#I'm back FWIW

[starflungwaddledee]

Oooo starstruck dee has little stars at the bottom of her feet! Are they just aesthetic or would they make imprints into the ground? (like pawprints)

exactly like that! though she's not the only one...

edit: might need to add some additional dialogue to this to make it more clear, but a clarification in the interim; he knows about his own footprints. he's just surprised to see something similar already there when he knows he's only just landed. he lifts his own shoe to confirm that they're not identical (and also to reveal this to the viewer). seems his stoicism beat off the clarity in this one, sorry 😭

[violets-emotionalbreakdown]

Whooooo wants to bet that on some level, Caitlyn blames Vi for her mother's death bc it was Vi who begged for Jinx's life and it's easier to be mad at someone else than deal with your own guilt and culpability?

[bardnuts]

i spend a lot of time thinking about when exactly Astarion catches feelings For Real and I think the funniest answer to that question is literally the first time you have sex. He's got 200 years of experience in not catching feelings. "This is a good plan," he thinks. "A nice, simple plan. Make them fall for you, don't fall for them."

Then you ask him if he's ok or some shit during sex and it's DOA. Plan failed immediately upon its attempted execution. Defeated by the concept of a gentle lover. The rocket blows up on the launchpad

[perdvivly]

*@caprice-nisei-enjoyer and David Foster Wallace enter*

CNE: Hey, so I heard you had some takes on the current state of AI?

DFW: You heard?

CNE: On the grapevine, yeah.

...

CNE: Could you share some?

DFW: *hums in consideration*

CNE: If it wouldn't be a bother. No pressure of course.

DFW: Well... It's such a non-specific question. Do I have opinions? Yes, I have opinions, so does the next guy.

CNE: Yeah, but I'm not asking the next guy, I'm asking you.

DFW: Right, but, an issue I'm having is that these issues are important issues. They touch what I think are the very deepest fathoms of the human soul, but talking about them as such comes off as grotesquely pompous.

CNE: Okay, so, inhibitions aside, pretend it's just you and me talking now. What parts of the soul do you think they touch?

DFW: I think the current state of AI is a reflection of certain forms of passivity. Have you seen SORA?

CNE: The new OpenAI model that turns text prompts into video?

DFW: Yeah, exactly. I think there's every chance a person using that doesn't have in mind some particular video they want to create, they have in mind that they don't want to work to make a video and if this tool takes that away from them, so much the better for them right? That's a layer of human drudgery swept away in service of a grander artistic vision.

CNE: Right?

DFW: But, of course, when you start sweeping away all the choices, eventually, without even noticing, you sweep away the artistic process. You've made a video, and you have no idea if it's the video you wanted to make. But it's real now. And there's. There's something perverting in that I think.

CNE: Perverting?

DFW: So, you could make me look like a total jackass if you share this out of context but... I think there's something noble about the human spirit. And I think that nobility has a drive to express itself. And a facet of that expression is in the artistic endeavour. Which is what makes great art so great right? That it's striving to acomplish something bigger than itself. It's part of a conversation. It is communicating and it is communication.

CNE: I do see where you're coming from. But I don't think it's as bad as all that. I think it's a perfectly legitimate use of somebodies time to make silly little videos that don't push an agenda or speak to a purpose, they just make the creator happy. And think of all the people that can do this now that couldn't before. Isn't that worth something?

DFW: Oh yeah, I totally agree with you. There's nothing wrong with it in small doses. If it makes you happy go for it. But it's not nutritionally dense with meaning. If it's the mainstaple of your diet, you're going to die.

CNE: Come on.

DFW: In a real, meaningful way, you're going to die.

CNE: You don't think that people can use it to make meaningful content?

DFW: Oh, I think you could. But I don't think there are very many incentives aligned to push folk in that direction. In fact, I think a lot of the primary incentives we've constructed as a soceity push in quite the opposite direction of living a more meaningful life. And moreover, beyond incentives, you're working against your own pyschology. Like I said, we can do it, but if we do it's against the grain, not with it.

CNE: In what way?

DFW: In the myriad ways it's easier to be a passive observer than an active participant in ones own life and choices. The deep allure of drugs and entertainment are that they offer an escape from choice, from the constant burning ache of being in control of your own life which in many ways is itself hellish. I think this is a very natural extension of that. A slow erosion of the burden of choice--a slow erosion of the possibility of communication.

