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stallithehooch-12 · 3 years ago

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Stalli talks... Videophone

In 2008 we saw the rise of a legend in the making, Stefani Joanne Germonatta changed the pop landscape with her debut album the fame and brought dance pop back to the forefront of public interest. However another huge popstar and absolute unmatched legend made a crossover to synth pop, Beyonce. With her 2009 album release I am… Sasha Fierce we saw Beyonce fully take on synth pop and push herself in an artistic direction we had never seen before and dare I say, we have ever really seen since. Now don’t get me wrong, Beyonce has surpassed by leaps and bounds the simpleton music of I am but till this day the music from that album still has us engaging in rapturous discussions over it’s placement in her legacy. I am pushed beyonce in many ways, from expanding her style and fashion decisions to her tackling vocals and production we had never heard her on before. I think it’s her collaboration with Gaga on the underrated hit Video Phone that really has me thinking as of late.

Twitter has been rife with discussion lately over the pairing of Beyonce and Gaga as a musical duo. Were they ever really that good? Or are we just remembering a time when icons were icons and yearning for a pop culture renaissance? The answer is, well, both. And even though I could go on for hours about how “telephone” isn’t just one of the best collaborations between women of all time, it’s one of the best musical endeavours ever created in this dimension-we are here to discuss the impact of videophone and how in recent years it’s gone through a surge in popularity.

I don’t think there's any doubt that beyonce is beyonce and gaga is gaga. Two artists who live in such polar opposite worlds that when they crossed over they learned lessons from each other that affected their art mutually for years long after they had released both songs.

Videophone was a collaboration that allowed Gaga to step into the world of beyonce and be a version of herself that she would have never presented at the time. Instead of piss colored wigs (yes she did call it that) green hair and giant disco sticks. Gaga was a beautiful, blonde haired vixen who was alluring and sexy on the song almost like a pop chanteuse similar to that of an early cher. Beyonce on the record does what she does best , make us get up and feel confident in ourselves in a way that only the queen could.

From the selection of the beat to the way Beyonce sings, to even the featuring of Gaga, everything about this track screamed different. With a thumping bass in the back the beyonce on b’day who almost faithfully utilized real instruments has been ditched for a much more production driven bey. One who isn’t afraid to get down and dirty with the beat and let it drive the song in ways that you wouldn’t expect. The Beyonce of I am sasha fierce was one of transition, a young woman ready to become a grown woman who was ready to experiment and try many different things without question.

And I think that’s what it is. In 2021 we expect Gaga to give us an electro pop smash, we expect Bey to make culture shifting projects. We have preconceived almost concrete notions of what these Icons are going to give us. But something like videophone that's simple yet different but culture shifting at the same time is a relic of a bygone era in pop culture. Legends in the making don’t decide to do fun collaborations like this anymore. Something that isn’t a heavy ballad but a sexy exciting romp through the soundscape of 2009. I think it’s hard in a sense for beyonce’s younger stans to comprehend a world where she was just fun, especially in 2021 when we’ve seen her push every musical boundary currently existing. So today we celebrate videophone with gaga and take it for what it was. Two legends who knew they were the hottest in the game teaming up give us something fun, a move we may never really see again with the way the perception of what a pop star is changes everyday. Cheers to videophone!

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sweetiecenter · 5 years ago

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Fallout, Borderlands, and how a Medium Compliments a Theme.

Fallout, Borderlands, and how the Theme can serve the Medium well, and vice versa. A small essay by me about two of my favorite game series.

2K Games and Bethesda are industry giants. Both of these studios have built their companies on the backs of extremely successful game franchises.

In the case of 2K, they built their franchise around sports, as well as Sid Meier’s RTS, Civilization, as well as delving into many other genres. It wasn’t until 2K started to delve into RPGs like Bioshock, from the creators of System Shock 2, that they started to develop their formula.

For Bethesda, they got their massive start a bit earlier with id software with games like Doom and Wolfenstein, which almost singlehandedly popularized the FPS genre.

