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makeusfreefromthisfandom · 4 years ago

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just sending some appreciation and good vibes to my people for the new year <3

kisses from me bc you all hold a very special place in my heart 💝

Also veryyy long post ahead I’m sorry I had to include everyone Aakklaksks 😭😭

@ominous-meme 🖤 sabah! You were my very first mutual on here I hope you know that! I can’t even begin on how excited I got when I found out you were a fellow desi girl and I will always appreciate you being there and advising me! <3 I love our street racing au! talks ! I’m glad I have someone to share ideas with <33

@weebsausage 🖤 dude omg!!! 😭😭😭 pls I literally forgot how we became moots I’m so sorry I have a tiny brain 😪 but I think we literally just messaged each other and started talking about free! ANYWAYS TYSM FOR PUTTING ME ON HXH I WILL ALWAYS LOVE YOU FOR THAT WTF ITS LIKE MY FAV ANIME EVER I HAVE BECOME HXH TRASH AJSJSJBS ❤️❤️ but other than that thank you for being a really great friend to me and I hope this year is nothing but good things for you <33

@dokifluffs 🖤 you were also one of my first moots on here! I honestly could not believe when you followed me back bc ur like my biggest inspo! 😭 you’re so precious omg I always look forward talking to you and get excited when I see a notif from you still! I hope the new year treats you well and brings good things in your life! Lots of love from me bae 🥰❤️

@syrenblubs 🖤 ah my most relatable person LOL. Omg syren ur my little bestie on here and I’m so glad we’re mutuals! I love our natsuya talks and OML THE C****** RAID! ALSJJSJSJSJJS AND DESI PARENTS AKSJJSNS. Just thank you for always interacting with me even tho I SUCK at responding 😭❤️❤️❤️ ilyyysmmmmmm

@linak 🖤 baby omg where do I even begin. Back when I had literally no one to talk to on here, you would be the one NEVER failing to send me a gm/gn message! You always bring a stupid smile to my face 😭 I’m so freaking glad that we are friends I literally cannot put into words!! Ty for always listening to me and letting me open up to you ❤️ love you always.

@croctears 🖤 vixxx ahhh!!! I’m so glad we became mutuals on this shitty app! You’re one of the highlights of my day and I love talking to you sm 😫 especially if it’s about Sou 😏😏 keep being amazing bae! Kisses mwuah mwuah 😽😽

@xakusa 🖤 Marty bby! 🥰 literally the only person I’m going to share my man natsu with 🙄 our conversations are always so RANDOM and out of nowhereeeee lollll but we also just go along with it and I love that! You are an angel and this year better be giving you what you deserve! Lots of love from my end 😽😽😽 kissies from me and natsuya <3

@cafelixie 🖤 I will keep saying this and I will never stop. YOU!!! ARE!!! THE!!! ACTUAL!!! DEFINITION!!! OF!!! PRECIOUS!!!! Need I say more? You’ve made my day countless times and I always look forward to seeing you in my messages/inbox!! Baby I freaking love you I really don’t know what else to say 😭❤️

@skippyskeppy 🖤 I will never forget the first time we interacted my Kisumi enthusiast 😙🤝 I love it sm whenever I see you pop into my inbox with a random hc about semi semi or Kisumi, Albert now too! You are an amazing person. A really amazing person. I hope you know that ❤️

@keeijiakaashi 🖤 I remember seeing your little comments under my posts before we became moots and OMGGGG YOU ARE SO CUTE AISJJSJSJS ALSO RIN ENTHUSIAST??? YES PLEASE!!! Tysm for always interacting with me and making yourself known as the ultimate sweetest person on my blog! Ilyyyyy ❤️❤️❤️

@animatedarchives 🖤 we have your fellow love of the kirishimas to thank for us becoming moots! You’re so cute soph omg 😫 I love how we literally have brainrots of the same characters LIKE MR GOJO LEECH SATORU!!! GET OUT OF MY HEAD OR PAY RENT!!! Ahh you’re irreplaceable soph! Never fail to make me smile like an idiot <33

@natsuya-enthusiast 🖤 how did we not become moots sooner wtf??? Do yk how alone I felt when I had no one to discuss my obsession of natsu with when I first made this blog 😪 AND THEN I REALIZED U WERE ONE OF MY FIRST FOLLOWERS???? ANYWAYS U ARE THE BIG SIS I NEVER HAD ALWAYS PULLING THROUGH W THAT LIFE ADVICE BAHAHAHA ilysm gaby wtf 😭😡😡😡❤️❤️❤️

@moonlitspring 🖤 do you even realize how happy I got when I realized there was another ACTIVE free! blog 😡😡 ajsjjsjs you are such an amazing writer and PERSON sky!!! You’ve been nothing but the sweetest and I hope we get to interact more this year and share our love of free! together <3

@ayumiko 🖤 laís you are such an angel! I absolutely adore both you and your edits/gifs smmm 🥰 you are so kind and I hope 2021 is also <333

@dalggina 🖤 omg??? YGO bae??? 😤😤 I thought literally everyone had forgotten ab it LOL THEN YOU CAME ALONG ❤️❤️ I’m really glad we interacted precious person! And I hope that you have a great year! ALSO YOU BETTER NOT STRESS YOURSELF OUT TOO MUCH FROM WORK OR IM MANIFESTING MR ATEM TO COME GET YOU 😡

@stormikujo 🖤 omg bby! We haven’t talked in awhile! I hope you are doing well! ❤️❤️❤️ ahhh I’m glad I got you into free otherwise we wouldn’t even have interacted 😫 I love talking to you stormi!! And I hope this year brings great things fro you! Lots of love ❤️❤️❤️

@aj-writes-here 🖤 omg hey girl 😼😼 you’re definitely one of the coolest people I’ve talked to on here for sure! Hope you’ve been enjoying hq and free! Your welcome for putting you on that simp train 😼 anyways, ilysm aj!! I really wish the best for you this year! Stay amazing as you always are, ily!! ❤️❤️

@attackonfics 🖤 wtf 😭😭 I don’t deserve you???? You’ve been nothing but the sweetest to me and also responsible for my unhealthy obsession with mr 5’2 angry gremlin >:(( jkjk but seriously, ty for the food 😌. ANYWAYS QUEEN I HOPE YOUVE BEEN TAKING CARE OF YOURSELF AND TREATING YOURSELF AS!!! YOU!!! SHOULD!!! VIRTUAL HUGS 😽😽 💝

@browsing-my-favourite-fandoms 🖤 Shizen! You are too good for this world! 😭 you are such a genuine person, you deserve nothing but happiness ❤️ I really hope that this year does that for you. I’ll keep checking in from time to time! Ilysm! ❤️

@inum4ki 🖤 sera...please...just invest in a personal guide or smth. Asksksknsjs n e wayzzz seeing you in my inbox is always so much fun! Sousuke really deserves more love and you are bringing it to the table hun 😤😤 also you’re a fellow inumaki enthusiast too??? Yes please. You deserve all the happy things in 2021 <3

@sneezefiction 🖤 Gracie!! I love how easy it is to get along with you! You are truly one of the best people I’ve met on this app and I’ll forever be grateful for our friendship <3 you give off such great vibes all the time omg giving you a huge virtual hug and here’s to more interactions this year! 🥰😽😽😽

@velvetfireworks 🖤 bbyyy!! 🥰 everytime we interact even if it’s not a whole lot, you’re always the sweetest what 😭 I love you and you’re writing so much omggg you are so talented!! I get super excited when I see myself get tagged in one of your stuff 😆 I hope we get to interact more in the future! Have a great New Years ❤️❤️❤️

@a8mine 🖤 stop being so mean to me 😡😡 !!!!!! ig ily anyways tho 🙄 you’re energy is honestly unmatched (in a good way!!) and it’s rare to meet people like that! You’re so funny omg and your random hcs and cursed discourses always have me dying 😭😭 you’re so cool hanna ily 😪✌️ <333

@giorvanna 🖤 ahh rena! Your blog and edits are *chefs kiss* I love our random semi brainrot sessions 🥰🥰 I hope we interact more in the future but in the meantime I’m sending you good vibes and lots of virtual hugs bc you deserve them queen ❤️❤️❤️

@seijohlogy 🖤 hey hey jaestar 🤩🤩 you are such a cool person??? Omg I’m so glad that we’re friends and randomly invade each other’s inboxes 😆 you are so kind! This year better be kind to you too or else 😡😡 I hope that after Ms rona decides to move her ass over, you get to go to Disneyland and take!! Me!!! With!! You!! Love you jae bae ❤️❤️

@prettysetterbaby 🖤 hey sexc 🤩🤩 no idea why you followed me but glad you did bc you are such a sweet and chaotic person!! I loveeeeee <333 I hope we get to interact more bc you are just genuinely such a fun person to interact with! Ilyyy

@datecho 🖤 yet another just genuinely sweet person! The world doesn’t deserve you! You’re so fun to interact with and a hottie??? omg shoto and kags better get off their asses rn and come get you or I will 🤩🤩 ly bae! have a great New Years! ❤️❤️

@miyasangel 🖤 we haven’t interacted much yet but ahaha talking about suna and sending my fanart to you is sm fun! Did I tell you that I also have a wip of Atsumu as a street racer? 😏 have a great year Arden bae! Kisses 😽

@aikk00 🖤 hi hi! We don’t interact on a daily or anything but when we do, omg!!! You are the most easy person to get along with 😭 you have such a good heart along with the talent???omg??? You are UNMATCHED babe! I hope this year brings you many more opportunities! Stay amazing love ❤️ ily and your art very much ❤️ I’m also still very embarrassed from fucking up the credits from last time. I’m so sorry bae 😭❤️❤️

@kurooskult 🖤 ma’am you might as well be the definition of bad bitch 😪🤝 ok but besides that, interacting with you is sm fun??? Like we don’t even have to be moots on your blog to feel just as included and loved! You are such a queen for that! Here’s to more mila x kuroo content in 2021 and he better be doing special for you as he should !!

It’s still the 31st here but THANK YOU ALL FOR MAKING MY COUPLE OF MONTHS ON HERE BEARABLE!!! This sounds like a goodbye post Oml-

I love you all very much. I suck at words, but I hope you know that. ❤️

#precious ppl✨<3 #OK NOW GN IVE BEEN UP FOR TOO LONG

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uta-h3m-vcd-tbw · 4 years ago

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Who Am I?

I have attempted to dialogue the events in my life at least 100 times beforehand but probably more but could never bring myself to be completely honest. Call this a personal inventory if you will. I consider myself a better writer than most however when it comes to writing about myself my brain goes blank. I know what I want to say, it’s just how do you go about telling anyone....”I am a Heroin addict.”

