#this journal is big so it's taken me 3 inconsistent years of writing in it but it's almost full

[waspgrave]

i barely did any journaling last year and i'm trying to do it again and my god, this thing must think i'm so cringe. i swear i'm cool, journal, and please don't judge my handwriting either

[catchcrows]

hello!!! for the writers ask meme - 1, 3, 14, 15, 17? thank you!!!!!

1. what’s something you’ve written that you know is ooc and you just don’t care?

fdjkslaf i actually loathe on a cellular level being ooc, or ig? less so being ooc than being inconsistent? like i’m sure i’ve written characters in a way that someone somewhere feels is ooc, but so long as it’s consistent for me (it’s how i always write them, there’s a reason they act the way they do that i pulled from the canon and built on, etc etc) then i don’t particularly care

that said, there’s one fic that i just finished (that may never see the light of day on ao3) that i hate bc it does feel sort of ooc, mostly bc there was a word limit and so i got hung up on managing backstory vs the Actual Plot

3. something you wish a commenter had called attention to, but got ignored.

lmao mostly i’m always just psyched that someone’s commenting (mostly bc half the time i’ll write something and only later when i’m editing go “oh hey that was a cool metaphor/analogy/phrase, wish i’d done it on purpose”). there was a blink-and-you-miss-it detail in the pacrim au about a phone going to voicemail in a flashback that became relevant later, but other than that i can’t think of any

14. what aspect of writing have you had the most growth in?

tbh looking back at some of my older stuff even from like a couple years back, it feels like i’ve regressed more than anything. which? idk how true or not that is bc my brain is also a shitty little fun-house mirror at the best of times, but since jumping back into non-science writing i’m definitely gotten better at just chilling the fuck out lmao! weird that it’s taken literal decades of writing for fun for me to grasp that writing should......be fun.....wild that something you do for your personal enjoyment should be something you enjoy Who Could Have Guessed

(okay to be fair i recently found some story i won a prize for when i was five and that one i probably had fun writing but the second i turned six? game over that’s when the brain worms got me)

15. we all project onto our characters. where has your personality or life choices leaked onto the page the most?

god so many of my weird made-up phrases/saying have wound up bleeding into people’s dialogue it’s fucking ridiculous....there’s usually one character per fandom that gets the brunt of it and otherwise it just sort of leaks into the narration (”undeserved confidence of a professional asshole” is something i’ve said about an old professor, for example)

also i’m one of those people who knows a little about a lot, and that combined with my #ProfessionallyDiagnosedBrainWorms and my research career makes doing deep dives into random subjects and producing fics with odd background scenarios a relatively easy thing for me

17. how are you procrastinating today?

lmao not so much today but yesterday i did make two big gifsets back to back.....today i’m actually doing fic-related work (condensing a bunch of info i got from a 9th century travel guide and a 14th century officer’s journal lol), which is dry but i gotta sort through it. plus i usually procrastinate one thing with another, so i’m also getting Real Life Responsibilities done too

[unclejimmie-blog1]

Deflating of America

Soft balls! Nearly two years ago, that was all anyone could talk about. People were obsessed over how 12 balls got soft. Those were weird times, huh? Oh, I’m sorry, things got weirder? Nope, I saw in those crazy PSI months the seminal turning point in the history of this once great country. Melodramatic? Maybe, I can be at times, but in squishy balls I saw the future of our nation.

If you are a Pats hater, I get it. It’s part of the fun, right? But what Deflategate showed me, a self-proclaimed lifelong Pats fan, was that the concerns I have for our country moving forward I first saw in the way the strange story of ball infatuation spread across this land. I don’t want to get political, but in this weird sports story the seeds of injustice, bigotry and even media bias can be seen in all their ugly colors.

Back to Brady’s balls. I was recently playing golf with a friend who is a sportswriter for a NYC paper. I casually asked him what he thought of the whole Brady suspension thing, wondering if, like me, he thought it was the NFL trying to expand their collective bargaining powers by going all 'Eric Cartman' on Brady and the Pats, "Respect my authority!"

