i don't think i'm going to have any time to play melee this week which kind of sucks but i can probably take notes and think about everything that i learned last week:

• my strongest mus at this point are probably peach, marth, and fox, whereas my weakest ones are floaty mid-tiers (doc, luigi, samus), falco, and falcon. i've gotten a lot better against falco recently but it's still a problem mu for me. falcon is sort of a weird one because i don't have any clue why i'm so bad at it. it's a similar thing with doc/luigi/samus, i think. might watch a couple videos and see how people deal with them
• my weakest aspects as a player are twofold: i buckle when under duress and i have an affinity for using medium/high-risk, high-reward moves. my sense of spacing goes almost entirely out the window whenever i feel pressured, and i think that's my biggest problem as a player. then i get completely blown up whenever i get hit because i panic and try to tech but i miss it and then i keep trying to tech and i keep failing and i eat so much extraneous percent because of it. i need to work on figuring out what to do there. i should also learn to keep my composure when i get hit and rewatch hmw's spacing tutorials. re: the abuse of higher-risk options, i don't know why i do this. i think my dash dancing is decent if not good for my level and for how long i've been playing (about a year and a month) and i do just fine with baiting unsafe decisions when i think of it, but that's the problem: a lot of the time, i'm not thinking about how to approach or bait out something because i'm too focused on doing one specific thing in a match or even in a session. my approaches are also pretty telegraphed; too often i'll get really greedy with grabs or something else and i already know that my opponent knows that i'm looking for a grab but i'll go for one anyways because sometimes it works. and when it works you want to go for it more. so i think i need to work on making my movement more ambiguous. i have tons of ideas but sometimes i forego them because i just want to win that specific friendly and that isn't a sensible way of thinking. i should be using my time to experiment with new ideas and try to expand on old ones, not only continuing to use the same things i've always used simply because they work.
• sometimes i also feel like thinking about all of this stuff in the middle of a match messes with me a bit. there's a ton to take in and it's really hard to incorporate it all at once. thinking hard about the match can be good at times but bad at other times. depending on the day it feels like i have either an autopilot problem or an overthinking problem.
• i should not, under any circumstances, attempt to laser camp on randall. both times i tried i have missed the cloud and died.

sorry if people are tired of my frequent posting but i think it's good to work things like this out for myself.