I have read a couple books about other addicts & have watched countless documentaries, movies, & shows about addiction. Always paying close attention to how the writer unfolds his/her story trying to translate it to my own with little success. I eventually came to the conclusion that so much has happened in the two decades of drug use that there is no way fathomable to include everything...at least not in your standard literary fashion.

A few days ago I stumbled across a new series on Netflix about a girl that liked to blog on Tumblr & suddenly I felt I may have an outlet to format this timeline of events. Make no mistake about this...everything I write from this moment on is 100% true whether you choose to believe it or not. Hell looking back....I don’t believe it sometimes & constantly find myself asking God why am I still here & why have so many perished before/besides me? What makes me so special?

Most stories I read/watch about addiction are pretty generic. It typically starts with someone who was injured & prescribed pain killers only to get cut off from the doctor & led down the dark & endless path of Heroin addiction. They tell stories about the terrible things they did to maintain their habit & of loved ones they hurt along the way. While I did horrible things as well, hurt & lost too many loved ones to addiction...this story is unlike any of the rest. This is a story of addiction...obviously...but also one of organized crime, corruption, murder, extortion, jail/institutions, & love but mostly death.

Every addiction specialist or rehab I have been to always had the same fault....they try to find some underlying reason as to why I started, “self medicating,” & attempt to address it. I’ve had numerous heated arguments with councilors & doctors who insisted I was suppressing something deep down & may not even know it! While I have heard of such instances to actually be the case I can very well tell you I am as normal as you are.

I grew up in a child’s utopia in an upper-middle class suburb roughly 20 miles North of Detroit. Think of the famous Tim Allen show, “Home Improvement.” Not only was I raised in Metro Detroit but I also come from a family of two parents, still married, & was the youngest of three boys. I know most people’s perception of Detroit isn’t very high however in the 80′s & 90′s it was a great place to start a family. Before the auto industry tanked most people skipped college to work on the assembly line at one of the, “Big Three,” (Ford, GM, or Chrysler) & lived comfortably. My dad was a, “Safety Restraint Engineer,” for a subsidiary company with several patents still in use today! We spent our days riding bikes through endless trails behind our house, building forts, playing back yard football, & camping in the backyard on warm summer nights. My brothers & I were raised Catholic. Went to Church every Sunday & Catechism on Thursday nights. If I could change one thing about my childhood I wouldn’t. It was that perfect! My Father didn’t fail to raise a man...I failed to be the man he raised.

When someone asks me why I started doing drugs I tell them because it was fun....simple as that. I know it sounds cliche but it’s true, everyone was doing them. My older brothers were way ahead of me, listening to Grateful Dead & dropping acid in middle school! I just liked drugs a lot more than everyone else. My mother knew I had an addictive personality because I would take everything I did to the max & always looked for instant gratification. I never wanted to wait/work for anything. I think my brothers were aware of this as well because they would NEVER sell me pot in these early days. They wouldn’t even talk to me about it. So as far as being as normal as everyone else....maybe that one’s a stretch. On the other hand I was years ahead of my classmates & understood how things worked much easier than the majority of my class.

By the time I reached High School I was selling/smoking pot & hanging out with kids my age but it wasn’t long before I caught the attention of the older guys in the neighborhood. I had already garnished a somewhat questionable reputation through my brothers by default & everyone knew my name from the paper route I had since I was roughly 12 years old. At first they were intimidating & I hated whenever I had to deliver papers on one of their streets...praying they wouldn’t be outside playing basketball or something. They always hung around the same two or three houses depending on who’s parents weren’t home that day. If they saw me coming every one of them would stop what they were doing & aim their attention towards me. All of them except one. I knew his face & heard stories whispered about him in the hallways at school. His name was Franco & he was not just the leader of their group...he was, “Head Fucking Hancho.” You know the scene from mob movies where people from the neighborhood come to sit with the boss & ask him all kinds of favors in return for their loyalty? That was Franco at age 15! He had everyone’s respect....even that of my older brothers who looked up to nobody. If you had a disagreement with Franco it didn’t go far. I’ve seen him hit guys so hard they temporarily lost the ability to speak! After a couple minutes of hazing from the guys he would shout from the porch telling them to leave me alone & they would scatter like roaches!

These encounters would eventually lead up to my first drug deal. Up until that point I had been stealing whatever I could from whichever brother wouldn’t notice at the time & smoking/selling it with & to my friends. They eventually caught me & beat the living shit out of me. I don’t think they were actually mad about the missing weed it was more about not stealing from your brother. The same day I was caught stealing weed I planned on meeting several kids from school at a friends house & of course everyone was expecting me to bring the pot. To this day I don’t know how I got the phone number or the guts to call it but I reached out to Franco’s best friend Mark. I don’t really no why I chose him....any of the older guys could have found me weed.....but I knew Mark sold it regularly & to pretty much anyone. There was no cell phones at this time so I had to call his house. He wasn’t as angry as I expected & told me to wait 5 minutes before riding my bike towards his side of the neighborhood. I did exactly as he instructed me to & before I could get to the end of my street he was pulling up in a dark green Ford Ranger...Frank was with him riding in the passenger seat. Mark got out...threw my bike in the back of his truck telling me to hop in the backseat before getting back behind the wheel & pealing off. The music was so loud I could barely understand the lyrics over the bass let alone what Frank & Mark were saying but it didn’t matter because they weren’t talking to me. At the time I thought Mark must want to get out of the neighborhood before doing the deal but after getting to know him I learned...that was his, “thing”. He loved to drive around, blaring music, & smoking weed with whoever was willing to tag along. He hated driving alone & his truck was like his office. Frank acted as if I wasn’t even there...holding a cool composure looking out the window while nodding his head to the music. Eventually we pulled down a random street, where Mark turned down the music before pulling the truck over. He turned around & asked me how much money I wanted to spend before opening a large grocery bag filled to the top with little, “dime bags,” or roughly a large gram of weed in each bag. I don’t know if it was how he had them bagged up but it was more than I had ever seen in one place at the time & my brothers always had a lot. I had a handful of crinkled five′s & one dollar bills I collected from my friends earlier in the day at school. It came out to around $24. I remember it was less than $25 because Mark insisted that an 8th cost $25 & that I was a dollar short. I didn’t even know what an 8th was or how much it cost but didn't want to screw up my first deal so I pretended it was just an honest mistake & he threw three bags in my lap. Franco asked where I was going & asked if I needed a ride which I humbly excepted.

From that day on things changed little by little with every passing day. I hung out less & less with the kids my age to be around Mark, Frank & the rest of the older guys. They saw me as the kid who could sell a lot of weed since I already had that reputation from my classmates. I saw them as a ticket to popularity. In my mind it was an even trade. My mother had an entirely different opinion.....constantly telling me I should be hanging around with my younger friends. To me it was harmless....choosing to see it as normal for a kid my age. I had no idea where this new found friendship would lead us. I had no idea what I was getting myself into.

As I was saying before....so much has happened since this day that I cannot even begin to piece it all together in a manner in which it flows conveniently into a timeline of events. This is the beginning of my attempt & you will have to stick with me to learn more as I continue to publish. I will warn you upfront that I will be changing some names, maybe even places or be vague as I am still getting death threats to this day & also don’t want to negatively impact any of the families that have already been ripped apart from unimaginable losses. Lastly I am still weary about telling my story in it’s entirety. I am sure those who are close to me will be able to figure out who I am since most of what I am going to tell you has never been a secret save one part. I have never told ANYONE the FULL story other than my parents. I feel it is the main reason I have struggled in all my attempts at telling/writing what actually happened. Please understand that I take absolutely NO pride in the things I have done & only feel I need to document what I went through so maybe the next kid contemplating the path I chose....will rethink the decision. I can tell you now their is no glory or honor in what we did & the end result was nothing but pain & suffering for our victims as well as ourselves. I really hope nobody reads this the wrong way & that I am able to accurately portray the pain/anguish we caused so they realize how brainwashed we were & the impact you can have on others no matter how minor you think it is. You have to stand up against what may seem to be the correct/hard decision at the time or even a harmless one that you know in your heart/gut is questionable & choose to do what you know to be right. The definition of the word, “popular,” is; liked, admired, or enjoyed by many people or by a particular person or group. The groups that are using/selling drugs are the minority & in the end you will find most are not truly your friend. When I go on social media, looking back at all the kids I graduated with, I realize now that those who did well in school & actively participated were actually the, “cool kids.” They are the ones posting pictures of new houses, nice cars & beautiful wives with blossoming families. There is nothing cool about being alone & having nothing to show for the last two decades of your life but scars. It is not romantic in any way shape or form. You will not find comfort.

Stay tuned for more to come!

#addiction #drugs #illegal #heroin

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sureinsunlight · 4 years ago

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happy valentines day! i love you so much, and i will be eternally grateful to you for introducing me to supergiant games and holding my hand through however many runs of transistor ive finished at this point. youre a wonderful writer, youre going to be an amazing gm, and youre a great friend!! much love

My power went out twice so I can’t respond but ;~; hugsa you real tight

#reference #saving this one to look at and be happy

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martinschwarzwald · 5 years ago

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For the ask meme - the lonely!!

The Lonely: Name a few of your friends and your favorite things about them.

:DDD im about to get SAPPY as HELL in here!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I LOVE MY FRIENDS

1) Alex @crashsfx -- incredibly funny and nice and creative and makes some of my favorite art in the fandom/in general! Pros: Positively Adorable, extremely valid,,, Cons: Art and concepts and ocs make me want to cry theyre so cute, lives far away..

I started out just being like :000 constantly bc omg Talented Artist, and im still like that tbh but also completely excited and grateful that I get the chance to talk to you and joke and learn about ocs and play dnd and assign you Kranch Vibes

2) Luna @thevoidcannotbefilled -- funky little nerd, my partner in crime, maker of The Good Aus, incredibly talented and wonderful and tbh don’t know why she still talks to me, but im so incredibly thankful for the circumstances that lead to us meeting and getting to know each other

3) Lurking, you’re not caught up, and you don’t follow my sideblog bc of that, but you might see this eventually, so ily and youre an amazing writer and an amazing-er person, and every time a notification pops up from you it makes my day bc it’s always the Wildest, most Wonderful Things

3) I would basically name everyone in the Cowards Collective because since joining I genuinely love and appreciate everyone in there so much, and their kindness and welcoming and the amount of love in there is overwhelming, but specifically Tal for pulling me in and being brilliant and I can’t wait to write with them, Abbegail for putting up with me being extremely cursed nearly constantly and being the Least Mean and Ominous out of the rqg cowards, Zoe for being an incredible GM and human being and someone i wish was close enough To Hug, basically everyone in the rqg channel w ur teasing and love and watching me React, i love you all a ridiculous amount

#m speaks #SAPPY ON MAIN HOURS #cowards discord #answered #crashsfx #ask game

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coldwall-collective · 6 years ago

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Happy New Year!

