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shining-magically · 5 years ago

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so I’ve wondered this since the trailer came out years and years ago and Chloe defended the movie - was the red shoes teaser written by the same team that made the movie? were they forced to market it like that, was that based on an earlier draft, etc?? not sure if you know but you seem like the leading expert!

Sorry, this is gonna be an absolute novel because you know I’m an animation fan and the history and production of Red Shoes and the Seven Dwarfs is SO interesting and insane. Like, Tangled levels of insane. Thanks for calling me an expert, no one else was gonna do it so I just kind of took up the helm lol.

Here’s the low-down... The timeline of the movie’s production is an absolute mess and kind of an extremely wild ride. It was in production for ten years, went through a lot of different crew members, and went through at least two other major versions of the story before landing on the final version.

Since there’s not a ton of info on the movie’s production, a lot of this is pieced together from different interviews and context clues, and also a lot of what I’ve read and what I am quoting has been translated from Korean, sometimes pretty roughly. But yeah.

Here’s the story of why the Red Shoes and the Seven Dwarfs teasers and poster were so, so bad and fatshame-y and the actual movie was so, so good and body-positive. (With pictures and production artwork!)

(This is a beast of a post so I’m putting it under a cut.)

All right, so. After its conception originally as a short story by the South Korean studio Locus Creative in 2009-2010-ish, Red Shoes and the Seven Dwarfs was being worked on and was set to come out in Summer 2017, as evidenced by this poster at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival, featuring a different logo and very different character designs for most of the dwarfs.

In early-mid 2016, the first teaser (in which we see Snow White undress and then two dwarfs recoil in horror at her fatness when she takes her magic shoes off) was released, after the film had kind of been slowly chugging along for 6 or so years. (I am having such trouble pinpointing when the second teaser was released (in which one of the dwarfs basically attacks Snow while she is sleeping to steal her shoes), but I believe it was around the same time.) The teasers didn’t get that much traction because this was a small film from a small indie studio in South Korea.

None of the final actors had been cast yet. At this point in the production, the story was different, one of the many versions that the movie went through. As in the final movie, the dwarfs were actually cursed knights/princes and Snow White switched back and forth between two body types due to her magic shoes, but in this version, the dwarfs needed to steal the shoes from her in order to break their curse (rather than needing “a kiss from the most beautiful woman in the world” like in the final movie).

The weird thing is, I believe they had JUST changed the movie’s story when the teaser came out. I’m almost positive it was released more as a proof of concept than as an actual trailer for the movie. They had just recently combined two separate characters (seen above), a typical pretty, skinny princess character (Snow White) and a cute chubby girl character (’Bonnie’), into one single character that switches back and forth between the two appearances when she wears the magic shoes (also they had just dropped literally half of the movie taking place in the real world, with a magic mirror portal, it was a whole thing).

They didn’t have the details of this aspect of the new story hammered out yet, and the first pass at presenting Snow’s magically changing body type, was, yeah, not good and super offensive. This was a really inexperienced indie studio making their first film on a low budget, so even the animation and voice acting wasn’t great. I think they just wanted to get SOMETHING out there because it had been 6 years and they wanted to have something to show for it.

But here’s the thing. Despite how the teasers make it seem, this was always supposed to be a movie about body positivity, letting go of appearance-based prejudices, and loving yourself and others for who you are and for who they are, which we see in the final film.

I like to think of our film as a kindhearted one. Our intentions are nice.

- Director Sung-ho Hong

It’s important to keep in mind that this movie was made in South Korea by a 99% Korean crew, and, as I understand it anyway, in Korean culture, ‘fatshaming’ is not really a thing that is seen as overtly offensive. Also, children’s media there seems to have more adult things in it than in the US, which probably accounts for the more risque parts of the teasers. That said, I really believe that at this point in the timeline, the movie was on-track to be bad (or at least not very good) when it was released, and it would have ended up bad IF a few key players hadn’t signed on (which I’ll get to in a moment).

Interestingly, the movie’s producer, Sujin Hwang, said in a 2017 interview:

“[Both teasers] were solely produced to induce curiosity. They’re completely irrelevant to the actual story.”

- Producer Sujin Hwang

I think what she was trying to convey was that neither one is a scene in the actual movie, because while the teasers didn’t reflect the revamped story as it existed in summer 2017 (the time of the interview), they DID reflect the earlier version of the story where the dwarfs wanted her shoes, which is what the story was at the time they were made.

Now that we’re in post-teaser 2016, HERE’S where things start to turn around. After the teasers were released, my guy Disney veteran and native Korean Jin Kim joined the project. He and Red Shoes director Sung-ho Hong had been buddies for about eight years and Sung-ho had been trying to get Jin to come to Seoul and work with him at Locus for a long time, and he finally succeeded.

Jin and his twenty years of Disney experience as an animator and senior designer on films like Tangled, Frozen, Big Hero 6, Zootopia, and Moana, had a HUGE HUGE HUGE influence on the movie. He redesigned almost all the characters, oversaw all the visual development from the moment he signed on, and heavily (HEAVILY) supervised the animation, literally going frame-by-frame through preliminary animations and drawing over them, teaching the inexperienced animators at Locus everything he knew. (Literally almost everyone except him either only had TV experience or had no professional experience because they just gotten out of school.)

From an outsider’s perspective, it really seems as though Jin joining the project (and his gargantuan effort) made the quality SKYROCKET. Not just in character design and animation, but also in things like effects animation, story, etc. After he joined, Locus really started pushing HARD to make a good, high-quality movie, and his influence and experience from being a prominent figure at Disney was absolutely key. The studio also began to really study Disney films and other well-made animated films from other studios to really try and pinpoint what the DNA of a good animated movie really is.

I don’t have any solid evidence, but I’m pretty sure that Tony Bancroft (an animator and the co-director of Mulan) then joined the project because he’s good friends with Jin Kim. He is only credited as the voice director (the movie was recorded in English and the characters were animated to the English dialogue), but I am SURE that he probably also had a pretty big influence on the movie, because like... How could he not? I really really think there was more to his role than his title would have you believe, even though there’s almost no info out there about it.

So now the movie goes through a gigantic metamorphosis. Character designs, visual development, and animation quality are all rapidly improving, the story is tightening, and the themes of the movie (which, again, were always the same and intended to be positive) are being presented in a more sincere way. The movie is becoming the sweet, self-love-encouraging and body-positive movie that was eventually released.

I’m putting a gif from the credits of the final movie here. As we move into 2017, when the giant eruption of backlash occurred, please keep in mind that the story was finalized at this point and that THIS was the movie people were so mad about:

Chloe Grace Moretz accepted the role of Snow White immediately after she read the script and she recorded her lines (I think) in early-ish 2017. Her co-star Sam Claflin also immediately accepted the role of the romantic interest, Merlin, after reading the script and recorded his lines in (I believe) July 2017.

In the summer of 2017, the story and script were more or less the same as in the final movie. Promotional images from that time show that most of dwarfs had been completely redesigned by this point and didn’t have their teaser designs anymore.

They also released a few screenshots that look exactly like the final film. The movie was advertised as coming out in ‘2018′ at this point. Here’s a promo image from 2017 that is MUCH more tactfully worded than the infamous Cannes poster:

So now we’re in summer 2017. The Cannes Film Festival. The movie’s script and story have been basically nailed down, animation is underway, and the Korean film company Finecut is beginning to market and sell the movie to worldwide audiences. They are planning on showing some footage to potential buyers at the festival, and they make a poster to advertise the film there.

Unfortunately, it’s THIS POSTER:

Now here’s where there are some unknowns. By this point, the movie is basically in its final form, which is an adorable, body-positive story about loving people for who they are, loving yourself for who YOU are, and that provides commentary on society’s standards of beauty and how they affect how people are treated/viewed. So why this poster??? All I can really tell is that someone (I think Finecut) really, REALLY messed up and either horribly mistranslated the tagline, or didn’t do enough research to know that this kind of thing is REALLY NOT OKAY in western culture.

The above picture is shared and the internet backlash begins, fueled by tweets from prominent body-positivity activists like Tess Holliday. Even Chloe Grace Moretz speaks out against it, because she of all people KNOWS that that’s not what the movie is about. The internet then finds the old teasers from before the movie was revamped and it makes things worse. Producer Sujin Hwang profusely apologizes and says that that is NOT the message of the movie. Locus pulls the advertising campaign, and takes down the two old teasers.

“Our film, a family comedy, carries a message designed to challenge social prejudices related to standards of physical beauty in society by emphasizing the importance of inner beauty.”

- Producer Sujin Hwang

Voice director Tony Bancroft also tried to explain the situation:

“The truth is the film has a body-positive message as its core theme–it’s the opposite of what reports are saying. The problem is one poorly translated movie poster that has been taken dramatically out of context.”

- Voice Director Tony Bancroft

And then... There was nothing for a while. The movie didn’t come out in 2018 and was delayed. From what I can tell, I DON’T believe this delay was related to the Cannes backlash. I think it was mostly due to Locus’s limited budget and resources, because as we know, animation is difficult, time-consuming, expensive, and easy to do badly but hard to do well. Also, probably with Jin Kim and Tony Bancroft’s influence, they REALLY wanted to make sure to do a good job with the animation because they now had a great story and they really wanted the movie to be a quality, worldwide hit that would kind of put South Korean feature animation on the map. Just take a look at how nice the final animation was:

The movie was released in South Korea on July 25th, 2019. Unfortunately, the damage was done in the English-speaking markets and it was not released to an English-speaking audience until June 22, 2020, when it was released digitally in the UK. At the time of this post, there is no set US release date, but the distribution rights were recently bought by Lionsgate and the MPAA gave the film an official PG rating.

So who’s to blame? There’s no good answer. You could blame Locus for making those old teasers. You could blame Finecut for the competely tonedeaf Cannes poster. You could even blame cancel culture for raging against the movie based on one poster and two old teaser trailers without researching what the movie was actually about.

All I know is, it’s a damn shame.

#mooncactus #red shoes and the seven dwarfs #red shoes and the 7 dwarfs #animation #animation production #animation history #red shoes movie #redshoes #jin kim #tony bancroft

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joshjacksons · 4 years ago

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Joshua Jackson interview with "Mr Porter" (2021)

Minutes before Mr Joshua Jackson joins me in a booth for a Friday afternoon drink at a vibey hotel bar in Santa Monica, he’s confronted by his past. Or rather, a woman in her early twenties who is binge-watching Dawson’s Creek, the teen show about a close-knit group of high-school friends coming of age in a sleepy American town, which made Jackson incredibly famous between 1998 and 2003. The series, which also made household names of Ms Michelle Williams and Ms Katie Holmes, went off air 18 years ago, but is now streaming on Netflix, to the bemusement of Jackson, who played lovable rogue Pacey Witter. “This girl was like, ‘Are you...?’ And I’m like, ‘Yes, I am. He got old. I’m sorry to break it to you,’” he says, before ordering an iced tea and a charcuterie board to tide him over until dinner time. “It always surprises me when young people say they’ve just got into Dawson’s Creek. I’m like, ‘Is it a costume drama to you? Do you feel like you’re watching a historical documentary?’”

The idea of a Friends-style reunion episode or a Sex And The City revival feels equally far-fetched to Canadian-born Jackson, now 43 and wearing it well in a pale green linen shirt and tailored linen trousers by Oliver Spencer that complement his fading brown hair and Cali-tanned skin.

“I don’t know why you’d want to [bring it back],” he says. “Nobody needs to know what those characters are doing in middle age. We left them in a nice place. Nobody needs to see that Pacey’s back hurts. I don’t think we need that update.”

And Jackson doesn’t need Dawson’s Creek. From Mr JJ Abrams’ sci-fi series Fringe (2008-2013) to the Golden Globe award-winning The Affair (2014-2019), from Ms Ava DuVernay’s ground-breaking true-crime drama When They See Us (2019) to the recent Ms Reese Witherspoon and Ms Kerry Washington-produced Little Fires Everywhere (2020), he has commanded the small screen – with a collection of dynamic and diverse work – ever since.

His latest role as Mr Christopher Duntsch, the Texas surgeon convicted of gross malpractice when 33 of his patients were left seriously injured after he operated on them and two of them died, in chilling Peacock crime drama Dr Death, is only stepping his career up another gear.

“I’ve never played anyone irredeemable before,” says Jackson, who is joined in the eight-part series (based on the 2018 Wondery podcast of the same name) by Messrs Christian Slater and Alec Baldwin. “He is charming, gregarious and has a high-level intellect, but he’s also a misogynist, probably a sociopath, certainly a narcissist and a complete incompetent who is incapable of seeing himself.”

If Duntsch is terrifying, then Jackson’s portrayal is even more so. The artist formerly known as Pacey is virtually unrecognisable (thanks to prosthetics) in the opening scene, but the real challenge for Jackson was allowing himself to view someone who is so “spectacularly evil” as a human being in order to walk in his shoes. “It’s a more damning portrayal of the man to make him into a human being, rather than just make him the bad guy,” he says. “He really believes he’s the hero, he’s the genius and that he’s the victim, so once I got past my own judgment, all the other things fell into place.”

Jackson might have his pick of stellar roles – and challenges – now, but it has not happened by accident. Take it from someone who has been in the business since landing his first job aged 14 in Disney’s live-action movie series The Mighty Ducks, opposite Brat Pack alumnus Mr Emilio Estevez.

“You try to make it look like it happens accidentally,” he says, “but there is no way to do this and not be ambitious. I’d say I’m extremely ambitious because I’ve been doing this cutthroat job for nearly 30 years. I’m in the pay-off phase of my career now. One of the benefits of surviving for as long as I have is you get to learn from your own mistakes.”

Such as? “I wouldn’t say, ‘I wish I hadn’t done that,’ because it all becomes bricks in a path, but [after Dawson’s Creek] I was not choosy enough about the things I was doing. You get stuck. You start trying to perform the performance you think people are hoping to see you do. I was so used to working all the time that I just worked all the time. There was definitely a conscious moment in my mid-twenties when I realised I wasn’t really enjoying the work that I was doing. My manager at the time just said, ‘Take a breath. You’re burnt out.’”

The turning point came in 2005, when Jackson was offered a role in the two-hander Mr David Mamet play A Life In The Theatre, opposite Sir Patrick Stewart. “God bless him, Patrick could have made my life miserable because I had no idea what I was doing, ” he says. “I hadn’t been on stage since I was a kid and now I was in the West End in over my head. But it reminded me that I actually enjoyed being an actor, that it’s not about the red carpet or travelling around the world. What I really enjoy is working on good material with good people.”

It’s no surprise Jackson’s time on Dawson’s Creek led to a career crisis. From the ages of 19 to 24, he lived with his fellow cast mates in Wilmington, North Carolina, filming day in, day out, in an arrangement he likens to college. “You get to the end and they’re like, ‘Here’s your degree. Go live now. You’re an adult. Go out into the world,’” he says.

But most graduates don’t have to deal with global fame. “It’s transitory. You’re only ever cool for a moment and then you become much less cool. I was always pretty dubious about flatterers,” he says, recalling a time he was stung in London in the mid-2000s. “I went on a date in Hyde Park with a woman whose name I will not use – she was socialite-famous – and she was acting completely bizarre, looking over her shoulder the whole time. I came to find out that she had hired a photographer to follow us through the park and gave a whole story to the tabloids about how I was going to meet her family.”

It was his growing fortune, rather than fame, that caused Jackson the most anxiety. “Suddenly, at 19 years old, I was making more in a week than most of my friends’ parents would make in a year,” he says. “It was lovely to have the money, but it was that feeling of nobody is worth that kind of money. You feel like a fraud and it took me a long time to forgive myself for not being the thing that I was perceived as.”

Born in Vancouver, but raised in Topanga, California, until he was eight (before moving back to Vancouver following his parents’ divorce), Jackson bought his childhood home in 2001 and lives in it today with his wife, British Queen & Slim actor Ms Jodie Turner-Smith, and their 15-month-old daughter.

“My father unfortunately was not a good father or a husband and exited the scene, but that house in Topanga was where everything felt simple, so it was a very healing thing for me to do,” he says. Fast-forward to 2021 and his baby daughter now sleeps in her father’s childhood bedroom. “There was a mural of a dragon on the wall in that room that I couldn’t believe was still there, years later. The owner [who sold him the house] said, ‘I knew it meant a lot to somebody and that they were going to come back for it some day.’”

Becoming a first-time parent during a pandemic sounds stressful, but it afforded Jackson months at home with his wife and child that his normal work schedule wouldn’t have allowed.

“I now recognise how perverse the way that we have set up our society is,” he says. “There is not a father I know who works a regular job who didn’t go back to the office a week later. It’s robbing that man of the opportunity to bond with his child and spend time with his partner.”

Despite his obvious career ambitions, fatherhood has changed Jackson’s priorities in “every possible way”, he says. “It’s 100 per cent changed how I approach my work and my life. That has been made so clear to me in this past year. For me to feel good about what I’m doing day to day, my family has to be the central focus.

“There are plenty of things left for me to do, but now the thing that gets me excited is experiencing the world through my daughter’s eyes. I can’t wait to take her scuba diving. I can’t wait to take her skiing. I can’t wait to read a great book with her. I’m not worried at all she’ll be a wallflower. She’s been a character from the word go.”

Jackson met Turner-Smith, 34, two days after his 40th birthday. He had been single since his 10-year relationship with German actress Ms Diane Kruger ended in 2016. “I was not looking to fall in love again or meet the mother of my child, but life has other plans for you,” he says.

The couple met at a party. Turner-Smith was wearing the same The Future Is Female Ejaculation T-shirt Ms Tessa Thompson’s character, Detroit, wears in the 2018 film Sorry To Bother You. “That’s what I used to break the ice. I shouted, ‘Detroit!’ across the room. Not the smoothest thing I’ve ever done, but it worked. We were pretty much inseparable from the word go. It was a whirlwind romance and I can tell my daughter I literally saw her mother across a room and thought, ‘I have to be next to this woman.’”

A self-confessed “useless” shopper, Jackson gives his wife full credit for his current wardrobe. He is jewellery-free, apart from a wedding band and a gold signet “JJ” ring on his little finger (a present from his wife), and discovered tailored sweatsuits (by Stampd and Reigning Champ) in the pandemic.

“Jodie has influence in the way that a wonderful wife encourages you, through love, to dress well. She was like, ‘We’re going to throw away all the sweatpants from your past and I’m going to get you some that actually make you look like an adult male and you will still feel comfortable around the house,’ and I’m like, ‘What an amazing idea!’ Who knew you could get sweatsuits that actually look good on your body?”

Jackson’s style has evolved, he says, “from slovenly teen to it’s-nice-when-your-clothes-actually-fit-you”. The penny dropped after he auditioned for his former co-star Estevez, who was directing the 2006 Mr Robert Kennedy biopic Bobby. He said to me, ‘You only got this job because I know you. You came in here to play a very well-put together 1960s political operative and you’re wearing jeans and a hoodie.’

“I had to grow up a little bit. We are very much raised in Canada to never, ever show off, so it took me a while to recognise it’s OK to look good when you go out.”

Still, when you’ve grown up in front of the camera, “every pimple literally documented”, and lived (very successfully) to tell the tale, you can probably be forgiven for the odd fashion faux pas.

“I wore a silk Ascot to an event once in Paris and I still have nightmares about it,” he says. “I looked like Fred from Scooby Doo, but you live and learn.”

#joshua jackson #interviews #jodie turner smith #dawson's creek #dr death #fringe #emilio estevez #mr porter #patrick stewart #michelle williams #katie holmes

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path-of-my-childhood · 6 years ago

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Taylor Swift: ‘I was literally about to break’

By: Laura Snapes for The Guardian Date: August 24th 2019

Taylor Swift’s Nashville apartment is an Etsy fever dream, a 365-days-a-year Christmas shop, pure teenage girl id. You enter through a vestibule clad in blue velvet and covered in gilt frames bursting with fake flowers. The ceiling is painted like the night sky. Above a koi pond in the living area, a narrow staircase spirals six feet up towards a giant, pillow-lagged birdcage that probably has the best view in the city. Later, Swift will tell me she needs metaphors “to understand anything that happens to me”, and the birdcage defies you not to interpret it as a pointed comment on the contradictions of stardom.

Swift, wearing pale jeans and dip-dyed shirt, her sandy hair tied in a blue scrunchie, leads the way up the staircase to show me the view. The decor hasn’t changed since she bought this place in 2009, when she was 19. “All of these high rises are new since then,” she says, gesturing at the squat glass structures and cranes. Meanwhile her oven is still covered in stickers, more teenage diary than adult appliance.