CNE: I still think there's some vital perspectives that you're missing. I'm delighted to live in a world where people's autonomy is being expanded by the tools they have available to them.

DFW: Right. There's that too of course. Very few things that find widespread adoption are wholly negative. And it's the glimmer of hope that's so pernicious here, that offer of autonomy feels... If it weren't at least partially true, this wouldn't even be an issue right? Nobody would want it. But it is, and it's so easy to look at that and use it as an excuse to justify the lazier parts of our nature.

CNE: Sometimes, perhaps. But sometimes it causes us to confront the lazier parts of our nature and interrogate them! It drives us to a deeper understanding that we didn't have before. Consider the work of Emily Howell.

DFW: The AI developed in the 90s by David Cope to produce classical music?

CNE: Mhm! Put to a blind test, human listeners couldn't tell the difference between the work of Emily Howell and human composers. This dispelled a lot of wrongheaded notions about a spark of human creativity that AI just couldn't capture. It also let a lot of amature composers generate a ton of high quality music for free, for them to study and understand the structural components of!

DFW: Emily Howell is an interesting example. But in my daily life I encounter music in one of three places. First and second, in elevators and shopping malls that play the most mindnumbing muzak you've ever heard, whose sole goal is to get you on autopilot. And thirdly, when I choose to put it on for myself. The times I'd be likely to hear Ms Howell are only in that third category.

CNE: Well. You've given me a lot to think about Mr Wallace! Thank you for this conversation, it means a lot to me. I need to get back to work now.

DFW: Of course. I hope we can talk again soon.

*Both leave*

[tea-and-secrets]

I don't miss people. I don't know what it is from but I feel very self conscious of it. even if I really like people and enjoy being with them, a lot of the time I just. don't have the urge to reach out or any feeling of loneliness. I've accidentally ghosted and even fully lost contact with lots of people and not even realized. probably part of my autism but I never see it mentioned. I like people, but I don't miss them.

.

[snowtimeisbesttime]

all classpect interpretations are equally canon- and this is why:

sburb/sgrub/sname is many things, but the first of those things we see is a computer game. said game's source code can be found in carvings in the frog temple, which comes from a Reckoning meteor; so each sthing version's code comes specifically from itself!

and considering every session we've seen has had an unique frog temple (beta kids: 4 land spires; beta trolls: two separate temples with 6 land spires each; alpha kids: 8 land spires, alpha trolls: at least one temple (with 12 land spires??), possibly located on beforus' moon), there's no reason to assume each and every temple's carvings are exactly the same…

therefore, two swhatever instances can have drastically different classpect definitions because they're running different versions of the game! for example, my own mirrorbent's sgame was compiled in a way where i won't have to go into too many specifics from their own, separate, 12 land spires temple (as opposed to being widely distributed like the beta kids' sburb), and classwise features active knights and passive pages, to pick an example that was recentlyish polled about.

of course, this mini theory thingy would be most applicable to fanventures, while most classpecting theory revolves about homestuck proper for obvious reasons. luckily, i've got some Key Insights about the canon classpects, just beyond this readmore:

get mutie'd lmao!!!!

413 zillion kitys attack!!!!

[actuallyvady]

the dragon age hyperfixation is back at full strength but having finished veilguard i can already imagine how a lot of tumblr is going to react to it so i think i'm going to stay in my corner and interact with no one

[bright-haired-teacher]

omg so they do a little staff highlight in a weekly newsletter for all staff and the fun fact about this week's person? they graduated from this school in 2020.

[blujayonthewing]

sure was Something to see a bunch of people on facebook yesterday like 'haha wow this weather is great! I'll sure take 70s over february weather any day!!' and then watch severe thunderstorms and tornados sweep through that night

[sisterdivinium]

I did some gushing over WN on Dreamwidth for the Snowflake Challenge if anyone is interested.