The Coldwall Collective would like to wish all of you, your friends, and your family a very happy, safe, and productive new year!

This past year has seen such a fantastic growth of the guild, evolution in it’s stories, and engagement in the community. We like to thank everyone on this fantastic server who continue to give us the chance to spread our wings and soar. Those of you who take the time to come to our events, you are what make them all the successes that they are, and we are humbled and grateful for your participation and continued support.

Going forward, we already have a slew of ideas on how to make our events bigger and better. How to make them more inclusive to those who’d like to take part, and how to engage our guild in the community at large in more meaningful and productive ways. We hope that 2019 sees us all making some fantastic stories together!

My thanks to Coldwall for continuing to be a guild I love and can be so extremely proud of. My thanks to all the writers who continue to add their amazing talent to our ever expanding fold. My respect to this server for continuing to welcome us, support us, and let us take part in your stories. We in CC owe our success to each and every one of you.

Let’s make 2019 a good one! BfA might be silly, but the RP community will compensate as it always does with amazing stories, events, and characters.

Cheers!

- @enigmatic-elegance (GM)

Another year down and as one would think, many things happened. Atop of the Masquerade Ball and a great shift in friendships as well as my own personal life I'd say it's been one of the best years of my adult-life. While I lose near all interest in the game, I haven't lost any with CC and many within it. The size is something I have to get used to, but with the great size and community built within comes a lot of good times. Looking forward to at least another year.

- @grannyshanny (Overseer)

Coming close to 2 years, my time in CC has been an absolute blast, and I look forward to all of the great things and stories we have going on, and will have going on.

- @harveedeadweight (Overseer)

What a year it's been! I just wanted to say thanks to all of my friends and family within Coldwall. This year has been an absolute blast where I've been able to expand my roster and stories to include a familiar cast of characters. Coldwall has been an absolute boon to me, and has offered me a great group of friends and a cast of talented and loveable characters that I get to write for and alongside!

- @the-petalpaw-family (Lieutenant)

Coldwall is the best fuckin guild I’ve been in okay. There's no drama, everyone is chill, Things get taken care of when they arise, and everyone is wholesome. Nobody gets pushed aside. People always get the chance to be in the spotlight and when they do, they make it count. The people in this guild are great writers and we all support each other. I've never gotten to develop my characters as much as I have while participating in the stories that are going on here. I mean yeah Xerxes usually gets traumatized but he's fine. But I've never been in a guild that actually makes me feel safe and gives me no stress or anxiety. At all. I’m glad to be an officer, even if I rarely have to do anything because nothing awful really happens. So yeah this guild is fuckin great and I love it and its dumb fuckin memes.

- @xerxes-jasper (Lieutenant)

From all of us in Coldwall!

Here’s to 2019!

Happy New Year, WrA!

#Happy New Year!#OOC

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dictionarywrites · 6 years ago

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Fanfic asks- G, N, U?

FANFIC ASK MEME (x)

G: Care to share a favorite crack fic?

I hate crack fics and don’t read them, lol. While a lot of my concepts could be described as “cracky” (anything in the Intersections ‘verse; Taneleer/Fandral, etc.) I just take them so seriously, like... No. I don’t find crack funny, and it tends to just grate on me.

N: Is there a fic you wish someone else would write (or finish) for you?

Mmmm...

I don’t know, really. Like, the way that I tend to read fic is that I select particular authors that I really love the work of, and then I just read the stuff that they write. Very rarely do I try to seek out a particular kind of fanfic, because my tastes are so specific and so fucking abstract that like... I have no idea what I would search for.

I don’t like modern or mundane AUs (unless @thotki does them, as @thotki is extremely good at everything); I don’t really like a/b/o because I think people write it very lazily, as a rule; I adore historical and sci-fi/fantasy AUs, but unless the AUs are impeccably researched and the tone is perfect, I just abandon them immediately. 95% of the time, when I open a fanfic that isn’t by one of the like, ten writers that are on my subscribe list, I just close it because of some sin or other, like an incredibly minor grammatical error, or because they use a word that is “off” in the speaking character’s voice. In Marvel specifically, I actually hate and despise when people inexplicably try to make the characters human, even within complex AUs. It’s just boring.

And so my neurotic and hyper-specific particularities about what I will read in fanfic set to one side, then we have the added thing that I just like really fucking bizarre pairings, and only when they’re done in the right way.

I would give any of my limbs for a good, long, DashingFrost fic that

realizes Fandral and Loki are actually very similar, and that they’re actually on even ground

doesn’t make Loki into a soft-sweet prince, and doesn’t act like Fandral is a saint

I respect that some people tend to go with a queer-positive Asgard, but like... I don’t see it, lol. and I would prefer a fic that actually has complicated elements like homophobia, and like Thor’s difficult consideration of everything, Odin’s absolute disapproval

somebody who actually considers the genuine class implications of a PRINCE OF ASGARD and a nobleman with absolutely 0 title except for the one he’s earned by going out and doing gay shit with Thor and the lads, which is worth nothing to the court unless he’s going out to kill something

I absolutely would just like to see some Taneleer/Fandral, but I’d love to see some Taneleer/Loki that isn’t utterly unbearable, too. I’d also really love to see some like, more elaborate Frostmaster AUs - pretty much every Frostmaster AU seems to just be “it’s the modern world and the GM is Loki’s sugar daddy”, which I don’t care about at all, but like...

Medieval king Grandmaster and criminal-turned-reluctant-court-sorcerer Loki, yeah; more space-centred AUs; just more stuff with like, complex power dynamics. None of these are things I specifically want, just that like... You know.

Anything but another fucking sugar daddy AU.

U: A pairing you might like to write for, but haven't tried yet.

Mmm, in regards to Buffy at the moment, obviously I’ve not written anything in that fandom bar the thing I wrote today, but I absolutely want to have a go at some of those parents - Ethan/Giles is obviously on the list, as is Giles/Jenny; and I’m really interested in the development of Angel/Buffy, so I’m kinda gonna be watching that and paying attention to it, like.

In other fandoms, hmm...

I’ve never really written much Thor/Bruce, and I’d like to do more of that seriously. I’d absolutely love to write some proper like, Bruce/Loki, especially in the aftermath of Sakaar and that sort of thing, yeah.

And then, God, a lot of the minor JGCU pairings - I’m excited to write some Jack/Gil, which @annethecatdetective‘s done some of this week, and I want to do some because... I adore them. I’m excited to some Hatch/Lindsey, because Hatch and Lindsey are just the cutest in Hideaway, and I really, really want to dig my heels into Jerry/Lisa, because I just won’t budge, like.

#Anomymous #t; answered asks #as defined by dictionary

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brian-wellson · 7 years ago

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An Open Letter ((OoC))

Hello, awesome people of Wyrmrest Accord! I felt compelled to write this because of, well, you’ll see!

I. A bit of background.

I first started playing WoW as a PvE’er (January 2009), and as an RP’er just a touch over two years ago (May 2015). It’s true… I am a Wrath baby, one nurtured on thottbot.com (and I ignored all advice given by icyveins.com). In July 2010, I developed a neurological disorder, one which has rendered me in constant pain and unable to sleep much past four hours a night, even under sedation, ever since. Needless to say, I had/have plenty of time on my hands. Once I maxed out at 80, achieved Explorer, and became a Loremaster, I decided to spend my time as a ‘raider’.

My feats were truly epic. Indeed, my guildmates had given me the affectionate nickname ‘Dr. Death’ – partially due to the fact that I have a Ph.D., but mostly because I was a horrible raider. Every pull? Dead. To this day, I still avoid ICC because Lord Marrowgar lives there. That bastard, he owned me. I can hear the redolent echoes of “Bonestorm!” quite clearly, and usually that echo’s antecedent is the death rattle of a human male.

Make no mistake, I held this title – Worst. Raider. Ever.

The friends I made in that guild, we’re still friends today, 7 years later. I even met one of them at BlizzCon 2015. That moment was amazing. We got drunk in the hotel room he was splitting with his girlfriend (and they’re still together to this day!), and laughed about the time our tank had finished off Professor Putricide, by herself, with 10% health remaining. I’ll never forget the thrill of that kill, nor the way we cheered once it was over.

Even though we are no longer in the same guild or even on the same server, we have celebrated real births, supported each other through real deaths, and rejoiced in real marriages – all online. Back when my liver was on the verge of failure, I had lost 60 pounds, and my kidney function was in the toilet, those former guildmates were the people who kept in contact with me the most. I’ve since recovered, but will forever be grateful to them. They cared, and they still do.

II. Why it matters.

I suppose what I am trying to say is the people with whom I align myself, they’re my friends for life, and I would do anything for them. (Well, everything except move a dead body, but even then there are three people who I would assist, if necessary.) Such unwavering loyalty has led to my being called a lapdog or yes-man; yet, unlike such people, I will often disagree with my friends, and tell them directly. And then we move on, send each other aesthetically incongruent covers of truly awful songs, and revel in gifs of cute pets doing silly things.

Therefore, when I see an anonymous call out leveled at someone who is very dear to me – someone who has been a far better friend than she probably knows – I get irritated. I get defensive. When compounded with the fact that someone has besmirched the quality of our writing, I am vexed that much more. To be sure, constructive criticism is good and we welcome it; anonymous insults, however, can be damaging and help no one.

III. Let’s talk about RP.

My RP partner and co-conspirator, Quai, and I worked toward resolving a plot for close to two years. We were faced with some very real logistical issues. There were more moving pieces than I think either of us had anticipated. Blackbay prides itself on its gritty realism, so how does RP resurrection even work? The short answer is, we did something different. The long answer is just that – long – and largely beside the point anyhow. The key takeaway is that we had to work within the confines of the game, in addition to our own harsh and self-imposed restrictions. To criticize us for being ‘too slow’ in pacing… well, I am sorry to hear that someone has perceived it this way, but I must respectfully disagree. Killing off a character is a big deal, but bringing one back? – even more so. The density and amount of detail necessary to craft something remotely believable in our gritty take of the Warcraft universe was quite high.