“It was an over-reaction, but there is no way Brady didn’t know the balls were deflated,” he stated.

I was a little surprised, so I asked, “But what if the balls were never deflated?” He nodded and admitted that was worth considering.

Now, I have huge man love for this dude, amazing sports journalist and great friend, but this struck me as insane. How is that not the ONLY scenario worth considering or at the very least THE most important? Let me put it this way, imagine a woman calls the police and says her jewelry has been stolen. Upon arriving, the Cops see her bedroom is a mess. She claims very expensive items were stolen. What’s the first question they and the insurance company are going to ask? Can she provide proof that she owned the items she’s claiming were stolen? Receipts? Pictures? Something that allows them to determine if something was, in fact, stolen.

Logical, right? However, the NFL never asked, “Hmm, what should the PSI of the balls be in these cold, wet conditions?” Instead, they leaked a story to ESPN, who reported it forward without any confirmation or facts. The barn door was now open and people were chasing the cow through town snapping its ass with wet-tipped terrible towels.

Here is my hypothesis for this little observation. Once you create a story that reinforces a bias toward an intended target that is predisposed to being hated it is IMPOSSIBLE to undue it. Yes, impossible. No amount of facts, correcting or reprints can fix that first falsehood, especially if most people are predisposed to want to believe it. Does this sound familiar? Which side were you on?

I call this tribal bias and here are the symptoms; my team’s always right, the other team’s evil and cheats. Period. No gray. We are now in an era where we don’t want to know the truth about our team. We only want to know “facts” that support our personal team’s “rightness”.

I’ll admit that when the story first came out I had no idea what to think. It seemed bizarre, I mean it made sense that if they were looking for an advantage maybe they’d push the envelope and make the balls softer. But as the story unfolded I noticed something odd, the judgement had been passed. The Pats were guilty and most of it hung on Mortensen’s first report. 11 of the 12 Pats balls were “significantly” deflated. That’s the story many still believe to this day. In fact, it took forever for it to be corrected from twitter, even though the actual results were known by the end of the game. Why wasn’t the NFL correcting or at least providing more details about the measurements to the press?

Follow the narrative that played out in the sports media by not correcting the story: balls were deflated, deflating the balls is cheating, the Pats have a history of cheating (want to know the truth about Spygate- journalism), soft balls are a huge advantage and Brady would have instructed such deflating to meet his desired ball softness. One Sportscasters even cried on camera saying that this was 'unforgivable.'

If you want to understand what is wrong with this nation you must first trust me and swallow this little pill. It is not dangerous, it will help you get small enough to travel into an alternate universe where the Patriots might not be the cheating-ist team in the history of sports. I know, it’s crazy what pills will do these days. One noted side-effect, if you have an erection for more than four hours just sit back and enjoy. That’s what it feels like to be Tom Brady every day.

So now that the pill is starting to take effect let’s travel back to the beginning, slightly after the part where the dinosaurs died because they were too fat and turned into oil… Imagine that the balls were never deflated. This assumes that any loss of air pressure was nature. Swallow hard. First, were you aware that only 1 of the 12 balls was significantly under-inflated (2psi), the infamous intercepted ball turned in by Colts. 3 of the 4 Colts’ balls measured at halftime were under the league minimum, too. Why? Well, because that’s what is supposed to happen. The League had no idea what the PSI of balls should have been so in their minds any deviation from the acceptable range was wrong, but after they tested 4 Colts balls and 3 were under they stopped testing (they were out of time, but it only supposedly took a ball boy 90 seconds to check all of the balls and deflate them, right?).

But didn’t the Wells report do a study and find that the balls had to be tampered with? Uh, kind of. They hired a lab to provide proof that the balls were “too” under-inflated. It was their science that pissed off and sparked the various other independent studies (if you love Gas Laws check out this scientific study.) Have you ever read about the firm hired to do the Wells Report study, Exponent that has a history of finding scientific evidence to support their clients’ legal needs? Big Tobacco? Oil? You didn’t know that? Few did.

