#it's been completely broken since like 2020-2021 or something... that's why i made this account

[loverdude]

I think my old account is somehow not broken anymore???

[ilovejevsjeans]

How another Aussie champion helped Ricciardo recover from horror start with Renault

As beginnings go, it was less than auspicious. Mere seconds into the first race of his high-profile Formula One move to Renault, Daniel Ricciardo's 2019 Australian Grand Prix disintegrated into a shower of broken carbon fibre, the front wing of his car smashed to smithereens after he ran off the side of the Albert Park circuit and clipped a trackside ditch.

Things didn't get a lot better in the early races of 2019 for Ricciardo who, so accustomed to fighting at the front with his former team, had to sate his hunger with occasional crumbs dropped by the Mercedes, Ferrari and Red Bull outfits that annexed the available podium places. Top-10 qualifying efforts were rare, decent race finishes largely out of reach. He couldn't recapture the feeling on the brakes in his new Renault that had made audacious, last-gasp passes his trademark at Red Bull, and he knew he was over-driving to make up for the performance of his car and his own frustrations, determination to fix one mistake inevitably leading only to another.

Ricciardo's signature smile was still there, but those who know him best could see the grin's wattage was dimmed. Ricciardo knew something needed to change – and another high-profile Australian athlete unexpectedly provided the impetus.

"It was April last year, the season hadn't been going all that well for me, and I was spending some time with [Australian snowboarder] Scotty James," Ricciardo tells The Age.

"Scotty's a good friend. He writes a daily journal, and he was telling me about how much it helped him focus on his goals, what he wanted to achieve, and how regularly writing things down for yourself forces you to be honest and accountable.

"I started one myself to see if it would make a difference, and it definitely has. I'm being honest with myself and it's for my thoughts and my eyes only, and it's something I look back on. It could be something as simple as 'how did I feel today?', 'how did I feel how I felt about that race?' and so on, and then going back and trying to understand why.

"It's just me and my thoughts, and it has definitely given me some clarity. I never sit down with a plan of what to write, but in the writing process you answer questions you may have about something, and that's really useful for me."

Ricciardo's season eventually recovered to some degree from its stuttering start, and while ninth place in the championship didn't get his pulse racing after a pair of top-three finishes with Red Bull in 2014 and 2016, he comprehensively out-performed the driver in the sister Renault, German Nico Hulkenberg, and achieved the team's best result with a storming drive to fourth in Italy in September.

A strong finish to the year gave the 30-year-old reason to be optimistic about the 2020 campaign set to start in Melbourne next weekend, but it's a season he realises comes with questions he can, so far, only take an educated guess at answering.

Ricciardo's knowns for 2020 are few, yet indisputable. One, he's in the second and final year of a deal with Renault that hasn't yet delivered on its considerable promise. And two, there's little chance the West Australian will see the view from any step of a Formula One podium given drivers from Mercedes, Red Bull and Ferrari have annexed the top three positions in all but six races over the past four years.

Can Renault show enough progress that he'd consider re-signing? Might Mercedes or Ferrari, both of whom have driver vacancies next year, remember Ricciardo's recent past in a race-winning team and come calling? And what of 2021, where a significant shake-up of F1's rulebook could completely change the sport's pecking order, as Ricciardo discovered the hard way the last time the regulations were rebooted seven years ago?

"This year definitely carries more weight than most," Ricciardo admits.

"The chaos that surrounded my move from Red Bull to Renault, I don't expect it to be anything like that. But there's a lot happening. I'm 30, so whatever I do, it's a case of 'how many more contracts will I sign?'

"The easiest decision would be that if my year is going well [at Renault], then I'd feel like we were only going to get better and I wouldn't even think about the what-ifs or maybes elsewhere. Even though next year is going to be a new car, I think if we were able to make some big gains this year with Renault, that would give me enough confidence that whatever happens in the future would be good, but you never know how these things will play out.

"I certainly see myself in the sport for at least five more years, but every year I'm one step closer to when my career might end. You're not thinking like a 20-year-old anymore."

