Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 34

In the year 2000, Ciro lived with his parents for 10 months in the Coventry because his father took some courses at the University of Warwick. This was Ciro's most important educational experience, more so than any other inCiro Santilli's formal education, because it taught him the Holy Language of English, which infinitely expanded Ciro's Internet horizons, and shaped Ciro's having more than one natural language is bad for the world philosophy. When he came back to Brazil, Ciro skipped dozens of levels in his English school in Santos, São Paulo, Brazil, a Brazilian chain called Cultura Inglesa, and was put to study with much older teenagers who marveled at Ciro's incredibly cute, but since lost, British accent.

Another huge advantage of Coventry is that the Hearsall Community Primary School where Ciro studied was a regular British primary school but with two classes dedicated to foreign students to learn English before integrating with the British students. There were a several kids from Kosovo there due to the Kosovo War which was just ending, and it was there that Ciro made his first Chinese friend, yet unaware of course of the role the country would later play in his life. One particularly fun memory was that of playing soccer on the school playground with a sponge ball to avoid breaking the windows. Then one day it was raining, british weather of course, but Ciro still went for a header, and the soaked sponge ball was soaked and splashed Ciro with dirty water all over. Good days.

Ciro also played a bit of Rugby in those days in a local club.

Some other good memories are of reading the first two Harry Potters, playing and mostly watching other kids play Pokemon on their Game Boys and Pokemon trading cards, and going to a nearby commons playing field and woods, as it typical throughout the UK. Ciro also played some rugby with a local boys team TODO name? but for some reason his team was always crushed when they went to nearby towns to play against other teams. And Ciro also went with his family or with school to some nearby attractions, like Stratford-Upon-Avon (Shakespeare's hometown), and some castles.

This vocabulary likely entered Ciro Santilli's vernacular through playing Counter-Strike when he was a teenager.

Magic is the best card game of all time. Ciro Santilli agrees with this fact, and this has nothing to do with the nostalgia factor of having played it while being a teenager.

It is also the one with the most cumbersome name possible, containing even a bloody colon punctuation in it!

However, besides that, Magic has another major flaw: the cards of old formats (Legacy and Modern), which are the only really interesting ones, are fucking expensive: Section "Magic: The Gathering is too expensive".

Like in mathematics, the most beautiful decks are those that do crazy things:All of this comes to a certain extent from the deep asymmetry that permeates the game.

It is also really interesting to watch as new sets as spoiled and try to guess if certain cards will have any impact on the Modern or Legacy metagame.

Here are some cool decks:

If Ciro were to ever overcome his cheapness and play the legacy forma (which will never happen), he would likely play one of the following decks when trying to be able to win at all:Both of this decks focus on cheating a huge creature into play in one go, and both have combo protection methods (discard for turbo depths, and counterspells for sneak and show). Ciro believes that those decks reflect his personality well, notably Ciro Santilli's self perceived creative personality. Related decks that don't appeal as much to Ciro:And above all, Ciro would never play a fair deck. Grinding victories is not for him. He'd rather quickly decide win/lose status and move on.

Competitive commander is also interesting, although matches tend to be much more random so the format is harder to digest, see for example this channel; Playing With Power MTG channel.

In Ciro's mind, Urza's block is the most epic of all, followed by the masques block. Those sets had a ridiculous power level and epic art, and they happened just before Ciro Santilli started playing during Invasion, which had an extremely low power level in comparison. So Ciro saw some cards from those slightly older formats floating around, but not many, and they felt so mystical and awesome.

ChannelFireball is one of the best Legacy resources out there, but they have too much crap filling in between legacy videos unfortunately.

The following creators share many of Ciro's interests and output large quantities of interesting content covering all memes/overpowered combos of new sets:

Ciro was pleased when he learnt that Steve Wozniak plays magic the gathering.

Magic's competitive play became a mess in the late 2010's. They had a clear tournament structure, but they decided to start changing things every 6 months, and give tournaments meaningless names like "Mythic championship", and it just became impossible to follow what is what.

The mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Card_frame#Original_frame is the best, much more epic all others (notably since 2003 update) ware bullshit, good overview medium.com/@raphaelaleixo/the-graphic-design-for-magic-the-gathering-card-frames-b3b6da4cd003

www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hk3IOQiisg Crazy MTG Scandals That Changed The Game by Nikachu (2021). Good list:

Ah, Ciro Santilli loved this one... games young Ciro Santilli played.

And as a result, adult Ciro really enjoys tool-assisted speedruns of the game.

Ciro Santilli used to play video games when he was young. But after he reached 18 he got bored of them.

The problem is that no matter how you look at, the how to become famous in the real world game is just always more interesting and fulfilling.

Therefore adult Ciro enjoys only the following types of video game content in video form, so that other people waste their lives playing the games while you only see the highlights:

The aspect Ciro enjoys about non-PvP games is atmosphere. Not as conveyed by useless story telling, but as conveyed by music and graphics, and the context deep idea. Legend of Zelda and Metroid come to mind.

And too many games commit the sins of dependency of dexterity, no save states, how do I skip this boring part, or jump straight to the beautiful one?

Another important point is; the perfect video game is an infinitely hard one.

It also doesn't help if you are already typing on a computer all day long on your job. Hands get tired. Eyes have an infinite capacity to consume useless YouTube videos however. Medically proved.

As a result, Ciro just watches videos about video games. Notably games he played when he was a teenager and already understand the rules for.

And things got even worse as after Ciro Santilli's Open Source Enlightenment, and he started to feel bad about playing any game that is not open source.