07-07-2024, 03:39 PM
(This post was last modified: 07-07-2024, 09:14 PM by wetwilleh. Edited 1 time in total.)
It’s once again time to put some fingers to keyboard and get some money to fund my next season or so! Also helps that there is a double media out for JK’s birthday! So first off, I want to congratulate JK on the wonderful achievement of having lived for 40 years. May the next 40 be slightly less chaotic, and may we find a bit more peace in the world.
I’ve got some free time this week, at least until I figure out what my work schedule is, and I’ll be doing my best here to catch up on everything I’ve been missing, get myself prepared for the short term, and not regret the time I had now to be free, when I won’t be as much down the line.
Where do we begin? Why not with S48, my first as a member of the ISFL, and it seems to have been a pretty interesting one! I played 13 regular season games with Minnesota, getting 32 pancakes and only 3 sacks allowed. I have no context as to whether that is good or bad, so I will assume it is good and keep my confidence intact. I’ll aim to do better next season and build towards improving my versatility and toughness. I never intended to make a flashy player, I’m not really looking to be a star here. I just hope I can never be the one that gets the finger pointed at them when things go south. I want to meet some fun people, have some good conversations and enjoy my time while I’m here. I may never be as involved as other people, and I’ve always said that as much as it’s the most involved users that make a shake a league, it’s the reliable depth that turns this from a pissing contest into a real, fully-fledged strategy game. If we were all the best earners, the best builders, the best distributed positionally, the best coached, the luckiest, who would ever stand out? What storylines would ever emerge? So I will accept the challenge of reliable depth. I will show up and do my job, and go home. I don’t need to win awards, I don’t need to show up on the scoresheet. I need to give everyone else the opportunity to. And I really enjoy the opportunity to have longevity. Whenever I can, I like to be loyal, I like to be a mainstay, and I like to push the boundaries of what it means to be a longstanding player in the league. I would rather be a lower TPE player for longer, playing my role and giving the team the chance to grab star talent, than to hog the spotlight for myself. I’m not looking for a short-term success bubble, I’m looking for the slow-burn, the painful crawl. And I love that commitment back, knowing that I’m a part of the plan, that I get to be a mainstay, and a part of the identity of a team. Minnesota developed an identity throughout the season with a really scrappy, young defensive group. We were pulling in defenders left and right, and pushing each other to get better and compete internally, before joining up to take teams down externally.
It was a pleasure to help facilitate some offense, to give our team the opportunity to play the ball however they chose to, to give the QB time to observe, analyze, and make big plays. To give the runners room to find holes in the wall, to move laterally and gain an advantage on the wings, and to flatten some fools who dared stand in our way. But we need to get disciplined, we need to play focused, and play with purpose. We got a little too rowdy, played a bit too hard. Sometimes ramming your head through a wall isn’t the best way to get inside a building. But now we’ve been around the block, so there’s no excuses. We aren’t the rookies anymore, there’s new meat on the grill. It’s time to start teaching these things to the new players, to be a role model for what players can become. And that means training as hard as ever, and carving out a niche for myself. I can be the same old O-Liner as everyone else, that’s fine and I’m sure everyone would accept that. But I can also push the boundaries, find a new avenue, and use my brain over pure brawn to hold the line.
It will take lots of brawn though, and a big investment this offseason is what’s on the books for Lolanin. He’s been in the gym non-stop doing his business, getting those muscles popping for the next stage of his career. Next comes the video, which is keeping him smart, keeping up with the crafty plays his QB is working with, and keeping him one step ahead of the opposing defenders. They’re quick and they’re slick, but they don’t see the game like Lolanin. He’s been incorporating more cardio into his regiment as well, something that will hopefully give him a bigger gas tank throughout the game, and the season. He needs to stay active, stay focused, and stay disciplined, not letting himself get sloppy in big moments late in the game. It’s hurt the team before, and he won’t be a part of it anymore. The last focus he’s had here so far is reaction time. His first step isn’t quick enough, his hands aren’t dexterous enough. He needs to become like a hockey goaltender, with balls and walls and those cool light-up wall pads that test your vision and reaction time. Thankfully Minnesota is the state of hockey, so there’s lots of opportunity for him to improve in that regard. Learning to transfer skills from other sports is something that gives players extra tools in their repertoires to surpass their peers.
