#learning that i dont gotta be available every second of the day is something i want to achieve

[famewolf]

my dögs are turning out really well and it's been nice to spend the morning doing a fun arts n crafts

im trying to do gray wolf markings on this last guy so we'll see how that goes!

[thedappleddragon]

I woke up from a really cool dream and made a post about it, I think I ate a little bit of oatmeal, and changed a trash bag in my mom’s room. the main thing I did today was finish the other paw to the set ive been working on. I took some videos, but I'll post pictures tomorrow maybe. I also have to share them to fursuit maker amino. I still want to give them cuffs, I just dont have the correct black fabric right now. I really like how they turned out :) theyre big and fluffy and fun to hit stuff with and look really funny when you try to pick stuff up because it looks so small in your hands lol. it just kinda sucks that little fibers keep sticking to the paw pads and I have to keep pulling them off but they keep getting stuck because the fur keeps shedding. oh well. if there’s a way to fix that I'd love to hear it. i’m exited to make another pair using what ive learned from this one. specifically, if I want to make puffy paw pads I either need to do darts on the pads or use a stretchy fabric. I ALSO BAKED A CAKE! to celebrate the inauguration. both of my friend groups said yes to virtually hanging out tomorrow so I gotta sort out which group is calling when. actually I just looked trough texts and it looks like high school friend group is available tomorrow after 5 and idk when my band friends will be free because only 2 people responded with times/dates :/ either way im still exited. in the timespan between finishing the paws and baking the cake I got frustrated. I kept scrolling through Tumblr but I was frazzled from not doing anything productive in that moment and I didnt want to scroll forever on Tumblr or tiktok and I didnt want to sit down and play a game so I just kinda thought too hard and scrolled through Tumblr and tapped out a beat on the desk really hard. my dad came in and mentioned that he was going to the bank so I gave him $100 to deposit in my account. im gonna keep an eye on my bank app to make sure he didnt fuckin steal it or something. I doubt he would but still. in fact im gonna set a reminder on my phone RIGHT NOW. I just set 2. ive been using the reminder thing a lot today. I also redownloaded Pokemon smile yesterday because my phone offloads apps that haven't been used in a while. I really like Pokemon smile because I have a very hard time remembering / making the effort to brush my teeth every day. I finished brushing my teeth, and it makes you wait at least 3 hours between every brushing so I set a reminder that just said teeth and I got very confused for a second when I saw it again later AWETSRDFTY oh wait I almost forgot about the cake. it’s boxed vanilla cake mix but I boiled a lemon and blended it up and added the puree into the mix so now its a lemon cake :o) tbh I dont think it’s gonna taste good because it tasted more bitter then sour/lemony and it had a weird aftertaste but maybe that baked out. because the mix power smelled like play dough when I was mixing it but I know that bakes out. I also ate too much of the vanilla frosting out of the container probably lmao. I hid it so that my sister doesnt take another spoonful because im kinda depending on the frosting to save it if the cake tastes like ass. also I had 3 egg yolks left because it only needed the whites so I added one more egg and scrambled it and that's the first time ive had scrambled eggs in fuckin forever. the cake is out of the oven and cooling on the stove right now and I'll frost it tomorrow and have a slice as the inauguration happens. my sister wants to dye the icing blue but I feel that’ll ruin the lemon cake aesthetic but whatever. anyway im cold and need to go to bed. I hope I catch the inauguration on tv but tbh I just might sleep through it on accident

[mettic]

Final Fantasy XIV: Heavensward, a personal retrospective.

jesus i put a lot of hours in this game. something finally managed to beat dota on my steam hours, maybe because people wont play dota with me anymore but thats a different issue.

You dont really realize how much you get into an mmo until you find one you really like. this is probably gonna be pretty long so im gonna put it under Read More.

How much experience did I have with MMOs pre FFXIV?

Basically nothing. I had done a trial of WoW during WOTLK but WOTLK was like 9 years ago man, I was like 12 at best

Part of my inspiration to start playing FFXIV was because Wildstar was drumming up some hype an I was on board because I could play as a cool robot. I was onboard with wildstar up until the open beta and then i played it and you dont have to be an MMO veteran to know what Wildstar was ass. I was actually SUPER salty about how bad Wildstar was and I think that dissapointment  made me say fuck  it and do the FFXIV trial.