Now 29, she has spent much of the past three years living quietly in London with her boyfriend, actor Joe Alwyn, making the penthouse a kind of time capsule, a monument to youthful naivety given an unlimited budget – the years when she sang about Romeo and Juliet and wore ballgowns to awards shows; before she moved to New York and honed her slick, self-mythologising pop.

It is mid-August. This is Swift’s first UK interview in more than three years, and she seems nervous: neither presidential nor goofy (her usual defaults), but quick with a tongue-out “ugh” of regret or frustration as she picks at her glittery purple nails. We climb down from the birdcage to sit by the pond, and when the conversation turns to 2016, the year the wheels came off for her, Swift stiffens as if driving over a mile of speed bumps. After a series of bruising public spats (with Katy Perry, Nicki Minaj) in 2015, there was a high-profile standoff with Kanye West. The news that she was in a relationship with actor Tom Hiddleston, which leaked soon after, was widely dismissed as a diversionary tactic. Meanwhile, Swift went to court to prosecute a sexual assault claim, and faced a furious backlash when she failed to endorse a candidate in the 2016 presidential election, allowing the alt-right to adopt her as their “Aryan princess”.

Her critics assumed she cared only about the bottom line. The reality, Swift says, is that she was totally broken. “Every domino fell,” she says bitterly. “It became really terrifying for anyone to even know where I was. And I felt completely incapable of doing or saying anything publicly, at all. Even about my music. I always said I wouldn’t talk about what was happening personally, because that was a personal time.” She won’t get into specifics. “I just need some things that are mine,” she despairs. “Just some things.”

A year later, in 2017, Swift released her album Reputation, half high-camp heel turn, drawing on hip-hop and vaudeville (the brilliantly hammy Look What You Made Me Do), half stunned appreciation that her nascent relationship with Alwyn had weathered the storm (the soft, sensual pop of songs Delicate and Dress).

Her new album, Lover, her seventh, was released yesterday. It’s much lighter than Reputation: Swift likens writing it to feeling like “I could take a full deep breath again”. Much of it is about Alwyn: the Galway Girl-ish track London Boy lists their favourite city haunts and her newfound appreciation of watching rugby in the pub with his uni mates; on the ruminative Afterglow, she asks him to forgive her anxious tendency to assume the worst.

While she has always written about relationships, they were either teenage fantasy or a postmortem on a high-profile breakup, with exes such as Jake Gyllenhaal and Harry Styles. But she and Alwyn have seldom been pictured together, and their relationship is the only other thing she won’t talk about. “I’ve learned that if I do, people think it’s up for discussion, and our relationship isn’t up for discussion,” she says, laughing after I attempt a stealthy angle. “If you and I were having a glass of wine right now, we’d be talking about it – but it’s just that it goes out into the world. That’s where the boundary is, and that’s where my life has become manageable. I really want to keep it feeling manageable.”

Instead, she has swapped personal disclosure for activism. Last August, Swift broke her political silence to endorse Democratic Tennessee candidate Phil Bredesen in the November 2018 senate race. Vote.org reported an unprecedented spike in voting registration after Swift’s Instagram post, while Donald Trump responded that he liked her music “about 25% less now”.

Meanwhile, her recent single You Need To Calm Down admonished homophobes and namechecked US LGBTQ rights organisation Glaad (which then saw increased donations). Swift filled her video with cameos from queer stars such as Ellen DeGeneres and Queen singer Adam Lambert, and capped it with a call to sign her petition in support of the Equality Act, which if passed would prohibit gender- and sexuality-based discrimination in the US. A video of Polish LGBTQ fans miming the track in defiance of their government’s homophobic agenda went viral. But Swift was accused of “queerbaiting” and bandwagon-jumping. You can see how she might find it hard to work out what, exactly, people want from her.

***

It was girlhood that made Swift a multimillionaire. When country music’s gatekeepers swore that housewives were the only women interested in the genre, she proved them wrong. Her self-titled debut marked the longest stay on the Billboard 200 by any album released in the decade. A potentially cloying image – corkscrew curls, lyrics thick on “daddy” and down-home values – were undercut by the fact she was evidently, endearingly, a bit of a freak, an unusual combination of intensity and artlessness. Also, she was really, really good at what she did, and not just for a teenager: her entirely self-written third album, 2010’s Speak Now, is unmatched in its devastatingly withering dismissals of awful men.

As a teenager, Swift was obsessed with VH1’s Behind The Music, the series devoted to the rise and fall of great musicians. She would forensically rewatch episodes, trying to pinpoint the moment a career went wrong. I ask her to imagine she’s watching the episode about herself and do the same thing: where was her misstep? “Oh my God,” she says, drawing a deep breath and letting her lips vibrate as she exhales. “I mean, that’s so depressing!” She thinks back and tries to deflect. “What I remember is that [the show] was always like, ‘Then we started fighting in the tour bus and then the drummer quit and the guitarist was like, “You’re not paying me enough.”’’’

But that’s not what she used to say. In interviews into her early 20s, Swift often observed that an artist fails when they lose their self-awareness, as if repeating the fact would work like an insurance against succumbing to the same fate. But did she make that mistake herself? She squeezes her nose and blows to clear a ringing in her ears before answering. “I definitely think that sometimes you don’t realise how you’re being perceived,” she says. “Pop music can feel like it’s The Hunger Games, and like we’re gladiators. And you can really lose focus of the fact that that’s how it feels because that’s how a lot of stan [fan] Twitter and tabloids and blogs make it seem – the overanalysing of everything makes it feel really intense.”

She describes the way she burned bridges in 2016 as a kind of obliviousness. “I didn’t realise it was like a classic overthrow of someone in power – where you didn’t realise the whispers behind your back, you didn’t realise the chain reaction of events that was going to make everything fall apart at the exact, perfect time for it to fall apart.”

Here’s that chain reaction in full. With her 2014 album 1989 (the year she was born), Swift transcended country stardom, becoming as ubiquitous as Beyoncé. For the first time she vocally embraced feminism, something she had rejected in her teens; but, after a while, it seemed to amount to not much more than a lot of pictures of her hanging out with her “squad”, a bevy of supermodels, musicians and Lena Dunham. The squad very much did not include her former friend Katy Perry, whom Swift targeted in her song Bad Blood, as part of what seemed like a painfully overblown dispute about some backing dancers. Then, when Nicki Minaj tweeted that MTV’s 2015 Video Music awards had rewarded white women at the expense of women of colour, multiple-nominee Swift took it personally, responding: “Maybe one of the men took your slot.” For someone prone to talking about the haters, she quickly became her own worst enemy.

Her old adversary Kanye West resurfaced in February 2016. In 2009, West had invaded Swift’s stage at the MTV VMAs to protest against her victory over Beyoncé in the female video of the year category. It remains the peak of interest in Swift on Google Trends, and the conflict between them has become such a cornerstone of celebrity journalism that it’s hard to remember it lay dormant for nearly seven years – until West released his song Famous. “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex,” he rapped. “Why? I made that bitch famous.” The video depicted a Swift mannequin naked in bed with men including Trump.

Swift loudly condemned both; although she had discussed the track with West, she said she had never agreed to the “bitch” lyric or the video. West’s wife, Kim Kardashian, released a heavily edited clip that showed Swift at least agreeing to the “sex” line on the phone with West, if not the “bitch” part. Swift pleaded the technicality, but it made no difference: when Kardashian went on Twitter to describe her as a snake, the comparison stuck and the singer found herself very publicly “cancelled” – the incident taken as “proof” of Swift’s insincerity. So she went away.

Swift says she stopped trying to explain herself, even though she “definitely” could have. As she worked on Reputation, she was also writing “a think-piece a day that I knew I would never publish: the stuff I would say, and the different facets of the situation that nobody knew”. If she could exonerate herself, why didn’t she? She leans forward. “Here’s why,” she says conspiratorially. “Because when people are in a hate frenzy and they find something to mutually hate together, it bonds them. And anything you say is in an echo chamber of mockery.”

She compares that year to being hit by a tidal wave. “You can either stand there and let the wave crash into you, and you can try as hard as you can to fight something that’s more powerful and bigger than you,” she says. “Or you can dive under the water, hold your breath, wait for it to pass and while you’re down there, try to learn something. Why was I in that part of the ocean? There were clearly signs that said: Rip tide! Undertow! Don’t swim! There are no lifeguards!” She’s on a roll. “Why was I there? Why was I trusting people I trusted? Why was I letting people into my life the way I was letting them in? What was I doing that caused this?”

After the incident with Minaj, her critics started pointing out a narrative of “white victimhood” in Swift’s career. Speaking slowly and carefully, she says she came to understand “a lot about how my privilege allowed me to not have to learn about white privilege. I didn’t know about it as a kid, and that is privilege itself, you know? And that’s something that I’m still trying to educate myself on every day. How can I see where people are coming from, and understand the pain that comes with the history of our world?”

She also accepts some responsibility for her overexposure, and for some of the tabloid drama. If she didn’t wish a friend happy birthday on Instagram, there would be reports about severed friendships, even if they had celebrated together. “Because we didn’t post about it, it didn’t happen – and I realised I had done that,” she says. “I created an expectation that everything in my life that happened, people would see.”

But she also says she couldn’t win. “I’m kinda used to being gaslit by now,” she drawls wearily. “And I think it happens to women so often that, as we get older and see how the world works, we’re able to see through what is gaslighting. So I’m able to look at 1989 and go – KITTIES!” She breaks off as an assistant walks in with Swift’s three beloved cats, stars of her Instagram feed, back from the vet before they fly to England this week. Benjamin, Olivia and Meredith haughtily circle our feet (they are scared of the koi) as Swift resumes her train of thought, back to the release of 1989 and the subsequent fallout. “Oh my God, they were mad at me for smiling a lot and quote-unquote acting fake. And then they were mad at me that I was upset and bitter and kicking back.” The rules kept changing.

***

Swift’s new album comes with printed excerpts from her diaries. On 29 August 2016, she wrote in her girlish, bubble writing: “This summer is the apocalypse.” As the incident with West and Kardashian unfolded, she was preparing for her court case against radio DJ David Mueller, who was fired in 2013 after Swift reported him for putting his hand up her dress at a meet-and–greet event. He sued her for defamation; she countersued for sexual assault.

“Having dealt with a few of them, narcissists basically subscribe to a belief system that they should be able to do and say whatever the hell they want, whenever the hell they want to,” Swift says now, talking at full pelt. “And if we – as anyone else in the world, but specifically women – react to that, well, we’re not allowed to. We’re not allowed to have a reaction to their actions.”

In summer 2016 she was in legal depositions, practising her testimony. “You’re supposed to be really polite to everyone,” she says. But by the time she got to court in August 2017, “something snapped, I think”. She laughs. Her testimony was sharp and uncompromising. She refused to allow Mueller’s lawyers to blame her or her security guards; when asked if she could see the incident, Swift said no, because “my ass is in the back of my body”. It was a brilliant, rude defence.

“You’re supposed to behave yourself in court and say ‘rear end’,” she says with mock politesse. “The other lawyer was saying, ‘When did he touch your backside?’ And I was like, ‘ASS! Call it what it is!’” She claps between each word. But despite the acclaim for her testimony and eventual victory (she asked for one symbolic dollar), she still felt belittled. It was two months prior to the beginning of the #MeToo movement. “Even this case was literally twisted so hard that people were calling it the ‘butt-grab case’. They were saying I sued him because there’s this narrative that I want to sue everyone. That was one of the reasons why the summer was the apocalypse.”

She never wanted the assault to be made public. Have there been other instances she has dealt with privately? “Actually, no,” she says soberly. “I’m really lucky that it hadn’t happened to me before. But that was one of the reasons it was so traumatising. I just didn’t know that could happen. It was really brazen, in front of seven people.” She has since had security cameras installed at every meet-and-greet she does, deliberately pointed at her lower half. “If something happens again, we can prove it with video footage from every angle,” she says.

The allegations about Harvey Weinstein came out soon after she won her case. The film producer had asked her to write a song for the romantic comedy One Chance, which earned her second Golden Globe nomination. Weinstein also got her a supporting role in the 2014 sci-fi movie The Giver, and attended the launch party for 1989. But she says they were never alone together.

“He’d call my management and be like, ‘Does she have a song for this film?’ And I’d be like, ‘Here it is,’” she says dispassionately. “And then I’d be at the Golden Globes. I absolutely never hung out. And I would get a vibe – I would never vouch for him. I believe women who come forward, I believe victims who come forward, I believe men who come forward.” Swift inhales, flustered. She says Weinstein never propositioned her. “If you listen to the stories, he picked people who were vulnerable, in his opinion. It seemed like it was a power thing. So, to me, that doesn’t say anything – that I wasn’t in that situation.”

Meanwhile, Donald Trump was more than nine months into his presidency, and still Swift had not taken a position. But the idea that a pop star could ever have impeded his path to the White House seemed increasingly naive. In hindsight, the demand that Swift speak up looks less about politics and more about her identity (white, rich, powerful) and a moralistic need for her to redeem herself – as if nobody else had ever acted on a vindictive instinct, or blundered publicly.

But she resisted what might have been an easy return to public favour. Although Reputation contained softer love songs, it was better known for its brittle, vengeful side (see This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things). She describes that side of the album now as a “bit of a persona”, and its hip-hop-influenced production as “a complete defence mechanism”. Personally, I thought she had never been more relatable, trashing the contract of pious relatability that traps young women in the public eye.

***

It was the assault trial, and watching the rights of LGBTQ friends be eroded, that finally politicised her, Swift says. “The things that happen to you in your life are what develop your political opinions. I was living in this Obama eight-year paradise of, you go, you cast your vote, the person you vote for wins, everyone’s happy!” she says. “This whole thing, the last three, four years, it completely blindsided a lot of us, me included.”

She recently said she was “dismayed” when a friend pointed out that her position on gay rights wasn’t obvious (what if she had a gay son, he asked), hence this summer’s course correction with the single You Need To Calm Down (“You’re comin’ at my friends like a missile/Why are you mad?/When you could be GLAAD?”). Didn’t she feel equally dismayed that her politics weren’t clear? “I did,” she insists, “and I hate to admit this, but I felt that I wasn’t educated enough on it. Because I hadn’t actively tried to learn about politics in a way that I felt was necessary for me, making statements that go out to hundreds of millions of people.”

She explains her inner conflict. “I come from country music. The number one thing they absolutely drill into you as a country artist, and you can ask any other country artist this, is ‘Don’t be like the Dixie Chicks!’” In 2003, the Texan country trio denounced the Iraq war, saying they were “ashamed” to share a home state with George W Bush. There was a boycott, and an event where a bulldozer crushed their CDs. “I watched country music snuff that candle out. The most amazing group we had, just because they talked about politics. And they were getting death threats. They were made such an example that basically every country artist that came after that, every label tells you, ‘Just do not get involved, no matter what.’

“And then, you know, if there was a time for me to get involved…” Swift pauses. “The worst part of the timing of what happened in 2016 was I felt completely voiceless. I just felt like, oh God, who would want me? Honestly.” She would otherwise have endorsed Hillary Clinton? “Of course,” she says sincerely. “I just felt completely, ugh, just useless. And maybe even like a hindrance.”

I suggest that, thinking selfishly, her coming out for Clinton might have made people like her. “I wasn’t thinking like that,” she stresses. “I was just trying to protect my mental health – not read the news very much, go cast my vote, tell people to vote. I just knew what I could handle and I knew what I couldn’t. I was literally about to break. For a while.” Did she seek therapy? “That stuff I just really wanna keep personal, if that’s OK,” she says.

She resists blaming anyone else for her political silence. Her emergence as a Democrat came after she left Big Machine, the label she signed to at 15. (They are now at loggerheads after label head Scott Borchetta sold the company, and the rights to Swift’s first six albums, to Kanye West’s manager, Scooter Braun.) Had Borchetta ever advised her against speaking out? She exhales. “It was just me and my life, and also doing a lot of self-reflection about how I did feel really remorseful for not saying anything. I wanted to try and help in any way that I could, the next time I got a chance. I didn’t help, I didn’t feel capable of it – and as soon as I can, I’m going to.”

Swift was once known for throwing extravagant 4 July parties at her Rhode Island mansion. The Instagram posts from these star-studded events – at which guests wore matching stars-and-stripes bikinis and onesies – probably supported a significant chunk of the celebrity news industry GDP. But in 2017, they stopped. “The horror!” wrote Cosmopolitan, citing “reasons that remain a mystery” for their disappearance. It wasn’t “squad” strife or the unavailability of matching cozzies that brought the parties to an end, but Swift’s disillusionment with her country, she says.

There is a smart song about this on the new album – the track that should have been the first single, instead of the cartoonish ME!. Miss Americana And The Heartbreak Prince is a forlorn, gothic ballad in the vein of Lana Del Rey that uses high-school imagery to dismantle American nationalism: “The whole school is rolling fake dice/You play stupid games/You win stupid prizes,” she sings with disdain. “Boys will be boys then/Where are the wise men?”

As an ambitious 11-year-old, she worked out that singing the national anthem at sports games was the quickest way to get in front of a large audience. When did she start feeling conflicted about what America stands for? She gives another emphatic ugh. “It was the fact that all the dirtiest tricks in the book were used and it worked,” she says. “The thing I can’t get over right now is gaslighting the American public into being like” – she adopts a sanctimonious tone – “‘If you hate the president, you hate America.’ We’re a democracy – at least, we’re supposed to be – where you’re allowed to disagree, dissent, debate.” She doesn’t use Trump’s name. “I really think that he thinks this is an autocracy.”

As we speak, Tennessee lawmakers are trying to impose a near-total ban on abortion. Swift has staunchly defended her “Tennessee values” in recent months. What’s her position? “I mean, obviously, I’m pro-choice, and I just can’t believe this is happening,” she says. She looks close to tears. “I can’t believe we’re here. It’s really shocking and awful. And I just wanna do everything I can for 2020. I wanna figure out exactly how I can help, what are the most effective ways to help. ’Cause this is just…” She sighs again. “This is not it.”

***

It is easy to forget that the point of all this is that a teenage Taylor Swiftwanted to write love songs. Nemeses and negativity are now so entrenched in her public persona that it’s hard to know how she can get back to that, though she seems to want to. At the end of Daylight, the new album’s dreamy final song, there’s a spoken-word section: “I want to be defined by the things that I love,” she says as the music fades. “Not the things that I hate, not the things I’m afraid of, the things that haunt me in the middle of the night.” As well as the songs written for Alwyn, there is one for her mother, who recently experienced a cancer relapse: “You make the best of a bad deal/I just pretend it isn’t real,” Swift sings, backed by the Dixie Chicks.

How does writing about her personal life work if she’s setting clearer boundaries? “It actually made me feel more free,” she says. “I’ve always had this habit of never really going into detail about exactly what situation inspired what thing, but even more so now.” This is only half true: in the past, Swift wasn’t shy of a level of detail that invited fans to figure out specific truths about her relationships. And when I tell her that Lover feels a more emotionally guarded album, she bristles. “I know the difference between making art and living your life like a reality star,” she says. “And then even if it’s hard for other people to grasp, my definition is really clear.”

Even so, Swift begins Lover by addressing an adversary, opening with a song called I Forgot That You Existed (“it isn’t love, it isn’t hate, it’s just indifference”), presumably aimed at Kanye West, a track that slightly defeats its premise by existing. But it sweeps aside old dramas to confront Swift’s real nemesis, herself. “I never grew up/It’s getting so old,” she laments on The Archer.

She has had to learn not to pre-empt disaster, nor to run from it. Her life has been defined by relationships, friendships and business relationships that started and ended very publicly (though she and Perry are friends again). At the same time, the rules around celebrity engagement have evolved beyond recognition in her 15 years of fame. Rather than trying to adapt to them, she’s now asking herself: “How do you learn to maintain? How do you learn not to have these phantom disasters in your head that you play out, and how do you stop yourself from sabotage – because the panic mechanism in your brain is telling you that something must go wrong.” For her, this is what growing up is. “You can’t just make cut-and-dry decisions in life. A lot of things are a negotiation and a grey area and a dance of how to figure it out.”

And so this time, Swift is sticking around. In December she will turn 30, marking the point after which more than half her life will have been lived in public. She’ll start her new decade with a stronger self-preservationist streak, and a looser grip (as well as a cameo in Cats). “You can’t micromanage life, it turns out,” she says, drily.

