#if you pay someone to pick up your yard then i 100% presume youre That Asshole who doesnt pick up your dogs poo while on walks

[comradecowplant]

going absolutely insane looking at indeed for a side job where half the openings are for positions like "trash valet" (bringing trash from someone's house/apartment to the actual collection area) or "pet waste removal" (self-explanatory)... idk if this take is "spicy" but unless you are physically disabled, take your own fucking trash out!!!! pick up after your own fucking dog!!!!!

[junker-town]

8 players I’m watching this NFL season

You owe it to yourself to pay attention to these guys.

By this point you’ve probably locked your Week 1 rosters for fantasy football, and that’s a good thing. Truth be told, I’m really pretty terrible at fantasy football. It’s a world that demands a very different mind to that of just appreciating NFL games. It’s like watching someone good play Madden, someone really good, who has an innate understanding of what breaks the A.I. and will always pick up a big gain on offense.

Instead I want to talk about the players I just can’t stop thinking about. The guys who I know will do something incredible every week, and who I cannot wait to see back on the field.

Justin Jefferson

God, I’m such a sucker for LSU wide receivers. I have no idea what’s in that Baton Rouge water but the Tigers need to bottle it and give it to every pass catcher around the nation. It feels like it’s been such a long time since we’ve truly seen a receiver so good he makes up for his quarterback, but that’s exactly what Jefferson did for the Vikings in his rookie season.

I’m not here to litigate the skills of Kirk Cousins, because Kirk Cousins is too boring to even warrant time on the court docket. Instead we should focus on a dude who caught 88 passes for 1,400 yards in his friggin’ rookie season. Know the last time that’s happened in the modern era? How about never.

Anquan Boldin: 1,377 yards

Odell Beckham Jr.: 1,305 yards

The GOAT himself, Randy-freaking-Moss: 1,313 yards

I want nothing more in this world that to see Jefferson dominate again, because frankly it’s been too damn long since the league had a must-watch receiver. Hell, it’s probably been since OBJ was making stupid one-handed catches and flexing on the entire league, and go figure, he was from LSU too.

I’m a sucker for feeling like I’m a part of history, and the possibility of seeing the emergence of one of the greatest receivers of all time is enough of an allure that I’ll actually subject myself to watching Kirk Cousins play football.

Derrick Henry

I’ve been trying to limit my red meat consumption under the assumption that reducing my carbon footprint will help the world, so Derrick Henry is my giant weekly helping of beef.

Everything about football is time and place. Go back a decade and Henry would be in the mix with a lot of stellar, league-defining running backs. Now, he’s an iconoclast in a league that keeps pushing more and more towards passing, and ignoring the sweet science of mashing a dude into the turf with a stiff arm and a steely grin.

The season, perhaps more than any other, I cannot wait to see what Henry does in Tennessee. With Julio Jones in the mix it’s going to be a fascinating weekly drama of “who’s defending who?” with Henry more than likely getting a chance to do his own thing and obliterate people, because that’s favorable to giving up 20+ in the air.

Derrick Henry's tired of the helmet on a stick...he needs live bodies to stiff arm pic.twitter.com/A5QcDKIhny

— Buck Reising (@BuckReising) September 6, 2021

If Derrick Henry turns his own teammates into sacrificial lambs, then what the hell is he going to do to his opponents?

Every single poor sap on the Texans

Okay look, I know this breaks my conventions a little because “58 players I’m watching this NFL season” doesn’t have the SEO-friendly ring to it, but I’m lumping the entire Texans team into this scenario as one sorry player.

I truly did not believe things could get worse for Houston than last season, but by gawd they found a way, didn’t they? You know David Johnson? The running back they traded DeAndre Hopkins for? He’s their backup running back to a 31-year-old Mark Ingram now.

I honestly feel slightly bad for the individual players on the Texans, because there are a ton of genuinely delightful individuals on this team. Collectively their depth chart looks like Santa’s workshop if all the elves decided to run off and become dentists, so dolls were pieces together by unskilled labor.

The elves really should have unionized.

Daniel Jones

Let it be known that above all else I am a petty, petty bitch — and while Daniel Jones is, by all accounts, a nice gentleman, he does represent something I love to hate on with the fury of 1,000 suns: Dave Gettleman.

I watched firsthand while Gettleman systematically destroyed my beloved Carolina Panthers are turned away team legends like Steve Smith with a bedside manner best described as “imagine if Jason Vorhees was your orthopedic surgeon.”

Jones represents his biggest roll of the dice. The guy Gettleman took and told the world to “trust him.” He passed on Josh Allen, gave Jones the rope to let Justin Herbert fly by a year later, now he’s getting one more year to prove he’s the guy, following a draft where New York could have selected Justin Fields.

I know Giants fans have reached the same point Panthers fans did with Gettleman. He made us all chuckle with his old man phraseology to start his tenure, then it became abundantly apparent he was still looking at football as if it was being played during the Reagan administration with no appreciation for what was happening in the modern game.

I don’t think this story is going to end well, and while I’m sorry for Giants fans, I promise it’ll be worth it to get rid of Gettleman.

Justin Herbert

Hey, it’s the guy I just talked about the Giants passing on. Cool.

Anyway, I love watching Justin Herbert play ... a lot. He looks like a 12-year-old and plays like a 40-year-old veteran. In fact, I’m not 100 percent sure Herbert really is entering his second year, and he’s not some wily veteran like Peyton Manning aging backwards like Benjamin Button.

I’d really like Herbert to succeed because dammit, I want the Chargers to succeed. I don’t know if there’s a more historically likable team than this one, but who never, ever seems to catch a break. Philip Rivers was a really nice guy, LaDanian Tomlinson was also a delightful fellow — I want Herbert to succeed where they didn’t and finally, FINALLY pull the Chargers out of the doldrums.

Also, it would be fun as hell if we get another elite quarterback in the AFC West for the next decade next to Patrick Mahomes.

Brian Burns

Here’s a guy who nobody outside of the Carolinas really talks about, but totally should. Sure, Burns doesn’t have a double-digit sack season to his name ... yet, but I think it’s about to happen.

The reason I just want to see him play is baked entirely within that sentence: I just want to see Brian Burns play. Last season he registered 9.0 sacks, but these weren’t effort, fight his way into the pocket type sacks. Burns flies off the line with unnatural speed and even without a tremendous array of pass rushing moves, he’s able to overwhelm defenses with his first step.