Quai and I – as well as our DM, Monette – are always pushing each other to think harder, do more, work faster, and to project things ever further out. To be clear: length does not equal quality – an axiom not only applicable to the line level, but also that of a plot or story arc. Does this mean every plot we craft is two years long? Of course not, for that would be preposterous. Does this mean that everything from one-offs to a years-long long plot or story arc feeds into an even bigger narrative? You bet it does. Admittedly, sometimes our stories flop, and sometimes threads are left hanging. More often than not, these issues arise because communication had broken down somewhere. Do we take lessons from such moments? Yes, absolutely.

While I understand and most certainly empathize with the point of view that new characters may have initial confusion during a long-term story arc, I present this challenge – if you don’t know what’s going on, ask the writer, ask the DM, ask the GM … hell, ask all three. I can guarantee that the people running the story would be more than happy to talk about it with you, either OoC or IC. We – all writers – love to talk about our babies. If you don’t know why someone needs to recover ‘X-object’, ask them: “Why the hell are we risking life and limb for X-object, when I don’t even know what X-object is or does?” (Perhaps with a bit more tact…) The reply could be OoC, or it could be IC, or it could be a little of both. Irrespective of the encounter type, the fact remains that it is always within your power – and I would say it is your imperative – to understand your peers’ and storytellers’ motivations.

Ultimately, RP is about enjoying oneself. If something is unclear, ask … because, you know what? You will enjoy yourself far more if you understand what is occurring, for understanding leads to personal investiture. This said, is asking difficult? It can be, but its rewards vastly outweigh the probability of being miserable… and this is coming from one of the most insecure RPers out there. Heck, there are times I am reticent to ask questions, so I understand this more than you might think.

More than anything, RP is about forming connections with characters and people, and granting those connections and relationships the opportunity to flourish.

Think of RP like wine. The best wine comes from the most carefully cultivated terroir. Even then, some of it is sour, or just doesn’t sit right with us. This is ok. Not all varietals are meant for all people. Some people can’t stand a Châteauneuf-du-Pape and only drink moscato (because they’re weird, teehee!); others want to vomit when they smell the sticky sweet of moscato, yet salivate at the mere thought of a well-blended meritage. And, once more, this is ok – that is why there are so many different varietals!

IV. A parting thought.

When I say that I’m lucky to be RPing with the people in my circle, it’s not bullshit – I mean it. These people, my friends and partners and peers, they impel me to work toward greater clarity, work harder, and be more creative. And these things, to me, are their own rewards.

Perhaps most importantly, those in my circle, and even those with whom I have yet not had contact, teach me how to be a better friend, peer, and collaborator.

Please. Before you complain about the length of a story or plot arc, the quality of the GM or DM or writer running it, or the general guidelines of a guild of which you are not part – I beseech you. Reach out. Ask what is happening, or why certain restrictions exist. Find your way out of the rabbit hole. Encourage interpersonal skills. Be kind & respectful. And, as always, write with heart, presence of mind, and with the cognizance that other people are involved aside from yourself. The decisions you make about your characters – IC & OoC – impact the way both you and your character will be perceived.

We are here for each other.

Let’s write a story.

(( Shout outs to my main RP partner and co-conspirator, @quai-mason; the fantastic people in [ @blackbay-wra ]: @monettemason, @juniper-rose-blower, @killerkyara, @alastar-wyatt; so many other people who I admire: @thalsianiii, @risrielthron, @adhelin, @manduhs-things, @patiencekindnesscourage; and all those who escape my exhausted mind at the moment. I adore you for who you are, and what you bring to the game. ))

#OoC #Author #RP thoughts #WRA #Wyrmrest Accord

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aaabhiklmnnrs · 5 years ago

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the first picture was taken around noon, the second is evening sun drenched, which one you prefer may most-depend on whether you are a photog or not rather than on other factors.

I remembered a while ago that it is a three-day weekend, and decided on hoping to spend some time on the Brain GM project.

I partitioned web browser spaces on the laptop... one is for healthcare and me, the other is for non-healthcare and me, a way of trying to separate niche spaces, something one may do while imprisoned to feel less imprisoned, to hold on to some individuality, to retain a feeling of it.

...tiny pieces of progress toward marking ‘stable mood’ every day on the daily tracker, that’s the good life. (update: marked ‘stable mood’ :) )

i listened to, actually I stimmed to, Norah Jones’ Sunrise unplugged. AspieHuman says ‘stimming is not necessarily caused by overstimulation. even non-autistics use stimming when they are overwhelmed. it’s basically a self-regulatory mechanism’. it is sustainability-anthem.

the Invisible Disability women I am routinely around... today I mostly thank AspieHuman.

More than Myself - Anne Sexton

Not that it was beautiful, but that, in the end, there was a certain sense of order there; something worth learning in that narrow diary of my mind, in the commonplaces of the asylum, where the cracked mirror or my selfish death outstared me, I tapped my own head; it was glass, an inverted bowl. it’s small thing to rage inside your own bowl. at first it was private, then it was more than myself.

“i do not hold the possibly-another-marriage-for-me-in-this-life outlook any longer. and, to feel ‘comfortable’ means that instead of shutting down entirely or reliving traumas or relapsing into dysfunctional every days, i feel up to practicing better at staying on the ground, just so life can be lived a little easier. i’m a writer-type, and to have niche spaces like @fanofStarc and aaabhiklmnnrs.tumblr.com, where i may feel comfortable, to express thoughts with the world, on healthy enough days, make me quite the grateful Worm Menon.”

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andrewuttaro · 6 years ago

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New Look Sabres: GM 79 - CBJ - New Revolt

Three games left. It’s almost over, everyone. No Sabres season, certainly none since I’ve been a hockey fan, has ever been this crazy a ride. There have been so many ups and downs… well mostly down, and now that we’re here it feels like we’ve come full circle: back in the Draft lottery conversation. This is our Stanley Cup. Well Edmonton is still is trash like us it was the Arizona Coyotes game tonight, yes the Arizona Coyotes game, that made me think about how much we’re missing – how much we’ve missed for eight years now. Arizona, the albatross of this league, just won a big game in March with playoff implications. Do I need to look up at Arizona now too? I was really close to naming tonight’s postgame #LoseForHughes but sweet, hockey gods, I’m so tired of accepting losing as a plus for my team. Losing can only be good for so long before you start cannibalizing your fanbase! Seven straight losses in March? Three games left everyone, then we can at least look forward without another ugly loss blocking our vision. Luckily there is something to read into these games now too; yes, even games that end in 4-0 shutouts to goalies who don’t even want to be on the team their net-minding for. That new context is the New Revolt. I am kind of grateful I didn’t have this blog during the Old Revolt, that time frame was a little bit more uncertain. When I say the Old Revolt, I’m referring to the 2016-2017 season or the second half of it at least. Dan Blysma was the Buffalo Sabres Head Coach and there were rumblings. By rumblings I mean unnamed sources by radio hosts and the Buffalo News (this was before the Athletic Buffalo so the reporting was a little better there); well those sources and the games we were watching. You could tell players were confused by Disco Dan’s system and the rumblings were that the players were trying to get rid of him. This criticism evidently found its way all the way up to ownership and on 4/20/2017 General Manager Tim Murray and Dan Blysma were fired. For extremely recent fans, this was the genesis of the meme about Jack Eichel being GM and Coach. Now we maybe seeing a New Revolt. It’s a little different than the old one. This game tonight against Columbus was completely unwatchable so we’re going to have a little talk about this New Revolt unfolding on this current Sabres team.

Talking about a New Revolt forces me to do one of the things I hate the most: agree with Mike Harrington. When I drag the Buffalo News Sports section its usually aimed at this guy. I don’t want to go into much more depth about that, but this guy is saying this same thing right now and I don’t think he’s wrong unfortunately. Look at these seven straight losses: six of them have been lost by more than one goal and all of those were over well before regulation concluded. If you look back past the St. Patrick’s Day victory over the Blues the same is still mostly true: big losses and if we’re being frank, losses where the Sabres more or less gave up at a certain point. March has been exceptionally bad. There was a time in February I thought the Sabres could still make the playoffs, but that month wasn’t great either. It’s not crazy to say this team has given up on Phil Housley. You could make an argument he lost the room after some poorly worded comments in January, you could say it was over for him in December if you want to. A lot of the same criticisms of Dan Blysma are now falling on Phil Housley: roster deployment choices, getting the team to start on time, getting the guys to play well in their own end and the list goes on and on. Granted, the revolt against Blysma had a very visible player-oriented streak originating in a locker room that sometimes made thinly-veiled postgame critiques. There is also the key difference that there was a growing will among Sabres fans at the time of the old revolt to can Tim Murray over poor trades and roster building that simply yielded no results. Today there doesn’t seem to be a consensus that Jason Botterill needs to go; in fact, I think there is a certain confidence in Botterill that is holding up good will for him. That good will is liable to evaporate overnight if Jeff Skinner leaves in Free Agency but we’ll cross that bridge if it comes, God forbid it comes. Moreover, that turnover in 2017 was a philosophy shift, certainly at the management level, that begged the question of what the Sabres would be long term. Regime change felt right then, and it gave us optimism for a while. Even after the abject nightmare that was the 2017-2018 season, this regime was still trusted going into last offseason and it delivered big time. I even made the joke that the Sabres won the offseason going into this season. If its going to be a New Revolt, if we’re going to chase Phil Housley out of town like Blysma, we ought to ask some questions about it.

For one, are we ruining this core by giving into another revolt? This question has no good answers but there are examples of teams being forced to stomach their coach and it pays off. The Detroit Red Wings of the late 2000s stand out. The Chicago Blackhawks of 2012 are a more recent example, but they had already won a Cup with that group. It isn’t a really sexy option but it’s worth noting because the current Sabres GM gave the current Coach a vote of confidence on February 20th. It’s fully possible the outlook has changed but you can’t forget that. There is an even scarier sub-question here: What if one of the core players is the problem… dare I say one of THE core players? Sorry I pulled that one out from under the bed, I’m putting it away now. The second big question with this New Revolt is a little easier to answer: What are we looking for with a coaching change? Ok, so the players, fans and hordes of bloggers and sports writers are right: the Housley system is not working, and he needs to go for the good of the team. The calls for Joel Quenneville from the rooftops come with big ifs but the deeper question is what kind of coach you’re going for. Housley was supposed to be the old fashion defensive-minded coach and that hasn’t worked out for us. Mind you, Coach Q and Housley sit on polar opposite ends of the proven/experience spectrum as head coaches but do we need more old fashion? There is an argument a guy like Q is good for a team that’s built and that’s a whole separate debate; that is, if this roster is more or less to a point to compete regularly. A March that saw no regulation wins suggests not but it’s a little more complex than that. Do you want to bring in a new approach because there are European coaches and AHL coaches and College coaches who all have a rainbow of different ideas of how to coach a winning hockey team? There are a lot of answers to that question and Housley isn’t fired yet so its kind of null to even ask. It is my opinion that Phil Housley will not Coach a Sabres game again after April 6th, so I have one perspective on this. I think a guy like Jason Botterill, always preaching building from the bottom up, sees the Rochester Americans go on a wicked Calder Cup run this Spring and he elevates Chris Taylor to Coach of the big club after it’s over. It’s a lot cleaner than any other option and I think it’s the option ownership wants after the madness of the 2017 regime change. That’s just one man’s opinion.