[awheckery]

DEATH TW and mentions of murder so if that is triggering for you don’t read, but if it’s not then i’d like to ask if you’ve heard of forensic genealogy? while i am uneasy at the prospect of using it to find suspects, it can also be used to find the identities of unidentified decedents, who die of accidental causes or are murdered, and often it’s the only hope to identify those who have been unidentified for decades. the dna doe project is a nonprofit that’s mostly volunteer run, and i think that your research skills could be useful there or somewhere like there. i know this is kind of a random ask to receive, identification of unidentified remains is my special interest but i don’t have the time or training to get better at researching beyond a few tricks here and there.

I feel like we've read the same articles recently; did you see the tumblr post (and linked articles) about Joseph Augustus Zarelli, the Boy in the Box?

Which is to say, yes, I am aware of forensic genealogy and the DNA Doe Project, because like many white American women, I'm a true crime junkie.* My big Thing is investigative procedure tho, so I'm also deeply interested in plane & train crash investigations, medical mysteries, archaeology, anthropology... basically 'what happened, and by which processes and methods do we figure out what happened?'

So far as getting into the game myself, I dunno. I assume there's probably some sort of required formal training, along with the expectation of reliability and sustained effort, and I'm a chronically ill autodidact with ADHD. I'm the research equivalent of a sprinter; investigative genealogy requires a marathoner, because there's so much exhausting, grinding work involved.

Something I've never seen brought up before in any investigation is how many extant family trees are just wrong. Genealogical sites make it too easy to crib notes from other users, and all it takes is one person deciding 'eh that's probably the right guy' for dozens of other amateur researchers to make the same mistake, and then somebody ties that erroneous information to their DNA profile. I don't know how the forensic genealogists deal with that.

You also have to take into account how many people throughout history have just gone missing, or otherwise fallen off the historical record. Just because someone's date of death is absent doesn't mean something nefarious happened to them. (Just because someone's date of death is present doesn't mean it's correct.) People emigrate. They marry. They change their names. They die alone and unknown in a ditch**, or they die somewhere that doesn't make those records public***. Paper records can burn or flood out, and family stories rarely make it down more than one or two generations. History is messy.

I've only done serious research into my family background for two years, in fits and starts interrupted by illness flare ups. Half the time it feels like I find more questions to ask than I get answers. I've found a pair of illegitimate daughters and a handful of adoptees. I've found some two dozen 'missing persons' who may as well have disappeared into thin air, for how suddenly they dropped out of the historical record. I've found a murder victim and a (maybe) would-be murderess.

And four months ago, I found the answer to another family's 150 year old missing person case, and it changed everything I thought I knew about my mother's family.

This is how.

Five months ago, I thought I knew everything there was that could be known about John Robert McDowell.

I knew he was born July 1st of either 1868 or 1869, in Belfast, Northern Ireland. According to his naturalization petition, he came to the United States in April of 1883, when the absolute oldest he could have been was fourteen, and at the time of his naturalization in 1896 he claimed his nationality was English, presumably due to anti-Irish sentiments at the time.

I knew John's handwriting was idiosyncratic: he wrote the J in his name with a rightward upper loop that scooped up again before curving back around the center staff, and his uppercase R was a mess of curlicues. I've never seen the like before or since.

I knew that despite living in America for ten years longer than he'd lived outside it, John still had an accent in 1908 when his second son was born. Spelling is incredibly inconsistent across historical records because up until very recently, it was the practice of the record keepers to write down their best guess at what they heard, and in 1908 a midwife heard and recorded John's surname as McDoul.

John's life was actually remarkably well-documented, in comparison to his contemporaries. I bought myself access to Newspapers.com along with my Ancestry subscription, and he made semi-regular appearances in the Newport News Daily Press for the better part of thirty years as a Navy veteran, successful entrepreneur, and president of a labor union that later became the United Steelworkers Local 8888. (A seemingly throwaway notice in the Daily Press was the only record I've yet been able to find for his divorce, which eventually led me to find out whatever happened to his wife, which is another saga entirely. Pauline, you dirty rotten cheater.)

I knew that John was in and out of the hospital with thyroid cancer, but he was such a tough old bastard it took the better part of fifteen years to kill him, and he died in 1954 at the age of 86.****

According to John's death certificate (and the U.S. Government records at the VA hospital where he died), his parents' names were Thomas McDowell and Isabell Rabb (or possibly Robb, the Accent strikes again.)

This is the only record linked to either of them on Ancestry.com at all.

