u/masterchip27

The latest in-depth 60+ minute interview with Praew and her family is sensational.

She said that the judges callbacks were supposed to just be her playing at Howie's house and studio, getting tips and so on. But instead Howie revealed to her that her practice would be at The Laugh Factory, a comedy show venue in the middle of Hollywood, just 3 hours befores her performance. She says she was shocked. Howie allegedly said, "the good news is that you're performing; the bad news is that it's in front of an audience tonight in 3 hours."

Super crazy knowing the backstory. She absolutely slayed.

How exactly did Julien save Thjazi? Like, what what was the thing about Thjazi's corpse being marked, and what would have happened had Julien not "paid his regards" to Thjazi at the funeral? Why did Thjazi seeing Mara change the his intended plan....and what exactly was the intended plan? Why did he want to to die exactly? Didn't ending up in Julien's shadow sort of compromise his plan still? Can he even be "restored" at this point?

I get the gist of what's going on, but I don't understand this on a granular level. I hope I'm not the only one who has this going over my head lol

Congrats to the winner of Hera's streamer invitational, Grubby! I must say, I was also blown away by PiG and the matchup between the two was truly neck and neck, ending 5-5 after ten games. The final match was truly a nail biter with Grubby able to win the battle of BBC with greater micro and ever so slightly more optimal build order.

It was wonderful to see so much awesome AoE2 coaching content, really bringing screen time to cool personalities from RedPhosphoru to Dr Agonstar, T90 and Lewis coaching to Lierrey casting. I also enjoyed so many of the players, some of them new to me such as Iyouxin who was hilarious, Waga who had a very cool approach to the tournament, Singsing who was a beast and a dark horse. It was nice to see legends like Day9 get back into it, delivering hilarious and entertaining content, and even the tragedies were quite memorable, such as Yamato's 6.5 hour long match against TeutonicFortress.

This also made me really appreciate what a beautiful game AoE2 is, with such a diversity of different styles able to win at the very top level, from imperial age macro to feudal aggression to castle age unique unit rushes.

Grubby is the well deserved as the winner for all the work he put into this game over the past few months, and especially the last few days, which cannot have been easy. I remember seeing him just starting out, to now having addressed many of his weaknesses earlier on. Hera deserves a huge shoutout as well for organizing this. GG

Links:

https://aoe2.criticalbit.gg/kings-gauntlet/

https://liquipedia.net/ageofempires/The_King%27s_Gauntlet