While I like to say that i started playing FFXIV during 3.0 thats a lie. According to these oldest screenshot i started to play around 2.3. I actually did hit 50  and get to the end of the 2.0 MSQ but i didnt do much later and I think life started to catch up to me so I unsubbed. I wasnt even on Hyperion originally, I was Adamontoise! 

3.0, Heavensward

Cant exactly remind myself as to why I started playing again. Old screenshots state that I started playing again around october 2015, a few months into 3.0. I had time available to me again, I think Carlego had decided to try the trial and Vitamin had offered to do stuff iwth me if I went on hyperion so I said fuck it and dropped the bucks for HW and a server transfer and started playing catchup.

its not really worth talking about the leveling experience but I’d like to say taht i actualyl really enjoy questing and leveling in MMOs. Some people hate it but I love this shit, even if at heart its just a huge time sink. Probably the thing I’m most excitied about in Stormblood is to do questing again. maybe I’m a loser?

3.0 was also my first experience in doing  content that you actually have to try to clear, in Bismark EX and Ravana EX.  I dont have much memory of Bismark, we were already pretty overgeared for him by the time I got there, and I swear it only took me atleast one look out to learn and kil lit. maybe. It was like two years ago.

Ravana I had put much more time into, started setting up nights and shit for it. I sorta wish I had footage of me doing ravana because im sure i’d be furious at myself for how bad I was probably playing, but hey I cleared it so whatever. It was an accomplisment, I felt good!

next primal, not so much.

3.1, As Goes Light, So Goes Darkness

I have a theory, and it’s that if you are a person who does end game bosses in the more modern MMO settting, there’s gonna be a fight  early in your “career” that humbles you and forces you to actually really fucking try in future fights. For me that was Thordan EX. Thordan was humbling. 

For reference I did not clear Thordan during 3.1, and its still frustrating to me. There were a lot of reasons for that, we had some frustrating people in the group I did it with, I was pretty bad, Thordan Divebombs were racist agaisnt roes

man i get salty watching this video cuz i was standing on the exact same spot as some other people and get hit but the NIN who gets clipped by the particle  effects didnt. racist.

Thordan forced me to start actually really consider my cooldown usage  in the context of the fight, and all that SHIT.  I still consider Thordan easily the hardest of 3.X primals but I’m not sure if thats just me being bias enough. I got my clear after the fact but it was never the same.

If it wasn’t obvious, I did NOT do Gordias prog at all during 3.0-3.1. Gordias was a meme and I didnt beat Thordan during tis patch, gordias was NOT happening.

3.2, The Gears of Change

Sephriot was also an infuriating fight but for different reasons from Thordan. I was probably the last of the people in my static to get my Seph EX clear because we didnt do seph as much as a group and did a lot of PFing. I play WAR btw and this fight was an absolute nightmare as an OT because OT is easiest role in the fight but the fight had a kinda infamous DPS check so even though I have had this dumb fight down on the back of my hand and can probably still explain it piece by piece off memory to people, I had to pray to god that my PF dpses didn’t die and lose us the fight because lol sephirot.

my sephirot clear was PEAK Mettic Yelling

what a nightmare.

However, as you noticed if you kept watchign the video, I also started doing Midas Progression! Midas prog would be my first e xperience in doing raid progression and what a dream. But I’ll discuss hat more in the 3.3

3.3, Revenge of the Horde

Before I start talking about Midas, I’ll talk about Nidhogg EX. Nid is probably my favorite of the 3.x primals, I think that fight is super fun, especially as a OT as its a very OT involved fight. Fuck the Geirskyol tethers tho that shit was BS sometimes.

Anyways, Midas.  My midas progession at heart was awful. Over the course of two patches worth of our best attempts at consistent two days 3 hours each a week of raiding,  we only cleared A5S and A6S, the later we only cleared two or three times. A couple reasons, one of the biggest was probably that we lost close to one-two months worth of progression due to various reasons of people not being able to make it, and we lost tons of time inside the actual fight due to every reason I could possibly think of, from random 5 minute long DCs to someone thinking that someone’s trying to break into their house. IMO if we didnt miss that huge amount of time, we probably could’ve cleared atleast A7s, because our A7S prog when we got to actually do it was pretty good (I wanna say that we managed to atleast hit second set of cages over the course of our fight dedicated a7s night.) But then someone left and we had to start teaching someone A5S and A6S and we were clowns and didnt get far.