Burns ranked Top 10 in the NFL in total QB pressures last season, and I think that will jump ahead again. This could be a breakout season, and it’s just fun to see how this guy plays football.

Trevor Lawrence

I’ve just gotta know. I have to know if all these years of watching, and waiting for the best college QB since Andrew Luck actually materializes in Jacksonville and FINALLY gets that team over the hump.

The Jaguars got so monumentally lucky to have this situation fall in their laps and get to take Lawrence, and this was a franchise in dire need of luck. Oh god, that’s three mentions of “luck” in two paragraphs, my editor is going to hate me (sorry Ricky). Shit, now it’s four. Better quit while I’m ahead.

I just want Jaguars fans to be happy in a way that doesn’t require copious amounts of pre-game liquor and vandalism. Is that so much to ask?

Kyle Pitts

In a similar vein to Lawrence I’m just fascinated by seeing what Kyle Pitts does this season. The rookie tight end is being asked to fill some tremendously large cleats with Julio Jones being traded away, but thankfully he is a large man who I presume has feet to match.

Before I get too carried away with feet references and y’all start rumors about me on the internet, let me just say that I think Pitts can be one of those iconic, league-defining players that makes us totally re-think the tight end position. I believe he’s that damn good.

Now, I know there’s also a learning curve here and that transitioning to tight end in the NFL is damn, damn difficult (I mean hell, no rookie TE has broken 1,000 yards since Mike Ditka), but there’s just something transcendent about how Pitts plays football. I need to watch him play and develop this season to satiate my own curiosity.

[cwdcshows]

Supergirl - S5 E3 - Blurred Lines

I'm begrudgingly considering watching Batwoman, mainly because I'm OC'd and I'm watching the other DC-CW series, but God damn, I catch glimpse of it whenever I cue-up Supergirl and the DVR has recorded the last few minutes of the preceding Batwoman episode, and it's not inspiring me with any confidence.  It apparently takes them 3 episodes to give her, her God damn hair - the hair we saw Batwoman sport nearly a year ago in the crossover, meaning at least part of this season is set in the relative past, presumably.  But then we get this bullshit commentary about "the bat being back, but curvier and sexier," like fuck you.  How the hell can you tell what this person looks in this suit?  And so much for the urban legend angle.   More importantly, how dumb is it that they have work so hard to come up with her name?  Are we supposed to believe anyone was seriously considering calling her "Batchick"; while "Batwoman" flies under the radar? Moving on.... So at the end of the last episode, we see Billy-the-Kiss ass volunteering at a shelter; now he's hassling some guy at a night club about playing ball?  

Of course Kelly gives random people she meets on the street unsolicited advice about their lives; because nothing makes someone more sympathetic than someone who likes to stick their nose into other people's business.  And it seems this show has once again tricked me into walking into a double entendre. It's her job to listen to people?  What is Kelly's job?  She's so boring and last season seems like a lifetime ago, I have genuinely forgotten.  Is she supposed to be a therapist or something?  I suppose that explains her guiding J'Onn through this ordeal in the previous episode; I was wondering what made her qualified to do that, but it seems completely incongruent with the high tech coporate setting they've put her in. And Alex going from Kelly giving advice to her barista to being kidnapped by a shape shifter is a hell a segue.  I have a feeling Alex has been waiting hours to find the right opportunity to bring that up; and it would seem she cracked under the pressure. "You don't want a world full of robots, you just want better people."

Oh.... Idiot Jed..... How does Brainy even function?  Data was more adept at picking up behavioral cues. Wait, do people really like reading about death?  I mean, I'll read the obits in my weekly hometown newspaper; I try to make it a point of at least paying respect to he recently deceased by reading their name and age at the time of death, but I'm don't go out of my way to scan for newspapers with a corpse on cover. Interesting aside, I was reading said newspaper just last night and noted how a local woman had died at the age of 44 - certainly a tragedy for a family to lose someone at such a fairly young age - and then I also saw that it noted her "husband of 30 years" and now I'm left wondering if one of those numbers was a typo or if this woman got married at 14..... So she hears Billy's heart beating fast and has to use her x-ray vision to confirm it?  What else did she think it could have been? Okay, so Kelly is a Doctor.  Yet the place she works doesn't remotely look like a hospital; and the staff don't look like medical staff.  They (and the set) looks like they're trying to audition for a future JJ Abrams Star Trek film. So Kara is going all over the world to get lunch and coffee, but are any of these items going to still be hot by the time she gets back to the states?  For that matter, how the hell does manage to carry all of this shit?  I have a hard enough time carry my order from McDonald's from car the dozen or so yards into my house; especially if I have to also carry in anything else besides the bag of food and my drink.  The couple of time I had my niece with me also got her something I absolutely asked the server at the drive-thru to put it all in one of those plastic bags they normally put salads in, because they have a handle - a fact I learned not because I have ever previously ordered a salad from McDonald's, but rather because I asked them if they had a bag with a handle they could put my order in to make it easier to carry and they responded, "you mean like a salad bag?" and I respond, "yeah, whatever." I'm just picturing Kara rigging up some sort of harness or something she can wear to help carry things around as she flies internationally; thumbing her nose at all of the customs agencies and international trade violations she's willfully causing. Also, now that Brainy has set it up so her suit materializes as soon as she takes the glasses off, shouldn't she get more clear of the doorway before doing that?  That also raises the question of what happens when she just wants to lounge around without her glasses or is going to bed.  Does she have to sleep in her suit now?  Is it bonded to her skin?  Is there a snooze button that allows her to take off her glasses and not activate the suit?  What if she just needs to remove her glasses to get something out of her eye or to clean the glasses?  Or those times like earlier in the episode when she just brings the glasses down just slightly to use her x-ray vision?  What's the point of no return her glasses have to pass before the process starts?  Can it be immediately reversed when she put the glasses back on; or is it something you have to wait until it's all the way done before you can go the other way? There are so many questions..... Seriously, Kara, Lena would be the only person interested in Lex's journals and there'd be no other constructive use for them other than therapeutic?   Wait just a damn minute, she took her glasses all the way off to x-ray the dead body and didn't generate her suit.  What the fuck?   You lied to us Brainy.  You lied and that can't be forgiven. What, the boy being called J'Onn might be J'Onn?  Whodda thunk it? Although I suppose J'Onn might be a common name on Mars, like John, Jacob or Jingleheimer Schmidt. I can buy that children on Mars or other planets even might develop games similar to hide and seek; it's a basic concept that seems fairly plausible.  What doesn't seem plausible is that children on Mars would play this game as humans. So in the last episode, J'Onn hit a wall in trying to recover his memories; and it was suggested that trying to use the Q-wave technology to go any deeper could do damage to J'Onn.  Now this episode J'Onn barely has to try, with the help of a woman who isn't even a telepath. Kara can fly halfway across the world to get lunch for her and Lena, but forgets to put in an delivery order for dinner with Alex - come on Kara, strap on your harness and go get dinner, chop, chop! You know, if Terrible-Boss gets and more terrible, Kara could probably make bank moonlighting with GrubHub.  Or start her own food delivery service - SupperGirl Should Brainiac have a clapper, as opposed to say, Alexa? Now that I think about it, why is Brainiac using his appearance filter when they're home alone or when he's sleeping for that matter?  Surely these devices don't have an unlimited supply of power; and Brainiac shouldn't be concerned about his appearance in private. Guardian: "Yeah, I came prepared." With what, a glow stick?  Seriously, is this supposed to be not-Spider-woman's not-Kryptonite?  Did I miss a whole big schpiel about this alien thing have some special weakness?  And why didn't Supergirl likewise come prepared? Also, who looped James into this?  Was it Kara? "This device uses magnetic resonance to attract the heavy metals in their ink." You really could have just said "this device des magic" and it'd make about as much sense.  Especially since it's not really ink, but rather some type of alien life form that only mimics the appearance of a tattoo.   Are we supposed to be surprised that it was actually J'Onn who did the mind wipe?  Like I mentioned with the last episode, I'm fairly certain he's wiped other people's minds without the permission; and we definitely know he's done it with their consent. In the last episode, Kelly was able to use her contact lenses to enter J'Onn's mind and interact with him in real time.  Now it appears on a computer monitor and there's a time delay.  In spite of this apparent de-evolution of the technological ability to merge one's mind with technology, this is still some next level shit that the characters just seem to be glossing over as no big deal. So if this...shadow... could kill bug-lady so easily, why even need her at all as an assassin?  Was it for the plausible deniability of the target seeming to die of natural causes Is this going to turn out to be the Shadow Thief?  Maybe Shade?  I kind of hope it's not Shade.  I know he (or sometimes she) has been a villain, but I kinda liked the run in the comics when he was an immortal good guy. Come on Brainiac, there's a fucking difference between "operating at 100%" and the fucking nuance of going overboard with things like food and poems.  It's the sort of difference between being able to open a fucking door and ripping clear off the hinges; or holding someone's hand gently or crushing it.  It's unrealistic to suggest that this quasi-organic-AI doesn't realize you can't go "full thrust" on every conceivable thing, because nothing in nature could function that way.  And if he really needs things in those terms, then it's a matter of variable comprehension of where those critical thresholds are; because 100% maximum food consumption in a meal is not dozen whole pizzas.  That is more than 100% of what one person can physically eat in one sitting and therefore should exceed his logical behavior. On the flip side, mazel tov when things turn physical and Brainiac brings this type of mindset to the bedroom....