I have most of a history degree, so I wasn't surprised. There are next to no records of the 1890 census of the United States, and that was down to a fire in the National Archives. Ireland was dragged backwards through hell by the ankles for centuries by a succession of British monarchs and governments, and Belfast was in the prime of especially conflicted territory for much of it. No census records from John's lifetime were kept, and the likelihood his parents would show up in the surviving fragments from 1841 and 1851 was slim to none.

There were transcribed indexes from birth and marriage records available, at least, and I scoured them through, looking for a John McDowell, and there wasn't a single damn one born to a Thomas or Isabelle McDowell in a decade on either side of 1868. There wasn't any record I could find at all of a Thomas McDowell marrying an Isabelle Rabb until well after John left Ireland.

Five months ago, as far as I knew, John Robert McDowell was probably a bastard, who'd either been left out of whatever records were taken at the time, or he was one of the unfortunate ones whose birth record had been lost.

Four months ago, I realized that the record indexes on Ancestry included film numbers, which meant there were pictures of those records to be found somewhere. If they were organized chronologically, I could try to find his birth registration that way. Googling "ireland civil registration records" brought me to the Civil Records search page of a genealogy site run by, of all things, the Irish government's tourism department.

Once again, there wasn't a John McDowell born to the right parents during the right time period, so I went looking for his parents' marriage. And found it.

If they married in 1872, John would probably still technically be a bastard, but I had a point to start from. Once I clicked into the actual scan of the record I nearly snapped myself in half sitting upright in attention, because Thomas McDowell's father's name was Duncan, John named his eldest son Duncan, Isabella's father's name was John, I had to have the right two people, this couldn't be a coincidence.

And then I noticed Isabella was a widow. Isabella was a widow.

Who was your husband, and when did he die, Isabella? I searched again, and found her marriage to a Thomas Logan July 30th, 1866. No men named Thomas Logan died in Belfast between 1866 and 1870, which meant he was probably still alive when John was born. It meant I had been looking in the wrong direction the entire time.

John Robb Logan came into the world on July 1st, 1868, in the Ballymacarrett district of Belfast, the second child of four born to Thomas Logan and Isabella Robb. Once I knew what I was looking for the rest came easy.

John's early life was riddled with tragedies. His younger brother Joseph was six months old when he died in March of 1870. His father died of smallpox in December of the same year, exactly one month after the birth of his sister Mary. Three months before his fifth birthday, his first half-sibling Bella died, at just five months old. And in 1879, his older brother William died after a long, miserably drawn-out illness from spinal tuberculosis.

(As an aside, god, poor Isabella. She had four children with Thomas Logan, and a further nine with Thomas McDowell, and before her early death from a long respiratory illness she buried a husband, two sons, and two daughters. How do you go on after that, how are you not forever shattered?)

If I hadn't been sure I'd found the right family, I was after William died. Thomas McDowell was the person who reported William's death to the registrar's office after sitting by his deathbed. The registrar recorded William as a "child of [the] baker" that Thomas was by profession; Thomas McDowell claimed his stepson as his own.

Duncan McDowell, John's step-grandfather, had a family burial plot in Ballygowan, and he named William Adam Logan as his grandson, with no qualifiers, when they buried him.

All the evidence suggests that the McDowells loved John Robb Logan and his siblings, and he loved them back every bit as much. You don't choose to take on the surname of people you hate, and it seems very much the case that John chose to go by McDowell when he came to America. I'm honestly not sure there was a way for Thomas McDowell to bequeath his name to his stepchildren, given John's brother William died a Logan and his sister Mary married as one.

John Robb Logan disappeared from history after his baptism, and John Robert McDowell made his first confirmed appearance in the historical record in 1883, but I was certain they were one and the same. The problem was proving it to my mother, because McDowell was her family name. She'd grown up with it, as had her sisters and her dozens of cousins and her father and his siblings and her father's father; I only had a paper trail arguing the name she knew didn't belong to any of them by blood.

So I went for blood.

I refuse to give my DNA to Ancestry.com on a principle born from paranoia and ethics concerns. It's absolutely not happening, ever, like hell do I expect a corporation to do the right thing with my genetic material. My mother doesn't share my concerns, either now or four years ago, when she bought an Ancestry DNA kit and then did absolutely nothing with her results besides marvel at the unexpected Swedish heritage in her 'Ethnicity Estimate' because doing anything else looked like too much work.