No matter what happens it’s a game like this and its aftermath… and oh by the way this loss ties the streak of terrible that the Sabres managed at the depth of the tank back in 2014-2015, that shows something has to give. It seems like there is no accountability right now, but it only seems that way until there is a whole lot of accountability if you know what I mean. With the Pegulas as owners of both Buffalo’s professional sports teams we’ve seen their willingness to drop the ax. We’ll see what that entails this time after these next three God-forsaken games are over. I am just too hopeful to not think change is coming. It has to. It just has to. On that cheerful note: like, share and comment on this blog. We’re wrapping up the season, but the offseason can create some of my best work in my humble opinion. I shared a lot of opinions in this New Look Sabres: agree or not, share yours with us! I’ll be driving out to Detroit for the Sabres last game on Saturday and no, I don’t regret buying those tickets… because that’s a new arena! JK, I look forward to it because its my first away Sabres game and that’s an original experience I’m dying to have. In the meantime, Let’s Go Buffalo!

Thanks for reading.

P.S. If you are an old enough Sabres fan to remember the old old revolt in the late 1990s against Ted Nolan than please comment. I want to get to know you.

#buffalo sabres #hockey #blog #nhl

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shirlleycoyle · 5 years ago

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Everything Is Innovative When You Ignore the Past

This article appears in VICE Magazine's Stupid Issue, which is dedicated to the entertaining, goofy, and just plain dumb. It features stories celebrating ridiculous ideas, trends, and products; pieces arguing that unabashed stupidity can be a great part of life; and articles calling out the bad side of stupidity. Click HERE to subscribe to the print edition.

Anthony Levandowski is a very smart man who has said and done a lot of dumb things. Once a brilliant young engineer, Levandowski established himself as a pioneer in the area of self-driving cars, long thought to be the next big thing. In the mid-2000s, he helped build a self-balancing motorcycle that could drive itself (poorly) and spent close to a decade at Google working on Street View and the self-driving-car teams.

Every profile of Levandowski produced a nearly identical quote from a former superior attesting to his brilliance. A representative one from his adviser at UC Berkeley, Ken Goldberg, went as follows: “Anthony is probably the most creative undergraduate I’ve encountered in 20 years.”

Never mind that Levandowski has taken shortcuts while operating experimental software on public roads that put people’s lives in danger and injured a coworker. The crash, and every other line he crossed, was just another “invaluable source of data” in his quest to change the world and handsomely profit from it.

Levandowski’s creativity extended to his finances. While at Google, he licensed or used products from companies he also owned, the kind of financial subterfuge more befitting a Trump administration cabinet member than a Google engineer. He also set up a self-driving truck company called Otto, which he sold to Uber for $680 million just months after cashing out and quitting Google, even though Otto was barely a year old. Waymo, the self-driving car subsidiary of Google’s parent company Alphabet, sued Uber and Otto for stealing trade secrets. (The suit was settled in 2018.) In August 2019, Levandowski was indicted by the federal government for that alleged theft. (He pleaded not guilty and has contended he did nothing wrong, and the case is awaiting trial.)

This is Levandowski, the poster boy of Silicon Valley hubris. In a 2018 profile, the New Yorker deemed him “an exemplar of Silicon Valley ethics,” an oxymoronic and backhanded compliment if there ever was one.

The publication was, of course, referring to his alleged felony and financial chicanery, which left him astoundingly wealthy because his repeated duplicity was constantly excused by his superiors as a regrettable side effect of world-altering intelligence. He was another difficult man in a world of difficult men.

But that’s not the sole or even most important reason Levandowski is an emblem of the industry that made him rich. Levandowski is an avatar for the tech industry’s foibles because of his obsession with the future and disdain for the past, a consistent refrain at the center of the Valley’s beating heart. If the past has no relevance, everything is innovation.

As with everything else, Levandowski doesn’t go about it half-assed. In 2015, he started a church called Way of the Future, shortened to WOTF, just one letter off from the more appropriate abbreviation. WOTF worships a divine artificial intelligence being called “the Godhead.” The idea here, as Levandowski told Wired in 2017, is to ease humanity’s transition from the smartest species on earth to mere pets of our AI overlords in a positive manner.

“We believe in progress,” WOTF’s official website states, noting that it wants to be on the Godhead’s good side when the technological rapture arrives. “Change is good, even if a bit scary sometimes.”

About a year after Levandowski talked to Wired about WOTF, the New Yorker ran another long feature on Levandowski and his escapades at Google and Uber and the ensuing lawsuit. Levandowski told the writer Charles Duhigg not only that the future is all that matters, but that he didn’t care much for history either:

“The only thing that matters is the future,” he told me after the civil trial was settled. “I don’t even know why we study history. It’s entertaining, I guess—the dinosaurs and the Neanderthals and the Industrial Revolution, and stuff like that. But what already happened doesn’t really matter. You don’t need to know that history to build on what they made. In technology, all that matters is tomorrow.”

Levandowski may say it more harshly than others, but he is hardly alone in the belief that the past is irrelevant for those obsessed with the future.

“Tech, historically, has been deeply uninterested in looking backwards,” said Margaret O’Mara, a history professor at the University of Washington and the author of The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America, a history of Silicon Valley. When tech companies do invoke history, she pointed out, it’s often closer to mythology. Consider the Tale of Two Steves of Apple in a garage. Otherwise, as she asked rhetorically in the book’s introduction, “Why care about history when you’re building the future?”

This anti-history bias is not merely a curious quirk of a group of people that has drastically shaped the modern world. It is a foundational principle. Like Levandowski’s church, it is the very basis for a belief system.

But O’Mara argues that this altar of progress is a distortion of what really made Silicon Valley what it is. “When you actually study history,” O’Mara said, “things get really messy really fast.” None more so than the history of the tech industry itself.

This hostility toward the past has deep roots in internet culture. In 1996, the Grateful Dead lyricist and early internet evangelist John Perry Barlow wrote “A Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace.” The second sentence is: “On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.” Wiping the slate clean with the digital era paved the way for the kind of ignorance techno-utopian narratives traffic in.

Whether intentional or not, reformatting the tech industry’s memory around the proliferation of the internet helped perpetuate a myth that the nascent industry sprang up from the brilliant minds of a chosen few without anyone else’s help. In turn, this story became the justification for a limited government that didn’t interfere with the independent spirit and economic structure that made the web great. Too bad it wasn’t true.

History does a lot of telling us what we don’t want to hear. It disposes of the progress myth we are taught in schools— which is also also a foundational principle of Levandowski’s AI church—that things just keep getting better, even as it feels like they are only getting worse.

To be sure, there were many brilliant minds working in tech, but they had help, and lots of it, from Uncle Sam. O’Mara painstakingly details such events in her book: Federal grants accounted for 70 percent of the money spent on academic research in computer science and electrical engineering from the mid-1970s to 1999; the fruits of that research were often spun off into some of the biggest and most influential tech companies of the day. Hell, the actual internet, at the time called ARPANET, was named after the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), a government agency that provided it with about $1 million in funding. Starting in 1994, the National Science Foundation, NASA, and DARPA (the successor to ARPA, which focuses on defense projects) gave $24 million to six computer science departments to figure out the best way to index and search the internet. Two grad students at Stanford University named Sergey Brin and Larry Page substantially benefited from this program, which “supported much of Brin and Page’s work,” O’Mara writes. That work soon became Google. If DARPA were a venture capital fund, it would be one of the most successful in history.

This important context is either downplayed or avoided entirely when the tech industry talks about its roots. Steve Jobs, one of the greatest storytellers in modern times, excluded the government’s role in seeding many tech companies of note when evangelizing for his—and other—companies during a publicity wave of cover stories in the 1980s. Jobs, by the way, was hardly immune to the lure of government largesse. He once spent two weeks walking the halls of Congress lobbying the federal government for tax breaks for computers donated to schools; he failed in Washington but succeeded in California, putting his products in front of thousands of California children for pennies on the dollar.

As O’Mara pointed out, ignoring your own history or writing an altogether new one can be a great business strategy. “We see a lot of this in mid-20th-century America,” she said, where companies embraced narratives of “we’re marching toward the future.” Business leaders realized it’s a great public relations gambit with investors, politicians, and the general population to spin a yarn about progress and possibilities, “making the world more open and connected,” and brushing aside inconsistent facts. History was just another marketing tool, sometimes literally. An Apple ad campaign from the 1980s featured actors dressed up as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Edison, and the Wright brothers holding Apple IIs. One of the taglines read: “Don’t let history pass you by.”

It’s traditional for cultures of innovation to regard history as more or less worthless. Considering Levandowski’s interests, it’s ironic that the Valley’s predecessor here is none other than the automobile industry. To take just one prominent example, for the 1939 World’s Fair, General Motors commissioned an exhibition called “Futurama” looking 20 years into the future, featuring vast, automated, congestion-free freeways. When the World’s Fair returned to New York in 1964, GM did it again with similar vast, automated freeways.

It was a good story, and good for business. In 1953, President Eisenhower appointed GM’s president and CEO Charles Wilson as secretary of defense to oversee, among other things, the planning of a federal highway system, a 100 percent government-funded program to the tune of some $100 billion that helped cement the automobile as a necessity for nearly all American families.

But this wasn’t merely about business. Charles Kettering, a GM engineer and perhaps America’s greatest inventor since Thomas Edison, was prone to decidedly Levandowskiesque pronouncements about history’s irrelevance. “You never get anywhere looking in your rearview mirror,” he once said. The future, Kettering added, was all that matters, because “we will have to spend the rest of our lives there.”

Kettering’s attitude was not only representative of the automotive industry around that time, said the Virginia Tech history professor Lee Vinsel, but of American business more broadly, which believed unflinchingly in American dominance and progress. Vinsel pointed out that one of the most infamous quotes about history comes from an American automotive titan, Henry Ford. An ardent isolationist, Ford said “history is more or less bunk” in a contentious 1916 interview with the war-hungry Chicago Tribune about whether the U.S. should get involved in World War I. The remark went virtually unnoticed for three years. (This and other details come from a 1965 Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society paper by Roger Butterfield that investigated the history of this quote.)

