Author: admin

I’m considering an expansion of the site. During my first day of the novel writing class I found myself telling my students that they need to learn how to stay active and communicate online. I remembered back to some of the domains I used in the past for such things–specifically the now defunct thoughtwired.com. With this site, talislegger, existing on a wordpress architecture I figured it wouldn’t be too difficult to create a second site or subset of this site where the students would be able to populate it with their own words, ideas, and stories. I’m still quite stoked about the idea, but with the advent of Social Media sites like facebook and Pintrest, I’m not sure creating a writing space for them that is off social media is entirely necessary. I can see the benefits of such a practice. They wouldn’t be held in check by the form of those sites and they could do a plethora of activities such as create blogs, vlogs, and columns. They could post stories privately or publicly without worrying about whether or not some site found their words inappropriate.

Maintenance is an issue. Students actually using the site is a bigger issue. Again, with the advent of social media individuals are drawn to those key and notable media and rarely have time to access yet another site. Still, I believe that gap can be bridged in the same way the 10 minute rule bridges it: they can post to facebook or wherever. They can generate an RSS feed. They can develop an online presence for the agents and publishers to come see.

I think I just sold myself on building a new site… now what to call it?

I keep on seeing AutoTrader.com. The appearance is almost subtle–like a fat ninja. The website keeps popping up in the shows I like. I saw it on Royal Pains. I saw it on Rizoli and Isles. I’m not talking about commercials here. I’m talking about scripted dialogue integrated into the storyline and driving the viewers towards autotrader.com. The reasoning behind this is simple: If the viewer identifies with the character and sees them experience the site, they might be more inclined to access the site and replicate the actions of the TV character. In each episode AutoTrader gave them a smashing deal. I’m beginning to wonder if this is the new direction of network and cable TV. If it is, does that take away from the artistry of the show? Are these shows even more commercial than in the past?

 

The drama that is Mistresses hasn’t changed much since it started but apparently I have. I don’t know how I stomached that stuff in the first place but it has quickly deteriorated into the typical ABC nonsense. Let me clarify that–I simply woke up and recognized the nonsense that has always been going on.

Like I mentioned once (or twice), the show follows four women through their torrid sex lives. Its Sex in the City but far less cool. The channel tried to add their brand of tokenism to the show, a vaguely African American woman and a first generation Asian woman. However, these two always end up being the most morally corrupt characters on the show. The Asian started the series by being the mistress to a married man who happened to be her psych patient. She went on to boff his son and then engaged in a seemingly endless string of one night stands that she herself called whorish. She wasn’t done. She slept with another client’s boyfriend and just recently one of her one night stands found her and let her know that she could have HIV.

Our black-ish character is a widow. Well, she was a widow… Apparently her husband faked his death, got a new family and left her and their daughter enough insurance cash to open a business. Once she discovered this she slept with her once dead hubby and went on to sleep with, well, every other black guy that hit the screen. She’s currently working with the lead character’s black ex (her lawyer) because the dead-ish husband turned out to be a drug mule wanted by the FBI, oh and at least one of the string of dudes she’s sleeping with turned out to be an FBI agent who was undercover ‘feeling her out’.

Ugh. Who writes this stuff.

At least I can say I finally hit rock bottom.

I thought I was there a few times before. There was the time my wife stuck a pencil in my flab and it didn’t fall out. That was bad. It triggered at least a week of good exercise. Then there was that moment my kids all called me fat. We can’t ever forget about the slew of outfit choices I can no longer wear. The thing is, I saw it getting worse. I was waiting, I think, for the moment my kids saw some lady in a bathing suit and reminded me that my boobs are bigger than hers. Its almost come to that a few times now, but that isn’t what made me hit bottom. No, bottom was worse than that.

It all started in the parking lot of a Sam’s Club. I was wearing black shoes with white sox and shorts that caught between the thigh more than they didn’t and a star trek shirt that’s seen too many miles to boldly go anywhere out of doors anymore. It was hot and I was sweating and feeling vaguely faint. As I strode towards the store I noticed a few people noticing me. To that point I’d never identified with the People of Walmart crowd, but as I continued inside that feeling settled over me. Fortunately nobody was flashing a cellphone cam my way.

The other day a friend called bullshit on the spreadsheet blog. She quipped that some of that is the men giving up and not being appealing anymore to their women. I’m extremely hopeful she wasn’t chucking javelins at me with the retort, but part of what she said sunk deep into my subconscious where it took root and waited for the right moment. That moment emerged during the Sam’s Club trip. It worsened when I stopped by Kohl’s to see if I could find a shirt that fit. You know things are bad when XXL feels too tight and leaves the definite impression of male pregnancy.

