#I'm having such a normal week guys

[ace-malarky]

I woke up stupid early and gave up on pretending to sleep so like? I guess I'm here now?

Technically we are writing but. you know how it goes.

[iizuumi]

Side effects of wearing your Kaiju suit too often ,,,, Part 2

[johnslittlespoon]

hii happy pride month, have a little 'you're a dog (i'm your man)' chapter four snippet as an apology for radio silence <33

“Did I wake you?” Gale asks, glancing at John apologetically, but John looks up from his effort to avoid muddy puddles to shake his head. Gale supposes it’s a silly question; John sleeps like a rock, dead to disturbances made by anything other than his own brain.

“Just my sixth sense,” John says, shrugging and shooting him a small smile. Gale snorts.

“You got a radar for me?” He teases, and John smiles wider, eyes crinkling.

“Built in,” he answers matter–of–factly, raising a hand and making a fist over the center of his chest before dropping it, returning his vigilant gaze to the uneven ground. Gale stares for a moment longer, floored not for the first time by John’s apparent obliviousness to the weight of his sentimentality.

Even knowing John how he does, it’s always unexpected coming from someone who a stranger might assume to be brazen and surface–level; John’s loud mouth and wandering hands do him no favours in that regard.

But Gale does know John, like an extension of himself half the time, and still he manages to render him speechless. The way his heart flutters as the sentiment hangs in the air makes Gale want to reach down his throat and squeeze it until it never beats again.

[wildsaltair]

me at least once a week: I need to watch another Russell movie on my watchlist!

also me: *turns Gladiator on again*

[somegrumpynerd]

Time for a new toy!

Camera stayed ahead pretty much all week, so tomorrow there will be a camera in the garden!

So now...

("Nothing" option will still attract a cat!)

[ohworm-writes]

Task Force 141 but instead of being in the military or the SAS they all work at a firehouse together and it's called Station 141. Send tweet.

[raiiny-bay]

>:-)

[maudiemoods]

There's a kitty I want to adopt at a local cat cafe and I'm going crazy thinking about her

[horsemeatluvr23]

i would pay obscene amounts of money to see bdubs stream Barbie: Horse Adventures

[vulpinesaint]

i don't have to be unwell about religion anymore i got into crochet

[taegularities]

some men are textbook villains fr

[brown-little-robin]

WAIT. In the last week I have talked to human beings in person for less than half an hour total, I've left the house 60% less than usual, I've been up til 1am four days in a row, AND I haven't touched a human being for over a month.

so that's why I'm going insane

[alacants]

this is my last post on this subject. probably. maybe. but look. as far as whether the ceremony was ""appropriate."" the brutal truth is that this is a risk you are taking if you choose to retire at an event like the davis cup. from an events-planning perspective, it is not anywhere close to the same league as roland garros or the atp finals or a big-money exho. i'm sure itf is doing their best lmao but it's just. not. and if you choose to retire at a competitive event, well. upsets are also a risk you take. a slicker outfit would have a more robust plan in place for that.

i'm using the second person but to be clear i'm not saying that i think rafa wanted a perfect movie moment. i think he wanted to retire in a meaningful competitive event on home soil and that was the most important consideration of all. (although i also would not be surprised to find out that there was some magical thinking at work. lmao.) i also don't believe for a second that he would have made himself available for a singles match if he didn't believe in his heart he could win. even when no one else did. (no one else except...) that's what makes competitors competitors.

rafa chose to play this event. ferru chose to put him in singles. the tournament organizers (feli) chose to put their logistical efforts in one basket. this was a group effort, guys.

sorry i did just listen to 30 minutes of the cope hosts reading all the sports tabloid criticism to david ferrer's face and i do feel a kind of way. it wasn't a winning lineup. yeah. no shit. (and again, the only thing i don't get is how anyone didn't see this coming a mile away but apparently they didn't.) but it's also not like ferru personally made rafa retire at this event and then disinvited the rest of the big 4 with his own two hands so maybe. maybe. we could chill.