Soon though, it’ll be back to fundamentals, the art of defending the rush and the pass. He’s got the raw tools, he has his signature pitches, the contact, the vision, but what he’ll need to rely on is muscle memory. He can’t be thinking about the basics so much anymore. He’s seen it all at this point, with 13+ games under his belt, now it’s time to engrain those in his mind, and focus more on taking on new circumstances, committing new things to memory, and growing past his current level. He needs to learn not only to be a great football player, but specifically to become a great offensive lineman. And if that means holding off the onslaught, and doing so with technical proficiency, that’s just what he’ll do. You can’t try something new and exciting without also having the foundation to build off of in a new direction. He’s got the raw tools, and it will soon be time for a direct application.
About halfway through my word target here, so lets switch gears from Lolanin’s season and training and onto some other miscellaneous thoughts.
I have not engaged at all with the Discord -> cash mechanic. It’s different, it makes some sense, as a new-age movement towards a less outdated medium, but I really just couldn’t be bothered to come up with some way to arbitrarily engage with the Discord servers. I tend to prefer more personal circles anyways, and public channels drive me crazy. Too much going on, too many people, and too much drama. I just have no real desire to partake in that, so I’ll earn my money in other ways. That’s the beauty of sim leagues though, at least well-designed ones, is that they understand that this is a niche, and that in order to expand the tiny scope of people who might be a good fit, they have to include a ton of broad avenues of acceptable engagement. The ISFL has opened their market to people who like to have open chats on the Discord platform. That’s cool, and it’s fine if that’s not me. That’s why mega-articles, 40th birthdays and word-based payouts exist. This is my niche, this is how I can be involved and sustain my training for another season. I don’t have to necessarily be engaged in the day-to-day, I can be engaged in the season-to-season, the week-to-week. Because that’s how I work best these days. Talk to me a few years ago and I would have been all over the daily chatting thing. I was sitting in front of my computer 24/7, playing games with my friends, staying up late, working remotely, doing school, and all the while Discord was open, I could take a peek, respond to something in a few seconds, and I was only ever out of the loop for more than an hour when I went to sleep. It wasn’t healthy, and I wouldn’t recommend, but it was a life I loved at the time, and that’s where my love for sim leagues came to be born. I was a minor league GM for quite some time in the VHL, I was one of the best at the time, and I was always available to mentor and teach anyone who came stumbling in front of me. My players, other people’s players, vets who had been around years longer than me? It didn’t matter, I was always able to lend a hand. That’s died down a lot for me, some of which came from some frankly healthy rule changes created by the commissioners at the time, taking away the need to be immediately available at all times in order to get new players, but also just a generally maturing in my daily life, as I worked my way through school, worked a lot more, moved, changed jobs, and now I live with my girlfriend in a new city, with a new limited hours job coming in, my presence as a sim league member has changed a lot. I’m not a kid anymore, and my time has changed. I have to spend so much more time taking care of myself and my affairs, and being a constant presence in sim leagues has taken a step back. It’s much easier at this point for me to give a little bit of time a couple times a month to get big tasks done, a few minutes a week to pump out the little ones, and try to read and respond to the pings when I get the chance. I still love sim leagues, and I think they’ll be a part of me for a long time. I don’t know if it will be forever, interests come and go, and this one has been going for almost 4 years now, so I’m sure one day I’ll move along to something else, but for now, I’m a veteran presence, a strategic earner, and a more passive enjoyer.