Both of these industry giants are responsible for thousands of hours of love and enjoyment, and Bioshock 2 is singlehandedly responsible for growing my love of video games, and their writing.

There are two franchises from these respective companies that are both known for being notable open-world, first person RPGs: Borderlands and Fallout, and both series were published by their respective companies around the same time, with Borderlands 1 entering development in 2005, and Bethesda being commissioned to work on Fallout 3 in 2007, which later turned into Bethesda buying the rights and absorbing Interplay. Fallout 3 was released in 2008 on October 28, with Borderlands coming out almost exactly a year later.

As time has gone on, both companies have paid mutual respect to each other, particularly in regards to these FPSRPG games; Borderlands 2 even has a gun called thre dog in reference to the infamous Three Dog from Fallout 3. The similarities between the themes and playstyle of these games has led to many comparisons, but I would just like to take the time to talk about how each respective game does justice to the themes of their stories and the medium they use.

So what are the themes of these games, really?

The more unique taglines and themes of these games would be “war never changes” and “everyone is the hero of their own story” for Fallout and Borderlands, respectively. The underlying themes that go unspoken (mostly), seem to be anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism.

The anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism arguments are where it gets interesting.

First, let’s look at how both games use American culture and atmosphere to their advantage and to get their point across.

We can all agree that governments are, at their core, made to protect folks, right? That is their stated job. It is in their job description. Especially in America, the idea is that you should never, ever have your rights taken from you. We are surrounded by people who believe in the government, and if not in the government, then in your country itself. Patriotism has its own dedicated holiday! This is why Fallout has such a huge focus on how the government of their universe shifted away from protecting people, and how they have become imperialistic, jingoistic, and xenophobic. Even if you hate the military, the world of Fallout is intended to make you go “shit, at least we aren’t THAT bad”.

And this tone helps to set the theme for the Fallout games. Everywhere you turn, you are completely let down by the people you rely on. Looks are deceptive, and yet they aren’t. The dark and gritty atmosphere of the games are constantly screaming at you that the world has already ended, even as Ron Perlman tells you it is only the beginning. Happy endings are nonexistent in almost every case, with the sole exception of perhaps the Courier... but then, the Courier is the only one with no ties to a Vault. No delusions of grandeur, no expectations.

It should be noted that in the dialogue choices as the Courier, you are the most aware of everything that has happened. Instead of being shocked that someone shot you in the head, you are apathetic at best and mostly want the package back; even if you roleplay your courier as a revenge-driven mailman, they are never surprised. Disappointed? Oh, almost certainly.

The first time I booted up the original Fallout and saw the Overseer start talking, my first thought was:

“This is it. Humanity has degenerated into ridiculous blue cavemen.”

I think the design of the Overseer was very intentionally made to be odd, and to showcase that the people have changed. Then you step out into the wasteland. You see the disconnect between the Vaults, the only remnants of pre-war society in the first game, and the rest of the world.

The discovery that the government willingly let all these experiments happen only adds to our disgust as we piece things together, piece by piece. You become jaded and cynical, and in your quest to save everyone, you truly have changed. Sure, the Overseer exiling you because “you’re different” may seem weird and a flimsy excuse to keep the experiment going, but it has a hint of truth to it. You’ve changed. You’re knowledgeable. You can no longer be controlled by the propaganda you had taken as the truth, that all Vault residents had taken as the truth. This disconnect between reality and the Vaults is further explored whenever you reach a new Vault.

Finding out the horrifying truth about what the Vaults were, what they were made for, never gets any easier. The game’s sound design is always made to harken back to something behind you, in some way. The base game’s sound design usually invokes paranoia and fear, while the radios that constantly play music from a bygone era invoke a general feeling of “nothing will ever be the same”.

All in all, Fallout does a fantastic job of setting the basis of its universe. Worldbuilding is a massive part, and their is little to nothing left unknown for a savvy player, should you be willing to listen to exposition. The overall tone is tragic and bleak, in order to juxtapose itself with the pre-war propaganda.