[batsplat]

Batsplat, I am not into tennis exactly but this year I have been exposed to a lot of Tennis meta, per se. I love reading through your tennis posts they reveal such a rich human side to a sport, esp the agassi sampras post. Wanted to ask, if you have read Infinite Jest and what you think of it. Additionally, do you see any parallels between motorcycle racing and tennis? Fundamentally different sports, but still crazy in their unique ways. Keep posting, many hugs!!

hugs back to you anon, really am very pleased that post has struck a chord... going to put a pin in the infinite jest half of the ask because I recently got another ask about that book and want to organise my thoughts a bit more. tldr I have a lot of fondness for the thing. I actually reckon being invested in tennis is a bit of a cheat code where that book is concerned, like it kind of gives you something to immediately latch onto... dfw has a reputation for being the writer about tennis - and he does capture something of the soul of the sport, both in IJ and in his essays. in IJ, he makes it feel claustrophobic and inescapable, like a curse of the blood. as it should be. there are many descriptions of the sport itself I love, ways it is integrated into the narrative, the meanings that are extracted from it... I'm not sure there's a concise way to talk about IJ and if anything that feels like it'd be against the spirit of the book, so for now I'll leave you with this: dfw knew ball, but his taste in tennis left much to be desired. religious experience my ass

anyhow, let's transition to the other half of the ask with an IJ quote chosen completely at random

'We're all on each other's food chain. All of us. It's an individual sport. Welcome to the meaning of individual. We're each deeply alone here. It's what we all have in common, this aloneness.’

on tennis and motorcycle racing - I think I do have a bit of a problem in answering this question in that those disciplines are the only two individual sports I have followed closely for a long period. (I suppose f1 is edging itself into that conversation, but that at least is relatively closely related to motogp.) so there is a bit of a 'getting a lot of boss baby vibes' issue here in that... things I feel are similar between the two of them might be equally present in croquet or skimboarding. but, well, I can only talk about what I know. I think they can both be quite lonely sports, though tennis is lonelier. motogp can be circumstantially lonely, tennis is so in its soul. this is because competing in a tennis match is such a fundamentally lonely experience in a way I'm not sure any other sport replicates. motogp is loud - tennis is defined by its silences. motogp is defined by its action while tennis lives and breathes in the negative space. the connection between ball and racquet is infinitesimally brief... the time between points stretches out as a void. a tennis match is a thing of many rhythms, superficially reliable, yet the experience of living through a match eats away at your perception of time. the match is provided structures by its units, wherein each can feel like it lasts a split second or a decade. motogp is fierce and noisy and full of life. tennis is empty

I think you can probably draw numerous fairly trite parallels between the two - the emphasis on one-vs-one duels, for instance, albeit a non-negotiable element of tennis in a way it isn't for motogp. different virtues and tropes represented by different athletes... offensive, defensive, the wild talent, the cunning mastermind, the tenacious and the feeble and the limited and the all-rounder - archetypes of a sort that recur even when the exact way they express their archetypal nature varies between sports. perhaps even a fanbase that neurotically oscillates between yearning for drama and hounding almost anyone who supplies it. there's some ways in which I have to follow the two sports completely differently... for instance, I am far more sensitive to injuries in tennis and tend to get peeved when anyone competes with injury - one of my least favourite things about federer (amongst some sturdy competition) was how big a virtue he made of never having retired from a match, and how it influenced the generations to come. I mostly stand by the same principle when it comes to motogp, but it does force you to readjust your idea of what kind of an injury is acceptable to compete with. (obviously to some extent this is just practicality - I'm sure plenty of tennis players would love to try and compete with broken ankles, but that sort of thing just physically isn't possible in tennis.) motogp is considerably less stressful to follow because of how concentrated it is. there's nothing quite like the death by a thousand cuts that experiencing a drawn-out defeat in tennis inflicts on you

