Month: April 2022

When teammates fight each other, everyone loses. I’ve had to think about that a lot over the last few weeks as my kid is the target of a lot (if not all) of the violence happening between players. He got into his 3rd scuffle this week and each with a different player. I’d be a fool to think he isn’t part of the problem. He has an ego and really believes in himself. Unfortunately there are several kids on the high school team that don’t believe in him and want to ‘put him in his place.’

None of this–nothing in his ego-driven attitude should lead to violence. Yet here we are in a situation where he will probably need to transfer to another school–throwing his younger brother’s future into disarray–in order to have a chance to avoid teammates stepping to him constantly as is happening now. To make matters worse, the social media is expansive and toxic and includes one of the fights, which is only making him more of a target for players who want to make a name stepping to a starter. None of this is good for him as a young man trying to find his way. It is worse for him as a player trying to give his all. Why would he want to and how could he if he’s concerned about being hit by a fellow player or robbed again while his teammates watch the robber and laugh it off like it doesn’t matter.

He’s in a toxic situation. Unfortunately, there is no clear way forward beyond leaving. So what happens after that?

Watching the latest two trailers for upcoming Marvel movies one thing remains rock solidly clear. That moment in Endgame was not a one-off. Marvel Studios is passing the torch to a generation of female heroes. The addition of America Chavez was just the latest bit of evidence that we are moving towards an MCU that not only embraces diversity but covets female leads. Of course, this is the comics, so we are not going to see plus-size female leads (discounting She-hulk) the way we accept men of various shapes as our heroes. However, we are going to see more women and different looking women and LGBTQ women and… well, a lot of women. I expect Marvel plans to flip the dynamic so that the majority of the heroes are female and the men take the role of being the lesser numbered. Consider how many Avengers remain active and or are being actively replaced by a female counterpart. Scarlet Witch, Captain America (stays male but America Chavez is known as Miss America in the comics and rocks the patriot vibe all the same), Iron Man (Iron Heart is the replacement with possible support from Rescue/Pepper Potts), Hawkeye is now female, Thor is having a female replacement/addition, and Hulk is being replaced by She-Hulk.

I am not mad at any of this. I just recognize how pointed this is.

Some Thoughts:

1. Now it’s time to go watch A Love Song for Bobby Long. More on that next time..

By February 2023 we will have Four Spring football leagues–The USFL, XFL, Arena League, and Fan Controlled Football. That is a lot of football being played and opens the door to a lot of college athletes having a shot at doing what they’ve spent a life preparing for at the professional level. Is it NFL quality or payscale? No. Is it a step in that direction? I don’t really know. There is not much of a history of players making the jump. A few do, but I’ve seen more going in the other direction following an NFL burnout. How does this apply to me? Well, I have a kid who is set on being the one who makes it to the pro level. He is in a year where he has a halfway decent shot of being a top state talent. Sure, there are a handful of better RBs in the state than him and I am sure there are even a couple of kids who will be late bloomers, but I still think he has the skills and the frame and the heart to be a Derrick Henry type if he can just develop the mental tools to get there (work ethic, fortitude, grit OFF the field). So, I’m saying there is a chance for him to meet at least some aspect of his goal. At this point I just want to be able to get him to the high school level and put him in a position to be successful.

Some Thoughts:

1. Rather odd and abrupt blog to be certain. Still, ten minutes is ten minutes…

Life is, well, what it is. On the eve of Easter I’m thinking about the strangeness that is my family. We have a lot going on. I also have a lot of thoughts running through my head. Here they are…

Some Thoughts:

1. I really need to get back to writing stories.
2. Oh, and I really dislike the idea of celebrity for celebrities sake. Be known for being good at something and not for ‘being known’.
3. Speaking of being good at something, I’ve noticed a small cadre of really really good actors and actresses who’ve been getting solid work lately. Lakieth Stanfield, Andrew Garfield, Kristen Stewart, and Robert Pattinson are all doing great stuff.
4. Looking forward to the end of Stranger Things. Also looking forward to what comes next.
5. The boys’ cousin is on Come Dance with Me. I’m thinking the kid is experiencing his 15 minutes right about now… What’s even more strange, they are not the only dancing pair I personally know on that show. Weird crap, that.

I am going to end the debate. I work better seated upright and at a desk. It is just a better writing environment for me. I see others at rest in bed or crosslegged on the floor and hunched over a laptop or sprawled across a couch at the coffee house and I don’t know how they get it done. It isn’t the environment so much as it is the positioning that I find difficult. If I am forward facing, upright and have all my tools in easy reach, I am going to keep my butt in the chair and I am going to produce something. That something is the blog. At least for today. Unlike last night I feel more at rest and at peace churning out the daily words. Surprisingly I have a lot to say today. However, I have a lot to say about a lot of subjects, so I am going to fall right into…

Some Thoughts:

1. Marry the 24 hr news cycle to a 12 month sports cycle and you get a lot of noise and very little information. The last few months of football talk has been bad bad bad. All you hear is speculation about the draft, about trades, about player attitudes, etc. I tune most of it out. I’ve tuned into little besides draft speculation and even that is a hot mess. There is little chance of the people who are posting these predictions knowing exactly how it will go and, to be clear, they take no responsibility for being wrong. In fact, they seem to forget they were wrong about a pick that turns out to be a bust.
2. My son’s track meet went bust. He hadn’t fully recovered from injury and managed to hit every single hurdle in the conference finals. His time was sub 14 and good enough for 11th, but not good enough for him. He knows he is better than that. He also knows that track is his last middle school sport, so he will be training all next year to get it right and to develop the self-confidence he needs rolling into freshman football training in SP23.
3. Spring 23 will also mark the start of two new courses for me: Game Studies and Writing for Video Games. I’m excited to be teaching both and hope to be able to bring some industry contacts to bear in order to help these students get a look at what their future could be like. It feels good to be teaching about the things that I do outside of teaching English composition. Comp and even Literature feels like a closed environment where they don’t recognize the work outside of the classroom. This feels different. It feels like sociology.
4. Out of time.