Later that year, Ford sued the Tribune for libel, demanding $1 million after the paper called him an “anarchist” and an “ignorant idealist.” The case went to trial in 1919 and the judge made clear the issue at hand was not whether Ford was an anarchist, but whether he was ignorant. Ford spent eight days on the witness stand as Tribune lawyers pelted him with questions in an attempt to prove Ford was an ignorant man, and the press wrote up every juicy exchange. One such exchange regarded just how much contempt Ford had for history.

Ford won the case, but only just. The jury awarded him six cents in damages. Shortly thereafter, he wrote to his secretary Ernest Liebold that he was going to start a museum “and give people a true picture of the development of the country.” He vowed to collect and preserve artifacts in service of this mission because the only history worth observing is “that you can preserve in itself.”

“We’re going to build a museum that’s going to show industrial history,” Ford wrote to Liebold. “And it won’t be bunk.”

And it wasn’t. The Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village complex in Dearborn, Michigan, is one of the largest collections of American historical artifacts. The guy responsible for one of the most famous anti-history quotes in our language came to care a tremendous deal about history.

This tends to happen. We get older and realize we may live the rest of our lives in the future, as Kettering said, but much of our time is spent in the past, too. As we age, the ratio flips. Great chunks of us become history. And one day, we will be too. The past no longer seems to be an abstract, irrelevant tale but something that happened to us, to people we know. It’s something we made, some- thing we did.

This is partly why O’Mara thinks we’re at the beginning of a shift in which Silicon Valley will start to care about history. She’s been invited to talk about her book up and down the Valley, in front of audiences of all ages. The industry is now mature enough that parts of it are history itself.

But it’s not mere nostalgia—or, less charitably, a dif- ferent form of hubris—that makes history important. Even historians disagree on why history matters. Some stress that its cyclical nature—“history doesn’t repeat itself but it rhymes”—is the business case for learning history, so one does not repeat the mistakes of the past.

There’s something to this, but history’s relevance runs deeper. Learning it can be almost spiritual, a kind of therapy. It’s oddly comforting to learn about times when people thought they were experiencing unprecedented circumstances, when they were scared out of their minds about what had become of their society, when they were afraid they had lost all con- trol over events. Things may be different today, but not that different.

History does a lot of telling us what we don’t want to hear. It disposes of the progress myth we are taught in schools—which is also also a foundational principle of Levandowski’s AI church—that things just keep getting better, even as it feels like they are only getting worse.

The three historians I talked to for this article stressed that history disabuses us of these easy “progress narratives.” Instead, it presents a much more challenging yet honest view of humanity.

Patrick McCray, a historian of technology and science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told me that the story of humanity is not one of linear progress, but of spurs and splits, fits and starts, progress and backpedaling. For his scientific history course, one of his main goals is to show students this. But it’s no easy feat, especially for students in science and technology, fields entirely based on progress narratives and finding clean solutions to difficult problems. “It’s really hard to get them out of that mindset, because they really have this view that science is this ever-improving thing and we’re just simply knowing more and more and more,” McCray said.

This is hard stuff, and acknowledging it comes with a corollary: We, as a society, are not particularly special. Vinsel, the historian at Virginia Tech, cautioned against “digital exceptionalism,” or the idea that everything is different now that the silicon chip has been harnessed for the controlled movement of electrons.

It’s a difficult thing for people to accept, especially those who have spent their lives building those chips or the software they run. “Just on a psychological level,” Vinsel said, “people want to live in an exciting moment. Students want to believe they’re part of a generation that’s going to change the world through digital technology or whatever.”

Perhaps no single human embodies the concept of digital exceptionalism more than Levandowski. In an anecdote from a 2013 New Yorker profile, he showed the writer Burkhard Bilger his collection of “vintage illustrations and newsreels on his laptop” of the failed attempts to have cars drive themselves in the past. Levandowski may not be a student of history, but he’s hardly ignorant. For all his bluster, Levandowski may be more like Henry Ford than he lets on.

When Vinsel tells his students about the importance of history, he references the philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s classic work On Bullshit, which experienced a brief resurgence in 2016. Frankfurt argued that bullshit is not about lying so much as simply not giving a shit about truth. Bullshit is saying whatever you need to get elected or to build hype around your product or get that next round of venture capital funding or win that government contract.

“I think history leads you to be a bullshit detector,” Vinsel said. He supposes this may be the fundamental incompatibility between tech companies, which disseminate an awful lot of bullshit, and their disdain for an honest reading of history. Perhaps, he thought, they might see a little too much of it in themselves. After all, Vinsel added, “there’s not a lot of innovation in bullshit.”

“We didn’t come up with this idea,” Levandowski once said of cars driving themselves. “We just got lucky that the computers and sensors were ready for us.” He believes this time is different, just like everyone before him believed their time was different. It’s a gigantic downer to be told otherwise. In many ways, that’s what history is.

Editor's note: After this article was finalized for print publication, Levandowski declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy following a court order to repay Google $179 million.

Everything Is Innovative When You Ignore the Past syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

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swipestream · 7 years ago

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Sensor Sweep: Lin Carter, Tolkien, and Modiphius Conan

Fiction (Tolkien and Fantasy blog): “The Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series, which published some 70-odd books from 1969-1974, is justly renowned, and Lin Carter (1930-1988) is often acclaimed as the editor of the series, but he was not the editor. Look at the footer of every single one of his introductions to books in the series: his title is given as “Editorial Consultant, The Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series.” The Editor of the series was actually Betty Ballantine. What titles Carter suggested for the series had to have her approval, and since Carter’s own taste was known to reach pretty low, we can be grateful to Betty Ballantine for holding the reins and keeping the standards higher.”

Gaming (Pulsipher Game Design): “I make games that are models of something, or are “pure” abstract games, that is, games that are very simple in conception. But there is an opposite philosophy of making a puzzle-like game more complex so that the puzzle is harder to solve. Simplification is quite a different matter in that situation, and something I can’t address specifically both because it’s the opposite of my philosophy and because I dislike that kind of so-called ‘game’.”

Fiction (American Conservative): “In the 20th century, as noted above, the greatest expression of a proper romanticism can be found in the works of Tolkien as well as in the works of the other Inklings, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, and Lord David Cecil. In terms of sales and influence, however, Tolkien has far exceeded that of his closest friends. For almost anyone under the age of 70, Tolkien is a champion of great art and high imagination. For an older generation—in general—he still, unfortunately, represents decadent hippiness, magic mushrooms, and psychedelic tuning out.”

Media (Bradford Walker Blog): “With the bad news about Justice League coming out over the weekend (taking in only $94M when it needed twice that to have a shot at breaking even, and needing to hit $1B domestic to be profitable), you know it’s going to mean bad reactions from all of the trustworthy folks. Midnight’s Edge had their say the other day. Today it’s time for the World Class Bullshitters.”

Fiction (The Weekly Standard): “In 1882, a Minnesota writer and politician named Ignatius Donnelly published Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, perhaps the most popular work of pseudo-science of the 19th century. Its opening pages confidently set forth 13 propositions about the legendary island kingdom—notably that Atlantis was real, that it was an advanced civilization with colonies in ancient Egypt and South America, and that it invented the alphabet and writing, practiced monotheistic sun-worship, and possessed sophisticated scientific know-how. Regrettably, as Donnelly wrote, ‘Atlantis perished in a terrible convulsion of nature, in which the whole island sunk into the ocean, with nearly all its inhabitants.’ “

Gaming (Tales to Astound): “The ‘Edge of Night’ sector includes over 400 star systems and marks the furthest spinward expansion of humanity from The Earth Before. The name refers to “The Night”; a vast of rift of dust and gas, devoid of star systems, and much too wide to cross with existing jump technology. No one knows what lies beyond ‘The Night’; likewise, many of the sectors’ inhabited systems are largely unknown to those in more civilized space.”

Gaming (Modiphius): “London 14 Nov 2017: Modiphius Entertainment is pleased to announce a fresh set of releases from its Conan: Adventures in an Age Undreamed Of RPG, with a Gamesmaster Screen, four exciting tile sets, a double poster map and the limited edition Conqueror’s Bag, a wealth of goodies to fuel gamers’ adventures in the Hyborian Age.

The Conan Gamesmaster’s Screen & GM’s toolkit is available for the first time in physical form, and features a sturdy four-panel build has four portrait-oriented panels, contains all of the useful tables and charts from the core rulebook, as well as rules summaries for quick reference. May also double as a shield from arrows, thrown tankards or ale horns, and even hatchets!”

Fiction (DMR Books): “As with most things, I find myself being exposed to the classics late in life, rather than during my formative years where most people seem to encounter them. As such, I’ve never read Jack Vance until now, “The Dying Earth” being my first. I was immediately enthralled by this collection of loosely-related short stories set in the distant future when our civilization is but a forgotten memory, machinery has been replaced by sorcery, and the sun is on the verge of being extinguished.

The stories in “The Dying Earth” are based on fantasy concepts that have become familiar to most of us over the decades, and yet here, they remain fresh. Plot devices that have become somewhat trite over the years are implemented in such a way that it feels like the first time I’m encountering them. This makes for a very thoughtful and enjoyable read that never fails to spark imagination. This is all well and good, but it takes more than just imagination for me to finish a book. “The Dying Earth” is unique because of the nature of the ambition of Vance’s characters, made evident in three ways:

Unabashed self-interest 2. Ongoing pursuit for perfection 3. Determination to find independence from the collective.”

Sensor Sweep: Lin Carter, Tolkien, and Modiphius Conan published first on http://ift.tt/2zdiasi

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cover32-yahoopartner-blog · 7 years ago

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Answering emails Qs Titans

What does Eric Decker bring that the Titans don’t have?

Experience. Rishard Matthews is the only veteran unless you now count Tajae Sharpe and McBride. Harry Douglas has been around but many have counted him out already. Douglas has not been cut and will be with the Titans throughout training camp. It’s been a long time since the Titans had an experienced group of professional veteran wide receivers to teach the young players. Matthews was new last year as was Andre Johnson. Coaching turnover led to everyone learning a new offense so many times during the last several years. This is a very well built group. Corey Davis and Taywan Taylor should benefit greatly from these veterans.

What’s the biggest change this offseason?

No one wanting coach Mike Mularkey fired. He has always been in stressful tenuous situations where he had to turn around a team as he barely held onto his job. Winning breeds job security as does a General Manager building a solid team. Mularkey seems very secure and more relaxed and confident. I’m happy for him. I can’t recall seeing him this comfy since his Pittsburgh days.