While Renault's preference is to retain their combination of an established race-winner in Ricciardo and French youngster Esteban Ocon for the first season of F1's rule reset, chances to drive for Mercedes, the dominant team of the past six seasons, and Ferrari, still the sport's biggest name despite not winning a drivers' title since 2007, are rare.

When the lights go out at Albert Park, Charles Leclerc will be the only driver among the sport's two biggest teams to have a contract beyond this year, the 22-year-old Monegasque inking a deal with Ferrari until 2024.

Reigning world champion Lewis Hamilton's retention by Mercedes appears a formality, but the futures of 2019 Australian Grand Prix winner Valtteri Bottas (Mercedes) and four-time world champion Sebastian Vettel (Ferrari) are murkier, particularly with Ferrari banking its future on Leclerc with such a long-term investment.

Ricciardo openly expresses his admiration for what Mercedes, who won a record sixth consecutive constructors' championship last season, have achieved since the advent of the sport's V6 turbo hybrid engine era in 2014, which brought down the curtain on a reign of dominance by a Vettel-led Red Bull as Ricciardo joined the team that same season.

Mercedes debuted a revolutionary dual-axis steering (DAS) system at February's first pre-season test in Barcelona, a hydraulically powered innovation that allows their drivers to adjust the angle of the front wheels to gain lap time by pushing or pulling the steering wheel while the car is in motion.

Rival outfits were blindsided by the DAS concept when it was unveiled, Renault's sporting director Alan Permane commenting the team was "wide-eyed" about something Mercedes admitted they had been hatching in secret for a year, but Ricciardo says Mercedes' relentless pursuit of progress should be lauded.

"Hats off to them because they have been dominant this whole turbo era, yet they are still the ones pushing everyone else," he says.

"They're not getting complacent, and I think that's why they've been so dominant. They're setting an example right now and as a competitor, I certainly respect that."

Further clouding any picture Ricciardo paints of what 2021 may look like are rule changes that will make the grid that appears for next year's race in Melbourne almost unrecognisable from next Sunday's starting line-up. The next generation of cars will feature significantly different bodywork and low-profile tyres on larger, 18-inch wheels, while a cost cap, set at US$175 million ($A263 million) per team per annum, will halve the budgets of the sport's biggest spenders at the flip of a calendar, creating, in theory, a more level playing field.

The sweeping changes have the potential to make more of an impact than the implementation of the current iteration of rules in 2014, which propelled Mercedes from the midfield to a team that has won more than 80 per cent of grands prix since.

Pre-season testing threw up enough clues to suggest Mercedes, who never really showed their true pace in Barcelona, may just demolish the field again from Melbourne onwards. Should that happen, and with little carryover between this year's rules and next, expect their rivals to switch their focus to 2021 early.

Driver market intrigue, short of Leclerc and Max Verstappen, who is contracted to Red Bull until 2023, will be the narrative of the season, and Ricciardo will be in the middle of it.

[analluringlecture]

I wrote this for college but they don’t deserve it.

How do you define the word integrity? It occurs to me that most people would say that integrity means to be moral and honest or “to do the right thing even when no one is watching”, as I’ve heard it so judiciously put. These descriptions would not be wrong according to the Oxford Languages dictionary. However, that same source has a second definition for the word that I believe is much more accurate. Oxford��s second definition for the word integrity is “the state of being whole and undivided”. What a simple yet beautifully complex statement. People often use the word integrity to describe themselves or others, but this definition of the word would mean that to describe oneself as having full integrity, we would need believe ourselves to be both “whole” and “undivided”. I personally do not know of a single human on earth that would truly fit that description, but I have been enlightened by three great books that have directed me on a path to pursue becoming the definition of integrity.