Which brings us to Borderlands.

Borderlands does not ask you as a player to think. It does not ask you to feel. The main focus has never been the story, and yet it is still a beautiful aspect of it, in the way of all the things that go left unsaid. How did the sirens come to be? Who knows. How did all the Eridians die out? Who knows. Why is it so much god damn fun to shoot a vertically challenged man in a gas mask and watch his head explode? Who knows.

Borderlands never gives you enough time to reflect on the overarching theme of the series. Compared to Fallout the game is much more fast-paced and linear, but if you take the time, you can see everything fall apart as the story progresses. You have no choice. Nothing you do ever matters, especially in the face of corporate overlords. All these bandits you’ve been fighting? They were normal people once. Convicts, sure, but they were also taken advantage of, brought to this strange alien planet and used as slave labor. Fresh off of the heels of Fallout, you could ask yourself, “what sick government would do this?” The answer is it isn’t a government. It is a corporation that styles itself as a government.

There lies the sick joke of the Borderlands series. This isn’t some far fetched, awful alternate reality. This is the future, where corporations continue down the same path they are on now - unchecked, allowed to ruin the worlds, contracted by governments - and nobody did a god damn thing. These guns you buy? Produced by Atlas. The clothes you’re wearing? Probably Hyperion fashion. The planets you come from? Owned almost completely by corporations. Atlas has an iron grip on Promethea, and Mister Torgue literally blew up an entire PLANET, even if it is played for laughs.

Just like in Fallout, nobody is on your side - and yet you know this. You embrace futility anyway; you buy Atlas, you buy Hyperion, and you buy Maliwan because at the end of the day, they are more powerful than any Vault Monster you could hope to kill. The bright tones and dark humor of the Borderlands are a direct result of embracing futility. The fun does not lie within facing your oppressors, it lies within killing them over and over. The thing that makes Borderlands so celebrated is its replayability; in Fallout, everything you do is permanent. Borderlands has next to no permanence. No matter how many Hyperion soldiers you kill, you won’t put a dent in them. These corporations span six whole galaxies.

Borderlands doesn’t need to set an atmosphere to make you immerse yourself in the story. We already know corporations are horrible. Jeff Bezos spends his money on space while Amazon employees die of exhaustion.

The horror of these two games directly correspond with each other. Fallout is horrifying because of past deeds, because of what could have come to pass. Borderlands is horrifying because of what still could happen.

Both of these game series have, in many’s opinion, fallen off in recent years, but I personally will always have a special place in my heart for these wonderful games and their storytelling.

Thank you for reading.

#long post #fallout #fallout 2 #fallout 3 #fallout 4 #borderlands #borderlands 2 #borderlands 3 #video games #bethesda #2k games #mine #sweetiecenter

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welcometomysflife · 8 years ago

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Regarding the death of loved ones, being in the country and the nickname ‘Poppity’

I’m writing this as I fly back from Lumberton, NC, where my last living grandparent (mom’s mom) and my uncle and family live. I was called to fly out because my mom told me that my grandma,’Motiba’, finally called us and told us we could come out. We need permission to visit because over the past 40 years, the relations between the my mom and her 5 siblings have been increasingly fraught and strained, to put it mildly. We basically have little to no relations with 40% of the that immediate family. There was some origin ‘big bang’ that I’m not even sure that the siblings even remember the details of. They just remember their grand egos, stiff backs and perceived slights. Since they’re already predisposed to not trusting or liking each other, even, it has been easy to build lives without each other through the years.

Then, we kids grew up and were like --- what the hell happened in those days? --- and no one is willing to talk about it – using any kind of excuse to change the subject.

The last time I saw most of this family was in 2008 – during my brother’s wedding, weeks after Obama won the first time.

Suffice to say, I don’t really know these people as people – more just as combinations of memory and gossip.