Midas was a nightmare. And also probably the most fun i’ve ever had in this game. The memes were out of this fuckign world.

and so many more were lost to time. Still sad that  we didnt record the time that we fugged a blaster tankswap that we used to vitamin would open on  brawler without 10 trillion magic vuln stacks that ended up with me yelling “NO WAIT” 0.1 second before he gets one shotted by the brawl autoattack. good times. Prog was ass but the memories will never be forgotten.

3.4, Soul Surrender

Won’t talk too much about Sophia. I really do not have much of a memory of the fight. It was a fight that gave me very little trouble in getting clear, probably second only to Bismark in clear difficulty. It’s a pretty good fight, but I got my clear and farmed it painlessly so whatever. 

Creator had a change in my static’s mindset because while Im sure everyone had a lot of fun in Midas, the lack of actual good prog was pretty fucking disappointing, and we had a lot of high hopes for our creator prog because A12S got killed on the second day of the patch, so everyone knew that Creator was easier than Midas.

AC still holds the title of Free Company That Does Everything  Everyone Else Does But Slower And Worst. We got A9S down on our second raid nigth, which  was kinda dooming cuz most groups had that fight down on day 1 but WHATEVER we got it at like 10%.

My screenshots and tumblr posts say that we took down A10s like a week later but it sure as hell didn’t feel like that. I think it was one of those things where we got the clear but didn’t stop clowning it afterwords, and we’d spend like an hour on raid night on getting a10 down before we could get back to progging A11S. 

My screencaps show that we got A11 during early December, so about two months after a10s clear.  These numbers are kinda depressing to write out, but shit hey we got it before 3.5. I remember that those winter months became a pretty big issue for people having to miss weeks, and we had a lot of weeks where we only got out a9/a10 weekly clears cuz people couldn’t stay for a11 and that kinda stuff. This would actually still be an issue into 3.5, if not get worst.

3.5, the far edge of fate

For EXs, I absolutely hate Zurvan. Probably my least favorite fight of 3.5, and I’m sure a lot of people sahre that sentiment.  The fight itself in of itself would already be one of my least favorites in a vacuum because I think think its annoying and the fire and ice tethers is a bad mechanic for a EX, which is designed to be done by PF groups with no voice communcation, but more importantly the community lost its mind on this fight because of that fucking tweet of good players beating zurvan a few hours after 3.5′s launch saying that it was easier than dun scaith. I gotta say really good palyers gotta stop saying shit is easy because it fucks up the PF scene with people having absurd expectations. Skipping Soar becoming common knowledge also helping fuck up the PF scene because peopel would do fucking anything to skip soar. 1-2-5 parties are the expectation for zurvans still, and lots of people even run 1-1-6 because GOTTA SKIP SOAR. not that I can blame them, soar was realyl dumb. Also people using Tank LB2 for second late phase soar is so silly. I do like that it was a fight that didnt require the standard 2-2-4 set up tho. 

It was easier than seph/thor and I think Ravana to get a clear but harder than Soph/Bis to get a clear. Annoying fight, Annoying scene, and Infinity is a wack song dont lie to yourself.

Anyways Creator. To make it quick we did NOT clear A12S before echo, but imo give me like 1-2 more weeks I think we coulda got it. But at the same time it felt like I was saying “we get it next week” for like two-three weeks. A12S was the fight that made me feel like I should’ve been more proactive in helping raid members learn mechanics outside of raid night, something I’ll think about going into Stormblood.  We did however end up clearing it, but we cleared it at the start of april. That’s like a 4 month time inbetween A11S down and A12S down, which is pretty depressing. But in oru defence it was our most awkward season for missing days, and like midas we’ve probably lost like 1-2 monthsf worth of raid nights, and who knows how many “no a12s prog only a9-a11″ nights, and more importantly two of our regulars couldn’t run anymore and we had to find replacements from outside our group of friends. But thats just excuses, and TBH this fight gave a lot of people awkward issues, i’d say taht I know how to do this fight as OT off the top of my hand but apparently I fucked up first time stop positioning last night so idk.

