thefncrow

Yep. Because of the long season, at some point, the manager may have to write off games as unwinnable to just let them go and situate yourself best going forward, because you still have to manage your bullpen guys usage over time. If this particular game has special significance to you because you've got money riding on a victory, you might choose to use your bullpen in a way that is optimal inside of the specific game but detrimental to your long-term strategic needs. Or maybe you choose to leave that starter out there for another half-inning because he's really rolling, even though he's already at 110 pitches and you might be putting un-needed wear on him just so you can avoid going to a bullpen guy who's perfectly capable of helping you win the game but who you don't trust to hold the lead above the 2.5 you need to cover the spread. Or you might use pinch-hitters and runners differently to maximize the chances of winning this one specific game. The manager's job gives him oversight over long-term strategic planning too, and giving him a bigger incentive to focus on single game results (because he's got money on the line) is a recipe for disaster when it comes to the long-term management. Not to mention the other case, which is just how the information about whether or not you've bet is valuable information for bookies. The idea that "I only bet on the team to win" is kinda admirable on a surface level, but unless you're betting on your own team every time and betting the exact same amount on every game, you're tipping off valuable information to anyone who knows whether or not you've bet on your team. If you bet on your team to win regularly, and then a game comes up and you're staying away from betting it, or you place a much tinier bet than normal, you're signaling your team's weakness to the bookies. If you bet on your team to win infrequently, then each time you decide to bet becomes meaningful because it signals a strong belief that you will win that particular game. The same also applies if you normally bet $100 and then show up one day and bet $500. That doesn't mean that coach's hunches are always right, but there is significant value in knowing the unvarnished opinion of someone who has insider information.

I grew up in the Dallas area, so all my teams are basically just the Dallas teams. I got into the Stars when they got good (98-99) and that got me into hockey. I'm pretty lazy about it though, where I kinda follow what's happening in the season but don't really get into it until the end of the season and the playoffs. Playoff hockey is some of the most entertaining stuff on the planet, and I really dig into it then. The Mavericks have always been a bunch of fun to watch. I went to several games in the old bad days, of the blue and green jerseys. I caught onto that team too late for their entertaining early runs, so my early memories are pretty much of how bad that team was, back in the Jamal Mashburn days and the days when everyone thought drafting Jason Kidd was really going to turn this team around. I spent the early part of the 2000s basically in shock that the team wasn't an absolute shitshow anymore, but (especially with the Cowboys fandom having made me a real pessimist) waiting for the other shoe to drop, and for the Cinderella moment where the fancy coach would turn back into a pumpkin. I still have a part of me that's really pissed off about the 2006 NBA Finals, but it also made winning in 2011 that much sweeter. It's going to be hard to see Dirk retire in the near future. I've been going to Rangers games for a long time, and went to a few games back at Arlington Stadium, and even got to go to the 2nd exhibition game held at The Ballpark in Arlington (before the season opener in the first year in that stadium, they played 3 exhibition games against the Mets to open the stadium). Unfortunately, I didn't get to actually see that much of the team's home games, were televised on a pay-cable channel called HSE, which was really expensive. Basically, adding HSE would pretty much double your cable bill. So I always had to listen to Rangers home games on the radio, and watch the team when they were on the road. The recent success has been fun (although also painful. See: 2011 World Series Game 6. I have very little memory of the specifics of that game anymore thanks to getting a little over eager with the booze, and I've decided that it's better that I've mostly forgotten that game.) But I did get to attend 2011 ALCS Game 2 against the Tigers, the 11-inning game capped by a Nelson Cruz walk-off grand slam, which was just an amazing moment to be there for. I've never heard anything louder than the crowd reaction to that. I caught onto the Cowboys about a year or two before the run of Super Bowls, which was a lot of fun, even though I'm really not attached to that team in the same way anymore. My motto for watching the Cowboys the last few years has been that they always are entertaining, because you could count on them to fail in the most spectacular way possible. However, I do kinda pull for one out-of-market team: the Cubs. When I grew up, I'd spend afternoons with my grandparents at their house, and they had cable. Since Cubs games were broadcast on WGN, and they had a preference for day games, the typical summer afternoon would involve sitting down to watch a Cubs game. With the situation I mentioned above with the Rangers home games being on an expensive pay-cable channel, I probably watched more Cubs games than Rangers games until things changed up to where that channel was either included with a basic subscription. I enjoy soccer and really get in for the World Cup, but I really watch very little of it. I've never bothered to get out to an FC Dallas game, unfortunately. I actually got into Formula 1 racing this year, thanks to Drew Scanlon and Danny O'Dwyer. I decided to listen to their F1 podcast just because the sport sounded really crazy, and ended up watching the races and enjoying them, even though I didn't really develop a rooting interest in any driver or team. I really wanted to go down and catch the US Grand Prix at Circuit of the Americas in Austin, but the ridiculous price of tickets kept me away. (Seriously, it was something like $175 for standing room, or like $300 to actually have a bleacher to sit on). So, not to try to hook you back in after you've kicked that habit (that I just cannot), but I've found the real solution to this is to only watch the Sunday afternoon games, and to watch Red Zone Channel. Red Zone Channel is like watching the games at the house of a person who has both NFL Sunday Ticket and ADHD, because it's constantly flipping between games to keep football action going. Game goes to commercial? We'll cut to something else where a play is about to happen. Replay delay? Off to another game. Someone called a timeout? Surely something is happening in another game. Hell, at points when two games are down in the red zone, they'll often start cutting between games as individual plays end, so that you don't even really have the between play downtimes. It has to slow down for the 4pm games, because they really only have 3 games to pick from, but the early session is always like 8 or 9 games, so they can pretty constantly find football action happening somewhere.