It was under this cloudy sky that I was told by my mom that Motiba had called and told us that she was soon to be called up to see visit her doctor in Philly and would erstwhile move in with another uncle – arguably the craziest and most disagreeable- up there. And before that, we should come out to visit her in NC. Because we didn’t know when she’d be called away, we decided that my mom should go soon, to visit. So, she pinched her nose and bought a ticket. A very pricey ticket. I was hemming and hawing and wringing my hands for a few weeks – due to price and just not want to go – but finally also pinched my nose and bought a flight – a VERY VERY pricey flight – and flew over for the weekend.

As far as family weekends go, this was remarkably uneventful. We ate, a lot. Like as if there was a family wedding happening kind of quantities and varieties. We also just chatted and slept. We rarely left the house. This suited my uncle’s family, as they run a motel and are generally just homebodies. This also suited Motiba, because everyone was under the same roof, in somewhat tighter quarters, making the house feel very full and lively. It was a unique time to see her with her great grandson, my nephew, playing around. I always thought that only white people had great grandparents. Our grandparents just died, tired and worn out. Motiba is the exception – in her late eighties/nineties (not really sure how old she is – she probably doesn’t really know either). Motiba has always been incredibly resilient – a bastian of determination and effort. She is an uneducated wife of a government worker, with 6 kids and countless extended family members – who would always drop in to eat – who became widowed when my mom, the youngest, was 16. Since then she’s had to live on my grandfather’s pension and the goodwill of her family, children and likely others. To be honest, I don’t really know what she did for money in that decade after my grandfather died. I do know that we were desperately poor – living in a very basic government housing complex. I’ve heard stories from people that knew my mom in that era, that the apartment didn’t even have windows. It opened into a dark hallway and you had to go outside for natural sunlight. Out of that situation, my mom emerged a great student and worker. Her success is a testament to what my grandfather and Motiba showed and taught her about the value and power of an education. I would certainly not be here, typing on a macbook, flying across the country on a moment’s notice to see her, if my mom didn’t know how to survive post divorce, in part by having watched Motiba do it for 40 years.

That brings me back to this weekend. Lumberton is a rest stop town, on the north south highway in south-central North Carolina. It is all Indain-owned motels and chain restaurants. Though my uncle moved his family there from Philly almost 20 years ago, I still think of them as my cousins in Philly that just moved to North Carolina.

This entire trip, though I treated it like any weekend with people I always saw – maybe I’ll come to regret that decision, maybe not – Motiba made no bones about talking about how this might be the last time she sees all of us before she dies. She, with her relentless sarcasm and play on words, turned a bit melodramatic declaring that she was nearing ‘the far riverbank’, a play on the word ‘kinara’ that refers to borders. She was shamelessly declaring her nearing death. So much so that she even asked me how I would feel when she died!? (I gave some equally sharp play on words and got up from sitting with her). I both haven’t and don’t want to start considering a world without her, nor do I indulge folks who I feel are fishing for compliments. Perhaps she was legitimately looking for some kind approval/legitimacy/declaration that all of her efforts were noted and recognized (whats the word!!!!??), but I’m too emotionally stunted to be able to express those kinds of things without having had a drink first. And to my grandma, no less!?! Had I really started it, it would’ve been endless waterworks. Though I have a tough exterior, I do cry, a lot. Most recently while watching the final act of the stage production ‘In to the Woods. ‘

I have not considered what it would be like with knowing she was alive somewhere out east, doing her pujas, fasting at least 5 times a month, laughing and telling old stories. She has the sharpest memory and can still tell you the price of a gram of barley from 1950. She will weave in anecdotes of about some random uncle’s son, who cried a lot during my mom’s wedding…40 years ago, as an add on story to when I would cry, that one cold winter when visiting Philly in the early 90’s. Apparently the central heating of the building ran too hot, so I would only stop crying when I was walked around in the building’s lobby, and eventually was just set under the Christmas tree to sleep. Particularly fitting as I love Christmas trees this day.