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t amped on actually clearing a raid tier, but getting it on echo it pretty disappointing. Creator to me was also never really as fun as midas even though our prog was much better, the memes weren’t there. But shit I as a player learned a lot from this, especially on optimization DPS in the context of individual fights

still too lazy to use pots tho.

FOR STORMBLOOD

My biggest personal goal for stormblood is to clear an omega tier before echo. I’ll be happy iwth myself if I can get that, and I want to be more proactive in helping raid members learn mechanics because mechanics is and what has always held my group back.

What I’m playing in stormblood is kinda up in the air tbh.  I really want to play Samurai because MY WEBBRAND but I also wonder if its worth it,  because I played almost exclusively WAR for EX and Raids in HW, so all my raiding experiene is on tank. Even on EXs I probably went as my sub class, BRD, less than 10 times over the course of HW. I’m gonna try to level all the melees going into stormblood to get melee practice and start taking my melee 60s to casual 60 content for more practice.  Tho I tell my raid members that I’m going SAM to Omega I’m not 100% against going WAR for the sake of getting a pre-echo clear. Plus none of these fuckign kids play war they just wanna play DRK/PLD. casuals.

get hyped for Omega!

anyways the important shit:  HW glamour.

3.0 glamour

Absolutely ador this set actually? It’s straight up vendor gear but it rules, and there isn’t a lot of good heavy armor set in this game.

The blue color is because its based on my favorite leveling set, the heavy iron set, and for reasosn I do not remember I dyed them all this color of blue. I think it’s a good blue!

3.1, The Behemoth King

A set inspired by old METTIC.TUMBLR.COM followers would recongize, it s bsaed on my favorite dark souls character I made, the Boar King, Which was the giants set with the iron boar helm. it ruled. I attempted to recreate it for FFXIV, and was the most effort I put into glamour because I sat for like 5 hours waiting for Behemoth for the helm. The gold was gaudy btu I love the gaudy. I also switche chest pieces during the patch cuz I was never really sastified.  I think I like the first one more if I ahd found better leg pieces instead of ones that show my fucking underwear. Might bring this back, I love the behemoth helm.

3.3

Probably my least favorite? I  designed it aroudn the chest that I saw the cape chest piece and really wanted to use it. The black and blue undyeable colors of the chest always put me off tho and I never found something that  really made it what I want. Good chest piece tho

3.4-most of 3.5

honestly my favorite leveling set in the game. I think this set fucking rules. SOmething about it just clicks with me. Also makes cutscenes really funny because you cant move your head with it on. 

I actualyl kept this unti llike last week, even through most of 3.5. I only changed it when i got the A12S axe cuz that one is cool

and I just painted it fucking red lmao. Kinda miss the blue but I’ll use this for a while. I’ll honestly probably be using this into 4.0 in some way unless some real dope shit comes out.

BARD 3-1 +

i leveld my bard and got this glamour in 3.1 and I dont think I’ve change it since. I like this set a lot, plus BRDs dont get a lot of full face helmets. Ive changed the weapon a lot tho, used the pruple ironworks for a while cuz i like it but i never really fit the aesthetic. Used the Lore bow  for a long time, and im currently using a purple a12s bow. Dont be surpried if im still using this in 4.0

see yall in stormblood!

[junker-town]

3 days in Washington with 4 NFL players fighting for criminal justice reform

Four NFL Players — Anquan Boldin, Donte Stallworth, Malcolm Jenkins, and Johnson Bademosi — spent three days on Capitol Hill to see what they could change.

WASHINGTON — Rep. Derek Kilmer (D-WA.) waltzes into a room of lawmakers and assistants, patiently waiting for current and former NFL players Anquan Boldin, Donte Stallworth, Malcolm Jenkins, and Johnson Bademosi. He seems unbothered that they are late.

“Morning,” Kilmer says. “This should be a good day.”

It’s 8 a.m., and the football quartet is scheduled to meet in the Rayburn House Office Building on a Tuesday to start a three-day tour of Washington, urging dozens of legislators and groups to hear their concerns.

The players are here to advocate for criminal justice reform. They'll see the inner workings of Congress firsthand as they try to learn what role, if any, professional football players can have in enacting change at the federal level.