When Swift finally answered my question about the moment she would choose in the VH1 Behind The Music episode about herself, the one where her career turned, she said she hoped it wouldn’t focus on her “apocalypse” summer of 2016. “Maybe this is wishful thinking,” she said, “but I’d like to think it would be in a couple of years.” It’s funny to hear her hope that the worst is still to come while sitting in her fairytale living room, the cats pacing: a pragmatist at odds with her romantic monument to teenage dreams. But it sounds something like perspective.

#taylor swift #interview #by taylor #the guardian #lover era #lover album #not sure how I feel about the interviewer's approach...there's a lot of irony in it #but a fun read for us nonetheless

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kestrelmarr · 5 years ago

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I don’t know if this has been done before

But I was getting very annoyed at the knee-jerk anti-arguments, so I decided to do a little research. And I gotta say, I did not start this journey as a 2Nu shipper, but I sure as fuck ended as one. Frankly, the more I dug into the canon backstory of the band, the more ridiculous the anti-2Nu arguments seemed to become. The gist of them seems to boil down to this:

1) 2Nu is pedophilia (AKA, “ew, he’s too old for her!”)

2) 2Nu is incest. (AKA, “he practically raised her/he’s like her older brother!”)

3) 2Nu will never be canon, “the creators have already said so, so knock it off!”

To which I reply-

1a) Noodle is legally an adult from mid-Phase 3 on, period. If Jamie Hewlett wanted to, he could have kept her a little girl, you can do that with cartoon characters, you know? There’s no rule you have to physically age them. Stewie Griffin has been a one-year-old baby for 20 years. Conversely, the male members of the band do not appear to have aged much at all. Murdoc is supposed to be 54 years old, and he looks fucking great for his age, aside from being a pickle. However yes, I will agree that shipping Phase 1 or 2 2Nu is pedophilia, but shipping them now is definitely not.

1b) A twelve year age difference is not the catastrophe you all seem to imagine it is. It’s more common than you think for people to date outside their own ages, especially when they’re in their 20s, 30s, and above. If it seems gross to you, honestly that just indicates to me that you’re just... really young.

2a) 2D was an active drug addict with brain damage for most of Phase 1 and 2. He could not “raise” Noodle. For fuck’s sake, he looked catatonic half the time back then. If anyone raised Noodle, it was Russel.

2b) Chronologically, the band spends more time apart than they do together. I know, I checked. Please see the chronological break-down of pertinent events in the canon Gorillaz timeline I have provided below (because I put a lot of time into it), but the gist of it boils down to: from 1998 - 2020, Noodle and 2D spend less than 10 years together, the longest stretch of continuous time being during phase 1 (5 years.) Coincidentally, this is also the time when 2D is *the most fucked up* from drugs and being brain damaged by Murdoc. After the ‘El Manana’ incident, they are separated for 9 years (from 2006 -2015), which means that 2D sees Noodle last when she is 16 and then not again until she’s 25.

And finally,

3) It’s shipping. It doesn’t matter that it’s never going to be canon- THAT IS WHAT SHIPPING IS FOR. So that we can create the content that we know we’ll never get from the source. I’m willing to bet that 90% of ships will never and have never been canon. And no, it doesn’t “upset them,” because at the end of the day, they’re not freakin’ real. Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett are real, however, and they chose to age Noodle into an adult, and then put 2D and her into various promo pictures together being adorable, and ships have been founded on WAAYYY WAY less, let me tell you.

Anyways, here’s the timeline. I’d say feel free to use it to beat 2Nu antis down with canon facts, but we all know they probably won’t listen, anyways.

Phase 1 (1998-2003) Noodle starting age (born 10/31/90, age 8) 2D starting age (born 05/23/78, age 20)

1997: Murdoc gives Stu Pot 2 dents in his head, puts him in a coma/wakes him up/convinces him to join his band.

1998: Kong Studios. Russel joins the boys/Paula Cracker gets kicked out/Noodle arrives via FedEx crate.

2000:EP Tomorrow Comes Today is released.

2001: Debut album Gorillaz is released. Toured Europe and Asia.

2002: Toured North America. Took a break for six months in LA at the end of tour to engage in talks for a film project.

2003:"Everyone was too concentrated on doing drugs and hanging out with celebrities." Murdoc tries to kill 2D. Gorillaz break up.

First hiatus: duration 1.5 years.

Time together during phase 1: 5 years. Ending ages: 13 and 25

Phase 2 (2003-2006)

2003: 2D works at his dad's fun fair in Eastbourne/ Russel stays in LA/Murdoc goes to Tijuana/Noodle goes to Japan.

2004: Noodle gets her memory back, goes back to Kong Studios, starts recording Demon Dayz. Band reunites in late 2004.

2005: Demon Dayz is released.

2006: Noodle goes missing after the windmill island in the El Manana video is shot down. When they can't find her in the wreckage, Gorillaz go their separate ways

Second hiatus : duration 2 years.

Time together during phase 2: 1.75 years. Ending ages: 16 and 28.

Phase 3 (2006-2012)

2006-2008: Murdoc went on a bender around the world and creates Cyborg Noodle/2D on retreat in Beirut/Russel's whereabouts unknown.

2008: Murdoc burns down Kong Studios and cashes in on insurance money, buys Plastic Beach, kidnaps 2D to force him to write album/Russel starts swimming to Plastic Beach.

2010: Welcome to Plastic Beach is released.

2010-2011: Noodle is found on a ship and rescued from pirates by Russel (now giant from consuming toxic waste and trash). They continue to Plastic Beach, defeat the Black Cloud pirates and destroy malfunctioning Cyborg Noodle.

2011: Band is separated after the battle of Plastic Beach due to several outside factors.

(2012: Video for Do Ya Thing shows the band living together at Wobble Street, but this was deemed non-canon because it contradicted events as told in Rise of the Ogre and thus is not included in this timeline)

Time together during Phase 3- NA. Ending ages: 21 and 33.

Phase 4 (2012-2018)

2012-2015 Murdoc: escapes Plastic Beach but is caught by EMI and thrown in Dungeon Abbey until he agrees to make a new album, moves to West London.

2012-2015 2D: eaten by a whale and stranded on Guadalupe Island, spends time there on vacation before reuniting with Murdoc in West London.

2012-2015 Russel: separated from Noodle, captured by NK, eventually shrinks back to normal due to malnutrition and rejoins Murdoc and 2D in West London

2012-2015 Noodle: washes up in Japan, spends time working as a pearl diver, accidentally releases a demon, spends years tracking demon and kills it in criminal underground Tokyo. Rejoins the band in West London.

2016: Band is all in one place together for the first time since 2006, spends the year recording.

2017: Humanz is released, world tour, Demon Dayz Festival is held in Margate, England.

2018: Murdoc is arrested.

Time together during Phase 4: 2 years. Ending ages: 28 and 40.

Phase 5 (2018-2019)

2018: Ace joins the band as Murdoc's replacement. The Now Now is released, and the band goes on tour again.

early 2019: Noodle embarks on a journey to Patagonia to see if 2D’s soul has been stolen by El Mierda.

late 2019: Murdoc gets out of prison and meets Noodle in Patagonia after she discovers the truth about El Mierda and Murdoc’s prison sentence, promises to be a better man and rejoins the band for the last leg of the tour.

Time together: less than one year.

Phase 6 (2019- current)

September of 2019 the band was on hiatus the whole month in separate locations, in preparation for the release of the Song Machine.

Ending/Current ages: 29 and 41.

Total amount of time spent together between 1998 and 2020: Less than ten years.

backstory source #1

backstory video source for phases 1-4

backstory video source for phases 4+5

#2nu #anti 2nu #gorillaz #just the facts ma'am #hate me if you want but it won't change these numbers

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disco-chef-blog · 6 years ago

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It begins

And just like that, the long, uncomfortable process of keeping a personal blog begins. Hi, I’m Niko (you can call me that or Nikos or Nick or Disco, whatever is easiest for you, don’t worry about it) and long story short I am a university dropout who quit in order to pursue a career in the cooking/baking world. From about the beginning of 2016 up until October 2018. Due to injury to my spine (herniated disc pressuring the sciatic nerve) I had to quit my job and seek re-education in another field. I was an engineering and business administration student prior to this in Loughborough University and KULeuven respectively. I have always found myself far more comfortable working with/around computers so when a close friend of mine was about to start a new one-year course in Java development, I followed him through the registration process which included 3 days of lessons and a test on the 4th day. I was told that due to there being an unusual amount of people with some experience with Java, the few seats that they had were given to those that scored highest, even though I had achieved a decent grade. That’s when I caught the second bug of my life: coding. I found another course that begins in mid-April, although it is in Ruby and focuses more on web (and app, kinda) development but thankfully it is in English, unlike the Java course where I found that the people there had a hard time understanding my semi-broken flemmish and alien accent. It was surprising to see how frustrating it can be to not be understood.

I have created this page in order to document that journey and everything revolves around it like side projects on java on codecademy, epiphanies and whatever else comes along with it. The idea is to develop an idea that I have had for an app during my time in the pastry business. Failing that, I will find a job as a junior developer, hopefully.

There has been odd sets of circumstances and events that have led to this point. If you are curious to find out, read on. If you don’t wanna be attacked by another huge wall of text avert your eyes now!

Back in the end of 2015, I was initially working as a part-time deal for funds while being a student, but I fell in love with the work, the intensity and funnily enough the stress of it. I quit my studies 3 months in, and took on every contract they offered me. These were at most week contracts for interim work and I believe the official title was either cook or cook’s helper. After about two years of this, I was sent to a client who was making these incredible structures from pastries. Choux “glued” together with caramel towering above the guests, tartes tatins as far as the eye could see while also the pâtissiers, who were all working in a synchronous rhythm.

I was mesmerised. I knew I had to at least learn the basics.

When it had come to regular kitchen work, I was very fortunate to have learned from my mother how to cook from a very young age. Being the youngest, I usually would come home first, having to wait for my sisters to finish their classes and my parents to return from work. My poor mother at the time had been working almost every day of her life since she was 15. I would call her a woman who had to be a superwoman in her times in order to achieve what she has achieved, both professionally and in her private life. She would have food ready for all of us in pots and casseroles when we came from school, but I was not a very patient child. I would eat half of the food that was available, at first stunning my family but later aggravating them slightly. So, instead of my mother having to cook more quantities and spending more etc, I decided I would cook for myself something extra. It’s very funny to me still, how children don’t have any self-doubt when they set a goal. If I wanted to eat more than the rest, I had to cook something more. The early days are mostly a blur of Greek, Italian, Turkish, French recipes. I couldn’t seem to stick to one, since we had shelves full of books to choose from. Eventually, I found my favourites and would endlessly perfect them over the years with each iteration.

But when it came to baking, to me it was a whole other world. You can fuck up a recipe and many points in regular cooking and you can quite easily remedy them at many, if not all, stages of the process. With baking, however, the margin for error seemed to be unforgiving. It would be the ultimate test of ability: preparing something to perfection, every single time, in order to provide a consistency and quality that I had not seen before.

I asked for a small raise after working for that interim company for 2 years and was denied. I basically asked 1-2 euros more per hour, seeing as I was accepting the jobs with asshole clients that no one would take. Since I never said no, always did what was asked, covered for my colleagues when they made a mistake. Accepting the blame for something that I knew exactly who had done it, but choosing not to make a big deal of it and rather keep my head down and work harder, faster. I must say to this day, that really surprised me. Kitchens environments in general are as bad as they seem in television. The people who work there are uncultured or uneducated most of the time, the level of humour is very, very low. I had thought I had a great relationship with my boss and the many planners we have had. Many of whom I had saved their ass when they double-booked someone or had no one available (or willing) to take on the jobs with lazy clients. So I wrote myself in a 6 month crash course in baking much faster than I had expected.

It was a government funded program intended to help those who were seeking re-education in another field. During that program I did my internship at a local bakery where in the area I had just moved in to. While I may not have been treated as a real employee there all of the time and was given a lot of crap for being the young new guy (which, honestly, is understandable and common in many kitchen environments) I loved every second of working there, even on the bad days. I learned more there than I ever could have at any other educational facility. Most importantly, I lost a part of my innocence and gained more self respect. Unfortunately, being the young new guy, I always found that I had to work as fast as possible and as hard as possible (even though while I did that, I was nowhere near the level of skill of my colleagues or my boss). Which in turn meant that I didn’t always lift things properly, lifted things that I probably shouldn’t have (in order to save time or to avoid bending over every time). I first started feeling the pain on a flight as the plane was taking off and my lower back was pressed on the corner of the seat. Still kept working, thinking it was just a mild sciatica, but it became worse. I never took a break from my job during that time, seeing osteopaths for a quick 30 minute session during work and then returning back to the workshop immediately to continue working. That’s the deal with small businesses like that. We were only 4 people working in the production and that meant that if any one of us was absent, we were fucked in the sense that we would have to pull off a 18+ hour day rather than the usual 10-13 hour day and still being behind schedule. I loved most moments of it though but the pain was getting worse and worse until eventually I was stuck to the floor while emptying the dishwasher. One CT scan later I find out that I have a badly herniated disc on the L5S1 (right side). My boss was understandably not happy about this.

At the same exact time, I had been living with an old colleague from when I was an interim cook. He had many demons he had been avoiding to face over the years, always avoiding his problems with cocaine or other hard drugs and a lot of alcohol. At some point, the housemate had a mental breakdown and came to the conclusion that the people who had stood by him over the years where not worthy of his friendship (this coming from him that would always avoid his friends because he was never in a mood to talk to them just because he was in a funk all the time). I was evicted and forced to move out with no help of his, even though he knew about my back. I begrudgingly moved back to my parents place with the help of a close friend and have been living here ever since (November 2018).

Since then I am following online courses and also in-person courses concerning programming.

So there, now we have come full circle. Onward now to much, much shorter (maybe even daily depending on if I feel like it, I don’t know..) updates.

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patriotsnet · 4 years ago

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Do Republicans Need To Vote On Super Tuesday

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/do-republicans-need-to-vote-on-super-tuesday/

Do Republicans Need To Vote On Super Tuesday

What Is Super Tuesday And Why Is It Important Here’s What You Need To Know

What You Need To Know Before Voting This Super Tuesday

Fifteen contests will be held across the country.

Super Tuesday: Top things to know

There is no national primary voting day, but Super Tuesday is as close as it comes. The end of the day’s voting will bring major delegate allocations and answer some of the questions looming over the Democratic primary.

Fifteen contests will be held across the nation on Tuesday. Polls close at various times beginning at 7 p.m. and extending until 11 p.m., though it is unlikely a winner will be projected in every state before the close of the night.

Here’s what you need to know about the largest day of voting in primary season:

‘we Sent A Message’: Buttigieg Ends Historic Presidential Bid

Warren is teetering around the delegate threshold percentage, too, with most polls conducted before South Carolina. Does she get above 15%? Does she pull from Sanders? Does Biden gain momentum from South Carolina?

A wild card is black voters. There were no exit polls in 2016; 2008 exit polls showed black voters were only 7% of the electorate. But the California Democratic Party estimates that African Americans are about 16% of the party. Do they turn out? Depending on which estimate winds up being correct could determine if Biden makes a dent in the state.

This will also be the first significant measure of Asian Americans in this election. They were 8% of the electorate in 2008, and the California Democratic Party estimates they are 10% now.

Do You Have To Vote For The Party You’re Registered With

Your state may give you the opportunity to declare your political party affiliation on your voter registration card.

You do not have to vote for the party youre registered with, in a federal, state, or local general election.

But in a presidential primary or caucus, depending on your states rules, you may have to vote for the political party youve registered with.

Also Check: Why Do Republicans Hate Planned Parenthood

Candidates Who Have Suspended Their Campaigns But Their Names Still On The Virginia Ballot

The following nine candidates are still on the ballot in Virginia, even though they have suspended their campaign. The deadline for the Virginia Democratic Party to provide a list of candidates to appear on the ballot was in December 2019, before these candidates ended their campaigns.

Cory Booker;

Booker dropped out of the Presidential race in January.

Im proud I never compromised my faith in these principles during this campaign, Booker wrote. And maybe Im stubborn, but Ill never abandon my faith in what we can accomplish when we join together.

Booker has served in the U.S. Senate since 2013, representing New Jersey. Previously he was Mayor of Newark from 2006 to 2013. He was also a tenant lawyer and city councilman.According to his website, he says his main accomplishments in the Senate have been helping to write and pass the First Step Act, a bipartisan criminal justice reform bill, and co-sponsoring the Equality Act.

While running for President, Booker unveiled his policy proposals, including decriminalization of marijuana and fighting to end the War on Drugs, fighting for Medicare for All, expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit, and expanding protections for DREAMers.

Michael Bennet;

Bennet suspended his campaign on Tuesday, February 11.

Bennett was appointed in 2008 as a U.S. Senator for Colorado, ;He won elections in 2010 and 2016. Before his time on Capitol Hill, he was the Superintendent of Denver Public Schools for four years.

Pete Buttigieg;

Amy Klobuchar;

What Is Super Tuesday

Its the day when the greatest number of US states cast their votes to nominate presidential candidates, who will eventually compete for the White House in Novembers general election.

It is the biggest day in the US election calendar apart from election day itself. The candidates have each held hundreds of meet-and-greet events, travelled thousands of miles, eaten a lot of junk food, and their campaigns have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to get them to this make-or-break moment.

In 2020, Super Tuesday falls on 3 March. Both Democrats and Republicans will be voting, but because Donald Trump does not face any serious challengers, all eyes will be on the Democratic contest.

The early voting states Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina have all had their say over the past month, with Bernie Sanders emerging as the possible national frontrunner in the race for the Democratic nomination.

But now, 14 states across the country Alabama, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont and Virginia as well as one US territory and Democrats abroad will cast their votes on the same day.

Read Also: Will Any Republicans Vote For Impeachment

Don’t Miss: What Are The Main Differences Between Democrats And Republicans

Who’s On The Ballot On Super Tuesday

The five remaining Democratic candidates for president will be on the ballot in every Super Tuesday state and territory.

They are former Vice President Joe Biden, former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.

On the Republican side, former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld is hoping to be an alternative to the incumbent Trump.

Additionally, some ballots will include lesser-known candidates and a few who dropped out of the race after registering to be on the ballot, like former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg and businessman Tom Steyer, both of whom suspended their campaigns over the weekend after weak showings in the South Carolina Primary. Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota dropped out of the race less than 24 hours before voters headed to the polls in 14 states.

Buttigieg, Klobuchar and another former candidate, former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke, all endorsed Biden on Monday.

Whos Running for President in 2020?

The field of Democratic 2020 presidential candidates is narrowing. Here’s who is still in the race.

Names And Prior Election Cycles

The name Super Duper Tuesday is a reference to earlier Super Tuesdays, the dates on which the largest number of presidential primaries took place. The term Super Duper Tuesday has been repeatedly re-coined to refer to even more states holding their primaries on this date, with the first recorded usage so far found dating back to 1985. In 2004, Super Tuesday fell on March 2.In 2004, the equivalent cohort of primaries, on February 3, 2004, was called Mini-Tuesdayâonly seven states held their primaries on that date.

On June 3, 2007, the name Tsunami Tuesdayâconveying the potential of the large number of simultaneous primaries to completely change the political landscapeâwas mentioned on Meet the Press during a round-table discussion with presidential campaign strategists James Carville, Bob Shrum, , and Mike Murphy.

Super Tuesday in 2008 occurred during and on the day of the New York Giants Super Bowl victory parade. Voting was hampered in several states by a major tornado outbreak that killed 57 people, and competed with the primaries for the news.

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Why Host These Primaries

One reason: Biden is not technically the nominee;until a majority of delegates have voted to make it so at the Democratic convention.;

Some states, like Connecticut and New York, allow primaries to be canceled if there is only one candidate remaining on the ballot. However, New York tried this,;and a federal judge in Manhattan;ruled;the state;must hold its;primary, which is on June 23.

Additionally, while the presidential primaries are the highest-ranking contest in which citizens can vote Tuesday, there are;down-ballot primaries for House and Senate seats or runoffs, as well.

More:Obama says George Floyd’s death shouldn’t be ‘normal’

How Do You Choose

County Officials Want Answers After Voters Waited Hours To Vote Super Tuesday

When you show up to your polling location, youll decide whether you want a Democratic or Republican primary ballot.

But after choosing a side in the primary, you have to stay in that lane through the runoff. You cant vote Republican in the primary election and then participate in a runoff election between top Democratic candidates.

That said, voting in a primary does not commit you to vote for a particular candidate in the general election. You can vote for either partys candidate in the November election.