Motiba is a grad repository of a bygone, and soon to be lost era in my family history. I’m not connected to anyone on that side of the family enough to be able to go to them for stories on who we were and how we got to be who we are now. How I got to be who I am now. Motiba was there through my mom’s childhood, her working, the negotiations around her marriage and the entire marriage. She was a key player and also a witness. My mom, is almost not qualified to tell me any of those stories and she’ll hold back details, and will have willfully forgotten large parts of her painful personal history. So what am I supposed to do now? Do I just actually stick to my promise and call her once a week? Should I be facetiming? Should I have ‘real’ conversations with her – telling her about my struggles at work, in finding my path in life, about my gayness and my love? Or do I keep it all top level, health and family and work (yeah yeah, its fine!). If I told her my TRUTH over the phone, would she be able to grasp it? Would she lose her mind? Seeing my uncle with my nephew this weekend reminded me of all of those men that say that their grandfather’s were their best friends in life – my nephew brings such joy to my uncle’s life. I have never see that man so soft and sweet and easy going. Makes me almost want to reconsider having children – the joy they seem to bring is quite palpable.

Could having a pet get you part of the way towards having that kind of joy?

Someone posted a comic to facebook today that showed a man sleeping with a dog on his bed. The man’s dream showed how he had gone through dark times and depression and it was meeting the dog and the dog seemingly saying ‘it will be alright. I am here with you’ that saved his life slowly and brought him to this current content moment. The man woke up and saw his dog was seemingly having a doggy dream. The dog’s dream showed how he was abused and abandoned and scared in the world, only to be taken home by a man who showed him kindness and said ‘it will be alright. I am here with you.’ That man, was of course the man in the bed.

Is that kind of love similar to the love a man might show for his child or grandchild?

Will I even know that kind of love? I don’t know. Life is a complicated journey – only the universe knows where it will take me.

I hope that I get to see Motiba again – she’s a living book of my history.

I want my brother’s young son to know her. I want him to understand that there were people that lived in a village in Gujarat – educated people, who cared for their communities – through whose toil gave rise to him. That had my mom married someone else, he could have traced his patrilineal lineage to Raavan – the deeply intelligent yet deeply egoistic King of Lanka.

I hope that I get to see Motiba again because no one will ever love you like your grandma does.

#grandma #dogs #pets #lumberton #northcarolina

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kristablogs · 5 years ago

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Meet the dads who can’t quit pinewood derby racing—even after their kids are over it

After his first race in an adult league, Dan Inman says, “I decided to roll up my sleeves and figure out how to be competitive.” (Heami Lee/)

Popular Science’s Play issue is now available to everyone. Read it now, no app or credit card required.

Dan Inman had anticipated this moment for months. It was the first Saturday of December 2018—tournament day—and he thought the cars he’d built could outperform anyone’s. They were compact. Sleek. Speedy. He watched anxiously as his pinewood derby racers took their spots at the top of a long, sloping aluminum track. When each heat began, they whizzed down the gleaming course. In the other lanes, the competition hopelessly gave chase. Inman’s entries finished at the front of the pack in two key rounds, and a thought slunk into his mind: He might just be the champion.

Then officials brought out the scales. Pinewood derby competitions are organized by class, like in boxing, and each has different rules. The categories Inman had won require that each wheel weigh a certain number of grams—because the lighter the disk, the faster the car. Break the rules, and you’re disqualified.

A referee carefully plucked one from each winner. Both registered two-hundredths of a gram too light. Inman was out.

“I was sick to my stomach,” he says. “The experience wasn’t just heartbreaking—it was embarrassing.” He’d have to wait 12 months for another shot at becoming a national pinewood champion.

Anyone who was a Boy Scout probably knows what a derby car is. Most likely your parents helped you fashion blocks of pine or balsa into a light, four-wheeled racer, usually about the width and length of an iPhone. You made them to win merit badges. For many, the experience is merely a cherished childhood memory.