So, yeah. Bottom.

Saying it is one thing. Buying a bunch of stuff to ‘change my diet’ is one thing, but nothing really adds up until I get real intentional about my health. I haven’t been feeling good and that is in direct proportion to the weight going up. I know what is wrong with me. Now will I do something about it?

Today I completed my first f2f draft for a league I just joined. The league has been running for years and the draft process is among the best I’ve seen. It was a fun gathering of guys who like talking trash and eating great food. However, the crown of the evening was the draft itself. We had first pick and selected Adrian Peterson.

The good guys over at fantasypros have a well-developed draft simulator offering a chance to draft against computer algorithms (the complexity of which is determined by whether or not you pay). The process is really good preparation for what madness may come during the draft itself. Ours featured multiple runs on WRs, which leads me to believe that, especially in PPR leagues, it is in your best interest to draft a WR very early. That being said, here is what I think is a good plan based on simulations and my own 2014 experience:

The top 3 talents to look for are Peterson, Charles, McCoy, and Forte in that order. Once those four are gone the RB pick can wait a bit. Spend your pick on Peyton Manning or Calvin Johnson. The next few rounds are going to be ‘best talent available’ rounds, with the real $$ player being Jimmy Graham. In the later rounds the key is to find the sleepers  nobody knows about or believes in. This link pretty much sums up who they are.

I think some of the best picks to take in the mid rounds are Randall Cobb at WR and Zac Stacy and RB. These aren’t top flight dudes, but they have a chance to be explosive. If he’s available after round 6, go for AZ’s Andre Ellington at RB. He did work last season and seems primed to build on that.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. With the Kevin Love being dealt to Cleveland, those Uncle Drew commercials are final the real deal. I’m excited about that combination. Oh, they have Lebron James too.

Sitting in the woods today I tried to find a few moments to just ‘be’. There was no TV, no music, no deep conversation to fuel my distraction from what I like to refer to as the passing of the universe. To understand the importance of this I have to take you back a few weeks to the moment I woke up in the middle of the night contemplating the totality of oblivion. It frightened me so deeply that I failed to sleep for several hours after that. I was as much terrified of the death part of it (inability to create and record new moments) as the great expanse of the universe that we are all a part of.

The other day I brought up the word entropy and talked about the fact that nothing every remains the same and how everything is moving, changing, and hurtling through time and space at incomprehensible speeds. I feel afraid to even consider the fullness of that. Not being still and not being silent allows us to ignore the largeness of life and disconnect from these great universal forces that are, in a real way, too much for us to soak up. I’m a huge culprit of that. The first thing I should do in the morning is breathe in the day. I should take a moment to listen to the world and think about my relationship to it and my purpose for being. Instead I snap on Sportscenter, or NFL Network or (Gods forgive…) CNN. I shut out that inner voice telling me I need to interface with the natural world.

As my body and mind ages I am becoming more aware of my unhealthy tendencies and especially aware of the impact they have on my personal -spiritual being (that force that drives you forward to want to achieve more). Just sitting in the quiet and learning to be is a way to connect to that part, and to heal that and through that healing to becoming the best possible me.

Most Fantasy drafts are taking place between this and next weekend and owners are scrambling to decide what to do after the first pick. A lot of drafting is about luck and runs. Luck means the players not having the same draft game plan as you. Runs are the periods in a draft when several players pick the same position, forcing you to take that position or miss out on any level of quality at the position. My longest running league is a 2 QB league. With 10 teams the run on QBs is swift and bloody. You need three in order to survive the bye week, and most players go for 4, just to create a situation where an opponent only has 1 QB to play at all.

Outside of runs, the value in a non-ppr league is the RBs. Though most teams are moving to a pass first offense, even the team that rushed the least rushed 31% of the time, with the majority of those runs split between two backs. It gets better. 20 teams rushed at least 40% of the time and of those teams 15 relied on a single back to carry the at least 70% of that load. Better still, 8 of the remaining 12 spent money on RBs this offseason, pointing to the possibility that they intend to increase the number of rushes attempted this upcoming season.

So, go QB and then follow up with a solid rusher. Afterwards, let the runs and your luck carry you through.

 

 

Some Thoughts:

1. I’ve been realizing how valuable something seems if you haven’t had it in a while. On shows like Naked and Afraid when folks haven’t eaten in some time any meal seems like the best ever. The same holds true of sleep if you haven’t had it in a long while. I wonder if the same holds true for speed. I’ve been too slow (and too fat) for some time and as I build the willpower and intention to do what needs to be done I feel like the goal must be the speed. My entire athletic life is predicated on speed and I’m too damn young to have lost so much of it.