It took a few days to figure out how to hook my mother's DNA results into the tree I've built, and a few more for all the features to populate, but all told it took less than a week between learning the truth about my great-great-grandfather's parentage and proving it irrefutably with DNA, via several descendants of his full-blooded sister Mary and a grandson of his half-brother Wallace.

Ancestry doesn't tell you when new DNA matches are found, or when someone adds you to their tree (and thank god for that, my mother has somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty thousand matches). To those descendants of Mary Thomasina Logan, the handful of John's descendants who've shelled out for Ancestry DNA kits could be any random person. Frequently the relationships between matches aren't clear, because of all the folks like my mom who never add a tree to their results, or those who don't try to go any further back than their grandparents.

As far as Mary Logan's descendants know, the sons of Thomas Logan dead-ended his line, and when I do find John in their trees there's never more than a birth year and a blank space where there would usually be a year of death. (They all have the wrong Isabella Robb too, but I don't really blame them; apparently Isabella was one of the most popular names for girls for well over a century, and Robbs weren't exactly thin on the ground.)

Someday soon, I'm going to reach out. People who study genealogy do it because they're looking for something: long lost relatives, answers to questions asked too late, or even a better, more personal understanding of history by learning about the people who were there when it happened. Every family has its mysteries and this one, at least, could be solved.

John's story doesn't end here. Here is where it begins.

~

*I'm aware of the problematic nature of White Lady True Crime Brain Poisoning, but I'm gonna have to pull the 'I'm not like other girls' card. I'm incredibly discerning about my crime shows, I hate the fucking cops, and I'm realistic about how unbelievably low my chances are of ever being the victim of a violent crime. I'm white, I'm broke as shit, I'm built like a running back and walk like the Terminator, and most importantly, I'm single and planning to stay that way for the rest of my life. The only way I'm getting murdered is if I happen to get caught in a random mass shooting, which isn't outside the realm of possibility because America.

**In case anyone's gotten this far and is still interested, there's strong evidence that the mystery of the Somerton Man was finally solved last year. At some point I'd like to take a look at the tree the forensic genealogists built tho, because I have some Doubts. There was only one person in that family that fell off the map in the 40's? Just one? I was lightning-strike kinds of lucky enough to find John's real parentage, but I dug up more unanswered questions with it, because two of his half-brothers dropped out of the records after 1901. Completely setting aside the possibility of infidelity in the Webb family and how common inbreeding has been (both historically and in recent memory) in populations of European descent, I have a hard time buying that Carl Webb was the only person who could be the Somerton Man. It's still cool as shit that they have a strong possibility tho.

***Maryland and Kansas specifically can blow me, if somebody died in either of those states I have to find an obituary or a tombstone to get the mcfrickin' date, and I have to either pay money and prove a relationship to see a death certificate, or show up to an archive in person to search on their intranet, MARYLAND WHY DO YOU NOT WANT ME TO KNOW WHEN MY GREAT-GRANDMOTHER DIED. (Being fair, I don't know if she died in Maryland, that's just a great-uncle's best guess, because she ran away from her family in 1949 and nobody ever saw her again after the early 60's. Helen, where the hell did you go?)

****One of the big reasons why I got into genealogy in the first place was to see if I could find how far back the predisposition to early deaths and autoimmune disease went in my family. What I hadn't expected to find was a predisposition for extreme longevity on all sides. Longevity as in 'skewing the life expectancy bell curve' kinds of longevity. As long as someone didn't come down with a freak illness or make a looooooooong string of poor life choices, they were apparently immune to death, which honestly explains a few things about Crazy Grandma, god damn.

[sheepdogsandsidesaddle]

Dutch got some sheep time today

[sarasa-cat]

Okay. Now it is time for me to do the new new thing. To look through my references and then commit an idea to multiple pages of actual paper. To do the thing. Low stakes bc it is for me. But yeah, to do it. The thing. Now is the time.