It was during my casual reading of Untamed by Glennon Doyle, a book that I passively picked up because of its colorful, eye-drawing cover and the words “Over 1 million copies sold” posted on the top of it, that I was struck with enlightenment. From the moment I began reading, I knew my experience with this book would be different than any other experience I’ve had prior. There was something about her tone, her choice of words, and how she flowed in the text that made me feel safe with her from the start. I felt like the way she wrote was so familiar, like I could have been reading my own forgotten entries from a dream journal. I believe this admiration I have for her writing style is what made her points ring so true to my heart and resonate deep within me. When reading the words: “Something's off about my life. I feel restless and frustrated. I have this hunch that everything was supposed to be more beautiful than this”, I knew I would learn something from this book that would change my life. I did feel that something was off about my life. I had been feeling like there was something stirring inside me for such a long time just waiting to be let out and, to my great frustration, I was unable to articulate it even to myself. It was after reading her words “I hope that whatever you do next is born from you and not imposed on you. I hope the rest of your life is your idea. For what it’s worth, I hope you trust yourself. You know what you know. You have good ideas,” and a following quote “This way of life requires living in integrity: ensuring that my inner self and my outer self are integrated. Integrity means having only oneself. Dividing into two selves – the shown self and the hidden self – that is brokenness, so I do whatever it takes to stay whole. I do not adjust myself to please the world. I am myself wherever I am, and let the world adjust.” that I had an epiphany. In an instant I realized that what I had been missing all these years and what was making me feel so unsettled in my seemingly perfect life was the trust in my inner voice to pursue my path of integrity. I’ve always felt that being true to yourself was one of the most important things you can do to pursue happiness but what I now know is that the path of honoring your true self is the only way to happiness. What I had been lacking was my ability to trust my true self (or my inner voice) to guide me. It was the author’s words of “The only thing that was ever wrong with me was my belief that there was something wrong with me” (Doyle & Audio, 2020) that made me see that I had been telling myself this lie for as long as I could remember, and it was the only thing standing in my way. I was the only thing standing in my way. Immediately upon reading those words, I was physically frozen in the feeling of relief from the realization that this was, in fact, an absolute lie. I had made myself believe that because I was unable to control my own thoughts and feelings enough to match them to my perception of everyone else’s thoughts and feelings, there must be something wrong with me. “We only control what we don’t trust,” her words coming to save me again. The instant gratification I received with the feeling of being freed from this self-deception was profound. I did not need to try to change myself to fit anyone else’s idea of what I should be, I am perfect exactly the way I naturally am. Once I was settled in that feeling and came back to my pondering mind, I began to feel that to pursue this way of integrity I must keep reading and learning everything that I can about aligning yourself with your true nature. 

In my reading and research into accounts of those who pursue a life of integrity, I have begun to see patterns of happenings in their lives that might seem like coincidences but are perhaps, to my hopeful mind, a result of living a whole life based in integrity. I had my first experience with this in my own life while reading Untamed. I recall saying to my boyfriend “it’s weird, it’s like I put the book down and pick it back up again exactly when I’m supposed to or something.” It was like my subconscious mind knew that the next chapter would be better served to me the next day, after I had made some significant realizations the previous night. It was only a few days after finishing the book that I completely stumbled upon a book with the title The Way of Integrity by Martha Beck. This was so bizarre to me because for one, the title was exactly what I was searching for and two, the way I found it was not in a search at all. I was scrolling through my Instagram feed and someone that I follow posted a picture of Beck’s book on her Story. I thought to myself “well I know I’m not seeing this because my phone is listening to me and feeding me targeted media because I’ve been following this girl for years”. I immediately downloaded and started listening to the audio book. This book was vastly different than Untamed but was just as meaningful to me. Beck did not have the shrouded poetic-ness that Doyle exuded but was eloquent and dignified. What the two had most in common, however, was that I was certain that I would learn something truly meaningful after just the first few sentences. It was Beck’s description of her integrity-seeking “No Lie Challenge” (Beck, 2021), the year of her life where she vowed to not tell even a socially pleasing lie (like a head nod or even smile that she didn’t believe in) that got me thinking deeper about what actions I must take in order live this fuller life that I long for. Doyle gave me the what and Beck showed me the how. Since learning of her challenge, I have since challenged myself to not lie. Not to others and especially not to myself. I will no longer present myself in any such way that does not align with my true nature, including silence. I see the act of remaining silent to seem either in agreeance with something or someone or to seem indifferent all together as a violation of my true nature. The most difficult part about this challenge is accepting that my path of true integrity will inevitably insight adversity. Beck has helped me with this acceptance too, she writes “If you’ve really stopped lying, with both words and actions, resistance from others is often evidence you’re on the right track. People around you are probably unnerved by your behavior because it challenges their own cultural compliance. In other words, they’re all telling polite or mandated lies in order to keep peace with others and the way you’re following integrity may involve the very things they are repressing in themselves.” This lesson will be invaluable to me in my life as I try to remain true to myself while loving others for who they are and accepting that the issues they see with my true nature are only out of frustration and insecurity as I challenge their way of life that they are unknowingly uncomfortable in. The other gift of knowledge that Beck graced me with in her book was my next reading. All throughout The Way of Integrity she parallels her thoughts on integrity with examples from Dante’s Divine Comedy. Dante’s beautiful words she quoted so often in her book would stay with me sometimes all day even as I lay in bed at night, so I knew I had to read it for myself. 