Their first planned stop is the Bipartisan Working Group, which usually holds a weekly breakfast among nearly 30 Democrats and Republicans to find common ground on current issues. It’s a battleground over coffee and donuts that doesn’t often lead to compromise.

“We aren’t singing ‘Kumbaya’ around a table,” Kilmer said. “We’re trying to figure out how we can make some progress and identify things we can agree on.”

Before they can attend breakfast, however, the players have to find parking. Staffers wielding cellphones hurry to different exits for their arrival. When the players finally enter Congress — Jenkins in a custom bowtie, Boldin’s broad shoulders squeezing into a suit jacket, Bademosi grinning, Stallworth shuffling in last — they hurry into the room to a red roundtable to explain why they belong in these halls and the urgency of the issues that brought them.

Bademosi spent time before his professional career interning at a lobbying firm in Washington. The District is his home. Recently, he found himself anxious, angry, and upset at the continued deaths of unarmed black men in America at the hands of police. He and some teammates wore “I Can’t Breathe” T-shirts during a pregame warm-up in 2014.

“The league and the fans need to see us as men, with our own opinions and the freedom to express them,” Bademosi wrote in an op-ed in 2014.

Stallworth has been in Washington for years. He used to write on politics for the Huffington Post and jumped at a chance to tour Congress. Stallworth believes in the power of sports and the opportunity for athletes to leverage their celebrity for substantive change.

“There’s nothing in life that brings about more bipartisanship than sports,” he said.

Jenkins has been a stalwart supporter of police-community relations reform in Philadelphia in the last year, going on ride-alongs with officers, visiting Pennsylvania prisons, and sitting down with Philadelphia’s police chief. He wants to break the barrier between athletes and politics.

“There are a lot of guys that have concerns about what’s going on in their communities and across the nation that are looking for ways to get involved and aren’t sure what to do,” Jenkins said. “That’s what me and Anquan have been doing. We’ve been trying to blaze that trail for them to follow along.”

Boldin is a quiet protester in the NFL who has started group chats for nearly 80 players itching to do something about policing. He has been to Congress to advocate on different issues. He tells the table about the night his cousin, Corey Jones, was gunned down by a plainclothes officer after his car broke down in 2015.

“I wish I could tell you Corey’s story was unique,” Boldin said. “I wish I could tell you that now, over a year later, we know exactly what happened and that the issue was resolved. I wish I could tell you Corey didn’t die in the first place.

“And I wish I wasn’t here at all talking about my dead cousin.”

Lawmakers gave them suggestions on how to enact change. Some proposed that the players act as stewards between cops and communities. Legislators called for more action at the local level. Criminal justice reform — especially under a White House administration that has been loath to acknowledge police-community issues in the United States — is tricky; something the players said they understood better after visiting the Hill.

Photo by Mitchell Leff/Getty Images

Malcolm Jenkins #27 is shown during the national anthem before taking on the Minnesota Vikings at Lincoln Financial Field on October 23, 2016

As the conversation fades, the breakfast morphs into a photo-op.

“I grew up watching you, man,” one staffer says to Jenkins. “I was a huge Buckeye fan. I grew up outside of Columbus, and those were my favorite years watching that team. Thanks so much for coming here. Hey, you mind grabbing a picture?”

“So who did you play for?” Susan Brooks (R-IN) asks Stallworth.

“This was great,” one staffer says to a player. “I think there’s some good things that came up about cops, and my boss is definitely interested in that!”

“All right, we gotta run!” Brooks says. “We gotta fund the government.”

“Not a big task, right?” Bademosi responds.

When Boldin and others have come to the Hill in the past, they didn’t always feel like they were being taken seriously. The first time Boldin ever gave testimony here, a staffer asked one of his handlers if Boldin knew how to read. Moments like those have made players wonder what stake they have in Washington.

Congress is accustomed to meet-and-greets with different groups about various concerns. There’s something different on the calendar every day. Monday could be about oil. Friday may address guns.

Regardless, Stallworth said they have no choice but to cherish the moment.

“This is one of the biggest things we can do: coming here, meeting with members of Congress on the Hill and seeing the whole process,” Stallworth said.