Don’t Miss: Where Are Republicans On The Political Spectrum

So How Does That Compare

Voters who live in states with closed primaries are required to register with a political party in order to vote in that partys primary. If you wanted to vote in the Republican primary in New York, you have to register as a Republican. Oftentimes, third-party voters are locked out of the Republican and Democratic primaries. But some states, like Oklahoma, are a bit of a hybrid and let independent voters choose which primaries they want to participate in.

Why Did House Democrats Underperform Compared To Joe Biden

The results of the 2020 elections pose several puzzles, one of which is the gap between Joe Bidens handsome victory in the presidential race and the Democrats disappointing performance in the House of Representatives. Biden enjoyed an edge of 7.1 million votes over President Trump, while the Democrats suffered a loss of 13 seats in the House, reducing their margin from 36 to just 10.

Turnout in the 2018 mid-term election reached its highest level in more than a century. Democrats were fervently opposed to the Trump administration and turned out in droves. Compared to its performance in 2016, the partys total House vote fell by only 2%. Without Donald Trump at the head of the ticket, Republican voters were much less enthusiastic, and the total House vote for Republican candidates fell by nearly 20% from 2016. Democratic candidates received almost 10 million more votes than Republican candidates, a margin of 8.6%, the highest ever for a party that was previously in the minority. It was, in short, a spectacular year for House Democrats.

To understand the difference this Democratic disadvantage can make, compare the 2020 presidential and House results in five critical swing states.

Table 1: Presidential versus House results

Arizona

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These States Are Also Holding Gop Primaries

The race between the five remaining Democratic presidential candidates may be the top primaries on Super Tuesday, but they arent the only elections happening.

On Tuesday, Alabama, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont and Virginia will hold primaries for the Democratic presidential nominee.

American Samoa will also hold a Democratic caucus.

WHAT IS SUPER TUESDAY? WHAT TO KNOW ABOUT THE UPCOMING PRIMARIES

Among those states, Alabama, Arkansas, California, North Carolina and Texas will also hold Congressional primaries and other elections for both Republicans and Democrats.

A voter is pictured marking his ballot at a voting center in Sacramento, Calif. in February.

In fact, former U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions is facing several other Republican candidates in Alabamas Senate race.

SUPER TUESDAY SEES HOLLYWOOD RALLY AROUND JOE BIDEN

Republicans will be able to vote for their presidential nominee in most of the 14 Super Tuesday states.

In Minnesota and Maine, President Trump is unopposed on the ballot, according to the Duluth News Tribune and the Bangor Daily News. In other states, Trump faces several opponents who arent strong contenders.

To receive the nomination, Trump must win 1,276 delegates out of 2,551 at the Republican National Convention in August. Because he is an incumbent, it is likely he will receive the delegates and the nomination as well.

Candidates And Election Results On Super Tuesday

This section contains the candidate lists and election results for each super Tuesday primary. Results will be updated as they become available. Click on the state’s or territory’s name for more information.

Alabama Democratic presidential primary on March 3, 2020

Â;

Total votes: 452,093 â¢ Total pledged delegates: 52

Alabama Republican presidential primary on March 3, 2020

Â;

American Samoa Democratic presidential caucus on March 3, 2020

Â;

Arkansas Democratic presidential primary on March 3, 2020

Â;

Total votes: 229,120 â¢ Total pledged delegates: 31

Arkansas Republican presidential primary on March 3, 2020

Â;

California Democratic presidential primary on March 3, 2020

Â;

Total votes: 5,784,364 â¢ Total pledged delegates: 415

California Republican presidential primary on March 3, 2020

Â;

Total votes: 2,471,580 â¢ Total pledged delegates: 172

California Green presidential primary on March 3, 2020

Â;

Total votes: 11,612 â¢ Total pledged delegates: 0

California Libertarian presidential primary on March 3, 2020

Â;

Total votes: 28,535 â¢ Total pledged delegates: 0

California American Independent presidential primary on March 3, 2020

Â;

Total votes: 56,568 â¢ Total pledged delegates: 0

California Peace and Freedom presidential primary on March 3, 2020

Â;

Colorado Democratic presidential primary on March 3, 2020

Â;

Total votes: 960,128 â¢ Total pledged delegates: 67

Colorado Republican presidential primary on March 3, 2020

Â;

Maine Democratic presidential primary on March 3, 2020

Â;

Recommended Reading: What 7 Republicans Voted To Impeach

History Of Super Tuesday

The prominence of Super Tuesday in presidential primary elections begin with the 1984 election and continue to take shape in 1988. During some presidential years, there can be more than one voting Tuesday in March which can be called Super Tuesday.

In 1984, there were 3 Tuesdays which were called Super Tuesday due to the number of states involved.

In 2008, many states tried moving their primary elections earlier in the process which created a scenario where February 5, 2008, was considered the first Super Tuesday of the 2008 cycle.

In 2020, March 10 and March 17 may also be considered Super Tuesday voting days with a handful of states holding primaries.

When Is Super Tuesday And What Is It Exactly

Super Tuesday is Tuesday, March 3. It is the most important day on the Democratic primary calendar because there are so many delegates up for grabs.

When exactly is Super Tuesday, what makes it so Super and how did we even get to a place where we have a day with that title?

Heres what you need to know:

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Clinton Could See Advantage

On the other side of the aisle, the Democratic Super Tuesday clash is not going to force either of the candidates out of the race however it ends.

But it could hand a clear advantage to Clinton as she seeks to exploit the Southern advantage that her campaign has long argued makes it impossible for Sanders to win the nomination.

The former secretary of state will be looking to engineer a sweep of the Deep South, Virginia and Texas and to also be competitive in states where Sanders, a Vermont senator, looks to have his best chance.

That could allow Clinton to build up a lead in delegates before the race heads to Northern and Midwestern states where the Sanders message of an economy rigged against American workers could provide her with a more irksome challenge.

Clintons huge win in South Carolina on Saturday was based on a huge outpouring from African-American voters.

What To Know About Voting In Mass On Super Tuesday

Trump Turns His Attacks On A Resurgent Biden After Super Tuesday | The 11th Hour | MSNBC

Tuesday, March 3 is not your average Tuesday; its Super Tuesday, where Massachusetts joins 13 other states, American Samoa and Democrats living abroad in voting in the presidential primary. Two of those states are Texas and California, making the day a potentially decisive one for the Democrats running for president.

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Make Or Break For Cruz

For Cruz, his win-or-go-home moment is now.

If Cruz doesnt win Texas, it is game over for him, said Phillip Stutts, a Republican political consultant. Rubio doesnt have to win, but Cruz has to.

Trumps big advantage going into Super Tuesday is that his opposition remains divided.

Cruz, Rubio and Kasich in some states are dividing up the anti-Trump vote between them, meaning no single candidate can unite opposition to Trump.

Right now, they are all fighting each other while Donald Trump wraps up delegates. Thats a problem it needs to be a two-man race, said Stutts.

For instance, in Virginia, Trump leads with 41% while Rubio is at 27%, Cruz is at 14% and both Kasich and former neurosurgeon Ben Carson have 7% each, according to a Monmouth University poll last week.

And in Massachusetts, its Kasich who is inadvertently helping Trump sitting tied in a WBUR poll with Rubio at 19% well behind Trump at 40%.

Even if Trump does sweep the field on Super Tuesday, his nomination will not be assured, however, because in the GOP, all states that vote before March 15 must divide delegates among the competing candidates based on their share of the vote, as long as they reach certain thresholds in some states.

Cruzs team is confident, however, that their boss can rewrite the political narrative Tuesday.

Also Check: Are There More Republicans Or Democrats In The Senate

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your-dietician · 4 years ago

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Inside the journey of Notre Dame's David Adams and life after football

New Post has been published on https://tattlepress.com/ncaa-football/inside-the-journey-of-notre-dames-david-adams-and-life-after-football/

Inside the journey of Notre Dame's David Adams and life after football

The magic is in his story now, in the climb that couldn’t reignite the smothered dream but perhaps launched something even better.

Even if it looks and feels like limbo at the moment.

Four months in the NCAA transfer portal for former Notre Dame linebacker David Adams produced curiosity from three Power 5 schools and slightly more than that from roughly half the schools in the Mid-American Conference and a handful of programs from the FCS.

During that same stretch, he also muscled up impressively, completed his final 10 hours of coursework for his ND degree in business as an Econ major and contracted COVID-19 twice in a 90-day span — the reinfection in April serious enough to send Adams to the hospital twice.

► More:Notre Dame athletes embrace NIL opportunities on first day of new NCAA policy

► More:Notebook: For Notre Dame OC Rees, the summer push to get better starts with himself

A litany of injuries that coaxed Adams to accept a medical disqualification at the end of his freshman year, before he could ever take a snap in a college game, was also the lingering reality that ended the comeback and prompted Adams to remove himself from the portal without a landing spot on June 14.

The original inventory of ailments Adams brought with him from Pittsburgh Central Catholic High included multiple concussions, a torn labrum of each shoulder, a torn elbow ligament, a torn medial collateral ligament in his knee, cracked knee cartilage, a knee hyperextension that required surgery, patellar tendinitis and four broken fingers.

That doesn’t count breaking both ankles during his AAU basketball days.

“I both wanted to try the comeback and needed to do it,” Adams said. “Wanted to, because I love football. I love the game. I love making tackles. I love playing defense.

“I needed to, because whether it was actually going to happen or it wasn’t, I’d get closure on this chapter in my life. If it didn’t work out, I’d get closure at the very least.”

What comes next is what the 4-for-40 mantra that Notre Dame bakes into its recruiting pitch really looks like in the real world in real time.

The gift in Adams having it thrust upon him at age 20 and reinforced at age 23 is his reaction to it.

The uncertainty of tomorrow doesn’t bother him, because the resolve and ambition that have been building inside of him are being channeled this summer into something truly inspiring.

“I’ve been stuttering my entire life,” Adams said. “Before I go looking for a job, I’m giving it my full attention. I’ve never had the time to do that before. I have it now and the belief I can overcome it.

“That’s my No. 1 focus right now. Well, that and my golf game.”

He’s working with Arthur Joseph, a renowned author, teacher, communication strategist and voice coach.

“I know it’s not going to go away overnight,” Adams said. “I’m just hoping I’m going to gain some more control for now.

“There’s a lot of people who have had it. Joe Biden. Tiger Woods had a stutter. Shaquille O’Neal had a stutter. He told stories about when he was in school, where he’d be called on to read and he couldn’t get any of his words out, and everyone would just laugh at him.

“I know how that feels. I also know it can be overcome. It’s time to give it everything I have.”

What might have been

On a November Friday night in 2015, with a road game at Pitt set for the next day, Notre Dame head coach Brian Kelly and four assistant coaches clustered on the sideline to be seen at — every bit as much as to see — Pittsburgh Central Catholic’s WPIAL Class AAAA home playoff game with Upper St. Clair.

The targets of their efforts were Adams, at the time a junior and ranked as one of the top five linebackers nationally by Rivals and third by 247Sports, and senior defensive back Damar Hamlin, who’d eventually land at Pitt.

Emerging as another player of interest following the 49-0 romp by PCC was an unheralded three-star defensive lineman named Kurt Hinish.

To put in perspective of what an ascending prospect Adams was at the time, the Irish allocated just one assistant — then-QBs coach Mike Sanford — to venture 20 miles north to Pine-Richland High School that same night to scout a vaunted sophomore QB named Phil Jurkovec, to whom the Irish offered a scholarship the very next day.

Adams verbally committed to the Irish the following March, and Hinish two days later.

“I love my hometown, but I wanted to get out of my box,” Adams said. “I wanted to take the hard road. I wanted to challenge myself athletically and academically. I wanted to grow as a person.

“I had never been to Indiana until I took a visit there. I didn’t even know … I just heard it was a bunch of cornfields.

“And it is a bunch of cornfields — and so much more.”

In the fall of 2016, though, Adams’ preferred hard road took on added and unwelcome dimensions. The injuries began to accrue during his high school senior season, and he played right through them and the pain that came with them.

He did so to the point where Pittsburgh Steelers head orthopedic surgeon Dr. James Bradley, upon examining Adams, said that he had been misdiagnosed and that one of his shoulders was actually “hanging by a thread.”

The consensus top 100 prospect nationally, unsurprisingly, began to fade in the recruiting rankings. By the time he signed with the Irish in February of 2017, Adams was a three-star prospect.

By the time he enrolled at Notre Dame in June, he was a constant in the Irish football training room, seeking treatment, rehab and hope. When the 2017 season rolled around, he not only didn’t play, he wasn’t even allowed to suit up for the games.

Over the next few months, head athletic trainer Rob Hunt, team physician Dr. Matt Leiszler, special teams coach Brian Polian and defensive coordinator Clark Lea each pulled Adams aside and tried to gauge if he really wanted to continue to try to play football.

Each time it took him aback a little bit. But when Kelly brought Adams into his office for a one-on-one at the end of his freshman spring semester, in 2018, it had a different vibe to it.

“He pretty much said the player he recruited out of high school would have played a lot of football for us,” Adams related. “But, he said, ‘Your body has changed a lot since then, and I’m worried about your health.’

“That was very hard for me to hear, knowing everything I had put in since I was a young kid. I finally get to this high level, and I wanted to go even higher.

“I obviously had NFL aspirations, All-American aspirations, everything. But to hear that after my freshman spring ball was very difficult, because it wasn’t something where he says to me, ‘You’re just not playing good. You need to step it up.’

“In that case, I adapt, I get better. In this case, there wasn’t a whole lot I could do, because of my body. So it was tough.”

Adams stayed home that summer, not sure he’d ever be back.

“They left it open — ‘We would love to have you back’ and ‘you’re always welcome’ — that type of stuff,” Adams said. “But that summer was very hard.

“Then I came back in the fall. Initially I didn’t plan on going around the football team. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to, but I thought it would be too hard emotionally. After I got back, I realized it was even harder to be away from it.

“I’ll always remember this. When I got back my sophomore year, I heard the band playing one day. And it was just like, ‘Wow, I’m back here. All my dreams are now shot. I don’t really know what to do. It’s hard being here and hard being away. But it’s harder being away from football.’

“So I decided I definitely wanted to go back and help out any way I can and hang with all my good friends.”

During Notre Dame’s 2018 playoff run Adams, then a sophomore, attended every practice and every home game. He watched film and made breakout tapes of ND’s opponents for Lea and senior defensive analyst Nick Lezynski.

He’d help oversee the scout team defense in practice. He’d help organize meetings.

“David was a throwback, in a sense,” Kelly reflected last week. “He was a downhill, knock-you-in-the-mouth linebacker. That’s how he played the game. So to have the game pulled from him so early in his career, a lot of people can’t handle the void.

“On top of that, David had to deal with his speech impediment. He already had a challenge in front of him as it was. And I don’t know that there’s anybody I’ve ever met that has handled it quite as well as David did, given all the things that could and probably did go against him.”

Making a difference

The function of medical disqualifications/hardships is to allow players to remain on scholarship and finish their education without it counting against the team’s 85-max scholarship limit imposed by the NCAA.

It’s college football’s Mulligan.

But Adams never personified that. He counted and mattered off the field, and at a particularly critical juncture.

In 2016, the Irish cratered and went 4-8. Kelly responded with a coaching staff makeover, lots of self-reflection and a reboot of his entire philosophies when it came to the way he related to his players and how he ran his program.

None of which plays well in the cut-throat recruiting arena.

After wide receiver Michael Young’s July 20, 2016, verbal commitment, the Irish whiffed on every opportunity to add to the class through the end of the second-losingest season in Notre Dame history.

There were also a Kelly Era-high six decommitments in the cycle, including linebacker Pete Werner and cornerback Paulson Adebo, eventual stars at Ohio State and Stanford, respectively. Over the other 11 completed recruiting cycles the Irish have had 15 decommitments combined.

“Decommitting never crossed my mind,” Adams said. “I knew what Notre Dame had to offer and it’s sports, you know. Everybody has bad years. And so it was, ‘Ok, they’re having a bad year. I’m sure they might make some changes in the offseason.’ I didn’t waver at all.

“I know some guys, who are on the team now and who have already graduated, and a few of them did waver a little bit. And me, along with others, tried our best to hold it together.

“I believe I was the first defensive commit in the class, so I took pride in trying to hold things together, making sure we got the best class possible.”

They also helped reverse the momentum late in the cycle.

Notre Dame broke the drought with the December commitment of offensive lineman Aaron Banks and closed with six commitments in the final week before signing day. Three of them, including future All-American Jeremiah Owusu-Koramoah, made their decisions on the actual National Signing Day, in February.

Four years later, the group reached graduation day with the same number of losses in four years combined as the 2016 team amassed in one (8). With it, that class helped fashion 43 wins and the first two playoff appearances in Notre Dame history.

And on Nov. 7, they played their part in upending No. 1 Clemson, 47-40 in double-overtime, at Notre Dame Stadium for the first victory by the Irish over a top-ranked team in 27 years.

“The memories are special — I’m glad I have those,” Adams said. “The people are even more special. Coach (Mike) Elston, coach Kelly. There are so many of them. They make a difference in who you become. Now I want to do that for other people.

“I don’t know what that’s going to look like yet, but I know my decision to come to Notre Dame was the right one. Football was my Plan A. My Plan B — if it doesn’t work out — I have an economics degree from one of the best universities in the world. I couldn’t go wrong either way.

“I wanted Plan A more than anything, but I ended up getting Plan B. So yeah, I’m happy. Going to Notre Dame is going to help me in a lot of ways in my life — with opportunities. Our alumni are very strong in helping each other out.

“The beautiful thing is when you know you have people in your corner. It makes you feel like you can still dream and accomplish anything.”

Follow ND Insider Eric Hansen on Twitter: @ehansenNDI

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junker-town · 5 years ago

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Fighting in the Age of Loneliness, supercut edition: A conversation with Felix and Jon

Secret Base is re-releasing our MMA documentary series as a single cut. Here’s a talk between its creators, Felix Biederman and Jon Bois.

Secret Base now has one million subscribers on YouTube. It’s a big moment for us, and it’s a testament to all the ambition, creativity and years of hard work put in by our team: Alex Rubenstein, Clara Morris, Graham MacAree, Jiazhen Zhang, Joe Ali, Jon Bois, Kofie Yeboah, Mike Das, Phil Pasternak, Ryan Simmons, Seth Rosenthal, and Will Buikema.

Out of appreciation for our viewers, we’ve decided to re-release our 2018 documentary series, Fighting in the Age of Loneliness, as a single two-hour video. Jon spent years working with Felix Biederman of Chapo Trap House fame to tell a story of mixed martial arts, sketchy business dealings, power-hungry families, the fading of American empire, and the refuge offered to us by our weird, stupid, beloved bloodsport.

Jon and Felix also took the occasion to have a long talk about what the project means to us two years later. It was a free-flowing conversation that sort of went where it went. We hope you enjoy.

Jon: I’ve been on the internet making all kinds of different shit for a really long time, and two years down the road, Fighting in the Age of Loneliness is one of the things i’m very proudest of. One reason it was such an interesting experience for me is that tonally, it’s just so different from other things I tend to make. It’s fundamentally a bittersweet story and it refuses to forecast a happy ending. It’s honest until it hurts.

I know you grew up watching MMA, and you’d wanted to make a large-scale MMA project for quite some time. Was there a specific point at which it stopped being merely a fun Saturday night for you, and you started to notice the erosion of the things that made it so special? Did it go hand-in-hand with you growing up and beginning to see the world for what it is? I’d be really interested to hear how and when you arrived at this place.

Felix: First of all, I want to say that FITAOL is the sort of thing I have dreamed of making since before I ever knew I’d work in media. It was a distant glimmer and I would never have been able to do it with anyone else. The way it looked and felt outpaced even what I had imagined something like it would feel like as a kid.

As for MMA, I didn’t notice the decline until I was in my early- to mid-twenties. Maybe there’s something to be said about the final parts of your childhood now dying around that time nowadays as opposed to earlier. I definitely became more prone to noticing seedier, more depressing, hollow aspects of things I enjoyed, but it was something more than that. There are tons of things I love that I now see the darker aspects of, but I’ve never gone from full obsessive mania to not touching it like [I have with MMA]. Or at least not as an adult. I knew everything, every fight, every event, who left which training camp, whose manager is an asshole, etc. I didn’t go from that to not watching instantly, though.