As I read through Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso I began to see for myself what Beck saw in the poet’s sentences that contained only a few words but seemed to hold the entire world inside them. “The man who lies asleep will never waken fame, and his desire and all his life drift past him like a dream, and the traces of his memory fade from time like smoke in air, or ripples on a stream.” These words made the hairs on the back on my stand straight up. Dante in one, beautifully written sentence summed up everything that I was feeling up to the point of reading it. I had learned that I was not on my true path, then I learned how I can go forward actively pursuing that path, and now Dante has shown me the why. What Dante just expressed was that when we live a life in pursuit of what we think we need to achieve or gain to be happy, we will fail and our souls will be forgotten because we are not honoring our true selves. Going after what we think love is, what we’re told success looks like, and anything else that is conceived outside of ourselves is abandoning our true nature that only longs for peace. Now I know why money will never satisfy the heart, forced friendships will not evoke understanding, and having vanity is the same as having nothing at all. This is an incalculable lesson.

These literary works have changed my life and I am now on a trajectory of peace and prosperity as I apply what I’ve learned to my everyday life. These books are my what, how, and why and they have sent me on my quest for understanding. The lessons have not done the work, they’ve only given me the tools to be able to grow. There is comfort in knowing that after gaining this knowing, there is no unknowing this. As Doyle says “Because once we feel, know, and dare to imagine more for ourselves, we cannot unfeel, unknow, or unimagine. There is no going back.” Even if I falter, I will always find my way back to this truth and will be on a continual, possibly unachievable journey of becoming the definition of integrity. If the journey is achievable, I think reaching full integrity may be when we get to experience what heaven (or nirvana) feels like and if it isn’t not, then maybe the continuous pursuit is the closest to it that we will ever get. 

[hikingmysteries]

Strength, Will and Inspiration

There are many things to be aware of when hiking. Proper gear, food, water, and a clear plan. Not many hikers anticipate a violent attack by a stranger. It is an exceptionally rare occurrence. That holds true of the Appalachian Trail. In its 83-year history, 12 hikers have been killed by another person. None of these murders have been in the back country. They occur when the trail is near civilization.

In 2019, the most recent murder took place.

Kirby Morrill, age 28, of Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, has been tenacious from the start. At the University of New Brunswick, she was a rugby star, known for her “off-the-charts” tackling, and sustaining two broken noses. Morrill is also a powerlifter who loves to kayak the rivers and lakes of coastal Canada and cycle her province’s trails. Her bucket list included completing a thru-hike of the 3,500-kilometre Appalachian Trail.

In March 2019, shortly after defending her Master of Science thesis at the University of New Brunswick, a survey of sea lettuce species in Canada’s Bay of Fundy, Morrill flew to Atlanta. This was the start of a solo hike that would take 5-7 months. The trail ends on Mount Katahdin, a final scramble up Maine’s highest peak.

All was great for the first several weeks. She loved the trail, experiencing the best sleeps of her life. Fellow American hikers provided her with the trail name, Toque, a Canadian word for stocking cap they had not heard before. Then in May, a mobile app used by hikers was issuing warnings of man threatening people on the trail. Descriptions of the man and his dog were posted. By May 10, Morrill, had passed the quarter-way point.

Kevin Bissett of The Canadian Press interviewed Morrill for a first-hand account, “I stopped at a restaurant because another hiker was going to meet me there with a new food bag for me.” Seated at the restaurant, she saw the hiker she now refers to as “the crazy guy with the knife” walking down the road. His real name is James Jordan. Morrill Googled his name based on the app’s warnings and confirmed his image from a previous mugshot.

