"Welcome, Ladies and Gentlemen... this is the Day9 Daily: where we learn how to be a better gamer!" "Except on Monday where we just dick around."
Taking the plunge into the competitive-scene of Starcraft II can seem like an impossibly daunting task. There are so many variables to keep track of and so many concepts, both basic and advanced, to wrap one's mind around that it can feel a bit overwhelming.
Enter the Day9 Daily, a place where anyone from a Real-Time Strategy stripling to someone scraping up against the ceiling of the exalted Masters league can learn how to be a better gamer.
Sean "Day9" Plott is a famous StarCraft: Brood War and Starcraft II player and commentator with his Internet Day9 Daily show, where he casts and analyzes high level play in front of a live audience, five days a week.
The self-proclaimed "Goldilocks of Starcraft II casting," Day9 keeps the atmosphere of his casting informal, lighthearted, and comical, all while ensuring that the actual analysis stays deep, thorough, and compelling throughout.
To shake things up, Day9 featured a rotating schedule of theme-based dailies:
- Funday Monday: A lighthearted, fun-oriented daily where a kooky constraint is placed upon players such as "No Queens" for Zergnote or "No Marines, Marauders or Tanks" for Terrannote . Hilarity is guaranteed to ensue.
- Newbie Tuesday: A daily aimed at concepts that lower-league players or beginners are struggling with such as "Dealing with Early Aggression."
- Frienday Wednesday: A daily featuring commentary by both Day9 and a professional Starcraft II player.
- Day9's Day Off: A Friday stream in which he plays something different.
In 2013, Day9 joined Artillery Games and began working as a game designer on Guardians of Atlas, a Multiplayer Online Battle Arena that ran in browsers using HTML5. The game, and company, folded in '17, but this day job created such a time crunch that he abandoned the Day9 Daily; today he is a relatively standard streamer who plays for fun, particularly Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft, Dota 2 and Magic: The Gathering. He has shoutcasted live tournaments for the latter two games. He also hosts a series called "Spellslingers" via Geek & Sundry, in which he and a guest play Magic; and he and two friends replaced Funday Monday with "Mostly Walking
," which revolves around the Point-and-Click Game.
Day9's streams through his website and Twitch. Archives can be found at either Blip or YouTube.
Tropes Associated With Day9
- Aside Glance: He likes to do this occasionally, alt-tabbing out of the game screen to take one at the camera. This usually follows a small jibe at some portion of the Starcraft II community.
- Atrocious Alias: TangKamikaze, an old handle.
- "DayJ" might count as well.
- Awesome, but Impractical: A natural result of some of the Funday Monday restrictions, though he will usually showcase games where the resultant outlandish strategy miraculously succeeded.
- Badass Bookworm: There's a reason he knows so much about the game, being a former professional Starcraft: Brood War player himself.
- He was arguably the top American Zerg player for a long time, getting second place in WCG USA 2004, winning WCG USA in 2005, second place in WCG USA 2006 and winning the grand finals of the Pan-American Championship in 2007.
- He claimed that his three secret accounts (used for playing each race based on a dice roll) were in Grandmaster League. Ironically this took place during the ravaging of his manhood while playing Amnesia: The Dark Descent.
- Badass Creed: "Day9 plays games, not girls"
- Badass Family: Not only is his brother a professional Starcraft player and commentator, but he has repeatedly emphasized the fact that his entire family, specifically his mom, have been incredibly supportive."Having a Starcraft family has been instrumental to, like, everything."
- Berserk Button: Reacts unfavorably to the word, "counter."
- Also, g.g.
- Dislikes incorrect pronunciation, for example, referring to a zealot as a zeelot.
- Captain Obvious: His best advice is often the simplest: Have a plan. Spend your money. Sometimes the best way to defeat your opponent is to just go and kill him. He will very often reference ideas like these with quick one-liners even if they're not the focus of that particular analysis.
- Catchphrase: Several.
- "Happily."
- "Easiest thing in the world"
- "Totally normal / most normal thing in the world."
- "Never give up; never surrender!"
- "In other exciting news..."
- "And all that jazz"
- "Because I'm awful."
- "Pylons and probes, pylons and probes."
- "...and x plus y is often z" where x, y, and z are incredibly elementary numbers.
- "...and then he went and lost his whole fucking base."
- "Just sayin'...[note]]"I am so sorry."[[/note]]"
- "Let us divine."
- "BAM"
- "Bejujular"
- "Whoopsie Daisy."
- "... his little heart out."
- "Less than ideal"
- "Counting station"
- "Easy, peasey, Febreezy."
- "Cutie patootie"
- Not a Catchphrase per se, but Sean uses the word "like", like, a ''lot''. Observe.
- Companion Cube: How can one resist the eternally-faithful "Carpal Tunnel Pillow"?
- Confusion Fu: The effective Funday Monday strategies rely in part on this.
- Construct Additional Pylons: Emphasizes "Pylons and probes, pylons and probes." Basically, simply ensuring a strong economy with lots of workers will result in a significant lead over the opponent at lower levels of play.
- Deadpan Snarker: Has been known to slip into this, usually during Funday Monday.
- Department of Redundancy Department: "Advancing forward!"