"You were right, I was too open and too trusting. It's all my fault." Fuck you Supergirl Writers, for trying to bring this back to the opening bit between Kelly and the random person she was offering advice to on the street.  J'Onn's brother manipulated Kelly by appearing to her as someone she knew and had at least enough of a past history with as to have a photo of him in her home.  Had he appeared as the street barista or was just walking along the street not even looking for Kelly when Kelly came along, randomly zapping people with Q waves to help make them feel better, whether they asked for that help or not, sure, that would be "her fault". But this was a sneaky fucking telepathic shape shifter was determined to get your to do what he wanted; and while admittedly it barely took him much effort to convince you, it was only because you were legitimately doing what would have been the right thing under any other normal circumstance. "For a friend like you, there are no boundaries." Alright, now the writers are just fucking with us with these two. So Kara evidently didn't just pop in and grabbed the books, but also the watch too; seems she decided that so long as she was committing a felony, she might as well get her money's worth - and I suppose that makes sense.  Is stealing some journals and a watch worse than just stealing the journals and not the watch, if you've only had to break into the one place? Next we'll see that she just cleared out the whole evidence lock-up, because you never know when you might need something else that's being held in Federal custody, and that way she's only had to break the law once; anything after that is just curation.

[mbii]

Mission Possible: Bison in Vegas, Brotherhood, and “The Upset”

I just wanted to run.

I wanted to run away from all of my problems, either self-made or world-made, and bathe in a shower of shoulder slaps and full body hugs. I wanted to go a place where I wouldn’t judge or be judged, or have to measure up to some illusory standard, or have to wear the mask or play a character for their delight or my survival. Orange Julius Caesar was still in office, and I was still reeling from Charlottesville.

I wanted to run. I needed to run. I’d promise to return and fight for oceans of justice and rivers of fairness, but for now, I needed to escape to my alma mater in the interest of self-preservation.

I wanted to be a lovable goofball. I wanted to sport an embarrassingly honest smile that spanned the width of my contiguous country, wear some ill-fitting alumni gear, and throw my arms around complete strangers while singing the aggressively long song of my university.  Winning the weekend for me wasn’t about SCOREBOARD. It was about family coming together at a Kairos moment to share love when we all needed it the most.

But I’ll take the W.

HOWARD OVER UNLV! YA HEARD! WHAT WHAAAAAAAAT?  

According to the sports books, this was the biggest upset in college football HISTORY.

The prediction? PAIN. We were supposed to lose by 45 points. $100 dollars on Howard with the right bookie would’ve gotten someone out from under a year of school debt.

YEP. THAT HAPPENED. Howard went ahead and became a football school. AND I WAS THERE.

Los Angeles is an urban sprawl. The numbers will tell you that it’s full of black folk, which is true, but we’re spread across this coastal city like a drop of grape jelly across two slices of white bread. I knew this was something to keep in mind as a DC transplant and native New Yorker, but even still, I was caught way off guard. Out here on the Left Coast, melanin just ain’t connected to each other like that.

Needless to say, I was eager to meet up with my HU family. I didn’t know anyone else going to Vegas – and part of me liked this, since I had quickly created a highly imaginative alternate reality where I would sneak into Vegas, act totally out of character for 72 hours, and jump back in my Prius for home (because why not save money on gas?). Walter Mitty would’ve been proud. But I caved to my better, more responsible self and invited two of my new LA friends to keep me in line – Gipp and Silk.