but none of that is particularly interesting or insightful. I actually think following tennis has given me a pretty good grasp of sports psychology because, not to brag, tennis is kind of the sport for understanding derangement. I'm not talking in terms of pure drama - unfortunately, motogp is miles ahead of us on that front. but in terms of actually understanding the intricacies of how competition fucks with the brain... motogp is so macro, races are building blocks of entire seasons, your results in march help determine your standings in november. it's also a lot more mysterious - I can't read as much into motogp results as I can into tennis, not just because of my personal level of expertise but also for the simple fact that there are far more hidden performance variables in motogp, mainly related to machinery. when I talk about how 'clutch' a player is in tennis, I can show you actual numbers to describe what I'm talking about that I can pull up for any player (unlike for instance stats relating solely to title contenders) and have a pretty big sample size and can be used to meaningfully draw conclusions. a big reason why tennis is considered the mental torture sport is because of its unambiguously deeply fucked up scoring system, making use of the units of 'point' and 'game' and 'set' within a single match to ensure that all your effort can be repeatedly rendered meaningless in numerous ways. what this does help us with in analysis terms is that not every point is 'equal' - they might be in literal terms, but the stakes vary drastically. which affects the amount of pressure you are under and what type of pressure it is. to use a very basic example, one measure of 'clutch' performance might be how a player competes in tiebreaks, given that they are inherently higher pressure situations where you can compare those points to the baseline of all the other points. tennis and motogp (+ motorsports more broadly) are kind of on the opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of how many raw numbers like that you will have at your disposal - with plenty of other ball sports like basketball or football or baseball slotting in somewhere in the middle

and what this DOES help you with is that if you are a proper student of tennis... y'know. you'll probably have a slightly more refined understanding of how mentality in sports works. more than just sorting every athlete into two categories of 'mentally strong' and 'choker', which is how a lot of discussion can read. even on platforms theoretically interested in serious sports analysis. how pressure affects competitors... so many motorsport discussions feel oddly naive to the basic concept that competitors may handle pressure completely differently if they are ahead or if they are behind. sometimes you hear motorsports reporting treat mentality as completely irrelevant, outright say that people should stop focusing on psychological factors... which is just not the kind of thinking you get away with in tennis

that being said, the real lesson tennis can teach you is if anything the very opposite: often, performing better under pressure is only very loosely correlated to mental strength. this is a bit of a bugbear of mine so if I've posted this before my apologies, I always have a version of this rant in my brain and genuinely cannot recall if I've put it on here before but... look. say you have two tennis players in a match. say each player is winning roughly 50% of the points, both players managing to drive up their side of the scoreboard. but say that one player, player A has to take a lot more risk to do so - and is aiming for about half a metre inside the baseline in every point. say the other one, player B, can aim for a way more comfortable metre inside the baseline. now say you get to a pressure situation, a tiebreak. tension rises, the muscles get tight, it's harder to swing through the ball... let's say that both of them are suddenly more likely to misfire - and that in every third shot, they will miss their target by over half a metre. even if the pressure has the exact same effect on both of them, player A will end up making more mistakes than player B - and they will be doing so disproportionately in the tiebreak, a high pressure situation. which means that on paper, they are less clutch than player B, even though in reality they have both been affected to the same extent by the pressure of the situation. one simply was always operating with a bigger margin of error, which suddenly became more noticeable in the pressure situation

this is obviously an extremely simplified understanding of tennis and it's never going to be as straightforward as that. the point however is that a lot of what people think is mentality ends up being down to technique. good technique isn't just effective - it's repeatable. it's all about optimisation, right... it's even the little things, like how much your technique asks you to use *force* - there are different muscle movements that are going to be affected in different ways by stress. if your motion always looks the same, then it's more likely you'll be able to repeat it under pressure - if you tend to hit the ball wildly differently each time, then however well you are doing it, quite likely that's going to be tougher to do under pressure. good technique is replicable even under pressure, but having good technique is obviously in itself not reflective of mental strength. in tennis, it is critical how much margin of error players have - both in terms of where they literally aim in shots, and in terms of how much a small deficit in absolute performance will spell relative catastrophe

and again. all of this is extremely basic. but it does feel like... how do I put this diplomatically. sometimes it doesn't feel like everyone's on the same page even with this basic stuff. because at the end of the day, it's going to roughly be the same situation in motogp, right? champions are seen as particularly clutch versus competitors who aren't champions... and sure, there probably is an element of mental strength to becoming a champion (though often that will also be in terms of macro career arcs, key choices and so on, not just performance in the moment) but it's not going to be that simple... because better riders are operating with a bigger margin of error. if you assume that every crash in every pressure situation is a uniform case of choking, then, y'know, this is bad analysis. fans are entitled to their bad analysis, but that doesn't make it any less bad. there is a tendency to just assume that the best athletes are the mentally strongest, rather than just blessed with a wider window of performance, and it can be. slightly galling. icl this a bit of a theme in a lot of the stuff I write, if you know to look for it lol (e.g. here)