I updated my wiki today, and after fumbling around for a while trying to remember how, and then making about 100 edits that I hope isn’t filling someones approval queue, I got it all to work. I threw some words in, figured out how to make a table, and actually appreciated the act of recording my history myself. The index is great, it says all of the things, but it doesn’t tell stories like we do. It won’t remind me of how I felt, what I was experiencing, and what it meant to me. I can do that in the Wiki, in a way that not even my media can really take on. This will get lost in some archive somewhere in a couple months, it’ll get graded, I’ll get my money and never think about it again. I won’t revisit this article ever again. But a Wiki I’m incentivized to update it, to think about the times we’ve had, to showcase the progression my player has made, the legacy he’s formed. I’m forced to see how I was early on vs how I’ll be at the end of it all, and when it comes to creating a new player, I’ll have a permanent memory of the times I had here before a new direction takes a hold of me. That’s something that’s really valuable to me, and something that I’ve never really gotten to experience in a sim league, and while yes, it’s tedious, and to many I would imagine it feels stupid. It is a lot of duplicate work, and it feels closed off from the rest of the site, which is my complaint for most of the offshoot projects in this league. It took me a long time to find the Updating tool, and I was trying to figure out how to actually apply my TPE for quite some time. I found the link when someone mentioned it out of the blue in the rookie chat while I was clearing notifications. And then I couldn’t find the link again the next week and just so happened to remember who sent it the last time and looked it up that way. I now have it bookmarked, but there’s no real evidence of it anywhere else. So yes, some centralization could be nice, and the time sink that was put into the wiki will probably keep it alive longer than many might hope, but it really is something unique, and it holds a special place in my heart. And sure the practice of documenting my experiences by myself is wonderful and I could do that in any league, or really about anything, but the fact that the community is incentivized to do the project together, to each contribute our portion to the league’s history, that’s what makes this all so special.
I explored the index for the first time as well today, as I was updating my Wiki, and talking about how my season went for the Offseason Task. It feels familiar, and I’m not sure what league has a similar output, obviously it’s not a football league, as this is my only one, unless the engine is the same as EFL’s was. But I really can’t remember that far back. It’s simple, it’s clean and it gets the job done. I do enjoy taking a look at the stats every now and then, sometimes it is nice to have a quantitative measure of improvement over just TPE. And it really is my best opportunity to learn to contextualize football, and try to figure things out a bit more. I may even learn what some of the stats mean. I probably won’t be following the index week to week, but it’s nice to have a reference when the season is done, and see how it all went. I hope to experience some more of the game day action next season, as I well really didn’t at all this season, just honking a few times in chat, but that’s what next seasons are for! Finding some ways to do better and getting at it, or at least making empty promises to get everyone’s hopes up.
Well I’ve hit my goal here, and should have enough to get my T6 Training this season, and with some contract money coming in from my new team, I should be ready to relax for a while. Thanks to everyone who took a second to read a few words, and see you soon!
I’ve got some free time this week, at least until I figure out what my work schedule is, and I’ll be doing my best here to catch up on everything I’ve been missing, get myself prepared for the short term, and not regret the time I had now to be free, when I won’t be as much down the line.
Where do we begin? Why not with S48, my first as a member of the ISFL, and it seems to have been a pretty interesting one! I played 13 regular season games with Minnesota, getting 32 pancakes and only 3 sacks allowed. I have no context as to whether that is good or bad, so I will assume it is good and keep my confidence intact. I’ll aim to do better next season and build towards improving my versatility and toughness. I never intended to make a flashy player, I’m not really looking to be a star here. I just hope I can never be the one that gets the finger pointed at them when things go south. I want to meet some fun people, have some good conversations and enjoy my time while I’m here. I may never be as involved as other people, and I’ve always said that as much as it’s the most involved users that make a shake a league, it’s the reliable depth that turns this from a pissing contest into a real, fully-fledged strategy game. If we were all the best earners, the best builders, the best distributed positionally, the best coached, the luckiest, who would ever stand out? What storylines would ever emerge? So I will accept the challenge of reliable depth. I will show up and do my job, and go home. I don’t need to win awards, I don’t need to show up on the scoresheet. I need to give everyone else the opportunity to. And I really enjoy the opportunity to have longevity. Whenever I can, I like to be loyal, I like to be a mainstay, and I like to push the boundaries of what it means to be a longstanding player in the league. I would rather be a lower TPE player for longer, playing my role and giving the team the chance to grab star talent, than to hog the spotlight for myself. I’m not looking for a short-term success bubble, I’m looking for the slow-burn, the painful crawl. And I love that commitment back, knowing that I’m a part of the plan, that I get to be a mainstay, and a part of the identity of a team. Minnesota developed an identity throughout the season with a really scrappy, young defensive group. We were pulling in defenders left and right, and pushing each other to get better and compete internally, before joining up to take teams down externally.