I think the moment my enjoyment declined too much for me to love it was 2016. I had more responsibilities and worked a ton that year, but to put it bluntly, I developed a life. I don’t think I really had one as a 22-year-old, and suddenly it felt like I had been dropped one from the sky. That’s never gotten in the way of me getting obsessive about things and drawing a singular focus, but in this case I had started missing fights I never would have and not really missing them. There was nothing drawing me back. If you can maintain an interest, hobby, obsession, or mania in a time of new meaning and excitement, there’s something at the core of it that’s radiating out to you on a very deep level. MMA did not have that for me anymore. I felt like that core had been hollowed out and it took me a while to figure out why.

Jon: You know, I think there’s something singular and special about that age you’re talking about, somewhere around like 20. A lot of parts of your life and things you always believed kinda melt off and float away. At the same time, the “rest of your life” – maybe not in everyone’s case, but in mine and by the sound of it yours – hasn’t started yet. So you’re left in this sort of twilight where you’re just sort of there, trying to make it day to day and clinging to whatever resonates with you. Despite all the confusion and indirection, while I’m glad I’m no longer there, I do get very nostalgic about it. It was this age of time-wasting, aimlessness and stupidity, and at the time it never dawned on me that I should cherish it, that it’s something I’d never experience again.

That was a time I thought about a lot as I started reviewing your script, actually. In most of the chapters you slotted in an interlude that painted a picture of the sorts of people this resonated with. People who were forgotten and rudderless in one way or another, and took refuge in a thing that was so unique and tasteless and off-the-path that it could feel like it was theirs. That was the case with me. Although my appreciation of MMA was much more casual than yours, it picked me like a lock. I was just like, so much of the shit I thought I was supposed to care about doesn’t make sense to me. But this does, perfectly.

We’ve talked about this a little before, but the thing about this I’m proudest of is its determination to try and capture that lonely, disjointed, forgotten feeling that countless people around our age experienced (and still do!), but is virtually never talked about. I mean, this isn’t new. Every previous generation has 900 million pieces of media documenting what it was like to be them. While each one is no more or less important than the next, each is different and shaped by different conditions. I don’t know if you wanna venture a guess. Do you think future generations are in for more of what we were in for, but worse? Can you imagine a realistic possibility that things will get better?

Felix: When I think about coming generations, I think about what Jarvis Cocker says in “Common People”: “you’ll never watch your life slide out of view.”

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It’s a gut-wrenching line in a song that’s musically upbeat. It hits at something very deep emotionally with me that I could never put into words. That’s exactly it: peoples’ lives just fall out of the collective field of vision. They’re forced to live at the periphery of everyone’s vision. They’re UberEats guys or they wipe down the aisles at CVS every 15 minutes, or they’re the saving someone else’s place in line for a COVID test.

The next generations will have a few carefully-doled-out seven-figure futures, and then a fleeting and tenuous middle class that is only defined as economic “freedom from” and not “freedom to.” Your purchasing power is shit compared to your parents, you’re going to live like a bug in a major city or in a new construction monstrosity that’s built to collapse on itself, and you have fewer family and friends every year.

Your dream of having someone you love and somebody that loves you, much less bringing someone new into this world, seems like more of a distant fantasy every day. But you’re the person ordering the food on the delivery app. You’re the guy who those CVS workers make way for when you sadly waddle down the aisle. Aren’t you glad you’re not those people who you only ever see in the corner of your eye? And that’s where everyone else will be: increasingly invisible. They’ll leave your food at your doorstep and be penalized at work if you make eye contact with them. They’ll bring you pallets of agribusiness-grown chemical bullshit that makes you feel sick and fucking miserable all the time. Your greatest fear on that middle class iceberg will be drifting off and becoming someone who does not exist to people like you, and it will keep you in line.

I don’t know how that changes. I don’t think anyone currently holding federal office gives a shit about those people or even putting their finger in the dam to momentarily pause the constant degradation and pain most people in this country feel that you never hear about. I don’t know what the path out is.

Jon: I don’t know either. I’m an optimist by choice because being that way makes me happier and motivates me to make whatever infinitesimal speck of difference i can make. It’s like religion. I can’t justify it, I can’t tell you you should be, it’s just the way i choose to be. One thing i’m fairly sure of is that if it gets better, it’ll happen over a long, long span of time, in increments usually too small to collectively celebrate, and so slowly that neither of us will ever really see it. It’ll be as imperceptible as Jarvis Cocker described. The small, illusory prize of seeing Bernie lose, for instance, is the fantasy that we were THIS close to getting on the right course, that we’re only a few breaks away from pulling the switch and rolling down another track.

And since it happens so slowly, we can’t let ourselves be driven to agony. I mean, we can, but we’ve only got one of these lives. We have to have things that make us happy, even if the avenues toward those things grow narrower, and even though the very nature of community crumbles and sends us seeping between the floorboards looking for it.

I remember during the aughts, when I was first trying to work my way into sports media, the popular line among the cool kids was that things like sports are a distraction that monopolizes peoples’ attention and energy that otherwise would go into enacting real political change. But things like sports are the fucking point! MMA, or learning how to play the lap steel, or thrift fashion, or Counter-Strike, or Scrubs fan fiction, or whatever in the world it is for you. That’s what you’re fighting for, if you’re fighting. Every hour you get to spend in that world is your victory against all this. Maybe it is the bread-and-circus shit that every guy on an aughts forum with a name like TheChortlingAtheist or whatever said it was. Maybe it is. But what exactly would we ask? Can you blame them? What the fuck else would you suggest, annoying guy i remember?

Felix: That’s exactly it. There’s this thing that happens when people get monkeys as pets: they go insane from a lack of enrichment and play (as well as not being around other monkeys). They never learn how to be a monkey. They’re just naked and vulnerable to the world because all they can do is hit the button or make the face that makes their owner give them food. That’s all their life is and it’s fucking miserable and terrifying. Sports isn’t the thing you strip away and then find meaning. It’s part of the palette we color our lives with. It’s the only way left we have to describe certain things.

I think it’s interesting, that for however highly Americans poll on the military on paper, the military feels it absolutely must have this massive presence at American sporting events. That for all the polling, no American recognizes someone from the joint chiefs of staff or the ranks of SEAL Team Six like they do someone from the NFL or NBA. I think people reflexively say they worship the military in this country, but they clearly don’t seem to believe we have any war heroes. We haven’t made any of them celebrities in a long time. We fundamentally don’t believe our wars are heroic. Our actions show we think our athletes are. That’s the thing actually giving our lives enrichment and color.

How to channel that, I don’t know. Maybe our Napoleon is at Michigan or Clemson right now. If we ever have a highly transformational single ruler who washes out the old, it will be an athlete.

Jon: RIGHT! It’s in sports where we find some of the most pure, honest expressions of humanity. To borrow one of my favorite lines of yours from the series, nothing about it lies to you. It’s so intensely expressive in ways people can almost never achieve even when we script it. I think about this moment a lot:

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Looking at this, you’d never know the Astros would win the next game and go to the World Series for the first time ever. A stadium full of people is losing their shit, Pujols hits a ball 700 miles, and in an instant, the entire place sounds like a shopping mall. There’s no lesson in it, there’s no narrative arc, there’s nothing being sold, no message sent. It’s just 50,000 people having their hearts ripped out. You’ll never see a more essentially human moment. Give me times like those over every TV show i’ve ever seen.

I’d love to say the military’s days of polling high are numbered, that younger people are beginning to see things for what they are. But hell, however old you are, odds are that either Vietnam or Iraq shaped your upbringing and understanding of the world in some way, and apparently that’s failed to sufficiently register. Once again, everything progresses so slowly and silently that maybe it’s just a foregone conclusion that most of us come to accept it.

I gotta reference the Civilization games here. The start of a Civ game is a hell of a time. You’re exploring the world, discovering things, introducing new technologies, building all over the place. then you start waging war as a colonizing piece of shit, and that’s a great time. After a healthy amount of that, Brazil invades and burns down half your cities, and you spend the next 700 years plotting revenge. And one day you strike back and take that revenge, and it’s so satisfying. It feels like it should be good times from there on out, but to your surprise, the late game is incredibly dull and lifeless. All you’re doing is researching how to build fighter jets and bombers. You hunker down, and you stop giving a shit about whether all your cities have enough food. All you’re doing is selecting a stealth bomber, scrolling across the map, bombing Barcelona. Then you scroll back to Philadelphia, select another bomber, bomb Barcelona again. This is all you’re doing now. You don’t even know why you’re playing anymore. You just keep doing it because that’s all there is to do.

Then sometimes you’ll scroll around and notice some ancient unit you forgot you had. Like a spearman or something you left on a far-flung part of the map in 400 A.D. and forgot about. You could disband the unit, but you don’t. You could send him to bum-rush a helicopter unit and get destroyed, but you don’t. Because you care about him. He’s all that’s left about what you once loved about all this, back when you at least thought you knew why you were doing what you were doing.

Felix: I think we’re headed in this strange fragmented direction none of us can quite place. Very few people want to admit that this is the end, the beginning of an imperial unraveling. I see all these debates over whether China is communist or not, whether they’re the fucking Third Reich or something ridiculous, or they’re the saviors of humanity. They all miss this very basic fact: China overcoming mass poverty on a scale we’ve never seen, China modernizing on the timeline and scale that it has, is the only generational human accomplishment of the last 30 years. That’s it. That’s the only thing anyone actually remembers in one thousand years if we’re still here.

They’re the only nation that has done anything at all. The United States, European Union, India, no one has any equivalent accomplishments. Oh, uninterrupted peace in Europe? Shut up! No one gives a fuck! You’d have to dig deep for something one one-hundredth as impressive.

In America, though, you never hear about it. You never hear about how they’re fucking spitting in each other’s mouths at water parks while we’re toiling in the slush. And you know what? I don’t care if more people died than what they said. I know nations lie, blah blah blah. The simple fact is that we’re squirming around in the mud while they are living in the present and that’s an unmistakable fact. Sorry. We may have the capability to kill some people and knock some governments over still, but we’re done. We’re revealed as pathetic. No one is actually afraid of us. So what happens next?

The one thing working in the military’s favor is that they’re the only institution with the resources and manpower to assume control and/or fight current oligarchical powers if it came to that, but I don’t know if the military will have the same emotional powers in people’s minds then. It may leave a different taste in people’s mouths if there start to be falls of Saigon every day. Maybe that happens under a Mike Lindell presidency in 12 years. We’re dragged kicking and screaming out of the world. We never acknowledged our time was up. That’s certainly the direction we’re heading in as Biden drools out something approximating “we’re going to restore global leadership.”

MyPillow / YouTube

Jon: In high school I was annoyed by this dude I knew who liked to go on about how America was in a state of decline. He was also a guy who signed his homework as Tyler Durden, but 20 years down the road, can you argue with him? I’m glad we talked about Hurricane Katrina in the series, because that wasn’t an aberration. It’s all Katrina. Sometimes it manifests loudly, like it does with this pandemic, but most of the time it happens completely silently. Someone sitting in Rikers for years without a trial. A $45,000 medical bill sitting on a kitchen counter. Whatever we collectively thought this was is long gone if it was ever here at all.

I’m watching an NFL game at the moment and it feels just like 1996. Aside from flipping on an old movie, sports might be the only thing that can do that for me. The material realities of our world completely evaporate there. Colin Kaepernick was blackballed from the league in his prime and the league’s owners knew they would never have to admit why. The moment it seemed like NBA players were on the precipice of the most radical labor action we’d seen in ages, it was whittled down to something compatible. Granted, they are stenciling END RACISM behind the end zones now. But it just dries up here, and a consequence of that is that we get this world that sort of exists outside of time. It’s our constant. It’s like you said: that’s where our heroes are, that’s what captures our imagination.

There’s no prescription I feel qualified to offer for any of this. Fighting in the Age of Loneliness doesn’t really either! We ended it with, keep fighting, keep putting one foot in front of the other, the only way out is through. But ultimately, a lot of this project’s ambitions lied in simply acknowledging the feeling of living in a time that we argue is unquestionably an era of American decline. Nobody wants to try to tell that story, and understandably so. It wasn’t us because we’re so smart or insightful or brave or whatever the hell. We just got a chance to try to tell it through Google Earth, iMovie, and inconsistent audio leveling on YouTube, the world’s most prestigious and important platform. As with any project that’s a couple years old, I’ll sometimes see something and wish I’d done it better or cleaner. That’s inevitable. But damn if it isn’t one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever worked on. It was fantastic to be able to make this with you, man. Maybe we’ll do it again someday.

Felix: Every day I have to remind myself that we did this. It doesn’t seem like something I really got to do because it’s so completely our own. I could not have written this with anyone else. Whatever happens, whether we’re just the next Turks or Brits, sad crusts of a water pie, a former imperial core driven insane by the frontier we created, whether we live in a Chinese century or the next power is some unexpected axis, or maybe even something good happens, I hope we can do this again.

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treeyo · 6 years ago

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Lets face it, I love planting trees. Doug the Digger. And after moving back to Treasure Lake in Northern Kentucky in summer of 2017, I have been busy planting and caring for trees. However in 2019, it took a large step forward building on top of what was before and planting in new spaces framed by a new zone zero; the tiny house. And this planting extends beyond just Treasure Lake, both in Petersburg, KY as a part of community building through my tips for tree planting jar, and also urban permaculture in Cincinnati. And yes I have been planting Paw Paws, and you can to with confidence after taking this new course, Paw Paw Master Class. Below is a list of locations and descriptions along with design visuals, videos, and pictures.

https://treeyopermacultureedu.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/final-cut-and-plant-with-carolien.mp4

Treasure Lake: Petersburg, KY

Back Hedgerow/ Backstop

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What was my first planting in fall of 2017, the back hedgerow, was dialed in a bit further this spring as previously planted nuclei have progressed nicely. First, I had to replant a few blueberries, which were knocked back aggressively by rabbits and were weak plants to begin with. My tomato cages work for deer for the most part but not for rabbits for sure. Properly caging everything throughout all these plantings has been a goal of mine this year and fully achieved. From there, I expanded in both east and west directions. The Methley plums on the east side have been growing quite rapidly so I decided to add in a couple of Asian Plum (shiro) to compliment. And being in love with Nashi fruit, Asian Pear, I added two of these beautiful trees to compliment the European Pears also in the hedgerow. I definitely dialed back the guilds for these new trees and went with a stronger sheet mulch because the weeds are quite intense and overbearing if you don’t do this heavy sheet mulch from the beginning. I also added in numerous berry plants within the guilds of the older plantings including six chokeberry seedlings and two white currant imperials. (Spring planting)

Furthermore just a small distance away from the two Asian Plums on the east side is a backstop that my grandfather had built many years ago as part of his dream to have a ball field at the lake. After years of junk collecting there and then it being finally thrown away this spring, it opened up a great edge for planting on this vertical resource. It is slightly U shaped allowing for five vines with two different species used. One of them is Hardy Kiwi so one male for pollination, one Ana, and one Michigan State. The other is Akebia, or Chocolate Vine, with one variety being Shiro bana and the other being silver bells. The hardy Kiwi, like expected, grew slowly yet the Akebia grew at a ridiculous speed with over twenty feet of growth in one year, a drought year at that. (Spring planting)

Backstop with coppice sycamore in front, vines planted at base of fence

Western Hedgerow Mushroom Bed

This triangular hedgerow is composed of wine cap mushrooms beds underneath a food forest style planting. Both performed very well along with abundant harvests of mushrooms. The mycelium breaking down the wood chips not only provided buckets of delectable mushrooms, it also seemed to unlock fertility. Thus I added in a couple more jostaberries, gooseberries, currants, and chokeberries to round of this space. The main anchor species of quince are growing very rapidly and I look forward to that fruit.

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Wine Cap Mushroom Harvest

Early spring

Sheet mulching for edge expansion

Permaculture guilding within food forest

Jostaberry flower

White currant fruit

Fall with fresh mulch and cages

Sheet mulching for edge expansion

Bar/ Community Center

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Base Map

projected future Development Map

What we accomplished in 2019

Full Site map so you can understand overall placement

Out in front of the bar/ community center/ classroom I planted in two new trees to replace the old big box elders that once casted shade on the bar during our intense summers. They died out as my grandparents passed and I planted these two new trees with being an homage to them. The choice was Rowan or Mt. Ash, which are known in antiquity as gatekeeper trees that keep bad spirits away. And they are beautiful and do produce an edible berry with this cultivar of Rabina. I had seen these trees line the streets of Eastern European towns i once walked. I also added some more edible landscaping plants in the bar landscaping beds like Jostaberry and Pink Currant. Honestly I just want to use them for propagation in the future, a different yield than just berries. I also fully dialed in the permanent location of the nursery under two large sugar maple trees for both Cincinnati Permaculture Institutes Growing Value nursery and my own personal nursery. The big addition in my own nursery was the scaling up of paw paw production with enormous success. This allowed for planting at treasure lake and beyond and is one of the topics we cover in the Paw Paw Master Class (Spring planting)

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Before Mt ash goes in

After Mt ash goes in

Mt Ash Rabina Foliage

Compost after tree planting

cardboard after tree planting

Compost on top of cardboard

green material on cardboard

Mt Ash with guild and fully mulched

Summer time of this MT Ash Guild

Amish Paste tomatoes harvested from guilds of the Mt Ash

Cincinnati Permaculture Institute Nursery at Treasure Lake, almost finished

Paw Paw seedlings

Sprouted Paw Paw Seed

Campsite 3.5

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Full Site map so you can understand overall placement

Over the years I numbered the campsites 1-5 but through use of a machine and general edge development, more campsites were developed. I never renumbered them, just added .5’s to help keep the continuity of name and place going. This particular space is a place that has been being developed for quite some years now with grafted paw paw complimenting the huge paw paw patch already there (planted in winter 2016). Thus in the spring with both the year-long PDC from the Cincinnati Permaculture Institute and me and Abby’s Spring class, we planted in lots more. With the PDC we planted terrace edges complimenting the chestnuts planted the fall before with Tom. This planting pattern was black capped raspberry and serviceberry flanking the chestnuts. Then with the other class we did a corridor planting with a mix of elderberry and hazelnut along the dry streamed. Even with the drought and no rain almost everything survived. I did a demonstration planting first with a beautiful Russian Hawthorn going in. Furthermore, in the fall we planted one more tree with Allison, a contributor to the place in so many ways. She donated back by purchasing a tree after her Into the Deep Soul event at the lake and her further connection to this place was solidified with a tree planting. On one of her volunteer days, I earlier in the day had been at Braden Trauth’s house, the director of the Cincinnati Permaculture Institute, and he had given me a Jujube of Chinese date fruit from his front yard tree. I gave it to Allison and she loved it! We decided to replace a Jujube that had died out in this area. There was still one alive in this area that was planted years ago when the grafted Paw Paws were planted. Thus we dropped a Black Sea Jujube in and hopefully the pollination is there for the two to thrive in this outer zone area.

Rooted in Gratitude planting

Allison planting in the fall her Jujube

CPI Year long PDC planting

Tinystead Development: A New Zone 0

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The banks in the tiny stead area

Permaculture Base Map from Last Year, 2018

Mid Progress map

Permaculture Base Map from this year, 2019

Permaculture Base Map from this year, 2019, with cultivars

Permaculture Base Map from this year, 2019, with cultivars and other trees

Permaculture Base Map projected for 2020

Full Site map so you can understand overall placement

Having never really felt settled here from not having a true living space, when the tiny house was lined up for arrival it immediately gave me a spark to plant. In the spring before the tiny house even arrived, myself and Carolien planted hazelnuts to the west on a slope to a cove before campsite one where the tiny house is located. Five were dropped in and the plants came from neighbor Daniel and more on that later. We also planted three Catalpas in the valley behind that cove together in that fun late spring. In late summer Carolien and I planted more after the first rain we had in quite sometime thinking the rains were finally coming back. We dropped in 12 Paw Paw together after a chop and drop in a zone directly behind the tiny house along the driveway.

I planted the final three with Griffin, an intern from University of Cincinnati, who has really stepped up and is learning a lot through our hands on work and talks. Then between myself, Griffin, and Allison we took a step further once fall had kicked in with planting the rim of the ridge plateau that the tiny house sites on. We planted in more of my homegrown paw paws raised from seed earlier this year. From there we headed downward to develop what I call the Banks development, which are the mainly south facing slopes below campsite one and two. First was hazelnut on individual tree planting terraces spread amongst regenerating oaks, redbuds, and black locust. The slopes of these banks, mainly to the north are towering shummard oaks, burr oak, and sugar maple. Thus it is always a balance challenge to find what will work best with the shade and what trees need to come out overtime.