I haven’t been sleeping very well, so if I pass out mid blog forgive me. Seriously. I’m a mess. The pre dawn transition from decent to absolutely chilly has ruined my sleep. I can’t use a blanket early in the sleep but I need it pre dawn. By three am I am a wreck. So, that’s my excuse for not having a lot to say tonight.

some Thoughts:

1. Knicks have gone back to truly sucking. The franchise needs new ownership to have a chance.
   
2. considering upstate NY dropped 850 million to build the Bills a new stadium the state will not profit from, they could at least try to force new management on to the team the city really believes in.
   
3. no, I don’t mean the Giants. Or the Jets.
   

We are considering combining households. In that I mean we are considering taking the space our daughter held and giving it to the two boys who live in the extra space. Financially it would be a change–though not necessarily beneficial to me as an individual but to us as a collective–and that change would also be social. We would be entirely on top of each other in a way we have not been. I’m not even starting to talk about the bathroom concerns of 4 boys sharing one shower that is already not doing so hot.

The kids would all be in one smaller area and thus the general area would be kid-landia most of the time. I have concerns with that. We both have concerns about the ‘culture of the house’ I also have concerns about designing a space that is amenable to two teenagers who will spend the majority of their home hours in that space. It needs to feel like they can have a inch of privacy (the other two boys each have their own rooms) and still have space for their stuff. Presently they share a room in the extra space, but that space is large enough that each boy has somewhere else to go when the other wants private time. Take that away and what happens? Maybe I’m being too giving or easy on them by making this my concern. I really don’t know.

So, I’ve been researching low bunkbeds (7 ft ceiling in the new space) and have some options there. I’ve also been researching capsule beds, which would allow max privacy in the initial bedroom space. Anything we do is going to be expensive. Buying a new bed, bunk or otherwise is a cost I have to absorb. I didn’t fully consider this when thinking about the move. As it stands it could cost several thousand just to make the move–after you factor in AC upgrade/repair etc. Still, the long term financial is better, and it seems to be what the family wants. So, onward.

Maybe I should go with timewarp? Regardless, this thing isn’t catching on all that well to begin with. Of course, I do write to an audience of (maybe) one, so there is that. I’m going all the way back to 809. Like the original 809. I was still buying kids meals and remarking on how $19 was a lot of money to spend on food for three kids. I just dropped $87 on 3 pounds of pulled pork for a kid after ruining the $14 rump I was planning to slow cook (the oven turned off. Apparently it does that on its own now). I was a different dude back then. I was still bright eyed about the future. I still felt like there was a chance of being wildly successful in life. I still had a bit of comedy left in these veins.

I was actually reflecting on supply and demand and monetization. I wrote, “The worlds financial engine is predicated largely on the principles of supply and demand.” Years later the oil market tanked due to nobody driving during Covid and then suddenly people started driving post-covid and the oil industry decided to cash in. Supply and Demand. No, it wasn’t because of Hunter Biden’s laptop. I honestly don’t really understand what that has to do with anything at all (largely because I’ve been avoiding Fox News). So, I’ve changed. The world has changed. Onward then. We gotta keep it moving.

Excited to be starting a new week and hopefully getting into a new groove as I start to develop a new novel and work heartily on the old one. The fantasy? It is still too big to write and I still don’t know the story I want to tell. In the process of developing the world I started thinking that I might come around to writing and publishing a book on building systems of magic for fantasy writing and gaming. I’ve learned and thought and created so much of that so far that it feels about that time to create this. So, in short order there are at least four projects available to me to work on. This means I am not quite used up yet. I like it.

I’ve been thinking about systems in general. I once developed a sport based around goal scoring that was meant for super powered individuals. The system of it was really fun to develop and it feels like, though that was a moment in time, the idea of system building that arose was meaningful. Now… apply that same concept to space and ship to ship gaming. That could be very interesting indeed. Space is huge and once you cannot see the enemy, it becomes a giant game of battleship. So, let us start there. I want to develop SPACE BATTLESHIP. Similar concept in three dimensional space. It is best suited for a computer game but works as a board game if you dial space into distinct levels. Not much but it is a start.

Some Thoughts:

1. Gary Brown and Dwayne Haskins both passed on this week. These things come in threes, yknow.

Tried a new custody strategy this week. We had the kids the entire week while the ex had them the previous week. The idea was to explore what this would feel like and what life could look like if we operated in this fashion. We couldn’t have picked a worse week. Between state testing jacking up school schedules and sports stuff spread out over the week, we (mostly me because I accept the task as mine) found ourselves driving all over town multiple times a day. I went through an entire tank of gas. I also had far less time to myself than I am accustomed to. Had I been writing steadily I would’ve lost at least 3 whole days. They wouldn’t have been balanced out by the no kids week either because that was largely couple time.

What did We learn? The kids like the schedule. They like sinking into each space vs moving every few days. I like having them for a longer stretch of time personally, but they need to develop better habits of cleanliness and of time management. I too need to stay on top of them more and make sure things are getting handled. Biggest miss: my first born didn’t get registered for college as planned.

The week off was great. We enjoyed a ton of us time. I had a lot of fun with my partner. I didn’t do enough work, but I’m planning on fighting that fight with myself tomorrow. All in all, the schedule was a win for me personally and we’ve a lot to talk about moving forward as a couple. This is only one of many possible options.