It was a pleasure to help facilitate some offense, to give our team the opportunity to play the ball however they chose to, to give the QB time to observe, analyze, and make big plays. To give the runners room to find holes in the wall, to move laterally and gain an advantage on the wings, and to flatten some fools who dared stand in our way. But we need to get disciplined, we need to play focused, and play with purpose. We got a little too rowdy, played a bit too hard. Sometimes ramming your head through a wall isn’t the best way to get inside a building. But now we’ve been around the block, so there’s no excuses. We aren’t the rookies anymore, there’s new meat on the grill. It’s time to start teaching these things to the new players, to be a role model for what players can become. And that means training as hard as ever, and carving out a niche for myself. I can be the same old O-Liner as everyone else, that’s fine and I’m sure everyone would accept that. But I can also push the boundaries, find a new avenue, and use my brain over pure brawn to hold the line.
It will take lots of brawn though, and a big investment this offseason is what’s on the books for Lolanin. He’s been in the gym non-stop doing his business, getting those muscles popping for the next stage of his career. Next comes the video, which is keeping him smart, keeping up with the crafty plays his QB is working with, and keeping him one step ahead of the opposing defenders. They’re quick and they’re slick, but they don’t see the game like Lolanin. He’s been incorporating more cardio into his regiment as well, something that will hopefully give him a bigger gas tank throughout the game, and the season. He needs to stay active, stay focused, and stay disciplined, not letting himself get sloppy in big moments late in the game. It’s hurt the team before, and he won’t be a part of it anymore. The last focus he’s had here so far is reaction time. His first step isn’t quick enough, his hands aren’t dexterous enough. He needs to become like a hockey goaltender, with balls and walls and those cool light-up wall pads that test your vision and reaction time. Thankfully Minnesota is the state of hockey, so there’s lots of opportunity for him to improve in that regard. Learning to transfer skills from other sports is something that gives players extra tools in their repertoires to surpass their peers.
Soon though, it’ll be back to fundamentals, the art of defending the rush and the pass. He’s got the raw tools, he has his signature pitches, the contact, the vision, but what he’ll need to rely on is muscle memory. He can’t be thinking about the basics so much anymore. He’s seen it all at this point, with 13+ games under his belt, now it’s time to engrain those in his mind, and focus more on taking on new circumstances, committing new things to memory, and growing past his current level. He needs to learn not only to be a great football player, but specifically to become a great offensive lineman. And if that means holding off the onslaught, and doing so with technical proficiency, that’s just what he’ll do. You can’t try something new and exciting without also having the foundation to build off of in a new direction. He’s got the raw tools, and it will soon be time for a direct application.
About halfway through my word target here, so lets switch gears from Lolanin’s season and training and onto some other miscellaneous thoughts.
I have not engaged at all with the Discord -> cash mechanic. It’s different, it makes some sense, as a new-age movement towards a less outdated medium, but I really just couldn’t be bothered to come up with some way to arbitrarily engage with the Discord servers. I tend to prefer more personal circles anyways, and public channels drive me crazy. Too much going on, too many people, and too much drama. I just have no real desire to partake in that, so I’ll earn my money in other ways. That’s the beauty of sim leagues though, at least well-designed ones, is that they understand that this is a niche, and that in order to expand the tiny scope of people who might be a good fit, they have to include a ton of broad avenues of acceptable engagement. The ISFL has opened their market to people who like to have open chats on the Discord platform. That’s cool, and it’s fine if that’s not me. That’s why mega-articles, 40th birthdays and word-based payouts exist. This is my niche, this is how I can be involved and sustain my training for another season. I don’t have to necessarily be engaged in the day-to-day, I can be engaged in the season-to-season, the week-to-week. Because that’s how I work best these days. Talk to me a few years ago and I would have been all over the daily chatting thing. I was sitting in front of my computer 24/7, playing games with my friends, staying up late, working remotely, doing school, and all the while Discord was open, I could take a peek, respond to something in a few seconds, and I was only ever out of the loop for more than an hour when I went to sleep. It wasn’t healthy, and I wouldn’t recommend, but it was a life I loved at the time, and that’s where my love for sim leagues came to be born. I was a minor league GM for quite some time in the VHL, I was one of the best at the time, and I was always available to mentor and teach anyone who came stumbling in front of me. My players, other people’s players, vets who had been around years longer than me? It didn’t matter, I was always able to lend a hand. That’s died down a lot for me, some of which came from some frankly healthy rule changes created by the commissioners at the time, taking away the need to be immediately available at all times in order to get new players, but also just a generally maturing in my daily life, as I worked my way through school, worked a lot more, moved, changed jobs, and now I live with my girlfriend in a new city, with a new limited hours job coming in, my presence as a sim league member has changed a lot. I’m not a kid anymore, and my time has changed. I have to spend so much more time taking care of myself and my affairs, and being a constant presence in sim leagues has taken a step back. It’s much easier at this point for me to give a little bit of time a couple times a month to get big tasks done, a few minutes a week to pump out the little ones, and try to read and respond to the pings when I get the chance. I still love sim leagues, and I think they’ll be a part of me for a long time. I don’t know if it will be forever, interests come and go, and this one has been going for almost 4 years now, so I’m sure one day I’ll move along to something else, but for now, I’m a veteran presence, a strategic earner, and a more passive enjoyer.