Gipp was a four-letter athlete at Howard, a starting wide receiver for our forlorn franchise for as long as his academic scholarship allowed. Gipp came from South Carolina as a two-sport guy in his high school days, but ditched his sprint spikes for a college career in cleats. Although Gipp and I didn’t attend Howard at the same time, we became fast friends through our shared Los Angeles church community and an equal zest for life and faith. He’s also the perfect Goose to my Maverick, unlike most sloppy husband types who forget what it is to navigate the perilous waters of young adult male singlehood.  

Gipp and I added Silk later, after running into him at the Whole Foods in Playa Vista. He’s the hyper intelligent black computer engineer friend who writes code for dating apps that everyone should have. Silk lives a sneeze from new Silicon Beach (which is how he got his name), has forgotten more about cryptocurrencies that I’ll ever know, and is addicted to CrossFit. No lie. Silk may not have Gipp’s football pedigree but he’s built like an Olympic decathlete. This, of course, made me the fat guy of the group.

Once the group was set, weeks felt like days. Gipp’s wife said YES, I snagged a room at Aria, Silk rented a gluttonously large Ford Explorer, and we piled in and zipped across the Mojave Desert to Vegas.

After sleeping across the middle row for nearly the entire drive, I yawned like a hibernating bear, rubbed my eyes with my fists and looked through the front windshield at the fast approaching city. Las Vegas is quite charming from a distance, like watching a handful of middle-aged uncles proudly march into church on Easter Sunday with neon suits.  Vegas’s skyscrapers touched the sky like Babel’s towers, but exist as nameless and faceless trophies until you get in range. Mandalay Bay. Tropicana. Luxor. Planet Hollywood. This was Las Vegas, in its marvelous splendor, standing as a symbolic affront to restraint.

We parked the Explorer at Aria, opened our doors, and got smacked in the face by the heat. It was God’s reminder that we were still in His desert, and we hightailed it for the hotel lobby. We checked in, inhaled three burgers at Gordon Ramsay’s, and strolled through the adjacent indoor mall like conquering heroes, analyzing the Labor Day horde that we were about to share our weekend with.

You see, Las Vegas is a city without duplicates. You’ve got your red hats, your coastals, your warlocks, your hookers, your fixed incomers, your derelicts, your grandmas and grandpas, your fiends, your infants, your sultans, your tycoons, your hipsters, your dancing girls and your degenerates, of all colors and shapes, crammed along one long strip of concrete, baking in the desert heat.

Not one person looks the same in Vegas. Gipp and I walked past a six-foot-three black man in the middle of the mall wearing a black welding visor that covered his face down to his mustache, a second golf visor above the first that stretched horizontally from his forehead (presumably, to shield the sun), a black fishnet shirt, and pink marina shorts that squeezed his quads like they were pigs in a blanket. And the man stared at us as if we were out of place.

After a Friday night alumni event catered by the good folks of HUAA (free food!), a superb community service project that I hear went GREAT! (we, umm, overslept), and a full day of soaking in poolside rays and Top 25 football games over family-style meats (although the food at the book left MUCH to be desired)…we made our way to Sam Boyd Stadium, home of the Runnin’ Rebels.

Yes, we were late. In our defense, we were afraid of getting barbequed by the Vegas desert. So, from the parking lot, we heard the public address announcer yell the first score of the game at us:

“TOUCHDOWN! FIFTY-TWO YARD RUN BY CAYLIN NEWTON! HOWARD UP 7 TO 0!”

I looked at Gipp. His mouth had already hit the asphalt like a grand piano.

“Wait, WHAAAAAAAA???”

We darted into the stadium, looked for our seats, and scanned the field turf for clues. The alumni section murmured politely, with a select few engaging in cautious celebration. Let’s keep it 100. We were pretty, pretty confident that this was a fluke. I remember the Jay Walker tales, but come on man: this is Howard football. We had to crumble sooner or later, right? Right?

For starters, UNLV’s QB was a cool six-foot six-inch black Randall Cunningham clone who could get seven yards a snap. UNLV also had a running back who I derisively called NUMBER 3. Dude moved like a Create a Player in Madden whose speed and agility were maxed to 99. And our diminutive defensive front made their offense look like The Monstars from Space Jam.

But, to our surprise, our defense bent without breaking. They were the unsung heroes. UNLV would hit a big play – like a monster play-action pass at the end of the first quarter to put them in the red zone – and our Bison would burr their noses into the goal line and hold them to chip shots.

A long run by College Randall Cunningham. Only 3.

A short field after a short punt. Still 3.

Later, a HUGE mistake by their QB…he was rushing to the line after another one of his backbreaking downfield plays…fumbled inside our 30-yard line, and our senior linebacker Rollins scooped the loose ball (he bobbled for a second in our line of sight and we GASPED) and rumbled down the sideline with an envoy of his comrades to pay dirt. 21-9. BISON.

UNLV quickly got some of it back, but the halftime score told no lies. In the face of open disbelief, Howard football was WINNING. 21-19 after 30 minutes.

It was a short halftime show. Showtime marched with a skeleton crew and UNLV danced their pirated moves. Meanwhile, the winds at Sam Boyd picked up to Dust Bowl levels. The debris blew so much that I watched most of the third quarter through my sunglasses like a freshman at his first nightclub.

The third quarter was rough. The Rebels ran out like dogs with their tails on fire, scoring two quick touchdowns and sending some of our alums straight to the strip. 33-21, UNLV.  We got the ball back and Philyaw – our ex-quarterback-turned-running back and runner-up for Player of the Game – quickly scored on a short run from three yards out. 33-28, UNLV.

Throughout the half, the wind was catching kickoffs and pulling them directly to Earth. On our ensuing kickoff after the score, the wind forced the ball into the hands of a clumsy UNLV up man, who promptly fumbled the ball right back to our squad. Short field. Back to Philyaw. Touchdown. Go for TWO? Why not! 

36-33, BISON.

Now, it was the fourth quarter. The wind flipped to our backs and our kicker booted the next kickoff into the UNLV end zone. UNLV started their drive at the 20, with a healthy dose of NUMBER 3, their all-Madden man. Six handoffs later, he was dancing in the far end zone, giving UNLV a 40-36 lead with just over 10 minutes left in the game. Gipp groaned, I stared deeply into the cement stands, and we began to prepare for the inevitable.

And then, Caylin Newton went to work.