But some adults never outgrow their derby days. These fathers are über-obsessed, similar to the guys who gush over model trains or miniature rockets. Inman, a 62-year-old U.S. Navy vet, is one of about 40 competitors in the National Pinewood Derby Racing League. Founded in 2008, it’s one of the longest-running such circuits in America, where about 10 pro leagues operate today. Having assembled the racers as kids and guided their own children through the sport, these grown men now want to earn their own bragging rights.

We’re talking middle-aged dudes with serious big dad energy who go to great lengths to craft the perfect car—forget prefab kits. Bandsaws shave the frame components down to a quarter of an inch wide; precision lathes trim acrylic wheels; syringes grease nail axles with synthetic oil. All to cross a tiny checkered line just one ten-thousandth of a second quicker. “We’re all geeks, you know,” Inman says.

Every year, it all comes down to the Man of the Mountain race in December—basically the league’s Super Bowl. Besides the title, almost $2,000 in cash is up for grabs. As Inman learned, though, it’s not just about who finishes first.

Inman’s dedication presents itself as soon as you near his home in southern Maryland. His pickup and his wife’s sedan jockey for space on a sliver of driveway, the garage long ago ceded as a private workshop. Inman calls it his man cave. Instead of a big-screen TV, he has a long workbench loaded with wheels, screwdrivers, scales, and a magnifying lamp. Instead of pleather recliners, drill presses and a miter saw.

Clean-shaven and with closely cropped hair, Inman is nothing if not deliberate—a holdover from his 28 years in the navy. A stack of more than a dozen yellow legal pads, filled with handwritten performance notes on 50 cars, sits on one shelf. He even insulated the garage door to keep the cold winter air from chilling him during the hours he spends tucked into the workbench.

In 1963 Inman’s dad took him to his first pinewood derby event. “I couldn’t wait for my own kids to get of age,” he says. In 1999 he got his chance: His three sons participated in a local league run by Awana, an organization of evangelical Christians that, like the Boy Scouts, hosts races.

Starting that year, Inman became a local legend. After a meet, he went up to a mom whose son’s car didn’t even make it across the finish line and offered to help out. Word of his acumen spread, and soon kids filled his garage for several months every year. He once hosted 17 boys from a local Scout troop; their cars wound up placing first through 17th in a field of 67.

“It got to a point where it was expected,” Inman says: “You go to Dan’s workshop, you’ll have a winning car.” He also competed in occasional adult races staged during the kids’ competitions. Soon he found himself dominating those events too.

By 2016, he was burned out on the amateur scene, and another dad urged him to try going pro. An online search led him to the National Pinewood Derby Racing League.

Inman’s hot pink star car Humble Pie is shown above, at center, surrounded by other models he crafted in his workshop. (Heami Lee/)

The move came naturally. He already knew from the lessons he taught in his workshop that maximizing potential energy (power stored in a car that carries it forward) and minimizing friction were the keys to victory. To boost potential energy, he affixed tiny blocks of dense tungsten around the center of his cars’ rear axles: More weight in the back equals more forward oomph pushing the car down the hill. To cut friction, he polished the axles—special derby-grade stainless steel nails—by wet-sanding with paper up to 12,000 grit, which might as well be cheesecloth, and oiling them to ensure they spun quickly inside the wheel hubs.

Inman’s major breakthrough, though, was how he constructed the bodies. Instead of starting with a solid block of wood, he built the frames from quarter-inch-wide sticks, making the insides hollow. This allowed him to add more tungsten blocks near his back axles while keeping the vehicles under the league’s maximum weight of 143 grams. By January 2017 he had assembled a fleet for four of the six different race classes.

Still, at the outset of that first season he finished consistently near the bottom. Besting dads who were building cars for maybe the first time in their lives had been easy. But league racers employed the same techniques that Inman had used in amateur matches—and more advanced ones, like slightly bending their axles to make their cars zippier. “I was humbled,” he recalls. “So after my first race, I decided to roll up my sleeves, get busy, and figure out how to be competitive.”