I updated my wiki today, and after fumbling around for a while trying to remember how, and then making about 100 edits that I hope isn’t filling someones approval queue, I got it all to work. I threw some words in, figured out how to make a table, and actually appreciated the act of recording my history myself. The index is great, it says all of the things, but it doesn’t tell stories like we do. It won’t remind me of how I felt, what I was experiencing, and what it meant to me. I can do that in the Wiki, in a way that not even my media can really take on. This will get lost in some archive somewhere in a couple months, it’ll get graded, I’ll get my money and never think about it again. I won’t revisit this article ever again. But a Wiki I’m incentivized to update it, to think about the times we’ve had, to showcase the progression my player has made, the legacy he’s formed. I’m forced to see how I was early on vs how I’ll be at the end of it all, and when it comes to creating a new player, I’ll have a permanent memory of the times I had here before a new direction takes a hold of me. That’s something that’s really valuable to me, and something that I’ve never really gotten to experience in a sim league, and while yes, it’s tedious, and to many I would imagine it feels stupid. It is a lot of duplicate work, and it feels closed off from the rest of the site, which is my complaint for most of the offshoot projects in this league. It took me a long time to find the Updating tool, and I was trying to figure out how to actually apply my TPE for quite some time. I found the link when someone mentioned it out of the blue in the rookie chat while I was clearing notifications. And then I couldn’t find the link again the next week and just so happened to remember who sent it the last time and looked it up that way. I now have it bookmarked, but there’s no real evidence of it anywhere else. So yes, some centralization could be nice, and the time sink that was put into the wiki will probably keep it alive longer than many might hope, but it really is something unique, and it holds a special place in my heart. And sure the practice of documenting my experiences by myself is wonderful and I could do that in any league, or really about anything, but the fact that the community is incentivized to do the project together, to each contribute our portion to the league’s history, that’s what makes this all so special.
I explored the index for the first time as well today, as I was updating my Wiki, and talking about how my season went for the Offseason Task. It feels familiar, and I’m not sure what league has a similar output, obviously it’s not a football league, as this is my only one, unless the engine is the same as EFL’s was. But I really can’t remember that far back. It’s simple, it’s clean and it gets the job done. I do enjoy taking a look at the stats every now and then, sometimes it is nice to have a quantitative measure of improvement over just TPE. And it really is my best opportunity to learn to contextualize football, and try to figure things out a bit more. I may even learn what some of the stats mean. I probably won’t be following the index week to week, but it’s nice to have a reference when the season is done, and see how it all went. I hope to experience some more of the game day action next season, as I well really didn’t at all this season, just honking a few times in chat, but that’s what next seasons are for! Finding some ways to do better and getting at it, or at least making empty promises to get everyone’s hopes up.
Well I’ve hit my goal here, and should have enough to get my T6 Training this season, and with some contract money coming in from my new team, I should be ready to relax for a while. Thanks to everyone who took a second to read a few words, and see you soon!