Cam’s little brother is a tidy 5 feet, 10 inches. He looks and plays like a miniature version of the 2015 NFL MVP minus the alligator shoes and Popeye arms. Still, Caylin’s deft handling of the offense – read optioning, audibling at the line of scrimmage, jump passing, and getting to the edge on designed QB runs – proved far too skilled for the Howard program I knew. How did we get this guy? Did his family owe a pound of flesh to the Merchant of Venice?

On this go-ahead drive, Caylin picked apart UNLV’s defense like a NASCAR pit crew mechanic. Handoff. Handoff. Run. Handoff. BIG PASS. PLUNGE. SIX! Howard up by 3, with a half quarter to burn.  

UNLV got the ball back, Howard held, and UNLV decided to punt into the wind. BAD IDEA. Only 10 yards in net distance, and we braced for the kill. Lil’ Cam got us to their goal line, but finally: UNLV’s d-line held firm. Turnover on downs.

Clone Cunningham got the ball in his hands at his own 2-yard line with a vendetta, firing a deep in route across his body to a streaking Vegas WR. His man caught it, had the angle on the Howard corner, slowed down for no apparent reason, and FUMBLED. HU with another recovery. Time to milk the clock.  

Penalty. Run. Run. Run. Pooch Punt. Touchback. And UNLV got the ball back, 19 seconds away from becoming an opening weekend trivia question.

I stood up. My hands were on my head like a sprinter after interval training. I had done no running.

Pass one? COMPLETE for 19 yards. UNLV now on their 38. Could Randall throw a Hail Mary from here?

Pass two? Incomplete. My heart was beating out of my chest. Why is our defense so far back? MOVE CLOSER. OHMYGOD. SOMEONE TELLS ME WHEN IT ENDS.

13 seconds left.

Pass three? CAUGHT. By speedy NUMBER 3, my personal nemesis.

He made his first man miss, and sprinted across the 50. We had men on his tail, but he was just FASTER.

To the 45. SOMEBODY STOP HIM.

To the 40. WE CANNOT LOSE LIKE THIS.

Down. Tackled at the 30.

GAME OVER.

HOWARD 43, LAS VEGAS 40.

You remember the scene from Goodfellas, when Henry Hill is showering while listening to the radio for details on the Lufthansa Heist, hears the juicy goodness, and begins to shrill like a banshee?

“YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA! JIMMY!”

That was me, in the backseat of our rental, yelling and pounding the mats with my feet like a rebellious toddler.

“AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! HOWARD! THE REAL HU! LET’S GOOOOOOO!”

We arrived back at Aria still delirious with excitement, cackling as black men do when richly enjoying the company of their own, sauntering into the casino at Aria like three sumo wrestlers after a buffet. We were using our outside voices inside, but we didn’t care. Something unbelievable had happened, and we were chosen by God as Las Vegas’s first apostles. And the whole world needed to know.

The tomb was empty, and our football program was alive.

MISSION POSSIBLE.

- mb

[djgamek1ng]

Final Fantasy XIV Job Review: Paladin (EXPERIMENTAL AS ALL HELL)

Hey there! I’m back with another post and this time it’s for a Final Fantasy XIV job review! This is very experimental, but I’m gonna try it anyway.

Rules: - The job in question must be played up to level 60 at the very least.

- If the job in question isn’t at level 70 yet, I can not give a final verdict and therefore the review is still a work in progress.

- There will be a final score from 1-100. This is to keep track at what jobs I rate the highest and the lowest

- A review maybe updated in 2 ways: 1) the post gets edited if these are smaller changes and a small post will be made, letting you know a review has been updated OR 2) A completely new review, which would only happen when the new expansion launches or when a job gets a major overhaul.

- Jobs get rated on story (small factor), power in their role and overall gameplay feel (big factors)

Okay, now that we got the boring stuff out of the way, it’s time to start. I’ll be talking about the Paladin job (shortened to PLD and that’s what I’ll be referring it to from now on)! Why PLD? Well, it’s my main job since I started this game all the way back in December (December 30th to be exact)... okay, I might have not been completely honest with that statement. I started out as a Marauder, which goes and becomes the Warrior (shortened to WAR), but I quickly changed my mind and picked up Gladiator to become a PLD. Enough rambling about my personal experiences though, on with the review!

Story: All the stories for the jobs are separated into 3 parts: A Realm Reborn (shortened to ARR, levels 30-50), Heavensward (shortened to HW, levels 50-60) and Stormblood (shortened to SB, levels 60-70). The story of the PLDs starts as follows:

For centuries there have been paladins, sworn to protect the royals of Ul’dah. These are therefore called the Sultansworn paladins. You also have the free paladins, those still loyal to the crown and they still keep their oath to protect, but they travel instead of staying near the royal family. Solkzagyl Keltnaglsyn is one of the few free paladins and accused to be friends with the Monetarists (bad guys in Ul’dah). This is where you the player come in. You are one of the best gladiators and you here that for the first time ever, Jenlyns, captain of the Sultansworn, is teaching outsiders to become a paladin! You’ll have to prove yourself of course, but you being the Warrior of Light and all, pass these tests. You get to learn the whole story of Solkzagyl, that he has stolen the blade Oathkeeper and was therefore labelled a traitor, which also brought down the name of the Sultansworn. Eventually, Jenlyns wants to confront Solkzagyl in a desert. You go there with him, only to find out Jenlyns is raising is sword against you. Why? He believes you are also friends with the Monetarists. You fight Jenlyns and win, but Jenlyns is stubborn. It’s at this point on of the other paladins of the Sultansworn readies his blade to kill Jenlyns, but unfortunately for him, Solkzagyl was around. Solkzagyl kills the attacker, saving Jenlyns. He explains that he was in fact not friends with the Monetarists and he was also looking for Oathkeeper. He also reveals that he is indeed a paladin and is still loyal to Nanamo Ul Namo (the current sultana of Ul’dah). Jenlyns is knocked out by his wounds, but recovers and eventually readies a plan to strike back against the Monetarists. Solkzagyl lends a hand and the three of you indeed do strike back. Solkzagyl afterwards heads off, still looking for Oathkeeper. Jenlyns thanks you for everything you’ve done by giving you the last piece of the Gallant armor (the traditional PLD armor you also see in the character creator when making a gladiator), the body piece (also, you’ve gotten the rest of the armor earlier, it was a trial to see if you were ready to face Solkzagyl). This is the highest honor and actually goes against the tradition, but he considers no one more worthy of it. And so ends ARR’s PLD story.