NFL players are starting to become part of the modern political routine. This is the second time players have come to Congress for their cause since November. Boldin has stumped for members running for political posts. Colin Kaepernick has become the ire of NFL owners and the nation’s president. Martellus Bennett and others said they won’t go to the White House to celebrate a Super Bowl victory. Jon Runyan held a seat in Congress as recently as 2015.

As the room begins to empty, Boldin sits down for an interview in front of a camera with lights beaming off his head. It’s a different field for the veteran receiver. He chooses his words as carefully as possible.

There is a realization here about how this process works as Boldin is peppered with questions about criminal justice. Thirty-minute afternoon chats, like these, with certain lawmakers don’t necessarily yield results. Instead, the meetings can turn into lessons on public relations and optics.

Fresh from his first conversation of the day, one thing did stand out: Boldin is beginning to learn Washington’s snail-paced definition of progress.

“For us, this started during the season,” he says. Then he paused to take stock of the next words he’d say. “We know it takes a long time to get things done here in Washington.”

Congressman Scott Peters’ office

Anquan Boldin, Donte Stallworth, Malcolm Jenkins and Johnson Bademosi sit with Rep. Scott Peters (D-Calif.) in an afternoon meeting about criminal justice reform.

Congressmen tried to educate players throughout the week about different ways to dive into criminal justice reform. The legislators called for more funding to police-community initiatives, which could be gutted as President Donald Trump takes aim at sanctuary cities.

“A lot of it gets back to making sure there’s funding available in the cities,” Rep. Jim Renacci (R-Ohio), a co-chair of the BPWG, said last week after meeting with the players. “As we talked, a lot of this is about the cities. It’s not as much about the federal government.”

Another way toward reform is backing bipartisan legislation, which all of the players said was something they’d consider. Publicly advocating for bills is a win for both sides of this conversation.

Currently in Congress, there’s the Fair Chance Act — backed by both parties in the Senate and House — seeking to ban the federal government from requesting criminal history from applicants until the end of the hiring process. Another bill, the Law Enforcement Trust and Integrity Act, incentivizes local police outfits to adopt performance-based standards ensuring job misconduct is minimized through more training, oversight, and protocol.

Players don’t have control over these bills, but they can use their platforms to promote legislation and, ideally, spur lawmakers into action, even at the state and local level.

“The system is flawed,” Jenkins said. “Our communities need trust and support, and we need to provide them with preventative and advancement resources to stop the cycle.”

As a Hail Mary pitch, some staffers and members told players they’d attempt to secure a future audience with Trump and his administration.

Players voiced concerns over the week about how the administration is a hurdle to their efforts — a White House that’s so pro-police in its policy platforms, that everyone from social justice organizations like Black Lives Matter to police chiefs nationwide have questioned the changing atmosphere around justice.

“It’s a legitimate concern,” Kilmer, the representative from Washington, said of Trump’s administration. “But by and large, these problems get solved on the ground in our communities, not in big buildings in Washington, D.C.”

Congressman Elijah Cummings’ office

Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) chats with Lions cornerback Johnson Bademosi during a forum on criminal justice reform and policing in March

Bademosi, the Lions corner, said before going to Congress that he wasn’t sure if Congress could be a strong ally against the administration.

“Oftentimes, there might be a bill or piece of legislation that’s going through committee and people are rallying around it, but because of the way things work, because terms are only two years and the second year people are trying to get re-elected, you don’t make progress on things,” he said.

Nobody has an answer for how players can push through Congress’ inefficiencies. Tom Perez, the new chair of the Democratic National Committee who met with players, said that nothing will get done if the players and American people don’t “swing the bat on these issues.”

He suggested having a Congressional and Executive branch strategy because on bipartisan matters, there’s “not a heck of a lot” getting done.

“The Trump administration is very unpredictable to say the least,” Perez said. “It’s hard for me to give [the players] any suggestions with any confidence about what [Trump] will do because it’s been such a chaos administration.”

The magnitude of that uncertainty hasn’t left the players discouraged. NFL players (and public figures like them) have a clear utility to Congress. Their celebrity, combined with their connection to communities, has the ability to bridge Washington to the rest of America — and as Jenkins mentioned, to Trump.

One of the players’ biggest supporters, Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), backed their efforts when he met them with Perez at the DNC headquarters in the Southeast corridor of the District.