reading the passage back it's... well. a bit funny. any tennis fan familiar with my history as a tennis fan will immediately recognise what match traumatised me so thoroughly I still see its shadow everywhere I look. sports, don't you love it

obviously there are more contemporary examples you could pick up on, but this is incidentally something that slightly ticks me off when people discuss valentino's rivals. like, with all love to casey, it is a lot easier to be 'mentally strong' and 'not broken' and bounce back from psychological torture when you have enough talent in your index finger to disrupt the orbit of a small moon. no shit he had better chances of rebuilding his confidence than some of his precursors. the game's rigged! always has been

none of this is to say that mentality doesn't matter in sports, which would be a bizarre stance for me to take. if player A and B had the exact same margin of error in their shots, one of them would still play that tiebreak better - and that's the clutch factor. it's just often harder to tease out than you might think, even in a sport with so many numbers at the tips of your fingers. sometimes you're just not going to be able to tell from the outside at all. that's the loneliness, right - constantly observed, but fundamentally unknowable. and of course, there's far more to get into here... given that tennis does demand more engagement from the outset in matters of psychology. it is a sport that is all about interaction, where every choice you make preempts the choices you believe your opponent is about to make - it's all psychology, all the time. motogp brings the macro dramatics in its rivalries (or, well, one guy did anyway), but tennis provides far more tools to understand said dramatics... it cannot help you understand motorcycle racing, but it can help you understand its psychology. but I think I'll leave it there lol. idk if these are really the parallels this ask was looking for, it's just really how I think about the two. obviously I'm biased in that I think tennis is the most important sport in existence, just like mr wallace. every bit of motogp analysis I write is inevitably shaped by my experiences with tennis, which probably also limits me in some ways. but, y'know. it is what it is. it should also be said that most tennis fans don't understand shit about sports psychology either. we persevere

anyway. yeah. for the parallels between the two. main takeaway - like I said, the game's rigged. always has been

incidentally, here's a passage of IJ I was thinking about recently

Bodies bodies everywhere. A tennis ball is the ultimate body, kid. We're coming to the crux of what I have to try to impart to you before we get out there and start actuating this fearsome potential of yours. Jim, a tennis ball is the ultimate body. Perfectly round. Even distribution of mass. But empty inside, utterly, a vacuum. Susceptible to whim, spin, to force — used well or poorly. It will reflect your own character. Characterless itself. Pure potential. Have a look at a ball. Get a ball from the cheap green plastic laundry basket of old used balls I keep there by the propane torches and use to practice the occasional serve, Jimbo. Attaboy. Now look at the ball. Heft it. Feel the weight. Here, I'll… tear the ball. . . open. Whew. See? Nothing in there but evacuated air that smells like a kind of rubber hell. Empty. Pure potential. Notice I tore it open along the seam. It's a body. You'll learn to treat it with consideration, son, some might say a kind of love, and it will open for you, do your bidding, be at your beck and soft lover's call. The thing truly great players with hale bodies who overshadow all others have is a way with the ball that's called, and keep in mind the garage door and broiler, touch. Touch the ball. Now that's … that's the touch of a player right there.

cutting it off there... obviously dfw being dfw, this paragraph continues another dozen odd pages. (I say this with fondness; unsurprisingly the parts of the book about jim and his father are some of my absolute favourite.) maybe you can guess why I was thinking about it... motogp worships its machinery - tennis has no such affection for the tools of its trade. even when we philosophise the body of the ball, all we can truly access is its emptiness. a ball is like a body because it is empty... that's the illness of a mind touched by tennis right there

[baifengxis]

I know it's on me for looking too many comments and reviews about my favorite shows but do you guys ever feel like people just don't know how to like something anymore? Especially when it comes to tv-shows. It's like everyone's so ready to tear something apart, to be disappointed, to be proven right that a show is terrible like they thought it would be. I'm not talking about constructive criticism nor am I talking about being fairly disappointed over something but not only people love being negative but if you dare say that you love a show they all dislike you have to apologize because how dare you? And if you tell them to stop with the negativity because you just WANT TO ENJOY A MFUCKING TV SHOW when everything in this world is shit, they'll tell you you're censoring their opinions. Like it's not that deep please for the love of god, just let people enjoy things, if you don't like something THAT'S FINE but you don't have to make long essays explaining why and not let other people who do like it, enjoy it.

[savage-rhi]

Magenta 😟