Well, I've got one of these Amiibos now. My brother ordered one for me for a Christmas present (which is actually great because it falls in that range of "interesting thing I'd probably never buy for myself") and it didn't ship until recently, but I now hold in my hands a Captain Falcon.

It's also similar to Rami Ismail's post on disclosure.EDIT: It is kinda scary to think that as bad as The Escapist behaved themselves over the last six months, that behavior was at least somewhat tempered by some good people who worked there, and that going forward those good people are gone and won't be able to even remotely moderate their behavior going forward. Also, looking at Greg Tito's statement again, I like how he mentions how his heart goes out to the people laid off and the people left behind, but then wishes all of them collectively luck on finding a new gig. That burn's so subtle I didn't even notice it the first time.

Additionally, shortly after word of The Escapist's layoffs was going around, Brianna Wu posted this on Twitter: Which makes it seem kinda obvious exactly which publication she was talking about.

That might just be school book depositories.

The grand conclusion to this should be that after many videos debunking GTA, Call of Duty, Assassins Creed, and other major series as "not a game", they do an episode on Gone Home and declare it a game.

My personal read is that Whiplash does at least prove Fletcher right. The key, though, is recognizing how it Also, I kinda had to dump out of reading some of those posts because Nightcrawler is one of the next things on the "To Watch" list, so I'll have to come back to those afterwards.

False memories/confessions are a huge problem. There was a case down in Austin, TX that's commonly known as the yogurt shop murders. Someone killed 4 teenage girls in a yogurt shop in 1991. The case has never actually been solved, but police have recorded confessions from more than 50 people who have all claimed to have committed the murders.

I saw Whiplash. That film is amazing, and if JK Simmons loses Best Supporting Actor this year he's been robbed (and I really like Edward Norton in Birdman). What a performance.

All this Ghost in the Shell talk is making me think I'm going to rewatch the original tonight. It's been, man, a long time since I watched that. And, yeah, it's hilarious how delayed all bits of Rebuild are. I remember when things originally started to slip, and the 4th movie was something that they somehow thought would still come 6 months or so after Evangelion 3.0. And a little more text to see if I can push this spoiler out of being visible in the post preview... Well, alternative retelling or . I still think there's too many little off things about it (especially everything with Kaoru) for it to be just a simple reboot.