“You folks oughta think about running for office!” Ellison said. Perez agreed. He even suggested taking the cohort on a country-wide speaking tour. He pondered aloud the power of a grassroots initiative with athletes as political pushers of progress, going state by state as the faces of Democratic criminal justice reform.

“Athletes are citizens, too. They have the unique ability to give a megaphone to important issues,” Perez said. “I’d encourage them to do this. Their passion was palpable in these meetings. They could bring a lot to the table.”

Rep. Elijah Cummings’ (D-Md.) office

Johnson Bademosi waiting for a handshake from Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), the “Dean of Congress” prior to a forum on criminal justice reform and policing in Congress, March. 30, 2017.

On Thursday, the players trek back to Capitol Hill for their biggest, most public moment of the week. They stand outside a large door holding in a room made for hearings. The four, accompanied by lauded John Jay College criminal justice professor Phillip Goff, are about to enter a forum on their firsthand experiences and building trust between communities and police.

The event wasn’t as fruitful as many had hoped. The chamber stayed empty for most of the morning. The group’s most publicized event wasn’t as widely attended, in part, because many members were voting at the same time the forum started.

The four athletes sat at a table and addressed no more than four congressmen at any time about their concerns, and always black congressmen. No white lawmakers or Republicans attended. The forum was black people talking to black people about issues plaguing, in large part, black people.

Despite the poor turnout, there were moments in this space that made you believe these players belonged in Washington. The congressmen who did attend made sure the players knew.

“I think back to the Civil Rights Era of the 1960s. People have taken to the streets to proclaim Black Lives Matter, to seek justice for those who have died. Today, we are joined by men of the National Football League. What an honor,” Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) said.

“Let me thank you all for stepping off the field and stepping back into the real life you all lived before you made it to the NFL and before you played in college,” Rep. Cedric Richmond (D-LA) said. “To get out of your comfort zone, but to actually give back and fight for issues that are critical, we don’t see it enough.”

“What you’re doing today is crucial,” Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-TX) said. “Who better than you to begin to talk about how African American men are treated, how they begin to be treated as boys, how the respect for them doesn’t exist [from the beginning of their lives] and then how the criminal justice system [treats them].”

When the players spoke, they addressed reform from several angles. They said that they’re not “anti-police” and that it’s possible to be both pro-police and pro-black.

Jenkins said there’s a need to humanize both sides of the issue and that the men and women who spend their lives protecting others also have the capacity to make mistakes.

“We all agree we need our law enforcement. They have tough jobs. But accountability is not the same as indictment,” Jenkins said.

Boldin called for better development of community-police relations and more federal hearings on criminal justice reform. He wants to see Congress use the extent of its power to ensure that the wrong people aren’t becoming officers and that they are vetted the same way athletes are.

“In the NFL we do a great job of screening guys because we only want the best in the league,” Boldin said. “If you’re not the best, you’re not afforded the opportunity to wear the shield. I think it should be the same way in the police department. I think we can all agree that everybody that’s a police [officer] doesn’t deserve to be.”

Many of the black legislators personally know the cost of waiting for progress and advocating for justice.

Jackson-Lee has spent months asking for justice for Sandra Bland, who was pulled from her car after a traffic exchange, jailed, and found hung in her cell in 2015. Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) stood between a phalanx of officers and testy protesters the same year after Freddie Gray was arrested for having a switchblade. Gray was thrown into a police van and had his spine broken and died in police custody.

They can appreciate what the players are attempting to do. As the members speak, they reiterate that progress can be slow but still monumental.

“Your efforts are significant and will affect generations to come,” Cummings said. “Kids you don’t even know, they’ll see this on C-SPAN. You don’t even know it. You’ll never meet them. But you will change their lives.”

“The NFL’s stature has just shot through the roof,” Jackson-Lee said. “Not because of your promise on the field, but because you are here, in the United States Congress and are associated with the NFL. I hope they are listening and looking. I hope they are seeing the value of what you are now saying.”

And soon, the players are whisked away. Boldin, Bademosi, Stallworth, and Jenkins escape through a side door in a building that never expected them, passing black-and-white pictures of black and brown people protesting during the Civil Rights Era, all advocating for real change.