Graphic that stated “No more Jetz allowed” in kid writing on a tree house

I love this. Yes, I’m pleased with the Decker addition but I am apprehensive of adding so many Jets the last few years. It’s odd how Jon Robinson was from Tampa and New England and there hasn’t been a predictable influx of players from those teams, but the New York Jets. I think Decker proved that I’ll be happy with good players from anywhere, but yes I do still have that sentiment.

AROUND COVER32

Around the NFL: Chiefs’ HC, Andy Reid receives contract extension, while GM, John Dorsey makes exit

What’s Trending: HOF LB, Lawrence Taylor, pleads guilty to DUI; avoids jail

NFL Comparisons: Is Pro Bowl DE, J.J. Watt the Brock Lesnar of the NFL

Player Spotlight: Four reasons why Raiders’ WR, Cordarelle Patterson excels in 2017

NFL Moments: Taking a look at the worst trade in Chicago Bears’ history

When will the Titans announce a new offense?

July 5th at 8:30 p.m.? I don’t think they will. I expect they will show a new offense during preseason, the reporters will question it, and then Mularkey will address it. I don’t like calling it a new offense. Let’s use words like adjusted or fine-tuned or altered or somesuch.

Love your Joe Gibbs idea

Thank you. I received a bunch of great feedback on that article. It fits their personnel perfectly in my opinion and also offers a minimal transition from where they are now. As I wrote previously, their staff probably knows it well as everyone did for a decade or so.

Is Decker or Matthews their best slot wide receiver?

Unless there’s a change, the slot is a poor spot in a Mularkey offense. I’ve written about this many times. The Titans best slot weapon is Delanie Walker and newcomer Jonnu Smith could be number two here. I could see an argument made for DeMarco Murray as he did well in the slot during the first four weeks last season. Mularkey wants a mismatch and his O often has the threat of pounding the ball with a few tight ends. The Titans haven’t had a Welker or Edelman type and I don’t think Decker will play that role unless an offensive change happens.

Jayon Brown should be an inside linebacker, that’s where we need the help?

Well, he’s going to only play a role he can succeed in. The Titans can’t adopt a square peg round hole philosophy. Brown struggled against the run in college, so I imagine the Titans want to see how he fares in pads and in live-action games. His speed and coverage ability is best suited for outside linebacker.

Most underrated player

Antwaun Woods.I can’t say it enough. Watch last preseason and watch week 17. He did not appear to struggle with the transition from USC to the NFL.

What writing advice could you offer me?

Learn the inverted pyramid and buy a book nicknamed The Scott.

Best football reporter in your experience?

Steve Cohen. He’s fallen off the map somewhat and I hope he’s loving whatever he is up to now. For 10-20 years, he would “hop on” the radio and “give me” all the injury news I needed in like five minutes. I’ve never found anyone to be so concise and direct for my fantasy football needs or Titans needs or anything like that. You didn’t ask of a writer but a reporter, so I assumed radio reports qualify.

Best guy on the Titans?

Well, Marcus Mariota has so much goodness to him. I think I’d probably lean toward Delanie Walker here. It seems like once a month he is showing his kind and generous heart doing some charity work and “giving back.” This is a tough Q and kudos to Jon Robinson for that.

What do you think of people now predicting success for the Titans?

It’s odd that Eric Decker would stir this up. He isn’t a Jerry Rice or Walter Payton type superstar. I think many just viewed him as a necessary piece to the puzzle. I don’t support it. It’s not how I am. I have more of a show me or prove it attitude toward teams. Free agency has made me a fool too many times over the years. The Titans appear to be a very good team, but they still haven’t beaten Andrew Luck and JJ Watt will always worry me. A natural progression would be for them to make the playoffs, next year make the championship game, and the year after to win the Superbowl. This process was oddly common for years and then free agency changed the league. I still remember it though and think that teams do need to lose first before they win. There will be no shame in losing to Tom Brady and then beating him the following year. I’m a bit uneasy of this supposed rush the national writers’ predictions have now put on the team. They will be good to very good. Let’s get the rookies some experience before we have them hoisting the Lombardi trophy.

Best player ever

Jim Thorpe. Best athlete ever too. It’s not even close. In my opinion, if someone thinks anyone else, then they haven’t read enough about Thorpe. He was that special. To summarize far too briefly- THREE professional sports, Olympic winner, coach and player.

What about Randall Cunningham, Michael Vick, and others would you have Mariota adopt if you could?

Nothing of Vick. He was blazing fast and had a huge cannon of an arm. I don’t think he qualifies in this light. Steve Young rolled out beautifully; he bought time and avoided injuries this way. I’d like to see some of that. Randall used to punt. I loved it! He wasn’t that great at punting but defenses were too worried of the Eagles converting a fourth down, so they often didn’t put their return team in. If Mariota could punt 35 yards, I’d be intrigued.

Will Mariota come out so Tyler Ferguson can run? Wouldn’t this keep Mariota healthy?

I could imagine a set of goal line plays where the Titans put him in at the five-yard line or closer. Maybe those plays work on 4th and one yard also. Aside from these situations, it would be too predictable for them to swap out the quarterbacks like that.

I hope Mularkey is as afraid of Mariota getting injured as I am. The plays need to be different so he is better protected.

Surely Mularkey is quite concerned of Mariota being injured again. I think we can safely say that. One thing people will have to struggle with this year is Mariota is going to be at risk at some points. It’s a violent game and it can not be played in a way that a guy runs around the field scared all the time. An offensive coordinator can not always call plays in this vein either. Mariota has to be Mariota. If he starts acting timid or scared, it will negatively impact his game. One thing that may make you feel better here is to look up some quotes by Taylor Lewan and the line. It hurts their pride when “their boy” gets hurt. They are fired up to protect him better in 2017 and they were fantastic in 2016.

International questions

I can’t really reply well with Google translate. I’ve tried and I’m sorry. Sometimes the language barrier is too much. I am extremely grateful that Yahoo and other sites have made me an international sports writer now. I don’t know Chinese or Ordu(?), and know very little Spanish and…I just can’t pull off replies well. I thank you so much for reading my articles and writing in. I am trying with Google translate and some other programs. I haven’t hashed this out yet. If you could try to write them in English maybe that would help. I’m working on it though. I did chat with some people from Singapore through an instant messenger program and that went OK with the program translating for us. It’s all very new to me, please bare with me.

The post Answering emails Qs Titans appeared first on Cover32.

#_uuid:416ecd21-7c24-3d74-a533-0edc44720dc3 #_lmsid:a0Vd000000DIJnLEAX #_revsp:cover32_362 #_author:Brian Moore

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junker-town · 8 years ago

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Does the NBA Draft Combine still matter?

The stars stopped showing up but there are still jobs to be won and lost -- for prospects and GMs — at the Combine.

CHICAGO — John Calipari was holding court by the baseline with a small group of writers. On the court behind him players wearing unfamiliar numbers and matching gear ran up and down in an endless 5-on-5 scrimmage while the men who hold their professional fate in their hands watched intently from the bleachers.

Surreal only begins to describe the NBA Draft Combine, a curious blip on the annual calendar in which the whole league gathers for two days at this West Side gym for the ostensible purpose of working out, measuring, and evaluating prospects. At its heart, the combine is a networking event wrapped around the middle of the playoff calendar. Everyone who is anyone in the NBA is here, and even unattached evaluators roll through town for the annual meet and greet.

Reporters position themselves for a bump and a side chat with GMs and information is the only viable currency. Writers want to know what the GMs are going to do, GMs want to know more about the players, and the players want to protect their interests. The players (via their agents) have come to understand that their information is so valuable that much of is not worth disclosing at the combine. It all makes for an awkward dance.

What was notable, but not surprising, about this year’s combine was who wasn’t here. Markelle Fultz, the likely No. 1 overall pick had already skipped town after a handful of private meetings with teams. Lonzo Ball, Josh Jackson, and Jayson Tatum didn’t even show at all. De’Aaron Fox, Calipari’s latest point guard prodigy, was in attendance and agreed to be measured but talk to the press until Friday.

Tough break for the scribes scrounging for a story, but then Cal appeared and all was well in our world. Observing the impromptu scene gathering around the Kentucky coach, New Orleans coach Alvin Gentry asked Cal in his deadpan manner if he could get him a chair. No need, the man was in his element delivering a delightful 20-minute back-and-forth that was part recruiting bluster and part improv comedy act for the grateful gaggle.

Cal pitched his players, sold his program, and even invited a writer to call him if he wanted to come to Kentucky to see the Wildcat madness for himself. He sliced his distinctions so thick he left a vapor trail of pithy spin and sharp-elbowed one-liners.

“I would never lie, but I’m not tilting it,” Calipari said about his conversations with NBA people. “There may be information that I’m not going to give them, but I’ll never lie.”

How do you do that, Cal?

Nelson Chenault-USA TODAY Sports

“Have you ever been around me before?” he answered in mock seriousness to the writers who were clearly gathered around him. “You’d figure I’d have a way of doing it where nobody would be offended and they walk away saying, ‘What did he just say? Did he really say that? I don’t even know what he just said.’ Then they call me and I won’t pick up the phone.”

And if they lie to you about where one of your players might get picked?

“Then I won’t let them in the gym,” he shot back.

Cal held forth on Malik Monk: “Malik Monk is special, folks. Special.” He endorsed his big man Bam Adebayo — “I’ll be stunned if he’s not a lottery pick” — and made the case for Fox by casually reminding us that he also coached John Wall and Eric Bledsoe without so much as taking a breath in offering this breathless critique:

“I asked John Wall about that. I said, ‘John, is he as fast as you?’ He said, ‘Naaah. I asked Eric Bledsoe. He said, ‘Naaah.’ But he’s fast. Let me say this, John Wall uses his speed as a weapon. Wasn’t as good with the ball, scoring wise at that age. De’Aaron has floaters. He’s not a great 3-point shooter. Neither was John. John’s thing was ‘I’m going to that rim and I’m going to dunk on you.’ This kid didn’t use it as a weapon. The whole thing all season, sprint the ball for layups and when he did it was like, ‘Oh my god.’ He doesn’t view it as a weapon. Yet. When he views it as a weapon, it’s a wrap.”

Then there was the curious case of Hamidou Diallo, a preps-to-pros prospect who enrolled at Kentucky but didn’t play. Because he’s a year removed from his high school class, Diallo is eligible for the draft but he hasn’t signed with an agent yet and is keeping his options open.

