The Wild Roller Coaster that is Diamond 1

I'm now sitting comfortably at 40 points. Of all the times I've heard of elo hell, Diamond 1 just might be it. Even though it's one of the smallest tiers, it's got the widest variety of players. You have the I'm-not-getting-challenger-so-I-can-mess-around people. These are basically the people that try new champions, builds, and do crazy things because they know they're already at the highest rank they'll ever achieve. I'm one of these people. Then, you have the arrogant flamers, who think they're better than everyone else because they're Diamond 1. Newsflash to those people: so is everyone else on the team. The next kind are my favorite to play with. They take the game really seriously. They communicate exceptionally well, and losing isn't an option for them (except 50% of the time). These are the I'm-getting-to-challenger-and-nothing's-holding-me-back players. They're the ones that will ping ten times for one thing. They will fill the chat with multiple sequences of words to express one idea. They will time every thing they can: summoner spells, objectives, inhibs, even wraiths and wolves.

Riven, The Exile

Here's some cool tricks I've recently learned with Riven.
1. You can shoot her ult during your E animation. Her E is a short dash that also provides a shield. During the animation of the dash, you can fire the second part of her ult without interrupting the dash.
2. When in her ult, Riven gains extra range on all her abilities. With her ult active, Riven can hit blue buff over its wall, without actually having to go over. It's not very practical, but I did see it happen once in a Challenger Korean ranked game.
3. You can perform Riven's Q-AA-Q-AA-Q-AA combo around twice as fast by moving slightly after each AA (auto-attack). This is very similar to attack-animation cancelling, commonly performed by marksmen.
Here's a video of an avid Riven player showing the trick

And here is my tip for climbing. Watch streams! You can learn so much by watching good streamers. There are some streamers that mess around and rarely give advice, but even with them, you can still try and notice what they do well and imitate it. Some streamers that are very informative, as well as being incredibly good players, are Cadburry, Voyboy, WildTurtle, and dayladavid. You can find their streams on twitch.tv.

I'll probably post on my blog in this format now. I'll give an update on how my personal league experience is going, followed by a cool trick or something I've learned recently, then a tip for climbing.

Good luck on your journey through Summoner's Rift!