- Dissimile / Metaphorgotten: Quite often."Cannons to block cannons is another way of saying 'We're gonna go ahead and build a dam in the middle of Los Angeles to prevent the construction of more buildings. That'll help sort of direct the flow of buildings out the front...'"
- Fanboy: Claims to be an unabashed one of
HuK. While it's often played for laughs, he really does hold great admiration for HuK's skills and is humbled when he learns that HuK holds him in similarly high regard. - Feghoot: Of epic proportions.
- Happily Married: to producer Brit Weisman, after a nine-year courtship (and two-month engagement).
- Heävy Mëtal Ümlaut: Subverted as it was merely mentioned as a possible punchline to a (
rather infamous) failed joke.
- Large Ham: Played for Laughs, usually on Funday Mondays. Expect to see it come up when a bad/new player makes hilarious mistakes. His hammiest yet is during his "mothership rush" Funday Monday, where one of the players would use vortexes at the tip of a hat, prompting Day[9] to shout: '''VOOOOORTEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEX!!!!'''
- Let's Play: Has done Amnesia, and has also done a short runthrough of Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning in the company of Felicia Day. Kind of an advertising stunt. Still awesome.
- Line-of-Sight Name: Discussed in this Grim Fandango LP clip when picking the drinking word of the day:Day[9]: We're really uncreative, we just saw pigeons and we're like "pigeon." [...] I promise you that if, like, our wife gives birth, we'll be like, "Let's name the baby Hospital!"
- Long-Runners: broke five hundred Dailies in September 2012.
- Lovable Coward. Some fans liked Day9's reaction to bugs note , reaction to ferrets note and other stories he told about himself so much, that they even wanted to ask him to play through Amnesia: The Dark Descent.
- Which, at time of writing, he is in the middle of doing. And it is hilarious.
- He has since completed an entire, live streamed playthrough of Amnesia: The Dark Descent, which is viewable here.
- Memetic Mutation: Almost one new meme every daily. Chances double if it's Funday.
- Motor Mouth: And we love him for it.
- Nerds Are Sexy: You bet they are.◊
- Once Done, Never Forgotten: Invoked after his "number j" joke."I'm never going to let myself live that one down, and neither are you."
- One-Steve Limit: whenever he tells stories about his dating life, the girl is always named "Felicity." Viewers had fun debating whether this was a deliberate contrivance, after a slip of the tongue during a live stream, or no contrivance at all.
- Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping: Has inserted foreign accents where applicable, usually in reference to a specific player's handle sounding funnier when spoken in a certain accent. Also has a habit of randomly using a Korean accent when saying unit or building names.
- Promoted Fanboy: With regard to Starcraft, naturally.
- In 2010, he was named PC Gamer's Gamer of the Year.
- In 2011 he was chosen as one of Forbes' 30 Under 30, earning the honor again in 2014 alongside his own idol Jaedong. Nerd. Baller.
- The absolute least impressive one compared to all these, but the one any given StarCraft player is most likely to interact with: for a Funday Monday, he proposed an alternate style of play wherein every player voluntarily limits themselves to only building one specific (military) unit the entire gamenote . It now has dedicated maps and reigned supreme as one of the most popular custom modes in circulation. Yep: Day9 invented Team Monobattles.
- In 2010, he was named PC Gamer's Gamer of the Year.
- Running Gag: Conveniently cataloged in the form of the Day9 Drinking Game. Participants beware.
- He refers to all of the girls in his stories as "Felicity" after accidentally name dropping the actual Felicity in one daily.
- Day9 has a squeaky chair for his streams. Every now and then he'll remind us of this fact by sloooooooooooowly reclining back for a long, drawn out, squeeee-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-eeeeek.
- Screams Like a Little Girl: Especially when he streamed his play through of Amnesia.
- Serious Business: Deliberately averted with Funday Monday."This is Funday Monday! We don't care about playing well; we care about being awesome!"Alternatively: "Welcome to the Day9 Daily, where we Learn To Be A Better Gamer... except on Mondays, where we just dick around!"
- Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness: Occasionally and usually hilariously results in Day9-exclusive neologisms such as "continuate" (as a verb), "aggrensive, or "irrescapable."
- Sibling Rivalry: Alleges that he and his brother were always each other's biggest gaming competitors. While not always directly competing with one another, they were formerly competing in the same pro-gaming scene back during Starcraft: Brood War and both currently work as high-level commentators for Starcraft II.
- The Smart Guy: He received a degree in mathematics from Harvey Mudd and in May 2011, a Master's degree in Interactive Media at USC.
- Sophisticated as Hell
- Trademark Favorite Food: Chipotle burritos.
- He has quite an affinity for tea and honey as well. Or else his voice will go out.
- Unfortunate Names: It's difficult for viewer-submitted replays to not feature an example of this, which Day9 will happily take advantage of."Is this a Pokémon, pharmaceutical, or ancient historian?"
- Wiki Walk: Has been prone to going on exceedingly odd tangents while casting. Naturally, these crop up more often during Funday Monday.
- You Keep Using That Word: Counter, for everyone else. He avoids using it, except when mocking those that do.
- This trope is brought to you by the number j!
