock out at 2am, go to
class at 9am. With that kind of sleep, I was living in a Five Nights at Freddy’s
spin-off, except instead of animatronics, I see crazy drunk hotel guests.
Level 6: Today, I’m in the world of spreadsheets and revenue
reports – fully living in Sims 4: Get to Work. I went from intern at 18 to
full-time Financial Analyst by 20, all while finishing my degree. Still
managing time, still juggling tasks, still fighting the invisible customer
patience bar that now suspiciously feels like a deadline from my boss. Every
game I played, every job I took, every timer I beat, trained me for this. Time management
isn’t just something I learned, it is the proudest and most powerful skill I’ve
built. It is what keeps me ahead, keeps me organized, and keeps me from burning
out while juggling school, work, and life.
These games have trained me, the jobs have tested me, and
now I’m playing the hardest, most fun game of all… reality.
I take a quick shower and ponder what my blog will be about as we all do, I have a really good idea but it'll take much longer than I have time for at the moment. My favorite thing to do on this blog is just write about stuff as it comes, we all know I love some slice of life. With that being said I decide to just take notes of the rest of my night's activities to give you all a glimpse.
(I didn't really consistently note the time for everything so just bear with me)
I hop out of the shower, realizing my hamartia (my laziness) has gotten the best of me again. Draped in nothing but a towel, I walk down the stairs and out to my car to get my laundry out of the backseat. My hamper has been stationed in the backseat since I left Palm Harbor last night at 8. I throw on the Minnesota Vikings shirt I pilfered from Nathan, some pants, and saddle up in August's passenger seat.
7:12 pm
As we venture to Trader Joe's I look down at my phone, "Are you ready to play soon?" From Ryan Powers.
"OMW to trader joes, ETA: 7:45."
"PoG."
August and I have an affinity for the Orange Chicken at Tjoes. 100 grams of protein for 5 bucks is just insane. While there we load the basket with the usual suspects, veggie fried rice, Greek Yogurt, granola, eggs, hash browns, blueberries, orange juice, but we also add a newcomer, Golden Berries. They sound awesome, August was theorizing that the cumquat had rebranded because of low demand, I thought that sounded reasonable. All I needed to do now was check off my final item on the list: Look At The Greeting Cards. For just 99 cents these greeting cards are just a good time man, I got a nice fun blank one with a cat on it, then my eyes were drawn to a card with two dogs hanging out of the window of a car.
"Why Don't Dogs Drive Cars" etched on the top of the card. Eager to find the answer I removed the plastic sleeve and opened the card with purpose. On the inside? No words.
I looked at August who was witnessing the whole event unfold, our joint gaze shared one emotion, bewilderment. For a moment I theorized, perhaps the punchline had to do with them being colorblind? No. They can't parallel bark? Also no.
Feel free to ponder it yourself while you read the rest of the blog.
I threw the card in my handbasket and we went on our merry way. Abetted by the sweet tunes of Jim Croce, we made it back home, and did all the grocery put away stuff.
7:47 pm
I texted Ryan that I was on, and joined him on Discord for our bi-weekly wingman session. Sometimes we're gods amongst men, other times were serfs amongst kings, tonight was the latter. Before getting into games he turned on his facecam and showed me Raechel and Finn behind him on the bed, we had a cup-filling conversation about life and her new job at a hotel in Epic Universe (passholders suck) before booting up CS. The first two games I tried to take notes in between the rounds but it ended up being mostly garbage. We lost both games 3-9, tough start. During the second game, however, August came into my room with a bowl of orange chicken and fried rice. What an angel. I had half of it during game two and then went downstairs to eat the rest with him at the table. We watched the Friday Beers crew play DND, after laughing heartily at Liam say "I'm gonna use my stealth to hand him drugs," I went back upstairs to reconvene with Ryan. Game 3 started mostly the same as 1 and 2. At half we were down 2-6, felt bad until both Ryan and I couldn't stop clutching. Our teamwork had finally clicked and after a furious comeback from 2-8, we finished the game in a 8-8 tie. I'll take a tie 7 days to Sunday (idk if that's a saying). We played a swift play Valorant (I hope it catches on with him, it won't) and he got off for the night.
10:33 pm
"I mean just let me know ever"
"Ummm like when"
Six minutes later it was Chris and I in discord, ready to play some Valorant. We played some ridiculous comp games. He tried out Raze, I played a game as Sage and did absolutely nothing the whole time except laugh. He carried as Iso, I carried as Neon, we had a goooooooood sesh. The last two hours we made a Spotify Jam and listened to a combination of underground UK rap and calm classical music. At 2 am Chris made it to SILVER LETS GOO.
We ended our night after we befriended a Chinese man in a swift play and promised to play with him tomorrow night.
3 am
I climbed into bed, after a good night of games and groceries, still pondering that Dog Joke. What was the answer? Why wasn't it on the inside. Why didn't I check the other cards to see if it was a misprint? Just kidding, after August and I contemplated for a little bit too long, we realized we had read the card wrong. There's not a question mark, but an exclamation point, also Dog and Don't are switched. "Why Dogs Don't Drive Cars!" and it's just because they stick their head out the window.
We laughed way harder at that realization than if it had actually been a joke, so I'll call it a wash.