Onward to HW’s story! It picks up at the end of ARR’s story. Jenlyns puts you through one more trial and after you beat it, he concludes he has nothing to teach you anymore. He lets you go roam around Eorzea to protect her people! ...Until a few steps further you come across Papashan, a former Lalafellin Sultansworn, who has something important to discuss with you. Not there though, since he doesn’t want Jenlyns to hear. So you and Papashan meet at the Ul'dah Dispatch Yard. Papashan informs you that he had contact with Solkzagyl and that he has said that he has retrieved Oathkeeper, but that Papashan also has hear nothing since from the Roegadyn. He grows ever more concerned and he sends you of to the place he believes Solkzagyl to be: Coerthas Western Highlands. There you hear that a large man, presumably a Roegadyn, was attacked and killed. Uncertain to the identity of the victim, you look around and find another Roegadyn named Hundred Eyes. He informs you that the victim was indeed Solkzagyl. He then informs you where he was buried and sends you to there. When you arrive at the grave you meet with a boy named Constaint. He’s there to honor his friend, since Solkzagyl had apparently thought him a thing or two about being a paladin. Later on, you and Constaint team up to find the killers (Death’s Embrace, assassins who work for the Monetarists) of Solkzagyl and trace back a set of gallant armor by important spots. It couldn’t have been Solkzagyl, since it fits Constaint perfectly. Constaint starts to question this, but before we get an answer to it, Jenlyns appears. He has heard from the death of Solkzagyl from Papashan (who you informed) and has come over to pay respects to him. He also notes that your and Constaint’s job stone (which he had just gotten) are glowing rather odd when near each other. This is brushed off until a bit later. You and Constaint continue serving justice and kicking Death’s Embrace’s asses. When all is set and done and Death’s Embrace has been served justice, you get the revelation that Solkzagyl still lives! He also has Oathkeeper, but there is one thing: it doesn’t shine. Oathkeeper is supposed to shine brightly for the most worthy paladin, whose soul is so pure and powerful. There is a problem though, you and Constaint are on equal level worthiness. Solkzagyl says that you and Constaint have to duel so that one soul proves dominant over the other. You win in the duel (was there ever any doubt?) and then you fight Solkzagyl to also establish dominance of his soul. You do so and Solkzagyl tells you over when he held Oathkeeper for the first time. It did shine, but only for a moment. He hands you the sword, believing that it will shine for you and indeed it does. It shines as bright as it did for the previous paladin captains. Seeing as you can’t keep the sword though (since it belongs to Ul’dah), you hand the sword to Jenlyns. The shine fades as you do and Jenlyns asks Solkzagyl to come back to Ul’dah. Solkzagyl agrees, but doesn’t join the Sultansworn again, because once you leave, there is no turning back. Constaint is promising to train as hard as he can, so that he can beat you (no chance of that ever happening) and so concludes HW’s paladin story.

Onward to SB’s story! Tournament arc. End of SB’s story. Seriously, I can type it all out, but it’s seriously just a tournament arc of an anime. It makes no sense to me too, seeing as it’s a PALADIN/KNIGHT (PLD’s japanese name) story arc.

Okay onward to more interesting stuff!

PLD’s power as a tank: PLD at the moment is the best tank in the game. It has everything you want from a tank: tankiness in the form of a good supply of defensive cooldowns, utility to buff the the party’s tankiness and damage. Yeah... PLD is still (even after the WAR and Dark Knight (shortened to DRK) buffs in the current (4.05) patch) probably the highest damage dealing tank. WAR and DRK just need a lot of setting up and while when completely set up potentially dealing more damage, PLD can do that stuff a lot quicker and with more room of error. Anyways, PLD is a great job for both beginners and raiders alike! PLD is pretty easy to just pick up and play and do decent with, but maximizing damage while tanking (assuming your the main tank (MT) of course) is a fun little challenge. So in terms of current strength as a tank (without going into too much gameplay detail), it’s amazing. It just has everything a tank wants at the moment. Do I see nerfs in coming? No, not really to be honest. I just see buffs for DRK and WAR incoming, since they are supposed to deal more damage to make up for the fact that they have less utility. Even if PLD gets nerfed a bit or if the other two tanks get buffed to outshine the PLD, it’s still a very good job too play!

PLD’s gameplay: PLD is a very simple to pick up tank. In fact it’s the easiest tank to pick up and just start playing, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t fun! Fun is subjective of course, but I think they are fun. PLD starts out as a GLD (Gladiator) and kinda... sucks until they become a PLD (Paladin). This is true of many jobs though, so don’t worry too much about it.

Okay to start with the basics of the PLD, you have 3 combos: your Rage of Halone combo (shortened to RoH combo) for enmity generation, your Goring Blade combo (shortened to GB combo) for a damage over time effect (shortened to DoT) of 21 seconds and your Royal Authority combo (shortened to RA combo) for damage.

You also have 2 stances/Oaths: Shield Oath for damage mitigation and enmity generation and Sword Oath for a little extra damage.

You have 2 spells in the form of Clemency and Holy Spirit. Clemency restores your or someone you targeted’s health. If the person you target is a party member, you also heal for 50% of that heal, so if you heal a party member for 1000 health with it, you also get healed for 500 health. Holy Spirit is a very potent (400 potency) magic damage nuke. You won’t be using this as a standalone skill. Instead you will be using it in tandem with Requiescat, one of your oGCDs (off global cooldowns).

Speaking off oGCDs, you have 4: Circle of Scorn (CoS in short), Spirits Within (SW), Shield Swipe (ShS/SS in short) and the aforementioned Requiescat (RS in short). Circle of Scorn is an Area of Effect (AoE) oGCD which also adds a DoT to all enemies hit. Spirits Within is a single target oGCD which is strongest when you are at maximum health. Shield Swap is also a single target oGCD which inflicts pacification (which won’t be relevant on any semi end-game content ever), generates a slight bit of enmity and it can only be used for a few seconds after you blocked an attack. Requiescat is your last, but definitely not least, single target oGCD which gives you a buff when you have more than 80% of your MP. That buff gives you 20% more damage on your attack magic (for now only Holy Spirit) and 20% more healing on your healing magic (for now only Clemency).