Inman had only to look as far as his day job. He’s a contractor at Naval Air Station Patuxent River on the Chesapeake Bay. While not strictly an engineer—his college degree is in aeronautics—he works on testing manned aircraft. If a plan requires that a cargo jet detect radar signals at a certain altitude and speed, for example, it’s Inman’s job to juggle the mission, maintenance, and testing schedules to make sure the right model of aircraft is available to engineers at the right time. “I knew how to isolate and set up a test, so I just applied that knowledge toward my approach in pinewood derby,” he says.

To pick an oil to use on his axles, Inman purchased a bunch from multiple online derby shops, set up his own league-regulation aluminum track, and created an elaborate two-car test. For his control, he applied Krytox lubricating oil, a standard in many Scout competitions, to the axles. He then ran each vehicle down the track 18 times. The first six runs settled the fluid and stabilized the racers’ speed; the next 12 runs determined the Krytox’s effectiveness. Then he’d rinse and repeat by cleaning off the old lubricant, applying a new one, and going through the whole 18-run process all over again. He threw out the slowest and fastest times for each oil and averaged the remaining 10, repeating the process with 10 different products. After a couple weeks, he found the one that gave both cars their best lap times.

“Through a ridiculous amount of testing, I started to figure things out and improve,” Inman says. By the last race of the season, in November 2017, his cars were winning. He earned rookie of the year. The next month, at Man of the Mountain, he was runner-up.

Racers compete for pinewood glory at Joel Redfearn’s modest rambler house in St. George, in southwestern Utah. Redfearn owns and operates the league and was once just like Inman: a dad whose three sons participated but who didn’t want to stop once they did. When the outfit’s first owner moved east five years ago, Redfearn stepped in.

“I was one of those obsessed racers who didn’t want to see it go anywhere,” he says. In December 2019, Redfearn, 43, quit his job as a Toyota mechanic to manage the operation as well as two derby-parts businesses full-time.

He stages monthly competitions in his basement. The wooden tracks of a bygone era have been replaced: Redfearn’s races happen on a slick 42-foot aluminum runway with a computerized lane timer. As many as 40 people enter, and Redfearn says usually 100 to 140 cars will glide down his four-lane course. Since all the events happen here, most contenders race by proxy, shipping their carefully packaged fleets to Utah.

Matches themselves are fairly straightforward. There are now 10 different championship-series classes, each with its own construction guidelines. Four categories, for instance, have strict rules about how much wheels must weigh; another one limits vehicle length to 4 inches. People can send in as many cars and enter as many classes as they like. (Racers pay a fee for every vehicle they enter, starting at $10 and gradually dropping the larger the fleet.) Some guys attempt just a handful of classes. Others, like Inman, try all 10. And it is, for the most part, guys.

Racers earn points at each competition, a structure borrowed from motor-sports racing leagues like Nascar. The higher you place, the more you win. Get enough by year’s end, and you’ll find yourself battling the best of the best at Man of the Mountain.

Meticulous only begins to describe participants’ fanaticism. “Just prepping one set of wheels for one car can take several hours,” Redfearn says, “and that’s not even the axles. We’re fighting for every ten-thousandth of a second, and lots of times we have races decided on that fourth digit.”

In his rookie year, Inman regularly lost to Brian Crane, a veteran who had risen through the ranks to become one of the league’s most formidable competitors. But over time, Inman discovered how to build faster models. He started using lighter one-eighth-inch sticks for the body so he could add more metal and potential energy. He also began slightly bending his axles to create what racers call steer. Center-lane rails on the track keep cars from flying off, but bumping on and off them can also make vehicles wobble and slow. Inman instead makes his cars ride on the rail the whole way down, which generates less friction than the alternative. “It’s those little details that started making all the difference,” he says.

As he learned in 2018, even a slight tweak can turn what would otherwise be a sweet victory into an agonizing defeat. When he raced his way back to Man of the Mountain that year, Inman was confident he’d win. But he’d blown his chances by shaving too much plastic from his wheels, making them just a hair too light. “I immediately went out and got a high-end scale that measures one one-thousandths of a gram,” he says. “Yeah, it gets that anal at times.”