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From there we moved onto the nectarines and blackberry to the west with two of the nectarines going on a terrace that further framed the pattern development for more of the banks. The blackberries were self propagated while many of these trees I am mentioning came from The Cincinnati Permaculture Institute’s Growing Value Nursery which is partially housed here at the lake. Above the nectarines down the main path path two Carolina All Spice trees were added to be entry trees. Further above the nectarines to the west deeper in shade we added witch hazel and vernal witch hazel to diversify the native palette. From there we moved eastward with other friends like Robert and Rachel helping with more individual tree planting terraces. To compliment the non native Eleagnus, we planted in the cultivar of Goumi. To compliment an already existing mulberry we put in another homegrown one as well. And we got a couple of Elderberries in the valley in between camp 1 and 2 below the 15 paw paws planted in fall of 2017 in that same valley. On the path we added a couple more russian hawthorns to the first one we planted in spring with Matt Gillespie, my paw paw class partner. From there we moved to the banks of campsite 2 and added in were 4 chestnuts procured through a trade with my friends Michael and Joanna down in Berea, KY but a Portugal connection. They got some of my paw paw, I got some their chestnuts. From there we knew we needed help and had our pattern well enough dialed in to invite others to come in and support and learn from our pattern. Thus we planned a permaculture action day of terracing and planting and over twenty people stopped through with over 150 ft of terrace dug in difficult conditions. All in all we planted 3 Jujube on elongated terraces and one on its on own in the furthest west part of the banks development. It is a rough and tumbled point showing to plant something hardy with the spiny vegetation that persists already. And west of that added was a very long asian pear terrace that four different cultivars fit on quite well. Above that I was going to do a fifth but as we were chopping and dropping scrub vegetation I found a hawthorn and decided to add in another Russian hawthorn there to compliment. That action day was great and yes a lot of work was done physically but also community formed. From there we made one big push as tree planting season was ending. The push was to get in the peach trees, an homage to my moms father who had some great peaches his suburban edible landscaping in Cincinnati. My mom wanted to plant this memorial garden and we again moved large logs for terraces, did terrace sculpting of the land, painted the landscape with four different cultivars of peaches, and interplanted with chokeberry. We sheet mulched heavily with cardboard and two loads of wood chips of my van with some friends helping to make the final push of the mulching. All along the way we added compost to the trees, home grown in my worm bins, and made cages to protect as the wildlife pressure is just two intense to not to. And as we sat on those banks with the fading sun, we realized the place had changed forever, in a very dynamic and positive way.

Matt stoked about Russian Hawthorn

Me and Caroliens hazels

Me and Caroliens catalpas

Allison and Paw Paw

Griffin and Paw Paw

Griffin digging on Nectarine terrace

Blackberry planting

The banks

Nectarine terrace

Sheet mulch and cage done right

Moving mulching with griffin and allison

Permaculture action day

Permaculture action day digging the asian pear terrace

the banks where we planted from the far side of the lake

Daniel and Colleens Half Acre Homestead: Petersburg, KY

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I am blessed to have neighbors less than a half mile away that are into permaculture, community, and homestead lifestyle. I have watched their yard develop nicely and produce food abundantly as I drive in and out of the lake. This year I decided to donate and trade plants with Daniel along the way to help fill out our food forests. The donations were done by the community through our tips for tree planting jar, which generated thousands of dollars worth of donations this year. From our bar business, camping, and fishing, the money was all donations to this fund. Daniel and Colleen’s yard got lots of the berry layer of the food forest this spring, currants, gooseberry, honey berry, serviceberry,raspberry, blackberry, siberian pea shrub, and some natives like witch hazel and sweetshrub. While I didn’t do the direct planting, I helped do the layout with Daniel. It is a fun yard to watch develop with their limited input but quite amazing outputs.

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Daniel, My neighbor down the road, holding a bit of his Egyptian Walking Onion Harvest dried at the lake

Backyard Permaculture elements at Daniel and Colleens, vine trellis, pathways, sweat lodge

Front yard terraces at Daniel and Colleens, to the left food forest

Recently planted honey berry

Josh and Maddy’s Homestead: Petersburg, KY

Daniels brother Josh and his partner Maddy own a larger piece of land a few miles down the road and are also into permaculture, community, and homestead lifestyle. Thus I supported them with the tips for tree planting fund and trades and also got to help on one of their tree planting days. We tried to run an action day there as well but the rain came in a way it hadn’t done so for literally months. Nonetheless the space in front of their home was changed forever with a large implementation of food forest planting extending off their already existing plantings. With chickens in the foreground and goats in the background this site has amazing potential and just took big next steps. Josh does really great fish scale tree planting earthworks for each tree because his soils are quite heavy. The uphill sunken boomerang will infiltrate water while the raised platform of the tree will give some extra root space before it hits the quite compacted and heavy clays below. The site got quite a diversity of plants with not only the berry layer, similar to Daniels list but also lots of fruit trees like asian pear, medlar, peach, nectarine, apple, and cornelian cherry.

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Josh and Maddy’s personal nursery, juiced up from the tips for tree planting jar

Before planting, recently tilled

fish scale tree planting style

One of my paw paws on trade going in the ground

sheet mulching trees being planted

food forest developing

Lincoln Heights: Cincinnati, OH

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I was drawn into this garden through the Cincinnati Permaculture Institute this spring to help advance this urban Permaculture initiative in Lincoln Heights. The neighborhood was started as an african american initiative and continues to be that way. Thus on this vacant lot, gardens were created and fruit trees planted in 2018. In 2019 the place was overgrown with weeds and not much happening, a common symptom of community gardens. So I came in and started taming the jungle and doing deep sheet mulching for the existing trees. This helped to setup the fall planting which focused on replacing a few dead anchor trees, adding the berry layer within the tree rows, and flanking with the shrub layer. The new anchors became plums, Methley and Shiro, and a Dolgo crabapple to be a universal pollinator for the apples since some of the trees that died out were apples. And the berries were jostaberry, currants, gooseberry, and chokeberry. On the flanks were my homegrown paw paws and also elderberries from the nursery. I donated the paw paws from my tips for tree planting fund and the rest of the funding came from Alan Wights giving tree foundation. It was tough digging, through rubble of all sorts, but man is there some good top soil. Myself and Griffin dig extra digging and breaking up the hardpan below because the heavy clay below seemed to be the culprit in the die of the other trees. We will mulch heavily when our next round of woodchips get delivered but for now they are in the ground.

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when i first arrived

Before fall tree planting

sheet mulched tree

cardboard for sheet mulching

Griffin finishing a hole for tree planting

After tree planting

Permaculture Action Network Day: Berea, KY: Clear Creek Community Food Forest

In the sweltering heat of mid summer, my Berea crew, who are connected to me through Portugal invited me to facilitate a tree planting action day based off of all their handwork in the community and beyond with their work with the Permaculture Action Network (PAN). They are chapter leaders, Joanna and Michael, and fate found them land only two hours to the south of Treasure Lake way before I ever made it back here in 2017. Its such a blessing to have this refuge but on this day it was hard work but some serious action happened. We chopped, we dropped, we dug, we planted, and we learned as there was the action site and the learning site. Fabulous was it!

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many hands make light work action

tree planting on my individual tree planting terraces

Chop and Drop into swales and mulching mounds with wood chips

Conclusion

So the hashtag of #letsplantsometreesyo was definitely enacted in this wonderful year of growth and further rooting. You can always plant more but what Permaculture teaches and what I have learned overtime again and again is that small scale intensive principle. This is why I write this blog, to encourage you to take next steps, have a goal of two to 10 tree crops a year and simply take care of them well. Do the extra work at the beginning to set them up for future success and less maintenance on your part. See when you deliver an action to the landscape like planting, there will be an equal and opposite reaction of maintenance. This forces us to go slowly, develop nuclei, and let them merge over time into a well developed food forest! Growing food, infiltrating water, building soil, promoting biodiversity, these are the solutions of climate change and healthy living. Do your part people and if you cant physically, well support others with your excess resources of time or money, please. Give back and the energy will cycle.

Author in his full tree planting glory on the banks goofing off

Doug Crouch

Allison, digging glory

Permaculture Action Day, thanks y’all

Written by Doug Crouch

Tree Planting Recap 2019 Lets face it, I love planting trees. Doug the Digger. And after moving back to Treasure Lake in Northern Kentucky in summer of 2017, I have been busy planting and caring for trees.

#agroforestry #community #food forest #fruit trees #native forest #Permaculture #Treasure Lake #tree planting #Treeyo Permaculture

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traderspro · 6 years ago

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CVS finally looks like it is reversing its downward trend – it might just be getting started

September 17, 2019

Fibonacci Retracement Fundamental Analysis Health Insurance HeathCare InvestivDailyTechnical Analysis Value Investing

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Over the last four years, one of the most disappointing stocks in the market unquestionably has to CVS Health Corp (CVS). The stock hit an all-time high in July of 2015 at around $113 per share, but has steadily declined from that point to its lowest point since 2013 a little below $52 per share. That downward trend would unquestionably have chased away any growth-oriented investor, but it has also translated to a value proposition that has become more and more compelling the longer the downward trend has lasted.

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CVS is a good example of the challenge that often faces a value-oriented investor. The traditional method behind value investing suggests that timing, or a stock’s current trend, is unimportant when compared to whether the company’s business is worth more than where the market is currently pricing the stock. The problem with that principle is that every investor, no matter how educated or experienced we may be, is an emotional animal, and that means that it is hard to hold onto a stock in the face of an extended, steep decline in price. As recently as two years ago, the stock had dropped to the mid-$80 range, and had begun to offer the first indication of opportunity as a strong value-oriented investment, but as any investor who bought the stock at that time can attest, watching the stock continue to decline until earlier this year to a low at nearly $50 would naturally make you question the wisdom of your decision.

Throughout the decline I’ve described, CVS’ fundamental profile has remained strong, which has ultimately meant that the longer the downward trend lasted, the better the value argument became. The market appears to finally be starting to get the hint; beginning in May of this year, the stock has rallied nearly 23% from that low, and has finally developed what appears to be a solid intermediate upward trend that could be poised to continue into a long-term trend.

Among the bearish pressures the stock has faced this year has been concern that the merger it completed in November of 2018 with insurer Aetna came at too large a price. CVS took on a massive amount of debt, which also forced the company to suspend its share buyback program until it lowers its debt load.

In the long run, management and most industry experts expect that the combination of one of the largest and most profitable pharmacy companies with one of the biggest insurers in the country will be able to navigate the transition involved in the integration of two distinctly separate, but complementary businesses; but there appears to be a lot of questions about when that success will translate to the stock price. The stock’s fundamental measurements are solid, however, and appear to be improving, suggesting that management’s strategy is working. Despite the stock’s increase in price over the last few months, CVS’ value proposition remains very positive in the long-term, suggesting that the stock could be poised for a new, extended upward run.

Fundamental and Value Profile

CVS Health Corporation, together with its subsidiaries, is an integrated pharmacy healthcare company. The Company provides pharmacy care for the senior community through Omnicare, Inc. (Omnicare) and Omnicare’s long-term care (LTC) operations, which include distribution of pharmaceuticals, related pharmacy consulting and other ancillary services to chronic care facilities and other care settings. It operates through three segments: Pharmacy Services, Retail/LTC and Corporate. The Pharmacy Services Segment provides a range of pharmacy benefit management (PBM) solutions to its clients. As of December 31, 2016, the Retail/LTC Segment included 9,709 retail locations (of which 7,980 were its stores that operated a pharmacy and 1,674 were its pharmacies located within Target Corporation (Target) stores), its online retail pharmacy Websites, CVS.com, Navarro.com and Onofre.com.br, 38 onsite pharmacy stores, its long-term care pharmacy operations and its retail healthcare clinics. CVS has a market cap of $81 billion. Aetna Inc. is a diversified healthcare benefits company. The Company operates through three segments: Health Care, Group Insurance and Large Case Pensions. It offers a range of traditional, voluntary and consumer-directed health insurance products and related services, including medical, pharmacy, dental, behavioral health, group life and disability plans, medical management capabilities, Medicaid healthcare management services, Medicare Advantage and Medicare Supplement plans, workers’ compensation administrative services and health information technology (HIT) products and services. The Health Care segment consists of medical, pharmacy benefit management services, dental, behavioral health and vision plans offered on both an Insured basis and an employer-funded basis, and emerging businesses products and services. The Group Insurance segment includes group life insurance and group disability products. Its products are offered on an Insured basis. CVS has a market cap of $82.5 billion.

Earnings and Sales Growth: Over the last twelve months, earnings for CVS increased by almost 12%, while sales increased nearly 36%. In the last quarter, earnings growth was about 16.5%, while earnings increased by 2.9%. CVS’ margin profile was narrow before the merger, and it continues to be so; over the last twelve months, Net Income as a percentage of Revenues is just 1.9%, but improved to 3.05% in the last quarter. The trailing twelve month number also marks a reversal from just a couple of quarters ago, when Net Income was actually negative.

Free Cash Flow: CVS’s free cash flow is healthy and improving, at about $8.44 billion over the last twelve months (it was around $4.3 billion in the first quarter of 2019). That translates to a Free Cash Flow Yield of 10.13%, which is also a useful improvement from earlier this year when it was 7.28%.

Debt to Equity: CVS has a debt/equity ratio of 1.39. This is higher than I usually prefer to see, but is primarily attributable to the massive increase in debt the company preemptively took on at the beginning of the year when the merger was first announced. Total long-term debt is $85.7 billion, while cash and liquid assets are about $8.5 billion (up from $6.5 billion in March of this year). By standard measurements, the company’s liquidity comes into question; however CVS has also laid out an aggressive debt reduction program that they expect will lower the total debt the combined company will be working with to much more conservative levels early in 2020. As previously mentioned, they’ve also suspended their dividend increase and share repurchase programs for the time being while they work on debt reduction.

Dividend: CVS pays an annual dividend of $2.00 per share. At the stock’s current price, that translates to an attractive dividend yield of about 3.15%.

Price/Book Ratio: there are a lot of ways to measure how much a stock should be worth; but one of the simplest methods that I like uses the stock’s Book Value, which for CVS is $47.37 — a drop from $57.46 two quarters ago. This is an element of the stock’s fundamental and value profile that is showing an unusual level of volatility and variability and that I take as evidence that the company is still dealing with post-merger integration issues. Even so, at CVS’s current price, that translates to a Price/Book ratio of 1.33. The stock’s historical average is 2.5, which suggests the stock is still undervalued by at least half and projects a long-term target at around $119. That number lines up with the stock’s all-time highs around $113 and that were last seen in mid-2015.

Current Price Action/Trends and Pivots: The chart above clearly shows the stock’s decline from about $84 in October 2018 to its bottom at about $52. The stock has picked up some interesting bullish momentum since late June, rallying near to the 38.2% Fibonacci retracement line at around $64. It is currently a bit below that level, which suggests that a break above $64 could give the stock some useful short-term momentum to push to somewhere between $70 and $71.50, based on previous pivots in late 2018 and earlier this year. Current support is around $62, with further support if the stock drops below that level in the $59 price area.

Near-term Keys: The stock’s current trend is clearly moving upward, and appears to be building bullish momentum. The value proposition is very attractive, and I think that is more than sufficient reason to suggest that this stock could be one of the best long-term bets in the market right now. If you prefer to work with short-term trading strategies, a push above $64 could offer an interesting opportunity to buy the stock or to work with call options with an eyes on the stock’s previous peaks around $70 as an exit target. On the other hand, if the stock drops below $62, you might consider shorting the stock, or working with put options, with an eye on the $59 price level as a short-term target to for a bearish momentum trade.

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afriendlypokealien · 4 years ago

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Eat ’Em Up, Kats! Sam Houston Wins First Football Championship

News and important information on Point of Sale & POS Hardware.

WHO: Sam Houston State University football

WHAT: The Bearkats beat South Dakota State in Frisco Sunday, giving Texas its first NCAA Football Championship Subdivision (FCS) winner since the tournament began in 1978.

WHY IT’S SO GREAT: Remember what it’s like to watch a Texas college football team win a national championship? It’s fun. It’s agonizing. And it sometimes seems about as rare as being struck by lightning.

On Sunday at Toyota Stadium in Frisco, lightning struck North Texas in the second quarter, delaying the FCS championship game between South Dakota State and Sam Houston for more than an hour. And then it struck again, when the Bearkats turned a 17–7 lead into a 21–17 deficit with five minutes and 41 seconds remaining in the fourth quarter . . . only to prevail, 23–21, with 16 seconds left.

The Bearkats join Division III Mary Hardin-Baylor (2016, 2018) and Division II Texas A&M–Commerce (2017) as recent Texas NCAA football national champions; the last school in the state win such a title at the Division I level, of course, was Mack Brown and Vince Young’s University of Texas Longhorns, in 2005.

Huntsville native and SHSU alum Richard Linklater is sort of the Matthew McConaughey to Sam Houston’s University of Texas, but he’s more of a baseball guy (and also not on Twitter). Instead, another distinguished graduate chimed in:

Congratulations to the #Bearkats on a national championship!!!! (Too many exclamation points? Don’t really care.)The South Dakota State squad played with grit and determination – one of the best games I’ve seen in a while.

— Dan Rather (@DanRather) May 17, 2021

Also offering congratulations was some combination of Governor Greg Abbott, his social media team, and an erroneous autocorrect.

In some ways, this was old hat for Sam Houston head coach K. C. Keeler, who won championships as a player at the University of Delaware and playoff berths as a Division III head coach at Rowan University before returning to his alma mater and leading them to the 2003 FCS title. Sunday’s game made Keeler the only coach to win an FCS championship at two different schools; he also passed Jim Tressel (of Youngstown State and, later, Ohio State) to become the winningest postseason coach in FCS history.

But for Sam Houston, the glory was new, and also overdue: under Keeler’s predecessor, Willie Fritz, the Bearkats lost to North Dakota State in the 2011 and 2012 championship games, while Keeler’s teams got bounced in the semifinals three times between 2014 and 2017. In the locker room after the game, the Pennsylvania native evoked the spirit of Philadelphia Flyers coach Fred Shero’s famous quote: “Win today and we walk together forever.”

(Shirtless college football players in cowboy hats. Talk about the best thing in Texas!)

“This is immortality,” Keeler said. “For the rest of Sam Houston’s life they’re going to celebrate this national championship. For the rest of existence.”

It almost didn’t happen. Sam Houston joined most of FCS (but not fellow Southland Conference teams Houston Baptist, Abilene Christian, and Stephen F. Austin) in choosing to play spring football for a shot at Frisco. The Bearkats played through all the usual COVID-19 limitations and then some, including not having a locker room (the athletics facilities were undergoing an “off-season” renovation), plus the Texas winter storm in February.

With a 6–0 record in the regular season and a number two seed in the postseason tournament, the Bearkats got to play every game at home until the championship, but with the bracket reduced from its usual 24 teams to 16 (eliminating a bye week for the top seeds, and generally reducing the potential for chaos/upsets), Sam Houston’s draw was anything but easy. To make the final game, they had to beat undefeated Big South champion Monmouth, eight-time national champion North Dakota State, and the only team besides North Dakota State to win the FCS championship since 2011, James Madison. The Kats needed a game-ending defensive play to dispatch Monmouth, trailed NDSU in the fourth quarter, and were down 24–3 at halftime against James Madison. Then they got to Frisco, where some players, unable to walk the graduation stage in Huntsville with the other students, participated in graduation rites held at the ballroom of an Omni hotel in Frisco.

And then came the rain and lightning. If you think college football in May is weird, how ’bout college football without halftime? Due to the second-quarter delay, the mid-game break was just three minutes. But for Sam Houston, such weirdness was just more of the usual.

“It wasn’t a shocker for us because we’ve dealt with stuff like that all year,” said Bearkats quarterback Eric Schmid. “We were kind of joking in the locker room, like, it’s got to be this way for us to win.”

It was a slippery game in more ways than one. Sam Houston’s defense knocked SDSU’s starting quarterback, Mark Gronowski, out of the game early. Schmid took one hit that had him spitting up blood, and another that saw the trainers re-taping his ankle. He hit the ground repeatedly and hard, as both a dangerous runner and before and after pass attempts. Had this not been the last game of the season, he might have missed the next one. Keeler said that offensive coordinator Ryan Carty told the QB, “‘I’m riding you in the national championship. You have three months to recover.’

“And Eric goes, ‘I know. Ride me.’

“You talk about a warrior and you talk about a guy who is just so calm under pressure and just doesn’t panic,” Keeler continued. “I think that’s why a lot of us felt that we were going to be fine on that last drive.”