Grayson Haver Currin of Outside Magazine writes, “for weeks, Jordan had harassed hikers in North Carolina and Tennessee, wielding a guitar and a 17-inch knife and making violent threats, prompting his arrest near that state line. For him, it was just the latest in a lifelong string of legal troubles. Despite efforts to buy him a bus ticket and send him home upon his release from a Tennessee jail, Jordan—who had dubbed himself “Sovereign”—returned to the AT just south of the Virginia border.”

After spotting Jordan, Morrill left a note at the restaurant register warning people and set out to get ahead of the man. As it turns out, he was ahead of her. She says, she went, “full Canadian,” pouring on pleasantries and petting his dog, Felicia. They parted ways and was grateful to meet three other hikers who all camped together that night.

Among them was Ron Sanchez, who she had met a few days earlier. Sanchez, age 43, was a U.S. Army veteran. “He was really comforting. He was a really great guy,” she said. “I really appreciated him, so it was nice to see him at that campsite again.”

Then the “crazy guy” showed up.

“As far as I know he didn’t have a tent, and he wandered around the campsite talking to himself,” she said. He sang to himself for half an hour by the campfire. “And then he came around to the tents threatening to kill us in a variety of ways and telling us why we deserved to die.”

Jordan retreated into the woods. The four hikers decided to pack up and get the hell out of there. It was not fast enough. He came back. Two managed to escape, Morrill and Sanchez, were confronted. Jordan then attacked Sanchez with a knife. He would later die.

Then Morrill was fallen upon, “I was pinned. Because we had packed up and tried to get out of there with all our things, I had everything on me. I had a 30-something-pound pack on my back, and when he came at me, he came at my front, so I fell onto my back like a turtle, and he was on top of me,” she said. “There was nothing I could do.”

Thankfully, it was pitch dark. The killer may have thought she was dead and left. She got up, deciding to head where she knew other hikers were camped, about 10 kilometres away. Morrill did not know the extent of her wounds, “I had so much adrenaline coursing through me at that point, I barely felt it. It was just kind of a general feeling of badness, like something is wrong here.”

It took about three hours to reach the next set of hikers. She was flown to a hospital in neighboring Tennessee. Morrill had suffered nine stab wounds and 40 individual lacerations, requiring about 50 staples and 10 sutures across her face. Her right hand barely worked, there were multiple wounds to her left leg, and gashes across her face and fingers. Her mental toughness shines through, “I look like scarface now.” Yet, she mourns for Sanchez.

James Jordan, age 30, from Massachusetts was arrested just hours after. He was charged with murder and assault with intent to commit murder. He underwent treatment after being found unfit to stand trial by a federal judge.

Recovery for Morrill involved physiotherapy, exercise and weightlifting in an effort to restore feeling and the use of various muscles, especially in her arms. Despite the pain, she was back on the Appalachian Trail in September that same year, although just for a day. While in hospital, she had promised a woman she had met on the trail to join her at Mount Katahdin and do that last peak together. And, Morrill did, through a great deal of discomfort balanced with joy.

Currin writes, “When she made it to the summit, she didn’t simply turn around and descend the mountain the way she had come. True to form, she bid her old trail-family member goodbye and pressed on, heading east across Knife Edge, the infamously steep, thin, and exposed trail that traverses two more of the massif’s peaks. “Coming down the Knife Edge, I thought, Now this is Katahdin. When I reached the bottom, I was exhausted. My knee hurt. My right hand was barely functional. Yup, that was a good day.””

Since that terrible night, James Jordan, has been deemed fit to stand trial. His lawyers plan to claim insanity with the trial scheduled for January 2021.

Morrill had planned to finish what she began, to complete the entire Appalachian Trail in 2020. Covid-19 interrupted those plans. Yet, there is no doubt that Morrill, based on character and ability, will get it done, “I am statistically more likely to die in a car crash than I am on the trail. It’s just pretty bad luck, a complete fluke, that I got stabbed. I wasn’t scared the first time, and I won’t be scared the second time. And even if I was scared, are you really going to let a little fear stop you from what you want to do in life?”