Yeah, the actual language of that contract is insane and probably not enforceable, but the trick about getting people to sign a document that extends that far is because it means you are basically maximally covered. I had an NDA/no-compete thrown at me in a previous job where it was similarly insanely restrictive. Like, part of it said that if I was fired, I couldn't go work any other computer programming job for a year. I got a labor law attorney to review it, and basically his opinion on the contract was that they'd written something that was not legally enforceable to the extent that of what's in the actual text, but that any challenge to the contract in court would still leave them as protected as they could possibly be under labor law. That makes a lot of sense, if you think about it. Like, Disney doesn't really expect that they're going to be protected from a civil suit if, say, one of their employees fucks up in fumigating and ends up killing people in the housing units. But the courts don't just say "This contract is ridiculously illegal, so much so that we're just throwing out the whole thing wholesale." And so by writing this insane contract that makes you agree that you waive any rights to anyone being able to sue over Disney murdering you in your sleep, any challenge in court would whittle the contract back to "just" something that protects Disney as much as is legally allowable under the law as it stands when someone challenges the contract. If they just wrote the contract to the maximal standards of the time, then they wouldn't be able to avail themselves of any future court decisions that expanded their protections even further.

This Ghost in the Shell discussion got me to finally watch Solid State Society. That's... a weird choice for a movie. I enjoyed watching it, but it the dawning realization that they were doing was kinda amazing. Also, I was struck by just how fucked up and dark is that plot of So you know, the first movie, End of Evangelion, serves basically as a replacement for the last 2 episodes of the series. Supposedly, the story goes that Evangelion basically blew it's animation budget by the time they finished episode 24, and were forced to try to figure out a conclusion to the series that they could do on a shoestring budget. End of Evangelion kinda serves as "What if we had a huge budget dedicated for the finale?" Probably a bit of a bummer to hear on your side, but it might soften your girlfriend's reaction to watching it. The newer movies are their own weird thing, and I don't know that I even want to say much about them. I remember liking them as I watched them, and the animation in them all is just gorgeous. The first movie in the Rebuild line is pretty straightforward and you'll think you know what these movies are once you get like 30 minutes in, but man, movies 2 and 3 are exceptionally crazy things (and movie 4's still not yet released, having blown past all previously announced release dates with nothing new announced).

Yeah, I don't think I've rewatched the series since I watched it as it was coming out, but I remember the TV show being really enjoyable. I've been meaning to watch Solid State Society at some point, but I just never get around to it.

I was actually tempted to consider a vacation to San Francisco for Sketchfest, because it's right around my birthday and it seems like there's a ton of awesome podcasts I could go see live in one shot. I could go see Improv 4 Humans, MBMBAM, Superego, and U Talkin U2 To Me (which I love despite and perhaps because of it being the dumbest thing on the planet). But I decided against that when I realized that the MBMBaM and Superego shows were at the same time. You can't ask me to make that decision, it's just unfair.

Anyone else played this? I ended up buying it after seeing Giant Bomb play it, and it's really fun. For anyone who just saw the title and was like "what the hell?", it's a Steam Early Access game where you play a unicycle robot (think Claptrap) and play dodgeball with other robots in these Tron-like black and neon-colored 3D arenas. It's a multiplayer first person shooter, except that your only weapon is dodgeballs you can collect around the arenas. If you don't have a ball, you can try to time a click properly and catch an opponent's shot, which kills them (in accordance with standard dodgeball rules, of course). You can also use your ball as a shield to block an opponent's shot. It's got this real fun sense of speed to it, the music's fun (although I wonder how much of it there is in there), rounds don't drag on too long, and it's like maybe 15 seconds between rounds. There's also a single player mode, but it's basically just arena challenges against waves of bots from what I've seen.