Indeed, while SHSU’s defense allowed a hundred-yard rusher for the first time in 21 games—South Dakota’s Isaiah Davis rushed for 178, including an 85-yard touchdown—and the team did most of its offensive damage in the second quarter, you could sense that they expected to prevail in the game’s final minutes, as they had all postseason. Dominant three-hundred-pound defensive end Joseph Wallace, a Texas Tech transfer out of Dallas’s Skyline High School, said the team never questioned whether Schmid would get the Bearkats back into the end zone.

“That last play, I was looking at my D-line coach, Coach Siddiq [Haynes], and he looked at me in my face—he said, ‘Watch this, we’re going to win.’

“And I told him, ‘I already know, Coach.’ Nobody ever doubted on the sideline. We all knew what was about to happen, honestly.”

Schmid hit wide receiver Ife Adeyi on third and goal from the ten-yard line for the winning touchdown, but another Bearkats wideout, Jequez Ezzard, was the game’s MVP. The Howard transfer made plays like this all year:

Soft-spoken on camera during the trophy presentation (and left out entirely from the postgame press conference), Ezzard still got himself an exultant hot-mic moment on the ABC TV broadcast.

If the Bearkats were formerly the Oklahoma or Notre Dame of FCS—often in contention, but with no title to show for it—now they’ll look to be Clemson to North Dakota State’s Alabama, battling to be in the final game each year, and maybe starting their own dynasty. And oh yeah: one nice thing about spring football is that Sam Houston’s fall season starts only 107 days from now.

This article was first published here.

I hope that you found the article above useful and/or interesting. You can find similar content on our blog: www.easttxpointofsale.com Please let me have your feedback in the comments section below. Let us know which topics we should cover for you next.

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niccongo0-blog · 6 years ago

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Way-too-early 2019-20 MLB free-agent rankings

This offseason's free-agent class didn't end up as glamorous as projected a couple of years ago. Yes, we have Bryce Harper and Manny Machado, but Harper isn't coming off a great season. Clayton Kershaw decided to stay with the Dodgers rather than opt out. Andrew McCutchen is no longer an MVP candidate. Josh Donaldson and Andrew Miller are coming off injury-plagued seasons.

Donaldson was the first big signing of the offseason, and as we wait to see what else unfolds, it's always important to note next year's free agents because that can influence what a team does now and how it spends its money. Players in their final year also are potential trade bait -- either in the offseason or during the season.

So keep this in your back pocket -- my top-30 free agents for the 2019-20 offseason (the player's seasonal age for 2020 is included in parentheses):

1. Nolan Arenado, Colorado Rockies (29)

2018 stats: .297/.374/.561, 38 HR, 5.6 WAR

The Rockies would obviously love to extend their franchise player, a six-time Gold Glove winner who has finished eighth, fifth, fourth and third in the MVP balloting the past four seasons. If the season begins with Arenado unsigned, the odds are he hits free agency -- and once that happens, the player almost always signs with a new team. Arenado, however, probably will want to wait to see what Harper and Machado get in free agency before he talks extension. The Rockies aren't going to trade him, but his situation complicates their offseason: Do they try to improve the team for one last run with Arenado without knowing whether he'll be on the roster beyond 2019?

Trade bait? Unlikely, unless the Rockies fall out of the race in July.

2. Gerrit Cole, Houston Astros (29)

2018 stats: 15-5, 2.88 ERA, 200.1 IP, 276 SO, 5.3 WAR

Cole went to the Astros, started throwing his four-seam fastball up in the zone more often and had the season everyone dreamed he could put together after the Pirates drafted him No. 1 overall in 2011. He fanned 34.5 percent of the batters he faced -- the eighth-highest single-season rate for a starter in major league history -- and if he does that again, he could be looking at a $200 million-plus deal.

Trade bait? No.

3. Chris Sale, Boston Red Sox (31)

2018 stats: 12-4, 2.11 ERA, 158 IP, 237 SO, 6.9 WAR

I rate Cole ahead of Sale because he's two years younger and Sale's shoulder problems that sidelined him much of the final two months of 2018 are a concern heading into 2019. The Red Sox would love to extend Sale, but they also need to find out if he's healthy before making a large commitment, so he probably heads into the 2019-20 offseason as a free agent.

Trade bait? No.

4. Xander Bogaerts, Boston Red Sox (27)

2018 stats: .288/.360/.522, 23 HR, 3.8 WAR

The Red Sox could have four impact free agents after the 2019 season if J.D. Martinez opts out, and you could argue that re-signing Bogaerts should be the top priority. No, he's not in the Francisco Lindor or Carlos Correa class, but he'll be reaching free agency at 27, is coming off a 135 OPS+ season and has averaged 3.6 WAR the past four years. His defense took a hit in 2018 (minus-19 defensive runs saved), so the only red flag is that he might have to move off shortstop in a few years.

Trade bait? No.

5. Anthony Rendon, Washington Nationals (30)

2018 stats: .308/.374/.535, 24 HR, 4.2 WAR

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FanGraphs liked Rendon's season even more than Baseball-Reference did, crediting him with 6.3 WAR, second to Christian Yelich among National League position players. Baseball-Reference WAR totals since 2014, Rendon's first full season with the Nationals:

Rendon: 21.1 Harper: 18.6

Rendon holds a similar edge in FanGraphs WAR. He won't get $300 million because of his age, but he has been the Nationals' best player the past five seasons, not Harper.

Trade bait? Only if the Nationals fall out of the race.

6. J.D. Martinez, Boston Red Sox (32)

2018 stats: .330/.402/.629, 43 HR, 6.4 WAR

If Martinez has another monster season, he'll almost certainly exercise his opt-out clause and forgo the remaining three years and $62.5 million on his contract. Edwin Encarnacion got three years and $60 million from the Indians for his age-34-to-36 seasons, and Martinez is better.

Trade bait? No.

7. Paul Goldschmidt, Arizona Diamondbacks (32)

2018 stats: .290/.389/.533, 33 HR, 5.4 WAR

He hasn't been as good the past three seasons (138 OPS+, 15.9 WAR) as during his 2013-15 peak (162 OPS+, 20.4 WAR), but he was still good enough to finish third and sixth in the MVP balloting the past two seasons. There are some small red flags here: His strikeout rate this year was his highest since his rookie season, and he has gone from 32 steals in 2016 to seven in 2018. He has hit just as well on the road as at home in his career, so changing parks shouldn't be an issue.

Trade bait? Yes, maybe the most likely guy on this list to be dealt (the Cardinals and Astros are possible landing spots).

8. Justin Verlander, Houston Astros (37)

2018 stats: 16-9, 2.52 ERA, 214 IP, 290 SO, 6.2 WAR

If you didn't know his age, you'd be willing to give Verlander a long-term deal at a mega-millions amount. He has finished second, fifth and second in the past three Cy Young votes and just recorded a career-high 290 strikeouts. He'll be 37 in 2020, but he has posted 30 starts and 200 innings every season of his career except 2015.

Trade bait? No.

9. Josh Donaldson, Atlanta Braves (34)

2018 stats: .246/.352/.449, 8 HR, 1.2 WAR

He has already signed a one-year deal with the Braves for $23 million. If he's healthy and productive, he'll get a longer-term deal next offseason even though he'll be 34.

Trade bait? No.

10. Madison Bumgarner, San Francisco Giants (30)

2018 stats: 6-7, 3.26 ERA, 129.1 IP, 109 SO, 2.4 WAR

He could rise much higher or fall even further on this list based on his 2019 performance. He still had a solid ERA in 2018, but his strikeout rate was the lowest since his rookie season, and his swing-and-miss rate is down more than 5 percent from 2015, suggesting an overall decline in stuff.

Trade bait? It might seem anathema to trade Bumgarner, but new GM Farhan Zaidi doesn't have the emotional ties to the franchise. A trade is possible, although the return might not be enough to warrant one.

11. Didi Gregorius, New York Yankees (30)

2018 stats: .268/.335/.494, 27 HR, 4.2 WAR

Bryce Harper and Manny Machado clearly are at the head of the class, but there are plenty of big names available beyond the star duo.

He couldn't cut it at Yankee Stadium. But insiders believe the Bombers will find a decent deal for the right-hander this winter.

From the free agents set to cash in to the big-name stars sure to come up in trade rumors all winter long, keep up with all of the latest action.

2 Related

He'll miss at least the first half of 2019 after Tommy John surgery. He has topped 20 home runs three seasons in a row, and he's a better defensive shortstop than Bogaerts. He has been helped by Yankee Stadium -- 42 of his 72 home runs the past three seasons have come at home -- and he'll hit free agency at an age when many shortstops start to lose their range.

Trade bait? Not while he's injured. He's expected to earn about $12.4 million in arbitration (via MLB Trade Rumors), and there's a chance the Yankees decide to nontender him. (The deadline to offer players a 2019 contract is Friday.)

12. Zack Wheeler, New York Mets (30)

2018 stats: 12-7, 3.31 ERA, 182.1 IP, 179 SO, 3.9 WAR

After missing two full seasons and struggling with a 5.21 ERA in 2017, Wheeler finished strong in 2018 with a 1.68 ERA over his final 11 starts. He always has had premium stuff and averaged 96.5 mph with his fastball, but he threw more strikes than ever in that stretch. If he does it again, he'll get a handsome reward.

Trade bait? The rumors are swirling around Noah Syndergaard, but those might be media-created fetishes more than anything. Wheeler certainly becomes trade bait at the July deadline if the Mets haven't signed him and they're out of the race.

13. Marcell Ozuna, St. Louis Cardinals (29)

2018 stats: .280/.325/.433, 23 HR, 2.9 WAR

Who is the real Ozuna? He had a monster first half in 2016 but struggled in the second half. He had a huge 2017, hitting .312/.376/.548 with 37 home runs. Traded to the Cardinals, his slugging percentage fell off 125 points in 2018 as he had only 40 extra-base hits in 582 at-bats. A nagging shoulder injury certainly might have affected his production -- he finally received a cortisone injection in late August, and had a short stint on the DL. His 2019 season will determine what type of long-term offers he'll get, but he'll be an interesting gamble regardless. While he's a good defensive left fielder right now, he's not particularly fast, he doesn't walk much (career .329 OBP) and he's topped 23 home runs only once.

Trade bait? No. The Cardinals are looking to add, not subtract.

14. Rick Porcello, Boston Red Sox (31)

2018 stats: 17-7, 4.28 ERA, 191.1 IP, 190 SO, 3.1 WAR

He has been extremely durable, and he's no longer just the groundball specialist he was with the Tigers. Nothing too fancy here, but he projects as a dependable mid-rotation starter.

Trade bait? No.

15. Aaron Hicks, New York Yankees (30)

2018 stats: .248/.366/.467, 27 HR, 4.7 WAR

The former first-round pick has blossomed with the Yankees after failing to break through with the Twins, and I could be underrating him here, given his power numbers and walk rate (90 walks). His defensive metrics were outstanding in 2017 but less so in 2018 (minus-3 DRS), and he's kind of a thick-bodied guy, so I'm thinking he moves to right field in his early 30s.

Trade bait? No.

16. Miles Mikolas, St. Louis Cardinals (31)

2018 stats: 18-4, 2.83 ERA, 200.2 IP, 146 SO, 4.1 WAR

The command specialist who discovered himself in Japan signed with the Cardinals and led the NL with 18 wins and a sub-3.00 ERA. Like all pitchers who don't throw hard, he'll have to prove he can do it again, and the low strikeout rate suggests he'll be hard-pressed to match that 2.83 ERA.

Trade bait? No.

17. Scooter Gennett, Cincinnati Reds (30)

2018 stats: .310/.357/.490, 23 HR, 4.2 WAR

That's two good seasons in a row at the plate, and he hit better on the road in 2018, so the home run numbers aren't all park-inflated. He doesn't walk much, and he's limited to second base on defense, where he's not exactly a Gold Glove candidate, so all his value resides in his ability to keep hitting.

Trade bait? Yes. The Reds have prospect Nick Senzel on the cusp of the majors. The trouble is Gennett's trade value is limited because there is a glut of second basemen in free agency (Jed Lowrie, Daniel Murphy, DJ LeMahieu, Brian Dozier, Ian Kinsler, Josh Harrison, Asdrubal Cabrera). With Gregorius injured, the Yankees could be interested, with Gleyber Torres sliding over to shortstop.

18. Yasiel Puig, Los Angeles Dodgers (29)

2018 stats: .267/.327/.494, 23 HR, 2.7 WAR

More flash than substance, Puig was better at 22 and 23 (9.8 WAR) than he has been at 26 and 27 (6.4 WAR). He's very good in right field, but for whatever reason has struggled two years in a row against lefties (.197/.292/.320).

Trade bait? Yes. Trade Puig to clear room for Harper?

19. Khris Davis, Oakland Athletics (32)

2018 stats: .247/.326/.549, 48 HR, 2.9 WAR

Davis is a one-dimensional slugger who is limited to DH, but at least he's really good at it, with three straight 40-homer seasons and an MLB-best 48 in 2018. He also has hit exactly .247 four straight seasons, which is maybe the greatest baseball oddity of all time. How about a two-year contract for $24.7 million? (He'll get a lot more than that if he hits 40 again.)

Trade bait? No, unless the A's are struggling at the July deadline.

20. Francisco Cervelli, Pittsburgh Pirates (34)

2018 stats: .259/.378/.431, 12 HR, 2.6 WAR

He has a .368 OBP in his four seasons with the Pirates and even added a little power for the first time. He even had his best season throwing out runners (39 percent vs. a career rate of 23 percent). Nothing about him blows you away, but about 25 teams could use him behind the plate.

Trade bait? Not yet. But the Pirates have one of the best backups in the league in Elias Diaz, so Cervelli could be available in July.

21. Dellin Betances, New York Yankees (32)

2018 stats: 4-6, 2.70 ERA, 66.2 IP, 115 SO, 1.7 WAR

He's older than you might think since it took him so long to reach the majors, but the four-time All-Star is still one of the most intimidating relievers in the majors with his size, fastball and occasional pitch that gets away (he has hit 16 batters the past two seasons). The control problems that plagued him down the stretch in 2017 weren't an issue in 2018, however, and he dominated with 15.5 K's per nine. Even given his age, he seems to be a safe bet to remain productive on a multiyear contract.

Trade bait? No.

22. Cole Hamels, Chicago Cubs (36)

2018 stats: 9-12, 3.78 ERA, 190.2 IP, 188 SO, 3.7 WAR

He'll be on the wrong side of 35 when he hits free agency, but he has made 30 starts every season since 2008, except 2017, when he had only 24 because of an oblique injury. His strikeout rate jumped back up in 2018 after a big dip in 2017 (maybe related to the injury), and he was extremely homer-prone with the Rangers before posting a 2.36 ERA with the Cubs (he also hit 19 batters). Still, he's the type of veteran presence clubs love to have, and while he's on the downturn, he hasn't had a bad season yet.

Trade bait? No.

23. Jonathan Schoop, Milwaukee Brewers (28)

2018 stats: .233/.266/.416, 21 HR, 1.4 WAR

As the offseason gets rolling, we're taking a look at the biggest question facing every team. AL East | NL East | AL West NL West | AL Central | NL Central

So far, it has been one big season (5.2 WAR in 2017) and a whole lot of meh. He's solid at second base but not good enough that he's helping much with a .266 OBP. As a free agent, he'll be young enough to attract some interest if he bounces back, but the 2017 season looks more like a fluke to me.

Trade bait: Not much trade value after his poor season, although it will be interesting to see if the Brewers nontender him and find a more reliable second baseman via trade (how about Gennett?) or free agency.

24. Jhoulys Chacin, Milwaukee Brewers (32)

2018 stats: 15-8, 3.50 ERA, 192.1 IP, 156 SO, 2.0 WAR

He has had two solid years in a row, and while the peripheral numbers aren't exciting (the walks are a little high, the strikeouts a little low), his slider has become a big weapon. He projects as a solid back-end starter for a few more years if he stays healthy.

Trade bait? Not with the Brewers looking to defend their NL Central title.

25. Nicholas Castellanos, Detroit Tigers (28)

2018 stats: .298/.354/.500, 23 HR, 2.9 WAR

He was a bad third baseman and now is a bad right fielder, so all his value is with the bat. He won't be an old free agent, however, so there should interest from AL teams who want to use him primarily as a DH. The strikeout-to-walk ratio (151 to 49) is a little disconcerting. I'd be wary about a heavy investment here.

Trade bait: Yes. The Tigers aren't going anywhere in 2018, and Miguel Cabrera needs to move to DH, so I don't see a long-term home for Castellanos in Detroit.

26. Sonny Gray, New York Yankees (30)

2018 stats: 11-9, 4.90 ERA, 130.1 IP, 123 SO, 0.6 WAR

Gray was good on the road (3.17 ERA) but lousy at Yankee Stadium (6.98 ERA), and Buster Olney wrote the other day that the Yankees believe he's one of those guys who just couldn't handle New York. His fastball velocity was the same as always, although as Olney pointed out, he threw it a lot less (35 percent) than he has in the past. He needs a change of scenery, and if he bounces back, he'll move up this list.

Trade bait: Yes. Pretty much a sure thing the Yankees find a taker for him (Reds or A's are good bets).

27. Starlin Castro, Miami Marlins (30)

2018 stats: .278/.329/.400, 12 HR, 3.3 WAR

I can't imagine the Marlins picking up his $16 million option for 2019. No, he has never lived up to that Sports Illustrated cover hype, but he has rebounded from a couple of sub-.300 OBP seasons earlier in his career to hit .288/.333/.423 the past two seasons. The 3.3 WAR was his best since 2012, and he'll still be only 30 when he hits free agency.

Trade bait: Yes. As with Gennett, however, there might not be much of a trade market for second basemen.

28. Corey Dickerson, Pittsburgh Pirates (31)

2018 stats: .300/.330/.474, 13 HR, 3.8 WAR

He was a totally different player with the Pirates, sacrificing power for a higher average by cutting down his strikeouts and suddenly transforming from a below-average left fielder to a Gold Glove winner. Still, he never walks, and I'm not sure I'm buying the defense.

Trade bait: Like Cervelli, he'll be available if the Pirates are floundering in July.

29. Jose Abreu, Chicago White Sox (33)

2018 stats: .265/.325/.473, 22 HR, 1.7 WAR

The White Sox probably should have traded him after a strong 2017, but they kept him in part because of his status as a mentor to Yoan Moncada. Unfortunately, he just produced the C.J. Cron starter kit, and that got Cron designated for assignment (and claimed on waivers by the Twins).

Trade bait: In theory, yes, but there isn't a lot of demand for the 2018 version of Abreu.

30. Hyun-Jin Ryu, Los Angeles Dodgers (33)

2018 stats: 7-3, 1.97 ERA, 82.1 IP, 89 SO, 2.2 WAR

The 1.97 ERA was a stone-cold fluke, but he did have a 3.00 FIP and a career-high strikeout rate. He has had a sizable reverse platoon split over his career, which I always like from a lefty, and owns a 3.20 career ERA. Health and conditioning make him a risk, but he has been a good pitcher.

Trade bait: No. The Dodgers were probably a little surprised he accepted their qualifying offer.

Players with team options for 2020 that probably would be exercised: Matt Carpenter, Anthony Rizzo, Jose Quintana, Starling Marte, Chris Archer, Carlos Carrasco, Corey Kluber, Adam Eaton, Sean Doolittle

Players unlikely to exercise opt-out clauses: Elvis Andrus, Jason Heyward, Stephen Strasburg, Kenley Jansen

Source: http://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/25401129/way-too-early-2019-20-mlb-free-agent-rankings

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thrashermaxey · 7 years ago

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Ramblings: McDavid Dragging Anchors, Karlsson, Wheeler, Pirri, & What’s Up With Ghost? (Jan. 9)

A nice slate of games tonight so we won't waste any time getting into the action.

The Caps and Flyers squared off on Tuesday evening in a battle of teams on the opposite ends of the division. Despite Nicklas Backstrom being sidelined with a bug, the results were as you'd expect.

Jakub Vrana potted two goals, an assist and four shots on goal in just 14:20 of ice. The difference was that with Backstrom out he got to take a turn on the team's top power-play unit. His 3:10 on PPTOI represented 55 percent of the team's man-advantage ice. That's a season-high for the 22-year-old. He also set a career-high in goals with his 14th of the season. Vrana has witnessed his point-per-game output increase in each of his three campaigns and is on pace to break 40-points in 2018-19.

