Over the years I have spent many hours watching my kids take part in various extra curricular activities. This has included standing on the side of a football pitch on a cold Sunday morning watching a herd of eight year olds chase a ball, seated in an airless theatre as the local amateur dramatic society over acted some play and sat on many a hard church seating while a guitar orchestra played.
Last night we spent several nervous hours watching the finals of the National University eSports League (NUEL) League of Legends (LoL) Summer Championships in which my youngest son and his University of Birmingham team were playing. This, at least, was one I could watch from the comfort of my own sofa!
The final was being live streamed on Twitch and there was commentary too. I couldn’t work out who was the obligatory ex-pro and who was the summariser but given that’s how it is in all other sports I am assuming that this followed the same formula. However, I could work out how our son was doing as he is called MTBluebear in game.
It was for us what it must be like for parents of footballers as they play their first televised match as we squealed “oh that’s Mat that’s just had a double kill!”.
It is always interesting to see your children through the eyes of others and last night was a real eye opener. I’m not sure that I would ever describe Mat as “cocky” but that is how he was described at one point! Reading the Twitch chat session was also interesting. Most of it was unintelligible but there was a long period where the participants were playing “If Bluebear was a X he’d be called Y” which I was quite touched by. Unfortunately you don’t seem to be able to replay the chat logs on Twitch so that’s lost foreverUPDATE they have been retained by a friend of Mat and so they are reproduced below at the bottom of the page. This chat also elicited the comment “Bluebear is the god” which I am taking as being a good thing, although you can’t be too sure these days with the current predilection for reversing meanings of words.
As any parent you want your offspring to have whatever they want so we were really disappointed for Mat when Birmingham were beaten by the bastards at Cambridge. Mat was more sanguine about it vowing to go one better in the main league this season and we’ll be watching when he does.
Balbiin: If Bluebear stuck things together, he'd be Gluebear Gmanel1t3: if bluebear wore a kippah he'd be jewbear Tripledan: If he really liked honey he'd be Poohbear Natoniann: If Bluebear was a ghost, he'd be Boobear. Gmanel1t3: if he was bronze he would be noobbear Selfishmexy: and if he was *** he'd be poobear Tripledan: If he went on your feet he'd be Shoebear Balbiin: If he was at a sporting event, he'd be Woohbear Dars02: if he was a cow he'd be bluecow Sammychowchow: If he played Volleyball, he would be Volibear Gmanel1t3: if he was a toilet he'd be loobear Sammychowchow: if you were a bear, you would be YouBear Gmanel1t3: if he was a cow he'd be moobear