I caught a cold. It was pretty bad the first day - I had stomach cramps and had to go home. Played lots of video games and that made me feel better.

Began writing a comic - probably going to be a 3- or 4-page vignette. This will give me some experience with layout and characterization without having the burden of fleshing out a story. I think I will produce several of these while I work on the noir story.

I am experimenting with more aggressive zerg playstyles. My default had been ice fisher for all three matchups. It works super-well in ZvT, moderately well in ZvP, and terribly in ZvZ.

- Most gold-level Terrans do two rax rush, one-base MMM or marine/tank. Spine crawlers and queens can handily defeat a large number of marines, and by the time a decent MMM or marine/tank army can be assembled, I am usually far ahead enough to swarm them down with lings/blings and infestors.

- In ZvP, ice fisher (and fast expand in general) is a risky move. I have found myself in situations where I scout a 4-gate, build 4 queens and 4 spine crawlers and hold off the first wave. I build some lings, but then a second wave comes, and I can't quite hold off the 12 or so stalkers knocking at my door. Worse yet, I end up with about 1000 extra minerals just lying around and no way to spend them (no larva). Some ideas:

* Grab an early gas and build roaches.

* Build more spine crawlers.

Both strategies sound a little risky. On the one hand, building (say) 10 spine crawlers would handily defend against almost any number of stalkers. But then I'm (marginally) 700 minerals behind, and the spine crawlers take an agonizing 50 seconds to build. On the other, investing heavily in roaches is risky, since roaches are hard-countered by immortals, plus it costs more larva. Regardless, I think the roaches have slightly more long-term utility, so I'll try them first.

- In ZvZ, ice fisher requires significant adaptation, since the probability of an 8-pool or speedling rush is so high. Lately I have been trying an 8-pool-expand build with early ling aggression to try to put the opponent on their back foot, but then I get a roach-ling counterattack before I'm adequately prepared to defend.

The problem with all of these builds (with the possible exception of ZvT), however, is that they feel way too passive. If I sit back and let the Protoss macro, I'm going to be in a bad position around 15-20 minutes, and by the 12ish minute mark it's too easy for the protoss to simply park his ass in his base with a bunch of cannons and defend against whatever drops or harassment I throw at him. And with ZvZ, I feel like I'm letting the opponent dictate the terms of the game.

So I 8-pooled every single game for two days. That was pretty fun, but I'm not sure it's the way to go.