[batsplat]

how has the motogp fan community grown/changed since you became a follower? can i get your thoughts on more fans coming in especially from f1? or on liberty media taking over? what are we hoping/bracing ourselves for?

honestly, I'm not the best person to answer the first question, because I've really not engaged all that much with the motogp fan community over the years... motogp isn't a massive thing in either the country I'm from or the country in which I currently reside, and I've only very rarely come across people irl who have any sort of interest in it. it's really just been through reddit, other forums, comments under blog posts on popular motogp sites, that sort of thing. I don't think reddit is a bad way to follow the sport - you've got all the hot topics but also stuff that's a little... broader than you'd get say on tumblr, about the more technical side or folks talking about less-discussed riders from the past, anecdotes from older fans, that sort of thing. it's also free and easy to not click on any post about sepang 2015, though admittedly there have been times where all these sites were quasi-unusable (hey ho argentina 2018). but I don't really feel like that community has massively changed, apart from maybe becoming a bit bigger and just having... more posts in general? you definitely get shifting opinions over time, sometimes it's a bit of a hive mind in terms of which riders are flavour of the month... so for instance bez was a lot more well-liked twelve months ago. but that kind of thing is common across all sports-oriented subreddits in my experience

I have checked in with the twitter fandom a few times in recent years just to see if, you know, it exists, and sure there's a few journalists and commentators it's worth keeping up with, but beyond that? there is a kernel of motogp-flavoured stan twt but a) many of them are primarily f1 fans, and b) their way of engaging with the sport is so alien to me that I generally take one look and then very much look away. as for the tumblr fandom, I can't speak to that at all though I'm sure others on here could tell you a lot more. I realised this bit of tumblr existed by complete accident at the start of the year. never even crossed my mind that this is a sport that would have an actual fandom on tumblr, god knows sports I follow I would consider a lot more mainstream barely do

as for new fans from f1... you know, what can you do, really. it's a good thing if the sport's fanbase as a whole becomes younger and more diverse, even if personally I am not a dorna shareholder and don't really care all that much about 'growing the sport'. new fans will bring their own biases and preconceptions and mostly not care about the bits of the sport that I care about... but that's how it's supposed to be, no? get them invested in the new riders, find all these young acosta and aldeguer and alonso fans to liven up the sport in the future. at a certain point you just have to learn not to care about what the wider fandom thinks about a lot of things. I have seen countless wildly inaccurate takes on this sport for years - which, yes, often there are howlers from newer fans who are clearly missing a lot of context, but also older fans can be flat out wrong about plenty of stuff. new fans migrating from f1 or whatever will create what... well, it's essentially fanon lol, based on how other fans introduce them to the sport as well as to certain historical events. but, you know, that already exists on here, and there's plenty of popular interpretations of these riders and past events and the current landscape of the sport that I personally strongly disagree with or are just... not true. plus ça change. stop worrying about a foreign takeover and just be careful to curate your space, imo - you can avoid most of the truly annoying stuff if you exercise self-control

generally speaking, I imagine more fans in a space like tumblr will lead to more polarisation and fragmentation in a way you can't quite afford in the same way in a smaller community. more drama, more controversy with more people who can potentially set it off and more people inclined to drag it out. corners that are based increasingly around specific riders or specific sets of riders. there's always upsides and downsides to that kind of thing in any fan space... you get more stuff created by fans, more art and fic and fanvids and essays about two decade old rivalries (funnily enough I'm not massively expecting an uptick in that particular market). more fans for riders who don't currently get a lot of attention. you do also get more discourse and more controversy... hopefully the most conflict-happy new fans stick to twitter. but at the end of the day, everyone starts out as the fan others want to gatekeep against, and it's not like you can actually stop them from joining, so. whatever. also, who knows if the sport really will actually 'take off'. I follow a sport for which a netflix show was announced and a lot of people were expecting something along the lines of the drive to survive-effect. so much posting and think pieces a dozen about whether the new fans would have the wrong opinions on all manner of hot topic issue. in the end, the show flopped and we got fuck all new fans, so that was a massive waste of everyone's time lol. motogp has itself been through something similar with the ill-fated prime show where they bungled the release... you never really know