See the media jumped on the story like boys on a pig-pile and weren’t interested in throwing any water on the flaming pile of balls. If this had been any other team but the Pats, sorry, 25k fine and move on. Don’t believe me that this story was overblown because it was the Pats, okay, well another team during this exact same time was found to have piped in 'fake' crowd noise for into their arena for YEARS to make it artificially loud thus effecting the visiting team’s ability to call plays. That's serious, right? Soft Balls- $1 million fine; Fake noise- $350,000. Balls, lose first round draft pick vs noise, 5th round draft pick. What about integrity of the game? Where was the 24 hr coverage? Where were the endless stories on how a loud stadium makes it very hard for the visiting team to audible and call their plays? Where was the crying former Quarterback?

 The narrative and hatred had taken root and nobody cared about justice or facts. Your team is evil.

“Tribal Bias” was running amok. Now I stated writing this story months ago and suddenly a new Deflategate 2.0 story breaks. Pittsburgh being accused of Soft Balls by Giants, except somehow the story died. Even ESPN that seems to love a good squishy ball story didn’t seem interested. What gives? Sorry, the hatred toward Steelers is nowhere near on same level as Pats. Maybe back during Steel Curtain days it might have been. Not now. And NFL nor ESPN want anyone to know that balls get soft when it’s cold. Period. Curious why the NFL has not released their two year study on "PSI" prior, during and post game to the media or public? No chance, especially now that Pats are going back to Super Bowl (quick update, they won...again). 

There are two issues I saw in Soft Balls that were a warning flair, a foreshadowing of the State of our Union. First, is find a good mark, someone easy to hate. If you want a story to explode just pick a target that people hate. Patriots, immigrants, the media? The bias will do the rest. Second, and profoundly more disappointing is the media will do little to correct the first problem.

ESPN could have done the right thing and corrected their story quickly from Mortenson, but they didn’t. They could have used journalism to correct errors, rumors and inconsistencies during their 24 hr coverage. Why didn’t they? Because they loved the story. People tuned in to join the hate party. Does this seem familiar? Do you remember media stories back over the summer about media not doing their job to call out the inaccuracy in another national story? Anyone read the story about the CEO of a very large media company reveling in the ratings of the primaries and election and not wanting to stop promoting that narrative?

Before the pill wears off and you head back to Hater Town, let me ask you one last soft ball question. Why was Brady suspended? Take a moment. If you said it was because of his general knowledge of the deflating of the balls, then you haven’t followed this very closely. No, he was suspended for impeding the NFL’s investigation. Right, the cellphone, you knew that. But here’s the problem, we spent the last few paragraphs talking about how, maybe the balls should have been soft, like in Pittsburgh early this year. But Brady’s 4 game was now upheld because of a cell phone. Not balls that science showed might just have done what balls do. Not to get to technical, but this entire thing went from balls to phones. And here is where the league got caught multiple times red handed, in manipulating and failing to follow procedure of due process (more sport journalism)  Now if you think he destroyed the phone because he was guilty, then you forgot what I asked before you swallowed. Imagine no balls were deflated. So, if no balls were deflated then why would Brady destroy his personal cell phone? 

We’ll never know, maybe TB had a text fight with his wife. Maybe he had other things on there that he knew if he turned over would probably end up in the public. Or maybe TB was fighting for all the NFL players that the NFL can’t just keep making up the rules as they go along. Maybe he and the Union were preparing for the next collective bargaining agreement. Either way it doesn’t matter as by this time I’m sure you’re back to hating this 199th round pick who worked his ass off to not just make an NFL team but to become one of the greatest of all time.

The media don’t want to do their jobs anymore and it may be too late. Money is driving the ship and hatred is blowing the sails. I don’t expect any of my non-Pats fans to like TB, the grumpy old man and the band of misfit toys that are headed another Superbowl (again, quick update, #5). But before you pile on with the hashtags and cheat reference think about the children. We as a nation need to stop blindly following the chorus of ill-informed. Let science be a decent arbitrator, or at least a starting point in a conversation. In today’s world, we all might need to take a breath and dig a little deeper to make it harder for them to peddle the stupid story and be a nation of haters. Fight the tribal bias. The reputation you save just might be our country’s.