You still have your defensive cooldowns. Rampart (role action) is a 20% damage reduction skill on a 90 second cooldown. Sentinel is a 40% damage reduction skill on a much longer cooldown (3 minutes). Bulwark is a 60% block chance increase also on a 3 minute cooldown. Cover is used on an ally, you take the damage for that ally and only get 80% of the damage, so if an ally would take 1000 damage, if they are covered by you, you will take that damage completely for them, but only actually suffer 800 damage. Awareness (role action) negates all critical damage and is on a 2 minute cooldown. Divine Veil isn’t a cooldown for you, but a cooldown for the party. When you get healed, all party members near you get a shield, negating all damage for up to 10% of your maximum health. Convalescence (role action) ups all healing magic you receive by 20%. Anticipation (role action) ups your parry rate by 30%. Passage of Arms is the best looking skill in the game, but aside from that, for the next 18 seconds you block every attack thrown at you and you get this cone behind you. Every party member in that cone you get 15% damage reduction. This can be used both as a selfish cooldown and a party cooldown, since it’s only on a 2 minute cooldown. Hallowed Ground is a very powerful cooldown. It makes you immune to most damage for 10 seconds, however it has a 7 minute cooldown. Then you have Shelltron. Shelltron goes into a different topic, the Oath Gauge! This is your job gauge. Truth be told, this thing is pretty much useless. In Sword Oath you get 5 of your gauge for every auto attack you do and in Shield Oath you get 5 for ever attack you block. You only have 2 skills who use this bar, Shelltron and Intervention, both costing 50 of your gauge (max is 100). Shelltron guarantees that the next attack that hits you is a block and gives you MP back. Intervention is a cooldown you can use on party members. It gives them 10% damage reduction, which can be increased while you use it during Rampart or Sentinel with half their percentages (so +10% or +20%).

So yeah, this is pretty much it for the PLD kit. The only things which I forgot to highlight is Total Eclipse, which is a basic AoE damage move, Flash, which is your AoE enmity generator, and Shield Bash, which is your a move that stuns. So what does PLD get in terms of gameplay? It’s really solid! It’s simple, but really effective. The only downside it has is that it’s defensive cooldowns have such long cooldowns and could use some tweaking. Bulwark for the random chance that it gives to block, shouldn’t be on a 3 minute cooldown. Sentinel could be brought down in terms of both damage reduction and cooldown and it would be better. Hallowed Ground for how awesome it can be, it has a second delay before you become immune and it has a 7 minute cooldown. That’s one of the longest cooldowns of everything in the game. The only thing that has longer that I can think of at the top of my head is Return with 15 minutes. Does this ruin the job though? No! You’ll just have to play smarter with your Shelltrons and your Passage of Arms for mitigation. The only thing I would say is that the job could really do without it’s job gauge and nobody would give a crap. It does nothing, since in this patch your job gauge doesn’t get reduced with half when you swap stances and both skills cost 50 gauge.

So what is my rating of PLD? - Story: 63/100. The HW story of PLD, while flawed, was actually pretty good. ARR was bare, but passable. SB’s PLD story can barely be called a story. - Power of the job: 87/100. Even after the slight nerf to Holy Spirit, it’s still probably the strongest overall tank. It’s so good at the moment. - Gameplay: 95/100. It’s fun gameplay wise, but it’s very simple maybe a bit too simple for some people. It could use a little bit more flow for defensive cooldowns, but it’s still perfectly fine.

Overal score: 90/100. Only things I would like to see for the job is a gap closer, since the other two tanks have gotten one, maybe a bit more complexity and some smoothing out for the defensive cooldowns. Aside from that, it’s a great job for anyone looking to start with tanking!

Thank you guys so much for reading this if you are! This is a long post and it took quite a while to make, so I hope I did a decent job at it. If you read all of this, you are amazing! Give yourself a cookie, you deserve it! Once again thank you for reading this! The next review (if I decide to continue this) is going to be of the Machinist (MCH) job! :D

[neilthechiseler]

This Story Used To Be About Joan

(Or “How To Finish Writing A Story In Ten Easy Years”)

[Reveries of a wannabe writer after the cut.]

This story used to be about Joan. 

That was about a dozen drafts ago. For the purposes of this testimony, I’ve moved past Joan as a character, but since this used to be her story, I feel compelled to tell you that Joan was a sweet-natured, mildly trippy woman in her mid-to-late 20s who had just given up smoking and her boyfriend of seven years. It was over a clash of life approaches. For Joan, life was about singing the song of herself, because she contained multitudes, and what was true for her was good for anybody. Dennis, on the other hand, was hung up on the world. Petty things like keeping the power bill paid. Food in the refrigerator. You know, crap like that.

Since Joan was a free woman again, she’d gone back to her default mode of dressing like the best rack at Goodwill and furnishing her apartment like the worst end of large item pick-up day on the garbage route. She had dark bangs that she’d finally gotten right, just like the woman on TV. She was going to get an iPhone just like her (and that should tell you how long this has been on the to-do pile) until she realized that she’d screwed up her credit rating several years ago when she wasn’t paying attention to what she was signing. You see, she was really into textures at that particular moment, and the feel of the paper was a monumental distraction. Besides, minimum service agreements were tools of corporate hostility, and she felt the same way about paying early termination fees. Sunk again by philosophical differences.

In fact, it was as she was walking back from the cell phone store, tripping along to music that only she could hear, that she found a puppy, the kind her mom used to call a “Heinz 57 mutt”. It was sitting in a cardboard box which was apparently its current home, foraging in the garbage for its breakfast…which, being in the bin behind an appliance store, is drilling a dry hole, but dogs find a way. Joan picked up the little guy and got a flood of instant-validation affection. The decision was made. The dog was coming home.

From there, Joan’s story would be heading into the adventures being a single pixie in a fair-to-middling town and how she has to adjust to the puppy way of doing things, pulling Joan out of herself and dealing with the needs of another living thing for the first time in her life—never mind that she’d just shared a life with another living thing for seven years, because continuity is for cowards. The story would’ve been warm and kind, full of the wonderful lessons that animals can teach us, because they’re so like us, you know?  In other words, it would’ve been a copy of Chicken Soup For The Soul soaked overnight in an indie rock soundtrack until it was a soggy mess that just fell apart in your hands.

So you see why I had to ditch that crap with great speed.

Then I started thinking about the previous owner of the puppy. After all, somebody finds a puppy, somebody loses a puppy. Either that or somebody tells a puppy to get lost. So now we were on the story of a brown-haired boy with skinned knees and a crooked smile who promised his dad that yes, he could take care of a dog. His mom went behind the old man’s back and helped the boy pick out a dog from the shelter. 