Rape is often used because people regard it as shorthand for a dark, gritty, "realistic" tone. In a world where rape was insanely rare, that shorthand disappears as well.

Oh god, I forgot to mention The Bugle. Yes, another definite recommendation.

Yeah, for CBB, all of those are good. I really like 289, it might be my favorite episode of this year. I really love Matt Gourley's HR Giger. But for just a sampler, I really have to suggest Best of 2014 part 1. There's a rambling 30 minute intro that a first-time listener might just go ahead and skip over. I enjoy the conversation, but, man, they really go on forever before they actually get to it. But after that, the episode has the vulgar Gemberling bit you mention from Little Button Puss, what might be my favorite moment of the year in the The Victor Podcast, a condensed version of JW Stillwater's introduction, and is capped off with a compressed version of the Calvins Twins. That's an incredibly good selection.

It actually depends on the game whether or not Motion Plus is required. I know Smash and Mario Kart allow non-Motion Plus Wiimotes. I actually thought Motion Plus was required on everything from what I heard (and missed out on a night of some Smash Bros because I thought we only had the 2 Wii U controllers and didn't bother to actually try out the Wiimotes), but the old style work just fine. It's safer to have Motion Plus, because then you don't run into things where your controllers don't work because they require it. Although you might check the price on those motion plus adapters if the price difference is significant enough, that might be cheaper.

You can actually play Super Mario Galaxy 2 on the gamepad! It's just that you would also still need the Wiimote and Nunchuck, with the gamepad standing in for your TV and Wii Sensor Bar.

My comedy podcast lineup at this point is: MBMBAM Adventure Zone Sawbones, another McElroys-related podcast hosted by Dr. Sydnee McElroy (Justin's wife) with Justin co-hosting, where they talk about topics in medical history and some of the bizarre and bad ideas old-timey medicine had for how to cure disease. Comedy Bang Bang Improv4Humans, a weekly improv podcast hosted by Matt Besser. Basically, guests will get suggestions and tell stories based on those suggestions, which then serve as an inspiration for a short improv scene. Quality can really vary based on the guests, but when the guests are good the show is amazing. Superego, which is a heavily edited improv thing. The members of Superego and the guests record some improv bits, which then get edited down and slickly produced to make up what seems to more resemble like an audio-only sketch comedy show. It apparently takes like 30 hours of work to produce a 30 minute Superego episode, which explains why there's only like 40 episodes for a podcast that's been around for around 9 years. With Special Guest Lauren Lapkus. OK, this is a weird one. It's a podcast featuring Lauren Lapkus doing a bunch of character work along with a guest. However, the weird turn is that Lapkus is always the guest on a podcast that is ostensibly hosted by the actual guest. So, like, the first episode has Paul F. Tompkins as the host of a LA-based local affairs podcast and Lauren Lapkus doing a character as the guest of the fake podcast. And for one that was just a limited series but one of my favorites of 2014, The Andy Daly Podcast Pilot Project (I think, it might be Pilot Podcast, I can never keep that straight). Each episode has Andy Daly playing characters he's played before on Comedy Bang Bang who have decided to try their hand at podcasting by producing a pilot episode. Every episode features Matt Gourley from Superego, as well as a couple of guests. My personal favorite from the run is The Travel Bug with August Lindt, which is among my favorite podcasts ever.

There's more Dallas-area Thumbs than I'd thought.

8chan didn't go down, the domain name got revoked. The site's still running and accessible if you know how. Unfortunately, I'm sure that a bunch of really heinous and ignorant shit is being plotted in response.

My go to reference whenever I see that now is just this bit of Review, when Forrest is reviewing being a racist, at 4 minutes in (since I don't seem to be able to pass the timecode to the embedded player): The sad thing is that, with GG where it is now, I could absolutely see some GGer saying something like that totally non-ironically.