Jasen Vinlove-USA TODAY Sports

Diallo wowed observers with his 44 1/2-inch vertical leap, but that’s just about all that anyone knows about the kid. Oddly enough, that may be his biggest advantage heading into the draft, along with that jaw-dropping vertical.

“Hami, they don’t know. Well, don’t show them,” Cal said. “They all like you right now without watching you. Good! The more you don’t play the more they like you, so don’t play! If someone takes him in the lottery, I will retire. There’s nothing more I can do. Four months, doesn’t play, lottery pick. I’m stopping.”

He’s not stopping, of course, not when he keeps churning out a steady supply of NBA prospects year after year. But then someone asked him the key question about this year’s combine. This week no less a figure than Kevin Durant suggested that the whole thing was a waste of time. Durant still harbors bad feelings about being embarrassed after he was unable to bench press 185 pounds a decade ago. There’s no way that in 2017 a player like Durant sets foot in Chicago, let alone subjects himself to a strength test.

“He may be right,” Calipari said. “For the guys if you think there’s anything here that will hurt you, don’t come. If there’s anything here that will help you, come. If you have to play to help yourself, come. If it doesn’t help you playing then don’t play. My job is to protect my guys. The job of these NBA teams is to get as much information as they can to get a great pick. So they would like to see every one of them play 5-on-5. It’s not the way it is for these kids.”

No, but then not everybody here is a top-5 pick and not everybody is a 5-star Kentucky recruit. For everyone else, which is most of the players here, this is a job audition. It’s the first step in a month-long evaluation process that will include countless meetings and coast-to-coast flights for individual workouts.

There are 30 guaranteed contracts on the line and 30 more opportunities after that to be chosen. The odds are stacked against many of these players having a career at all, let alone one that will endure. Emerge here with good measurables, solid play, and strong interviews and those odds can increase ever so slightly in their favor.

For a team with multiple picks, the combine is as good a chance to see these players up close. Nail these picks and a franchise’s fortunes can improve tremendously. Mess one up and it becomes that much harder to breakthrough in the future. So, yes, the combine still has value. It just depends on who you ask.

Stephen R. Sylvanie-USA TODAY Sports

Consider Ivan Rabb, a 6’10 sophomore from California who was part of a celebrated recruiting class that included Celtics’ forward Jaylen Brown. Viewed as a potential lottery pick last year in a weak draft, Rabb went back to school and is now looking at the latter half of the first round. No regrets, though.

“I thought I needed it,” Rabb said. “The plan is to stick in the league for a long time, not get there as soon as possible. So I feel like I made the best decision for me.”

He added a bit of range, but his numbers didn’t improve noticeably and the Bears had a disappointing season. Without the proven ability to stretch the floor, Rabb lacks an obvious offensive role in the NBA. But he can rebound and rebounding translates across all levels. This is a chance to tell his story and he came across as prepared and focused.

“I changed my mentality a lot,” Rabb said. “I’m way more mature off the court, being able to say no to people. And on the court just knowing how to work. I did before but now it’s on a whole different level. I think people don’t know I got better. I was doubled every game so it was hard to show what I can really do. Now when I get in a setting where I’m not being doubled I can showcase my game.”

Then there’s Justin Patton, a 7-footer from Creighton who grew from 6’2 to 6’9 before his sophomore season in high school and took a redshirt season while he grew into his body. If Rabb is poised and confident, Patton is endearingly earnest. He plans to wear a bowtie on draft night because, “It’s kind of my signature.”

Kyle Terada-USA TODAY Sports

Patton needed to be here because even though he’s viewed as a mid first-rounder, nothing in his basketball career has ever been guaranteed. He was barely recruited out of high school and as he noted, if he didn’t have that growth spurt he wouldn’t be here at all. His one season with the Blue Jays was a revelation, showcasing a long, skilled player doused with that magic pixie dust of upside.

“I wasn’t focused on anyone else,” Patton said. “I was just focused on coming here, getting better and putting my results in. It’s a good experience. I’ve never been through an experience like this. I have the chip on my shoulder because people didn’t think I was good enough. There’s still some doubt in people’s mind. My job is to do as best I can to eliminate everyone’s doubt.”

During his interview process, one team asked him what he would do if he was driving and came upon a yellow light. Would he put his foot on the gas or slow to a stop? “Depends on where I’m going” was his answer, which seemed like a clever enough response. (Pressed on which team asked the question, Patton gave up the Timberwolves to which the assembled Chicago writers answered on cue, “Thibs!”)

Even as the top prospects were nowhere to be found, the combine endures with all of its fixation on wingspans, vertical leaps, and shuttle run times. For players like Patton and Rabb it’s their showcase and their stage to make a lasting impression. I asked Patton what he learned about himself during that redshirt season and he had a great answer ready for that one, as well.

“My potential is unfathomable,” he said. “I can go as far as I want to go. I learned there’s really no limit. I learned I can be ready for this.”

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andrewuttaro · 6 years ago

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New Look Sabres: Preseason GM 6 - PIT

Guess who aren’t Stanley Cup Champions anymore! It’s the Pittsburgh Penguins. Before their back to back Cups I complained about the Chicago Blackhawks and the LA Kings and their fans that were far from gracious winners. I look back upon those years of Western domination somewhat fondly now. Somehow the Pens have always been well represented in Western New York. You may have already heard this rant but either way I’ll save it. I will say the most refreshing thing about the Washington Capitals winning the Cup is that it’s a more grateful market of sports and they feel like kindred spirits for us Sabres fans. I feel like a broken record saying this is just the preseason. I just want to get into some regular season trash talk. This game was pirates only to watch but it’s hard to get colicky about that this close to the regular season. This game was the second matchup between these two teams this preseason. This time both teams switched roles from their meeting last week. Pittsburgh brought their A-team and Buffalo brought the hot Young Sheldon competitor show Young Sabres. Knowing this the result shouldn’t be terribly surprising. The Buffalo Sabres lost 5-1. The only result more decisive than this game’s boxscore is the effect it has on the final cuts.

I don’t really feel the need to recap the scoring in this game. The Penguins scored a lot of goals: Letang, Brassard, Kessel twice, and Cullen who is looking to become the Canadian Jagr at the age of 41. The one thing we can pull from the boxscore that looks good for the Sabres is that Alex Nylander scored. He’s had more than a couple assists this preseason so this goal seems like the fruit of his labor. Marco Scandella passed to Jason Pominville who made a quick pass to Nylander who skated up in front of the goal and put it home. I was still driving home from Buffalo State when I heard the goal happen. It was the nice part of this game because when I got home and started looking for streams the Sabres were already starting to get buried. I ended my stream hunting there. Believe it or not a few other Sabres looked good in this game. Lawrence Pilut, who probably doesn’t make the team but is a shoe-in for a call-up, had some wicked poke checks and defensive plays. Rasmus Asplund looked vaguely hungry this game but not enough to secure a spot last minute. Justin Bailey looked okay but the spiel on him doesn’t really change… hmm… okay time to get negative.

Justin Bailey: he was played on the wing in this game: played in two straight games at different positions. That’s desperate grasping at straws for a fit. This is the end of the line for him to make the Sabres. I refuse to mock injured players so I am going to be real straight forward about the Johan Larsson injury: it sounds bad enough to hold him out of regular season games. He was already a very weak lock to make the team. If he’s still a Sabre when he’s healthy I am not convinced there will be a spot left for him to take. It’s the unfortunate reality of this business. It was fun having you, Johan. Matt Tennyson was a fan punching bag last season and this game makes you not want to see him in a Sabres uniform again. There was a group of young Sabres sent down yesterday announced a few hours before the game that included CJ Smith. It was a little surprising Smith went down before Will Borgen. Will Borgen played himself out of a spot against Pittsburgh. He’s a guy you forget about, I routinely misidentified him as a forward, but this game made you notice him in all the wrong ways. One of the Kessel goals looked atrocious because Kessel skated into the zone untouched and just tapped it in. Gross from everyone involved in that. And as much as I love my friend forever Linus Ullmark, three, maybe four of these goals were stoppable. This doesn’t hurt his stock, it just finally made me remember why Jason Botterill got a starter for him to play behind this season in Carter Hutton.

Speaking of management, Phil Housley said after this game that this was a nice lesson for the young guys. That seems like it could go without saying since he iced this team against that Penguins team: He was very clearly narrowing down the roster for final cuts and this last preseason season game trip to Oshawa, Ontario on Friday includes team building stuff. Most of the lineup that played in this game will not see action again, this season at least. I will have a blog post “Training Camp Closes” early next week in which I dissect what this team looks like going into opening night so I won’t do that here. However, just like this game was a teaching moment for the Young Sabres, I think it’s a teaching moment for Sabres fans. Anthony Sciandra, a fantastic Sabres writer for the Hockey Writers (find him on twitter), pointed out during this game that with how the lineup now looks heading into the final cuts, Wilson and Girgensons are probably both kept as extras. The lesson here as fans is that we have to count blessings before we count hype. Coming into camp it looked like the whole fourth line and several winger positions would be up for grabs. That was a little too hyperbolic. I am guilty of it too. I feel bad how I talked about Larsson; he really was a fun player sometimes on the Sabres teams of these last three years. We got to count blessings first this time of year: who amongst us saw Alex Nylander and Tage Thompson as shoe-in starters on Labor Day? Maybe Anthony Sciandra (seriously, go follow him, he’s that good). I very openly called Nylander the “lesser Nylander brother” in my offseason retrospective. I mean it’s hard to compare him to Willie right now, since Willie is sitting on a couch in Sweden but you get my point. Thompson and Nylander showed up and no one really saw it coming.

Tomorrow’s Islanders game in Oshawa is our last preseason game! I am so ready for this to be done. The only real interest I have for this last go at it is that it probably features the opening night roster with only subtle tweaks. That and what is this team building activity? Are they going to go to Steve Dangle’s house and play NHL 19? Eichel is a real competitor at Chel I’ve heard. I would understand you not sharing this recap with your friends, what a bloodbath for the poor Young Sabres. However I would appreciate it. Also: I thought if you invite criticism you get it overflowing? I have asked for input over and over. You all are really passing up on the opportunity to call me stupid and spellcheck me. Do you have a Will Borgen hot take and think I sold him short? Hit me up on twitter @EternalRhino15. I really would love to hear such a hot take. One last ride on this preseason train and then real deal starts! I hope you join me on the journey ahead.

Thanks for reading.

P.S. My Nylander apology will probably come next New Look Sabres or the Training Camp Closes one after that.

#buffalo sabres #pittsburgh penguins #preseason #hockey #nhl

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