While the boy was in the process of losing his mind, Liz, mother of one (“but some days it feels like two,” she usually tells her friends), noticed that her husband was looking on with an almost rictus grin. “It’s going to be fine, Tony,” she said, resting her head on his shoulder as they settled into the porch swing. “A boy that age needs something to get out of his own head. Care about things other than himself. Y’know?”

Tony finally snapped out of it, just enough to wrap his arm around Liz. “Yeah. We’ll just see about that.” 

The first three days were filled with the type of kid/dog romping that used to be underscored in family movies with a lonesome harmonica and guitar accompaniment. On day number four, however, the boy left the back gate open, and the puppy (who, even as a puppy, had become rightly freaked out by the boy’s strenuous, hands-on type of love) made a break for it.

It took the boy awhile to notice his mistake. He was busy burning ants with a magnifying glass, and wondering how long it would take to burn the squirrel that had ruined his pine cone bird feeder. When he finally figured out what had happened, an ungodly piercing wail of misery went through the air. The old man was on deck first.  “What’s got into you, champ?”

“Daaaaaaddy, the (blub) puppy (blub) got (snort) awaaaaay!” Through blubbing and snorting and snot bubbles, he relayed an edited version of the past hour that he thought would let him off the hook. “Help me find him?”

A kind of hardness crept into the father’s face, possibly because he had heard nothing but the puppy and the puppy and the puppy all week, and he was the one feeding the dog and cleaning its “peeps and poops”, as the rest of the household insisted on calling them. If this is a test, the boy’s failing, he told himself. And here comes a teachable moment. “I dunno, champ, this dog is your responsibility, so maybe it should be your responsibility to bring him home.” Then, just to twist the knife, “Better get your umbrella. Looks like a storm’s coming.”

What was coming was a torrential downpour that flipped the child’s cheap plastic Ninja Turtle umbrella inside-out almost instantly. Because of the miserable visibility, he ended up walking well past his “safety zone”, calling for the dog with a name the animal would never recognize because the baby genius had never bothered to tell the dog what its name was. That was the least of his worries, though, because when he was barely 100 yards from his subdivision, the driver of a tractor-trailer, fresh as a chemically-preserved daisy on his 30th working hour without sleep, suddenly lost control of his rig.

And at this point, with the steel behemoth close to spilling its presumably-toxic-to-humans cargo all over the suburbs, its indifferent headlights staring down a child who didn’t think he’d have cause to regret not mulling over his life insurance options this early in the school year, and two years away from the divorce hearings that would take the boy upstate with his mother while the dad dedicated his basement to a massive train set that he was convinced would make everything right again, let’s take a brief intermission.  

You might have noticed that I never named that child, and there’s a good reason for that: the little punk was a unsentimental aggravation. In a “write what you know” sort of way, I used to be that kid…and I couldn’t stand me either. At the same time, if I actually did the kid in, I’d either be drawn and quartered by a sentimental public, or I’d run the risk of clicking with an audience who kind of gets off on stories about kids being run over by diesel-fueled death. Since their money spends just as well as anybody else’s, I’d have to find new and “exciting” ways to flatten children, and who wants that on his head? If that makes me a coward, then fine, I lost my nerve.

(Occasionally someone reminds me that there’s a third much more likely option, that people could continue to ignore all this noise. My response is always the same: “Who the hell gave you this address?”)

Anyway, this is the point where I started thinking about the truck driver. At the time there were reality shows, news reports, and darkly amusing YouTube videos about truckers and the grueling lives they lead. Why not the truck driver?

His name was “Sweet William” Dallas, entering his second decade of cross-country freight hauling. William’s nickname was from a Leon Redbone song, and he had a tattoo of the man himself from the cover of Double Time on his left bicep, both of which he regretted once he decided Lynyrd Skynyrd was a better fit for him. 

Bill, as he now begged friends and coworkers to call him (which was the primary reason why they didn’t), was trying to finish a big-money run a day ahead schedule because his silver-haired mother was fading fast. At least that’s the way she put it after spending a week dealing with his aggravating brother, who had broken an arm trying to fish the TV remote out from behind the big dresser. "Get Richie out of here,” she had texted him a few days ago. “He’s really screwing up the schedule for my krav maga lessons.”

That gave William at least two deadlines to beat, and to that end, a twitchy neighborhood kid sold him a cluster bomb of caffeine pills and other stimulants, which our driver had been popping like M&Ms since Fredericksburg. Bill was either so tweaked or so zonked that he thought Unnamed Kid was a deer (a deer in jeans and a Polo shirt) when his truck told him to screw off and turned itself into a telephone pole flattener. 

(At which point I tell myself “Now that’s a pathetic way to put a button on a story. What about the drug dealer? Yeah, the dealer, let’s roll with that for awhile.”)

Andy was as thin as nothing squared, wearing a Make America Great Again cap pulled down tight over his sweaty forehead and an army jacket from the dumpster behind Goodwill buttoned to his neck, even in summertime. As far back as he could remember—that’d be last Tuesday—he wanted to launch a career in recreational pharmaceuticals, and attempted to jump-start a weed concern. Unfortunately, not only did he have a “black thumb” for agriculture, but no sense of effective camouflage, as his arresting officer told him. So he ended up in the bottom-feeding world of ordering pills from the ads in the back of High Times and selling them with a markup to people who couldn’t find a better connection. His primary clientele was desperate people on a deadline (mostly reckless college students), but sometimes he got special cases, like a young twentysomething woman who was just coming off of a long-term relationship…

Hold on a minute. That’s Joan, isn’t it? You do remember Joan, don’t you? This used to be her story, you know.

Not only is Joan more tenacious than I thought, but she turned out to have a few more jagged angles than she appeared to on first blush. She claims that her plot refused to launch because it kept blowing sunshine up my ass. No argument there, but to remedy that, she decided to go dancing on a patch of ice, screw her back up, and get hooked on under-the-counter pain killers...a shocking number of them homeopathic, which is a hell of a trick if you can pull it off. Joan insists all that had nothing to do with me, but there’s this hopeful look in her eyes when she says it that, under the circumstances, scares the crap out of me. So negotiations with Joan have resumed, because as much as I don’t want fictional people to wreck themselves for attention, there’s a mercenary streak in me that wants to see if this goes anywhere marketable.

So watch this space. Maybe the next time you read this, it’ll be about Joan again. Who knows?

That kid’s not coming back, though.

--enw