that being said, it is quite likely that if the liberty media purchase goes through, they will do a pretty good job of attracting new fans. they've broadly done a good job with f1 - and it's not like they can really be blamed for most of the problems with the actual racing. it wouldn't be a bad thing to get new races in the states, as long as they're good ones (my problem with the newer races certainly isn't location but is with some of the rather drab circuit layouts) - and if f1 is anything to go by, I doubt we're going to lose any of the series' gems. quite frankly, if we need to cut a few european circuits, not wanting to name any names but I do have a bit of a shortlist. further calendar bloating is a worry, but for various reasons it's not going to happen in the short- to medium-term. and unlike in f1 there's less enthusiasm at the prospect on the part of the actual teams (also, crucially, the tyre supplier). obviously street circuits aren't going to happen. hopefully, some aspects of the way the sport is presented to audiences will be improved - from the actual television product, to what footage is released to fans, to how much we see of riders further down the field, and so on. hopefully, the sport will become more accessible to more fans in terms of viewing options... but yeah, how riders lower down the field are treated is I think the main thing I'd like to see change. hey, maybe we'll finally have access to more on-board cameras. maybe they'll finally show us the controversial and presumably interesting incidents happening outside of the top ten in any given race. my main worry just from a selfish perspective is any change to the videopass product (unless they'd like to make it a wee bit cheaper). I'm just about willing to shell out the amount I currently do given I heavily make use of the archives and think it's a fantastic resource, but for instance in f1 there's geo-restrictions to the kind of f1.tv you have access to... there's always the slight concern what new tv deals might change. still, this is all pretty minor stuff, and really I don't expect liberty media to be either able or willing to come in and make radical changes to how the sport currently works. concerns about ticket prices and fan experiences are also reasonable, though as someone who hasn't had the money/opportunity to visit any races myself, I really can't bring a lot to the table to that discussion beyond 'I hope it doesn't become prohibitively expensive'

of course, there's some things I very much want to see retained, for instance I'd hate it if liberty pushes for riders to speak english more often. also, we need to petition them to bring back the press conference table. overall, though... some of the changes will probably be bad, a lot of them will hopefully be good. change is necessary and motogp needs to finally adapt to a post-rossi world. it's unhealthy for a sport to continue to rely on the second hand glow from a man who retired years ago, to pray that the fans he created are somehow going to continue to care if you don't give them a reason to. rossi revolutionalised the sport, but eventually you need a new revolution. anecdotally and according to various podcasts, there's finally been a shift this year away from just crowds of yellow at all these circuits... which is categorically a good thing. above all, you need fans to care about the current product, make them fans of the current racing, the current riders, while also providing them opportunity to get interested and emotionally invested in the history of the sport. a lot of them will ignore that history... but eventually, that's how the cycle goes with everything. you don't get much discussion of, say, doohan these days on tumblr, and time will creep up on all these riders. you see it on here with how many newer fans say they went back to watch races starting from 2013 - because they care about the marquez era and are less interested (if at all) in either rossi's golden years or the alien era. which is how it should be... you cannot expect new fans to care about over twenty years of racing when they're just getting started (if they ever will). all you can do as a sport is hook them with whatever they're willing to be hooked with, and gently nudge them wherever they're willing to be gently nudged to. and if the end product of all that change is something that's more palpable to the masses but less suited to your personal tastes... well, you can always watch the old stuff

[abysskeeper]

So just...yeah...alright.

[lord-radish]

Whenever I'm upset about something and I have to like rant about it to myself to come to terms with how it makes me feel, I have a go-to sentence I use to really hone in on it. Like if something is so irritating or nonsensical or generally anger-inducing that I just have to get it out.

Like I have a coworker who's always talking about what would make the laundry better, talking about these multi-million dollar renovations and things that are *never going to happen* and entirely fail to fix the immediate surface-level issues we're experiencing right now, in the moment, that I'm usually trying to fix while he's talking to me. It really does come off as him going "oh you know what would be so much better for efficiency? if cars ran on rainbows and grass clippings and the tears of happy kittens :)" - he means well, but it fixes NOTHING, it's wishful thinking at BEST

And I swear to god, at least once a week - at LEAST

I have to conjure up the mental fortitude to bite my tongue and keep it to myself

but mentally? I'm winding it up like a punch, before I let out the loudest, angriest call of:

"Coworker, what in the everLOVING NAME OF FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?!?!?!?!?!?!??????!!!!??"