It is far easier to write about what is unfolding in your life. The realism and depth of character is far more genuine than some contrived fantasy steeped in years of reading Dragon magazine and hacking at trees with swords. My life is change. My life is moving from the deep connections between myself and three hyper-energetic boys to a building sense of longing to maintain that connection as they wind away the hours at school and I prepare for a new semester.

When learned writers say ‘write what you know’ they are talking about the emotions underlying the situations. Orson Scott Card didn’t know a thing about leading an army in an interstellar battle to save humanity. He did know about being gifted and being an outsider and trying to live up to a rigid standard that shaped you more than you shape it.

I’m writing about change and working towards a highly difficult transition from being a full time dad to being a full time instructor. There are mixed feelings here–I love the intellectual challenge of work, but I love the emotional load of being with the boys all the time. As I prepare, I’m working through a meaningful understanding of the word entropy, and thinking how it applies to my life and to my growth.

A big part of transition is having that willingness to accept that change is a constant.

I often wonder if a situation is as serious (or not serious) as it is portrayed, or is the media simply choosing the stories and emphatic direction that best serves their perspective audience. The Ferguson situation now sits on the edge of America’s long-brewing racial tension. Everyone is listening to see what the President says (cause he’s sort of a black guy–at least in skin color, because we ignore the rest of his heritage).

Now we are hearing about the other side of the story and the marches and the fund raising that is going on in Ferguson for the affected officer. For the people of Ferguson this is about more than one confused and angry kid who was killed.  The kids of Ferguson get it. Robert Klemko of MMQB quoted an 18 yr old Ferguson football player as saying, “The looting was uncalled for, … We’re supposed to protest and get justice for Mike Brown, but that was just pointless. We can get justice for him if we stay real smooth.”

Its the agitators that are making this thing more newsworthy and drawing up a national debate about the police and about the protestors. I hope more people react like that kid did… Stay real smooth.

Some Thoughts:

1. This isn’t a football day, but I find my thoughts turning towards the Patriots. Playing Madden the other night I realized the limitations of a salary-cap era football team. My money is tied up in a handful of players and to bring more in–even for a Looksee requires funds I don’t have. I feel like the Patriots ended up in that spot at some time and got really scared about financial investments in particular positions. In particular, I don’t feel like they spend all that much on receivers, which hasn’t much phased all-world QB Tom Brady. I’m doing the same, leaning into a home grown program of draft and train. It works for the Patriots. Nobody is saying they cannot throw the ball. Now can they keep people healthy enough to throw to?

The last few books I’ve listened to have been based on the idea of AI and the role that digital intelligence plays in our world. It is becoming almost blasé to say, “Big Brother is Watching You’. We realize this as a ubiquity and, for the most part, people aren’t afraid of that. These same books also point to Facebook as a veritable treasure trove of personal information. This is more true than most of us want to admit. We expose ourselves on Facebook. We tell the world where we are, where we’ve been, where we are going and when. We share photos and heartbreaks. We connect with others and share our feelings on a forum where everyone looks on and, at times, comments on what we are saying.

This message is quite hypocritical coming from a blogger, but in a way I am the type best qualified to make that declaration. We give too much of ourselves to the ‘net. Somewhere in the digisphere are a billion bot programs plucking and filing our digital ghosts like a warped rendition of the matrix. These bots power algorithms that show themselves on the side of every page we click as ads and suggestions of what to buy and where to go next. Often we think nothing of it—of how those suggestions came to be and why they are, at times, deeply accurate about our desires or the desires we are about to have. There is a reason why my Google searches populate in the specific fashion they do—a way that is always different from the person sitting nearby searching for the same thing. Big Brother knows me, knows my habits by the trail of cookie crumbs I leave from site to site.

A few times I went Incognito to see what would happen. The Boolean search streams no longer knew precisely what to tell me. They populated based on the things I had done and not what I was doing. They coughed and sputtered and fizzed, wondering for the first time what I might do next with my present so concealed from them. I felt like Harry Potter.

Once the cloak of invisibility slipped the web rushed in to fill the void. The bots didn’t speculate about my absence. They acted like the momentary vanish never happened, or worse that wherever I’d gone was worthy of pulling a vanishing act. I wondered aloud if they thought I was seeing porn instead of clicking random pages just to see if they still knew who I was…

Some Thoughts:

1. Sometime after 1 AM I realized I hadn’t posted yesterday’s blog. The thought was fleeting, slipping from my mind as I passed into sleepland. I later realized I wouldn’t even be able to do so until much later in the afternoon. This is what it is like when work starts up in full…