Despite a disqualification costing him the top spot, Inman still earned enough points that year to repeat as runner-up. He lost, as he had in 2017, to Crane.

“Just prepping one set of wheels for one car can take several hours,” says league owner Joel Redfearn. “And that’s not even the axles.” (Heami Lee/)

Almost two weeks. That’s how much time Inman took off work to get ready for Man of the Mountain 2019. By late November, he’d selected the 18 cars he would enter in 10 classes. These were the ones that had run the fastest throughout the season, and the ones he thought gave him the surest shot.

Prepping his chosen fleet for race day entails a process the derby world calls tuning: oiling the axles to enhance speed and bending them to create steer. After a thorough polishing, Inman coats his nails with Jig-A-Loo, a silicone-based lubricant. They dry overnight underneath plastic containers to keep out dust. Afterward he applies two types of oil. When the axles finally make it onto the car, Inman achieves steer with a screwdriver, twisting the nails until they position the nose of each car two inches to the left so it rides the center-lane rail the length of the track.

He’s just as careful with his wheels. A friend in Virginia who competes in a different league custom-cuts each set of four. Inman’s touch is a quadruple layer of Icon car wax ($300 a bottle) anywhere the disk touches the track or the axle. Each coat dries for up to eight hours in a small oven—the kind nail salons use to cure polish. Afterward he weighs the wheels to ensure he won’t be disqualified again.

Still, there are variables he can’t control. Competing by proxy is risky, because he doesn’t know until race day how his fleet fared in transit. If the shipping box gets turned on its side for too long, axle oil will drip. If the package loiters on a hot tarmac, the fluid might evaporate. And once the contest begins, even a perfectly engineered vehicle can’t avoid “dirty air,” the breeze generated by the competition passing on the left and right. Enough of it can wiggle a winner right out of first place—though each class runs multiple heats, giving every contender a chance to race in all four lanes and mitigating the overall effect. “There’s all these little aspects that can help or hurt you in speed, and that’s the frustrating part,” Redfearn says.

On the first Saturday of December 2019, Inman’s 18 cars join another 124 from 26 competitors across America to vie for the title of Man of the Mountain.

First-place finishers in the different classes win $100 each. At the end of the day, Redfearn will calculate annual points totals, and the racer at the top becomes champion and wins an additional $500. Redfearn mans the track while his wife, Ronda, runs the camera down at the finish line. They livestream every race, which enables Inman to watch from his workshop.

Just after 1 p.m., he finds out if his preparation paid off. It’s time for the semifinals of BASX Pro. Not only is it the most competitive class—more people race in it than in any other—but it’s also one of the two in which Inman was disqualified last year.

A slim little racer—shorter than a deck of cards, painted pink, and called Humble Pie—idles behind one of four starting pins. When the pins fall, Humble Pie goes sailing down the silver-white track, the only audible noise a gentle whirring of plastic wheels. As it accelerates, it flies past the entries in the other three lanes, finishing in 2.9512 seconds.

Humble Pie advances to the BASX Pro finals, where it wins the day’s opening round. This time, when Redfearn measures a wheel, it makes weight. By the end of the afternoon, three of Inman’s other entries have taken first in three other classes, which is how he finally earns $900 and the ultimate prize, the title.

Yet as he savors his victory, Inman can’t help but recall last year’s lesson: It’s never entirely about who crosses the finish line in front, especially when some cars don’t even have the chance to get there. The fleet from Crane, the racer who bested him the previous two years, fell to the worst of all things that can go wrong in pinewood derby racing—a shipping delay. “I love having the victory,” Inman says. “But it was somewhat hollow without actually beating the best, head-to-head.”

So for another year he’ll toil away in his workshop. Bending axles. Waxing wheels. Waiting in hushed anticipation for a chance to defend his title. Eagerly chasing every ten-thousandth of a second.

This story appeared in the Summer 2020, Play issue of Popular Science.

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scootoaster · 5 years ago