He's a player that's always had a great deal of skill. It's just a matter of receiving sustained prime ice.

Jakub Voracek scored a goal and added an assist in the loss. He has four points in his last four games. Perhaps we're seeing him warm up a tad? His current 65-point pace is a letdown for those who drafted him on the heels of an 85-point 2017-18.

Phoenix Copley stopped 37 of 40 in the 5-3 win.

Speaking of the Flyers, where have all the Shayne Gostisbehere points gone? After no points on Tuesday, he's on pace for just 32 this year. The 25-year-old led all blueliners in power-play points a season ago with 33. This year, he has eight through 43 contests. Ghost has just one power-play point (an assist on January 3rd) in the last 23 games. This, despite averaging over three minutes of power-play ice each night.

It boggles the mind.

As a team, the Flyers have witnessed their man-advantage conversion rate dip from the middle of the pack at 20.7 percent in 2017-18, to a basement-level 13.1 percent this season. That’s clearly contributing to the issue. However, the difference between a player like Claude Giroux – who is also feeling the power play crunch, and Gostisbehere, is that Giroux has improved his even-strength production.

In 82 games a season ago, Giroux produced 65 EVP or 0.76 even-strength points-per-game. In 2018-19, he’s already racked up 35 EVP in 42 games, or 0.83 even-strength points-per-game. Meanwhile, Gostisbehere produced 32 EVP in 78 games in 2017-18 (0.41) but is producing at nearly half that rate (0.21) in 43 games this season.

Yes, his metrics are below his career average, but not demonstrably so.

The good news? Gostisbehere has 40 shots on the power-play this season. That total leads the Flyers by a good margin and sits tied with Roman Josi for tops amongst blueliners in the NHL. He scored seven power-play markers on 86 PPSOG last season – or an 8.14 conversion rate. That would lead us to believe his five percent mark on the PP this season is due for a market correction. However, he clicked at just 3.18 percent in 2016-17.

At this point, any hopes of a second-half turnaround are likely built on just that – hope. He’s proven to be an elite producer in two of his four season-long career. Here’s hoping he wakes up soon.

Tuukka Rask and the Bruins shutout the Wild 4-0 in one of the early affairs. Rask has now won four straight while allowing just five goals. Jaroslav Halak has done a fine job of threatening (and stealing) the starting gig in Beantown but Rask is heating up just as the Bruins had hoped for. Halak owners can hold on for a bit longer, but the shine is likely running out on his star.

Patrice Bergeron and Brad Marchand each had a goal and two helpers while David Pastrnak had a rare night off the scoreboard. I can't harp on it every week, but what Patrice Bergeron is doing at 33 years old is something. He's missed time with an injury (as we expected) but the team's captain is clicking at 115-point pace through 27 games played. All the while shutting down opponents and seeing two minutes of shorthanded time a night.

He's a first ballot Hall of Famer in my books.

Dallas beat the Blues 3-1 on the back of Tyler Seguin and his two goals and an assist. Make it six goals and 10 points for Seguin in the six games since his team's CEO called him many, many insulting expletives. It appears a fire has been lit. Maybe not so much for the captain, Jamie Benn though. The 29-year-old power forward has just two goals over that span. He's on pace for his lowest statistical output since his rookie season.

Ben Bishop continues his strong year. He stopped 23 of 24 to up his save percentage to 0.922 on the year. That's good for a top-10 spot amongst regulars. Dallas will need him to be at his best if they hope to scratch and claw their way to a playoff birth.

John Klingberg helped out with a goal and an assist. That's six points in his last five games. It took four or five contests after returning from injury to get warmed up, but the 26-year-old Swede looks nice and toasty now.

Another loss for St. Louis and another pointless night for Vladimir Tarasenko. He's also on pace for his lowest output since his rookie season. However, let's not forget the shoulder injury that robbed him of his off-season training. With the Blues looking like an oil tanker down the stretch, it'll be difficult for him to put together a real second-half. However, there's little reason to believe we've seen the last of the dominating Russian's skill.

He'll be a great buy-low option for 2019-20.

In a match-up that I had circled for tonight, the Avs and Jets did not disappoint.

It was Colorado that came out gunning. They peppered the Jets and had them hemmed in their own zone for much of the first period. But it was Winnipeg who ended the frame up 2-1. The goals just kept on coming in the back 40 as the Jets ended the night with a 7-4 victory.

Blake Wheeler led the way with a shorthanded tally and three assists. That gives him 48 helpers on the season, trailing only Nikita Kucherov. There's been some concerning talk regarding the 32-year-old's mediocre five-on-five production, but he remains an animal on the man-advantage. Tonight, he was a force all over the rink.

Nate MacKinnon (0+2), Tyson Barrie (0+2), Gabe Landeskog (2+0), and Mikko Rantanen (0+1) were all buzzing on Tuesday. Who am I kidding, that group is buzzing every night. Unfortunately for the Avs, the rest of the squad isn't. Colorado has now lost 11 of their last 14 games.

The Panthers got pumped 5-1 by the Penguins on Tuesday. Apparently head coach, Bob Boughner didn't enjoy what he saw from some of his star players. He sat down Keith Yandle, Jonathan Huberdeau and Mike Hoffman for the entire third period. Message sent.

Roberto Luongo's tough season continues. He let in four goals on 16 shots before getting the hook. A sub-.900 39-year-old is not ideal for anyone.

Jake Guentzel continues to roll out on the top power-play unit ahead of Patric Hornqvist. The 24-year-old has five points on a current four-game streak and is on pace to break his career-highs set last season in a few short weeks. I've been a proponent of Guentzel's since he stepped foot in the American League. It was all about him seeing prime ice, and he's seeing it now.

Get him if you can.

Casual 1+1 for Sidney Crosby tonight. The Penguins' captain has been on quite the roll of late. He has 21 points in his last 13 games and is on pace for his best season since the concussion-shortened 2012-13 campaign where he recorded 56 points in 36 games.

31-year-old Sid is feeling it.

With a goal and an assist in Tampa Bay's shutout victory over Columbus, Nikita Kucherov is up to 71 points in 43 games. I don't even know where to begin.

We haven't seen a player click along at this pace since Jaromir Jagr posted 70 in 38 back in 1999-00. If the talented Russian maintains his pace he'll finish the season with 135 points. We haven't had a player break 130 since the mid-90's when Lemieux and Jagr were running roughshod.

Kuch is right there with Connor McDavid as the best fantasy asset in the world.

Here was the lineup for the Oilers tonight.

I can’t help but feel we’re being robbed here. Once upon a time, we witnessed Crosby’s prime years go up in smoke. That was the result of some nasty concussions and difficult to lay blame upon. What we're witnessing in Edmonton right now is a thoroughbred horse attempt to drag around two ship anchors. It’s the complete opposite of cool beans.

And there's a clear figure to point our fingers at.

The only hope (I know, more hope) is that Chiarelli is gone before long and whoever comes in has the ability to right the ship quickly. Because if they can’t, we’ll be looking back on Connor McDavid’s prime years and wondering what could have been if he were surrounded by legitimate NHL talent.

McDavid did his part as usual on Tuesday. He set up Alex Chiasson for a power play tally and was creating with his feet and hands on most shifts. And as per usual, it wasn't enough as the Sharks blew out the Oilers 7-2.

After a shutout on Sunday, Talbot was yanked after allowing four goals on 17 shots. Not exactly a momentum builder. Fortunately, Mikko Koskinen didn't fare much better.

On the brighter side of things, Erik Karlsson kept his mojo nice and warm in sunny California.

{source}<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Erik Karlsson is just the 5th blueliner in NHL history to post at least one assist in 14+ straight appearances. <br><br>The others: Paul Coffey (17 GP in 1985-86), Brian Leetch (15 GP in 1991-92), Phil Housley (14 GP in 1992-93) and Bobby Orr (14 GP in 1970-71). <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/NHLStats?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#NHLStats</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/EDMvsSJS?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#EDMvsSJS</a> <a href="https://t.co/wSqyk8nJlT">pic.twitter.com/wSqyk8nJlT</a></p>— NHL Public Relations (@PR_NHL) <a href="https://twitter.com/PR_NHL/status/1082847477236158464?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 9, 2019</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>{/source}

With three assists in the contest, Karlsson now has 25 points on a ridiculous 14-game streak. He's up to 41 points in 43 contests.

He's all the way back now.

Brent Burns tacked on a goal and an assist himself. That brings him to 49 points in 45 games to lead all blueliners in points, and assists (41). His 17 primary assists at even-strength are nearly double his next closest competitors – EK and Carlson, who each have nine.

Evander Kane had two goals and an assist. That extended his streak to six-games and 10 points.

Brandon Pirri was back up with the Golden Knights against the Rangers on Tuesday. The 27-year-old was skating next to Paul Stastny and Alex Tuch on the team's second line and skating on one of the evenly-distributed power play units. This move was facilitated by a Reilly Smith injury and an elevation of Max Pacioretty to line one.

In a surprise to literally no one, Pirri found the back of the net yet again. Seven goals and 10 points in eight games for Vegas this year. There's no reason this guy should be anywhere near the real-life waiver wire, let alone the fantasy wire. Pick him up, people, the stream is calling.

Marc-Andre Fleury made 27 stops in the 4-2 victory. He's been the low-key fantasy pick of the year. The 33-year-old is running away with the wins and shutouts lead and he does it all with a smile on his face.

He's an easy guy to root for.

Thanks for reading and feel free to follow me on Twitter @Hockey_Robinson

from All About Sports https://dobberhockey.com/hockey-rambling/ramblings-mcdavid-dragging-anchors-kucherov-wheeler-pirri-whats-up-with-ghost/

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terabitweb · 7 years ago

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Original post from Tao Security / Richard Bejtlich

This is not strictly an information security post, but the topic likely affects a decent proportion of my readership.

Within the last few years I experienced a profound professional “burnout.” I’ve privately mentioned this to colleagues in the industry, and heard similar stories or requests for advice on how to handle burnout.

I want to share my story in the hopes that it helps others in the security scene, either by coping with existing burnout or preparing for a possible burnout.

How did burnout manifest for me? It began with FireEye’s acquisition of Mandiant, almost exactly five years ago. 2013 was a big year for Mandiant, starting with the APT1 report in early 2013 and concluding with the acquisition in December.

The prospect of becoming part of a Silicon Valley software company initially seemed exciting, because we would presumably have greater resources to battle intruders. Soon, however, I found myself at odds with FireEye’s culture and managerial habits, and I wondered what I was doing inside such a different company.

(It’s important to note that the appointment of Kevin Mandia as CEO in June 2016 began a cultural and managerial shift. I give Kevin and his lieutenants credit for helping transform the company since then. Kevin’s appointment was too late for me, but I applaud the work he has done over the last few years.)

Starting in late 2014 and progressing in 2015, I became less interested in security. I was aggravated every time I saw the same old topics arise in social or public media. I did not see the point of continuing to debate issues which were never solved. I was demoralized and frustrated.

At this time I was also working on my PhD with King’s College London. I had added this stress myself, but I felt like I could manage it. I had earned two major and two minor degrees in four years as an Air Force Academy cadet. Surely I could write a thesis!

Late in 2015 I realized that I needed to balance the very cerebral art of information security with a more physical activity. I took a Krav Maga class the first week of January 2016. It was invigorating and I began a new blog, Rejoining the Tao, that month. I began to consider options outside of informations security.

In early 2016 my wife began considering ways to rejoin the W-2 workforce, after having stayed home with our kids for 12 years. We discussed the possibility of me leaving my W-2 job and taking a primary role with the kids. By mid-2016 she had a new job and I was open to departing FireEye.

By late 2016 I also realized that I was not cut out to be a PhD candidate. Although I had written several books, I did not have the right mindset or attitude to continue writing my thesis. After two years I quit my PhD program. This was the first time I had quit anything significant in my life, and it was the right decision for me. (The Churchill “never, never, never give up” speech is fine advice when defending your nation’s existence, but it’s stupid advice if you’re not happy with the path you’re following.)

In March 2017 I posted Bejtlich Moves On, where I said I was leaving FireEye. I would offer security consulting in the short term, and would open a Krav Maga school in the long-term. This was my break with the security community and I was happy to make it. I blogged on security only five more times in 2017.

(Incidentally, one very public metric for my burnout experience can be seen in my blog output. In 2015 I posted 55 articles, but in 2016 I posted only 8, and slightly more, 12, in 2017. This is my 21st post of 2018.)

I basically took a year off from information security. I did some limited consulting, but Mrs B paid the bills, with some support from my book royalties and consulting. This break had a very positive effect on my mental health. I stayed aware of security developments through Twitter, but I refused to speak to reporters and did not entertain job offers.

During this period I decided that I did not want to open a Krav Maga school and quit my school’s instructor development program. For the second time, I had quit something I had once considered very important.

I started a new project, though — writing a book that had nothing to do with information security. I will post about it shortly, as I am finalizing the cover with the layout team this weekend!

By the spring of 2018 I was able to consider returning to security. In May I blogged that I was joining Splunk, but that lasted only two months. I realized I had walked into another cultural and managerial mismatch. Near the end of that period, Seth Hall from Corelight contacted me, and by July 20th I was working there. We kept it quiet until September. I have been very happy at Corelight, finally finding an environment that matches my temperament, values, and interests.

My advice to those of you who have made it this far:

If you’re feeling burnout now, you’re not alone. It happens. We work in a stressful industry that will take everything that you can give, and then try to take more. It’s healthy and beneficial to push back. If you can, take a break, even if it means only a partial break.

Even if you can’t take a break, consider integrating non-security activities into your lifestyle — the more physical, the better. Security is a very cerebral activity, often performed in a sedentary manner. You have a body and taking care of it will make your mind happier too.

If you’re not feeling burnout now, I recommend preparing for a possible burnout in the future. In addition to the advice in the previous paragraphs, take steps now to be able to completely step away from security for a defined period. Save a proportion of your income to pay your bills when you’re not working in security. I recommend at least a month, but up to six months if you can manage it.

This is good financial advice anyway, in the event you were to lose your job. This is not an emergency fund, though — this is a planned reprieve from burnout. We are blessed in security to make above-average salaries, so I suggest saving for retirement, saving for layoffs, and saving for burnout.

Finally, it’s ok to talk to other people about this. This will likely be a private conversation. I don’t see too many people saying “I’m burned out!” on Twitter or in a blog post. I only felt comfortable writing this post months after I returned to regular security work.

I’m very interested in hearing what others have to say on this topic. Replying to my Twitter announcement for the blog post is probably the easiest step. I moderate the comments here and might not get to them in a timely manner.

Go to Source Author: Managing Burnout Original post from Tao Security / Richard Bejtlich This is not strictly an information security post, but the topic likely affects a decent proportion of my readership.

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jdeowrites · 7 years ago

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I have an agent!

The short version: I am happy to announce I am now an agented writer! I have signed with Jennifer Azantian of Azantian Literary. She first expressed interest during this April’s #DVPit!

The long version: I debated whether to just make an announcement or actually write a whole “How I Got My Agent” post, and eventually decided to do the latter. Why? Well, firstly, because I’ve always found them fun to read. And secondly, it was by reading dozens and dozens of these posts from different writers that I fully grasped the amount of variability in peoples’ querying journeys— some were long and some were short, some were straight-line and some went all over the place before they got there. And it’s interesting to see. So my hope in writing this post is that it will add to that conversation, and be helpful to someone the way so many similar posts have been for me.

I got the idea for this book (a YA contemporary fantasy) in 2014, while on the rowing machine at the gym. It was just one scene—the opening scene. With no context or literally anything helpful. But it intrigued me, and it stayed with me. I didn’t start writing it until near the end of 2016, and I had basically pantsed my way through a truly terrible first draft by the end of April 2017. Then I took a month long break, picked it up again and revised it until early November, when I no longer felt I could productively improve it on my own. So I asked a close friend of mine, who I found in fandom years ago and is a huge support in all my writing endeavours, to read it for me (love you, MJ).

My goal for 2018 was to start querying it, although I didn’t know when exactly. I just knew I wanted more eyes on this story beforehand. Alas, I didn’t really have writer connections. So I started looking at CP swaps and critique giveaways, and it was around this time that I came across Meredith Ireland’s announcement that she was looking for a mentee for the April 2017 DVPit Twitter event. I’d applied for a similar mentorship already without any luck, but I thought what the heck and submitted to this one too. I ended up getting that mentorship (if you’re reading this, Meredith, you’re the best. Legit.).

We worked on polishing the manuscript (MS) for a month and a half. Then, we worked on tweaking my query letter, synopsis, Twitter pitches, and all that good stuff. I’ve learned a LOT from her, stuff that would have taken me much longer to learn on my own (not to sound like an echo chamber buuuut…. you’re the best Meredith).

DVPit came and went. I posted multiple pitches, with varying degrees of success (the majority of my tweets that day got no likes, lol). Here’s the one that my agent, Jen, liked:

Meredith and many other lovely writers on Twitter boosted my pitches, which I’m super grateful for, because I doubt I would’ve gotten any interactions otherwise. After the day was over, I compiled a list of agents who had expressed interest during DVPit as well as other agents I wanted to query and sent these in small, staggered batches for the next few months.

And then… I waited. Checked my email a lot. Got some interest, got some rejections. Got some interest that ended in rejections. The usual.

DVPit and the beginning of my querying journey also happened to coincide with the end of my school year. I started on a new MS (I’d read advice to do that while querying, and spoiler alert, it was great advice.). I wrote the rough draft of this new story slowly over my four month summer, and fell in love with it along the way. By mid-August, I had typed “The End”. I had also queried the majority of my list of agents; I still had a few partials and fulls out (including a partial Jen had just requested), but mostly things didn’t seem like they were going anywhere. However, it didn’t bother me as much as I think it would have if I wasn’t working on something else. I hadn’t looked at my old MS since April. I still loved its concept, but figured if nothing came of it, I could always revisit it in the future.

It was near the end of August, a few days after I had started research for revisions of my new project, when I got Jen’s email. She wanted to have a call.

It’s safe to say I didn’t sleep very much for the next few days. I prepped madly for our talk, and then the call itself was just amazing. At least, she was. Friendly, eloquent, full of great ideas. I’m pretty sure I came off as a weirdo, but she seemed unfazed by my level of Cringe™ and instead of hanging up, offered me representation (!!!!!). Afterwards, I did a lil happy dance and notified the other agents who still had my materials. I got some more interest. Some step-asides. And calls with two other absolutely wonderful agents.

I won’t lie—it was difficult to realize I’d have to say no to two agents who loved my work, especially after so long being rejected myself. I considered multiple factors in making my decision. Ultimately, I chose Jen because she felt like the right fit for me and my life.

Before I signed, I did a more thorough review of the agency agreement, since I’m new to this and wanted to understand all the nitty-gritty details. Jen was absolutely amazing about making me comfortable with everything. And I’m thrilled to be her client!

It’s surreal to think that almost two years after I wrote the first words of this book, I am continuing work on it with such an incredible agent by my side. I’m grateful for the opportunity, and for all the people who have made my journey to this point easier. That number includes family, friends and mentors who’ve encouraged me, read or boosted my work, and supported me in general—both in writing, and other aspects of my life. I’ve been very fortunate to have you with me; thank you so much.

So there you go! That’s How I Got My Agent. Upon reflection, two things still strike me as funny. One is that Jen was never even on my initial list of agents to submit to (Because she wasn’t open to unsolicited queries.). If it wasn’t for DVPit, we may never have connected! Second thing is that four months after DVPit, I’d started to assume my window to get a DVPit offer had passed. I was definitely naive for thinking this, but I hadn’t really heard of anyone getting one so long after the actual event. The organizers had already started promo for the next DVPit, for god’s sake. But I was wrong! Things like this just speak to how unpredictable this journey can be, and how much of it is out of our hands. It’s humbling to realize just how much luck was involved in mine. The best we can do as writers is ensure that our best possible work is out there and giving us the best chance.

And at the end of the day, when I was disheartened, it was about realizing that I’d be here, writing, no matter whether I had an agent or not. I want to remember that going forward, too: No matter what happens in my traditional publishing career, telling stories is something I want to do my whole life in some capacity or another. I don’t have control over the industry, but I do have control over that.

I’ll close this post with my stats:

Queries: 49 (19 of those to agents requesting from DVPit)

Partial/Full Requests: 11 (6 from DVPit)

Offers: 3 (2 from DVPit)

Number of times I checked my email: …. CLASSIFIED INFORMATION.

#in conclusion i have a lot to thank DVPit for!#how i got my agent #my posts #tc #DVPit

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